How to Get Over Your Ex

How to truly move forward after a breakup without your ex.

A breakup can be devastating to your confidence and self-esteem. The memories and hopes of what could’ve or should’ve been with your ex linger and pulsate through your mind. It would be great if the Men in Black would come and delete these memories. But chances are, they won’t. But I’ve outlined some ways to help you move on with your life, theres still hope moving forward.

Be Realistic About the Time

Getting over your ex, especially if you were together for a while will take some time to get over. It can be similar to mourning the death of a loved one. It does not happen overnight. With all of the plans, emotional investments and the memories that it takes to create a connection can be tough. 

The road to going without the relationship that you desired to happen is not a quick fix, I cannot lie to you. I’ve been through a couple of heart breaks. My first one came in high school, I had been cut from the varsity basketball team, failing about 4 classes and then my gf at the time broke up with me. I was devastated! All of the things I wanted most slipped away in one day.

It’s amazing how just writing about it brings back that feeling of despair that I felt as a young man. It was tough and certainly not the last time that it happened to me. This has only happened to me twice in my life. Both times, these women eventually wanted me back. I figured out that there was a sequence of events that were similar in both cases. Enough about me, in this post I’m going to outline how I got over them and started to rebuild myself.

Give Yourself Permission to Feel

As mentioned before, going through a breakup can feel like the mourning of someone near to you passing away. With that being said, it’s important to allow yourself to go through the grieving process. You need to do this for two main reasons:

• It allows you to connect with how you truly feel. Stifling your emotions will cause you to become emotionally detached from yourself and make it harder to be emotionally in tune with others.

• It helps you to truly move on with your life. A lot of people get stuck in the past because they haven’t allowed themselves to shed the pains of old relationships. They become emotionally unavailable to something new and potentially better. 

Giving yourself permission to go through the process of feeling is a good thing. For me it allowed me to explore how deep my emotions can go for someone. Most of the time this is where the jewels are and they are priceless. The true art of healing is know how far into your feelings you were and maybe just maybe that person really didn’t deserve to be there in the first place. 

Our feelings run so deep that the only way to know yourself deeper is to go swimming in them. I like to look at it like an iceberg, the tip is only about 10% of what’s hidden underneath. The only way to see the whole picture is to go under the surface. Pull out your snorkel or air tank baby, because the truth is what makes you free!

Only by going through your emotions can you get the full scope of who you truly are. Think about it this way, your ex was probably the only one who could create the environment where you could begin to explore. This is a positive thing, Looking back over those experiences, I’m glad that those women were able to help me explore my true self.

So what did I do? I gave myself permission to feel:

This was the starting point that allowed me to know what was in me initially. Over the years it allowed me to work on these areas to create a new and improved me. By looking at the reflection of my feelings it really started to make sense why I allowed myself to be in the position that I was in at these moments.

Before I got to a place of acceptance of the facts, I had to ask myself:

What Could You Have Done Differently?

Well, for me before the breakup happened, nothing! I literally didn’t know what I learned about myself until after it happened. This gave me a place to start improving myself. That was acceptable to me. It allowed me to go to work on the areas that caused me so much pain. Now when I feel them creeping up, I investigate why I feel this way. I don’t hide or suppress my feelings, I just allow and give myself permission to explore.

The truth is there’s not much that you could have of done in your previous relationship to make your ex choose what the wanted when they wanted. More than likely you did the best that you could at the time, given what you knew about yourself and them. So ask yourself, what could you have done differently? If you do come up with something, good! It’s time to go to work on improving that area.

Mainly, you can only control your portion of the relationship. What you can do better moving forward? By accepting the fact that any person at any moment could choose to walk away, was truly liberating for me. I am only responsible for my portion of the problems and they’re left to figure out their own. Without the pain of being left to figure things out how can someone improve?

Pain Produces the Best Results

You’ve heard the phrase “No pain, no gain” right? Well, it’s partially true. If you’ve went to the gym and worked out after a long time of not working out, then you know that first workout pain is a motherforya! Some people never go back to the gym because of it. But those that work through the pain, start the process of improvement and getting stronger. Those that don’t will have to start over from scratch. 

As you go through the process of improvement and becoming better, you’ll begin to notice, that the things that use to hurt, don’t hurt as much anymore. That is because you have gotten stronger in these areas. The pain now becomes your indicator of what needs to be improved and not what needs to be avoided. Many people avoid the pain of a breakup but going through the motions hurt only for a little while. But the pain of avoiding hurts for a lifetime.

Moving Forward Into the Future

If you can crystalize the lesson(s) learned from the breakup, and take anything away from it, please let it be something positive. Something that you can use as motivation to creating the best version of yourself. You cannot undo what’s been done, but you can work on what you should’ve done moving forward. 

Sure you can go out and have fun and try to medicate the pain with pleasure. But I believe it’s best to give yourself time to feel. Many people seek to avoid pain with pleasure and become pleasure seekers, whenever they experience pain. But even that has its drawbacks, many never have a serious relationship if it’s not pleasurable. Pleasure seeking is like eating only deserts and never give your body the nutrients that it needs to progress.

There’s a time and a season to everything, “A time to weep, And a time to laugh; A time to mourn And a time to dance…” Ecclesiastes 3:4 NKJV. Don’t rush the season, you just might miss the most important time.  Eventually, you have to just let it go and RIP in order to start the process of healing and moving on. Take the positive, but understand and allow yourself to feel the negative. 

Thats where the jewels lie and the self-improvement begins. 

Recap:

Breakups take time to heal from, but avoiding the healing and feeling process only creates more of the same. It’s best to allow yourself to feel what you feel, acknowledge them and make peace. Focus on improving in those areas, and forgiving your ex for doing what you believe they done. But ultimately you cannot stay in pain or pleasure and expect to heal. Over time you’ll realize that they actually did you a favor by choosing to walk away. It may not seem that way at the moment.

But as you go through the healing and self-improvement process, you’ll understand why things had to happen the way they did. Mainly you’ll appreciate yourself for going headfirst into your emotions and be grateful with what you bring back up to the surface. If you have any questions or thoughts leave them in the comment section below.

Peace & Blessings

Coach R. Anthony

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