Kids First Co-Parenting with Dr. Royster

Protecting Your Kids from Gaslighting in High-Conflict Co-Parenting

• Dr. Karalynn Royster • Season 1 • Episode 11

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Ever watched your child’s face twist with confusion? Up at night worrying about gaslighting and how to protect your child from the exact dynamics you experienced?

 We’re tackling the quiet damage of gaslighting in high-conflict co-parenting and sharing the exact words you can use to steady your kid without badmouthing your ex or dragging them into the middle.

We start with validation on steroids. You’ll learn simple, easy to remember phrases that meet your child where they are, “I can see why that feels confusing,” “I’m glad you told me” and grounding strategies. 

Then you'll learn how to build the muscle that manipulation tries to weaken: a child’s trust in their own perception. Through open-ended prompts and gentle reality-checks, we show how to help kids hold two stories without losing their center, and why this skill protects them in friendships, school, and future relationships.

From there, we set clean boundaries that keep kids out of adult logistics and blame. You’ll hear how to avoid using your child as a messenger, when to share brief factual context about safety or court decisions, and how to correct misinformation without turning your kitchen into a courtroom.

For moms who want more, we point to our High Conflict Communication Bootcamp for Moms concise, self-paced training with scripts, strategies, and a printable workbook so you always know what to say and how to say it. If this helped, tap follow, leave a quick review, and share it with a mom who could use a steadier week. 

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Kids First CoParenting System: If you are co-parenting with a narcissist, dealing with a manipulative ex, or feeling overwhelmed by high-conflict dynamics, you are not alone. These resources are designed to help you protect your child’s emotional health and take back control of your co-parenting experience.

