Taylor Kaspar (00:02.062)
All right, welcome back to this episode. Today I want to talk about another mistake I see all the time. And honestly, this might be one of the hardest ones for me to personally admit because I didn't realize I was doing this until years later. I thought I was negotiating things like parenting time, child support, the summer schedule. But looking back, I wasn't really negotiating any of those things. I was negotiating from a place of guilt.
And guilt is one of the worst negotiators you will ever meet because guilt doesn't ask you what's the best decision for you or me or the kids. Guilt asks, what can I give away so that I don't have to feel this anymore? And that was me. About six months after my divorce, my ex wanted to modify our agreement. He was a teacher and he wanted more parenting time over the summer. Now, on paper, that sounds like a pretty normal request, but that's not what was happening.
Because for the six months leading up to that conversation, my life had been emotional whiplash. Like one day he hated me. I had ruined his life. I was the worst person in the world. I had destroyed our family. I was so selfish. Everything wrong in his world was somehow my fault. And then the next day, he wanted me back. He'd tell me we hadn't tried hard enough, that we belonged together, that we'd somehow made a mistake. And in the background of all of this,
On his nightly phone calls, he would call and talk to my oldest daughter, who was six years old at the time, and he'd tell her how lonely he was and how much he missed her, how he was all by himself. And she would cry. She would just cry. And she'd tell me she wanted to go to daddy. She'd tell me how much she missed him. And because she was six, she couldn't possibly understand that she was being asked to carry emotions.
That were never hers to carry. She didn't know that she was being put in the middle and manipulated, quite frankly. She just knew that daddy sounded sad. And as her mom, watching that absolutely crushed me. Then there were the money issues. I had moved back in with my parents after the divorce. And my ex had stayed in our house. And every time child support came up, there was some other comment.
Taylor Kaspar (02:20.748)
Well, I don't have the luxury of living with my parents. I'm paying all the bills at our house. Must be nice to just be able to run back home to mom and dad. And sometimes he would pay child support, but other times he would like come up short. He would deduct things from child support. He would be like, you didn't pay your share of the expenses the last month that you lived in the house. So I took it out of child support. I bought you know, our daughter a pair of snow boots. So I took that out of the child support.
Right. Sometimes he'd come late. And every conversation somehow turned into another reminder that, like, I was the reason that his life was so hard. And I started believing it. I started feeling so guilty for living with my parents. And then I was getting state health insurance for my kids while I got back on my feet. And I felt guilty about that. Even though the reason I had to do that was because I had been working.
part-time and homeschooling the kids during the marriage while he worked full time because it was COVID and I was never given the luxury of being able to put my career at the forefront, even though my earning potential was, you know, at least threefold his because I had just graduated from law school. But I felt guilty about that. I felt guilty for having to go back to work, guilty for receiving child support, guilty that my daughter missed her dad.
Guilty that I left the marriage. Guilty that maybe, just maybe, I was becoming exactly the kind of mom that everybody talks about. The bitter ex-wife, the mom who keeps the kids away from their dad who loves them, the woman who couldn't move on. And looking back, none of that was actually true. Like I had good reasons for leaving the marriage and for the places that we had been and for the places we are even now.
But when somebody repeats the same thing to you over and over often enough, and you're hearing it every single week, every single day, and it becomes the soundtrack in the back of your own head. And there's the part that took me years to understand. None of those feelings had anything to do with the modification requests themselves. They came from something so much bigger. And I had allowed so much inner.
Taylor Kaspar (04:45.462)
And I had allowed so much interpersonal communication with my ex-husband that was not warranted. I had given him so much access back to me. I had given him so many opportunities to tell me who I was that by the time we sat down to negotiate things, I wasn't thinking strategically anymore. I was emotionally exhausted. I wasn't asking myself, whoa, what's best for my kids? What's gonna make sense and work for me?
Or what's gonna work in the next 10 years or the next two years or whatever? I was asking myself a completely different question. And the question was, how do I make this feeling stop? This is excruciating. I don't want to feel like this anymore. How do I get this to go away? And that's one of the most dangerous places you can negotiate from because when relief becomes your goal.
You start giving away things that were never your responsibility to give away.
So what did I do? Well, at that moment in that season, at that time, just six months after we had gotten divorced, I gave him exactly what he wanted. I agreed to give him more parenting time. And I told him that he didn't even have to pay child support anymore. I said, you know what, if you just pay the kids health insurance so they can get off the state health insurance, which will mean like the county won't come after you for the child support and you can pay their school tuition. We can, we'll just call it even.
