Episode Details

You know that feeling — the text comes in from your ex, your stomach drops, and before you've even finished reading it your fingers are flying. You're typing something you'll probably regret, something that's going to make everything worse, and you know it even as you're doing it. If that sounds familiar, this episode of Divorce Happens was made for you. Host Olivia Howell sits down with Lyerly Spongberg — a certified ADR divorce coach, pre-mediation coach, co-parenting specialist, trauma-informed and coercive control-informed coach, and divorce survivor — to unpack one of the most quietly powerful communication tools available to anyone navigating a difficult divorce or high-conflict co-parenting relationship: strategic empathy. It's not a concept you'll find in most divorce advice columns, and it's not about being nice for the sake of being nice. It's about being strategic — and that distinction changes everything.

Strategic empathy, sometimes called cognitive empathy, is the conscious act of putting yourself in your co-parent's or ex's shoes — not because you agree with them, not because they deserve it, but because doing so creates a pause between your reaction and your response, opens space for actual conversation, and quietly, powerfully, changes the dynamic of the conflict. Lyerly breaks it down with real-world examples that will sound immediately recognizable to anyone mid-divorce: the last-minute custody schedule change, the heated mediation table, the text that arrives out of nowhere and ruins your entire afternoon. She offers specific phrases — "I can understand how you might feel that way," "it sounds like this really matters to you" — that aren't about capitulation or people-pleasing. They're about buying yourself the one thing you desperately need in a triggered moment: a beat. A breath. A chance to respond instead of react. Olivia and Lyerly also tackle the hardest objection head-on: what do you do when you genuinely don't want to be empathetic, when this person has hurt you deeply and you feel like extending any grace at all is a betrayal of yourself? Lyerly's answer is both clear-eyed and compassionate: this isn't about them. It's about how YOU walk away feeling.

The mindset shift at the heart of this episode is deceptively simple and genuinely transformative: you cannot control what your ex says or does, but you can control your behavior — and changing your behavior is the one lever you actually have. Strategic empathy is that lever. It's a muscle, Lyerly explains, one that gets stronger every time you use it, one that slowly reduces your reactivity to the triggers that have been hijacking your nervous system for years. Whether you're at the mediation table, in the middle of a custody dispute, navigating a high-conflict co-parenting relationship, or just trying to get through a difficult text exchange without blowing up your day — this episode will give you a new tool, a new framework, and a new question to ask yourself every time things get heated: how do I want to feel when this conversation is over?

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