A few weeks ago, Shrink4Men became an affiliate of the OurFamilyWizard (OFW) program. For those of you who are unfamiliar with OFW, it’s a third party software system and data bank that helps divorced families co-parent with less friction and ambiguity. OFW describes their system as follows:
The OFW™ website is more than a calendar for divorced parents or just another online custody or visitation calendar; it gives you access to an array of tools that allow you to easily schedule and track parenting time, share important family information and expenses as well as create clear communication.
The OFW™ website reduces divorce conflict between you and the other parent by providing a shared tool for scheduling parenting time calendars and visitation schedules, sharing information and managing expenses like un-reimbursed medical bills.
OurFamilyWizard is all of the above and much, much more. If used properly, OFW is one of the most effective tools a parent sharing custody with a high-conflict person (HCP) and/or an abusive personality-disordered individual (APDI, e.g., Borderline Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Histrionic Personality Disorder, Antisocial Personality Disorder, Avoidant Personality Disorder, Dependent Personality Disorder, etc.) can have at his or her disposal.
OurFamilyWizard is quickly becoming a routine requirement in many Family Court systems in the US and Canada because it reduces the he said-she said arguments that are typical of high-conflict custody cases. OFW is an objective third party system that can and will be used against you in a court of law. It can be used to demonstrate your ability to co-parent with a HCP as a co-parent (no small feat) and it can also demonstrate that the HCP cannot co-parent. In a perfect world in which neither parent is a HCP, OFW demonstrates you both can co-parent. Think of OFW as your living “continuing record” and/or your “continuing affidavit.”
Before You Enroll in the OurFamilyWizard Program
Before you enroll in the OurFamilyWizard program, you need to obtain an agreement in writing from your ex to use the program. There are 3 ways to do this:
- As part of a Court Order;
- As an agreement between your attorneys or solicitors; and
- As an agreement between you and your ex that’s documented in writing. If your ex refuses to use OFW;
- You refuse to use anything other than OFW to communicate and send your messages, schedule updates, etc., through the system and enter her emails, texts and voicemails into OFW.
Unsurprisingly, many HCPs resist using OFW. Why? Probably because it’s in the children’s best interests, it reduces conflict and it holds one accountable for one’s behaviors. Your HCP’s reluctance to use OFW should be all the incentive you need to make sure the program is legally required. HCPs resist using OFW because they seem to understand that they’ll have to begin behaving themselves, otherwise their bad behaviors will be exposed. [*I will discuss common HCP arguments against using OFW and your counter-arguments in Part 2 of this series next week.]
It is always in children’s best interests for their parents to behave like mature adults and collaboratively co-parent. Effective co-parenting means keeping the petty nonsense to a minimum. Unfortunately, many HCPs are unable to put anyone other than themselves first, which is why you need to stand your ground make OFW a requirement. I’d be willing to wager the degree to which the HCP resists using OFW is in direct proportion to how bad her or his behavior would become without it.
If you have to resort to number 4, just enroll both you and your ex, pay their fee, send them the program/membership information and notify them that you’ll only communicate via OFW from that point forward and will only respond to their communications through OFW. By paying the fee for them, they should have no reason to complain, except that they’re a HCP and HCPs complain about anything that isn’t one of their unilateral decisions and/or makes them accountable.
How OurFamilyWizard Can Help You
If used diligently and correctly, you can neutralize many of your ex’s high-conflict behaviors fairly quickly. Anecdotal evidence suggests it takes approximately three attempts by the HCP to try to get around the OFW system before they begin behaving better. The threat of having their lies, antics, aggressions and manipulations exposed seems to greatly dis-incentivize their high-conflict and abusive behavior. However, this largely depends upon how consistent you are in using the system, how well you use the system and how well you maintain your boundaries.
