Speaker 1: 0:00

Today I'm going to give you eight reasons why you shouldn't mind read your co-parent. And you may be thinking to yourself why shouldn't I mind read my co-parent? I know him really well. I had a kid with him. Well, lots of reasons why let's get into the first one.

Speaker 1: 0:14

The first reason why you shouldn't mind read your co-parent is because you're often wrong. You may think that you have them dead to rights. You know their subjective intent for whatever it is that they're about to do. But there's lots of other reasons. Sometimes what you think may be the reason is one of several reasons that are layered together and kind of nuanced. If you assume you know the reason why your co-parent is taking some sort of action, making some sort of decision, then you're going to wind up often getting it at least a little bit wrong, and when you do that, you're providing yourself with false information. You're giving yourself improper data on which now you're trying to make some sort of decision. You may be trying to sort of turn the tables on them and take advantage of what you think their rationale is. But if you're mind reading, if you don't actually know, then you may wind up hurting yourself right. It's not good to make decisions based off of faulty data and when you mind read, as confident as you may be, you're more than likely using faulty data. The second reason why you shouldn't mind read your co-parent is because it's just going to cause you to become anxious and stressed out. Let's be honest If you're mind reading your co-parent, you're not ascribing to them good intentions, right? You're thinking something negative about them. So now you're sitting there imputing to them negative thoughts about you, and that's just going to stress you out. For all you know, they don't even care about this rationale. You know, never pass up an opportunity to think that someone is just being dumb. I mean, it could be the case that your co-parent is just, you know, being stupid and not necessarily being malicious. Now, both of those may stress you out, especially because it deals with your kids, but wouldn't it be a little bit better if it was actually just that they did something kind of stupid, instead of they were trying to actively hurt you? If you're assigning malintent to them for their various actions, when stupidity or inadvertence may be the cause, then you're putting a burden on yourself that you just don't need to have. I imagine if your co-parenting is kind of in that state where you're just describing some of these bad intentions anyway, that they're causing you enough legitimate stress. Don't borrow trouble. Don't add more stress on when you don't need it.

Speaker 1: 2:34

The third reason why you shouldn't mind read is because it blocks actual communication. I mean, we should be like Ted Lasso in the sense that we need to be curious, not judgmental. If you're mind reading your co-parent, you're skimming right past curious, you're going straight to judgmental and that's not going to help anybody. If you want to actually improve your co-parenting relationship, you have to communicate, and if you have concerns about what your co-parent's intentions actually are, you need to ask them. That's the first step, right? So it blocks good, constructive communication and replaces it with anxiety-inducing, negative thoughts about what their intentions may be, when you really have no idea.

Speaker 1: 3:19

The fourth reason why we shouldn't mind read our co-parent is because, really, what we're doing most of the time when we do that is projecting our own feelings onto them, and since what we're thinking, that they're thinking is something malicious towards us, then our feelings that we're projecting from are our hurts. It's our trauma, probably with this particular individual, in addition to all the other trauma that we've suffered All the other times where we felt insecure or felt like somebody didn't love us or hated us or wanted to get us. All of those are wrapped up into these projections that we're putting onto our co-parent. And you know you may be right right, it's possible to be right for the wrong reason. But it is unhelpful to base your decision-making, to structure your relationship, based on your projection of your feelings, based on trauma that you've been through in the past, onto your co-parent in the present.

Speaker 1: 4:19

The fifth reason why we shouldn't mind read our co-parent is because it ignores the possibility that they've grown. I mean, this is a person who you loved once, potentially hopefully, and then you had a falling out with. This is a person who has hurt you in the past and when you're once potentially hopefully, and then you had a falling out with. This is a person who has hurt you in the past. And when you're mind reading them, you're mind reading the most negative aspects of your relationship with them from the past into the present. I mean, especially if your relationship with them ended a while ago, you're completely ignoring the possibility that something so traumatic as a separation in this custodial situation has produced no growth in your co-parent. That's not fair to them and it's not fair to you Now. You know the situation better than I do and it's very possible that there's been no growth. Unfortunately, as a parenting coordinator and mediator and a guardian ad litem, I see that all the time. I see zero growth occurring, sometimes in co-parenting relationships. But when you mind read and you're taking the past and pacing it onto the future, you're just ignoring that possibility to your own detriment.

