How to Survive a High Conflict Ex

The Years We Don’t Get Back

Growing older is strange. The face in the mirror changes, coffee becomes a small daily rescue, and things that once came easily require a little negotiation. Yet I can sit for hours with old photographs of my children, impossibly small, and wonder where all that time went.

I remember being at Science World with my three preschoolers, who were bouncing like flies while I frantically tried to keep track of them. An elderly woman stopped me and said, “Remember, dear, these are the best years of your life.” I was so horrified by the suggestion that I scoffed at her advice for years.

Now I think of her interruption as almost divine. It was one of those warnings life delivers before we have enough wisdom to understand it. I did not heed it. She was right.

My children grew up while I was busy living in a decade caught up in litigation that began a quarter century ago. There was no simple way out of it, and I wish I had possessed then even a fraction of the perspective I have now. The time seemed endless while I was inside it, but of course it wasn't.

Some Things Really Are Worth Fighting For

I do not want to romanticize family conflict or suggest that the disputes consuming parents are merely petty arguments. Refusing to allow a child to participate in extracurricular activities during one parent's time, withholding consent for international travel, or refusing appropriate medical treatment or disability testing can have real consequences for a child. Some issues require parents to stand their ground, obtain professional assistance, or ask a court to decide.

The lesson I learned is different. Do the necessary work, and stop. Do not allow one legitimate dispute to expand until it occupies every available corner of your life. I spent days drafting affidavits, writing and answering endless emails, gathering evidence and dealing with one issue after another, including issues that genuinely mattered to my children. What I did not understand then was that you can take an issue seriously without allowing the conflict around it to consume you.

That is where structure matters. Identify the issue, gather the information actually necessary to decide it, make the proposal, consider the response, and determine what comes next. Give an important problem the attention it deserves, but do not give it the rest of your life.

Structure. Compartments. Boundaries.

These are words I have come to believe in deeply after decades in family law. A dispute needs a compartment, with a beginning, an issue to be resolved, a process for resolving it, and an end. Everything else does not get to climb into the compartment simply because emotions are high.

A disagreement about disability testing deserves the information necessary to understand the child's needs and make a proper decision. It does not require relitigating Christmas, criticizing the other parent's new partner, revisiting three years of text messages, or fighting about who caused the separation. Stay with the issue until the necessary work is done, and then get out of it.

The same principle applies to the smaller implementation disputes that consume astonishing amounts of family life. If the question is whether parenting time can be traded this weekend so the children can attend a family event, make a clear proposal, exchange the information needed, and answer the question. It should not become a vehicle for every other complaint the parents have about one another.

Because Your Children Are Growing Up

This is the part I wish I had understood when my own children were small. Parents caught in conflict are understandably preoccupied with who is right and who is wrong, because sometimes there really is a right and a wrong. But twenty years later, the merits of most individual arguments are not what remains.

The children remember that their parents were fighting.

That is difficult for me to write because I cannot tell this story as merely an observer. I was part of it. I can understand now what I could not understand while I was inside it: proving that you were right does not give you the years back.

Children grow up impossibly fast. The preschooler running away from you at Science World becomes an adult, and suddenly those exhausting years you thought would never end exist mostly in photographs. There is no appeal from the passage of time.

Do the Work and Go Live Your Life

This is what I now want parents to understand when I work with them. Take the real issue seriously, use the structure available to resolve it, and resist the powerful temptation to expand it. A Parenting Coordinator, mediator, arbitrator, lawyer or court process should help bring a dispute toward an endpoint, not provide a new arena in which the conflict can continue indefinitely.

If the same problems repeatedly produce dozens of messages, hours of professional involvement and enormous expense, pay attention to what the pattern is telling you. Simplify the process, narrow the questions, establish better boundaries, or, where necessary, return to court to seek a different structure. Endless conflict resolution is not resolution.

Do the necessary work. Then stop.

Go back to parenting. Walk the dog, make dinner, go to the hockey game, take the trip, see your friends, leave the laundry until tomorrow, and live the ordinary life happening around the problem. Those ordinary days are passing whether you notice them or not.

Put down your phone. Stop endlessly messaging your ex about multiple issues, answering every accusation, revisiting what happened last month, and adding another problem before the first one has been resolved. Address one issue at a time, do what is necessary to resolve it, and then let it go.

Because there is one uncomfortable thing I learned along the way. Even with the very best intentions, we can unwittingly become part of the conflict through the way we respond to it. Sometimes surviving a high-conflict ex means learning not to become one too.

For years, I scoffed at that elderly woman’s advice because, in the madness of three preschoolers and a divorce, I couldn’t imagine that these could possibly be the best years of my life. Now I understand that she wasn’t telling me those years were easy. She was telling me to notice them, because one day my children would be grown, those days would be gone forever, and I would finally understand exactly what she meant.

Written by Cori L. McGuire, family law mediator, arbitrator, collaborative family law lawyer and Parenting Coordinator with a family law practice in British Columbia since 1998. 

© 2026 Cori McGuire. All Rights Reserved. Proprietary Workflow.

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