Co-Parenting With a Narcissist and Learning to Regulate Yourself When You Cannot Change Them
Written by Lisa Forsberg, Clinical Hypnotherapist
Lisa Forsberg is a clinical hypnotherapist and narcissistic abuse recovery specialist who combines deep clinical expertise with her own lived experience of healing from a toxic relationship. Her mission is to help others rediscover a life filled with peace, purpose, and possibility.
It is 6:05 pm on a Tuesday, and you hear the familiar sound of a text notification from your phone. You have not even opened it yet, and your chest is already tight. You know, before you read a single word, that this is going to derail your evening. You open it. It is nothing, really a passive-aggressive comment about pickup time, a subtle dig disguised as a logistics question. But by the time you have read it twice, your heart is racing, and the calm evening you had planned with your kids has quietly evaporated. If you are co-parenting with a narcissist, this is not an unusual Tuesday. This is most Tuesdays.
The trap you keep falling into
Somewhere along the way, you probably decided the solution was strategy. The perfectly worded email. The documented, unemotional response. The boundary stated clearly and calmly, exactly as every co-parenting article told you to do it.
But it has not worked. Not really. Your ex-spouse finds the loophole, ignores the boundary entirely, or twists your calm response into evidence that you are the difficult one. You start to wonder if you are simply bad at this, if a better-worded text or a firmer tone would finally get through.
Here is the truth nobody tells you: it was never failing because of your wording. It has been failing because you were trying to out-logic someone who is not playing a logic game. Most co-parenting advice assumes the other parent is reasonable and simply needs the right communication approach. When you are dealing with narcissistic traits, that assumption falls apart at the first hurdle. There is no perfect email. There was never going to be one.
What is actually happening in your body
When that text sinks in, you are not just having a bad moment. You are having a physiological one. A single message, sometimes just a subject line, is enough to trigger the same fight-or-flight response your body would produce if you were facing a real physical threat. Your amygdala fires before your thinking brain even catches up. Cortisol floods your system. The very part of your brain you need most in that moment, the rational, reasonable, “let me think this through” part, goes quiet. It is simply not built to be online while your body thinks it is in danger.
This is why you can know, intellectually, exactly what you want to say and still find yourself typing a reply you regret twenty minutes later. It is easy to assume that is a personal failing, as though you simply need more self-control. But willpower was never the missing piece. What actually changes this is not trying harder in the moment. It is training your nervous system ahead of time, so that calm becomes your automatic response instead of something you have to force your way into. That is subconscious rewiring work, not willpower work, and it is something you can build.
Regulate before you respond
This is the piece that gets left out of most co-parenting advice because most of it focuses entirely on what you say to your ex-partner. But the real leverage point is not the reply. It is the time you give yourself before you write it, and that window is often much longer than you think.
The first question to ask, before you do anything else, is whether this actually requires an urgent response. Most of it does not. A dig about pickup time, a passive-aggressive comment, a message clearly designed to provoke – none of that needs an answer in the next five minutes or even today. In fact, some messages do not require a response at all.
If it is not urgent, give yourself 24 to 48 hours before you respond, and use that time to decide whether a response is even necessary. Let your nervous system fully come back down. You will write a different reply on Thursday than you would have written in the heat of Tuesday evening, and it will almost always be the better one if you decide to write one at all.
If it genuinely is urgent, something involving your child's immediate safety or wellbeing, then you do not have the luxury of time, but you can still take a breath before you type. Try this:
Put the phone down. Physically set it out of reach, even for a minute. Walk away, outside if that is available to you.
Take three slow breaths, making the exhale longer than the inhale. This alone signals safety to your nervous system.
Name what is happening, silently or out loud: "My body thinks this is an emergency. It is not."
Ask yourself one question: What does my child need from me in the next ten minutes? Not what does the other parent deserve from me. What does my child need?
Only once your body has settled, even slightly, do you open the message again. You are not trying to feel calm. You are trying to feel calm enough that your thinking brain comes back online before your fingers hit the keyboard.
