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I want you to picture a specific moment. It's after the kids are in bed. The house is quiet. You're sitting at a kitchen table, or maybe you're lying in bed staring at the ceiling, and you're doing the calculation again. The one you do every night. You know the relationship isn't healthy. You've known it for a while, but tonight something happened. Maybe he raised his voice at your son over something small and you watched your son's whole body go still. Maybe you spent 20 minutes quietly explaining to your daughter that daddy didn't mean it the way it came out. Maybe you noticed your kids get unusually quiet the moment they hear his car pull into the driveway. The same way that you get quiet too. And now you're sitting there in the silence, and underneath all of the exhaustion is a question that you can barely bring yourself to say out loud. What is this doing to my children? And behind that question is another one, the one that keeps a lot of mothers in impossible places for a very long time. What if leaving makes it worse? What if leaving means that they're alone with him when I'm not there to step in? Today's episode is for the woman sitting at the table. Whether you're still in the relationship, actively preparing to leave, already separated, or years into navigating, co-parenting with someone who hasn't made it easy, today is for you. This is not going to be a list of things that you should have done differently, and it's not going to pretend that there are easy answers when there really aren't. This is going to be an honest conversation about one of the hardest versions of an already hard situation. Being a mother in an unhealthy relationship. Welcome back to Pattern Breakers Collective. I'm Lisa. First, the usual note, throughout this episode, I'll use he when referring to the partner causing harm and she for the person navigating it. That reflects my own experience and the experiences of most of the women that I work with. But I recognize that these dynamics happen across every kind of family, different genders, different relationship structures. If your situation looks different from what I described, the core of what I'm saying still applies to you. I also want to say at the start that this episode is not going to cover every possible family circumstance. I will not be giving legal advice and I won't be making universal statements about custody or what any particular court will do. And I'm going to be careful not to pretend that one episode of a podcast can substitute for qualified legal, safety, or mental health support when those things are genuinely needed. What I can do is help you think more clearly, feel less alone, and leave today with a few things that might actually be useful. On this show, we talk a lot about why women stay in unhealthy relationships. We talk about trauma bonds and financial dependence and hope and fear. And all of those things are real. But when you're a mother, every single one of those calculations gets more complicated. Because you're not just deciding what happens to you, you're trying to make decisions for people you love more than anything in the world, with information that you don't fully have and consequences that you can't completely predict. And sometimes there isn't a good choice. Sometimes you're choosing between different kinds of uncertainty. And you need someone to acknowledge that before you can think clearly about any of it. So let's do that first. Let's acknowledge it. You're monitoring his moods before he walks in the door. You're reading the energy in a room the second he enters it. You're positioning yourself physically and emotionally between the tension and the kids. You're doing tiny calculations all day long about what's safe to say, what's safe to do, what's likely going to set something off, and what might actually keep things calm. And you're doing all of that while just being a mother. The school runs and the homework and the meals and the bedtimes and the emotional labor of raising actual small human beings who need things from you every single day, regardless of what else is happening. And then there's the guilt, the particular grinding guilt that a lot of mothers in these situations carry quietly. The guilt about whether staying is the right thing or whether it's harming the kids. The guilt about whether leaving is protecting them or disrupting them. The guilt about not having gotten out sooner or about not being sure yet whether you should go at all. The guilt about losing your patience when you should have had more. The guilt about the moments when you were so depleted that you couldn't be the parent that you wanted to be. I want to say something about that guilt directly because I think it's important. That guilt is evidence of how much you love your children. It is not evidence that you have failed them. Those are not the same thing. And the fact that you're sitting with it, that you're thinking this hard about their experience already tells me something about what kind of mother you are. You are trying to protect everyone, including yourself, which you've probably been putting last. Today, I want to ask you to hold all three at once, just for a little while. Yourself, your kids, and the complexity of the situation that you're in. None of them cancel the others out. And one of the most important things that I want to address in today's episode is something that I think gets misunderstood a lot, and it's this children don't have to witness screaming or physical violence to be affected by what's happening in the household. They're absorbing the atmosphere. They're learning from what they observe every single day, how adults talk to each other, how conflict gets handled, what happens when someone is upset, and whether home feels safe or uncertain. Kids are remarkable at picking up on things that adults think that they've hidden. A tense silence, a look that