Develop Your Vision: Where Your Attention Goes, Your Life Grows

If you've spent any meaningful time coparenting with a high-conflict ex, you know how much real estate they take up in your head. The next message that might come. The next dispute that might arise. The next court date. The next manipulation. The next thing you'll have to defend yourself against.

You may have noticed that no matter what you do — how carefully you communicate, how thoroughly you document, how rigidly you maintain your own boundaries — the mental occupation doesn't decrease. The high-conflict ex is rent-free in your head, and the rent is paid in your sanity, your sleep, your work, and the moments you should be present with your kids.

The first strategy of parallel parenting addresses this head-on. It's called Develop Your Vision. And it's based on a single observation that, once you grasp it, changes everything.

Where attention goes, life grows

Carl puts it simply: anything you give your attention to grows. Anything you don't, diminishes.

This isn't woo. It's a practical observation about how human attention works. The things you focus on become more present in your experience. The things you don't focus on recede. Over time, what you give your attention to is what your life is largely about.

Now apply that to a high-conflict ex.

Every minute you spend reading their messages, drafting responses, replaying past offenses, anticipating their next move, processing what they did, complaining to your friends about them, ruminating in the shower, lying awake thinking about them — every one of those minutes is fuel. You are feeding their presence in your life. You are growing the very thing you wish would shrink.

This is not a moral judgment. It's a description of how attention works. A psychologically disordered ex is not worth wasting your attention on. When you give attention to a high-conflict person, you waste your energy in the present and you feed them, which causes more demands for attention in the future.

The narcissist's dependency

Here's a useful frame, especially for people coparenting with narcissistic exes: narcissists prey on the un-invested.

A narcissist with a target who has nothing better to do than respond to them, defend against them, fight with them, and process them is in heaven. They've found someone to feed. The supply is endless. The attention they need is reliably forthcoming.

A narcissist with a target who is genuinely engaged in creating great life experiences for themselves — pursuing meaningful work, maintaining rich relationships, building a beautiful home, deeply present with their children — finds that target slipping away. Their attempts to engage fail, because the target's attention is set on higher things that are too awesome to divert from.

This is the entire mechanism by which "ignoring an ex" becomes "the ex eventually loses interest." It's not about willpower. It's about having a life that is, frankly, more interesting than they are.

Most people know what they don't want

The trap most people fall into when trying to develop their post-divorce vision is starting from what they want to escape. They make long lists of what they don't want to experience: chaos, fights, financial stress, anxiety, the kids being unhappy, bad relationships.

The list of what we don't want is endless and easy to generate. We're trained on it.

The trick is devoting time to getting clear about what experiences we actually do want to create.

This is a different skill. It's harder. It requires actually imagining a positive future rather than just naming the negative present.

And here's why it matters: when we define what we want in terms of what we don't want, our attention is still on the things we don't want. When we frame our goals as "not repeating past events," our attention is still on the past events. We're still feeding them.

The shift is from "I don't want chaos at dinner anymore" to "I want dinner to be a beautiful, candlelit time when the kids and I talk about their day, when the food is delicious and the table is set with care, when the conversation is warm."

Both of these can be true. But they direct your attention to fundamentally different places. One keeps you focused on what was wrong. The other gives you something to actually move toward.

What does your dinner table look like?

Here's an exercise. Pick any ordinary dimension of your life and answer the question: what would I love this to look like?

Not "what does it look like now and what's wrong with it." Not "what would I tolerate." Not "what would be acceptable given my limited resources." What would I love it to look like, in a forward-focused, positively-defined way?

Take dinner with the kids:

What time do you want it to start? What kind of food do you want to serve? Who's setting the table? What's on the table — what kind of plates, what kind of napkins? Is music playing? What kind? What's the tone of the conversation? What do you want the kids to remember about dinners at your house when they're adults?

The more detailed you can become, the more your attention has somewhere specific to land. Vague goals don't pull attention. Specific images do.

Now consider the morning. What does the morning look like? Bedtime — what does that look like? Weekends? Birthdays? The first day of school? An ordinary Tuesday afternoon? What does your home feel like when you walk in? What does it smell like? What does it sound like?

This isn't fantasy or escapism. This is the actual content of a life. And it's content you have authority over — at least within your own home, on your own time.

The vision becomes the screen

Once you have a clear, detailed, positive vision for the life you're building, something useful happens with the high-conflict ex's attempts to occupy your attention.

Their messages become smaller. Their dramas become more obviously irrelevant to what you're actually doing. The bait becomes less alluring because you have something better to give your attention to.

This isn't about pretending the messages don't matter or that the legal stuff doesn't need handling. Logistics still need handling. The strategy isn't denial.

The strategy is that your default attention — the thing your mind goes to when it's not actively required somewhere else — has somewhere worth going. It goes to the life you're building. Not to the ex.

And the ex notices. People who feed on attention can sense, at some level, when the supply has dried up.

Your kids are watching

One more thing worth saying about this strategy. The single most important thing about developing your vision and living it isn't about you. It's about what your kids are absorbing every day.

Your kids have one parent who is high-conflict, controlling, and emotionally unstable. They are absorbing that. They are learning, every time they're at the other parent's house, what kind of life that produces — the chaos, the drama, the focus on grievance and conflict.

What are they learning at your house?

If your house is also organized around the other parent — if your conversations are about what they did, your moods are reactions to their messages, your time is consumed with managing their fallout — your kids are getting the same lesson, just with a different protagonist. Life, they're learning, is fundamentally about the high-conflict parent.

If your house is organized around something else — your values, your interests, the experiences you want to create with them, the warmth and beauty and integrity you're building — they learn that life is about the things you fill it with. They learn that one of the most important freedoms an adult has is the freedom to decide what to give attention to.

That's not just philosophical. That's a direct, lived demonstration of the alternative to the world the other parent shows them. And it may be the single most important thing you give them.

Where to start

If this strategy resonates and you want to start practicing it, a few suggestions:

Spend an hour writing. Not about what's wrong. About what you want — your house, your meals, your weekends, your work, your relationships, your hobbies, your sense of self. As detailed as you can manage. Not what would be possible if everything were perfect — what you want, even if you have to start small.

Pick one dimension and start building it now. Don't wait to overhaul your whole life. Pick one thing — Sunday dinners, the morning routine, your bedroom, your books, your walks — and start moving it toward what you want. Start small. The momentum from one win helps with the next.

Notice when your attention drifts to the ex, and gently redirect. Not with willpower or self-criticism. Just notice — "I'm doing it again" — and put your attention somewhere it serves you. The garden, the project, the kids, the book, anything. Practice this dozens of times a day. It gets easier.

Build a life that demands your attention. Not as a strategy to escape the ex. As a thing worth doing in itself. Friends. Projects. Movement. Learning. Beauty. Service. The fuller your life is with things you love, the less room there is for things you don't.

The promise

This is the deepest gift parallel parenting offers, and it has nothing to do with the ex. It's the freedom to take back the attention you've been spending on them, and start spending it on the life you actually want.

The ex doesn't get smaller because you defeat them. They get smaller because you grow.

That's available starting today.

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