Tori Spelling and Dean McDermott Reunite for Their Daughter's Graduation: A Therapist on What Divorced Parents Are Actually Doing When They Sit Next to Each Other Again
Seven months after finalizing a divorce that was reported through the lens of financial strain, Tori Spelling stood next to her ex-husband Dean McDermott for their daughter Stella's high school graduation, which happened to fall on her 18th birthday. In a recent Daily Mail piece, you see photographs of two parents who spent years publicly falling apart, now standing shoulder to shoulder for a child who is legally, on that same day, becoming an adult.
The internet did what the internet does. Some cheered. Some sneered. Some pulled up old headlines about money problems and used them as evidence that this reunion was performative, or overdue, or too little, or too late.
I want to say something plainly at the start. I do not know Tori. I do not know Dean. I will not diagnose either of them from a photograph. The Goldwater rule applies here as much as anywhere. What I will do is use this moment as a doorway, because underneath the tabloid frame is a phenomenon I have watched hundreds of times in unphotographed living rooms. Two people who could not stay married finding their way, imperfectly, to stand next to each other for a child. That is not a story about celebrities. That is a story about what actually happens inside two adult nervous systems when the marriage ends but the parenting does not.
The Bridge: From a Graduation Photo to Your Kitchen
Almost no one reading this had their divorce covered by Page Six. Almost everyone reading this either is co-parenting after a rupture, is watching someone they love do it, or grew up as the kid who watched their own parents try. The choreography in that graduation photo is happening this week in ordinary kitchens, at ordinary drop-offs, in ordinary school auditoriums where two parents sit three rows apart and try to breathe.
That is the layer I work at. That is what this article is about.
Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.
Money Was Never Just Money
The tabloid framing keeps returning to the financial pressure that ran alongside this marriage's ending. I want to name something about that, because it matters for the reader whose own marriage has been quietly buckling under the same weight.
When couples talk to me about money, they are almost never talking about money. They are talking about time. They are talking about safety. They are talking about whether the ground under their family is going to hold. Money is the architecture of time. Time is the architecture of safety. Safety is the architecture of attachment. When the money becomes unstable, the time becomes unstable, and the nervous system starts reading every ordinary disagreement as a threat to survival.
I call this a fiat relationship. Two people trying to build love inside a system that no longer supports long-term planning. The bond is real. The love is real. But every conversation about the credit card statement lands like a small earthquake in the chest, and after enough earthquakes, the body starts bracing before the door even opens.
If that is what was underneath this couple's public unraveling, it will be familiar to any reader whose marriage buckled under the same load. You did not fail at love. You tried to love inside a system that keeps debasing the ground beneath you.
The Waltz That Survives the Divorce
Here is the part that most divorced parents do not get told, and the part that made Stella's graduation a much harder afternoon than a photograph can show.
A judge's gavel does not sever a biological attachment bond. The negative cycle you had inside the marriage almost always survives the paperwork. I have written about this before in co-parenting counseling and what to expect, and the pattern is remarkably consistent. Two people who spent years running the same dance around each other's protector parts do not stop dancing just because they now live in different houses.
The pursuer, still terrified of losing the bond, still scans for signals. Is he going to show up on time. Is she going to say something cutting to our kid. Are they going to sit near me. The withdrawer, still flooded by any hint of criticism, still reads every text as evidence they are failing. Their prefrontal cortex still goes offline. They still go quiet or defensive.
The rational brain runs behind the survival brain. Every parent who has stood at a graduation next to their ex knows the specific feeling of the amygdala firing before the ceremony even starts, of a body preparing for threat while a program plays on stage.
So when you see two divorced parents standing next to each other for a milestone, do not assume you are watching a triumph of individual sovereignty. That is the pop-psychology reading. The clinical reading is that you are watching two nervous systems trying to hold themselves together long enough to let a child have a day. Sometimes they manage it beautifully. Sometimes one of them holds it together in public and cries in the parking lot afterward. Both are real. Both are proof of work.
The Third Chair at the Graduation
Here is a distinction that matters for any reader in this spot.
Every co-parenting arrangement I have ever worked with has three seats at the table. You. Your ex. And the relational entity that exists between you now, which is no longer a marriage but is still absolutely a thing. The parenting relationship. The family your child still lives inside, even if it now has two addresses.
I call that third seat the Sovereign Us, though after divorce it takes a different shape. It is no longer romantic. It is functional, protective, and specifically dedicated to the small people whose ground you are still building together. When a divorced couple sits next to each other for a graduation, the question is not whether they are getting along. The question is whether they can, even for two hours, put the third chair between them and let it hold what neither of them can hold alone.
