I’ve already started getting emails coming through about my new ebook The No Contact Rule and the chapter that seems to have resonated deeply with readers has been the chapter Breaking Your Pattern by Understanding Your Compulsion. Here I share an excerpt from it which gives some initial insight into how we can essentially end up being trapped in our feelings for someone, distorting our perception of ourselves and everything else around us, and having us running back to the person to try to stem the rejection, so that we end up numb….
“Some of the women I regularly correspond with feel a compulsion to make contact with their exes. They conjure up excuses to send a text, agonise over whether to send a birthday card, worry about what he might think about the fact that she’s not supposed to be thinking about him, and will have gone through regular periods of cutting contact, albeit maybe more fleetingly. Many women cut contact physically, as in they don’t see or speak with their ex, but they stay mentally connected by moving into obsessing about him. This is effectively like conducting your relationship in spirit on an alternative planet.
Obsessing about your ex and analysing the coulda, woulda, shouldas of the relationship is about looking for reasons to blame yourself, which also become reasons for you to find a way to try to ‘fix’ things, which in turn also keeps you emotionally invested in the person and the relationship.
Of course, if you are literally consumed by your thoughts and feelings for this person, you will not only fail to move on, but you’ll end up being trapped by your own feelings.
It’s very difficult to gain objectivity, perspective, and a sense of reality if you’re submerged in an underworld of illusions. You’ll feel intrinsically tied to him irrespective of whatever pain you have been through and become convinced that having him in any way, shape, or form, is better than not having him at all in your life. And so you will opt back into the cycle and likely make contact with him and go through all the rigmarole until something else happens to cause you to feel like you have to find a way out of the relationship.
Not only will you be trapped by your feelings, often feeling paralysed unable to do anything or resist the compulsion, but you may feel isolated.
No Contact is difficult. There is a huge reward at the end of it, but particularly for those of you who are constantly fighting yourselves, you’ll struggle to recognise what the reward is because you’ll perceive the absence of him from your life as ‘punishment’.
Unfortunately by isolating yourself in your feelings, you’re putting yourself into emotional purgatory.
This happens because with your dating habits, the likelihood is that you validate yourself based on your success or lack of it, with men. You’re likely to feel invalid when you stop trying to pursue a relationship with him and will internalise the reasons as to why the relationship ‘failed’. You may not even know why you want what you want, you just know that you feel like you want it because of the fact that things have not worked out in the way that you expected.
We choose men that reflect the things that we believe about ourselves, love, and relationships, and if we are carrying a lot of negativity, we’ll find ourselves with the very type of men that we profess to want to avoid. The classic example of this is being afraid of abandonment and then finding yourself with partners who disappear on you or who keep abandoning the relationship and are completely disloyal.
The danger in having a lack of self-love is that if we seek validation in others, when we are alone, we’ll panic, and quickly try to go back to the original source for some familiarity.
If you’ve kept going back to a relationship, you don’t know how to, are afraid of, and are unprepared to deal with loss. In fact, you may be hypersensitive to loss, and rather than actually work your way through it, you just avoid going the whole hog of feeling the loss.
Avoidance of feeling the pain and professing fear of it, is about dodging the full extent of your feelings about the loss, abandonment, and any perceived rejection.
Hard as it may be for you to hear, the fact that you avoid feeling out something to the fullest extent, doesn’t change the reality. The relationship is still over, you still need to grieve it, and you’ll still feel rejected. The difference is you’re prolonging your own agony and suspending yourself in limbo. This is why you’ll end up being stuck in an illusion being completely distanced from the reality. You won’t see the real him and he’ll be able to recognise this because you need to live a lie so that the reality doesn’t pierce it.
Burying your feelings as a coping mechanism is basically shutting down. You may have numbed the pain but it will play its way out through your health, mental, and emotional state with the potential to affect how you cope with stress, family, work, and general life. It’ll feel like swimming through quicksand.”
Your thoughts? Are you consumed by your feelings for someone?
My new ebook The No Contact Rule is now available to buy and provides a dedicated guide to cutting contact so that you can gain back your power and move on to real love. For a no holds barred guide to emotionally unavailable men and the women that love them, you can also get Mr Unavailable & The Fallback Girl. For personal advice or analysis of your relationship/situation, check out my consultation service.
{ 52 comments }
← Previous Comments
I believe when the student is ready the teacher appears!!! This website has been my teacher and I am sooooo ready for a change. I am thankful for all the insite. I have spent too much time picking myself apart and thinking, if I didn’t say this or that or if I should of called or not called. It always seemed that their was something I was doing to change the dynamic. I realize now, that a eum/ac is….just that. I am successful, independant, attractive women, who choose to be with these people because of my own issues. I can’t be any more thankful for learning to get off my ass and start doing things that make my life happy and more fulfilling.The nc rule is going to be good, hopefully. I have had the unfortunate pleasure of having two of them back to back. One being and alcholic and the other a workaholic. I know it is easy ladies to believe that they aren’t capable of loving or somehow they are a wounded puppy that needs rescuing. The truth is they are capable but chose NOT to be, at least with you/me. I think the most important part of this is for me to stay focused on ME!!! and stop accepting blame for things I now know are not my fault. If only….blah blah…blah!!! I would like to live in their perfect world, hahaha…they can’t possible believe that they do no wrong. I see that it is all manipulation and I never realized that I had a low self asteem but I obviously must. To be willing to accept such crumbs and act like I am getting the whole pie. Silly girl, I am embarrassed to have been such a fool. I used to think that because I would say, “That is unacceptable” and thought I had some dignity but saying it and doing something about it are two totally different things. I agree no explanation is needed, that is huge for me. I always had the desire to be the nicer person and explain everything, heaven forbid someone think ill of me. But I am hopefully learning because of this site, that the only way to be that good person is to truly love myself enough and accept that people are what they are and not what we HOPE they will be.
I know that i will have a hard time at first but i decided to block ac/eum from my cell phone, at least that will help me to stay strong and not accept his calls. Which i may add run hot and cold. Its so interesting to me that so many people are in my boat. Thank u ladies for sharing you stories they really are helpful.
It seems that everytime I say to myself this is it, I deserve better, all he has to do is call and I am on the phone all gooey. Whats with that? I then think oh, he must really miss me and realise how good I am. I really want to get through this. I believe with the help of this site and me trying to stay focused on me and focusing on how much better my life will be, i am going to make it. Thank you all….I am humbled by this reality, that it is ME. I think I have to understand that it is not that if I love him enough or I say nothing and go with his program that this will work out. I need to accept that it won’t no matter what i do and when he finally does call and blames me something, I need to understand that it is NOT me needing to be more understanding. It is him having no regard for me and my feelings. So I am on day #1 of the ncr. The road seems long right now but I must have faith in this site and all you ladies that nc and no explanation is the right thing for me to do. He wll think what he wants with an explanation or not. My prayers are with all of you and my congraduations to the ones who have already made it!!! I hope that I will be on the other side looking back with a rich full happy life, again!!!
Definitely in your boat!! I’m still in the random text and random facebook message phase, and actually still in denial that we are actually no longer together. we’ve broken up plenty times in the past, but this is the first time i even LOOKED at sites like this. Because I think deep inside, I know its over. I have been OBSESSED with him for almost ten years but Jeez…SO MUCH BAGGAGE that only came up right before we’re getting married. As I said in my blog, I pray either he CHANGES (cmon..) or that I WILL BE OK. I think the No Contact Rule is step one =)
.-= Trippy´s last blog ..and on other things… =-.
← Previous Comments