Julie

Getting Over A Break Up

Posted on May 1, 2016 by Julie

Getting over a break up is like getting over a hangover. Everyone wants a remedy, a quick-fix, or a secret way to bypass the discomfort.

Experts will tell you they know a five-step program that’s guaranteed to help you successfully get over a break up. Others will supply you with endless lists of things to do such as journaling, exercising, or even burning an effigy of your ex.

There’s at least a little bit of worth in every “getting over a break up” remedy, but each one will only offer you temporary relief from the discomfort, endless thoughts and analysis, and loneliness that accompanies any break up. That’s why there are so many remedies. When one fails, you can just jump over and try another in an endless cycle of dissatisfaction.

In the end, as much as we don’t like to acknowledge it, just like a hangover, the only thing that gets us over a break up is good, old-fashioned, deeply-frustrating, patience-requiring time.

HOWEVER, while we are waiting for that time to pass, there are some helpful things that you can do to make things easier on yourself. One of those things includes understanding why you’re struggling in the first place. Once you know why you’re struggling, it’s easier to weed out the bullshit remedies and find ones that are actually helpful.

Why do break ups feel so uncomfortable on a physical level?

Human beings are biologically wired to like stability. We instinctively gravitate towards it, work to create it, and fight to protect it. Not only do we like for our internal systems to be stable, but we like our external environments to be stable as well. Why? Because back in the caveman days, a lack of stability threatened our chances of survival. Therefore, we are biologically wired so that when stability drops, we feel a sense of anxiety. It is believed that this anxiety is there to prompt us to rebuild or bolster stability until things feels safe and secure again.

Now, back to the present day, we may rationally know that a break up usually doesn’t threaten our survival. The problem is that our body (and inner reptilian brain) doesn’t know that. It treats a break up the same way it would treat the realization that our entire food supply gathered for winter was eaten by another animal. Our stability has been compromised, and anxiety will ensue until that stability has been regained.

Today, various things in our lives contribute to our overall feeling of emotional stability and security. These things might include:

Relationships with friends
Relationships with our families
A sense of security in our occupations
A relationship with a therapist or counselor
A sense of confidence and mastery we get from engaging in favorite hobbies
Stability we feel from engaging in daily routines and rituals
How well we’re doing with our finances or how much money we have in the bank
Our physical health through exercising, eating, and sleeping well
A connection to some sort of spiritual or mysterious other
and, of course, our relationship with a romantic partner

The Stability Game

To illustrate the concept of stability further, let’s play The Stability Game.

Pretend I give you 100 Stability Tokens and ask you to allocate these 100 tokens to each of the 10 bullet items – or Life Categories – listed above. The game rules specify that you must allocate at least one token to each Life Category. To win the game you must hold on to as many stability tokens as possible because: the higher the tokens, the lower your anxiety level. If one of the specified Life Categories is threatened in the game, you will lose all the tokens allocated to that particular category.

So, knowing the rules, you might choose to disperse your 100 Stability Tokens equally across the 10 Life Categories, allocating 10 tokens to each (10 x 10 = 100 for all you geniuses out there). Strategically, this is the safest move because if one of the 10 Life Categories is damaged or destroyed in the game, you will only lose a maximum of 10 tokens. Your overall stability may be reduced by 10%, but you will still have 90% of your stability allocated to other Life Categories, and you could probably rebuild that 10% in a fairly short amount of time.

However, if you decided to put 1 token into 9 of the Life Categories and 91 tokens into the 10th Life Category, you are taking a risk. If one of the 9 life areas with 1 token is damaged or destroyed in the game, you still have 99% of your stability, but if that 10th area is damaged or destroyed, your overall stability level drops to 9%. Not only will 9% to 100% take a much longer time than 90%, you will be riddled with 9x the anxiety. Sounds fun.

The Real World (not MTV’s shitty version)

We are rarely as strategic in our real lives as we might choose to be in The Stability Game (Ugh – thanks, emotions!!). In real life, our Stability Tokens are rarely scattered equally between the areas of our lives that provide us with stability. Many people put many more than just 10 tokens into that 10th item of ‘a romantic partner.’ In reality, many of us rely on our partners for stability and security much more than other areas of our lives, and there isn’t anything wrong with that… But it does have its consequences. It means that if the relationship is shaken, damaged, or lost, we will find our entire stability greatly shaken, damaged or lost, also.

