Transcript
A (0:00)
This topic is one that comes up a lot. And I was joking that I thought if I wanted to get any actual views on this video, I need to name it. How to have five ways to have a conversation with your narcissistic ex. But that's not. I'm not going to do that to you. That's not where we're going. We're going to be. We're going to be curious and compassionate towards ourself and others. And in this conversation we're going to focus on how we can help ourselves be prepared to have difficult conversations. Is that right?
B (0:33)
That's right.
A (0:34)
So how can we. How can co parents do that? How can they be prepared to approach a difficult conversation?
B (0:41)
Yeah, this comes up in a lot of contexts for me as a therapist. So one thing that my clients have appreciated learning more about is using this strategy of talking about a subject, using multiple perspectives that they're experiencing inside of themselves. So there's often when there's a difficult conversation coming up, a lot of times we feel pressure to come into the conversation with our position and we want to have the right position and we want to be able to defend the position. And it's all about our position that we're the thing that we want or the position that we want to maintain or achieve. And so the strategy that I'm sharing is really different from that. It's more of acknowledging that I don't necessarily have one solid, monolithical way that I look at something or feel about something. And so maybe it would help to have that be part of the conversation and the other person might be experiencing that as well. Because I think most of us do have mixed emotions about things or different perspectives that we can take. We might not realize it at first, but once we slow down and are mindful about it, we might realize that it is true that we have just multiple things going on inside us about this conversation or issue.
A (2:22)
There are lots of examples that come up in co parenting that I could throw out there. See if any of these stick for you as maybe a good one for us to talk about. Sometimes the choice of a daycare provider for like really little kids, or the choice of a school or an extracurricular, or whether we feel okay with our child being around our co parent's new romantic partner. There can be a bunch of different situations where we're dealing with a joint decision with our co parent with whom we have some conflict and we're concerned about the safety of our child. And it can bring up just a lot.
B (3:03)
Maybe it's the first. Because it's the first one you said. But the one that stuck in my mind was the one about the daycare. Because one of the things that I notice parents having different perspectives on and feeling pressure about is what kind of environment and experience do they want their child to have? And one of the issues that immediately came up in my mind was there are some preschools that are more academically focused and then there are some preschools that are more focused on playing. Play. Let's say I'm the parent that wants to focus on play. I might start a conversation by saying, acknowledging that part of me is really focused on the child being able to be in an environment where there's play as the focus. Because from a developmental perspective, children, the work of childhood is play.