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SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Kids First Co-Parenting Podcast, the podcast for smart, intentional, millennial moms raising resilient kids after separation and divorce. I'm Dr. Carolyn Royster, a child psychologist, coach, and a mom. After thousands of therapy hours with kids caught in the middle of high conflict households, I'm here to help moms like you do it differently. From peaceful co-parenting to total chaos, I've got you. Here we talk boundaries, regulation, and how to raise a great kid, even if your ex is beyond difficult. We blend science with real life, and as always, keep focus where it matters on raising great kids. This is Kids First Co-Parenting. Welcome back to another episode of the Kids First Co-Parenting Podcast. I'm so happy you're here. In today's episode, we're talking about how to protect your kids from gaslighting. Gaslighting is one of the most damaging dynamics that I see as a co-parenting expert and coach in high-conflict co-parenting because it really confuses kids about what's real and who they can trust. If you have not listened to our previous episode, I'll link it in the show notes. But you really should go back and listen to where this term comes from, what it means, what it isn't, because there is a little bit of an overuse of this term. It is important to have a good understanding of what we're actually talking about here. Because this episode gets very into the nitty-gritty of okay, I I understand what it is, Doc. I understand how we got here. I know how to identify it. I don't really know exactly what to do. Okay. I don't know how to protect my kid. The the really tricky thing that I see very often is that moms get kind of stuck in what they've been told, and is very good advice that they shouldn't talk badly about their ex. And so it becomes well, how do I correct this with my kid without calling my ex a liar? Or how do I say, no, honey, he's manipulating you, which you wouldn't say either of those things. And so what happens is that moms tend to not say anything. And that also causes problems. Gaslighting is not something that you can just not respond to. I'm sorry, but it's not. There's a lot of reason for that, but the main one is that kids that are being gaslit, kids that are experiencing emotional invalidation, have a very hard time. We know this. We've seen this. The research is very clear. Again, if you'd like to learn a little bit more about that, go back and listen to the last episode where I really talk through that research on emotional invalidation as well as how it affects kids and how it puts them into a real loyalty bind that they struggle. They struggle with. Unfortunately, it's a very common thing. What makes this even harder for moms to navigate is that it's really often very subtle and it takes a long time to effectively gaslight someone out of believing what they know to be true. It tends to be more of a water eroding a stone rather than uh a flood. When a difficult ex or co-parent is just outright manipulating or is just talking shit about you, you're that's gonna feel more like a flood. It's like, okay, well, that was obviously out of line. But what happens with gaslighting is that it tends to be a little bit more subtle. It's like, well, maybe they just forgot, or you know, he's not very emotionally in tune. Like perhaps he just didn't know how to respond when you were upset. It is important to kind of know what it is so that you can help your child and prepare them and yourself for these conversations. If you've ever opened a message on your co-parenting app from your ex and felt your stomach drop, you are far from alone, my friend. High conflict co-parenting plays by a completely different set of rules. And if you keep trying to just be reasonable, you're going to keep feeling blindsided. This is exactly why I created the High Conflict Communication Bootcamp for Moms. It's a short, self-paced, three-day training that will teach you exactly what to say, how to respond to toxic or manipulative messages, and how to keep your child out of the middle. You'll get scripts, strategies, and a printable workbook you can use right away. And it's only$19. You can grab your spot by following the link in the show notes, or go directly to learnwithlittlehouse.com slash bootcamp and start today. That's learnwithlittlehouse.com slash bootcamp and start today. Protect your piece, protect your child, and stop letting someone else control the energy. So let's dive in. We're going to talk about three strategies today that you can use to protect your kid from gaslighting. And really the whole point is to avoid putting them in the middle or overwhelming them with adult conversations or adult topics. Number one, the place I want you to start, the place I always want you to start as a trained child psychologist is validation and grounding. I often refer to this inside kids first, when I teach on this topic, when I write about it, I talk a lot about validation on steroids. You know to validate your child. You know that it's important to acknowledge, to recognize, and to attune to their emotional experience. We know this is important because this is how kids learn what emotions are, what they're not, how to manage them, how it feels in their body, how to get their needs met, all that good stuff. It's just really, really good, guys. And you got to keep doing it. Validation is so important. You know this. I know this. In terms of gaslighting, one of the best tools you can use is to simply validate what your child is experiencing and that their emotions and their perceptions of that event are real. When they come home confused, when they come home questioning, when they approach you and they ask you a really off-the-wall question, and you're like, where did that come from? The first step is always to validate their experiences and to validate their feelings. What does that look like? It looks like I can see why this feels confusing. An example would be Dad says you lied about the divorce. What you are saying is not true. Dad says you lied about the cops coming that night. I was too little, I was asleep, I don't remember. He says you lied about it. Again, this is a little bit more overt than kind of the more subtle gaslighting, but it's still a good example for us to talk about. How you would validate that is you would start by saying something like, I can see why that feels confusing. I I understand why you are curious about this. Or something along the lines of, it makes a lot of sense to me that you'd have a lot of feelings about hearing different stories. And then reinforcing that they're talking to you about it. So something like, I always want to hear what you think. It's always okay to talk to me about your feelings. It's always okay to ask your questions. I I want to hear it. Okay. So you're saying, not only is this yes, confusing. Yes, you are hearing two different stories. I am acknowledging that. But you're going to then say, it's good that you brought it to me. I'm happy to listen. I want