They say the opposite of love is not hate, the opposite of love is indifference. The truest test of your progress or closure about the end of a relationship is whether you can truly just nothing them.

The ends of relationships can be so emotionally hurtful. When you’ve been together for awhile, you know what makes one another feel great, but you also know each others’ vulnerabilities. You know how to truly hurt one another in ways that have an impact. People play on their former partner’s biggest insecurities, worst fears, and biggest problems.

A lot of potential clients contact me wanting to get their revenge. They want to make a petty move that will cause the other side to spiral. Those people don’t become my clients unless I can talk them out of that mindset. I’ve had people wanting to serve their soon-to-be-ex on Valentine’s Day or their anniversary. I’ve had people who moved out of a shared residence wanting to kick the other person out because they moved in a new partner. I’ve seen kids and parenting schedules be negotiated to inflict maximum pain and suffering on the other parent. It’s terrible what people will choose to do to one another when they’re hurting and angry.

But it can’t matter. As with any bullying scenario, they keep doing it because it gets a reaction. The most satisfying thing is to not react and then watch the other person spiral themselves into a fury because they can’t get to you.

I’ve recently read David Goggins’ book Can’t Hurt Me and he talks about a concept he calls “taking souls”. He uses this in reference to being so mentally tough that when his instructors were tormenting him and his fellow crew during hell week he flipped it back on the instructors to show that they weren’t impacting him. It had the effect of shifting the dynamic and throwing the instructors off their game.

We see this kind of dynamic all over the world and throughout history. The people that think they have power and leverage that power over others are deprived of that power simply by being treated as unimportant.

If you don’t let your former partner get to you anymore, they don’t have a hold over you. You can’t let it matter. You can’t control a million things about their life anymore but they can’t control anything about yours either. Move forward and find your own way. Don’t let them matter in your life anymore and they soon actually won’t.

You don’t need to stoop to their level, you don’t need an eye for an eye. If they have been terrible to you, so what? They have to live with that, you don’t. And if you engage in that fight and swing down to their level, then you have to live with the knowledge that they still have power over you. They can still get to you. Don’t give away your power.

Just move forward on your own terms.