Choosing To Laugh At Their Behaviors

Welcome back to Unapologetic Parenting, the podcast where we say the quiet parts out loud about high-conflict co-parenting, blended families, and the family court system—and then talk about what actually works.

In this episode, host Carl Knickerbocker dives into one of the most maddening (and, when you step back, genuinely hilarious) realities of dealing with high-conflict, narcissistic co-parents: if there’s anything they can mess with, they will. Big things. Small things. Completely unnecessary things. All in the name of control, attention, and feeding a very fragile narrative.

Carl walks through a real-world example involving a routine pediatrician visit that somehow turns into an Olympic-level performance of martyrdom, victimhood, and chaos—complete with dramatic exits from work, preemptive copay payments, uploaded receipts, and instant outrage over reimbursement that hasn’t even had time to process yet.

From there, the episode tackles the question so many parents ask: How do I make this stop?
Spoiler alert—you usually can’t. Courts don’t issue orders telling people to stop being ridiculous, and logic rarely works on people who aren’t operating in reality.

Instead, Carl offers a different solution: change how you relate to the behavior. Stop letting it steal your peace. Stop feeding the narrative. Stop burning emotional energy trying to fix what has never shown any capacity to change. And, when appropriate, learn to laugh at the sheer absurdity of it all.

This episode is about:

• Why pushback often makes high-conflict behavior worse
• How attention fuels the chaos
• Letting go of the need to “solve” disordered behavior
• Using humor as a form of emotional detachment and self-protection
• Preserving your time, energy, and sanity for the people who actually matter

If you’re tired of being angry, frustrated, and exhausted over nonsense that doesn’t truly matter—and want a healthier, lighter way to handle it—this episode is for you.

Sometimes the most powerful response isn’t a legal strategy or a perfectly worded message.
 Sometimes it’s paying the $25, shaking your head, and saying: Well… that was objectively funny.