to hear it. Why? Because we want to know if this is happening. We want to know if that experience is happening for your child. And we want to position you as a person they can talk to about it. Why? Because you're a safe adult that wants to help them and cares about their feelings. The second piece that I really want you to hold on to is you're going to start a process which can be very gradual and takes a long time of teaching your child to trust in their own reality and their own intuition and their own emotional experience. Outside of the co-parenting world, outside of this high conflict parallel parenting world, this is important. We want to raise kids that can stand in their truth, can stand in their values, know who they are, and know and trust themselves. I get kind of caught up on a little feminist soapbox sometimes, but women and girls in particular are often taught to not trust their intuition or to not trust what they're seeing and observing. No, he wasn't leering at you. He was just, you know, curious about the tree behind you. Or I'm sure that guy wasn't following you for any reason other than he was walking the same way. That might be true, but if your intuition is telling you like something's not right here, I want to raise girls that trust that and listen to that. Okay. Boys alternately, again, not to get too gendery, but boys alternately are often gaslit out of the experience that it's okay for them to have feelings. Don't cry about that. It's not worth your tears. Or you shouldn't be so upset about this. You shouldn't be so sad about that. When we talk to our children in general, in that way, we teach them to not trust what data is coming to them, whether that be feelings, whether that be the environment, whether that be their experience. But we don't want that for kids. It causes a lot of problems as they grow up. If you're told that your anger is not valid, if you're told your sadness is not valid, if you're told your fear is not valid, then you learn to not trust it. And you learn that the cues that you are developing and picking up from the environment are not to be trusted. And eventually that translates to I can't be trusted, my experience can't be trusted. And then we have real fertile ground for things like anxiety, depression, um, insecure, unhealthy relationships, being easily manipulated. It's it's not something we want to encourage with our children. So when someone is chipping away at that confidence in what they know to be true, you want to help your cut your kids to know and stand in what they experienced, heard, or felt and reinforce that that matters. So a great example is maybe they're sad because dad missed an event and you hear your kids say, Well, he said he never promised he would come to my game. He wasn't sure. And you're like, hmm, that's interesting because just a little while ago you were telling me that he was for sure going to be there, and he had told you all that. And like in your head, you're kind of thinking this what you might say is something like, huh. I I'm hearing that that's what he said after the game. What is it that you remember? I mean, I trust your memory too. And sometimes grown-ups remember things differently, sometimes we forget. Like, again, you're not talking poorly about your co-parent in this situation. Sometimes we remember things a little bit differently, but but what you remember is important too, and what you experienced is important too. Do you see how that entire phrase in no part of it am I, as the parent, saying, he lied to you, or no, sweetheart, he did promise you. And it fell through. Or, you know, dad says a lot of things and they don't happen. You're not saying any of that. You're saying, I hear that that's what he said when you when you told him about it. What do you remember? What are you noticing? I I trust you, is what you're communicating. And I trust that that you, even though you're young, have a memory of this as well. This is how you do that. Your memory is important to me. Are you stuck in a high conflict co-parenting situation? The Best Interest app uses proven techniques endorsed by Dr. Romani herself to reduce conflict and protect your peace. Join thousands of co-parents finding relief. Get 22% off a yearly subscription with code LITLEHOUSE22. Download Best Interest from the App Store or the Play Store today. One thing that's really hard to do, and we'll get to this in the third step now, is protecting kids without pulling them into the middle. What's tricky here is we don't want to put them in a position where they have to communicate what's going on or what's wrong or what so-and-so didn't remember correctly. In the last example we gave, what you wouldn't want to do is push that really hard. Well, listen, I mean, I have a text from your dad that says he's for sure gonna be there. Do you want to see? That would be something where you're kind of talking poorly about your ex there. You're putting your kid in a loyalty conflict because they're like, Why don't I put them in the middle would be saying something like, Listen, well, you better tell him next time, don't you promise me to come if you're not gonna come? You're making your child be the messenger or setting them up to say, Well, mom said that you have to come to all my events. It's required. Like they are literally in the middle of your conflict. You really want to avoid that. Well, how do you do that? How do you keep them out of the middle? You want to really hold on to this idea that you're not out here to prove your ex wrong. You're here to help ground your kid and keep them in the present moment and keep them from feeling like they're in the middle, the messenger, or feeling overwhelmed. It's important to explicitly say something like these disagreements between your dad and I is not for you to worry about. It's not your burden, it's not for you to fix. It is not your job to schedule him, it is not your job to schedule me. It is your job to pay attention. And when he says something like he's gonna be at your game, and you're excited about that, you get to say, I'm excited about it. If you want to share that you were sad he wasn't there, you can, or you cannot. It's up to you. You see how that kind of opens the door for them to process it and choose their response in the way they want. Another example would be something like, Dad says it's your fault that we had to move out. We don't live together. We don't live in the house that I loved. You, how I would coach you to respond if you were one of my kids' first moms, would be to first validate. So say something along the lines of, that is a big thing for a little kid to hear. Gosh, that must be kind of hard for a second grader, whatever it is. You'd put it in their context. If you know your child's kind of sensitive, you might add that piece. Wow, that's a that's big for somebody who's really having a hard time in our new house. That's a big question mark for you. Or I can see how this would be worrisome to you or confusing. So again, we're validating, okay, you're bringing this up to me because you're having