Why Resistance Changes Everything

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Hi, welcome back to the postseparation abuse podcast. I'm your host, Danielle Black. We've spent the first four episodes in this series when children resist or refuse time with a parent asking some fairly uncomfortable questions What might a child's resistance or refusal actually mean? What do we mean when we're talking about a quote meaningful relationship? What happens when our own nervous system starts telling us what our child's behaviour means? And what happens when lawyers, barristers, report writers, and other professionals start sounding less like people offering a thorough assessment and more like oracles handing down the future. This series is not multiple episodes explaining why children say no. It's a series about what happens when they do. Because the moment that a child begins resisting or refusing contact or communication with a parent, adults start making meaning of that. Someone might say that the child is frightened, someone might say the child's being influenced, someone says the child just needs firmer boundaries, someone says the other parent needs to encourage harder. Someone says the child needs more time with the resisted parent so that the relationship can be repaired. And sometimes in all of that frantic adult meaning making, we skip over a rather obvious question. What is actually happening in the relationship between this child and this resisted parent? And if there's a problem in that relationship, whose job is it to fix it? Supporting a relationship is not the same thing as creating one. Creating opportunities for a relationship is not the same thing as manufacturing attachment. And one parent cannot perform another parent's relational labor for them. That's what we're talking about today, and as always, we're not talking about one predetermined explanation. Sometimes a child refuses or resists contact or communication with a parent because that parent has harmed them. Sometimes a child resists a perfectly safe parent during a particular difficult developmental period or transition. Sometimes there has been poor attunement, conflict, family violence, a relationship rupture of some kind, coercive control, parental influence, loyalty conflicts, neurodivergence, anxiety, ordinary preference, a significant imbalance in caregiving, or multiple things tangled together. Sometimes the resisted parent has a lot of work to do. Sometimes the preferred parent has work to do. Sometimes both parents have work to do.

Care Arrangements Versus Real Relationship

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One of the strangest things that can happen after separation is that relationships start being measured in overnight time, oftentimes on a fortnightly schedule. Two nights, five nights, seven nights, alternate weekends, half the holidays. Wednesday after school until Thursday morning, and before long we can start speaking as though the allocation of time is the relationship. But it isn't. Children spending time with a parent can create opportunities for relationship. But it's not a measure of that relationship. A child can spend four nights a fortnight with a parent and feel lonely, frightened, unseen, or emotionally responsible for that parent. A child can spend less time with a parent and experience that relationship as warm, secure, and deeply important. A child can love a parent and not want to sleep at their house. A child can enjoy a weekend and still have concerns about the broader arrangement. A child can be distressed at changeover and settle twenty minutes later. A child can appear completely fine at changeover and fall apart afterwards. The care arrangements give us information about where the child is, about who's responsible for caring for them, but it doesn't actually tell us much about the quality of what happens. That matters when a child starts saying no, because one of the first adult responses can be to protect the care arrangements. We need to preserve the five nights, or we need to restore the alternate weekends. We need makeup time, we need to get it to equal time. We need to provide more opportunities for a relationship. But this is where I want to ask a different question. Are we protecting the relationship or are we protecting care arrangements? Because those are not the same