Here are some potential benefits of using OurFamilyWizard:
1. Instant accountability. OFW can be used as a tool to hold the high-conflict parent accountable down to the most-minute detail. All communications, including emails and texts, go through the OFW system. If your HCP ex tries to go around the system by using outside forms of communication, you can upload texts, emails and mp3s of abusive voicemails into the system with specific notations that your ex has been communicating outside of OFW. This becomes even more effective when you email or text your ex through OFW to politely ask that they please communicate via OFW in future communications. If the HCP continues to refuse to use the program, it demonstrates that they ignore agreements and court orders. This should help you establish a pattern of bad co-parenting behavior.
2. Minimize lying and game playing. Everything you do within the system is documented, including text messages sent to and from your phone. Every communication, every message, every photo upload, every private and public journal entry, every schedule and calendar entry and update, every SMS text is time stamped and is impossible to backdate. The time stamp is determined and held by the OFW server.
Additionally, when either of you reads an email, text, journal entry or calendar update, etc., you each receive a time-stamped alert notifying you that your communication has been read. This means your HCP ex can’t play games about not receiving messages or claim that they emailed requests/messages to you on fictitious dates. Not opening parenting communications and/or not responding in a timely manner can be damning for the HCP. In the eyes of many judges, a negative reply to your message is better than no reply and/or not opening your messages at all. Ignoring your communications shows a lack of interest in co-parenting with you and an utter disregard for the children’s welfare.
Alternatively, HCPs who use OFW to bombard you with hostile or irrelevant messages will establish a pattern of harassing behavior. I’ll address how to manage this kind of behavior using OFW in Part 3 of this series.
3. Demonstrate the HCP’s unwillingness and/or inability to co-parent. If your HCP ex refuses to use the system, tries to get around it and/or abuses the system, their own behavior becomes evidence that you can take back to the judge of their unwillingness and/or inability to co-parent with you. As mentioned earlier, think of OFW as a running affidavit. This is especially handy in states that don’t allow one-way party recording.
If Children’s Aid Society (CAS; Canada) or Children’s Protective Services (CPS; US) are involved in your custody case, OFW can be extremely valuable. The communication logs can be used to demonstrate their bad co-parenting behaviors and even their attempts at parental alienation (more on this in Part 3).
Here’s a real life example: My client’s ex made false claims about him to CAS. Fortunately, they were using OFW. He gave CAS his entire log of OFW communications and the results were incredible. CAS reviewed his log before interviewing his ex, but she wasn’t aware CAS would do so. Then, in typical HCP fashion, she lied about the dates of events, claimed she had the children on dates when they were in my client’s care and lied about her responses to my client. CAS exposed her lies and then filed a report against her! It’s highly likely that my client will now receive primary custody.
4. Minimize conflict and increase co-parenting transparency. Many high-conflict parents try to control the other parent (and the children) by withholding information, giving limited information, giving conflicting or false information, withholding information until after an event or appointment has passed and/or withholding information until the last minute. OFW nips this HCP behavior in the bud by providing both a calendar and public journal.
With OFW, you can document requests for visitation schedule changes well in advance. These requests then go to the other parent for approval/disapproval and vice versa. This cuts down on the games many HCPs play around requesting “emergency” schedule changes and or lies such as, “I told you; you just don’t remember because you never listen to me!” Simply put, if the HCP doesn’t impute the information into OFW, you can’t be expected to know about it. Therefore, the burden is on them to use the calendar or be held accountable for not doing so.
If your ex insists on blurting out childcare information at pick-ups and drop-offs, send them an email or text stating, “At the custody exchange, you said Jake has a doctor’s appointment on Thursday Apr 27 at 11 am for x, y, z. Please confirm that this information is correct. In the future, please remember to enter this kind of info into OFW.” The goal is to shrink the HCP’s ability to misbehave and you do it via brief, but meticulous documentation.
Receipts for childcare costs can also be imputed into the system. You can even pay for childcare items by linking OFW to your bank. This means the HCP can’t claim they didn’t receive money that you’ve already paid, make up childcare costs and/or inflate the amount of money they spent. If they don’t enter a receipt; you don’t pay.
