A divorce doesn't happen in one stage. Neither does recovering from one.
Most people arrive here looking for one book and find they are standing in two places at once. These four were written for four different moments. Find the one you are actually in, not the one you think you should be past.
Which of these sounds like today?
Pick whichever is truest right now. Not the most flattering one, the truest one.
Nothing selected yet. Pick one above and it will show you where to start.
Four stages, and the book written for each one.
They are not volumes one to four. Each stands alone. The order below is the one recovery usually follows, but almost nobody walks it in a straight line.
It is still raw, and everyone has stopped asking.
The first months, when the paperwork is done and the feeling is not. Where most people are when they go looking for a book and cannot find one that starts early enough.
The marriage ended. The habits followed you out.
The stage where you notice the divorce solved the relationship but not the thing underneath it. Usually arrives once the grief has quietened enough to see clearly.
You know what you want. Saying it is the problem.
The stage where the work turns outward. You can see the pattern now, and the difficulty is holding a line without the guilt collapsing it by Thursday.
You are the only one negotiating in good faith.
The stage that never fully ends while there are children involved. Plenty of readers start here rather than finish here, because this is the one that will not wait.
Grief does not politely finish before the pattern shows up, and an ex who will not cooperate does not wait for you to feel ready. If two of those descriptions fit, that is normal, and it usually means starting with whichever one is loudest this week.
Reading is one half. Doing something with it is the other.
The four books explain what is happening to you. The journal is where you put it down on paper afterwards, on the days when it is still happening.
The grief
The pattern
The line
The ex
Co-Parenting After Divorcing A Narcissist: A Companion Workbook
A guided journal built as a practical companion to the co-parenting book. Somewhere to write freely on the evening after the handover went badly, rather than carrying it into the next week.
Then take the whole road.
The set exists for the reader who recognises themselves in two or three of the stages above, which is most people. Every stage on the shelf means the next book is already there on the night you need it, instead of being another decision to make.
I could not find one book that covered all of it.
Every book I picked up handled one piece and assumed the rest had been dealt with. The grief books skipped the ex entirely. The co-parenting books started at logistics, as though the grief had been filed away with the paperwork.
So there are four, and they are deliberately separate. You should not have to read three hundred pages about somebody else's stage to reach your own.
The questions people ask here.
No. Each one is written to stand alone, with its own opening and its own arc. The numbering describes the stages, not a required sequence. Most readers buy one, then come back for whichever stage arrives next.
That is the normal case rather than the exception. Start with whichever description made you wince most, and treat the second one as the next book rather than a competing choice.
Three of the four apply regardless. Co-Parenting After Divorcing a Narcissist is specifically about raising children with an ex who will not cooperate, so it is the one to skip. The other three deal with grief, pattern, and boundaries, which are not conditional on having kids.
Co-Parenting After Divorcing a Narcissist, by a wide margin. It has 200 verified reviews against a handful across the rest, largely because an uncooperative ex creates urgency that grief does not.
No, and we would rather say so. It is priced at exactly the sum of the four books. It exists for convenience and for having the next stage already on the shelf, not as a discount.
It was written as a companion to Co-Parenting After Divorcing a Narcissist, so that is the pairing it was designed for. The prompts on patterns, triggers and boundaries carry over usefully, but Setting Boundaries already contains eight workbooks of its own.