Co-parents often find themselves at a stalemate with one parent distrustful of the other. Trust can be rebuilt, and returning guest Dr. Michael Saini has some tips on how to do it.
On today’s episode of Children First Family Law, Krista welcomes back Dr. Saini, a Toronto-based renowned psychologist who has authored more than 200 publications, including book chapters, government reports, systematic reviews, and a vast number of peer-reviewed journal articles highlighting research in the area of family law and its impact on children. Dr. Saini is a passionate advocate for children’s rights.
Krista and Dr. Saini begin their conversation by explaining the importance of establishing boundaries around trust and repairing trust violations in the context of a divorce situation. Dr. Saini outlines the research on trust as the number one dynamic for co-parenting success, emphasizing the importance of accepting who your co-parent is and building trust despite any disputes you may have with them. He shares why coming to terms with “good enough” parenting can be helpful, how the erosion of trust can lead to additional conflicts as co-parents, and why the conflict is worse for your kids than getting your way in the fight you’re having with your co-parent. You’ll hear Dr. Saini’s method of using mini goals to rebuild trust with your co-parent, the foundation childhood creates for trusting or distrusting in future relationships, the importance of exposing kids to new romantic partners carefully, and learning to become comfortable with your new roles post-divorce. Finally, Krista and Dr. Saini explain when trust-building models aren’t appropriate and how to figure out what each parent is willing to do to demonstrate their trustworthiness.
Trust is a complex and significant topic in divorce, and Dr. Michael Saini’s tips can help you rebuild trust with your co-parent and foster a healthy relationship for your children, thereby breaking intergenerational conflict tendencies.
In this episode, you will hear:
- Building boundaries around trust and repairing trust violations
- Research about trust being the number one dynamic for co-parenting success
- Dr. Michael Saini’s take on viewing trust as a bank account with a positive or negative balance based on experiences
- The importance of coming to a place of acceptance of your co-parent, thinking beyond the dispute, and building trust
- “Good enough” parenting and not placing your standards on the other parent
- Why emotional processing is like an iceberg, because we only see a small portion of it
- How erosion of trust leads to additional conflict in co-parenting
- For your kids, the impact of the conflict is far more harmful than who ‘wins’ the argument.
- Anger and fear as secondary emotions to fear
- Using mini goals to rebuild trust
- Childhood is the foundation for trusting or distrusting future relationships
- When conflict is modeled poorly over generations,kids can repeat the same unhealthy patterns rather than learning how to resolve them
- Exposing kids to new romantic partners very carefully
- Boundary ambiguity post-divorce and becoming comfortable with new roles
- When the trust-building models are not appropriate, especially considering the dynamics of violence
- What each parent is willing to do to demonstrate trustworthiness
Resources from this Episode
www.childrenfirstfamilylaw.com
Dickie 2015 Trust and Conflict Resolution
Saini 2025 Trust in AFCC CA Handouts2PP
All states have different laws; be sure you are checking out your state laws specifically surrounding divorce. Krista is a licensed attorney in Colorado and Wyoming but is not providing through this podcast legal advice. Please be sure to seek independent legal counsel in your area for your specific situation.
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Incremental Trust Building for Co-Parents: A Challenge from International Expert Dr. Michael Saini Podcast Transcript
0:00:00 – Dr. Michael Saini
A problem is only a problem until you find the solution. And so, in that case, I would want to know how would they want to get past that barrier, because parents don’t want to be stuck in conflict. If they had a choice, I always like to ask parents what will you do when you no longer have to deal with conflict? What will you do with your time? What hobbies will you take to replace the amount of time that you’re spending on the conflict? What will you do with your time? What hobbies will you take to replace the amount of time that you’re spending on the conflict? You know, knowing that they would rather not be in this situation if they could.
And the opposite of love is not hate, but it’s a place of acceptance. And so if they’re still hating each other, then there’s this emotional connection that’s keeping them engaged in court. And so how to start thinking about beyond that dispute, beyond that conflict, what do you need to see happen, you know, first, and then second, and then third, to really have you start thinking about trusting this person, at least in a way that you’re okay with the child, spending that time with them. It’s not going to be perfect.
