You can throw all your stuff in the back of your car and drive away. You can curl your texting-fingers into fists that you jam in your pockets. You can pack your calendar with yoga, coffee dates and cooking classes. You can buy a dog.
But you can’t stop thinking about your Ex.
Waking up from another nightmare in which you are victimized, abandoned, or ignored by your Ex you lay in the darkness. Memories of conversations you had, or wanted to have, play in your head like movies until it’s time to get up in the grey light of morning. Coffee. Shower. Driving. Working. No matter what you’re doing, throughout your day, the bulk of your mind is focused on your Ex. What they are doing, or not doing, or who they’re doing it with. The other ten percent of your attention steers you, on auto-pilot, through the rest of your life.
Your brain has been bound up in a tight, elaborate knot by an unsolvable riddle: “What the hell happened?” It works to free itself by wrestling with old memories or speculations, one by one. If it could only understand — emerge the victor from one of these skirmishes — you might be released from the cage of obsession. But there is no final victory. The memories are indestructible, and crowd together in a mob that has no end. Your mind is stuck, hemmed in on every side by ghosts of your former life.
You’ve moved on physically. But I don’t have to tell you that moving on mentally and emotionally is very, very difficult. You want to stop, but you can’t. If you could take a big bottle scrubber to your brain, and be done, you would. But it feels impossible to get away from your Ex when they, and their army of ghosts, have taken up residence in your own head.
Step one in your recovery is understanding that the thoughts about
your Ex are an addiction. An addiction that drains energy from everything else in your life. A torment that sucks the joy out of your days. An inner obsession that keeps you from connecting with new people. An addiction that traps you in sadness, and keeps you from moving forward.
How to stop it?
Like all transformational growth work, your recovery is a process. Healing requires new understanding. Your brain is trying to do this work— make meaning from trauma, and put all the pieces together in a way that makes sense again. As you move through the steps with your community this will happen, so be patient with yourself.
But in the meantime, you deserve to have respite from rumination.
1). Stay in the present.
If you pay attention, you’ll notice that there is a distinct difference between what is actually happening, literally, right now…. And the things that you are thinking about. Thoughts about your ex are “time travelers.” They are memories of things that happened in the past, or worries about things that could happen in the future. In the actual, literal, present moment very little is usually happening. You’re sitting in a chair, looking at a laptop, or holding a phone. You’re breathing. That’s it.
As odd as this sounds, your mind can’t really differentiate between an experience that’s happening in the present moment, and what it’s thinking about. So sad or angering thoughts about your Ex will activate you in the same way that an actual interaction with them would. If you are able to notice, “I am having a thought about something that is not happening right now,” and come back into physical reality, you’ll be able to step back and detach from distressing thoughts.
2). Stop and replace.
Another way of helping yourself with rumination is to use the “stop and replace” technique. This involves planning in advance what you’d like your replacement thought to be. This might need to be a new thought, unique to each day. But it needs to be something that is pleasant, and enjoyable. An upcoming vacation, your fish-tank, LUNCH — whatever. When you notice yourself obsessing about your Ex, just say to yourself, “Stop.” And then intentionally shift to thinking about your ski trip this weekend. I’d also like to add that if you don’t currently have many things that are pleasant in your life, you need to get some. I’ll elaborate on this subject in another post.
3). Be tolerant of your emotional truth.
Both of these cognitive techniques require practice, and you will have to do them over and over again through out the day. They are not going to “heal” your obsession— only meaningful growth work will do that, and that is going to take time. Just like if you broke your arm, it’s going to hurt. The pain in your arm is saying, “I’m injured! Take care of me!” Likewise, your “stuck” mind that generates painful thoughts is saying, “Ow. I am not okay. Work on this.” So we have to respect pain and allow it to guide us to the work we need to do. You have been injured, and it is okay for you to not be okay for awhile. Accept the fact that right now your mind is an obsessive pain-factory, and that this is normal, and that it’s going to get better.
Mindfulness, shifting, and acceptance, when applied consistently, will give you some respite, allowing you little moments of sanctuary from the torment of your thoughts. And feeling even a little bit more in control of your mind is worth a lot. Are there other techniques that you have been using to help yourself during this difficult time? If so please share them in the comments -- your community benefits from your wisdom!
