Co-Parenting with a Toxic Ex Won't Break You (Here's the Science of Why)

You know you shouldn't react. You know exactly what your ex is doing when they push, bait, violate the court order, or put the kids in the middle. You've read the articles. You've heard about grey rock. You're smart — you've built a career, raised children, solved genuinely complex problems.

And you still react. Every time.

This is not a character flaw. This is your nervous system doing exactly what years of coercive control trained it to do — and no amount of willpower changes a nervous system. You have to work with it.

Dr. Jordin Wiggins is a naturopathic doctor, author of The Pink Canary, and fellow survivor who has spent years studying exactly this: why the people least likely to be fooled are the ones most likely to be targeted, what coercive control does to the body at a physiological level, and how to start reclaiming your regulation — and your identity — one small pleasure at a time.

Dr. Wiggins' clinical work began at the intersection of women's health and sexual dysfunction — and she quickly realized that a significant portion of the women she was seeing with libido issues were also living with coercive control and abuse. That professional observation, combined with her own experience as a survivor who didn't recognize her abusive relationship until the damage was deep, shaped an entirely new area of practice. She developed a healing model rooted in pleasure — not as a luxury, but as a physiologically grounded return to the self that coercive control erases. Through her book The Pink Canary, her Pleasure Collective community (founded in 2018), and her Pleasure Principles Podcast, she has supported thousands of survivors in reclaiming their sense of self from the inside out. She works with high-functioning, high-achieving survivors who carry the double burden of 'I should have known better' — and she has a particular gift for helping them understand why their very excellence made them a target.

00:00 — Introduction: The impossible co-parenting situation — and why smart people keep getting baited
01:45 — How Dr. Wiggins discovered the coercive control connection through clinical work in women's health
04:20 — Super traits: the qualities that make you exceptional — and that make you a target
07:10 — The professional's shame: 'I counsel people on abuse and I didn't see it in my own home'
09:30 — The boiled frog analogy: how coercive control escalates in ways that are impossible to detect in real time
11:45 — Why the violent incident model of abuse completely misses coercive control — and leaves survivors unprotected
14:00 — How small moments of deference establish power dynamics long before abuse is recognizable
17:20 — When the erosion is complete: Dr. Wiggins' personal turning point — 'I didn't know what food I liked'
20:10 — What chronic hypervigilance does to the body — sleep, weight, immunity, mood, thought clarity
23:30 — The MRI research on pleasure centers: abuse literally turns off your brain's capacity for desire
27:45 — Pleasure research: how discovering what you want — even in tiny ways — starts rebuilding identity
31:00 — Emotional baiting decoded: what it does to your nervous system and why your response is predictable
35:20 — A real case study: a male client being deliberately baited through court order violations in front of the children
39:00 — The wise owl, watchdog, possum model: how to identify where your brain is in a triggered moment
42:30 — Overexplaining — the most expensive mistake in co-parenting with a toxic ex, and how to stop
46:00 — Learning to feel your feelings: why victims of coercive control lose access to their own emotional experience
50:15 — The feelings wheel and why naming the precise emotion is the first step to regaining power
53:40 — Holding rage at an unjust system while still functioning — and not getting stuck in it
57:00 — The lotion challenge: five minutes,