When Disagreement Is Not Safe

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thing. There's a question that I keep coming back to when I think about parent-child relationships. And that is can you tolerate your child having a mind that exists separately from yours? Not just when their separate mind is adorable, not just when they prefer the same football team or music or food. But can you tolerate it when their separate mind contains a view that you don't like? Can you tolerate your child saying, I don't want to stay here tonight or I don't like it when you do that or I feel safer at mum's or I miss dad or I want more time at the other house or I want less time here or I don't want to talk about it or I don't agree with you. The test of a relationship is not whether or not your child agrees with you, rather it's whether they can safely disagree. And I don't just mean safely in the physical sense. Can they disagree without having to manage your emotions, without being shamed, without being interrogated until they eventually change their response, without being told that the answer isn't really theirs, without having affection withdrawn, without being recruited into proving that you're a good parent, without discovering that honesty threatens the relationship. Children are exquisitely capable of learning which truths adults can actually tolerate. And once they learn that a particular truth causes emotional collapse, rage, guilt, interrogation, or retaliation, we shouldn't be surprised if they become strategic about how and when they tell their truth. And that doesn't automatically mean that they've been coached by anyone. Sometimes it means that they've learned something about this particular relationship with this particular adult. And this brings us to the fact that our children's experience of us is not necessarily our experience of ourselves, which is a hard one. You can know yourself as loving. You can know how much you've sacrificed, you can remember every lunch that you've packed, every school pickup, every sleepless night, every dollar spent, every appointment attended, and your child can still experience something in the relationship differently. Now that doesn't make their interpretation automatically complete or factually perfect. Children can misunderstand things in the same way that adults can misunderstand things. Memory can be imperfect, emotion shapes perception, and development and maturity matters. But saying that's not how I intended it is not at all the same as whether or not that's how they experienced it. And relationship repair usually requires some capacity to stay present in that gap. To hear when you did this that made me feel this way without immediately responding, no you didn't. That's ridiculous. Your mother put that in your head. After everything I've done for you, you're too young to understand. Imagine trying to repair an adult relationship that way. Someone says, Hey, when you said that, that hurt me, and you just say, no it didn't. With children, adults can sometimes use authority to keep the interaction going long after the genuine relational engagement has stopped. A child can still be going through the motions at changeover, can still be getting in the car, can still be sleeping in the bed, and the adult might interpret that proximity as evidence that the relationship is going well, that the relationship is repaired, but proximity is not repair and compliance is not connection. Having contact and enjoying a healthy relationship are not the same thing. A court order can create contact. Parenting arrangements can create proximity. A parent can facilitate opportunities, and none of those things can force intimacy. You can't order a child to trust a parent. You can't order them to confide. You can't order them to relax or to show affection, and you certainly can't order an adult child into any particular contact or communication arrangement. And that's just

Proximity Is Not Repair

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one of the reasons why the relational work now matters so much, because eventually the scaffolding of parenting plans in court orders falls away. There's not always going to be a parenting arrangement capable of placing the child in the room. At some point the relationship has to be able to stand on its own two feet without all of that scaffolding.

The Resisted Parent’s Relational Work

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And so this brings us to a part in the series that I think so many of you have been waiting for, which is where is the work of the resisted parent? Where's that? What is that? What does that look like? When a child resists a parent, enormous pressure and focus can fall on the preferred parent. Encourage more, facilitate more, be more positive, don't show anxiety. Make the child go. Tell them they have to. Don't collect them early. Don't let them call you. Don't validate the refusal. Enforce consequences if they refuse. Now some of those things may in some circumstances form part of appropriate adult support for a child navigating transitions. But we all want to know something else, don't we? Where is the work of the resisted parent? What are they doing to understand the child's experience? What have they changed about themselves? What have they repaired? Can they hear criticism without retaliation? Can they apologize without adding a but or some kind of qualifier? Can they tolerate affection not being reciprocated on demand? Can they remain emotionally available even when the child is distant or angry? Can they tolerate the child loving both parents? Can they modify their behavior when something isn't working? Can they stay curious when their preferred explanation would be easier? A demand for time with a child is not evidence that that parent has capacity for a relationship with that child. Wanting a relationship with a child very badly doesn't tell us what form, frequency, or duration of time will support that relationship, and saying I love my child does not end the assessment. Of course the majority of parents, if not all parents, love their children. But the question is, what does being in a relationship with you feel like for them? And obviously the preferred parent does not get a free