But you can’t stop thinking about your Ex.
Waking up from another nightmare in which you are victimized, abandoned, or ignored by your Ex you lay in the darkness. Memories of conversations you had, or wanted to have, play in your head like movies until it’s time to get up in the grey light of morning. Coffee. Shower. Driving. Working. No matter what you’re doing, throughout your day, the bulk of your mind is focused on your Ex. What they are doing, or not doing, or who they’re doing it with. The other ten percent of your attention steers you, on auto-pilot, through the rest of your life.
Your brain has been bound up in a tight, elaborate knot by an unsolvable riddle: “What the hell happened?” It works to free itself by wrestling with old memories or speculations, one by one. If it could only understand — emerge the victor from one of these skirmishes — you might be released from the cage of obsession. But there is no final victory. The memories are indestructible, and crowd together in a mob that has no end. Your mind is stuck, hemmed in on every side by ghosts of your former life.
You’ve moved on physically. But I don’t have to tell you that moving on mentally and emotionally is very, very difficult. You want to stop, but you can’t. If you could take a big bottle scrubber to your brain, and be done, you would. But it feels impossible to get away from your Ex when they, and their army of ghosts, have taken up residence in your own head.
Step one in your recovery is understanding that the thoughts about
your Ex are an addiction. An addiction that drains energy from everything else in your life. A torment that sucks the joy out of your days. An inner obsession that keeps you from connecting with new people. An addiction that traps you in sadness, and keeps you from moving forward.
How to stop it?
Like all transformational growth work, your recovery is a process. Healing requires new understanding. Your brain is trying to do this work— make meaning from trauma, and put all the pieces together in a way that makes sense again. As you move through the steps with your community this will happen, so be patient with yourself.
But in the meantime, you deserve to have respite from rumination.
1). Stay in the present.
If you pay attention, you’ll notice that there is a distinct difference between what is actually happening, literally, right now…. And the things that you are thinking about. Thoughts about your ex are “time travelers.” They are memories of things that happened in the past, or worries about things that could happen in the future. In the actual, literal, present moment very little is usually happening. You’re sitting in a chair, looking at a laptop, or holding a phone. You’re breathing. That’s it.
As odd as this sounds, your mind can’t really differentiate between an experience that’s happening in the present moment, and what it’s thinking about. So sad or angering thoughts about your Ex will activate you in the same way that an actual interaction with them would. If you are able to notice, “I am having a thought about something that is not happening right now,” and come back into physical reality, you’ll be able to step back and detach from distressing thoughts.
2). Stop and replace.
Another way of helping yourself with rumination is to use the “stop and replace” technique. This involves planning in advance what you’d like your replacement thought to be. This might need to be a new thought, unique to each day. But it needs to be something that is pleasant, and enjoyable. An upcoming vacation, your fish-tank, LUNCH — whatever. When you notice yourself obsessing about your Ex, just say to yourself, “Stop.” And then intentionally shift to thinking about your ski trip this weekend. I’d also like to add that if you don’t currently have many things that are pleasant in your life, you need to get some. I’ll elaborate on this subject in another post.
3). Be tolerant of your emotional truth.
Both of these cognitive techniques require practice, and you will have to do them over and over again through out the day. They are not going to “heal” your obsession— only meaningful growth work will do that, and that is going to take time. Just like if you broke your arm, it’s going to hurt. The pain in your arm is saying, “I’m injured! Take care of me!” Likewise, your “stuck” mind that generates painful thoughts is saying, “Ow. I am not okay. Work on this.” So we have to respect pain and allow it to guide us to the work we need to do. You have been injured, and it is okay for you to not be okay for awhile. Accept the fact that right now your mind is an obsessive pain-factory, and that this is normal, and that it’s going to get better.
Mindfulness, shifting, and acceptance, when applied consistently, will give you some respite, allowing you little moments of sanctuary from the torment of your thoughts. And feeling even a little bit more in control of your mind is worth a lot. Are there other techniques that you have been using to help yourself during this difficult time? If so please share them in the comments -- your community benefits from your wisdom!
No comments:
Post a Comment