Five Ways to Support Clients Through Divorce When Conflict Keeps Circling Back
- Jul 28
- 6 min read
Leoniek van der Maarel is a Dutch psychologist, grief expert, author, and trainer with a clear and powerful mission. "Creating a world where grief is no longer a silent struggle, but a supported path forward."
You know the feeling. Your clients come in, and the conversation circles again around the same conflict. The same accusations, the same deadlock, the same exhaustion on both sides. You try to stay neutral, you reflect back what you hear, you look for openings, and yet nothing really shifts.
What looks like conflict is often loss underneath. Loss of trust, of certainty, of the future they had imagined. Loss of the home they shared, of daily life with their children. When that loss goes unacknowledged, the conflict keeps refuelling itself. It has nowhere else to go.
The SCHIP method, developed by Tineke Rodenburg and Leoniek van der Maarel, authors of Vechten voor je scheiding, schipbreuk geslaagd (Fighting for Your Divorce, A Successful Shipwreck), offers a framework that takes both seriously, the conflict and the loss that drives it. The acronym, S for Sharing the past, C for Conflict and Loss, H for Helpful listening, I for Integration, P for Partners in parenthood, gives you a clear arc to work with. Not a rigid script, but a way of orienting yourself when you're not sure where to go next.
Here are five ways to bring that into your practice:
1. Recognize that conflict and loss are two sides of the same coin
This is the foundation of the SCHIP method, and it changes how you listen from the very first session. When a client describes their ex partner's behavior with fury or contempt, underneath that is almost always something lost, a relationship they believed in, a version of themselves, a sense of safety. The conflict is real, but it's also a container for grief that hasn't found another form yet.
The S, Sharing the past, phase is about creating enough safety for both dimensions to be present. Before anything can move, your client needs to feel that you see the whole picture, not just what went wrong, but what it cost them. When you name that early, something often loosens. The defensiveness drops a little. There's more room to breathe.
Conflict without loss is rare. Loss without conflict, in a separation, is almost impossible. Holding both at once is where your work begins.
2. Don't rush to resolve the conflict: First, make room for grief
The C in the acronym stands for Conflict and Loss. It's a familiar pull, you want to help, so you move toward solutions. What agreements can we make? How can we improve communication? These are useful questions, but asked too early, they land on unprepared ground. Asking them without getting to the bottom of what has been lost leaves partners feeling unseen and unheard.
The H in SCHIP stands for Helpful listening, and it asks you to slow down before you problem solve. What does your client actually need right now? Often it's not a strategy. It's to be heard in the full weight of what they're going through. They need and want to be heard and acknowledged by the other partner. The pain the other partner "caused". The grief of a divorce is not a side issue to be processed before the real work starts. It is the real work, for a long time.
Practitioners sometimes worry about opening up grief, afraid it will overwhelm the session, or that they won't know how to hold it. But grief that's been given space tends to become less consuming, not more. What stays stuck is grief that keeps being redirected into conflict because there's nowhere else for it to go. Helpful listening means tolerating the not knowing together. It means not filling the silence too quickly.
3. Understand that people process loss differently
One partner is already making plans for the future. The other can't get out of bed. One is angry. The other is numb. One wants to talk endlessly, the other has shut down completely.
These differences are not personality flaws or signs of bad faith. They're different expressions of the same loss, processed through different nervous systems, different histories, different ways of coping. But when ex partners don't understand this, they read each other's responses as attacks. The one who's moving forward seems cold and unfeeling. The one who's still grieving seems manipulative or unstable.
As a practitioner, naming this dynamic explicitly can shift something. When your client understands that their ex partner's apparent indifference might be a different form of grief, not the absence of it, the conflict often becomes slightly less personal. Not resolved, but reframed. That's enough to create a little more space.
4. Help clients name what they have actually lost
The I in SCHIP stands for Integration, and integration can only happen when the loss has been made concrete enough to grieve. Vague grief is harder to move through than specific grief.
Your client can say it in a hundred different ways, "I lost the house," "I lost the life I thought we'd have," "I lost the version of myself I was when we were together." Ask them directly, what is actually gone now that wasn't gone before?
This isn't just a therapeutic exercise. It's what allows the conflict to loosen its grip. As long as the loss stays abstract, a general sense that everything is wrong, it has nowhere to land. It keeps circulating back into blame, into old arguments, into the same three accusations on repeat.
Naming the loss specifically gives it a place to exist that isn't the conflict itself. Integration doesn't mean the loss disappears or that your client feels fine about it. It means they can carry it without it running the whole show. They can think about their ex partner, about the future, about their children, without every thought pulling them straight back into the fight. That's the shift the I is aiming for, not resolution, but room.
In the Integration phase, they find a common ritual to leave the past behind them, a kind of funeral for their relationship. This way they decide to take the step into the future and let bygones be bygones.
5. Guide ex-partners toward staying parents together, even when the partnership is over
The final phase in the SCHIP method is the connection in parenthood, in such a way that benefits the children. The P stands for Partners in parenthood, and it's the phase where everything from S, C, H, and I gets put to use in the one relationship that doesn't end with the divorce, the shared responsibility for the children.
This step is often where practitioners feel the pull to rush. There are school schedules to sort out, holidays to divide, decisions to make, and it's tempting to move straight into practical agreements. But if the loss underneath hasn't been acknowledged yet, those agreements tend not to hold. The same conflict resurfaces, just wearing a new topic.
When your client has had room to grieve what's gone, the marriage, the shared future, sometimes the version of the family they'd imagined, something becomes possible that wasn't possible before. They can separate the ex partner from the co parent. Not because the hurt is gone, but because it's no longer the only thing in the room.
Your role here is to help them see that staying connected as parents isn't a betrayal of what they lost. It's a different kind of relationship, built on what's left rather than what's over. Some clients find this easier than others. Some circle back to old conflict when a new decision needs to be made, and that's not failure, it's part of how this phase moves.
What you're really helping them build is a working partnership around their children, one that can hold disagreement without collapsing back into the old fight. That's the arc the SCHIP method was designed for, from conflict, through loss, to a new form of being connected.
In conclusion
Conflict and loss are not two separate things to address one after the other. They're intertwined, and the work is to keep holding both, from the first session where you name what's underneath the anger, to the last stretch where two people learn to trust each other again, maybe forgive each other, and co parent from a place that isn't the marriage anymore.
If you recognize this pattern in your own practice, the conversations that keep circling, the moments where you're not sure whether to hold space or move toward solutions, the SCHIP method gives you a map for that terrain. Grief Training Centre offers training in applying it in your own practice, for practitioners who want more than a framework to read about, who want to actually know what to do when it gets difficult.
Read more from Leoniek van der Maarel
Leoniek van der Maarel, Academie voor Verlies/Grief Training Centre
With over 25 years of experience and a deeply personal connection to her work, Leoniek has become one of the leading voices in the field of loss and transition. Her approach is grounded in the understanding that grief does not always begin with death, and healing is never one-size-fits-all. Her career is defined by one central truth: grief is everywhere. In the aftermath of a death, a divorce, a broken family bond, or a lost dream, it weaves itself through human lives in ways both visible and silent. And yet, society still often asks us to "move on" too quickly, or without the right support. Leoniek’s life's work is to change that.
