104: What To Do When Your Ex (Or Their New Partner) Annoys You

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  [Unedited transcript, please excuse errors.]
  

  You are listening to Welcome to the Other Side, the podcast for parents navigating the turbulent waters of divorce and getting their footing in a new land. I'm your host Meg Gluckman, certified coach and divorced mom of two kiddos, and I'm ready to share strategies for how you can move on from your divorce, how to co-parent without drama, and how to thrive in your post-divorce life. You are not alone on this journey. There's so much we can share together. Let's jump in.

  Hello friends, and welcome back to the podcast. Sometimes when we're going through divorce, or after divorce when co-parenting feels hard, we can feel like it's visible, a big monster that's kind of ungraspable, right? It's just this big hard thing. And one of the things that I do with every single one of my clients is break it down and we take one small piece at a time and we look at it and we look at where our power is, where our agency is, where there are decisions that we can make. And we kind of conquer that one little piece. And then we put that aside, and then we go back and we pick another piece.

  We aren't looking for some silver bullet that's going to magically make all of co-parenting, or the whole divorce process, or everything kind of post-divorce feels smooth and easy, and just one fell swoop. That would be lovely. If I had a magic wand to make that happen for you all, but that's not how life works. Instead, we have to look at one piece of the puzzle at a time and work through it.

  I thought I'd bring you an example today of doing just that. This wasn't from a client of mine. I was doing a consult with another practitioner who also works with couples, with parents that are going through divorce. And she was describing one of her clients' challenges to me. And we actually didn't even have time to talk about this one particular challenge. And so I thought it would be fun to address it on the podcast. We ended up talking about some other stuff that was going on for them so that she could help us out, more ideas of different approaches to bring back to her client. But the one thing that we didn't get to talk about that I wanted to share with you today was a mom who said that every time her kiddo facetimed with their dad, the stepmom would also be on the facetimed. FaceTime.

  And she didn't, the mom, no, the mom didn't like, I'm kind of using air quotes here, that the stepmom came into her house every time they FaceTimed. And so because she didn't like it and because she had this thought that the stepmom was coming into her house every time, the arranged times to FaceTime were always kind of a source of stress and frustration and anger for this mom.

  And I got to thinking about, well, what would I do for this mom? How would I help her deal with this thing that's a regularly occurring situation and it's probably not gonna stop anytime too soon. And she's the one who's suffering during it, right? She's the one who's feeling all these big emotions. It's not impacting her ex and the new stepmom. It's just all in her body. Imagine how she's feeling if she's not feeling well. If it feels like this person is intruding in her house and she can't prevent it, she is really upset. She is stressed, she is annoyed, she's frustrated. And those feelings are gonna linger so that probably even after the FaceTime conversation is done, whether it's five minutes or whether it's an hour. She's gonna have to process those emotions every single time in order to come to kind of a clean place to be able to then interact with her child again.

  So my question to her, my first question would be, do you want to keep feeling this way? That's always my first question because sometimes we are so not ready to change how we feel about something, right? We want to hold on to the anger. We want to hold on to the resentment or the sadness or the grief and that's totally our choice. It's totally fine. We really can't make ourselves change how we're feeling about something until we decide that we want to feel differently about something.

  So if she said, "Yes, I'm ready, I want to feel differently about this." The first thing I would encourage her to do is to take the anger scale, which one of our guests introduced just a few episodes ago, that was from Maggie Reyes. She introduced this anger scale, which was the idea is on a scale of one to 10. Where does this fall for me? How angry about this am I? Is it a two? Is it a nine? And then what Maggie recommended was, at least in her practice, if it was six or higher, then she dealt with it somehow. Right? And if it was six or lower, she kind of shook it off and she moved on with her day. So I would ask this mom, where does it land for you? Because then we might take two very different paths.

  If she felt super angry and it was six or higher, we might take one path to really uncover what's going on with the anger and what else is there. And if it was six and lower, we might do something different.