Intro/Outro 01:11
Welcome to the Children First Family Law podcast. Our host, Krista Nash, is an attorney, mediator, a parenting coordinator, and child advocate with a heart to facilitate conversations about how to help children flourish amidst the broken area of family law. As a child advocate in demand for her expertise throughout Colorado and as a speaker on these issues at a national level, Krista is passionate about facilitating and creatively finding solutions to approach family law matters in a way that truly focuses on the best interests of kids. Please remember this podcast is provided to you for information purposes only. No one on this podcast is representing you or giving you legal advice. As always, please enjoy this episode and be sure to like, subscribe and share the podcast with others you think would benefit from this content.
law matters in a way that truly focuses on the best interests of kids. Please remember this podcast is provided to you for information purposes only. No one on this podcast is representing you or giving you legal advice. As always, please enjoy this episode and be sure to like, subscribe and share the podcast with others you think would benefit from this content.
0:02:00 – Krista Nash
Today on the podcast, we welcome our very first second appearance guest, dr Michael Saini of Canada, president of the International Association of Family and Conciliation Courts and worldwide known psychologist and prolific researcher on issues in families of divorce. We are grateful Dr Saini is willing to join us again this time to speak about the important topic of incremental trust building with parents of divorce. When parents go through a divorce, their bank accounts, if you will, of trust are depleted to zero or are in the negative. Yet they are then asked to co-parent together from a basis of trust. This is a nearly impossible ask, making it essential to children’s outcomes that parents figure out how to rebuild that trust. Dr Sayeni’s research provides details as to why this is so vital and how to approach it with real ideas for parents and those of us who work in family law arenas. We hope you enjoy this insight from Dr Sayeni to help families, help kids, flourish despite the devastating life event of divorce.
Welcome to today’s episode of the podcast. I’m so glad you’re here and I am thrilled today to have the esteemed Dr Michael and I’m going to say his name right this time Saini, correct, perfect, yes, I said it wrong last time. I’m going to keep practicing this until I get it right every time With us for my very first second time guest. So thank you for doing this and welcome back.
0:03:27 – Dr. Michael Saini
Thank you. A pleasure to be here. It’s wonderful. Thank you for inviting me back.
0:03:30 – Krista Nash
For those of you who didn’t listen to the previous episode with Dr Sayini, I appreciate. No, I said it wrong. Yeah, did I say it right or wrong, sayini?
0:03:38 – Dr. Michael Saini
You said it right, no it’s good With Dr Sayini.
0:03:48 – Krista Nash
I first talked with him generally about alienation and Caden’s Law and a whole bunch of different research that he is working on.
He is out of Toronto and has a lot of worldwide influence and, I think, is doing research in virtually every area that we discussed. I think I joked last time that you must not sleep because every topic I even brought up you thought, oh, I have a research paper on this and a paper on that and a study on that, so very fortunate to have you here back on the show. Last time we talked about how Dr Saini had done some work on incremental trust building, and I have seen through so much of my work that that is such a core problem for co-parents because the trust one of your most intimate relationships has eroded, and so the trust has understandably completely been broken down usually, and so I thought it was very interesting to hear that Dr Syeney had done this work. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. So give us a little intro, tell us why you maybe did this research and some initial thoughts on what people need to think about in terms of introduction to this.
0:04:46 – Dr. Michael Saini
For sure, so when you think about what we’ve been trying to accomplish in terms of high conflict and putting boundaries around the conflict when parents separate, we haven’t really been able to move that far in the last 40 years. We can put boundaries around the conflict, but we don’t actually do a lot to change the dynamics. We can try and put structure. We use the courts, we use clinical professionals, we use forensics, we try everything we can to put a boundary around the conflict so it doesn’t spill over to the kids and we tell parents don’t involve your children in the conflict. But then they do. We haven’t really moved that far in the last, you know, 40, 50 years, since we’ve been really studying separation and divorce and so on. The other side of conflict is really the lack of trust. And so what if we were going about this the wrong way? What if, instead of focusing on putting boundaries around the conflict, what if we were instead trying to address trust violations and try and repair those in some sort of incremental way so that they can hopefully, with some assistance, create some more foundational trust or at least have some foundational trust? If there’s no trust left in that relationship, then when we do ask them to take on a parenting plan or we give them parent education that we hope that they’re going to apply to their family and to their children, that they’re more likely then to integrate it, because now we have a foundation of trust, and so it’s really been an area that I’ve been excited about, and you know, when you do this work for a long time, it’s always good to find things that get you excited and focused on thinking about doing things differently, and we have a bit of research on this right now.
Marsha Prude and I we developed a co-parenting tool. We developed a co-parenting tool, and the number one factor that really is related to positive co-parenting is this trust dynamic, and so it really brought me deep into the literature, and I’ve spent a lot of time reading about trust. And what do we actually know about trust? Because we always say we have to trust each other, but what does that actually mean? Who has studied the trust and the various formations of trust? And what does trust violations mean? And what does trust building look like? And even if you go to the literature, the word trust is everywhere, but no one really defines it and no one’s really spent any time trying to figure out how to build it when it’s been ruptured.
