The Simplest Practice to Make Your Former Partner Irrelevant
I get asked a lot about making your former partner irrelevant, and while it is a goal of many after divorce, few seem to get there.
In an effort to fast track you to your former partner’s irrelevance, I’m sharing today and doing a little workshopping with you on how to get skilled at this critical practice. It basically comes down to two questions that you ask yourself over and over.
Anytime you find yourself ruminating on some fact of your divorce or post-divorce life related to your former partner, simply ask yourself these two questions:
How is this relevant?
How is this irrelevant?
Here is how it works.
Example 1: You are thinking about your former partner’s new love interest.
How is this relevant? You knew something was up with them long ago. You can’t believe they moved on so quickly. They are so distracted from the kids now. This new person is not good for this family.
How is this irrelevant? Who your former partner dates is his business. Who you date is your business. What part of their new reality impacts what you need to shift now in your own life? Maybe the new love interest is affecting how your kids feel. Your attention wants to go to the story of the love interest, but your life needs you to go to creating safety, different rhythms, and space for your kids to feel and deal with this new person in their life. You can also ask yourself what other business of your own do you need to address today? An intentional redirect puts you back on the subject of you.
Your former partner’s new love interest is relevant because you make it relevant. It’s a habit that limits your sense of peace.
Relevance often masquerades as an excuse to stay connected to them. If you truly wanted disconnection, you would need a commitment to connecting to something else.
That something else is you.
Do you see how asking the irrelevance question created a lot more questions…and that those questions were about your own life? Making your former partner relevant keeps you focused on them. Making them irrelevant makes you curious about you.
Let’s try another one.
Example 2: Your former partner is not parenting well.
How is this relevant? Their actions and inactions affect your kid. You have to take on more work where they slack off. It’s not fair.
How is this irrelevant? It is very possible that your former partner will continue to not parent well. Your resistance to that fact is lost energy that needs to be put toward integrating the reality of their disappointing ways. Your partner does not parent well. What does that mean for what is required of you to continue creating places of safety, warmth, and responsiveness for your child? Given that your former partner drops the ball, how do you need to shift your own commitment to the health and wellness of your child?
Asking yourself how is this relevant is a way to honor that you have a lot of quite legitimate thoughts about how a certain reality is impacting you. Unfortunately, it also often puts your former partner on your to-do list. You start wondering how can you get them to start or stop this behavior; it does not create meaningful results.
Asking yourself how is this irrelevant puts your brain to work on coming back to you. And when you are on your to-do list, things actually get done.
Take these two questions with you in your day. As you get better at developing your former partner’s irrelevance, you will find that the first relevance question does not scream so loudly for your attention.
I can’t wait to see what you make of your life.