A real allocation of tokens for a person in their 20s or 30s might look more like this:

Friends – 13/10
Family – 7/10
Job or School – 8/10
Therapist/Counselor – 1/10
Hobbies – 3/10
Daily Routines – 12/10
Finances – 3/10
Health – 6/10
Spiritual Connection – 4/10
and, of course, a Romantic Partner – 33/10

That’s right, 33/100 for our romantic partner, meaning close to one-third of our total stability goes into that relationship. So, quite naturally, if something happens to that relationship, we have lost a third of our overall stability. This causes us to experience a very high amount of anxiety as our body triggers us to rebuild that missing third.

The Hard Truth

Unfortunately, this second scenario, while just an example, has a lot of truth to it. In most cases, when we fall in love and get into a relationship, we give less attention to other areas of our lives. That just has to happen. When you add a romantic relationship to your life, a new item has entered the equation. Naturally, other items in our lives will now get less attention. There’s only so much time and attention to go around. We’re not miracle workers!

However, many of us end up not only giving other areas of our lives less attention, we often straight-up neglect or abandon them altogether. Sometimes we neglect and abandon friendships, sometimes hobbies. Sometimes we stop going to the gym as much, or we struggle to maintain our daily routines. Sometimes we even start daydreaming at work, or chatting with our partner online, and our work ethic suffers.

I get it! Those pesky emotions have gotten involved, again! Having a relationship is fun, intoxicating, and incredibly distracting. However, over time, our relationship starts to stand in for more and more of the stability in life. The more things we lose during our relationship, the more the breakup (IF it occurs) is going to suck.

What to do NOW

So, since you’re reading this I’m guessing it’s probably way too late to go back and keep those other areas of our lives thriving. Which is OK, but guess what we’ve got to do now: build them up.

After a break up and one’s stability is threatened, your clever but unintelligent mind will urge to get that stability back as quickly and easily as possible. This can involve your mind floating thoughts through it that involve getting back together with your ex. It makes sense! It’s the easiest, quickest way to regain that stability, but DON’T LISTEN! It’s a shit strategy. You aren’t getting out of this break up quickly and easily, unless you want a temporary fix – which never works in the long run.

Instead of getting back together with your ex or going on the prowl for a boyfriend stand-in, start building up the other areas of your life. Slowly but surely you will begin to get that stability back. Here are some examples of what I mean:

Friendships: Call up a friend you haven’t spoken to in awhile. Mend past relationships and make new ones.
Family: Get back in touch with your family (if they are a positive, supportive influence) and reach out to them on a regular basis.
Job or School: Get enthusiastic about a new project at work or school (if that’s possible). Or maybe it’s time to look for a new job that actually gets you excited to wake up in the morning.
Therapist: Maybe you need to start seeing a therapist to have an extra person in your life who you can lean on, and who offers unbiased, objective emotional support.
Hobbies: Get back to whatever hobbies you love, or start ones you’ve always wanted to try. Join a sports league, take a class, or sign-up for a workshop.
Daily Routines: Re-establish your daily routines to help you feel grounded.
Finances: Make sure everything is in order (as best as it can be), start saving up for a trip, get back on track with your budget, or give to a charity you support.
Health: Get back to the gym or whatever type of exercise you enjoy. Make sure you’re eating healthy, and get an adequate amount of sleep.
Spiritual Connection: Join a meditation group, or any other activity that connects you to your higher power.

The point is, there is no one specific way to get over a break up, but there are things you can do while you’re working through it.

Because you now know why you’re doing these things, you can make a plan that works best for you. The key is building stability and security back into your life so you can feel as comfortable and safe as possible without a partner.

TWO FINAL NOTES

Final Note #1: Getting over any break up WILL require you to go through a period of time during which you feel uncomfortable, anxious, sad, angry, and everything in between. That’s a given and there’s NO way around it. You can trick yourself with drugs and alcohol, endless distractions, a new relationship, a make-up and break-up (again!) with your ex, and other methods of temporary relief, but in the end, these will just represent wasted time during which you could have been REBUILDING STABILITY.

Final Note #2: One of the most important things to remember is: It’s totally and completely normal for your mind to bother you with thoughts related to reaching out to your ex or rekindling the relationship. EXPECT THOSE THOUGHTS. Do not fall into the trap that those are unique thoughts to your special situation, and thus, you should listen to them. Those are universal thoughts that everyone experiences in one break up or another. It’s your body’s attempt to regain stability in the quickest way possible because it will do anything to stop feeling pain.