0:07:44 – Krista Nash
So is it fair to say that you make the assumption, I mean that we can make the assumption that there’s some level of trust before the divorce or breakup? I mean, maybe at some time during the relationship trust was probably violated because we see this family unit breaking up. But is the idea that and maybe you can define trust force but that you had it at one point and maybe that’s even more injurious right If you had it at one point and then you lost it, versus never having it and still not having it?
0:08:14 – Dr. Michael Saini
Yeah, you look at a relationship where they’ve had conflicts and if you think of a bank account, you know you open up a bank account and you start putting money into the bank and you start saving and saving. And that’s what you do with trust in a relationship. You keep on saving trust into your relationship Because one day you’re going to have to withdraw from trust, you’re going to have to withdraw from that bank account and you want to make sure that there’s some money in the bank that you’re withdrawing from and you want to make sure that there’s some money in the bank that you’re withdrawing from. What happens is that sometimes you withdraw so much, like an affair, for example or you withdraw over time, a little bit at a time.
Every single time you criticize, every single time you have those small micro trust violations. They start depleting the account and so by the time they separate, there’s nothing left in the account. So we ask them to trust that. You know the child is going to be fine at the other parent’s home, but there’s nothing left in the bank for them to withdraw from. So they’re in overdraft by time. They separate and they’re involved with us and yet we’re asking them to trust each other.
0:09:27 – Krista Nash
And I suppose if people are litigating or even just that’s part of why I even have the podcast is people can get this information, because so much information is conflict ridden. You know, when I go look for divorce lawyers, I see websites that have we’re gonna win, or the picture of a bear, angry bear, or caution tape like we gotcha, we’re going to win for you. You’re like we’re going to war, and a lot of times the cases are going to posture that way. Right, I have a hard time, even myself being as amicable as I am, not being in that seat when you’re confronted. That’s what we learned in law school. So the people that are leading these people, often if they’ve got attorneys not a lot of people do not have attorneys but what does that add to that conflict dynamic? Does that fuel the conflict, then, or the lack of trust?
0:10:13 – Dr. Michael Saini
Yeah for sure. I think every time that you move into a situation where you’re eroding the trust through additional conflict and you know, position yourself to win against the other and not take the opportunity to recreate some trust if there had been trust or, if not, then put trust into that relationship then you’re just prolonging the conflict, You’re prolonging the inability to trust each other and oftentimes you can have the best deal. You really think that the parties are going to agree Like. This sounds perfect, why would you not agree to this?
But they still walk away from the deal, they walk away from settlement or they walk away from the opportunity to come to some sort of agreement on their case because they just don’t trust. They don’t trust the other person, they don’t trust the process, they don’t trust themselves, they don’t trust the system at large, and so they walk away because they just don’t feel that they can trust. You know whatever’s going to come from that. And so if we’re not addressing their trust propensity or their propensity to trust as they come into these situations and deal with the potential trust violations and how that’s having an impact on their feelings about the agreement, then they’re going to break down and we see this happen, unfortunately, far too often. So even when we have in the lawyers who are friendly and trying to resolve, you may still have parties who decide that they don’t trust the lawyers, they don’t trust the other person and therefore don’t follow through with what we would think would be an otherwise good deal for them and their children.
0:12:06 – Krista Nash
I think it just points out to. This is a slightly off topic, but I’m dealing right now with a client who, where I’m representing the parent and we have a perfectly good plan ready to go, not just for parenting time but for the division of all the money and all the things, and there’s a hang up emotionally right Over a very small thing, like it’s a very small thing and it’s just like I have to say it’s irrational not to do this. But I understand, like you, as long as you understand you’re operating out of emotion and operating out of kind of vindictiveness, right, I I’m trying to encourage this person not to do that because it’s a huge waste of money. But people are willing to spend a huge amount of money over something very trivial because they’re so caught in this web. So I don’t know, that isn’t necessarily about the trust, but I mean I suppose it could also erode the trust, right, because the other person receiving this is like, oh, they’re just trying to stick it to me.
0:13:12 – Dr. Michael Saini
I mean it does fail to think that we’re going to get through this amicably right Makes that other person feel that way. It could be trust related, because if they don’t trust whatever, that piece is in the overall plan.
