Co-Parenting With a Toxic Ex: When Abuse Doesn’t Stop After You Leave

Clients have asked me directly, “How do I get out of it?”

They left. They did everything right — therapy, boundaries, documentation. And they still keep ending up in the same place: disbelieved, blamed for their reaction while the original harm disappears, wondering if they’re the problem. Leaving an abusive relationship is supposed to be the hard part that’s over. For anyone co-parenting with a toxic ex, it’s often where a new, more institutional version of the same dynamic begins.

I know this dynamic from the inside — not just from fifteen years of clinical work, but from watching it play out between my own parents’ custody battle as a child. Survivors in custody battles where their ex’s abusive behaviour is presented as one side of a reasonable disagreement — and the court finds the abuser more credible—different rooms, the same pattern. The person with less institutional power is left holding something the system refuses to see. Recognizing this pattern matters — not because awareness will magically fix it, but because naming what’s happening is the first step toward choosing your response.

What’s actually happening when co-parenting with a toxic ex: the triangle

There’s a framework that explains this pattern. The Karpman drama triangle describes three roles: victim (damsel in distress), persecutor (villain), rescuer (hero). The roles rotate. These labels aren’t tied to gender. The person who was hurting you becomes the wounded one. You become the aggressor. The person who stepped in to help becomes the new problem. The triangle exists on a spectrum: from very subtle to extreme.

I find the persecutor role easiest to identify because of their actions: blaming, finger-pointing, and putting the other person down. Their position is I win, you lose. Others don’t factor in.

The rescuer is harder to spot. They often feel warm and supportive — but they are emotionally detached. They cannot clearly name when harm is happening, cannot stay with your emotional experience without minimizing it, and shift into advice-giving rather than staying with what is unfolding. A warm presence that isn’t actually letting what’s happening land.

The victim role has the biggest emotional impact. It can dysregulate your nervous system and put you into an immobilized state. Hopeless. Powerless. Stuck in a box you can’t escape. You can’t see options or make decisions. And to be clear, in this dynamic, especially when a court or the family law system is involved, your options are genuinely limited. That’s not a distortion. That’s the reality of the position. A part carrying unprocessed trauma may get activated and intensify the experience, though you are not responsible for the behaviours of others.

Every version of this framework I’ve encountered says the same thing: once you see the pattern, you can choose differently. There’s a truth in it. And it’s more complex.

Here’s what that framing consistently misses: the triangle is a system. You cannot exit a system unilaterally when the other person is invested in keeping it running. And when power is one of the players — a court, a lawyer, a co-parenting counsellor who’s been played — awareness alone won’t protect you.

Some versions of this framework suggest that as soon as one person moves into healthy communication, the triangle dissolves. I’ve never seen that happen when the power imbalance is significant. I’ve never been able to change the triangle on my own. And I’ve watched clients try — with more goodwill, more therapy, more self-awareness than anyone should have to bring to a dynamic that wasn’t their fault — and end up in the same position. You cannot dissolve a system the other person is invested in keeping. We can break the triangle, yet all participants need to take accountability and work towards breaking it.

When the system already has its answer

My mother died. That same day, my stepfather beat my sibling when they tried to see our mother’s body one last time. He threw them out of the house, their home. The police came and said they don’t intervene in family affairs. The doctor came and said, “She’s free now.” No acknowledgment of the violence. No support. My grandfather came and found excuses for my stepfather. He became a poor man who had lost his wife. Nobody saw that we had lost our mother, our home, and any financial support available. I moved out the same day. The loneliness and lack of support stayed for years.

That’s the triangle inside a family system on the worst day of our lives. The persecutor became the victim. The person who was treated unfairly became invisible. Every person who should have seen what happened — didn’t. Or wouldn’t. Often, because seeing it would have required them to sit with something too uncomfortable to hold.

I have noticed over the years that stories which challenge the dominant narrative about families easily pull everyone into the triangle. The parent’s experience is dismissed and invalidated because others don’t have the capacity to sit with the discomfort that not every co-parent is safe. It is easier to find excuses for the persecutor than to see what was done.

That’s when I understood something the triangle doesn’t teach directly: speaking up isn’t always empowering. In a room that has already decided not to hear you- a courtroom, a mediation, a co-parenting coordinator- it can increase your exposure, intensify the emotional labour, and cost you more than it creates. Knowing when to stop is not giving up. It’s reading the room accurately, for yourself.