5. Reduce costs. Using OFW can significantly reduce your custody case costs. Most HCPs are so toxic that communication becomes impossible, which necessitates that you communicate through your attorneys and/or parent coordinators. Once attorneys and/or coordinators act as your co-parenting intermediaries, your already high legal costs can really skyrocket. OFW explains:
For parents engaged in a high conflict parenting relationship, a typical change to the parenting plan schedule because of a work related trip can end up costing a family hundreds of dollars. The phone chain becomes expensive very quickly when mom calls her attorney, who then calls dad’s attorney, who then calls dad. Dad has to make a decision based on the request and send the response back through the attorneys to Mom. The legal fees can be thousands of dollars if alternative proposals have to work their way through the attorneys.
OFW costs approximately $200 USD per year for both parents. This very well may be the wisest money you spend during your divorce and custody case.
6. Level the playing field. HCPs thrive in high-conflict environments that are toxic to most people. Therefore, many of their behaviors are calculated to increase the conflict in any situation because it gives them the advantage. The more conflict, drama and chaos they can stir up, the more calm they typically appear. Equanimity isn’t the HCP’s natural habitat.
They only appear calm and stable when they’re able to stir up a crisis and/or provoke you into reacting. If you allow them to do so, they then sit back and smirk, while you seem like the crazy high-conflict parent in comparison. OFW can help you expose the HCP’s machinations that provoke others into responding negatively and with hostility to them, which means they can no longer portray themselves as innocent little victims.
OFW allows you to manage your ex’s attempts to needlessly inject conflict by documenting their behaviors and holding them accountable. They will lose a great deal of their ability to create conflict, which gives you the advantage. What’s your advantage? You will have basically wrangled them into behaving like a mature and responsible adult, otherwise, their behaviors will be exposed and they’ll finally have to pay the consequences for they’re high-conflict and abusive behaviors. Additionally, you will no longer have to continually play reactive defense. OFW can put you on tactical offense. It’s the difference between being reactive and proactive; and, as they say, the best defense is a good offense—especially for the non-HCP.
If you can maintain boundaries, remain unflappable in response to their button pushing and other manipulations, and expose their high-conflict behavior for what it is, they’ll become destabilized and both you and the children benefit. The only person who benefits from being in a constant state of conflict is the HCP. OFW can help you defuse and contain your HCP ex.
OurFamilyWizard, Parts 1 and 2
In a few days, I’ll post the second and third articles in this series. Part 2 will address the most common reasons (i.e., lame excuses) HCPs employ to avoid participating in OFW and your counter-arguments for using the service. Part 3 will examine the different OFW features and functions and how to maximize them to your advantage.
Counseling with Dr. Tara J. Palmatier, PsyD
Dr. Tara J. Palmatier, PsyD helps individuals work through their relationship and codependency issues via telephone or Skype. She specializes in helping men and women trying to break free of an abusive relationship, cope with the stress of an abusive relationship or heal from an abusive relationship. Coaching individuals through high-conflict divorce and custody cases is also an area of expertise. She combines practical advice, emotional support and goal-oriented outcomes. Please visit the Schedule a Session page for more information.
Want to Say Goodbye to Crazy? Buy it HERE.
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At least two judges in my jurisdiction pretty regularly order parents in high conflict cases to use Our Family Wizard as their exclusive means of non-emergency contact with each other.
This tool has been around for a while and is well known among those of us who deal with HCP’s regularly. I have some additional comments, but I’d like to hear others’ thoughts before I say more. Nice affiliation, Dr T.
great idea! Too bad they can’t expand it for everyday living with a HCP.
No kidding, right?
PS Maybe they could if they marketed it as organizational software
Wow!! What a great invention! It’s too bad it wasn’t created sooner!