That could be the barrier. Like, since I’ve been doing all of this research on trust, I have changed the way I do parenting plan evaluations. Because now I’m asking parents you know I’m asking about their propensity to trust so how trusting are they as individuals, generally speaking? And then how much do they trust the person in which they’re in conflict with? And then I want to know, from a calculus-based trust, what will it take specifically for you to start trusting the other person? And it may mean that before anything else happens, they need to see the other parent show up on time at least three times. Well, now we can measure trust building. Now we’re making progress, now we’re looking for solutions and we’re not stuck in the problems of the past, like a problem is only a problem until you find the solution. And so in that case, I would want to know how would they want to get past that barrier, because parents don’t want to be stuck in conflict.
If they had a choice, I always like to ask parents what will you do when you no longer have to deal with conflict? What will you do with your time? What hobbies will you take to replace the amount of time that you’re spending on the conflict, you know, knowing that they would rather not be in this situation if they could. And the opposite of love is not hate, but it’s a place of acceptance. And so if they’re still hating each other, then there’s this emotional connection that’s keeping them engaged in court. And so how to start thinking about, beyond that dispute, beyond that conflict, what do you need to see happen, you know, first, and then second, and then third, to really have you start thinking about trusting this person, at least in a way that you’re okay with the child spending that time with them.
It’s not going to be perfect, and Winnicott’s good enough parenting concept is a really nice model to use, because we typically assess parents as being experts. And well, no one’s an expert. I’m not an expert parent, but I’m good enough in terms of Winnicott’s good enough parenting. As long as I’m not harmful, I’m not abusive, then good enough is just okay. Abusive, then good enough is just okay. And so how do you get parents to trust that the other parent is good enough to take care of the child when they’re not around? That’s the real key of what’s often missing in what we’re doing.
0:15:56 – Krista Nash
Okay, so we’re going to take a little detour here because I’ve not heard of that, winnicott. So first of all, how do you spell it?
0:16:02 – Dr. Michael Saini
It’s W-I-N-N-I-C-O-T. Okay, and who is Winnicott? So Winnicott is? She looked at object relations about 100 years ago. It’s an old theory. Okay, it’s before Bowlby, and Bowlby, of course, is the attachment dude. Yes and so. But when I was talking about what is good enough for parents so that their children can adjust, ok, and the idea here is that typically, especially in child protection, child dependency and in family law, we often hold parents to too high a regard. We expect them to be perfect parents when none of us are the perfect parent. We’re all sort of good enough. And so, from a child protection standpoint, when I do training with child welfare, I talk about that threshold of as long as it’s not abusive or neglectful. Where it’s now contrary to their safety and well-being, then we need to be thinking about these allegations in context of good enough. For example, the child eats Kraft dinner at dad’s place on Wednesdays it’s not perfect. Or mac and cheese? Do you have Kraft dinner in the?
0:17:20 – Krista Nash
United States. I was going to say we probably just call it mac and cheese, but it is Kraft and it is Kraft mac and cheese. Yeah, for the Americans Is that what you just call it? Mac and cheese, but it is craft and it is craft, but it is craft mac and cheese. For the Americans, don’t you Canadians call it, it’s just craft dinner. It’s just craft dinner yeah we just call it mac and cheese.
0:17:32 – Dr. Michael Saini
Yeah, but if they have it on Wednesdays, it’s not great but it’s not harmful, right? Especially if they’re having, you know, broccoli and other vegetables on Monday, tuesday, thursday, friday, whatever. And so, yeah, it’s not great but it’s not harmful, it’s good enough, it’s fine, your child’s going to be okay. And actually, you having conflict about this and you making this an issue in the courts and exacerbating the conflict because of this is actually making it worse than the food itself. And that goes with routines and what kids are watching, and I mean there’s always you look at, you know, in the video that kids play, some of it is harmful, but most of it is fine. It’s not going to.
You know, we have to make sure that they’re not on it for too long, but some of it is fine, it’s not going to. You know, we have to, you know, make sure that they’re not on for too long, and but some of it is okay, everything in moderation. And so, you know, when I learned about this concept, I felt relieved as a parent. I also felt, you know, good for my dad, who I thought was a good enough parent. So on Father’s Day I gave him a card that said thank you for being a good enough dad.
0:18:51 – Krista Nash
I love that. I know I think I’ve shared. You know I’m open book on this, but I’ve got four adult kids and over the years they’ve said we need a child advocate. You know, like, can we call a child advocate into our house? Because I’m just good enough to right and I’m not trying to tell parents that too, when I’m talking with them. It sends me back these comments to. I guess I’ve trained under this Winnicott theory and not even known it. But when I first got engaged, right after college, probably even during college, I was a CASA volunteer, court-appointed special advocates. Not sure if that’s in Canada at all, but in the United States the dependency neglect court started using lay people to come in and basically take one case at a time. Just go lay eyes on this. The caseworkers are too busy and I know you used to do that work yourself when you first started.