Attorneys will tell you the standard here is best interests of the child. That phrasing is legal shorthand for what is actually happening in the body. The best interests of the child is the Third Chair. It is the seat that holds the whole system when the two adults would rather turn away.
What Your Kids Are Actually Watching
There is a version of this story where the moral is stay together for the kids. That is not the story I am telling. Staying together while running an unrepaired cycle is worse for a child than a clean rupture followed by real repair.
What kids need is not intact parents. What kids need is witnessed repair. They need to see two people who love them get hurt, get it wrong, and then find their way back to something that works. That is the emotional education that carries forward. A child who watches her parents fight, divorce, and then still stand next to each other on her 18th birthday has learned something that a child of a smooth marriage may never learn. She has learned that connection can survive rupture. That love does not require perfection. That the door back is real.
Your kids are not standing on the ground of your perfection. They are standing on the ground of your willingness to come back when you stumble.
I say this to almost every divorced parent I work with. What if your child could see you go from fighting to actually softening around each other. From cold logistics to a moment of shared sadness about what did not work. What an inheritance that is. Not the intact family. The repaired one.
Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.
The Couple I Saw Across Two States
I worked with a couple once who came to me already divorced. They were living in separate states by the time they called. We started on video, one of them on each coast, both defended, both convinced the other person was the reason their family had broken.
I did not try to get either of them to take accountability. I did not try to shame either of them. I gave them a framework for seeing that they were both hurting, that both of them had done things to get to this point, and that the system between them was the thing to look at, not each other. Within a few months, they were flying to see each other for the sake of their kids. We did some sessions in person. They never remarried. They never even really liked each other again. But they built something they could stand inside, and their children got to grow up watching two adults handle a hard thing without weaponizing it.
If you want to name your own pattern before you start any of this work, you can take the free Figs Quiz.
That couple's story is the frame I would put around any headline about divorced parents showing up together for a milestone. The photograph is not the accomplishment. The years of imperfect return, one drop-off at a time, are.
The Two Questions Never Stop Running
Even after divorce. Even after the papers are signed. Even standing in a school parking lot next to a person you no longer share a bed with. The nervous system is still running two questions in the background of every interaction.
Are you there for me. Am I enough for you.
Only now the questions are not really about each other anymore. They are about the child between you. Are you there for our kid. Am I enough as their parent. When those questions get answered with a yes, even a partial one, even a grudging one, the shoulders drop half an inch and a graduation ceremony becomes bearable. When they get answered with a no, the whole afternoon is a slow-motion collapse that only the two of you can feel.
This is why the money layer matters. When financial pressure is still hot between two exes, the answers to those questions get harder to hear. The old wound and the new bill fuse into one signal, and suddenly a text about the tuition bill lands the same way an old accusation used to. The rebound after this kind of ending is delicate, and I have written more about the biology of that in what a rebound after divorce actually reveals.
What This Moment Asks of You
If you clicked on this article because you are Tori-and-Dean-adjacent, meaning you are trying to figure out how to stand next to your own ex at a milestone that is coming, here is what I would ask you to hold.
The event is not the work. The event is the exam. The work is what you do in the weeks before it, and what you do in the weeks after. The work is noticing when your body is bracing three days out. The work is calling a friend to metabolize the grief so it does not leak onto your kid at the ceremony. The work is refusing to litigate the marriage inside a text thread about parking logistics. The work is protecting the third chair.
Grief for what did not work belongs somewhere. It just does not belong in the car on the way to the graduation. Your child's joy on their day belongs to them, not to you and not to your ex. Guarding that joy fiercely, even when it costs you, is a form of love that will show up later in your child's own capacity for adult intimacy. That is the inheritance you are building even now.
And if you are the divorced parent who is dreading the next milestone, who cannot imagine standing next to that person again, I want to say this. You do not have to like them. You do not have to forgive them completely. You just have to be able, for a defined period of time, to put the third chair between you and let it hold what you cannot hold directly. That is not weakness. That is proof of work.
Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.
Your marriage ended. Your parenting did not. The question that matters is not whether you can be photographed smiling next to your ex. The question is whether your kid, ten years from now, will be able to say her parents did the harder thing. That they came back to the graduation. That they let the third chair hold them. That love, in some form the paperwork could not describe, kept showing up.
Show up. That is the whole assignment.
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