For high-conflict co-parents, separation can lock families into an adversarial loop where every decision, from school pickup to summer schedules, becomes another courtroom skirmish.
Dr. Celeste Simmons, a forensic psychologist, has built her work on the premise that co-parenting in these situations comes down to establishing a stable system. “We don’t need to make families perfect,” she says. “We need to make them functional.”
Today, Simmons brings years of experience in family systems to her practice, a multi-service ecosystem dedicated to helping individuals, families, and organizations create healthier relationships and more resilient systems.
Through her work, she applies psychological insight to reduce conflict, stabilize relationships, and build structures that allow people to function effectively under pressure. Simmons traces the stakes back to a question families rarely have time to name. “Some say home is where the heart is. I say home is where the soul is, where the heart is vulnerable to be broken. The soul remains untouched.” After separation, the heart may be bruised, but children still need a place, and a process, that feels like home.
Courtroom lessons with co-parent consulting
Simmons began her career doing therapy with families who often arrived under court mandate and who were already in crisis. Over time, she noticed that the very conditions that brought people to court made standard family therapy difficult to execute.
“When I first started working with families, I wasn’t doing consulting per se, I was doing therapy,” she says. “People were coming to me for court-mandated therapy, people who did not get along, people who could not come to solutions.” In those cases, the rupture was ongoing and reinforced through repeated legal actions. “There’s been so much rupture and even involvement in the court system before they see someone like me that they’re not going to come in the room and do therapy and come to some sort of solution,” Simmons says. The co-parenting field, she adds, has often built models around people who can “reasonably get along.” But the families she saw were in court precisely because they could not. Co-parent consulting grew out of that reality. Instead of asking parents to rebuild trust, it focuses on immediate decisions, communication boundaries, and repeatable agreements that reduce volatility. “Sometimes people just need, okay, what do I do right now?” Simmons says. “I don’t like this person anymore. We have this history. We can’t come to an agreement.”
Simmons now formalizes this approach as Strategic Clarity Consultations, individual sessions for parents navigating high-stakes decisions, joint consultations where attorneys and clients align on strategy together, and group programs that teach frameworks for managing conflict unilaterally. She trains law firms and organizations on recognizing and responding to high-conflict dynamics. “You can’t always change the other person,” she says, “but you can change the patterns you’re feeding.”
Function over idealism
A central thread in Simmons’ work is the gap between what systems hope families will do and what high-conflict parents can realistically sustain. Therapy requires vulnerability, and vulnerability requires at least some trust. Many high-conflict separated couples have neither. The result is a mismatch, with courts referring families to therapeutic models that assume emotional readiness, while parents arrive defensive and exhausted.
“It’s like, oh, we’re going to sing Kumbaya and everything’s going to be great,” she says. “But in fact, we just need to make them functional.” Functionality changes the metric of progress. In consulting, success may look like fewer escalations, clearer protocols for decision-making, and a consistent structure children can predict. It also means helping parents accept that co-parenting is not a referendum on the past relationship. It is a responsibility in the present.
Self-regulation as the first intervention
Simmons’ strategies begin with the parent, not the parenting plan. “Ultimately always starting with yourself,” she says. Her reasoning is that children borrow nervous systems from the adults around them.
“If you are a parent and you’re regulated, you can help your kids regulate,” she says. “If you are a parent and you’re dysregulated, you can’t help your kids regulate because you have to work on that yourself.” In high-conflict cases, that self-regulation is often the missing ingredient. Parents are reacting not only to each other, but to the symbolism each interaction carries: betrayal, rejection, fear of loss, or old family patterns.
When parents step back and address their own dysregulation, Simmons sees change ripple outward. She describes clients who decide to pause certain battles after recognizing the toll. “They can see the impact it’s having on them. They can see the impact it’s having on their kids. They can see the impact it’s having on their extended families,” she says, particularly when new partnerships and blended families are involved.
Drowning out the noise to identify shared priorities
There is a common assumption in high-conflict separations that parents with constant disputes must have fundamentally different goals for their children. In her experience, the opposite is often true. “Pretty close to 100% of the time when I have parents come in and they’re not getting along and their families have broken, they want the best for their kids,” she says. “They have the same goal. How they get to it is different.”
The work, then, is to “dilute the noise.” That means separating the parenting task from the relationship story and anchoring conversations in what is non-negotiable for the child. A simple framework she uses is to have parents identify three non-negotiables. “Just identify three things that are non-negotiable and people are usually able to do that by drowning out the noise,” she says.
In a consulting context, that exercise becomes a decision filter. When conflict spikes, the question shifts from “Who is right?” to “Does this move us closer to the three priorities we agreed matter most?”
Why the shift matters for family stability
Co-parent consulting recognizes that in some families, repairing the adult relationship is not the immediate lever that protects children. Building structure is. “Therapy is the idea that you’re working on more deep-seated things that impact how you show up in the world,” she says. “And consultation is more like this is what I’m dealing with. How do we solve it?”
For some families, it is both: an individual might do therapy to understand patterns and triggers, then use consultation to translate that insight into workable co-parenting protocols. The promise of this model is not that separation becomes easy, but that children are spared the instability of endless conflict. If “home” is the place where the soul can remain intact, co-parent consulting offers a path to rebuild it, one functional decision at a time.
Simmons hosts Co-Parenting Champions with Dr. Celeste, a podcast exploring what works when traditional co-parenting models fall short. Her work specialties also include military families navigating deployment and custody, parents reunifying after incarceration, and organizations addressing how family conflict impacts workplace performance.
She’s the creator of proprietary frameworks including the Proximity Model, the 7 Seeds of Resentment, and the 3CM framework of Conflict Mastery; tools designed to function even when cooperation between parents isn’t likely.
Follow Dr. Celeste Simmons on LinkedIn or learn more about Strategic Clarity Consultation on her website.