passes between parents, the way the energy in a room changes when someone walks in, the topics that never get discussed, and the way one parent seems to shrink around the other. What I often see in children who are growing up in households with ongoing tension, controlling behavior, or emotional unpredictability is this. They adapt. And the adaptations can look very different depending on the child and their age. Some kids become very good at monitoring the mood in the room, the same way you do. They start anticipating. They become unusually attuned to everyone else's emotional state and correspondingly disconnected from their own. Some kids become the peacemaker in the family, the one trying to lighten the mood, to distract, to smooth things over. Some withdraw, some act out, some seem completely unaffected on the surface and are carrying enormous things underneath it. Little kids, toddlers, and young children may not understand what's happening between the adults, but they feel the tension in the home as a baseline. They may become clingier, have more tantrums, have sleep problems, or regress in some areas. School-age children are starting to understand more. They may have questions they're afraid to ask, feelings they don't have words for, and a tendency to believe that they are somehow responsible for what's happening. Teenagers are often the most complicated because they're old enough to understand more of what's going on and have real feelings about it, including anger at both parents, and that includes you. And they need space for those feelings without being handed adult burdens that they can't carry. Now, there's also an important distinction worth making here. Two parents can have a difficult relationship without being harmful to the children in the deeper sense that I'm describing. Conflict, disagreement, imperfect parenting, those are all part of real family life. What's different is a pattern of fear, unpredictability, or coercion that creates a chronic low-level threat in the household. Where children learn to be careful, to monitor, and to manage. That's the kind of environment that shapes how a child understands relationships and themselves for a very long time. Children are not simply bystanders in a difficult adult relationship. They are participants in the emotional climate of the home. They are learning from what they see. And what they need most is not a perfect family. It's a household where they don't have to be afraid and where at least one adult is paying honest attention to what they're carrying. Okay, let's get practical because understanding what your children might be experiencing is important, but what you actually need is something that you can do with that understanding when you're still in the middle of a situation that you haven't been able to change yet. And the most important thing I can tell you is this. You don't have to pretend everything is fine. And you also don't have to give your children the full adult explanation. There is an enormous amount of space between those two things, and that space is where honest, age-appropriate support lives. If your child witnesses something upsetting, like an argument, yelling, a tense interaction, the most helpful thing you can do afterward is find a quiet moment with them and simply acknowledge it. Not a lengthy explanation, not an apology on someone else's behalf, just acknowledgement. For a younger child, maybe something like, I know things got pretty loud in there, I know that can feel scary, you didn't do anything wrong, and I love you. That's often enough. You're telling them that their feeling was real and that they're not responsible and that you're there. For an older child or teenager, you might have to go a little bit further. Like, I know what happened earlier wasn't okay. I want you to know that I'm aware of that. You don't have to figure out how to feel about it right now. You can come talk to me anytime. You're not asking them to pick a side. You're not explaining the full history of the adult relationship. You're just leaving the door open. One of the most important things to protect is your child's ability to come to you with what they're feeling without feeling like it's going to make things worse. That means when they tell you something that upsets you, you respond to their feeling first, not to the information. Wow, that sounds really hard. I'm glad you told me. Before any problem solving, what I'd strongly encourage you to avoid, and I say this with full compassion because I know how much you need someone to talk to, is using your child as your confidant. Even older teenagers, they love you, they want to help you. And if you share adult-level details of what's happening with the relationship, they will try to carry it. And it is too heavy for them. They need to be allowed to be children, even imperfect, complicated children in a difficult situation, they need that. Outside support matters enormously here. If your child is showing signs that they're struggling, whether it's changes in behavior, sleep, appetite, school performance, or their mood, connecting them with a school counselor or a child therapist can give them somewhere to put the things that don't involve you or him. That is not a failure on your part, that is giving your child what they need. And now I want to talk about something that often gets mentioned briefly and then move past as if it's another detail rather than a central reality. And that is money, the financial reality of leaving. Because here's what a mother is often holding on to in her head when she's trying to figure out what to do: rent or mortgage, childcare, health insurance for herself and the kids, transportation, school stability, whether moving means a new school, and what that disruption costs the children, legal fees, which can be substantial and which don't come with a payment plan that works for most people. The possibility of maintaining two households