Susie Pettit: Emotional Regulation When Your Ex Runs the Chaos

The filings, the evaluator, the judge, your ex: none of it is yours to decide. Susie Pettit says there is still a real list of things you do decide, and the first item on it is how much of your thinking your ex gets to occupy.

Susie Pettit is a mental health coach based on the east coast of Australia, originally from outside Boston. She holds a master's in education and taught high school English before becoming a coach, and she now hosts the Love Your Life Show podcast and runs the Love Your Life School, a membership where members get live coaching and accountability. She also teaches a parenting course on raising confident, resilient kids. She was married nineteen years, in the relationship for twenty-six, to someone who controlled what she read and who she spent time with. Her own family backed her ex through the divorce. She talks openly here about ending up in the hospital during that period, and about deciding not to fight in court when the money on the other side was effectively unlimited.

Susie and Lisa work through expectations first: why the sentence "he should not have done that" keeps you in the fight long after the fight is over, and what changes when you can say instead, of course he did that, that is the person he is. Susie describes a written exercise she gives clients for getting there. They talk about the habit of over-explaining and over-defending, which she frames as a behavior that kept you safe inside the relationship and costs you outside it, and about why chasing the question of why your ex behaves the way they do spends energy you need elsewhere.

Then they turn to children. Susie describes stepping out of the God role, where you carry personal responsibility for outcomes you cannot reach, and what she puts in its place: keeping the kids safe, holding boundaries, and teaching them how to feel a feeling and do something reasonable with it. She explains why she coached her sons through difficult conversations with their father and then deliberately never followed up, the difference between empathy and codependency, and why a kid who comes back from the other house and pushes against you is usually showing you that your house is the safe one.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• What is actually inside your control during a high-conflict divorce, starting with your own thinking
• Why arguing with what already happened keeps you stuck, and what to do instead
• A written exercise for describing your ex plainly, so the same behavior stops blindsiding you
• Why over-explaining and over-defending are survival habits, not character flaws
• Stepping out of the God role: what you are responsible for, and what you are not
• The three jobs a parent has, and the two jobs a child has
• Why your child pushing back at your house can be a sign they feel safe there
• The difference between empathy for your child's situation and codependency with it

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 A last-minute guest from Australia, and what stress does to the body
5:00 What is in your control, and how Susie got here
14:00 Expectations, and why lowering them is not giving up
19:00 Describing your ex plainly instead of resisting who they are
20:30 Why "why did they do that?" is a dead end
23:00 Kids in the middle: this is the parent they have
27:00 Empathy vs. codependency, and grieving on your own time
30:30 A parent's three jobs, and a child's two
34:00 Regulating yourself first, and why the pushback lands on you
37:30 Where to find Susie

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Susie Pettit's Love Your Life Show starter roadmap: https://smbwell.com/roadmap
🔗 Susie Pettit's parenting class: https://smbwell.com/parenting

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.