  So that's the first thing. First, just kind of grounding into how angry am I? I really about this? And maybe there's a different emotion too that comes up how sad am I about this on a scale or how frustrated am I about this and using a similar kind of scale. Because the reality is not everything is gonna be a nine or a 10. Some, sometimes like I was saying, we feel like divorce or co-parenting is... this big monster with all these tentacles, and it feels kind of unconquerable. We can't truly change this big monster. But in reality, when we break them down, some of these things are going to be twos and threes. And some of them are nines and tens. So, getting perspective of like, how big is this really in the whole thing? of things and do I want to keep carrying it with me?

  The next question I would ask is Does it feel appropriate? Does your reaction does the emotion that you're feeling feel appropriate to the situation? And I'd be really curious what she said She might think it does feel appropriate or she might might have a perspective that it's overblown or it's not quite appropriate. And I think we'd get a lot of information out of that question.

  Then I'd ask her, what do you really want? What is it in this moment that you really want? Sometimes we don't even know what we really want in any given moment. We just don't like something else that's happening, right? So getting clear, is it in that moment you want more connection with your child and you're not getting it? Is it that you want the other parent to react a certain way or maybe appreciate you in a certain way that you're not getting? What is it that you really... want? And when we come to that want, then I would ask why? Why do you want that right now? Why do you need that right now? Let's get super curious about it. Sometimes it takes a few rounds of why as well. I love asking why. Sometimes I'll do it five times. When we're thinking about saying this example, why does it matter that the stepmom is on the FaceTime with your child? Why does it matter to you? What do you, what do you make it mean? Let's get super curious about really what is underneath this?

  Another question that that I would love to ask is how does this feel in your body? I love tapping into what our actual physical experience of any situation is. We do that for two reasons. One, because so often we're just up in our head, we're just in our thoughts and our body's having its own response to any situation. situation, right? And we're kind of disconnected from what's going on in our body. So by asking ourselves, how does this actually feel in our body? We're reconnecting to our body and we're, we're validating the response that we're having. The other reason to go into our body is to notice what is this concretely and is it such a big deal. So if if, say, when the stepmom comes on to the FaceTime and you can hear her voice in the background, you feel frustrated or angry. And how that shows up in your body is that your heart starts racing a little bit. Or maybe you feel kind of a heaviness on your chest or a clenching in your throat, or maybe your stomach gets really tight. tight. And just noticing , is that okay? Can you experience those physical sensations? Is there a problem with you experiencing those physical sensations? What does it mean if you experience those physical sensations? And again, bringing just like a whole nother level of curiosity to it.

  So I'm just throwing you some examples of the kind of, of ways that we can probe, that we can question how we're feeling, that we can kind of dissect when we're having a strong emotional response to something that we kind of want to change, that we want to be different. And you'll notice in all of these questions that I brought up, I'm not talking at all about getting your ex or the stepmom to change at all because they don't actually need to change. Nothing about the situation needs to change in order for you to get to feel really differently if you want. And again, it's not, we just wave a magic wand and you've suddenly changed how you feel. It's that we ask these questions that get our brain and our body opening up to other possibilities because, as I said, in the end it comes down to how do we want to experience this because right now we are the one who is suffering and it's our decision if we want to suffer less.

  All right. And I hope that example even if it doesn't directly apply to your situation can give you some ideas of how to approach things in your co-parenting relationship or in your divorce process that you might be really struggling with right now. Choose one specific thing and see if you can apply some of these questions or some of this inquiry to that one specific thing and see how it shifts. Alright y'all, thanks so much for being with me and I'll talk to you next week. Bye now.

What can we do when something our co-parent (or their new partner) does regularly ANNOYS the beegeezums out of us??? 

I share a specific example and the Reflective Practice I recommend, which includes:

1. Check-in with Yourself: Take a moment to assess your emotions using the Anger Scale [introduced by Maggie Reyes in Episode 98] and whether how you are feeling warrants action.

2. Embrace Curiosity: Ask yourself if your emotional response is proportionate and appropriate. 

3. Clarify Your Desires: Identify what you REALLY WANT in the given situation. Whether it's seeking more connection with your child or feeling appreciated, clarity helps us focus on the goal and not get distracted.

4. Uncover Root Causes: Delve into what’s underneath your emotional reactions. I share the power of asking “why.”

5. Connect with Your Body: Pay attention to how these feelings show up physically. 

Tune in to discover a holistic approach to co-parenting, where emotional intelligence takes center stage, allowing for smoother interactions. 🌟