Here’s the thing, friends – you can either be in your power and personal integrity or you’re not.

If you constantly use your energy to motivate, educate, disprove, change your ex, then you are not in your power.

If you are constantly using your energy to log all the wrongs or horrible parenting decisions your ex makes, you are not in your personal integrity.

Your energy is leaking out and swirling around inside of you instead of you using it to move forward.

You are not their accountability partner anymore.  You are not the judge and jury of how your ex should behave.

Ultimately, if you look deeper, you will understand you are still dependent on how another person should be in order for you to be at peace, which puts your power outside of yourself.  You have lost yourself to the fight, filled with delusions of control, not real power.

Once you see and feel the difference, you will act accordingly.

You will no longer lose yourself by giving in to someone’s expectations of how you should behave. Perhaps they say you are always bitter and angry, so somehow you always act bitter or angry instead of enforcing clear boundaries. Their perceived dominance over you, their belief they are better than you because your family of origin, difference in education, or past mistakes will no longer be triggering. This may be an unconscious pull at first, yet awareness will come. You will understand this is the bait to pull you away from yourself.

Ask yourself if you have been using the way your ex has used, betrayed, or discarded you for the stimulus of your behavior and choices.

If you can be brutally honest with yourself, you will come to know your inner self again and notice when you are acting from this place of persecution instead of your solid self.

You will start to feel the difference in your body when you act with dignity and respect for all you are – all the wonderful, good, and powerful ways you know you already are.

You will notice when you are white-knuckling, working hard to make them change, during interactions with your ex. You will know it when your sleep is disrupted, when your day is ruined because you ruminate about what to text back. You will come to know when you are out of alignment with your values because your attention goes to what they are doing, their motivations, their choices, and how they desperately need to transform so you can be happy.

When you do those, you have lost yourself. Your choices become contingent on proving yourself to them instead of standing in your power by aligning your choices with your values.

Power is keeping yourself grounded in your wholeness, your good virtues, your behaviors, your choices – not being tricked into being their moral guidance system or being drawn into a box of their defining.

No matter what they say about you, label you, bring up the past to badger you, your motivation will be your integrity.

Just as you are a fierce protector of your children, you will become a fierce protector of your integrity and power.

You do you, and the energy and dynamics of the relationship will change for the better, even if your ex doesn’t, because you are now in charge of yourself.

This is deliberate and authentic power by being accountable to yourself.