So, get over the fact that there’s no easy way to get over a break up, and get out there and start rebuilding. The pain only lasts as long as the stability remains broken. Mend the stability, and the comfort will return. How you mend it is up to you…

Breaking Up and Getting Back Together: A Cycle of Insanity

Posted on April 1, 2016 by Julie

In this day and age, I’d be hard pressed to find someone who didn’t at least know of a couple who has gotten stuck in that cycle of breaking up and getting back together over and over again. Many of us have done it ourselves in one – or two – or ten relationships.

Albert Einstein defined insanity as: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

I love this definition because I think it’s so true. When we get back together with an ex for the umpteenth time, we are, essentially, doing the same thing over and over and over again. We think that it will be different this next time. Maybe you and your ex had a really good talk and you’re sure things are going to change. Maybe things even do change for a small amount of time. But sooner or later, we find ourselves falling back into the same routines, the same patterns, the same arguments, the same problems, and after a little while, breaking up is back on the menu, served cold.

Firstly, let me specify: I’m not talking about the couple that that broke up and got back together ONE time. It’s very normal, and IMO, it’s OK for a couple to break up once and get back together – for whatever reason. Maybe they want to date around, maybe one or both partners think it’s best, maybe someone cheated or strayed or betrayed and they need the time apart to let emotions settle. Then, over time, they talk it through, or finish exploring, or realize they made a mistake, and they get back together, and they STAY THAT WAY – together… Or they break up FOREVER. There isn’t a constant returning to what was.

This blog is about the couples that are so on-again, off-again, their friends and family have lost count of how many times they’ve broken up and aren’t even sure what the couple’s current status is in any moment. The people in their lives have grown apathetic to the trials and tribulations of that particular couple, because they know that their advice to either party will fall to a deaf ear. Friends and family have long lost the desire to assist with the couple’s relationship because they know the couple will do whatever they’re going to do anyway. The couple’s behavior is impulsive, predictable in its unpredictability, highly emotionally-driven, irrational, and, I’m sorry to say it, but someone has to: immature.

If you’re one of those couples right now, don’t think I’m judging you. The majority of us have been there, done that in at least one of our relationships, and many of us will do it in the future. However, this blog is an attempt to help you navigate the murky, unsettling channels of on-again, off-again relationships and help you gain some clarity on why you’re doing it and how to stop.

Why do couples break up and get back together over and over again?

If you’ve read my stuff before, you might know that I find it extremely important to explain to my audience why people do what they do. You can’t move forward and implement strategies and changes in your life effectively if you don’t understand why things are happening in the first place.

So, here we are. Why do so many people do it? Why do so many couples break up and get back together numerous times?

Well, there’s no one specific reason that scientific research has proven to be true in this particular context, but there are many scientifically supported theories that, when put together, help us get a greater understanding of what’s going on.

1. Our biological wiring

As I’ve said in posts before, we are wired to maintain stability, both in our bodies as well as in our external environments. In the caveman days, this sort of wiring kept us alive. It kept our internal systems functioning properly, and it kept us working to keep our external environments safe. Because of this wiring, it is included in it that when stability breaks down, anxiety increases. This is so that the anxiety will prompt us to rebuild, replace, or re-establish that breakdown of stability. The more unstable we feel, the more anxiety we feel.

When we go through a breakup, stability in some form and to some degree, is threatened and lost. The form and degree depends on how much you relied on your ex for support, in any form. If your ex provided you with 40% of the stability you felt in your life, when he walks out the door, you will have lost 40% of your stability. Your anxiety levels will skyrocket and your body will tell you that something is wrong and something is missing.

Here’s the important difference though: while something is wrong, and something is missing, we have to realize that the body does NOT know the difference between stability shaken by a break up and stability shaken by a lion entering the territory. It reacts to both the scenarios the same way. That’s why it’s normal after you break up with someone to feel, at times, incredibly intense anxiety, fear, and sadness similar to the degree that you might feel it if your actual life was in danger. You might have alarm bells going off in your mind saying, “warning! Warning! Something is majorly wrong! Fix the situation immediately! You are in danger!”