on an income that was built for one, and in some situations, the complete absence of income of her own because the financial structure of the relationship was built around one earner and one person who did everything else. I want to say this very plainly. This is not an excuse to stay. This is a reason why leaving safely requires planning and resources that a lot of women don't have immediate access to. There is a significant difference between those two things. Financial control is also one of the ways that abusive partners maintain power both during and after a relationship ends. If he controls the bank accounts, if you don't have access to important documents, if your credit history is thin because everything was in his name, those are not accidents. They are mechanisms, and they are worth understanding as such rather than as personal failures. So what can you actually do? Here's a few things that are accessible to most people regardless of where they live. First, quietly, carefully start gathering copies of important documents, birth certificates, social security cards, insurance information, financial records that you can access, your ID. These can all be stored with a trusted person outside of your home or in a safety deposit box or photographed and stored in an email account that only you have access to. This isn't leaving, this is preparation, and preparation is not betrayal, it is intelligence. Second, contact a domestic violence organization, even if you're not sure what you're experiencing rises to that level. Many DV organizations have advocates who can help with financial planning, legal referrals, safety planning, and connecting you to resources like emergency housing, childcare subsidies, and legal aid. Please contact your local organization or the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233. It is available 24 hours a day and can connect you to local resources. These calls are all confidential. Third, if at all possible, start building even a small amount of financial independence, a savings account in only your name at a bank he doesn't use, even small amounts over time. Not because you have a plan yet, but because options require resources. And fourth, consider a confidential legal consultation. Many family law attorneys offer free initial consultation, and legal aid organizations exist in most areas for people who can't afford private representation. Knowing your rights and your specific situation is genuinely different from not knowing them. You don't have to take action to get information. A woman can know with complete clarity that she needs to leave and still not have the resources to leave safely today. Those two things can both be true simultaneously. The goal isn't to judge the timeline, the goal is to shorten it safely. Something I see with some consistency in the aftermath of an unhealthy relationship is this. The relationship ends. But the dynamic doesn't. The control that was exercised over you during the relationship finds new pathways once you're separated. And one of the most common of those pathways runs directly through the children. It can look like a lot of different things. Being asked to relay messages, oh, tell your mom, or oh, ask your dad, which puts the child in the middle of adult communication and makes them feel responsible for information that wasn't theirs to carry. Being questioned about what happens at the other's house, what you said, who came over, where you went, which turns the child into an informant and makes them feel like they have to choose between parents with every answer. Or being told things about you that they shouldn't have to process, or being put in the position of comforting a parent who is presenting themselves as a victim of the other parent's choices. There is also the use of parenting arrangements themselves as leverage, changing pickup times at the last minute without reason, being late in ways that disrupt your plans, threatening to withhold visitation or take you back to court or tell the children things as a way of maintaining the ability to control and destabilize your life even after the relationship has technically ended. Here is something that I want to be very clear about because it matters for the kids. There is a real difference between a child having an independent, loving relationship with both parents, including a parent who has been difficult or harmful to you, and a child being recruited into adult conflict. A child who loves their father is not betraying their mother. A child who misses the other parent is not choosing sides. Their capacity to love both of you is not evidence that the other parent is fine. Children can love people who are not safe. Adults can too. Those things coexist. What you are trying to protect is their right to have their own relationship with each parent without being used as a tool in either direction. That means not asking them to report on what happens at the other house, not sharing information about the other parent that serves your emotional needs rather than theirs, not using them to send messages or gather intelligence, not placing them in the position of emotional support for your grief about the relationship. They are your children, not your witnesses. I understand that this is genuinely hard to maintain, especially when you're scared and angry and in pain. And I'm not saying it to put another burden on you. I'm saying it because one of the most concrete ways that you can protect your kids in the middle of adult conflict is by keeping them out of it, even when the other side is not doing the same. Two parents who might not like each other much, but who can be in the same room at a school event without it becoming an incident. And if that's your situation, if difficult but functional communication is possible, then working toward that kind of cooperative arrangement is absolutely worth pursuing. Mediation, co-parenting counselors, and parenting