Speaker 1: 5:25

The sixth reason why you shouldn't mind read your co-parent is because it's just going to make them defensive. Think about it from your own perspective. If your co-parent were looking, it's just going to make them defensive. Think about it from your own perspective If your co-parent were looking at something that you did and maybe you made a mistake. It was completely inadvertent, you didn't mean to do it, but it was the wrong thing to do. Your co-parents looking at you. They're communicating with you about the mistake that you made and they're ascribing to you all sorts of negative intentions that had nothing to do with your decision. That's going to make you upset. It's going to piss you off. You're going to be defensive. It's going to increase the conflict. It's not going to invite from you, most likely, a calm, rational, understanding response. It's not going to move the conversation forward in a healthy manner.

Speaker 1: 6:09

You would be much more open to your co-parent reaching out to you and say I'm really confused about why you did this thing. Can you help me understand, like what was going on? That gets us back to the earlier idea we talked about, where it's more helpful to have this Ted Lasso approach of being curious and not judgmental. If you're not curious, if you're judgmental, it's going to make your co-parent defensive and you're just going to wind up having more arguments, perhaps unnecessarily. And that ties into the seventh reason not to mind when you do co-parent, which it just increases conflict.

Speaker 1: 6:45

There's enough conflict in co-parenting relationships. Probably if you're watching these videos, you're dealing with a lot of co-parenting conflict. Increasing to that conflict without any good reason, especially when you're the one who's unnecessarily kicking up the conflict, is no good. It doesn't help you, it makes you look bad to the court and, more importantly, it gets in the way of leading to perhaps a more productive co-parenting relationship. So let's try to lessen the conflict right. Less conflict is better for our kids.

Speaker 1: 7:21

That ties into the eighth reason why you shouldn't mind-read your co-parent and that is because it models poor communication for your child, as careful as you may try to be, your kid is going to see when you're mind reading, especially if your kids are older. They're hearing you. They're seeing some of the communication. Potentially they're hearing you mutter under your breath or not under your breath. They may hear you guys on the phone or see you at a visitation transfer. They're going to witness you assuming the worst about their other parent and leading to an argument about it. If for no other reason, you should be modeling for your child curiosity, good communication, a little bit of charity and goodwill in your communications, especially with someone that you don't particularly like. It's easy for us to be kind and charitable to people we love, to people we like to be around. It's hard to be charitable to people with whom we're upset. That's especially when we need to model that kind of openness and curiosity to our kids. That's how we want them to be. We need to show them how to do it.

Speaker 1: 8:29

The reason I thought about this topic of mind reading was because I received a great comment in response to my right of first refusal video that I posted last week. That comment was asking about a specific portion of that video in which I talked about a scenario in which a parent would come home, say from work at lunch, to avoid triggering the right of first refusal, like they come home after four hours to have lunch. If they had a six hour right of first refusal or an eight hour right of first refusal it wouldn't be triggered. And so the person was asking is that coming home from lunch thing a malicious act to prevent the other parent from spending time with their child? It sounds really inconvenient and definitely a tool for a manipulative, bitter ex. Great question, and yeah, I mean I think on a lot of occasions I think you might find that it is a tool for an ex who is bitter and being manipulative, but it's not always the case.

Speaker 1: 9:28

Right, it may be the case that there are multiple different layers of this. Your co-parent may be receiving pressure from a current spouse, from a grandparent, current spouse from a grandparent. There may be some issue related to concerns that maybe you're speaking negatively to the child, and I mean it's not uncommon that a child will come back from seeing one co-parent for a short duration during a right of first refusal and they have trouble making the transition back the other parent, the one who had the child previously, but then the child was taken for the right of first refusal is going to tend to assume that you said something right, that you're like oh I got to take you back to your other parent's house now. Sorry about that. I know it's not going to be fun. But also, you know, kids just sometimes have trouble making transitions. So it may be the case that your co-parent just doesn't want the disruption to their day. They don't want to have to deal with that difficult transition when they come back, especially if there are differences in parenting or discipline styles, if there are differences in the electronics that are available, if your house is way nicer than their house.

Speaker 1: 10:36

There's lots of reasons that could touch on things other than maliciousness. It could be an insecurity. Very often it's our fears that drive us, not our hate. And so what is your co-parent afraid of? Answering that question itself requires some mind reading, but very often it's going to be a fear that you probably didn't even realize they had that is driving a behavior that you ascribe to maliciousness. When it's just a fear response that they have, or, again, it could just be that they're stupid. I mean, things happen. Sometimes co-parents do things that don't make any sense because they're dummies. Sometimes it's because they're being malicious, but mind reading is not the way to figure out which is which. The way to figure it out is to be curious, to ask questions and to then to have a productive conversation that turns potentially harmful conflict into an opportunity to learn more about each other, to create common meaning and to grow together as co-parents and individually as well. So thank you very much. Hope you have a great day.