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Daily Living
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Hey Guys, looking to hear some real world stories about how you are able to navigate your anxiety with an ex while coparenting.
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Hi, welcome
If you are having co-parenting issues and that is triggering anxiety then that anxiety will pop up during other stressful events as life goes on so overall your anxiety is a problem to be tackled.
The best advice I can offer with anxiety is to read the following thread, the first post that I wrote some years ago.
https://forums.beyondblue.org.au/t5/anxiety/anxiety-how-l-eliminated-it/td-p/183873
There is also ways to cope with it as posted in the first post here-
https://forums.beyondblue.org.au/t5/staying-well/depression-distraction-and-variety/td-p/275790
In terms of your communication with your ex wife, I've been through that. My kids were 7 and 4yo when we separated then divorced. From the day I left her she held a grudge. That was 28 years ago now. However when my youngest reached 18yo (for 14 years I had to communicate with her and it wasnt pleasant each time) I informed her that under no circumstances is she to ever contact me again. That was an enormous load off my mind.
In contrast a later relationship with a lady with 2 kids was the opposite, her husband and his partner all 4 of us were friends. amazing.
The distraction shown in the 2nd post - you can test that out. Eg say you drop off the kids and you leave with anxiety. Go window shopping or to a movie and notice how your mind automatically erases your ex and focusses on what you are watching and listening to.
Finally, remember, your kids welfare in all its forms is what you are sacrificing during their growing years. I eventually married again, now in our 13th year we are happy and I'm 68yo, my kids 35 and 31. The events surrounding my ex and I are long gone and I dont think about those days very much. So there is a good future for you ahead, plan well, be civil and try not to allow here too much space inside your mind. Fill your life with activities and realise you are worthy of better treatment.
TonyWK
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The warmest of welcomes to you at such an incredibly stressful and challenging time in your life.
While I haven't faced this exact challenge myself, I have a close friend who has. I imagine her advice to be 'This is the kind of thing that can't be managed alone'. The stress she experienced would have been too much for her to manage alone. This leads me to think of something a great guide in my life once said to me, which was 'If you need to be raised and supported through a challenge, find or establish a circle of people who can raise and support you'. Such a circle helps not only with mental health but also in the ways of personal development.
What your circle looks like will be very specific to you, based on your nature, your needs, your specific challenges, the kinds of people you have in your life and more. To give you an idea of what my friend's circle looked like...
- Someone who helped her manage her nervous system. This was a person who led her to become more conscious of the need to breathe her way through certain triggers while also leading her to find ways of releasing degrees of stress that had built up over the preceding years
- Someone who led her to develop the seer in her. What I mean by this is while all she could see was what was stressful at times, this person led her to develop visions of different ways forward beyond the stress
- Someone who helped her manage her inner dialogue. Inner dialogue can be incredibly stressful and incredibly depressing at times. While certain triggers will trigger the stresser in us to life with its dialogue or the pessimist with its dialogue, what brings the sage in us to life (a calmer and wiser element) or what brings the pure analyst in us to life (the part that feels nothing while purely analysing the best way forward)?
- Someone who could promote a sense of adventure. If we're not adding ventures or adventuring, technically we're facing can be the same old (sometimes) stressful or depressing stuff. Self development can be found in adding ventures. They don't have to be huge, although my friend did have someone in her life that gave her breaks from the stress by taking her on occasional overseas trips. This helped her redefine herself as 'an adventurer', not just 'someone who suffers through stress'. This was one of the things that helped her change her sense of identity
The list goes on.
So, how to start or develop a circle of supportive guides? I suppose you could consider coming here as a start. You could say 'I begin my circle with Tony (white knight). Who, amongst my friends, could I add to this? Could I add a counselor to it as well? Perhaps I could find someone in the kind of group I'd considered joining in the past and now feel a greater need to join (a club, interest group etc)'. There can be circles outside the square. Meditation circles, soulful circles, adventure or nature loving circles and so on.
My friend's ex was an incredibly arrogant and stressful guy to deal with. He was also a very self serving person who left her alone to manage their children's challenges, including mental health ones and certain added financial challenges (necessities she struggled to afford). He led her to feel incredibly alone in raising their kids until she remembered she could rely on her circle of people to help her manage. As they say 'Sometimes it takes a village' (to raise a person). Find your tribe, your circle.❤️
