I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read some version of that sentence. It arrives from a parenting coordinator, or a mediator, or occasionally from a lawyer who ought to know better, or even a judge, who certainly should know better, and it almost always arrives at the end of a paragraph that has just finished describing something done by just one side in the “conflict.”

This sentence surfaced last week, from a parenting coordinator, in a story that was everywhere in the US political news, involving a small stuffed animal that went missing, apparently held hostage by the child’s father. There’s a lot to say about that case, and you can read more about it here and here. The details, which have shocked media commentators, will be all too familiar to you.

Here’s the whole message from the coordinator.

What’s said usually runs in the same order, and this is just as interesting as the content.

The coordinator opens with a defense of her own neutrality, before she’s said anything substantive at all. I’ve seen this so many times before, including from a Canadian Supreme Court judge. It’s usually some variation of I’m not taking sides here. Protecting her position as a neutral person is her utmost priority, and everything else comes after that.

Then she states that the dad won’t let the child’s grandfather pick the bunny up from the dad’s mailbox. She’s not vague about this. In fact, she even uses an adverb, adamantly.

Next, she declines to do anything about it.

Finally, she gives the mom a solution, which is to change her own behavior.

That fourth move is where the damage is, and it’s the one that’s hardest to object to, because it looks like problem-solving. Keep the item at your house.

One version of this, experienced by one of my clients, was when she was told by the mediator in the parenting coordination program she and her ex were participating in to put a dollar in a jar every time he berated or insulted her during the session.

I’m sure the coordinator thinks she’s being pragmatic. What she’s actually doing, though, is making a decision about who pays. Certainly not the adult who misbehaved. The cost of that refusal is then charged to the other adult, who’s already complying. In my client’s case, she was the one who had to take the dollar coins out of her own wallet when her ex verbally abused her. In the blue bunny case, it’s even worse because it’s actually passed down to the child.

There’s another problem with keep it at your house, and it’s the kind of thing anyone who has spent an afternoon with a toddler can see immediately. A comfort object’s whole function is to travel. It goes in the bag, to daycare, and to the other house, because the whole point is to help a child feel safe wherever they are. The coordinator is essentially telling the mom to make the bunny stop doing its only job. The remedy is more than just unfair. It’s absolutely unworkable.

The obvious alternative is never on the table. Nobody suggests that the person who’s clearly in the wrong behave themselves. That would require the professional to name the other parent as the source of the problem, which is the one thing her role is structured to avoid. Canadian-based DV agency Battered Women’s Support Services refers to this as the downplay effect.

Nothing in this coordinator’s description involves two people who are equally responsible for what’s happening. A dad is refusing to send his daughter’s stuffed bunny with her when she goes back to her mom’s. But phrases like these situations and high-conflict divorce all take two, and the moment an expert reaches for one of them, the analysis is over.

And that’s exactly what she does in her last phrase: unfortunately, in a high-conflict divorce, these things tend to blow up.

High-conflict divorce is doing the heaviest lifting. It’s a container: you put an event inside it and the event acquires two participants, regardless of how many it started with. A refusal by one adult goes in; a mutual dispute comes out. And once something is in the container, you can no longer see who put it there, because containers don’t record that.

These things tend to blow up is a phrase that has no agent. Things blow up the way weather happens. Nobody chooses it, nobody is responsible for it, and the only sensible response is to bring an umbrella. The dad withholding the bunny is actually the one “blowing up.” But he’s like a thunderstorm nobody can control. In the coordinator’s eyes, he has no agency. Only the mom has.

I could write a whole newsletter about the coordinator’s use of the word “unfortunately”. But I’ll say this about it: It lets her be sympathetic about what’s happening without taking any accountability. “Unfortunately” is used in situations where we have no control. So it extends the metaphor of the dad as a force of nature that has just happened and about which nobody (nobody being the coordinator) can do anything. Even worse, the regret she expresses in this word implies that the desirable outcome was the situation not blowing up. Not the return of the bunny.

The objects at the centre of these standoffs are almost never valuable. A comfort toy. A winter coat. A homework folder, a booster seat, a retainer, a library book that’s due.

That isn’t a coincidence. Getting worked up about someone withholding a minor object comes across as petty. There’s no financial exposure, no obvious legal risk for the person who’s withholding a minor item. The person who escalates about it has to spend her own credibility to do it. It’s coercive control at its most pernicious.

But repeated incidents of someone withholding small items become an incontrovertible pattern. Parenting coordinators or evaluators, who are trained to be “unbiased,” can’t do anything about it and refuse to lay the blame at the door of one party, but one day your case might go before a judge who uses this kind of pattern to assess credibility or the ability of the parents to act in a child’s interests.

It’s no coincidence that, even though Miller has been dogged for months by allegations of abusing more than one woman, including throwing scalding water on his ex-wife and holding a gun to her head, the actual last straw that led to his Republican colleagues calling him to step down from his position as a congressman was the fact that he had a pattern of refusing to return his daughter’s blue bunny.

If you want help showing proof of this kind of pattern from what’s already in your inbox, that’s one of the things I offer in my coaching. You can book a 30-minute consultation free of charge, and we can review what you’ve got and discuss how to move forward.

Written for the record, my self-serve course on documenting patterns rather than incidents, covers this sequence in more depth. The waitlist is open if you’d rather work through it on your own time. If you want to be notified when it’s ready and register at the low early-bird price, just respond to this email with “Waitlist”.

Want to know more about what I do?

This report from the Canadian government will be useful for my Canadian readers in particular, but it contains insights that will be useful for any victims of post-separation abuse. The last section, Differentiating high conflict from family violence is a must-read.

The UK’s statutory guidance framework on controlling or coercive behaviour can work as a template to help you, even if you live outside the UK, organize your evidence, explain why apparently mundane incidents must be assessed cumulatively, give your lawyer, advocate, evaluator, or parenting professional a structured chronology, and identify the practical impact on yourself and your children.