Co-parenting with a toxic ex?
Are you raising a teen or pre teen and having to deal with a toxic co parent?
What if your teen starts disrespecting you and repeats what the ex says about you?
What makes it difficult to deal with your child's disrespectful behavior towards you when you are co-parenting with a toxic ex?
Why you should NOT blame yourself for your triggered reactions.
What actually happens psychologically when you are triggered?
What might need healing when you continue to be triggered by your teen's disrespectful behavior?
When you put these 2 together: raising a teen and co-parenting with a toxic ex, many find themselves in a double bind.
You are in fact dealing with 2 major challenges: raising a teenager with all the beauty of this developmental stage of life AND having to deal with a toxic co-parent.
It can become overwhelming and unmanageable sometimes.
Especially in those times when your teen starts disrespecting you by maybe saying something very rude or making dismissive comments.
In my practice, I often work with clients who find themselves in this double bind.
I have recently worked with Mara, a single mom who was struggling to deal with a toxic ex and deal with a child who imitates the ex.
Mara's 12-year-old started to repeat things about Mara that her dad says along the lines of " Oh you only work so little, you are not really smart with...What do you actually do for me?"
What if your ex, like Mara's, is in a better financial position and plays a friend with your child? They offer little discipline, lots of gifts, and soft home rules.
You are the responsible parent, reinforcing discipline and structure, making sure their tasks are done, getting them to bed early, and working full time all the way. You are perceived as strict and no fun. When your teenager comes back from a weekend with the ex it's like they are a different person.
Mara's daughter becomes negative and judgmental of her after spending time with her dad.
What makes it difficult to deal with your child's disrespectful behaviour when you are co-parenting with a toxic ex?
When Mara's daughter makes comments that remind her of her ex, Mara gets very upset, to the point of experiencing emotional overwhelm. She gets emotional, starts overexplaining herself (why she does what she does), and yells. None of this helps to deal with rudeness but leaves Mara with a feeling of guilt. She regrets reacting emotionally and beats herself up after interactions with her daughter.
When your child starts disrespecting you just like that other parent, maybe they repeat their words and you see the attitude and traits of the ex in your child’s behavior, you are going to react emotionally. It is very normal.
You are triggered by their behaviors as they look, sound, and feel familiar. Psychologically it feels like you are being thrown back into the nightmares of your past relationship when you had to deal with your ex-partner.
As a result, you go into a reactive cycle, when old stress cycles are activated. You might feel tension, and your defense response in the form of stress is activated. In a sense, you are back in the past with your emotional reaction, stress reaction, and thought reaction. Feelings that are triggered can be very overwhelming such as hopelessness, anger, and helplessness. And you can be flooded by these heavy emotions from a disrespectful comment.
If this happens to you, it can be a sign that the old stress and reaction patterns developed in past relationships have not been dealt with or healed.
In addition to the old stress patterns, there can be an extra layer of stress that is connected to your role as a parent to this child. There is this extra emotional charge because you might feel a heavy sense of responsibility for your child's disrespectful behaviour, as well as hurt, guilt, unfairness, a sense of failure, and second-guessing yourself as an effective parent.
So your body and nervous system can go into a double overwhelm, both with stress and emotions.
This brings me to the second point.
Why you should NOT blame yourself for your triggered reactions. What actually happens psychologically when you are triggered?
Your mind and body go into a reactive cycle, which is unconscious. We can not control the unconscious.
Your brain will actually go into a reactive cycle of trauma response: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. And when this happens, you can’t cope in better ways, instead, you will cope in the familiar ways on autopilot. Chances are you will overlook new information and see the situation for what it is in the present, and you will make the inference that what is happening with your child now is exactly the way it was with the ex.
When you can go into a reactive behavioral, thinking, and feeling pattern, you assume things and assume the worst; you catastrophize in your head.
Your automatic defense reaction takes over: you yell, you become silent, freeze, you get very hurt, you withdraw, you fall into depression, and feel despair, or hopelessness.
These automatic reactions are NOT something we can control at the moment, or easily bring awareness into because they are purely unconscious and might trigger the wounded parts of us.
It’s like you are robbed of time, and you are hijacked by emotions and stress.
A reactive cycle needs time to run as it is activated by unconscious beliefs, feelings, emotions, and physical reactions.
As you are there dealing with your own inner overwhelm, how can you deal with the situation in a calm, logical, and creative way? Chance are you can’t. Not because you don’t want or don't know how, but because you go into this reactive cycle. And the reactive cycle doesn’t give you time, It’s instant and awareness goes offline.
Hence it’s very very hard to put a stop to a reactive cycle when you are in it. So, please, do not judge yourself.
It’s not something you can stop, but it is something you can heal and learn more about.
What might need healing in you when you continue to be triggered by your teen's disrespectful behavior?
Reactive cycles run on stress energy and stress patterns, beliefs, and emotional charges from beliefs. All of this is unconscious.
If you find yourself constantly falling into reactive cycles and being triggered by your child's attitude, it makes sense to look into the origin of these reactions, dismantle old beliefs and let the stress patterns heal. These reactive cycles are unconscious so it’s very very hard for us to consciously understand them.
Being stuck in old patterns of behavior, emotion, and thinking stops us from finding creative solutions to problems and makes it difficult to see choices in a situation. It robs us of accessing our resources to cope and build better, healthier, and more enjoyable relationships with our children.
If you feel like it's not time for you to seek help with healing emotions, there are a couple of tips you can use today to deal with disrespectful behaviour and shift towards healthier options.
-----Let the reactive cycle pass. Try to NOT judge yourself for how you handled the situation with your teen.
-----Let some time pass, and have a bit of analysis of the interaction in retrospect.
Think about these questions; try to be curious, and be open.
What triggered me?
Is it something about my ex? What actually reminded me of the ex?
Is it something I believe about myself?
What are my biggest fears about this situation?
Another good thing you can do is to analyse your values as a parent,
by asking yourself.
What are my values as a mother or a father?
Finish this sentence. I am a parent who...
Here are some examples.
I am a mother who.... ( works hard.)
I am a father who.... ( buys my kids love with gifts)?
I am a mother who......( learns about herself)?
I am a parent who.....( values freedom and independence?)
Make a list of those values, and be honest with yourself. Making a list like this can potentially help you bring awareness to the triggering situation.
If you continue to be triggered by disrespect from your teen, maybe it’s time to look into those unconscious reactions, and find the origin and the reason for their existence in you.
We all deserve the peace that comes from healing, self-understanding, and compassion. The peace we find within through connecting to and better understanding ourselves is transferred to our interactions with our children.
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