The Preferred Parent’s Blind Spots

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pass. If you're the preferred parent, you also need to be able to tolerate your child's separate mind. Meaning being able to tolerate them having a good weekend with the other parent, coming home happy, maybe missing the other parent at times, maybe talking about wanting more time there. Maybe evidence that doesn't support your hypotheses, your theory. If a child comes home distress and that proves the arrangement is harmful, but the child comes home happy and that also proves the arrangement is harmful because obviously they were masking, fawning, manipulated, or love bombed, well we've created a bit of a theory that just simply can't lose. And a hypothesis or a theory that can't lose doesn't teach us a lot. Now that certainly does not mean that masking isn't real. It doesn't mean that children don't appease unsafe parents. What it means is that we don't get to use every possible observation as automatic confirmation of the same conclusion. What evidence would you accept that your children has a different view than yours? That question's important, I think, for every parent. And we also have to ask what would change my mind? That's not a question that we ask about established facts, if there's been an admission or a disclosure, particular evidence, we don't pretend that those things disappear just so that we can seem open minded. Rather the question of what would change my mind is a question for the particular theory that we have. If I think my child is refusing because they're frightened, what information supports that? What exists independently of the refusal? What has the child said? What have I observed? What am I inferring? What genuinely remains unknown? What else might fit? What information would cause me to modify my assessment and my theory? Or if we step into the shoes of the resisted parent, that resisted parent might think that their child is refusing because they're being influenced by the other parent. And again we have to be reflecting on well, what's the evidence for that? What's the child actually said? What was the historical relationship? What was caregiving like before separation? Were there ruptures in the relationship? What responsibility have I taken? What evidence would I accept that this child genuinely holds this view? And if the answer to that question is none, well, again, we're no longer getting curious about what's going on. We're instead holding really firmly to our preferred theory and defending it until the death.

A Personal Story About Equal Time

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I know a bit about what it's like when a child's refusal is treated as evidence that the preferred parent must be responsible, albeit not evidence by a court, but rather as evidence by the resisted parent. My eldest child spent around a decade in an equal shared care arrangement fifty fifty, that he ultimately was very unhappy with. Eventually, he disclosed abuse to professionals, child protection became a circuit breaker, and his views were listened to, and he was about eleven at the time. His father took me to court, and of course there were allegations that I had influenced our child, that I had brainwashed our child, and this is not me saying that every child who refuses has been abused by the resisted parent, and it's also not me saying that the preferred parent has never been engaging in any influencing or coaching, but there is something from my experience that has stayed with me. For years, my child's father seemed to want equality, equal time or nothing. The care arrangements mattered enormously to the point that my former partner would tinker with the calendar swapping nights here or there so that across a month or a particular time frame the exact number of nights was spent in each home. Equal time to my child's other parent appeared to represent something important to him about fairness, fatherhood, status, perhaps even a kind of victory. At least that's my interpretation. What I do know is eventually the care arrangements disappeared completely, and the relationship between our child and his father had an opportunity to stand without it and it didn't. And now that particular child that I'm talking to you about is nineteen. He has had many, many years in which contact with his other parent has been completely his choice. The door has been open and he has chosen not to have any relationship with his other parent. I've sometimes wondered whether or not that relationship would have survived if his father had actually listened to what he was saying when he was talking about his unhappiness with the care arrangements. I don't know. There were many serious issues. But again I do sometimes wonder what might have been different if when our son first said this isn't working for me, if the response from my former partner had been curiosity rather than a battle over equality. Maybe nothing would be different. I don't know. But that uncertainty is important because my point isn't listen to your child or they'll estrange from you. Rather, my point is that care arrangements can hold two people in proximity for a while, but it can't actually create a meaningful relationship. And I mean most people who have tuned into this podcast for any length of time and particularly clients who work with me one on one, and also people who are engaged with the blueprint know my thoughts on equal time arrangements. I could talk about the issues with equal time arrangements indefinitely, so don't worry, I'm not about to. Suffice to say that children are not equality instruments. They don't exist to distribute attachment evenly so that both parents feel equally important. Children can and do have different relationships with different parents, different histories, different levels of comfort, different attachment experiences, different shared interests, different needs at different ages. Each parent being important to a child does not require identical parent-child relationships, and that is not something that could be created anyway. And if a parent experiences every preference for the other household as some kind of injustice requiring correction, then the child can end up carrying an impossible task, which is to somehow make the adults feel equal. And that is not a child's job.

