10 Effective Ways To Deal With An Impossible Ex (When You've Tried Absolutely Everything)
Dealing with divorce is never easy.
Dean Drobot, Kristina Chernavina | Canva Divorce and the related fallout are probably among the most stressful and grueling experiences one can go through. When we get married, we start with a tremendous amount of hope and expectation.
Intellectually, we know it will take work, but it is truly impossible to know what kind of work it will take until we are already down the path of marriage. The reason it is difficult to get an idea of what the work of marriage will look like is because it is individual to each marriage and the specific issues that exist between the partners.
Here are 10 effective ways to deal with an impossible ex (when you've tried absolutely everything)
1. Only communicate the necessary information to your ex regarding the kids
Whatever the issues are that end the marriage, being divorced can often be harder than it ever was being married, especially if you share children. When divorced couples share children, there is no ending to the relationship, which makes moving on difficult because the children bind us together for our lives.
We not only have to deal with our exes, but we often have to deal solely with all the aspects of them that we tried to divorce. This can be the most frustrating aspect to cope with. Here, we have divorced this person to get away from their negative traits, and we seem to deal more with them post-divorce than we did married.
This is where the children often become the victims because control (especially for the spouse who was left) becomes the big issue in these circumstances. When this happens, it often leads to parent alienation syndrome, as described in the Journal of Child Custody. If children start distancing from the other parent, we can be sure parent alienation is occurring.
There is nothing more debilitating emotionally than when one spouse manipulates the children against the other. The loss of one’s children to manipulation is maddening and very difficult to recover from because the children are not old enough or mature enough to see what is happening.
When our ex is manipulating our children, it can be the hardest thing to let go of. There is no greater pain than watching our children being poisoned. We often feel powerless and heartbroken. The only cure for this is time.
In time, children always come to see the bigger picture. When these circumstances occur, which sadly is more often than not, it can feel impossible to keep any balance in our lives or the lives of the children because there is so much manipulation being inflicted upon them that they cannot see or understand.
When this type of situation is happening, there is only one recourse. We have to stay focused on the love we can give our children when we have our time with them. We have to stay focused on our individual lives and make them so strong that we have fulfillment individually, which will make us a happier, more emotionally available parent.
When we have control in our world, it gives the children the space to feel their emotions and go through their own experiences of manipulation. An article by Mark Teich in Psychology Today helps show how scaling back and focusing on our own lives will not only start to bring stability back into our world, but it will also begin to slowly bring stability into the world of the children when they are on our custodial time.
Suppose an amicable relationship cannot be had regardless of our efforts with our ex-spouse, then learn how to treat that person as a business. This relationship should be minimized to talking only about the children and their needs.
This is not an easy thing to master, especially when you are aware the children are being manipulated, and decisions regarding the children are being made without our full agreement or consent. We have to keep in mind that there is no way to control our exes or what they covertly do to the children emotionally. The only thing that can heal that wound will be time. See, the truth is like the cream in the coffee, it will eventually rise to the surface.
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2. Protect your finances
Get wages garnished to eliminate money games.
3. Document everything in writing
Communicate only through writing so you have a line of documentation, if necessary, to review with your legal team, as suggested by a study published by the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. If your ex responds to your communication with the attack, re-read what you sent and see if you communicated all the necessary information, and if so, do not respond to the attack. Be cordial, but say very little when in person with your ex.
4. Educate yourself
Become aware of covert tactics and manipulations by your ex. Educate yourself so you can see them so you can avoid getting sucked in.
5. Respect the custodial schedule
Minimize asking favors from the ex, like switching weekends. A review in the Journal of Law and Family Studies suggests this will be held against you in the future. Also, respect your ex's time when they do not have children.
6. Keep your space
If your children have activities during your ex’s custodial times, do not attend them. Attend activities on your own time and attend all games.
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7. Don't forget your children's love
Remember, the children love you both and deserve for you to both love them rather than barter and fight over them. If one partner stops the fighting, the other will soon have nothing left to fight with, and things will calm down.