Wow, this came at exactly the right time. I will certainly check into it. I especially liked the part about paying for it yourself since it gives them one less thing to complain about. My NPD is very secretive about what she is doing with the children and planing for them, not surprisingly. She tells me that she only tells me on “need-to-know” basis. The problem is that she decides what I need to know and when she is going to tell me. When I do get some details, she tells others that I am only trying to look like a good parent to impress [insert any of the following: my parents, my friends, the social worker, the judge, etc.]. I feel like Bob Newhart living in Bizzaro World.
A good parent needs to know, period. Who is she to decide what you need to know about the children? Presumably you have shared custody, which means you’re both obligated to share information that pertains to the children. More projection. More than likely, she only behaves like a cooperative co-parent to snow the judge and others when it suits her purposes.
If you purchase the program, please consider doing so via my affiliate code.
We are separated right now but have joint custody. Her secrecy is just another way to try to screw me during the divorce. I will sign up (and pay for it) and if she refuses to us it then I have one more thing to bring to court.
Will be sure to use the code.
Sounds like a great program. Could this work when the HCP is sometimes incapacitated or in the hospital and custody is managed through the also HCP mother-in-law?
Why is your ex subcontracting out her custody? If she’s unable to care for them they should be with you (I’m presuming you want/are able to take them when she can’t). I made sure my agreement says that if she’s out of town, in the hospital, etc, for more than a couple days or so (can’t recall exactly) then the kids are with me. The idea that custody is fungible, like money, is absurd to me. Clauses calling for right of first refusal for any significant stretch of time she’s unavailable are pretty common.
It depends on the agreement. My Fiancé’s agreement with his ex states that his daughter is in his care during his time. Whether or not he is around. So if he heads off to work and has to be gone for two days, his daughter is with me. The ex wanted right of first refusal when he was traveling, but lost that in mediation. She has tried to fight it when he was out of the country, but even the police told her that during his scheduled time with his daughter it didn’t matter who picked up or stayed with her, as long as she was in his home. When we both are traveling, he does give her an opportunity to have the time with her, however it has turned into more of a headache than it is worth (because we gave her the whole weekend of mother’s day due to traveling, she now thinks every year she has the whole weekend).
I am really thinking this calendar will do some great wonders to the communication breakdown. 2 nights out of the past 4 have been spent on the phone and texting trying to come up with a 2 week vacation (ex is refusing us to have our normal weekend time due to her family being in town… AHHHH!) It is frustrating because she believes her family has so much more priority over ours.
Yes. It should be possible for the MIL to receive her own login and then discontinue it. Although, JP raises a very good question. Why don’t you get first right of refusal if your ex is unable to care for the children?
Actually this is not my situation but a friend’s. He would like first right of refusal but doesn’t believe he would get it. He hasn’t filed for divorce or custody yet because of the medical issues and how that might be perceived by the court (pity for her). Plus it’s a child care issue for him, he doesn’t have a reliable/capable/ available person (besides the HCPs) to watch child after school/until he gets home from work and can’t afford a child care service. Also I’m sure the HCPs would raise a major coup d’etat over that having the child in day care instead of with them.
I have a question about my own reluctance to co-parent with my ex. We have joint legal and an approx. 70/30 parenting schedule in her favor.
For 4 years after separating we had few overt conflicts however our co-parenting via email was difficult. She would complain frequently to me about trivial things she objected to (eg. my explaining to the kids (6 and 7) what a funeral is), and on the rare occasion when I would express a legit concern to her (3-4 times over 4 years) in a respectful non-inflammatory way, she would erupt at me, making absurd accusations, calling me names, and in one case being incredibly abusive.
Eventually I learned to ignore her petty complaints and she stopped sending them. I ignored her attacks in response to my concerns, and chose instead to keep future ones to myself and deal with the kids best I could on my own.