Who Gets Assigned The Labour

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There's also a piece of this that is often gendered that I think we need to be willing to name, and that is the relational responsibility that is placed on primary caregivers in particular, and in heterosexual relationships, primary caregivers are typically female. But whether we're talking about a heterosexual relationship or a same-sex relationship, we sometimes give non-primary caregivers enormous relational entitlement while assigning primary caregivers enormous relational responsibility. If we're talking about a heterosexual relationship in which the primary caregiver is mum, this can look like dad being entitled to the relationship and mum being responsible for making the relationship happen. Dad wants more time, mum needs to encourage. Dad's hurt, mum needs to make the child go. Dad and the child have conflict, mum needs to stop validating the child and enforce consequences if the child doesn't do what they're told. And again, this doesn't mean that mothers or primary caregivers never undermine relationships between children and non-primary caregivers, either deliberately or inadvertently. They can. And I'm certainly not saying that fathers or non-primary caregivers are always the resisted parent, because that's not true either. But whichever parent is preferred and which one is resisted, I think we need to apply the same standard and ask the question who's being assigned the labour of this relationship? Because one parent can refrain from undermining. They can keep the door open, they can speak quite respectfully and very neutrally, irrespective of what's gone on, they can facilitate appropriate opportunities, they can help a child regulate, they can support therapy, they can avoid exposing the child into any adult conflict, but they can't make another adult become emotionally safe, attuned, accountable, or relationally capable. Supporting a relationship is not the same thing as creating a relationship, and supporting a relationship is also not the same thing as repairing a relationship on behalf of someone else.

What Repair Actually Requires

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And this brings us to what does repair actually require? Repair is not some kind of magic word, and quote, reunification is not a treatment plan. Rather, that's an outcome that someone's hoping to achieve. Any intervention, any repair still has to fit the reason that the relationship ruptured, or again, remember, we've also we also need to be reflecting on what relationship actually existed in the first place. Is it a relationship that has actually experienced a rupture? Or is the reality that the relationship was never actually very solid or highly developed to begin with? Whatever the intervention, it needs to actually align with what's going on within the relationship. So if the problem is ordinary transition anxiety, the response is going to look one way. If the problem is a lack of familiarity after limited historical caregiving, it's going to look really different. If the problem is a parent who repeatedly humiliates, frightens, or dismisses the child, well that repair requires something from that parent, the resisted parent. If the problem involves family violence, so coercive control or other forms of abuse, safety can't be skipped in pursuit of, quote, repairing the relationship. If the child has been exposed to negative messaging from the preferred parent, well, that is going to require some kind of intervention too. And importantly, forced proximity can't manufacture the thing that's missing. Sometimes relationships grow through time and just simply opportunities to be together. But sometimes they also require accountability. Sometimes they require less pressure, less time, sometimes through more supported contact, sometimes with a child getting older. Sometimes the relationship is always going to remain strained and limited. We can't actually promise anyone a particular ending. If you're the resisted parent, I would ask you to reflect on what evidence you would accept that your child genuinely holds their particular view. If you're the preferred parent, I invite you to reflect on what evidence you would accept that your child might hold a different view from yours. And so all of this to say that the reason for the resistance and the refusal is really key to the type of repair or the type of intervention that will be appropriate. And this is where getting curious is really important. Particularly most importantly, if there's a bit of confusion about what exactly is going on underneath the resistance or the refusal, if there's not already significant evidence about what it is, if we don't have an older child who's been able to specifically articulate problematic behavior from the resisted parent or something along those lines.