And at the time it felt like relief. I remember thinking to myself, like, finally, maybe this will be enough and this will stop. Maybe he'll stop now. He'll stop asking me for things, calling me all the time, guilting me for you know the money. Maybe he'll stop trying to like make me seem like I'm keeping the kids from him. He'll see how fair I'm being, how much I support the kids' relationship with him.
Taylor Kaspar (06:45.486)
How I'm not trying to bankrupt him. I'm not trying to ruin his life. Maybe he'll stop making me feel like I'm the bad guy. But you know what happened? Nothing. The guilt disappeared for like maybe five minutes. But then there was something else. There was always something else. Another demands, another negotiation. There were more accusations, more reasons. I wasn't being fair enough. And that's when I learned something I wish somebody had taught me so many years earlier.
High conflict people don't negotiate the same way healthy people do. Healthy people negotiate to solve problems. High conflict people negotiate to gain position, and dare I say, as a mechanism of abuse. They negotiate every single interaction. It's not just in the mediations or the settlement conferences or in a court hearing or through their attorney. They are negotiating for.
Their own benefit in every single phone call at every single holiday during every exchange asking you for some new favor, some schedule change to break a boundary that you have set. Every single thing becomes open for negotiation. And if you don't recognize that, you'll spend years of your life thinking you'll solve today's problem when you're actually teaching them.
What works to break you down and erode your boundaries tomorrow. That doesn't mean you never compromise. It doesn't mean you never say yes to anything that makes sense. It doesn't mean that every request that they make is automatically unreasonable. I'm not saying that. It means you stop making decisions just because you feel guilty. Because guilt is a terrible decision maker. Guilt says just give them what they want.
Strategy says, let's think about what this decision creates six months from now. Guilt says, I don't want to look selfish. And strategy says, is this actually in my child's best interest? Guilt says, if I just cooperate a little bit more, maybe the conflict will stop. And strategy says, has more cooperation actually ever changed this pattern before? And those are completely different conversations.
Taylor Kaspar (09:07.826)
One of them is rooted in fear, and the other is rooted in wisdom, in deep thinking, and wise mind. And here's what I eventually realized. The question was never, Am I being nice enough? The question was always, will he think I'm being reasonable? Right? Like my frame of reference was what will he think about how I'm acting? Isn't that wild? The person who did so much to you.
And you are literally still thinking from a place of like, how will they react to me? The questions should have never been rooted in that, right? The questions should have never even been, can I avoid another hearing? Like, maybe you can't. So what? So what? But the question should have been: does this decision move me closer to the life that I'm trying to build? I wish somebody had taught me to ask that question earlier when I got divorced the first time.
Because it would have changed so many of my early decisions. Not because I would have fought my ex harder or been more difficult, but because I would have worked much more to be intentional. I would have understood that every agreement becomes tomorrow's expectation. Every compromise creates a new baseline for how he would treat me. Every pattern that you reinforce today.
Has a way of showing up again six months from now or two years from now or five years from now. And when you start looking at negotiation that way, you stop negotiating to make today less uncomfortable, and you start negotiating for the life you want to live in the future. And that's a completely different skill. And honestly, it's one of the biggest reasons I teach negotiation the way that I do. Because negotiation isn't really about getting a better deal or the best deal. It's about making decisions you're still proud of years from now.
Creating a system that you can live in longer than five minutes, 30 minutes a month, right? You wanna be here making decisions that protect your peace, that protect your children, that align with the future that you wanna create, not just the conflict you're trying to escape from because you wanna stop feeling bad. In our next episode, we're gonna talk about what I think is one of the biggest lies women.
Taylor Kaspar (11:26.526)
accidentally learned in family court and in high conflict co-parenting and the belief that gets reinforced there. And that's the idea that peace will come when the judge signs the final order because they s they secretly deep down believe that the judge's order is going to change their ex. I believe that for a long time. Hasn't worked yet.
And if you listen to the first five episodes, you probably already know where this is going. Because if there's one thing I hope you start seeing, it's that peace is not going to come externally from some judge, from your ex changing their behavior, from some piece of paper. It's going to come from learning how to navigate high conflict differently and how to live your life through it. And that's exactly what we're going to talk about next. So I will see you over there in the last mistake.
