His name pops up on your phone, and your body reacts before you’ve even read the message.
Your stomach drops. Your chest tightens. You try to ignore it because you don’t want to deal with whatever is waiting for you. But you know eventually you have to open it. So you read the message.
And there goes your afternoon.
You read it. Reread it. Start wondering what he meant, what he’s trying to do and whether you need to respond. You draft a response, delete it, rewrite it, and spend far more time than you wanted figuring out exactly what to say.
Even after you’ve responded, you’re still thinking about the conversation while you’re trying to work, make dinner, spend time with your kids or fall asleep.
It’s exhausting. And it can be especially frustrating when you’re already separated or divorced and thinking, Why does he still have this much power over how I feel?
You may believe you wouldn’t react this way if he would just communicate differently.
Divorce Doesn’t Equal Better Communication
Divorce doesn’t mean he’ll start communicating differently. He is who he is. And if you share children or are still working through financial, legal or other issues, ending your marriage doesn’t mean all communication stops.
But you don’t have to wait for him to change before you can experience these interactions differently.
A Better Approach to Messages From Your Ex
You can’t control what your ex sends, how he says it, or whether his communication feels reasonable to you. But you can change what happens between seeing his message and losing the next several hours of your day to it.
In this blog post, I share a 3-step practice that can help you change that pattern:
- how to get grounded before you engage with a message
- how to separate what actually happened from everything your mind is making it mean
- how to decide intentionally what, if anything, you want to say in response
Step 1: Get Grounded Before You Engage
One of the most useful things you can do happens before you ever open the email or read the text message.
When you see his message and feel your stomach drop or your chest tighten, notice what’s happening.
Isn’t that interesting? I was feeling calm a minute ago, and now my mind is racing, my body is tense and I can’t concentrate.
Your body is reacting before you even know what the message says.
This is why I don’t want you to wait until you’re already activated and halfway through writing a response to think about getting grounded. You can set yourself up differently before you ever read the message.
First, consider whether you need to see his messages the moment they arrive.
Unless there is a genuine reason you need to be immediately available, you might choose one or two times during the day when you check email, texts or your co-parenting app. Choose times that work for you, while allowing flexibility when something genuinely requires more immediate attention.
Now you’re deciding when you engage rather than allowing every notification to interrupt whatever you were doing.
Before you open the message, check in with yourself.
Do you feel grounded enough to read it, or do you need to move some energy first?
If you’re feeling anxious or keyed up, shake out your wrists and arms. Move your body. Gently jump up and down. Then place a hand on your heart, close your eyes if that feels comfortable, and take a slow breath in through your nose for a count of four. Hold for four. Exhale slowly for six.
There isn’t a right or wrong way to get grounded. Different practices work for different people, and different emotions may need different things. Part of the work I do with clients is helping them identify what their body needs in different moments, rather than relying on one technique for every kind of activation.
The key is that you’re not starting the interaction from an already highly activated state.
Awareness is a skill we practice and strengthen. I teach my clients to use what I call the Non-Judgmental Observer, or NJO. It’s the practice of noticing what’s happening without judging yourself for what you notice.
One of the ways we strengthen that awareness is by setting reminders throughout the day to pause and ask:
What am I thinking? What am I feeling? What am I doing?
You practice this when nothing particularly difficult is happening so you become better at noticing what’s happening inside you when something is.
Over time, when his name appears on your phone and your chest tightens, you’re more likely to catch what’s happening instead of automatically getting swept up in your default response.
That moment of awareness creates space between the trigger and what you do next.
And in that space, you can move your body. You can breathe. You can get grounded.
Then you can read the message from a steadier place instead of beginning the interaction already activated.
The goal isn’t to never get triggered. It’s to build the ability to notice what’s happening sooner and know how to help yourself move through it before it takes over the rest of your day.
Step 2: Let the Message Be What It Is
Once you’re grounded enough to read the message, pay attention to what happens next.
Let’s say you open an email from your ex and somewhere in it he writes:
You’re a terrible mother.
Your mind may immediately take off.
How dare he say that to me.
Maybe I am screwing this up.
He’s trying to make me feel guilty.
I need to tell him exactly why he’s wrong.
One sentence can quickly become an entire story about you, him, your parenting, your marriage and what you need to do next.
This is where something I teach my clients called Isness can be incredibly useful. Isness is allowing his words to simply be words without immediately making them mean something.