Listening Without Handing Over Control

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And this is where listening to our children is just so incredibly crucial. And again, listening to our children is not the same as our children getting a veto on things. A child having a voice is not the same as the child bearing all of the responsibility for the decision making. Our children can tell us what something feels like for them without them also being handed the burden of designing the care arrangements. They can be heard without being made the judge. They can have a separate mind without being left to carry all of those adult decisions. Which brings us to the obvious question, which is okay, fine, listen to the child. Don't automatically jump to a particular diagnosis. Don't make the child responsible. Don't assume the care arrangements of the relationship. Don't make one parent perform all of the relational labour. Wonderful. But what the fuck are we supposed to do at four forty five on a Friday afternoon when our child is crying in the hallway saying I'm not going? That's what we're going to talk about next. I know how hard this can be. Our children having a voice is not the same as our children having veto. But their voice is not background noise either. Listening is not the same as agreeing. Validation is not the same as factual endorsement in the same way that supporting a relationship should never require us to stop asking what that relationship actually feels like for our child.

When Encouragement Becomes Coercion

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So in our next episode, we're going to be talking about what happens when encouragement becomes coercion. And

More Support Inside The Blueprint

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if this is something that you're dealing with, a child resisting or refusing contact or communication, we just so happen to have an entire module on this inside the post-separation parenting blueprint. That module covers age-specific considerations. It dives into the types of resistance and age-appropriate modifications to care arrangements or transitions. It talks about how to best support children who are resisting contact or communication, as well as guidance on how to work with the resisted or the non-preferred parent. We also dive into the common misinterpretations and harmful responses when a child is resisting or refusing time or contact with a parent. That module also looks at the therapy that isn't therapeutic. By that I mean court-ordered family therapy or quote reunification therapy. We discuss long-term considerations, and there's also a specific lesson on when children have been influenced by a parent. All of that is inside a specific module inside the post-separation parenting blueprint. You hear me talk about the blueprint a lot for very good reason. It has so many foundational modules related to post-separation parenting, such as understanding child development in the context of separation, safety assessment fundamentals, age and developmentally appropriate parenting arrangements, as well as considerations for children with additional needs, navigating high conflict and abuse dynamics, and also deep dives into topics such as substance abuse concerns, mental health concerns, relocation considerations, adult children and family separation, repartnering and new relationships. Of course, we talk about growing our capacity. That's a big thing here at Danielle Black Coaching. We have an entire module dedicated to coercive control. We have a module on challenging the equal parenting ideology. We have a module on legal considerations. That's already undergone some expansion and is in the process of further expansion. We've got a module on using AI, including a lesson that runs through how to best use our digital coach AI Danielle, which is something that all blueprint members have unlimited access to. And we also have a reference and resource directory because we are very evidence-based here at Danielle Black Coaching. We're also expanding the audio versions for every module. We've got about half of the blueprint content available as audio on our private podcast, which I know is so incredibly valuable for those of you that are incredibly busy and still want to be learning and benefiting from the blueprint content while you're on the go. And just as an example, the coercive control module, the audio for that is almost four hours in length. That's obviously broken up into different lessons, but that just goes to show the depth of the information that we're providing here. This is not a brief surface-level post-separation parenting resource. This is something to really sink your teeth into that is here for your entire journey, the foundations and the fundamentals of your journey, as well as some more of those complex issues that many separated parents ultimately end up needing to navigate, whether we're talking about aspects of family violence, whether we're talking about substance abuse concerns, co-parenting communication considerations for our kids that are neurodivergent or who have other additional needs, all of those things. So if what we've been covering in this podcast series on when children resist or refuse, if this is something that you want more information about along with other topics, please do head to the website or use the link in the show notes to learn more about the post separation parenting blueprint. Thank you so much for your time. I'll look forward to chatting with you again soon.