Transcript

0:00

Welcome to Unapologetic parenting, the podcast dedicated to candidly and unapologetically discussing high conflict, co parenting, blended families and the family court system, we take on the topics most people don't want to talk about and offer solutions and support to help you be a better parent, better spouse in your blended family and happier human being. Now without further ado, let's get right to it. Welcome to Unapologetic parenting. I'm your host, Carl Knickerbocker, and on this episode, we are talking about the hilarious and often just downright ridiculous lengths that some of these high conflict, narcissistic co parents will go to just to create these illogical, strange situations that seem to do nothing other than just feed their attention and create all sorts of problems where there don't need to be any. And so one of the things I frequent, frequently say about these high conflict folks is, if there's something they can potentially Jack with, they're going to jack with it. And it doesn't matter if it's something of great importance or little importance, if it's just something they can mess with and gain attention for themselves and create problems for others. They they're just going to do it. And many times, when you look at it from the outside, it is just such bizarre, disordered behavior, all you can do is scratch your head and wonder what's going on. Or, as I advise a lot of clients, try to reach the point of being able to look at it and laugh at it. Just find the humor in it. Find the hilarity in just the bizarre, insane behavior that so many of these folks exhibit. And so the situation that I'm thinking of right now, still chuckling about it from the other day, but situation where, you know, it starts off normal enough, you know, child is with dad and has some symptoms of not feeling well and needs to go and see the pediatrician. And so dad does the sensible thing, schedules an appointment for the child to go and go see the pediatrician to have a checkup. Well, once that appointment is set, the system pings mom that there's an appointment. And so mom goes instantly, apparently, into the I am the only parent that can handle anything and everything relating to MediCal and I am the one who has to take charge and care of everything mode. And so she leaves work early, goes over to the doctor's office ahead of time, well ahead of time of the appointment, pays the co pay, and so she knows that the copay is $50 and she pays the $50 at the counter, and then leaves and goes back to work the appointment. And what we what we find is so many times these folks, they're so attached to the narrative of I am the only parent and I am the only one who can handle this. And so I saw that he the bad, bad man. Set an appointment, so I had to leave work, and had to drive across town and had to pay this co pay, and now I've uploaded the receipts, and poor me now I am having to wait for him to reimburse me half of the money, and look how controlling he is being because he hasn't paid me yet. It's like five minutes later. And so these poor folks, they they call me and they're like, What do we do? How do we make this? Stop this. This behavior is just constant. It's every little thing that she can possibly Jack with she does. And so we talked about different options and outlined, well, we really can't go to court and get a court order that says, hey, stop being silly. And, you know, stop acting these bizarre ways. No judge is going to enforce that or modify anything, or do any sort of order that tells mom to behave. And we talked about, well, I mean, you could send a note, and you can just point out how weird it is and ask her to stop, but most likely, that is only going to embolden her to do more, because writing her and telling her, Hey, knock that off. There's no need for you to do it. She's just going to completely disagree because the objection doesn't fit with her narrative. In her mind, she has to do all these things, and she's always the victim, and she's the one that's helping out by driving across town and doing all this weird stuff. And so getting any sort of pushback is just going to be seen by her as further evidence that she's right. It's only going to fuel her narrative. It's only going to make her look. For more opportunities to do the same thing, plus it's going to give her the satisfaction of knowing. Ha, well, guess what. Now, dad and his new wife, what are they doing? They're sitting around thinking about me. They're thinking about these weird things that I did. They're thinking about how to handle me, and they love that idea. They love knowing that they're causing other people in other relationships to have to sit there and waste their time and their energy and their attention thinking about them. They love it. They get off on that. And so the recommendation for me once I stopped laughing about the whole situation was and y'all need to, you know, find a way to laugh about this too, because at the end of the day, you can have an experience that is driven by Anger, that's driven by just resentment, frustration, and it's not going to do anything except ruin your day. It's only going to add anger and resentment and frustration and all these other negative emotions to your day, and it's not actually going to change the other person's behavior. What you can do, though, is change how you relate to these situations. And so in these obnoxious, rather innocuous situations, what you can do is just look at it and laugh. Just say, Oh my gosh. So here she is again. She gets pinged by the app or the portal, whatever that says that there's an appointment. So she gets all in a tizzy and has to pack up and leave work and run across town and pay the co pay, and does all of this stuff. Doesn't even stay for the appointment, and she's just creating all of this extra weird work and travel and back and forth and everything, just for herself. And just laugh at it. It's like, of course she does. There she goes again. There she is doing the same thing yet again. And just have a good laugh about it. And say, All right, so $50 for the copay. My half is 25 bucks, you know, fine, here's $25 for a really great laugh. Thanks so much. And of course, this is what you think. You don't write that in the memo line. Here's $25 for making us laugh our asses off at you. It's just, you know, here's 25 bucks and whatever. And just go about your day at the end of the day, that's a lot of times. All you can do when you're dealing with these high conflict and just bizarre people is they. All that you can do is look at the situation and say this. It's hilarious. This is objectively funny. It's subjectively sucks. Of course, I have to deal with these people over and over again, but you can change the subjective approach and change your experience of the whole thing by saying, all right, nothing's on fire. Nobody's really being threatened. This is obnoxious behavior, so I'm just going to choose to find the hilarity in it, I'm going to find the irony, I'm going to find just the stupidity, and I'm going to just laugh at it. You know, the alternatives again, is to say, you know, we need to try to solve this. We need to try to prevent it. We need to try to, you know, find some sort of logical explanation and some sort of logical solution to make this person's behavior change, and guess what? That is not going to work. That doesn't change most of the time, these folks are what? They're in their 30s, they're in their 40s, they haven't changed. They don't change. They've never shown a capacity to change. And so no logical thing that you do is going to objectively change their behavior. So again, what you can do is just don't waste your time, don't waste your emotions, don't waste your energy, don't waste your attention, don't waste the time that you have with your loved one or whoever is sharing that this hilarious journey with you. Instead laugh at it. Pay what you got to pay, if it's some you know, pittance amount and just move on. You.