They’re too busy. We need one person to be on one case just to give me, the court, some more information, right? And I remember when we trained way before I became a lawyer or anything like that they would say your standard is not the standard Like it’s good enough. I mean, that’s not what they said, but they said you know, if the kid is safe, if the kid has a bed and the kid has food, it’s okay, and I remember going to my first home visit with that and the kids eating hot dogs like cold hot dogs, I think, even you know, not on a plate just grabbed out of the fridge. There are a lot of things that I might not have agreed with, that I might want to take that kid away from, but I just had that kept running through my head. Right, that’s not the standard Right, the standard safety Right.
And so now, though, when we look at these family, you know now we’ve got people who’ve got oh, this is how we did in our family. Now the other two families are doing it differently when they’re broken up, and there is a huge tendency to come in and say I’m hearing that they’re not getting this, or they get to stay up too late or they’re playing the wrong video game, and I agree with you, some of them are truly bad and we can just agree they’re bad. But I hear that a lot in conflict. So I love that good enough idea because I think you’re right that the conflict over it injures the kids more than whether they get an extra serving of broccoli, right, okay, well, that diverted us, but I think that was really important because we’re all only good enough parents you are, and same with me, okay, so we were going back into the trust stuff, so I’m actually, are you going to let me put you can just announce during our recording Are you going to let me use your slides?
Can I share those with people? Like sure, okay, so I’m going to put on my show or on my website some of these slides that people who are interested in. There’s a presentation that we have here that I’m kind of flipping through, that we’re not going through exactly, but I’m looking at a slide that is about emotional processing and this iceberg of emotions, so maybe you could talk about that a little bit. As we get in more into the trust conversation, you’ve got a triangle for those just listening that say anger above the line, fear below the line, and it talks about how only one ninth of these emotions are visible and basically eight of the nine are hidden. So tell the audience about that a little bit.
0:21:33 – Dr. Michael Saini
So anger and hostility are secondary emotions, and they’re brought to the surface by unacknowledged fear, worry, concern, and they’re expressed in ways that protect you from your vulnerabilities. So you use your secondary emotions because it’s your amygdala hijack that is pushing you into a fight or flight or freeze. So you’re activated and you’re now emotionally dysregulated because of the concerns and the fears and the worries. But what that tells us, though, when we intervene with folks, that these secondary emotions, if we can tap into the underlining emotions, the primary emotions, what’s really upsetting? Like, for example, if you criticize somebody and you say, well, you’re lazy, and all you do is sit on the couch, what you’re really doing is talking about so that’s an angry, you know comment towards somebody else. But what that is your own fear and concern and worry. So the concern may be that you wish you had more leisure time, that you are really busy and you wish you had more time to relax, and so it’s more about your own concerns than about your anger towards somebody else. It also, as professionals, it allows us to be much more empathetic. So when somebody’s angry, when I worked in child welfare and they would bang their fist and yell at me, I didn’t look at the anger I looked at. Well, what’s the concern? Why are you showing this anger display? What’s going on underneath that? What are you worried about? What are you concerned about? You know, a peacock doesn’t show their feathers unless they feel threatened. And so if we were to address the fear and the worry and the concern, then we would be able to move much further along in trying to help people out. So, instead of what’s wrong with you, why are you so angry? The question would be what are you concerned about? What am I not getting? What do I need to understand? Why are you emotionally feeling unheard by this?
And so it’s just another way of trying to again be empathetic in our approach and not get caught into the conflict, because I think we can exacerbate the conflict, because when somebody you know is angry, they may be accusatory towards us. We then get defensive because we’re trying to do a good job and we don’t understand why they’re angry at us. And now we’re now upset, and now we’ve just escalated the situation, and so we’re now, you know, we’re arguing with a client or we’re now labeling them as being uncooperative. We see that a lot. There’s a lot of labeling around, you know, people being uncooperative, or because they’re angry, and really, to me, that’s just a sign of them not being able to articulate their feelings. It’s like a child who is having temper tantrum in the grocery store. It’s because they can’t articulate their feelings and so they’re acting out as a way of trying to get their message.
0:24:59 – Krista Nash
Oh, interesting.
I mean I was telling you, as we were preparing for this today, about a situation where a father has been acting in a way that the kids are reacting to and in that situation one of the kids has said to me in a visit that I did.