Rain falls. Birds fly. Flowers grow.
And your ex sent an email saying you’re a terrible mother.
It just is.
Nothing has meaning until you give it meaning. He can say words, and they don’t have to be charged. They can simply be words.
That doesn’t mean his words won’t bring up feelings. They may bring up anger, hurt, shame or fear, and those feelings need to be felt and processed.
But notice how quickly the story can take you somewhere else.
He said I’m a terrible mother.
Becomes:
What if there’s some truth to that?
What if the judge thinks I’m a terrible mother?
What if this affects custody?
What if I lose my kids?
Now you’re not reacting to the words he wrote. You’re reacting to everything your mind has made those words mean and the future it has created from them.
And that can affect what you do next.
Maybe you stop using your voice because speaking up suddenly feels too risky. You stop asking for what you need. You start tolerating unreasonable behavior from him again because it feels safer than risking another reaction. You may even begin second-guessing decisions you had already made about moving forward with the divorce.
This is why the story matters.
You can notice the anger, fear, hurt or shame his words bring up and allow yourself to feel and process those emotions without following the story all the way down the rabbit hole.
Then you can come back to Isness:
He sent an email saying I’m a terrible mother.
And it just is.
From there, you’re in a much steadier place to decide whether his message actually requires a response and, if it does, how you want to respond.
Step 3: Decide What Needs a Response
When you receive a message from your ex full of what I call “verbal vomit,” it can feel like you need to respond to all of it.
You don’t.
Not every communication requires a response, and not every statement in a message needs to be answered. You don’t have to correct every accusation, defend yourself against every criticism or explain your side of every disagreement.
Learning to be intentional about what you respond to and how you respond is part of the work I teach inside LIBERATED. Instead of automatically reacting in the way you always have, you learn to pause and choose how you want to respond.
If you’re involved in litigation, or might be, keep in mind that communications between you and your spouse or ex-spouse may eventually be read by attorneys, a judge or other professionals involved in your case. That’s another reason to be intentional about what you choose to respond to and how you respond.
Think about the email from the last section where your ex tells you that you’re a terrible mother.
You’re a terrible mother. You never put the kids first. I’ll pick them up at 6:00 on Friday.
You may have a lot you want to say in response to this message. But what actually requires a response?
Your response might be:
Thank you for your email. I disagree with your characterization of my parenting. Friday at 6:00 works.
Or there may be circumstances where all that’s needed is:
Friday at 6:00 works. Thank you.
The BIFF Framework
One of the tools I share with clients who are dealing with difficult or high-conflict communication is Bill Eddy’s BIFF framework: Brief, Informative, Friendly and Firm.
Brief means you don’t need three paragraphs when three sentences will do.
Informative means you stick to the information that actually needs to be communicated.
Friendly doesn’t mean overly nice, accommodating or pretending you agree. It means keeping the tone civil.
And firm means being clear about your position without inviting another round of argument or negotiation when there is nothing left to discuss.
The goal isn’t to write the perfect message that finally gets him to understand your point of view or communicate differently. He is who he is.
Your goal is to decide what actually needs to be communicated and communicate it clearly.
You can’t control what he says next. But you can choose how you respond to it.
Messages From Your Ex Don’t Have to Ruin Your Day
The goal isn’t to get to a place where nothing your ex says ever bothers you.
You’re human. Some messages may cause you to feel angry, frustrated, ashamed or worried. They may bring up fears you thought you had already worked through.
The difference is what happens next.
- You notice your reaction before you automatically act on it.
- You feel through it and make it safe internally before you engage.
- You allow his words to be his words without giving them meaning, creating a story and going down the rabbit hole.
- You choose what, if anything, you want to say in response and feel confident in that decision.
How you think, feel and act doesn’t require him to communicate differently.
If you continue to wait for him to change before you change your experience of communicating with him, you may be waiting a very long time. In the meantime, his communication continues to determine how you feel and what happens next.
Knowing intellectually that you can’t control how he communicates and actually being able to respond differently are two different things. Especially when you’ve spent years reacting to this person in familiar ways.
Changing those patterns takes awareness and practice. It’s also the work I help my clients do inside LIBERATED, so they can respond intentionally instead of automatically reacting to what someone else says or does.
You can’t change how he communicates. But you can change how much power his communication has over you.
For More Personalized Support,
