I've taught this routine for years. I'm rewriting it today.

You know the feeling. Your phone buzzes, or the number on your email icon ticks up, and your stomach drops before you’ve even read a word. It could be about the upcoming dentist appointment. It could be three paragraphs about what a terrible coparent you are. You won’t know until you open it. And that not-knowing is doing exactly what it’s designed to do.

Years ago, I published a routine for dealing with this. Contain the messages, calm your body, cut the message down, respond to what’s left, document the rest. It works. My clients still use it, and I still stand behind every step.

But if I wrote it today, there’d be one more step in the middle. My thinking has moved on since then, not away from the routine, but deeper into it. So consider this the updated version.

Create an email subfolder that your ex’s messages land in automatically. If you communicate by text, turn off notifications for that thread. If you can get communication ordered onto a co-parenting app, even better.

Then pick a day and time, once a week, when you deal with them. Not when they arrive. When you decide. (If you’re in a phase where genuinely time-sensitive child logistics come through this channel, adjust the rhythm, but you’ll be surprised how little is actually urgent once you look at it in daylight.)

Before you open that folder, do something that generates the good chemicals. A workout, a brisk walk, dancing around your kitchen, somatic calming exercises, whatever. Then sit down with a drink you like (whether it’s a glass of wine, a frappe, or kombucha, or whatever) and open the folder.

The nice drink part isn’t a reward. It’s something to put your brain into a happier mode. I do this to make horrible translation jobs more palatable or when I have to open emails from the tax department. You can’t do the next part while your nervous system is braced for impact, which is the state your ex's messages are engineered to put you in.

Paste each message into a blank document, away from the app, the thread, or wherever that place is that has your ex’s name at the top of the screen. This step was always in the routine, and I used to think of it as purely practical. I now think it’s the most quietly powerful move in the whole sequence: you’re turning a message aimed at you into plain text in front of you. That's the position I read from when a client sends me her ex’s correspondence, and it will help you get some distance too, on your own messages, once they’re sitting in a neutral document.

This is the new step. Before you cut anything, read the message once and answer three questions.

Who is this written for? Some paragraphs are for you. Others are for the judge, the lawyer, or the evaluator who might read them later. They might be reasonable-sounding, oddly formal, suddenly concerned about things he’s never once asked about at handover. And some are for an audience of one: him, enjoying his own performance.

What is it trying to make happen? Every functional part of a message wants something from you. Usually it’s a reaction in writing. You’re expected to deliver an over-explanation, a defence, a flash of anger that screenshots well in a court exhibit. Or maybe you’re expected to agree to a small change that won't look small in six months.

Ask yourself, why did I get this message now? Check the calendar. What's coming up? Is there an exchange, a court date, mediation, a birthday? Messages like these are often not random. Just the timing itself could be content.

I spent decades as a translator before I did this work, and the first rule of translation applies here: you can’t translate a sentence properly until you know what it’s doing. The same is true of your ex’s messages. Once you can see what a paragraph is for, it loses most of its power to make you do it.

Delete everything whose function is to provoke, wound, or bait you. What survives the delete key is logistics. In other words, sometimes nothing survives at all.

If the whole message dies, don’t respond. This rule is really just a decode in disguise: deleting everything is just another way to conclude that the message had no legitimate purpose. When I originally wrote this, I was teaching you to understand that you don’t need to engage. Now, I’m also teaching you to show your working.

Be brief, factual, and civil. If you have to refute a false accusation, one line does it: Your claim that [x] is noted and disputed. Or use one of the responses here. You don’t need to provide a defence, or write an essay. If drafting even that feels beyond you on a given day, then turn to AI. A well-instructed chatbot can hold the neutral tone when you can’t.

Paste the original, uncut message into your documentation system. And add one line: your decode. “Accusation of medical neglect, sent two days before the case conference.” “Sudden warm tone, copied to his lawyer.”

That single line is what turns an archive of nasty messages into evidence of a pattern. Individual messages, especially ones that seem polite and reasonable, get explained away. Patterns of audience, function, and timing are much harder to argue with.

Then close the laptop

Now, do something good for yourself. This is not an option or a consolation prize. It’s the last step of the routine. You did strategic work today. Reward yourself for it.

One more thing. If the decode step interests you, it’s the heart of something bigger I'm building. It’s a self-serve course called Written for the record, which teaches this whole way of reading and responding from the ground up. More and more women are learning to work with their ex’s messages this way instead of being worked over by them.

And please also reply and tell me what your next decode turns up. I read every message.

One of the best parts of this work is watching a client outgrow her need for me. It happened again last week.

She’s a mom who's been self-representing against the attorney from hell. She finally had her day in court with a no-nonsense judge, after a year of appearances that seemed to go nowhere. A while back, a threat from her ex’s attorney would have sent her into a panicky, fear-ridden spiral, and I’d have talked her down and helped her sift the facts from the fears.

Last week she sent me a voice message that started with “I don't know if he got in my head”—and then, over the course of that same message, she worked out what he’d actually said, what it was designed to make her do, and concluded that his words were empty threats. She decoded him in real time. I didn’t have to step in at all.

That’s where the real strength of divorce coaching lies. Not just in helping women navigate a case, but in building skills that keep working long after the case is over. She can read a threatening letter now and tell the difference between what it’s trying to do and what it can actually do. That’s a skill for the rest of her life, not just her custody case.

If you want to get a taste of this, even just to get some clarity on an issue that you’re struggling to deal with, you’re welcome to book a 30-minute consultation, free of charge, with me.

Want to know more about what I do?

For containing: If you’re still receiving your ex’s messages straight into your main inbox, most email providers let you set up an automatic filing rule in under five minutes. Search “[create rule + your email provider]” and set every message from his address to skip your inbox and land in its own folder. This is the single highest-return five minutes in this whole routine.

For regulating: Try one of these exercises for calming your nervous system.

For responding: The Yellow Rock / BIFF AI prompt in my book is long, but all you have to do is insert the message and any context details, and the AI will do the rest. You can download all the prompts from my book here (scroll down to “Claim your free prompts” and enter your email address. It won’t resubscribe you to this newsletter).

For logging: Tina Swithin's documentation workshop at One Mom's Battle takes the headache out of building a record that holds up. One of my clients used her system to pull together evidence for her lawyer in under an hour when it was needed urgently for court. It’s not free, but it will save you a lot in lawyers’ fees.

You’ll notice there’s no resource for the decode step. That’s because there isn’t one out there. It’s the piece I've spent the last few months building myself. If that’s the step that made you sit up, stay tuned for my course, and don’t forget to respond to this email with “Waitlist” to get access to it at the low, early-bird price.