If you’ve lived this, you know it immediately. You name something true, you push back — and either the focus shifts onto your reaction, or you hit a wall of silence. You become “too sensitive”, “too traumatized.” The original harm doesn’t have to be acknowledged if your response can be reframed as the problem, or simply not engaged with at all.

The both-sides problem — and the professionals who cement it

I watched my parents’ custody battle as a child. I know what it looks like when a system presents two fundamentally unequal positions as equivalent. When the system doesn’t look deep enough into the dynamics to understand them. Justice is supposed to be blind, but that isn’t helpful when coercion is at play.

My clients in custody situations know it too. Their ex’s abusive behaviour is presented as one side of a reasonable disagreement. The court finds the abuser more credible. Not because the evidence supports it, but because the abuser has learned how to perform reasonableness in rooms that reward it, while the survivor, carrying years of chronic trauma, is asked to perform credibility under conditions designed to destabilize them.

Coercive control is the clearest example of why this fails. No single incident looks like much in isolation. A lawyer or judge looking for documentable events will find very little. With lack of physical or sexual violence, there are no bruises. But the pattern, cumulative, erosive, relational, is the emotional abuse. The both-sides framework has no mechanism for seeing patterns. It sees incidents.

I saw this up close: a judge ordered my mother to meet my father every Christmas, year after year, regardless of what their relationship actually was. On paper, it looked like farness — shared time, equal access. In practice, it was coercion with a court order behind it. Yes, it would have worked if their relationship had been healthy. It just never was, even years after the divorce. The court didn’t see what it was forcing her back into.

After thirty years of my own healing work, I still haven’t been able to reconcile my parents’ stories about each other. They describe two completely different people, two different lives. That’s not a failure of my objectivity. When emotional abuse is at play, and one side is, intentionally or unintentionally, distorting what happened, there is no version of “each party is partially true” that can hold both accounts.

The both-sides model assumes two overlapping partial truths. Abuse doesn’t produce that. It produces two irreconcilable stories, and someone is wrong. I’ve learned to believe my own truth about them. I stopped trying to find out what might have been true between them. That was never mine to solve. Believing yourself was never about winning the argument over what really happened. It was about no longer needing the argument settled at all.

Publishing my memoir was part of how I reclaimed my voice and found my own sense of empowerment in the aftermath of all of this. I’m not saying that’s the path for everyone. Writing a book isn’t the point. Finding your own way to stop needing their agreement is.

Some mental health professionals, not all of them, become part of the problem. The co-parent walks in, hoping that someone with professional authority will finally see clearly. Instead, the assessment confirms the abuser’s version. The survivor’s trauma response gets documented as instability. Bipolar. BPD. Anxiety. Labels that follow them into every custody hearing where their credibility is being weighed, and hand the abuser a professional document saying they were right all along. The person targeted by the abuse becomes “too sensitive. Too traumatized.”

The person who was supposed to help becomes the one pointing the finger. The abusive dynamics are disregarded again. This time with a clinical signature on it.

When the person causing harm also holds professional or institutional authority, or simply performs calm and reasonable better than you can while flooded, their reading of the situation is assumed credible. Yours isn’t. The system has already decided whose perception is more reliable before you’ve said a word.

What my clients carry in these situations is that they can see their children being harmed. They know what is happening. And their ability to protect their children is limited by the system. They are not failing their children. They are trapped inside a structure that was supposed to protect both of them and is protecting neither.

The fact that the person in the persecutor or rescuer role may also carry trauma does not excuse their behaviour. Trauma explains. It does not justify. The harm they cause is still harm. They are accountable for their behaviour.

Getting your power back when co-parenting with a toxic ex

Let me be clear: reclaiming your power may not change the custody dynamic. You can learn to advocate for yourself — and when to choose self-preservation, explore your options, and make choices that protect what matters to you — but you cannot control whether your ex, a judge, or the family law system takes responsibility.

Getting your power back does not mean making them understand. It does not mean making the court admit what happened. It doesn’t mean your ex will change. It means you no longer allow their inability to see you to determine how you see yourself and your experience. It means trusting your own reality, even when a system built for “both sides” refuses to acknowledge there weren’t two equal sides here.

From my own experience with the drama triangle, the dynamics didn’t always disappear. Sometimes people were willing to take responsibility; sometimes they were not. But the more I healed, the less power those dynamics had over me. I still had feelings. They were connected to the present, and not more intense due to the past. I saw that I was okay. I saw the situations for what they were, and made the choices that were best for me.

That’s what healing actually looks like. Not invulnerability. Recovery speed.

Getting ground under your feet

Start here

It’s outside your reach whether a court sees you clearly or whether your ex ever takes responsibility for what they’ve done.

