Is your divorce high-conflict? The seven markers

When you need this

You have been told to “just communicate”. You have tried. Every message, however it begins, ends in the same place, and you have started to wonder whether the advice is wrong or whether you are.

Before you change how you behave, you need to know what kind of divorce you are actually in. The rules for a peaceful divorce and the rules for a high-conflict one are close to opposites. Used in the wrong place, each set does harm.

Most divorces are not wars. They end in an agreement, a division, two new lives. The protocol in the book is not for them; it would damage them. The book says it in one line:

Applying war rules to a peaceful divorce produces a war.

The seven markers

These are the markers by which the book recognises a high-conflict divorce. Read them against the last year, not against your worst evening. Nothing you tick is stored or sent anywhere; the count lives in this page and disappears when you close it.

How to read your count

Three or more markers: in the book’s words, this protocol is for you. Fewer than three: negotiate, give way, build. The normal rules apply.

The threshold matters because both mistakes are expensive. A parent in a genuinely high-conflict dispute who keeps offering goodwill gestures hands over material, month after month. A parent in an ordinary, painful, low-conflict divorce who starts answering in four cold sentences and refusing phone calls builds the very conflict the checklist was meant to detect.

A wrong diagnosis costs more than the illness, in both directions.

If the count is three or more: three rules

The book draws here on the literature on high-conflict divorce, above all the work of Bill Eddy, and then adds three rules for using that knowledge, because it is as dangerous as it is useful.

1. You recognise a pattern; you do not hand out a diagnosis. A diagnosis belongs in a clinic. A clinical label spoken at a hearing or in front of your child is ammunition against you. The pattern serves you privately: to predict moves, to stop expecting behaviour that will not come, to stop explaining.
2. You look for the same traits in yourself. This is the part everyone skips. A dispute that lasts for years produces black-and-white thinking, anger that flips on an email and bending the rules “because they started it” in a perfectly healthy person. The book’s test: does your behaviour outside the dispute increasingly resemble your behaviour inside it? If it does, the dispute is formatting you.
3. The other side’s structure changes your strategy, not your goal. The goal stays the same: the interest of the child. But negotiation techniques made for calm people stop working. A compromise is read as weakness, a goodwill gesture as an admission, giving way as an invitation to the next demand.

What does work, according to the book, is short enough to memorise: boundaries without explanation, consistency without exception, documentation without emotion. The other tools in this section are those three things in practice.

A worked example

What this is not

• It is not a diagnosis of the other parent. The markers describe a conflict, not a person. Recognise the mechanism; never diagnose the person. Respect the person, watch the pattern.
• It is not a verdict on who is to blame. Rule two applies to whoever is reading this page.
• It is not a safety assessment. A person who is a victim of violence deserves protection, unconditionally. If you or your child are in danger, this page is not your first step: your local emergency number and domestic-violence services are.
• The pattern has no gender. The book was written from a father’s chair, but the same moves are made by fathers and by mothers, and these tools work the same way for either.
• Nothing here is legal advice. Procedure, deadlines and the names of institutions differ from country to country; a lawyer who practises family law where you live is the person to ask.