Then last June she was being irresponsible in including the kids in a new romance with a married man who was part of a couple and family our kids were close to. The kids were confused and uncomfortable and asking difficult question and comments to me, whole simultaneously being secretive around me, and the ex was also covertly rubbing it in my face during family acitivites (birthday parties for the kids, etc.), and so I reluctantly confronted her in email, politely, telling her I had no interest in interfering in her personal life but that she needed to leave the kids out of her affair. I volunteered to take the kids anytime she needed to see him, told her I had no interest in getting inolved or blowing the whistle, etc.
Her response was the most viscious verbal abuse I’ve ever experienced. I was shocked…and burned. Since then I’ve limited my contact with her to the bare miniumum and I’ve told her I’m only willing to discuss schedule and health issues and decisions we need to make jointly as part of our agreement. And that if she wanted to discuss anything more substantive it would have to be with a mediator/counselor etc.
Well it’s been almost a year since then. She verbally abused me badly once more in Dec., this time in person in front of the kids, though they were behind a glass door and couldn’t hear, during a pick up, but things qiuckly died down again.
She’s taken no reponsibility for either event and indeed is attacking me for my relative silence, saying I’m fighting “through the kids” and that detachment is harming the children (though no specifics). My response is, when I share my concerns I get abused, so we don’t really have a co-parenting relationship. I can be reached for sched, health and emergencies, but I’m not interested in discussing her concerns about, say, why one child is being fussy at meal times, because I’m not willing to risk being abused again and since I can’t raise legit concerns then I don’t want to hear hers.
She won’t take responsibility for these abusive episodes, at best tried to pass one of them off as something “we messed up on” which is complete BS.
I’ve become a big proponent of low/no contact as result of all this because not only have I reduced the big abusive episodes, though there weren’t that many before, but I’ve also ended the many little covert digs and insults I was subject to on an almost daily basis. I feel a LOT better. And though the kids aren’t happy mom and dad aren’t chummy anymore, they seem to me to be doing fine.
However, she just recently sent me an email listing several concerns she has about the kids and said she’s decided she’s going to continue sending me email with her concerns regardless of whether I decide to respond in kind.
I’m concerned she’s doing this to leave a ‘paper trail’ to show I’m not collaborating as a possible legal tactic (for full legal custody?) ad I’m angry she’s planning on emailing me about things that are beyond the scope I’ve told her I’m willing to discuss. I reitarated to her that I’m not against co-parenting, far from it, but that the reason I don’t want to dialog with her her is because when I share MY concerns..and I have several, a couple of which are rather serious…I have a strong and reasonable fear of being subject to more brutal verbal abuse.
Dr T’s piece here is pretty hard on parents who don’t actively co-parent, but what about my situation. How obligated am I to continue to ‘co-parent’ with her–and to what extent–when I have email evidence of past abusive tirades and insults from her in response to my expressing legit concerns. When she’s not raging she can sound very reasonable, mature and concerned. But her narc traits mean she can’t stand being challenged herself. What’s my culpability here?
I forgot to mention…when she emails me or texts me about something that doesn’t meet the guidelines I’ve given her, I ignore them. They might not even be nasty…in fact it could be something nice pertaining to the kids, but isn’t about their schedule or health. The first few times she did this I repeated my guidelines, but then just started ignoring them. She still sends them but not frequenlty enough to be considered harassment. Am I tactically on dangerous ground by not responding to these?
Have you discussed any of this with your attorney?
You don’t have to deal with her verbal abuse but you could be right that the paper trail is intentional. I avoid talking to my ex on the phone for the same reasons, plus there is no record of it. She will deny that she did or did not say something or agree to something, even if I follow up with a confirmation email immediately afterwards. Now, if she calls, I ask if it’s an emergency and if not (it never is) I ask her to put it in writing.
Also, she won’t use OFW, so I send everything via ReadNotify.com’s “ensured” delivery (the message stays on their server until she opens it). That way, she can’t say she didn’t get the message.