8. Refrain from telling your ex how to parent
Let the children experience your ex in the truth of who they are. An article in the Family Court Review exposes how manipulation can be hard for the children to see, so just be patient time will heal this.
9. Be happy
Focus on yourself and make your life happy. You have paid your dues.
10. Don't get extorted
Stay out of manipulating offers of friendship by your ex when friendship means you do whatever your ex wants so they won’t manipulate your children. This is extortion, not friendship.
These steps will help to clean up the power struggle that often occurs when people divorce. There is a lot of grief, adjusting, and loss when our nuclear family falls apart, and many of us get caught up in being more committed to our exes in fear or hate than we were ever committed to them in love, and this makes the divorce even harder than the marriage.
We can only be committed to fearing or hating someone until we decide it is not worth the energy and time. If we have divorced, we need to remember why we made this decision. The decision was made in the thoughts of getting our lives back to happy, and we did it for the health of our children. Stay with that mindset. We made this decision to make our lives more at peace and more open to love. No matter who our ex is or how difficult they are to deal with, it is up to us how much of this we will tolerate or not.
After a divorce, it is our time to focus on loving ourselves. Giving ourselves the love we were in the drought of in the marriage. We have to find the places, out of the marriage, where we can see freedom. We have to be creative and enter into new adventures.
When we have our kids, we need to make the world about them with love and discipline, and when they are with our ex, we need to let them be with our ex. When we have our alone time, we need to take advantage of this time to focus on ourselves by setting some goals and taking steps to achieve the happiness we chose to find in deciding to divorce.
It is a new time in our lives and a time for us to celebrate and find love again. It is not a time for us to waste all kinds of energy in trying to either control our ex or spend too much time defending ourselves to our ex.
If this is happening, then we are not free yet. If the manipulation by our ex has given us the feeling that we have lost our children, we need to find people who we can love and trust to share our grief with. Find a good therapist and legal team. Be assured that with time, children always see the truth.
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Focus on the best interest of your children and focus on the best interest of you. If your children ask you questions, answer them honestly. It is in no one’s best interest to stay committed to negativity. Let go. Let go of the need to control, let go of the need to defend, and let go of the need to fight. Start to make a list of all the things you would like to do and achieve as a single person and make steps each day to reclaim your identity and your life.
When you stop allowing your ex to engage you in drama, you finally sever the last bit of commitment between the two of you. It is a real lesson in humility to do this, but it is the one thing that will set you free.
At the end of the day, we have to let each soul walk its path. The only path you have to focus on is your path. Whether you like your ex as a person or not, you will always have to respect that to your children, that is, their other parents.
It's not always an easy pill to swallow, but those are the facts. When your children see that you accept this, it takes the pressure off of them to not have to take sides or to feel as if they are somehow flawed and defective if they still love their other parent. Guilt is one of the most covertly manipulative tools used on children.
We all have lessons to learn from the relationships we have. We have to trust our children were meant to have the exact parents they do, or else things would be different. There will be many learning opportunities provided to the children through your ex that they could not get from any other person, good or bad.
They are meant to have these lessons, so try and back off and trust that. If they come to you in pain, be there to understand and comfort them, and this will build deep bonds between you and your children based on understanding by experience.
For now, focus on renewal and rebirth. Separate all your emotions from your ex and let them go to be whoever it is they are. If they choose to stay connected to you through their hate (whether overtly or covertly), then so be it. That is their waste of life and energy, and you do not have to engage.
Focus on you. Add love to your life. Eat right, laugh, go out with friends, love your new romantic interest if you have one, exercise, sleep well, and love your children. That is what life is all about. When we take good care of ourselves and our emotions, we teach and model our children to the same.
Dr. Sherrie Campbell is an author and a licensed Psychologist with more than nineteen years of clinical training and experience. She provides practical tools to help people overcome obstacles to self-love and truly achieve an empowered life. She is a featured expert on a variety of national websites and has a successful practice in Southern California.