The kid said one of the kids who used to not see a parent but now is seeing the parent much more regularly this child is describing and I thought this maybe he should be a psychologist because he really had some very poignant things to say. He said well, I stopped getting caught in the tone trap of my parent and I started realizing that what my parent was doing was the intention of my parent was based on love and care and fear that I don’t succeed and fear that I don’t. You know that I, that I’m not going to make something of myself and all of these things, and this parent would almost have this temper, tantrum or react in a way that was bad. But the kid really could parse through that. But you know, I don’t know if this parents really just was learned to act differently, but the trust was eroded. We’re talking a lot about trust between co-parents, but the trust was eroded between the children and the parent as well, which I think is an interesting dynamic.
0:26:13 – Dr. Michael Saini
Typically it’s harder for children in high conflict situations to be able to identify emotions and also mood repair, so they also may move to a dysregulated state because they’re taught that. And so if you have a child who, even though their parents are teaching them to dysregulate rather than to regulate, and still can make sense of that and articulate a response, you know what is really happening there from an emotional standpoint and that says something about that child. Yeah, it’s pretty rare.
0:26:54 – Krista Nash
I mean this kid’s on the verge of adulthood, but still, I mean I thought it was very rare. This kid also said that his mother paints a painting without naming the painting, like you know, which I also thought was really interesting, right, it’s like we’re painting a painting of something, but we’re really interesting. Right, it’s like we’re painting a painting of something but we’re not going to tell you what we’re going to call it, but it’s very clear what it is, and in sort of this way. That is like I’m going to paint a monster and not tell you it’s a monster. You know what? The way?
0:27:21 – Dr. Michael Saini
I want you to think about your other parent right, you name, you name the painting, and then I’ll say it’s your idea.
0:27:28 – Krista Nash
Yeah, right. So I’m affirming, I’m completely affirming, right, this sort of thing and the kid’s like, well, you know, sort of sort of sort of so just interesting dynamics about.
You know the in the field kind of situation, so all right. So then I think it’s true what you said about parents teaching their kids, modeling dysregulation right, and how we expect a different outcome from that. You mentioned, like the. Let’s come up with some actual ways to rebuild trust. Like what would trust look like? So what are some of those mechanisms? How do we like add to this bank when the people aren’t together anymore?
0:28:05 – Dr. Michael Saini
So I think it’s first of all figuring out what is their level of trust. Do they have any trust? Did they have any trust before? If so, was there a rupture, or were there many ruptures, and what do those ruptures say about their ability to trust in the future and the types of trust that they would need to establish to start trusting the other?
So, for example, you know, you look at, I’ll just be using a mom and a dad and so let’s say, mom has been in the relationship for 10 years. She thinks she knows dad, she thinks that they have a good relationship, she thinks that she can trust him, she thinks that he’s a good dad, that she knows him and knows that he would do no harm to these children. And then she finds out that dad had an affair with a younger person, and now she feels that this is a complete trust violation. It’s been a rupture of trust. She doesn’t know this person anymore. She thought she knew him, but he’s been sneaking around behind her back for the last you know year, two years or whatnot. So she, the person that she thought she knew, she doesn’t know. And so now we’re asking her to just to trust that he’s going to be a good parent with these children that they share. And she’s saying I don’t even know this person, I have no trust in this person at all, and how am I supposed to allow the children to go to a stranger Because this person is now a stranger to me? And then what happens is then she gets accused of being an alienator and it gets really complicated and the courts get involved and then they get stuck in that false binary of is she an alienator or not, and it becomes a really bad situation.
But what if we looked at it from a trust perspective and said, okay, well, would you need to see happen for you to start trusting him, not as a spouse, because that relationship is done, that’s not coming back, but can he still be a co-parent, can he still be a good father? And what would that look like? What would be the first thing that he would have to prove to you that he could be a good father? And it may be again, he will. He has to, you know, make sure I get to call them when they’re over there, and so there may be some hyper monitoring that is needed in the very beginning. Maybe that there needs to be a hyper focus on consistency. So we can’t even be a second late, because that’s going to throw off the feeling of trust.
And so it’s that calculus-based trust and it’s I trust you because I know that you’re doing A, b and C, and as long as you do A, b and C, I can start trusting you again on these things.
I still won’t be able to trust you on other things, but I can trust you on these things as long as there’s a pattern that we can now start establishing, which is why consistency and predictability and having a structure that everybody follows is so critical for these families when they separate and they’re trying to rebuild trust.
