Issue Sheet 6: Coping with your ex-wife & parent empowerment — Canadian Council for Co-Parenting
Note on language: This issue sheet refers to your ex- as female, so is primarily targeted to separated men. CCC aims to develop and test a similar, but modified sheet targeted to separated women. Both men and women are invited to read, reverse the genders as appropriate, and provide feedback. Not all points may apply to you or your ex-: you must take responsibility for your own relationship, select modify, or discard these tactics according to the characteristics or extremity of your case.
Steps to Coping with a highly conflicted separation relationship:
- Accept that the relationship is over: she is no longer yours to rescue or control.
- Focus on your kids: work on the relationship with your children – but cope with your ex- for their sake.
- Understand that her fears and insecurities are what drives her behaviour and that you must control your actions if you hope to earn respect and gain influence.
- Accept that few men succeed by “proving” an ex- is crazy, unstable, a bad mother, alcoholic, etc., but many succeed in shared parenting by being stable, unprovokable and respectful (and by giving her enough rope to hang herself).
- Always show up, answer accusations, but don’t respond with wild accusations against her…
- Stick with it and be patient: many, but not all highly conflicted separations improve with time.
- Understand your role in the dysfunctional relationship. Nothing is more common than repeating the same script in a new relationship. You may have learning and changing to do to get ready for a healthy new relationship. It is hard, uncomfortable but necessary to look at your part of the dance, to abandon victimhood for growing to be the responsible parent your kids deserve.
ACCEPTANCE: Men typically retain strong love feelings for an ex- which makes it difficult to make new, healthy relationships. Work on acceptance, respect, distance, to replace romantic idealizations, hatred, or anger.
CHILD-FOCUS: Men typically focus more on parenting and children after separation, thinking, rightly, they have found what is truly important in their lives (i.e., the kids, not money or career or sex)
UNDERSTANDING: Her past behaviour is the key predictor of her future behaviour You may be in a better position than anyone to understand what motivates your ex-. Consider her relations with her family, brothers and sisters, a previous ex-, bosses, etc. Does she carry grudges?
Confidence: act like a responsible, influential parent, even if you don’t feel like one. Your kids want to believe you have the situation under control, even if you don’t feel that. Act confident that you and your ex- can work this out; your kids will feel less blame for the failure of the marriage.
You can, with great effort and difficulty, change yourself. You can’t, generally, make fundamental change in other adults, but you can influence their behaviour.
Out of Control: Feeling your life, finances, court case, etc is out of control? That’s normal, and is probably realistic.