🦚Think you've got no cards to play against your ex?

Last week, I walked you through the four types of power you’re already building: expert power, informational power, connection power, and referent power.

None of this power can be taken from you. It’s truly and firmly yours. You’ve earned it all through the work you’ve been doing since you left.

This week, we’re covering the remaining three types of power. This is where things get tactical. I’m showing you how to enforce your legitimate power, how to stop rewarding bad behavior, and how to see through the coercive power your ex has been using to keep you feeling small and defeated.

Let’s get to work.

Legitimate power: know your legal rights and use them

Legitimate power is the authority that comes from your formal position or legal standing. In post-separation situations, this includes your custody agreement, your court orders, your parenting plan, your children’s best interests as enumerated in law, and your legal rights as a parent.

Abusers tend to think they’re above the law. They are so entitled that they assume they can do anything they want. This is actually the opposite of legitimate power. What they’re doing has no legal standing.

When your ex violates the parenting plan, they’re undermining your legitimate power. So, if they refuse to follow court orders, document it. Every single time. Because legitimate power only works if you enforce it.

By “enforce it”, I don’t mean take them back to court for each and every infraction. That will just drain your bank account and your credibility with the court, which will start viewing you as the problematic party.

That’s why too many protective parents get worn down by the constant violations and stop enforcing their rights. And that’s exactly what your ex is counting on. Your ex is betting you’ll get tired of fighting and let things slide because filing another motion feels impossible.

This is where strategy comes in. You can’t control what your ex does, or how the courts respond. But there’s one thing that you do have control over. That’s documenting what they do. Every time your ex violates the agreement and you don’t document it, you’re letting that legitimate power slip away from you. And eventually, you’re teaching your ex that your legitimate power has no teeth. You’re reinforcing that they don’t have to follow the rules.

Legitimate power requires you to actually use it. Know what your custody agreement says. Know what your court orders require. Know your legal rights. And when they're violated, document it and be prepared to enforce it when the right time comes.

You might not be able to enforce it now, but at the very least, you can set your boundaries and document the violation. One of my clients has just come out of a battle around child support arrears and vacation times that lasted a year and a half and cost her $150,000 in attorneys’ fees. The judge gave her practically everything she asked for. The ink is barely dry on the judgment, and her ex is already breaching it in ways she never imagined. But there’s no point in her communicating with her attorney every time he does something else egregious because that will cost more than it’s worth.

For now, she’s setting boundaries where she can and documenting everything. She knows that, in a couple of years, her children will probably want to live with her most of the time and the court will take their views into account (she lives in a jurisdiction where this is the case). And she’s going to be SO ready with oodles of evidence showing how he can’t coparent and acts against the interests of their children just to spite her. She’s being realistic about what she can do. She’s also not being petty. This is how she’ll show the system that one of the parents takes these agreements seriously and the other one doesn’t.

Cutting your ex off at the knees: reward power

Reward power is trickier in co-parenting situations because your ability to directly control rewards and consequences for your ex is limited. There is one thing you do control, though. It’s your own responses.

Every time you take your ex’s bait, you’re rewarding their behavior. Every time you engage in the fight they’re trying to start, you’re giving them exactly what they want: your attention and your emotional energy.

When you refuse to play their game, you’re standing firmly in your power.

Gray rock. Yellow rock. BIFF responses. Canned responses. Whatever method works for you. The point is the same: stop rewarding bad behavior with the reaction your ex is fishing for.

When your ex sends you a three-paragraph email full of accusations and you respond with “Let’s stick to the facts. Exchanges will continue as scheduled,” you’re using your power to withhold the reward they’re so desperate for. You’re deliberately not feeding the drama they need to sustain their control over you.

This is reward power in reverse. You’re refusing to give them what they want. And it drives them absolutely crazy.

Coercive power: what your ex has been wielding against you

Coercive power—the ability to punish or threaten—has been your ex’s primary weapon this whole time.

They threaten to take you back to court. They threaten to pursue full custody. They threaten to ruin you financially. They threaten to make your life hell. They threaten to turn your children against you. They threaten to expose private information or maybe even intimate images of you (in some places, this last threat is a crime, BTW). They threaten to make you look crazy to everyone who matters.

This is coercive power. And they’ve been beating you over the head with it since long before you left.

Most abusers get away with exerting coercive power because it’s most effective when the person wielding it doesn’t actually have to follow through. Usually, it’s the threat that controls you, not the actual consequence.

Think about it. If they actually had all the power they claim to have, why do they spend so much time threatening you with it? If they could really take your children away or destroy you in court, why haven’t they?

The answer is usually because they can’t. Or because it’s much harder than they’re making it sound. Or because they know that actually following through would expose them in ways they can’t afford.

Once, when my ex made some legal threat against me (I can’t remember now what it was), I told my lawyer about it. I do remember my lawyer’s response, though, because it was so brilliant. He said, “Tell me again, what law school did he go to?”

His words were like a pin to a balloon. My ex’s threat was empty and hollow, because it was absolute bullshit. So often, I’ve seen victims gaslit and paralyzed for years by legal threats their ex has made that have absolutely no connection to reality. A quick Google search would clarify things for them.

Your ex is wielding coercive power as a bluff. And they’re counting on you never checking on what they say or calling their bluff. And even if they do believe what they’re saying, which is sadly common with narcissists in particular, they’re often wrong because their entitlement and their lack of self-insight blinds them to the truth.