coordination services exist for exactly this purpose. There's apps like Talking Parents or Our Family Wizard that create records of communication and can reduce direct conflict by keeping conversations focused and documented. But I want to speak honestly to the women who hear that description, and it sounds like a different universe, where every exchange becomes an argument, where every request becomes leverage, where every conversation about the kids ends up being about something else, about power, about control, about scoring a point in a conflict that never actually ended. Where the idea of cooperative anything with this person feels not just difficult, but genuinely unsafe. For those situations, there's a different model called parallel parenting, and it's worth understanding. Parallel parenting is essentially the opposite of cooperative co-parenting in terms of how the two households relate to each other. Instead of lots of communication, you minimize it, keeping it written, child-focused, and limited to what's actually necessary. Instead of flexibility, you build in structure, predictable schedules that require as little ongoing negotiation as possible, because negotiation is another word for opportunity to be controlled. Instead of joint decisions about everything, you delineate who has authority over what during each parent's time. The goal is not to eliminate the other parent from your child's life. It's to reduce the number of contact points between you and a person who has demonstrated that contact will be weaponized. Family mediators, parenting coordinators, and family law attorneys can help design these kinds of arrangements. If safety is a real concern, if there's been physical abuse, threat, stalking, or behavior that makes you feel afraid for your children's well-being when they're with the other parent, that is a different and more urgent conversation, and it requires individualized legal and safety guidance rather than just general advice. A domestic violence advocate can help you think through this, and so can a family law attorney who has experience with these specific dynamics. Don't try to navigate that alone. And here's something I want to name honestly. Parallel parenting reduces contact between adults. It does not eliminate the impact of the other parent on your kids. If the behavior that harmed the family continues in the other household, your children may be experiencing things that you cannot see and cannot control. That is one of the hardest realities of this situation, and I don't want to smooth it over. What I can tell you is what comes next. When you cannot control what happens at the other parent's house, and there will be a great deal that you cannot control what You can control is what happens in yours. And that matters so much more than you might think. A home where your child knows what to expect, where the rules are consistent and the consequences make sense, where they can come to you with hard things and you won't fall apart or immediately make it a bigger problem. Where mistakes get addressed but don't become catastrophes, where repair happens, where you apologize when you get things wrong, model accountability and show them what it looks like when a person takes responsibility without drama or self-flagellation. That is genuinely healing for a child, even one who is also dealing with very difficult things in another environment. One specific and practical thing, resist the urge to debrief your child after every visit with the other parent. I understand exactly why that urge exists. You're worried, you want to know if they're okay, and sometimes something happens that you genuinely need to know about. But if the pattern is that every time they come home, you ask a lot of questions about what happened over there. Children learn that coming home means an interrogation. And they may start managing your feelings by telling you what they think you want to hear, which really helps neither of you. A better approach would be to be present, be calm, let them decompress, let them tell you things at their own pace. If you notice something concerning, you can create an opening. Hey, you seem a little quiet. I'm here whenever you want to talk. Without making them feel like they have to report. And if they tell you something that genuinely concerned you for their safety, take that seriously with the appropriate adults, a therapist, an attorney, a guardian adletum, if one is involved, rather than through the child. And you need to remember that your children are also allowed to love their other parent. Even if that parent has caused a great deal of harm, even if they don't understand why you and he are not together, even if they sometimes come home having had fun and you have feelings about that, allowing them to love both parents without punishing that love and without making them feel guilty for it and without using your pain to pollute their experience of the other relationship is one of the most protective things that you can do for them. Not because it protects the other parent, but because it protects your children from being put in an impossible position. And please know when to bring in help. If your child is struggling visibly, if their behavior has changed significantly, if they're having nightmares or refusing to go to school, if they're expressing things that concern you, a child therapist or school counselor is not evidence that you failed. It is evidence that you are paying attention. Child therapists are trained to create space for the things kids cannot say or don't want to to the adults they love. That support can make a significant difference. The guilt you're carrying may be enormous. Guilt about staying too long, guilt about the things your children witnessed, guilt about the things that you couldn't prevent, guilt about not being emotionally present on the days that you were just trying to survive, guilt about what the separation is