What remains yours is how you make meaning of it while you are in it. Whether you turn on yourself, or stay oriented to your own perception of what you know to be true.

And underneath all of that is your nervous system. Because none of these choices are available if you are flooded, collapsed, or frozen. Regulation is what makes choice possible again.

I am not saying that’s fair. That’s healthy.

The role feels disempowering and hopeless because someone else has defined you through their version of events. Your ex may refuse to see you clearly, avoid responsibility, or continue behaviours that harm you and your children. That is outside of your control.

But you are more than the position they have placed you in. Their inability or unwillingness to see the full truth of you does not change who you are.

You may need to grieve the possibility that they, or the court, will never give you the acknowledgment you deserve. That grief is real. There may be a part of you that is still waiting for them to finally see you, understand you, or admit what happened. That part makes sense. It has been carrying the hope that if they acknowledge the truth, you can finally feel free.

Healing is not about forcing that part to stop wanting what it needed. It is about turning toward that part yourself. Seeing it. Validating it. Letting it know: I believe you. I know what happened. You don’t need to keep fighting for someone else’s approval for your experience to be real.

From there, you can act: you can document, set a boundary within the co-parenting structure, look for support, or reduce exposure where the custody arrangement allows it. Not to fix the system — but to protect your capacity inside it.

Read the room — for yourself.

The first thing I said to my client: this is a role, not all of you. You have been put in a position. You are not the position.

Assess what’s actually happening. Who is in what role? What’s rotating and when? Where the power sits — with the court, with a lawyer, with a mediator or co-parenting coordinator who’s been charmed. You’re not doing this to explain it to them. You’re doing it for yourself. Acknowledge the dynamics coming from every direction, including the rescuer. Know what your body is telling you before you act.

Where to put your energy

Choose your battles. Contain the energy you put into it. When I was caught in a systemic dynamic, I could spend hours turning it over: What happened, what I should have said, what they meant. Grounding pulls me out. So does putting my energy into something where I actually have power. Focus on what’s within your control. You can’t control how the court responds.

Get rid of support that doesn’t believe you. When you’ve been disbelieved long enough, by family, by a lawyer who tells you to just be more agreeable, by friends tired of hearing about it, you can start to mistake familiarity for support. They aren’t the same thing.

Find people who believe you and understand coercive control and the both-sides problem in family court. A therapist or coach who hasn’t done their own work on power dynamics will miss what’s happening. A friend who keeps suggesting you look at your part will leave you more alone than before. You need people who can see the pattern and the other actors, not just your response to it.

Getting back to yourself

Start with your nervous system. When the interaction is over, when you are physically safe again, tell yourself that. The threat has passed. Use grounding if you feel dysregulated. It doesn’t mean that you are weak or crazy. Your nervous system responds to a threat. Tell yourself: I can do this. I’ve gotten through it before. Your nervous system needs that signal. It won’t come from the situation. It has to come from you.

Find somewhere to put your anger. It doesn’t have to be managed quietly. Anger is not the problem. Anger is the appropriate response to what happened.

Getting out completely may not be possible while you share children with this person. Getting ground under your feet is. That’s what’s within your control. That’s what keeps your sanity intact.

Where I landed

Let me be clear, I know the triangle from other dynamics, not co-parenting. I get that this is a different context, but here’s how I manage it. I’ve stopped trying to change the triangle. I assess what role I take on. I acknowledge the dynamics and keep my distance once it’s clear the others aren’t willing to change. I grieve the losses if the situation was unjust. I focus on what’s within my control: how I show up, where I set my boundaries, and when it’s healthier to disengage from a fight I can’t win in that room.

That’s not giving up. That’s protecting my sanity. My dignity. That’s knowing where I can still have an effect.

If you’re in this, exhausted, disbelieved, your reaction becoming the event, your perception is not the problem. The pattern is real.

Your anger is correct. It’s telling you something is off. That part of you that says enough — I like that part. It’s not the problem either. We can work on what you do with it. But the capacity to say I don’t care what you think of me anymore — that’s not dysfunction. That’s assertiveness. That’s the beginning of getting ground under your feet. Validate yourself even if nobody else validates you.

Not invulnerability. Not indifference. Just self-preservation. I know what’s happening. And I know what I’m no longer willing to give to it.

If you’re co-parenting with a toxic ex and want support that understands power, coercion, and relational harm — while helping you rebuild trust in yourself and your ability to choose what comes next — you can explore trauma counselling with me.

Book a free consultation online — let’s explore whether working together makes sense

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