Now, I’m not saying they have zero power. They can make your life difficult. They can file frivolous motions. They can be a pain. And yes, there is a chance that the court will enable their coercion with judgments that reduce your access and increase theirs. That happens. But that actually happens way less than you’re made to believe by the fearmongering you encounter in many online circles. And by strategically leveraging the other types of power I’ve mentioned, you can make that possibility extremely slim.

When it comes to coercive power, that gap between what they’re threatening and what they can actually do is where YOUR power lives. It’s up to you to find that gap. You’ll probably be amazed at what you learn.

One of my friends is actually in that situation right now. She was cowed for years by her ex’s threats to take her to court every time she tried to set a boundary with him as he refused permission for everything and anything he could. It wasn’t her that called his bluff in the end, but the child protection services, who removed their children from his custody for physical abuse after a teacher reported bruises on the children to them.

Since then, instead of working to repair the situation, he has been constantly filing frivolous motions against them. Because she’s the mother, she also has to be represented in court, and she’s over $100,000 down in legal fees in the last 2 years. This woman is a school teacher, not a rich person. They have the final hearing, a 10-day trial, coming up. The attorney’s fees would bankrupt her.

So she came up with a hybrid solution, where she does most of the work and she will represent herself in court. Based on her extensive documentation (she is using AI to help her find the patterns of abuse from the messages between her and her ex), her attorney is preparing questions and statements for her to use in court.

It’s a glorious thing to see someone stepping into their power like that. And I’m also noticing the side effects. She’s gaining confidence, and her fear responses and her anxiety are diminishing.

Look at what she’s doing here. She’s leveraging expert power: learning the legal system, understanding how to present evidence, using AI to analyze patterns in thousands of messages. She’s building expertise that her ex never in a thousand years thought she’d develop.

She’s wielding informational power through her extensive documentation. She has the receipts. She can show the patterns. Her evidence clearly tells a story that her ex can’t rewrite.

She’s using connection power: She found an attorney who understands the situation and is willing to work with her hybrid approach. For the last two years, she has been listening to the child protection workers and following their guidelines, even where she knew it was pointless to do so, and, in turn, they have her back. She has a cheerleading squad—a small chat group of other protective moms to vent to. They set her back on track when she gets overwhelmed or anxiety hits. She has support systems in place instead of being isolated.

She’s exercising legitimate power by preparing to stand up in court herself and help defend her children’s interests. She’s not backing down from the legal process even though it’s designed to bankrupt her.

Most importantly, she’s building referent power. Her children are watching her refuse to be intimidated and stand up to their abuser even when it’s hard. They might not know the full extent of the legal battles she’s fighting for them but they see her sitting every night, working on her documentation for court. One day, they’ll know all about the creative solutions she found instead of giving up. Even now, they can see clearly how she is the protective parent.

Shifting the power balance

Understanding these power dynamics won’t change your ex or make the family court system less broken. What it does is to give you a framework for seeing the situation more clearly.

Your ex has been working very hard to convince you that you’re powerless. They’re trying to keep you dancing on their strings through a psychological operation that depends on your compliance. Often, the threats they make are based on an egregious misunderstanding of how the system works.

When you understand that you actually hold expert power, informational power, connection power, referent power, and legitimate power, and that you control how you respond to their attempts at coercion and how you withhold rewards for bad behavior, everything shifts.

You’re not powerless. You never were.

You’re up against someone who’s very good at making you believe you are. That’s different.

Here’s what to do with this information

Start by taking inventory of the power you’re already holding. What expertise have you built? What information have you documented? What connections have you maintained or rebuilt? What legitimate rights do you have in writing? What kind of parent are you actually being day-to-day?

Then look at where you’re giving away power unnecessarily. Where are you still taking your ex’s bait? Where are you letting violations slide without setting whatever boundaries you can or documenting? Where are you isolating yourself? Where are you doubting what you know to be true or believing stuff without checking to see if it’s true? What can you do to strengthen or maintain your connection with your children in whatever ways are available to you, even when your ex makes it nearly impossible?

I’m not saying that you should become power-hungry or start playing the same manipulation games your ex plays. What you want is to stop operating from a position of powerlessness when you've actually got a shit-ton of power.

You’re dealing with someone who’s running a very specific playbook designed to keep you feeling small, reactive, and defeated. Understanding these power dynamics is how you stop playing their game and start playing yours.

Want to know how I can help you?

Ready to map out your power strategy? Book a 30-minute consultation, free of charge, and we'll identify exactly where your power lies in your specific situation and how to use it effectively.

(On a personal note: I’m still in Ireland with my mother who fell down her stairs and was hospitalized, so I’m unavailable until the end of next week when I get back to Canada.)

Want to know more about what I do?

Resources

I mentioned Tina Swithin’s book The Narc Decoder in the last newsletter (and forgot to link to it) but I wanted to add that Tina is in the final stretch of writing her long-awaited second version and YOU HAVE A CHANCE TO BE INCLUDED IN THERE (yes, I am shouting). So, check out the examples of the types of messages and their decoding from the first book here and then go and hunt for a juicy message (or messages) from your ex and submit it to Tina here. You get to have your own go at decoding it in your submission. It’s a great way to boost your expert power.