Doing Nothing
When my co-parent behaves in a way I don’t like, I generally have one of two responses. The first sort of most obvious response is that I get pissed. If I’m at all tuned in to the sensations associated with it, my heart races, my face gets hot, and my hands get a little shaky. The sensations though are secondary to the story that pops immediately into my head that reads something like this: That asshole. He’s wrong. I’ll tell him. The second response is that I also get pissed, have those same sensations, tell myself that same story, but I do nothing. Depending on where you are in your divorce process, you may be one of those people who believes that telling your ex when they’re wrong is absolutely the thing you’re supposed to do. You might be early enough on where, when your ex accuses you of doing something you didn’t do, you feel obligated to defend yourself and correct them. Or when your ex does something that goes against your agreements—doesn’t tell you their travel plans, doesn’t consult with you on a teacher meeting or a doctor’s visit—you reach out to remind them that they’re bound to the same court order as you. If you’re in a relatively harmonious co-parenting relationship, it’s just fine to do that, especially if your co-parent’s most likely response is something to the effect of, “Oops, my bad,” or, “Oh, maybe you missed the text I sent last week????” But if your situation with your co-parent is high conflict, you might be better off keeping your mouth shut.
You may be wondering, “Gee, Tob, do you have an example for me that could illustrate this point?” To which I would answer, “Why yes, yes, I do.”
Just last week, my ex responded to two emails I had sent at the beginning of the month in a way I’d hoped he wouldn’t. One was about a $650 bill I paid for our son’s car, and the other was about being able to see my daughter off to sleep away camp. The details are a little lengthy and, when you get right down to it, not all that important. Because all arguments, whether we like to admit it or not, have to do with a difference in perspective and an inability or an unwillingness to see the other person’s point of view. So, I could use up 1000 words here to tell you what happened, but it’d only be my side of the story.
Suffice it to say, my ex and I neither agreed on who should pay for my son’s car bill, nor whether I should see my daughter before she left for camp. Using the best of my emotional vocabulary skills, I’d say both emails left me feeling crestfallen. I was sure that the car problem that I had to get fixed was a result of a mistake he had made; and I was sure that he would be reasonable and let me spend a moment saying goodbye to my kid. But so often I forget that not everyone subscribes to the same level of conscientiousness, or has the same capacity for empathy as I. What I think is reasonable, or to use the Buddhist term, skillful, is just not on others’ radars like it is mine. And while I might want to rail against it, I have no business getting in someone’s face and making them see it my way.
Now, I can see in a high-conflict divorce situation where you might think several thoughts about why “doing nothing” is a bad idea. You might think you have to protect your child, knowing they will be sad or even anxious, not getting to say goodbye to their mom before a week at sleep away camp; that your ex is obviously being selfish or perhaps even vindictive, by not letting that happen. You might think that the bill for your kid’s car should be paid for by the person whom you believed screwed it up in the first place And, more seriously, you might think, with the looming threat of a court battle, that your ex may use both of these instances as a way to make you look like an unloving, unsafe parent; that they could very easily twist these stories into something utterly untrue about you and you must defend yourself in writing to prevent that from happening. Frankly, this third scenario is the one that kept me locked in ongoing conflict with my co-parent for years. But as Mark Twain so famously said, “I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which have never happened.”
Frankly, most of us trust neither our exes nor the family court system. And with good reason. Read any sociologist, family law scholar, or divorced mom on social media’s account of divorce and family court and you’ll see that they are not at all institutions that protect women or children. With centuries of oppression under our belts and an ingrained, cellular terror, women instinctively know that the protection of ourselves and our kids will fall solely, and heavily, on us. So, when we get emails about car batteries and summer camps, we go zero-to-sixty to self-defense mode, ready to pounce, to claw out a couple of eyes, and to spit in the face of whoever is trying to keep us from our kids’ best interests. It’s not really an exaggeration. The limbic response is a built-in mechanism to protect the survival of ourselves and our offspring. That physiology is largely unconscious and, if we’re trying to change it, we learn that it dies hard. So it’s reasonable for us, when we’re not conscious of it, to try to save ourselves from this perceived annihilation. Trouble is, the threat doesn’t always translate to an actual, real-life danger.
In my example here, there definitely was only a perceived threat. Sure, I was gonna be out a bunch of money. And yes, my daughter and I were very sad that our goodbyes before camp came two and a half weeks early. But would we all survive this? Of course we would. And after my initial reaction to those offending emails, I realized the best thing for me to do was to drop it.
When I allowed myself to have a few days (and it took a few days) of disappointment, of sadness, and a couple anxious glances at my credit card statement, where I ended up landing was a place of acceptance. The more I learn about conflict resolution, the deeper my understanding that there are some conflicts worth fighting and others that are best left to die on the vine. If I were involved with someone with whom I could safely express my own feelings, and hear with openness theirs, then this would be easy because there’s common ground—the well-being of our kids. Finding common ground in conflict is essential, and actually quite possible when we stop to listen to what the other person is feeling. Underneath even the harshest words, there’s often something there that both people value, long for, and expect. Coming to a place of mutual respect helps us get to that place of understanding and then, often, agreement. Part of reaching this place though, is knowing with whom you can and can’t relate. There may come a time when my coparent and I are able to see eye to eye on something that benefits our kids, but at the moment, that’s not the nature of our relationship. So rather than try to convince, cajole, or even really just correspond, I’m better off letting some things go.
In her book with Robert Thurman, “Love Your Enemies,” Sharon Salzberg points out that “There is nothing weak or defeatist in not confronting our enemies directly and aggressively. Rather, it is a completely different way of relating to others that allows us to avoid being trapped in the role of victim or aggressor.” While both victim and aggressor are familiar roles to me having been in a high-conflict relationship with my ex, I don’t have to stay married to those roles any more than I had to stay married to him. In fact, letting go of feeling victimized and consequently lashing out with aggression was only going to exhaust and destroy me. Not him. And it wouldn’t have helped my kids one bit. My reasoning wasn’t going to be heard, and his mind was not going to be changed by anything I said. It was more important to keep my peace and keep enjoying my kids. Opting to do nothing about my situation was the most compassionate thing I could do for myself and yes, maybe even for him.
