Articles

4 Key Professional Paradigm Shifts of New Ways

By Bill Eddy, LCSW, Esq.

New Ways for Families was born out of the failure of individual therapy and parenting classes to help parents and children in high-conflict families. These families often involve one or both parents with a personality disorder or traits, such that they need a much more structured and different approach.

As a therapist for 12 years (Licensed Clinical Social Worker), I was trained in family systems therapy, with an emphasis on cognitive-behavioral therapies. After 15 years as a family law attorney, it was obvious to me that individual therapy was making many high-conflict families worse in family law cases. Parents with personality disorders or traits became preoccupied with defending themselves and attacking each other, and insisting that their counselors help in that lose-lose process. Their children became more alienated by meeting with individual child counselors – who were trapped in the lose-lose dilemma of agreeing with the dysfunction of their alienated clients or seeming to oppose them by pressuring them to reconcile with the parent they despised.

Parenting classes, including on-line methods, generally provide parents with great left-brain logical information, but with high-conflict parents this misses their right-brain relationship/attachment issues - which need to be addressed first to lower their extreme defensiveness. Such relationship/attachment needs are more effectively addressed in a 1-to-1 relationship with a therapist, but not in the traditional supportive therapy structure for the reasons described above. New Ways was designed to overcome all of these issues with a very different approach.

Paradigm Shift #1: Skills Before Decisions

New Ways focuses on teaching the 4 basic skills: flexible thinking, managed emotions, moderate behaviors, and checking yourself constantly to make sure you are using these skills. By focusing on skills instead of decisions, potentially high-conflict parents can be less defensive and can experience success in ways that they can apply in every area of their lives: in dealing with the other parent, with the child, and with co-workers, neighbors – and in making separation/divorce decisions.

This method significantly changes the therapist-client relationship, because the therapist is not allowed to become involved in the decision-making process, but rather focuses solely on helping the client learn the skills. The skills workbook helps the therapist and the client relax, creating an opportunity for learning. Instead of trying to convince the client to change behavior, the therapist can form an alliance with the client to learn the skills in the workbook assignments.

This also significantly changes the lawyer-client relationship, because the lawyer can now ask the client to use his or her skills in problem-solving, rather than being seen as solely responsible for solving the client’s problems. When high-conflict clients call with complaints about the other parent, about the lawyer or the lawyer’s staff, the lawyer can ask them to use their skills in managing these problems, rather than joining in the attack-defend cycle. When reasonable clients (not high-conflict) raise issues with their lawyers, the lawyer can help them use the skills to manage the other parent. Most reasonable parents are eager to learn and use these skills, and it helps them avoid reacting in a high-conflict manner themselves.

The emphasis on skills gives parents a chance to improve their behavior and show the court their potential for change before the big decisions are made. This way, a single bad incident does not define who they are to the court, if they can demonstrate their own positive skills. By having professionals quiz the parents on what they have learned, the burden shifts from saying how bad the other parent has been, to demonstrating how much each parent has learned the skills. And, of course, their inability to learn and change will help the court make decisions when the parents are unable to do so themselves.

Lastly, focusing on skills helps parents with their children. They are in the role of teaching their children in Step 3: Parent-Child Counseling. This gives them a positive identity regardless of how bad they have been as parents. (Even a parent in prison can teach their child that it’s better to avoid extreme behavior.) When parents are alone with their children, the children know that they are supposed to be demonstrating these positive skills. And when they deal with each other as parents, after their court case is over, they have a little bit more positive behavior they might just use in the future.

When the whole focus is on decisions instead of skills, parents learn nothing to use out of court. Orders to get counseling or take parenting classes after the big decisions are made are rarely followed by personality-disordered parents, because their defensiveness about the decisions is so high. New Ways teaches skills when they are most able to learn – before the big decisions are made.

Paradigm Shift #2: End the Parent Contest

A fundamental paradox of family law decision-making is that the process of making decisions about “who is the better parent” makes both parents act worse. Even personality-disordered parents have a range of behavior, from good to bad. The environment they are in significantly determines which behavior they use. For example, under stress many personality-disordered parents act much more impulsively than the average parent. Deciding “who is the better parent” places them under significant stress, thereby causing them to act much worse. (For example, the majority of family law murders seem to occur during custody battles).

As much as possible, New Ways does not allow a parent contest. New Ways is required for both parents and they are both expected to learn the same skills – and to teach them to their children. There is no reward for tearing down the other parent. Instead, the workbook exercises require them to support the other parent in realistic ways. This method helps counselors, lawyers and judges treat both parents as benefitting from practicing these skills, rather than “splitting” them into one all-good parent and one all-bad parent.

Paradigm Shift #3: Guiding, Not Deciding

The biggest paradigm shift for professionals as individuals is taking on the role of guide rather than decision-maker. In our professional trainings in New Ways, the feedback we get is that this is the hardest part: “I have to really practice not deciding what my client should work on and not telling them how to do it right.” This is a big part of practicing each skill in Step 2: Individual Parent Counseling. For example, counselors have a hard time helping their clients check themselves about how they have written their BIFF responses, instead of simply telling their clients how to improve their responses. The goal is to have the client check their own BIFF responses and think through whether they want to make any edits to them.

This is also a big issue in Step 3: Parent-Child Counseling. The counselor should guide the parent in teaching the child the skills, and resist being the brilliant teacher himself or herself. This helps the parent play a positive role with the child and helps the child learn that the parent really wants to behave in a positive manner. It also appears to help the parents reflect on the effect of fighting versus settling the case.

Paradigm Shift #4: Working with Resistance

It’s human nature to react negatively to high-conflict parents, because of their unrestrained aggressive behavior and statements. However, we have learned that many of them can respond positively to professionals who treat them with Empathy, Attention and Respect (E.A.R.). At the core of New Ways is understanding the fear and anger of high-conflict parents as a form of resistance to growth and change. Instead of attacking the resistance, professionals can be highly effective if they practice “working with the resistance” by providing encouragement instead of anger and education instead of criticism.

Few family law professionals even think about this resistance and they repeatedly try to deal with it by criticizing parents as a way of venting their own frustrations and lack of knowledge of what they are dealing with. In reality, many family law professionals today are dealing with mental health issues in family court cases that they do not understand and which need different methods, including guiding them to learn and use skills with lots of repetition and encouragement.

Conclusion: New Ways Takes a Team Approach

All of these paradigm shifts require family law professionals to support each other, rather than tearing each other down in the pursuit of winning a decision. Our hope is that New Ways will contribute to a culture of learning skills to a realistic extents, rather than a culture of all-or-nothing thinking about high-conflict parents – with battles that often never end. For professionals, we believe that this approach can reduce stress and increase a sense of satisfaction in your work, as you help parents help themselves and their children.

New Ways for Families, a program of High Conflict Institute, was developed by Bill Eddy to manage high-conflict personalities in family court. It is designed to help families avoid getting stuck in a never-ending high-conflict battle that costs huge sums of money, involves multiple professionals, works against the child's best interests and impacts them in both their short-term and long-term well-being. Bill is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with twelve years' experience providing therapy to children and families. As an attorney, he is a Certified Family Law Specialist and the Senior Family Mediator with the National Conflict Resolution Center in San Diego. Bill presents the New Ways method to therapists, judges, and lawyers throughout the United States and Canada. For more information about the steps of method, current programs, or seminars and training, go to: www.NewWays4Families.com or call 619-221-9108.