When you’re a protective parent with an abusive ex, sometimes mainstream parenting advice can be really triggering.

Like when clinical psychologist and NYT bestselling author Dr. Becky Kennedy says in this Instagram reel, “It’s not my job to remove my kid’s distress.”

As a parent whose children are subject to their other parent’s coercive control, manipulated, and weaponized against you, you’ll probably feel your blood pressure spiking fast as you watch this.

As Dr. Becky tells you “Our ability to tolerate our kids’ distress leads to their ability to tolerate their distress,” you want to yell at your screen, “WTF! You’re saying I have to let my ex abuse my kids and just accept their distress and my distress and do nothing about it?!!!!”

I get it. Most parenting advice, just like any relationship advice, doesn’t address abusive situations.

It feels like every time one of these experts makes a statement like this, they should have to hold up a card that says “This doesn’t apply with abusers.” Because statements like this often end up either enabling abusers or triggering victims and putting them off the message completely.

So, let’s throw some nuance in here. And I’ll also explain why I think Dr. Becky’s advice is incredibly valuable for protective parents.

First of all, the situations that Dr. Becky describes don’t necessarily involve abuse. She talks about a kid getting a bad grade or a kid feeling lonely on the playground. Secondly, if you watch the whole context of her interview here, you’ll see that she’s talking about parenting kids who have BIG feelings.

I was one of those kids. I would have loved it if my parents had sat on Dr. Becky’s feelings bench with me. But my father was incapable of even acknowledging his own feelings, let alone anyone else’s. My mother did a way better job but she was hampered by the fact that she was working full-time and just surviving her marriage to an emotionally and financially abusive man.

My inner child took me off track there. But she just wanted to let you know that, when one of your kids’ parents is abusive, it’s even more important that the other parent works overtime to validate your children’s feelings.

Dr. Becky’s point is about optimizing for long-term resilience. When you have an abusive ex, that’s even more important, and the job gets extra complicated.

As a protective parent, your instincts are to fight for your child. Documenting, setting boundaries with the other parent, and dealing with courts, lawyers, evaluators, and sometimes even child protection workers are vital actions that many of you need to take. But they’re only part of the picture.

The other part is, as Dr. Becky describes, helping your children become more resilient, showing up, not just as their protector but also as the parent who sits firmly on the feelings bench with them, at every step of the way. Both of these are vital.

Do the feelings bench but not the fighting, and you’re just enabling abuse and exposing your child to severe trauma, undercutting any resilience you try to engender in them.

Do the fighting but ignore the feelings bench, and you might win battles in court, but you risk your child aligning with the other parent when they get older. You risk them falling for the other parent’s manipulation and seeing you as the weaker, more reactive parent.

Dr. Christine Cocchiola points out that, in the context of coercive control, children align with the parent who feels more powerful. That’s often the one who’s actively grooming them and holds the keys to safety in the child’s nervous system.

If your fighting comes from dysregulation rather than grounded strength, strategy, and choosing your battles and you’re laser focused on court battles rather than validating your child’s feelings, their nervous system may drive them to align with their abusive parent, in spite of your efforts to protect them.

Your job as a protective parent is to show your child that you are a powerful, strong person. But if you try to do this on your ex’s terms, you risk ceding the valuable ground of your child’s trust and loyalty. Being powerful doesn’t mean what your ex thinks it means. Real power doesn’t come from winning court battles. It means being regulated and emotionally attuned to your child, even while you fight strategically where it truly matters.

If you’re constantly triggered and fighting court battles but you miss out on the important validation step, you risk coming across as unstable or unsafe to your child, especially if the other parent is constantly putting you down or seems calmer or more “fun.” That makes them more susceptible to your ex’s manipulation tactics and more likely to protect the abuser’s feelings than their own.

And even in the context of a coercively controlling ex, Dr. Becky makes an excellent point. You can’t fix everything and sometimes you don’t need to. It’s ok to just sit on the feelings bench with your child.

That’s hard for us to accept as protective parents. Everything the other parent does to our children feels like a five-alarm fire. But sometimes it’s really just a few sputtering sparks and our child really does just need their feelings validated.

So, we need to be honest with ourselves about when we’re genuinely protecting them from abuse versus when we’re just trying to fix things because we can’t handle our own discomfort with our child’s discomfort.

When we can tolerate that discomfort and still stay present, whether or not we decide to protect them from their other parent’s actions, we give our child a place to anchor that isn’t built on fear of the more “powerful” parent, but on genuine safety with us.

Want to know more about what I do?

If you want to go deeper into both sides of this—protective parenting in coercive control and “feelings bench” parenting—here are a couple of helpful resources, first from Christine Cocchiola…

and then from Dr. Becky Kennedy (click on the image for the link. This is the link to Amazon USA, so switch to your own country, if necessary).