Essays on leaving a high-conflict relationship
How do you leave someone who needs you to be the villain?
Some separations are a negotiation. Others turn into a campaign, with you cast as the enemy. These essays are about staying safe, staying believable and staying yourself for as long as it lasts.
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Patterns · Communication
Should You Tell Them What Is Wrong With Them?
You have found the word that explains everything. The case for never saying it aloud, and what to say in its place.
Read the essay · 3 minStanding Firm
Fight Back, Give In, or Something Else?
An email written at one in the morning, and the cousin who stopped it. On the third way to respond to an attack.
Read the essay · 4 minCommunication
How Do You Answer a Message Written to Hurt You?
Four hundred words of insult with one real question buried inside. A four-letter method for the reply.
Read the essay · 3 minPatterns · Preparation
Why Does Everyone Believe Them?
He cried, and your aunt put her arm around him. How emotion persuades, and what slowly works against it.
Read the essay · 4 minPreparation
What Should You Write Down?
You remember the fear exactly and cannot remember the date. Why the dull habit of a notebook decides so much.
Read the essay · 3 minSafety · Preparation
Is It Safe to Say You Are Leaving?
The most dangerous moment is often the leaving. Four questions to ask, and what to arrange before you speak.
Read the essay · 4 minChildren
What Do You Say When Your Child Takes Sides?
A sentence that is not hers, in the car on a Saturday morning. Five things not to do, and why you must not disappear.
Read the essay · 3 minStanding Firm
Should You Give Them Everything, Just to End It?
You are exhausted and they want it all. What large concessions buy, and the one thing never to sign.
Read the essay · 4 minAftermath · Children
When Is It Actually Over?
The decree ends the marriage and leaves the pattern in place. On being neither too close nor too cold.
Read the essay · 3 minAbout
You cannot make another person reasonable. You can become very hard to knock over.
Arm’s Length is a collection of essays for people separating from a partner who blames, rages or rewrites what happened. Each one ends with questions to sit with and one small thing to try.
The ideas come from Splitting: Protecting Yourself While Divorcing Someone with Borderline or Narcissistic Personality Disorder (second edition, 2021) by the lawyer and therapist Bill Eddy and the writer Randi Kreger. Nothing here diagnoses anyone. The authors themselves insist on describing patterns of behaviour and not labels.
The book was written for the United States, and family law differs widely from place to place. These essays are not legal advice. Please speak to a lawyer where you live.
The letters and stories that open each essay are composites. Names and details are invented. If you are afraid of your partner, your safety comes first: contact the police or a domestic violence service near you.