You Can’t Control Your Ex—But You Can Control This

When your ex is triggering, unpredictable, or just plain difficult, the key to peace isn’t changing them—it’s managing what’s yours.

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For most of my life, I genuinely believed that if I just tried hard enough—said the right things, stayed calm, explained things just the right way—I could influence the people around me to behave in ways that made me feel safe, respected, and okay.

I thought peace would come when everyone else changed.

When I could finally feel like someone understood everything that I was feeling and experiencing.

But through intense heartbreak, therapy, recovery, and coaching others, I’ve learned the hard truth.

Trying to control people or external forces is not just exhausting—it’s a complete illusion.

And control doesn’t always look like micromanaging, speaking up or being assertive. Sometimes it looks like overthinking, anxiety, depression, or hopelessness.

It looks like waiting for an apology that may never come. It looks like spiralling in frustration because life shouldn’t be this way.

Real peace doesn’t come from trying to change people or being able to predict when we’ll finally start to feel better.

It comes from letting go of the illusion that we ever could.

My Turning Point: When My Ex Took Yet Another Gig

I used to get so triggered when my ex-husband would accept gig after gig on his weekends with the kids. Towards the end of our marriage, that had been one of the biggest sources of our disconnect in our relationship, and now he was doing it to them.

It pissed me off—not just because it felt like he was choosing his bands over the kids, but because I couldn’t control it.

I’d spiral into stress. I’d over-explain. I’d try to reason with him. I’d feel hurt on my kids’ behalf. I’d catastrophize: What kind of message is this sending them? Won’t they feel abandoned?

But after years of attempting to get him to stop booking things in on his kid weekends, I realised something important.

No amount of explaining, emailing, or moral reasoning was going to change him. All it was doing was wasting my time, draining my energy, and making me miserable.

So, finally, I stopped. I made the decision to let go.

Instead of fighting what was, I chose to reframe it for myself to save my sanity and my health.

I get bonus time with my kids. This isn’t mine to fix. He’s responsible for his own relationship with them. Whatever the outcomes of this, I’ll deal with it when it happens, rather than trying to control it all now.

I stopped turning his choices into a story about their future relationship being ruined. I made a conscious decision to stop believing the narrative that they were going to be “damaged” because of his actions.

And you know what? Today, my kids and their dad are closer than ever. It all worked out. All that stress and effort I spent trying to control the situation didn’t help anyone. Letting go helped me—and in the end, I didn’t need to worry nearly as much as I thought I did.

I’m not gonna lie, it felt scary as hell the first few times I tried this. I had to do a lot of work to remind myself that I couldn’t control everything for my kids’ future. It took intention and commitment to the process. But it was 100% worth it.

I learned that I can let go of trying to control my family dynamic, and things can still work out.

Three Lessons I’ve Learned (The Hard Way) 👇

Control isn’t always loud

We often think of control as being assertive or forceful—but it’s sneakier than that. It can show up as anxiety, rumination, or quietly hoping that if we just do things in the right way, people will finally change.

Especially post-divorce, we can still be stuck in a dynamic of waiting for our ex to get it together, change their behaviour, or finally co-parent in the “right” way. But waiting for someone else to shift so we can feel okay?

That’s giving away today’s peace and living in an imagined future.

Peace isn’t found in their behaviour

I used to believe that if someone was being a jerk to me, I had to feel like crap. That their actions caused my bad day (or week). But I’ve learned that’s not true. We can feel our feelings without fusing with them. We can get triggered—and still take care of ourselves instead of reacting.

This doesn’t mean we never feel hurt, angry, or overwhelmed. It means we stop making those feelings someone else’s responsibility to fix, and we make it a priority to figure out ways that we can come back to feeling calm quickly.

This looks different for each of us, but these types of strategies and actions are available to all of us if we are willing to do the work to figure them out for ourselves.

For me, it was always about reading books or listening to YouTube videos on letting go, writing out my biggest struggles, taking my dog for long walks or talking to friends who had also been through a divorce.

For you, it could be ten other different things. But once you figure them out, you’ll be able to use them to get back to a better mindset when you feel the frustration, anger or sadness come over you.

Your real power lives inside you and no one else

You can’t control people.

You can’t control life’s curveballs.

But you can control your responses.

You can set boundaries.

You can decide what kind of co-parent and person you want to be.

Peace isn’t a reward for finally getting the circumstances you want. It’s a practice. One you can begin right now, no matter what your ex, your family, or your life is doing.

What healing actually looks like

Healing isn’t always a linear climb toward sunshine. Sometimes it looks like setbacks. Triggers. Bad days. Bad months.

But what if we expected that? What if we saw those days not as failures, but as part of the process?

Real healing is subtle. It’s in the moments when you don’t react the way you used to. Where you pause. Where you notice your patterns and choose a new way of helping yourself to get through it.

It’s not about perfection—it’s about progress.

And letting go of control? That’s a powerful step in the right direction towards finally moving on after divorce.

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