doing to them, or what the ongoing conflict is doing to them, or the uncertainty is doing to them. And underneath the guilt is usually a belief that a good mother would have figured this out sooner. A good mother would have protected them from it all. A good mother wouldn't have needed to be in this situation in the first place. But I'm gonna directly challenge that because I think that that belief is doing you real harm. You were trying to protect them. You were doing that inside a situation that was designed, however consciously or not, to limit your options, your resources, your confidence and your own judgment and your access to support. You made decisions with the information and resources and the help that you had available at the time. You were not operating with perfect information. None of us do. And the decision that you would make today with everything you know now from a place of greater clarity, that is not evidence that yesterday's decision was irresponsible. It's evidence that you've learned something, that you've grown, that your circumstances have changed. Pattern breaking for your children does not require you to erase what happened. It doesn't require them to have lived a perfect childhood or to have never experienced difficult things or to carry no effects from what happened in the family. It requires you to create something now. A relationship with your children where they feel safe, where they feel heard, where they see you being honest about hard things without making them responsible for those hard things, where they see you setting limits, where they see you making decisions that reflect what you actually value, where they see over time what a healthy relationship between two people looks like, even if the example that they're learning from is you and them. Children are remarkably resilient when they have at least one adult in their lives who is genuinely paying attention to them, who acknowledges what is real, who doesn't require them to pretend everything is fine when it isn't. You can be that adult. You don't have to have everything figured out to be that. You just have to keep showing up honestly. You can love your kids more than anything in the world and still not know what the right decision is. You can be doing everything you know how to do and still need help. And you can look back and wish things had been different without making the rest of your life a punishment for the decisions that you made when you had fewer resources and less support. Pattern breaking doesn't require you to have been a perfect mother yesterday. It asks, what kind of relationship do you want to build with your children today? Before I let you go today, I want to offer just a few simple questions that you can carry out of this episode, not as a checklist, but as a starting place. First, what does my child need from me today? Not from a perfect parent, from me right now with what I actually have? Sometimes that question cuts through a lot of the noise and tells you something useful. Second, is there something my child is carrying that they haven't been able to put down? Is there a way that I can create space for that this week without making them feel responsible for fixing it? And last, what is one thing within my control that I can do this week for myself, for my kids, for the practical situation I'm in, that would move things even slightly in a better direction? Not everything, not the whole problem, one thing. If you are still in the relationship and trying to figure out what to do, please reach out to a local organization or the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233. They work with parents specifically. They're confidential and they're not going to tell you what to do. They're going to help you think through your specific situation. If you're already navigating separation and co-parenting, resources and apps like Our Family Wizard and Talking Parents can help keep communication structured and documented. There's a book called Splitting: Protecting Yourself While Divorcing Someone with Borderline or Narcissistic Personality Disorder by Bill Eddy and Randy Krieger is frequently recommended by attorneys and therapists working in this space. I'll link it below in the show notes. And if child custody or safety is an active concern, please consult a family law attorney. Many offer free initial consultations, and legal aid is available in most areas for those who qualify. If you're looking for support as you do this work yourself, rebuilding your sense of who you are, understanding your patterns, figuring out what healthy looks like going forward, the Pattern Breakers Collective group program and individual coaching support are available. You can find all the details on my socials or at patternbreakerscollective.com. You do not have to do this alone. And one more thing before I go. This podcast is free, and I'm committed to keeping it that way because I know that the women who need these conversations are most often not in position to pay for them. But if this show has meant something to you, one of the most direct ways that you can help keep it going is to follow the support link in the show notes. Whatever you're able to give makes it possible to keep creating content like this for the women who need it. If today's episode resonated with you, please share it. Not just with the people already in this community, but with a mother that you know who's sitting at the kitchen table after the kids go to bed doing the calculation again. She needs to know she's not alone. And she needs to know that people who understand this exist. And you can leave a review wherever you listen if you haven't yet. It genuinely helps other women find this space when they're searching for something that they can't quite name. Until next time, your children don't need you to be a perfect protector. They need you to be present, honest, and on their side. You already are. Just keep going.