Some divorces are disagreements. Yours might feel like a war. If every text turns into an argument, every handoff becomes a standoff, and decisions that should take five minutes take five weeks, you’re not imagining it. High conflict is its own condition. It doesn’t respond to the advice that works for everyone else, and it doesn’t burn itself out on its own.
I’m Cherie Morris. I’m a divorce and conflict coach, I hold a J.D., I’m a CDC Certified Divorce Coach, and I teach other coaches as an instructor in the CDC High Conflict Divorce Coaching certification program. This is the work I train people to do.
Why I work with the whole family system
Most divorce coaches work with one person at a time. Whenever possible, I work with the couple and the whole family system, because high conflict doesn’t live inside one person. It lives in the pattern between two people. You can send one exhausted parent off to learn better scripts, but if the pattern survives, the fights come back wearing new clothes. When both of you are in the work, even reluctantly at first, the pattern itself is on the table. That’s what actually lowers the temperature, for you and especially for your children.
And you don’t have to call yourselves “high conflict” to belong here. I coach couples in medium conflict who simply want to keep things from getting worse. Often one partner starts alone and the other joins later. Both doors are open.
What we actually do
Coaching with me is practical, not theoretical. We build what I call the conflict pivot: the move from reacting to responding. You’ll learn to feel the surge that comes before you fire off the message you’ll regret, and to wait it out. Respond, don’t react. Because that surge is physical, we work with the body as well as the mind, using simple nervous-system tools that let you stay steady in exchanges that used to undo you. Then we rebuild how the two of you communicate and make decisions, so the everyday business of your family stops requiring a battle.
About your children
Here is the truth at the center of this work: it’s not the divorce that harms children. It’s the conflict around it. Kids can thrive across two homes. What they can’t do is thrive in a crossfire. Every degree of temperature we take out of the conflict is protection you’re giving them, and it’s the part of this you’ll never regret.
What coaching is not
I’m not your therapist and I’m not your lawyer, and I’ll never pretend to be. When something belongs with a therapist, a lawyer, or a financial professional, I’ll say so plainly and help you get there. What I offer is the thing none of them are positioned to do: working directly on the conflict itself, with both of you.
“Working with Cherie was… quite literally a lifeline during the most stressful period of my life. She taught me how to navigate many high-conflict interactions with a level of grace and understanding I didn’t know I had.”
— Haylee J.
Start with twenty minutes
A Discovery Zoom is free, it’s twenty minutes, and it’s enough to tell whether this is the right help for your situation. If I’m the wrong person, I’ll tell you that too.