IMHO, I’d say you should respond to her emails but be BIFF (Brief Informative Friendly and Firm).
I have an extremely HCP ex-wife (diagnosed Bipolar/Borderline/Narcissistic/Histrionic/Paranoid). OFW was first recommended over two years ago and has been ordered five times since then (we have a young son – I have sole legal custody and we share physical custody). She simply won’t use OFW. I suppose I could file for contempt but I’m representing myself up against her attorneys and I’d have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she was willfully disobeying the order.
OFW is a nice concept but I also encountered many technical issues and have not been impressed with their handling of new functionality (many basic features like searching emails are missing) and their software releases appear to be frequent and random (an indication that they are not managing the development well). There are alternatives (e.g. parentingtime.net) and lately I have been using RPost.com and ReadNotify.com (both of which have their pros and cons).
OFW could help document what communications do occur, but for me a bigger issue is that there are usually no communications when there should be. I will be returning to read the follow-up posts because I’d like to see what ideas there are to get a HCP to communicate when she is totally unwilling to do so.
I find that the biggest problem with communication is the total refusal to communicate. My ex will not inform me of virtually anything I need to know about the kids, even things as basic as she has kept them out of school or placed them in care in a camp on days when I am supposed to pick them up. She does send me the bills for the camp, of course, but I generally only get them after the fact. Often she outright lies about the camp locations and times and communicates these lies just hours before I’m to pick up the kids, leaving me scrambling to confirm what is really going on.
Every time I see the kids, it is a constant struggle to even be able to pick them up. Nobody can get my ex to cooperate in a reasonable fashion. Not judges, attorneys, psychologists, or anybody. That’s because nobody holds her accountable for her actions and she knows she can get away with almost anything, maybe even murder, so she has no incentive to be reasonable.
She has gotten us kicked out of a paid custody exchange service that was inexpensive because she refuses to pay a fine for her premeditated malicious actions and violations of their rules. Then she turned around and perjured herself in court trying to get a restraining order on me for an attack she and her friends staged on me at the exchange service. She tried with many judges, none of them would issue it. But what do they do to defend me and to prevent incidents like this from happening again and again? Nothing.
Even with a new paid custody exchange service (which of course I have to pay for entirely) helping for the weekend exchanges, she threatens to refuse to turn over the kids and has actually done it. She justifies it by twisting the words of the judge and the court orders.
As another typical example of refusal to communicate, repeatedly I have picked up the kids only to find out they have some activity to which they have been invited like a birthday party and I was given no advance notice and already made other plans. It is like their mother is setting us up into no-win situations in which they may be disappointed or at least she will jerk me around because of her total unwillingness to give me even a few days advance warning of things I need to know.
I tell the kids they need to call me as soon as they can when they find out about these things. Usually they know a week or more in advance. But they tell me that their mother won’t let them call me, they are afraid to have my phone number in their cell phone, etc. They are too young to use email as of yet, but I’m reasonably confident their abusive mother will terrorize them from using email, too, just as she has done with the phone. Parental alienation is allowed and rewarded and the courts ensure that it will stay this way.
This woman is so toxic that she had me afraid to talk with my own parents for years because of what she would do to me for weeks over even a simple phone call. So I can empathize with the children’s fears of what their mother will do to them.
In my experience, people like her are bent on controlling and dominating everybody around them. They regard emotional connections their “slaves” have with others (like I did with my parents) as a reason to alienate their “slaves” from those people. Disrupting all communications with such people via manipulations and intimidations is a classic means to accomplish this.
I’ve just signed up for this site after being refered to it because I had questions about the Our family wizard site. I’m having troubles finding part 2 of this post any info on how to find it?
Here you are:
https://shrink4men.com/2011/04/13/ourfamily-wizard-part-2-common-excuses-made-by-high-conflict-parents-not-to-use-ofw-and-effective-counter-arguments/
thanks!