How to stop thinking about your ex and how to resist the urge to call them or take them back. This is a typical psychological thing that many people go through. This happens when you are a teenager and it happens to adults.
When you are in a relationship and the person is up close, you see all of the things that they are made up of. You see both the good and the bad. The bad things are right in your face.
If they were abusive to you, then you remember the things that they did to you, at first. Once a few days or a few weeks pass, it is common for our brains to begin to filter our the bad things about them. We will start to remember the good things for a few reasons.
One reason is that we are not alone and we feel lonely. We begin to think that maybe they were not that bad and maybe we should be more tolerant of their behaviors. We remember the nice things that they said and did for us.
We forget the bad things or they get fuzzier in our minds. We forget how frequently those things happened and we forget how badly they made us feel.
It seems that there were more good things that bad things and the bad things were not that bad anyway. Right?
NO, This is not right. If your partner was abusive, disrespectful, cruel, inconsiderate, sarcastic, jealous, manipulative, dominating, selfish or a anything else like this, then those behaviors were most of the time. People are not just sarcastic and mean once on a while.
If they made comments to make you feel like you were less than them in any way, or that your needs were less important than theirs, then they were like that all the time. There may have been times, at the beginning of the relationship when they masked those feelings, of being more important than you.
But the feelings they have about themselves being dominant over you were always there within them.
Do not let your memories play tricks with you. How many times did they really do something nice for you? Were they standing to gain from it, in any way? How much did they remind you of the nice thing that they did for you?
If they had to remind you about the time that they did something nice for you, then maybe they did it for that reason. They did that one nice thing, so that when you asked them to do something for you, they could say …”But I did something nice for you last month…”
Maybe you needed to talk to them about something and they said , “I am always listening to you. I listened to you for 2 hours that one time. You cannot dominate all the conversations. I have to get a turn too.”
Sound familiar? If it does , then don’t go back to them. Your needs will never matter and they want the entire relationship to focus only on themselves.
They want to do 1 nice thing for you,,,and then ask for 100 things from you.
Then they might throw in 1 nice thing for you. The they will remind you about how nice they were to you that 1 time, every time you want to make any requests about the relationship or talk about your relationship in any way.
They will not give you are turn to talk about things going on with with you, They will not give you a turn to talk about the relationship itself.
If any of this is true about your ex, then don’t call them. They are a narcissist and you will only cause yourself injury by reconnecting with them in any way.
The brain wants to remember the good things, The brain does not want to retraumatize itself by remembering the times your ex screamed at you, humiliated you, embarrassed you, and manipulated you by making you fear that they would leave you…or give you the silent treatment.
You have to make your brain remember things in a realistic manner. Make yourself remember the mean things they did and how thoughtless they were.
Do you really want to live that way again?
How did it feel to have to walk on eggshells all of the time, because you were afraid to make them angry at you?
How did you feel about yourself , that they were controlling what you said and what you did not say?
How many times did you want to discuss something with them, but you held it inside because you feared their response to it? How many times did you sacrifice your own needs for theirs? How much did you lose, in the relationship? What did you gain?
When you feel like you want to call your ex and you are remembering only the good things about them, try this. Make a list if 5-10 things that you really disliked that they did to you. Then make a list of things they said or did to others, that made you feel uncomfortable.
Here is a list for an example
1. Told me to always call him before interacting in any business situation, so that he could make sure my state of mind was okay and also so he could instruct me about what to say. This was for my Protection.
Then when I told him ahead of time that something like that was coming up he….made sure he was busy and unavailable to talk to me. Then made a point of my finding out that he had spent that time talking to someone else, about something unimportant and not urgent.
2. Insisted that I do work to help him with his company. Even insisted that I get on the computer late at night, telling me it was an emergency and had to done right now. Then the next day, when I asked him how it worked out, he said “Oh I did not do anything with that work you did yet. I can’t just drop everything I am doing to do that. You should be more concerned for me and less concerned about your ego and how your ideas worked out.
3. Threatened to be feeling suicidal, anytime I said anything that he did not want to deal with. Said that too much anxiety from me was going to cause him to want to kill himself.
4. Gave me money for the work I did for the company, one time, by crumpling up bills and throwing them on the table in the diner we were eating in. I felt like a prostitute picking up the bills, in front of the people in the diner, and putting them in an orderly fashion again.
I asked him not to give me money by crumpling it onto the table like that. I told him that it made me feel cheap and also they it felt like he resented paying me for the work. He then grumbles something about how everyone wants money from him.
I had not even asked for the money in the first place. He paid me the first few times, after I had done like 30 hours of work and paid me for about 5 hours of it. After the first 2 months of the relationship, he never paid me for work. I did not want to ask him, because the memory of the crumples dollars on the table made me feel like a prostitute if I asked him to pay me.
SO, I worked for him whenever he asked and neglected my own work that I needed to do. Any time I told him I needed to work on my own small business ideas, he made me feel guilty that he needed more help than I did. In the mean time, he has much more money than I do and I am barely able to buy the groceries I need each week.
5. He was rude to waitressed, hotel clerks and taxi drivers and made me feel embarrassed at his behavior to these people that he considered “lower than himself”
6. He insisted that I call him back right away, but got angry if I took too long to call him.
7. He would schedule “together time” for us and then spend the entire time ignoring me or making me work.
8. Anytime I felt upset or sad about something, he told me I was in post traumatic stress and that I was really upset about something someone had done in my past. I was not really upset with him, because he could not possibly have done anything.
9. He left me standing outside in the streets of New York City. This was after I had told him that I was afraid of the city. He left me standing on the street alone, while he brought things up to his office. He would not take me up to the office. He just left me there by myself for 10 minutes, even after i told him I was very afraid.
10. He jumped out of my car once, because he was too impatient to wait for the light to change. I was about to make the turn for the restaurant. I could see he was about to open the door to the car. I told him it made me uncomfortable for people to just jump out of my car, in the middle of traffic. I asked him to wait and we were about 30 seconds from parking. But he jumped out anyway . Then I parked at the restaurant and sat in the car and cried. he actually ordered and ate, leaving me in the car.
Now, I do not want to call him. The urge had passed. You try it. I bet it will keep you from calling them.
GentleKindness 