a concern or question about it. It's a big thing. I want to honor that. Then I would say something that is neutral and sets a boundary around what is there for the kids to worry about and what is not. What's important that you know about this situation, about where we live, is that none of it is your fault. And my job is to take care of you and to make sure you're okay. And where we live is part of that, but it's not all of it. Right? So it's a little bit of a backdoor way out of this. You're saying, you know, this comes up a lot with finance. You're saying something like, you know, the money decisions in our family are for the grown-ups to worry about. That's not for you to worry about. And if it ever is something you need to worry about, we can talk about it. You're taking it out of their hands. You're saying you don't need to figure out whose fault it was that we moved houses. You don't need to spend your little precious brain power wondering about who made the final decision and why the court decided that we needed to leave and sell the house, or why we needed to stay, or he had to go, or whatever the dynamics are. Sometimes parents will choose to insert a little fact, a little factual information during this part of the response. They may say something like, We made the decision to separate together, and where we live or don't live was decided by the judge. Something like that. Or was decided by someone, you don't even have to say, who took all of the things into account where you guys go to school, where we work, where our families are, and they made the decision for us. And that's what you're saying. You're not saying, actually, it was him that asked me for the divorce. Or, you know, I would have stayed there, but I can't afford it. You're not putting it into this place of inappropriate information for a child to have, nor are you getting into the weeds about how you got to the place that you got, because that's not helpful for anybody. And again, it would create a loyalty bind for your child. It would create an issue where they would then be like, Well, I'm kind of unhappy with this divorce and separation. I don't love it. And mom's the reason that I have to go through it. Or dad's the reason I have to go through it. It may very well be that he is the reason. That doesn't mean we're going to tell our kids that, right? It doesn't mean that that's ever appropriate to tell them. What it does mean is that they are questioning why this is their reality. And your job is to make sure it stays as neutral as possible. Sometimes moms ask me, what if something very clearly is someone's fault? What if it really is? Like, I didn't want this divorce at all, and I knew we'd have to move to, you know, a crappy house, or he had an affair, and I can't be with someone that had an affair. And so it is his fault. Yeah, uh, valid, valid. Um, not always information that children need to have. And again, for that kind of individualized support, there's a lot of ways you can work that out. But this is the type of thing we talk about inside kids first. This is why it's helpful to have somebody that knows your unique situation that can talk about, like, okay, that may all be true. That might be the case. You know, you were the one that decided to sell the house. It was a choice, you made it. How do you frame that to your kids in a way that doesn't burden them with adult information or create a dynamic of like you're the bad guy or you're the bad guy, the other person's the bad guy. Now, when it is a factual event. So I'm thinking about when there have been founded abuse cases, when something objectively happened, there was a car accident, there was a CPS founded report. That is a time that you want to try to keep it to just the fact. Let's say somebody's saying something like, Dad says you made up that I got hurt at his house, and you told the doctor, and that's why he got in trouble. And you're thinking to yourself, like, oh hell no, that is not at all how this went down. It may be important again, with the support of a coach, with the support of your child's therapist to set that record straight. You may at that point opt to say something like actually so-and-so got upset, and this scary thing happened, and the doctor was worried about your safety because we're always worried about safety. And so he did what he needed to do to keep you and kids safe. That doesn't have any sort of judgment or accusatory tone to it. It's just this is what happened, this is what needed to happen next, and this is why it happened. It was a safety issue. There was a reason for it. It was not just me being like, I'm making stuff up. But again, you want to be really careful and deliberate and thoughtful about how you approach that. Inside the kids first community, we do talk about that quite a bit because most of the moms that I work with have these really sticky, tricky dynamics. And you want to be kind of, you have to toe the line always between what's factual and what's talking poorly about your co-parent. The the big mistake would be to just let that slide because you're not supposed to talk badly about someone. I'm using air quotes if you're just listening. And so that's a really tricky thing that we, you know, talk a lot about on the podcast and within the community. And so those are the types of questions that it's it's important to not make in a vacuum. Gaslighting can be so damaging for kids, and it can really create a lot of confusion and anxiety and difficulty for both kids and you. It's a really tough spot to know what to do and when to do it, and how to do it, and how to say it. This is why you need support. You know, you don't have to untangle every lie or accusation on your own. You can have a support network around you. A great place to start would be looking at our high conflict three-day communication boot camp where I really teach you what to say and how to how to go about documentation and things like that when your ex is doing some gaslighting behaviors to you andor your child. And how do you protect your kids as they're going in and out of an environment like that? So I highly encourage you to check that out. If you have ideas for future podcasts, please let us know. Until next time, I thank you so much for being here. I'll see you soon. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Kids First Co-Parenting. The best way you can support the show is by following, rating, and reviewing wherever you listen to podcasts, and by sharing it with another mom who could use the support. You can also connect with me on Instagram and Facebook at Learn with Little House, where I share daily tips and encouragement for moms raising kids through high conflict divorce. And if you're ready to go deep and get more tools, scripts, personalized support, and coaching, come join us inside the Kids First co parenting community. You'll find the details at Learnwithlittlehouse.com. Until next time, remember your kids don't need you to be perfect. They just need you to be steady and grounded, and as always, to put them first. Thanks for being here.