And so once you understand the rupture, once you understand what’s keeping them from being able to trust, then you can start looking at, you know the type of trust that’s needed. And then you put a plan in place for step up parenting plans, or you put a incremental situation where over time, they go OK, well, you got that one, we’ll see about the next one, but so far so good. And you put money into the bank, into their co-parenting relationship, where over time, hopefully they don’t need us and they can do it on their own Because at that point at least they trust each other for being able to maintain a parenting plan, because, again, we’re only asking them to trust specifically to the co-parenting relationship and what’s required for a child to go back and forth.
0:32:13 – Krista Nash
So when people don’t have a parenting plan evaluator or custody evaluator we call these different things in different places involved in there. Maybe they’re just listening to this and they’re in a bad co-parenting situation Generally. What do you think or what would your suggestions be for parents who don’t have these helpers to help them? How can they? I mean, it sounds like almost impossible and very difficult, but how could parents approach, trying to reach better levels of trust without having a lot of money or helpers or people actually guiding them through it and hand-holding them? Because it’s one thing to you know, for example, in another situation I’ve got a really broken child. I’ve got high, high conflict over many, many years.
One of the main things I did in initial problem solving was to say this kid has to have the gizmo watch going back and forth where the kid can contact the other parent. Because you know, probably the one parent isn’t sleeping much on the times that the parent is not with the child because there’s this monster in her head that is, you know, really, really concerned and she doesn’t have any contact over the course of this week and the kid can’t contact the other parent back either. So you know it’s like, okay, let’s, can we at least do that? Can we at least within reason say let’s let the child have the charger and have the watch, and can we at least do that? Can we at least within reason say let’s let the child have the charger and have the watch, and can we at least start with these small things? So what would be something that parents could do on their own, you think agree to do on their own?
0:33:39 – Dr. Michael Saini
Well, I think individually. First, I think parents can make note of the areas where they perhaps don’t trust the other parent. So what is it? Specifically? Because I think the more concrete we can be, the more that they can identify those points in the parenting plan that are going to create a rub. So is it the sleeping? I don’t think my child is going to get their eight, 10 hours of sleep while the other parents are. And you say it there, but I don’t trust you because you haven’t been able to do that previously and I’m concerned about the child’s overall sleep habits because if not, then they can’t function well at school. To your point, with the watch you can get them like a Garmin watch.
0:34:29 – Krista Nash
That shows your rest time, yeah.
0:34:31 – Dr. Michael Saini
Show your rest time. There’s things that you can do and again, highly monitoring won’t work out forever, but let’s say, in the first six months I’d say to parents like it’s counterproductive to hope that you’re going to trust the other person. Let’s be realistic. You cannot trust the other person and they probably don’t trust you. And so what do you need to do in your relationship? What are those conflict points that if you don’t address, if you don’t write it down and agree to, then they’re going to be points of concern. So I’m concerned that the other parent is going to cut their hair. Well then you make sure that that’s part of your agreement that you make with the other person. Let’s have a plan for cutting their child’s hair. So then we don’t have to worry about that’s one thing, with less we have to worry about. And as long as you don’t violate that, then we can start building trust in that area specifically. And now let’s move on to the next one, and then the next one, and then you, over time, you’re building a, an overall plan to trust.
0:35:45 – Krista Nash
And so making parenting plans really specific. That, like, what are the things you need in here to build trust? I will make. I keep thinking, as you’re talking about I’ve done five episodes on this already, but about sobriety problems as one of the huge, huge problems that we have in these situations with families, because when you’ve got a history of a parent knowing the other parent has in Colorado, a lot of issues with marijuana or with drinking is the more common one or with any other drug it’s so hard, and understandably hard, you know, to for the other parent to trust, which is why we do all these testing protocols and things like that, you know, but it’s still. You can see how difficult that topic would be calls and things like that, you know, but it’s still a very.
0:36:29 – Dr. Michael Saini
You can see how difficult that topic would be. Yeah for sure. When I worked in child dependency, you know when I worked with parents who were using and we needed to intervene. I mean, I think people are, you know. You know parents are doing the best they can with what they got. If you give them more, they do more.
I don’t think you know parents typically say I’m going to drink so I can be a bad parent. Think you know parents typically say I’m going to drink so I can be a bad parent. The drinking gets the better of them and they know that they struggle with this control issue with substance. And then it gets exacerbated because the other side also knows that you struggle with that substance and so you know it’s invitation to responsibility. So it’s not just accusatory, it’s not just saying you know you have to change.
