Published on The Huffington Post 2/07/2017 5:32 pm ET 

Parenting is arguably the hardest work one can do in life, even with a loving and compatible partner. Coparenting with a narcissist ex is exponentially more difficult—draining, disorienting, divisive, and at times cause for feelings of black anger and despair.

Your Narcissist Ex Doesn’t Love Your Kids the Way You Do

It is painful, perhaps incomprehensible, but your narcissist ex will never love your children the way you do. If your ex has narcissistic personality disorder, s/he may be flatly incapable of loving them at all, seeing them instead as projections and extensions of her-/himself to be manipulated and abused to serve her/his agenda of maintaining a sense of entitlement and superiority. To make matters worse, your narcissist ex’s main objective may be to hurt you, regardless of how it harms your kids.

If you did the leaving, the rejected narcissist is likely to hold a profound long-term grudge, seeking to punish you for triggering her/his narcissistic injury—the repressed feelings of shame and unworthiness that drive the narcissistic personality. If your ex left you, you are still fair game for propaganda and persecution.

Whoever initiated the break up, the narcissist is likely to use every opportunity to bolster her-/himself at your expense. S/he may insult and demean you in front of your children; engage in a smear campaign behind your back to your kids, extended family, and social circle; and undermine your efforts to communicate as coparents.

Forget CoParenting with a Narcissist

Teamwork is outside the narcissist’s playbook. By definition, narcissists lack empathy or genuine feelings of connectedness with others, most poignantly their family members. As painful as this is to accept about the other parent of your children, you need to face reality and move on.

Accept Parallel Parenting

First and foremost, narcissists do not play fair or nice. They will vie for their children’s attention and adoration but also readily cast it away when it loses value (i.e., becomes costly, taxing, boring, irritating, etc.).

Throw out the normal rules of engagement. Embrace minimalist “parallel parenting” to gain control and reduce your vulnerability to manipulation. This is necessary for you and for your children.

Parallel Parenting Do List

  1. Do limit contact/communication with your ex to absolute essentials.
  2. Do establish a regular parenting schedule and stick to it.
  3. Do keep strict boundaries with your ex.
  4. Do withhold your true feelings/thoughts from your ex.
  5. Do ignore your ex’s antagonisms, whether passive-aggressive or overtly aggressive.
  6. Do accept that you cannot control your ex’s parenting, even if it sucks.
  7. Do have faith in your own parenting (one attuned good parent is more powerful than several bad parents/stepparents—really).
  8. Do be as honest as you can (age-appropriately) with your kids about your family situation.
  9. Do modulate but don’t deny your feelings with your kids.
  10. Do model empathy and resiliency for your kids.

Parallel Parenting Don’t List

  1. Don’t argue with or try to explain yourself to your ex.
  2. Don’t make yourself vulnerable to your ex.
  3. Don’t react to your ex’s barbs or criticisms.
  4. Don’t demonize your ex to your kids.
  5. Don’t internalize your ex’s projections.
  6. Don’t try to explain your concerns about your kids to your ex.
  7. Don’t ever criticize your kids to your ex, as s/he will use it against them/you.
  8. Don’t engage emotionally with your ex: Go “gray rock”—boring, flat, monotonous.
  9. Don’t blame yourself for your ex’s behavior.
  10. Don’t forget that although your ex may be a jerk, the silver lining is your kids.

 

Listen to Julie’s audio course “Understanding Narcissism” for free with code JULIE.

Julie L. Hall is the author of The Narcissist in Your Life: Recognizing the Patterns and Learning to Break Free from Hachette Books. 

Need support? Julie provides specialized narcissistic abuse recovery coaching to clients around the world. 

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Lead photo courtesy of Stephan Hochhaus, Creative Commons.