Something interesting sometimes happens here. On a second read, from a calmer and more regulated place, you may find you interpret the message entirely differently. The same words that felt like an attack the first time round can read, on reflection, as simply neutral or even irrelevant. Your body was reacting to the history behind the message as much as the message itself, and once it has settled, the words on the screen do not always look the way they did a few minutes ago.
This is also where deeper nervous system work, the kind hypnotherapy is particularly suited to, becomes valuable. Not as a one-off trick for a single difficult text, but as a way of gradually training your body to stop treating every message as a full-blown emergency.
Remember: It may end up in a courtroom
There is a second reason to slow down before you respond, and it has nothing to do with your nervous system. Every text, every email, every message you send in writing is a potential exhibit. If custody or parenting arrangements are ever contested, these messages do not stay between the two of you. They can be printed, screenshotted, and read aloud in front of a judge.
This matters more than it might seem to in the moment. A reply sent from a place of hurt or anger, one that is sharp, sarcastic, or reactive, will not read the way it felt to write. On the page, out of context, it can make you look like the unreasonable one, even when you were the one responding to provocation. Narcissistic co-parents are often skilled at sending messages designed to provoke exactly that kind of reply, then using it against you later.
This is one more reason that pausing matters. A message written 48 hours later, from a regulated state, does not just protect your peace. It protects your record. Before you hit send, it is worth asking yourself one more question: If a judge read this exact message with no context, would it show the parent I actually am?
Boundaries are not requests, they are decisions about you
Once you are regulated enough to think clearly, it is worth revisiting what a boundary actually is, because most of us were taught the wrong definition.
A boundary is not something you tell your co-parent and then wait for them to respect. That framing hands them the power every time because it depends entirely on their cooperation, and cooperation was never something you could count on.
A real boundary is a decision about your own behaviour that does not depend on what your ex-partner does. Not "I need you to stop texting me after 7 pm," which they can simply ignore. Instead: "I will not read or respond to messages after 7 pm, and I will check them again in the morning." One of these requires their compliance. The other requires only you. This shift is significant because it takes the win out of their hands and puts it back in yours.
The long game of parenting
Here is the part that is hard to hear, but something that is sadly necessary to accept: co-parenting with a narcissist is not a problem you are going to solve. You are not going to find the strategy, the email template, or the perfect tone that finally gets through to your ex-spouse. This is a relationship with a difficult person that you are going to keep having, on a schedule not of your choosing, for years.
Once you understand that you cannot change your ex, their version of the truth, their priorities, or how they choose to engage with you, you have a choice to make about what you can control.
What you can learn to control your own nervous system is entirely within reach: staying regulated enough, handover after handover, message after message, to keep showing up as the parent you actually want to be. Some Tuesdays you will manage it beautifully. Some Tuesdays you will not, and that is allowed too. What matters is that you keep coming back to your own body, your own breath, your own decisions, rather than waiting for the other parent to finally be reasonable.
Your ex-partner was never going to be the variable that changed. You were always the one with room to grow.
Where this work goes deeper
Everything above – regulating before you respond, rebuilding your sense of what a boundary actually is, and learning to trust yourself instead of waiting for your co-parent to change is exactly the nervous system work I take clients through in Release Rewire Renew, my four-month program of personalised support.
If you recognise yourself in this article and want support building that regulation into something lasting, rather than something you're rebuilding from scratch every Tuesday, that's where we'd start.
Read more from Lisa Forsberg
Lisa Forsberg, Clinical Hypnotherapist
Known as The Healthy Hypnotherapist, Lisa Forsberg is one of Australia's leading specialists in narcissistic abuse recovery. A survivor of narcissistic abuse herself, Lisa brings both lived experience and deep clinical expertise to her work, creating a space where clients feel truly understood, often for the first time. She works with adults, teens, and children across Australia and worldwide, helping them heal from toxic relationships, rebuild their sense of self, and break free from repeating cycles. Lisa also mentors fellow hypnotherapists who want to work confidently in this deeply nuanced field.