But I would also speak to the person with the substance and just say, like you know, you know that even the conflict itself around substance misuse can have an impact on your relationship with your child. So why don’t we just come up with a plan? You know, does it write it out in a contract I will not drink while my child is in my care and you don’t even have to agree to it that you drink or that you have to Right, as long as that’s put out there and you agree to follow that, then you can start eventually building trust around you, having more control over substance issues.
0:37:53 – Krista Nash
I was looking at one other thing that I, as I’m skimming kind of some of these slides, I thought this was an important thing to talk about. Again, a little bit of a segue, but it makes me really sad to see the part that says childhood is the foundation for trusting or distrusting future relationships. I mean that should hit parents right in the heart, right.
0:38:14 – Dr. Michael Saini
Yeah, well, that’s the intergenerational problem with the conflict, and the way that this all gets played out is that they’re not just combating or, you know, they’re not just in conflict with their ex.
They’re teaching their kids how to regulate, how to trust or not, to you know, whether somebody is trustworthy or not. Children are building their propensity to trust, and that can create problems, either by trusting too much or not trusting enough. And we’re trying to, as parents, have children grow up with a realistic propensity to trust, that is, you know, slightly suspicious of others. You don’t want them to be blindly going in and trusting relationships, but at the same time, you don’t want our children going into relationships thinking that it’s going to end in a big blow up, because that’s what they expect to see anyways, because that’s what you get when you have a fearful attachment style. You avoid close relationships because you’re afraid that it’s not going to work out anyways.
And so what we’re doing is we’re teaching our children to go into their young adult relationships with severe skepticism and with fear and concern, or the other side, with the hope that things will be different in these relationships. And so they overtrust and now they’re in an abusive relationship and rather than see the signals for what they are. They think that they can make it better because they trust that they have the skills to do so. I mean, either way, it’s still adaptable and it’s functional. We’re actually doing our children a huge favor, and anything less than that is problematic.
0:40:40 – Krista Nash
I wonder too if this has to do or impacts I’m sure it does, but maybe you can tell us, if you agree, the percentages of failed second marriages. You know that it’s higher, right? I mean, what’s happening to the parents who they had this trust bank building up, to use your analogy? Then it gets all depleted or trashed all at once, or a little over time, or all together once, and then it kind of goes up and down and way down and then they get remarried, right? What’s that person going through? Does that have to do with why we see so many failed secondary relationships? Probably after that.
0:41:16 – Dr. Michael Saini
Yeah, I do a divorce group, and you know, one of the key messages that I focus in on is using this time to figure out how they got to be where they’re at right now and to forgive themselves for allowing this to happen as it did. Even if, for example, they say, well, it wasn’t me, I was married to a narcissistic jerk, well, you still have to forgive yourself, because you probably saw the warning signs a long time ago and you chose to ignore those for whatever reason, and so you have to come to terms with that and forgive yourself and learn from that. Like, did I overcommodate? Was I too trusting? And where does that trust that without reflection, without concern, come from? Or was I too reserved and I did not allow myself to open up? I could not trust? Is that because of previous relationships with my own parents or a previous relationship that I had? Did I bring that big bag of weight from my previous relationships into this one and then did that big bag of weight ultimately become too heavy for the relationship? And so if I keep on adding to that bag of failed experiences and I bring it to my next relationship, well, of course it’s more likely going to fail and your third marriage is even worse it’s 70%. And so you just keep on adding to the wrongs of the past and you just carry that bag from relationship to relationship until you take the time to unpack it and see, well, what’s in there, like what’s holding me down from being happy, from having a more balanced propensity to trust with me being able to appreciate myself and like myself in relationships.
Oftentimes, when people separate, they stop liking themselves in the relationship.
They don’t like what they’ve become in that relationship, and so you need to figure out how did that happen that you no longer liked yourself, and how do you start liking yourself for who you are?
So, for example, if you were in a relationship and you were accommodating and accommodating and accommodating until finally you could not accommodate anymore because your needs were not being met, you know then from that experience that it’s really important for your needs to be met. So the next time you’re in a relationship and you’re sitting down with somebody who you’re maybe interested in, you’re going to start negotiating your needs right from the very beginning and say this is what I need in a relationship, and you’re going to practice asserting your need, because you know if you don’t, you’re going to just accommodate. Again. You’re going to repeat that same cycle and so you’re really just trying to learn from the past, to make a better version of you for the next relationship, and then you can go against that statistic. But if not, yeah, it’s more likely to be doomed before you even start because the bag that you brought into the relationship of your previous relationship is too heavy to really bring in.
0:44:26 – Krista Nash