However, take a deep breath, because you are not actually in danger of death, and it’s important that you realize this. Those warning bells fire up areas of the brain that prime us to fight for our lives. In these moments, hormones are coursing through our bloodstreams that actually shut down the rational, critical thinking areas of our brain. That is why it becomes nearly impossible to think rationally, and that’s why we have many, many irrational urges to engage in impulsive behaviors. We become wounded, adrenaline-driven, emotional, impulsive, and unpredictable animals if we don’t realize what’s happening.

2. The Mind in its infinite cleverness

Have you ever noticed what happens when you tell yourself to stop thinking about something? Usually, you, then, can’t think about anything else other than the one thing you told yourself not to think about.

The mind is a tricky, tricky thing. As I’m sure you noticed, after you break up with an ex, it will flood you with thoughts and impulses related to your ex, constantly. It does that for different reasons. One reason is that that’s just the way the mind is. It’s a constantly chattering voice that never stops commenting for even a few seconds. It’s a tool that we have overused and identified with strongly throughout the decades and now it runs a muck in our heads, thinking, thinking, thinking, analyzing everything, and never-ceasing for a moment.

One thing that’s important to know about the mind, and I’m not talking about the brain. The mind is what I also refer to as the ego, it’s the voice that you hear constantly in your head. The brain is an organ and a tool. The mind can be a tool, but 95% of the time, it isn’t used for that purpose. As one of my favorite spiritual teachers once said, “the mind is clever, but it’s not intelligent,” and this is true. In time of emotion, pain, or any form of discomfort, the mind will pop in and give you a suggestion on what you can do to make that discomfort go away. This is another type of wiring we have: to avoid unpleasantness at all costs. The mind will often suggest whichever is the easiest, most reliable, quickest way to ease the discomfort, even if, intelligently, the choice is not in your best interest. This is why when alcoholics feel anxiety, their mind tells them to drink. The mind is being clever in that it is fixing the problem of the anxiety. However, the fix is a shitty fix because it’s only temporary and usually significantly harms the person’s life in the long-term.

When you are lonely, depressed, and anxious about your ex, the mind will give you suggestions to stop feeling that anxiety. Usually, the easiest, most reliable, quickest way to ease the discomfort and regain stability is to just go back to the way your relationship was, or get back together. After all, getting back together is much faster and easier than:

Meeting someone new, and gradually over time building a relationship that is as stable as the one you just hopped out of.
Being alone and gradually learning to tolerate the discomfort of loneliness, rebuilding your life as a single person.

However, while these are the more intelligent ways, the mind isn’t interested in them, because they won’t ease your discomfort NOW. You have to make the conscious decision to override your mind and do what’s best for you in the long-run, while not engaging in a quick fix in the moment that will lead to more heartache in the near future.

3. Technology makes it difficult to disconnect from our ex

This one is especially true for the younger generations.Today, it’s incredibly easy to stay connected to each other and that has served many important purposes in the advancement of civilization. However, when it’s important not to be connected to someone, or important to actively disconnect from someone completely, technology makes things more challenging.

Decades ago, when our parents and grandparents were growing up, they didn’t have cell phones or the Internet, or they didn’t use them nearly as much. People were not constantly connected through email, online chatting, smart phones, apps, facebook, twitter, texting, video hang outs – the list is endless. It was much much easier to disconnect from people when we needed to.

Back in the day, if you had an impulse to talk to your ex, and you had the two options of finding a landline phone and making a call to your ex’s family’s house phone or actually going to the house to call on him or her, between the impulse and actually carrying out the action you have much more space and time. In that space, you have more time to think about if you really want to do what you’re doing, and more time to abort the mission.

These days, if you’re sitting in your room and you’re overcome by a sudden sadness and loneliness of missing your ex, followed by an impulse to reach out, and you have a cell phone in your hand at that moment. It takes maybe two seconds to shoot off a text to your ex and make connection. That’s not enough time to think!

We were already impulsive beings to start with, with minds that are wired to tell you the fastest way to a quick fix, but now we have technology allowing us the luxury of turning any impulse into action if we so choose. It’s a recipe for disaster.

The Cycle in a Nutshell

So, here’s a glimpse of what a typical on-again, off-again relationship cycle could look like:

You’re in a relationship and you decide to break up.
The stability in your life is suddenly decreased, and with it, your anxiety increases.
Your body enters attack mode and tells you you’re in danger, so your emotions intensify and it makes it difficult to think rationally.
You become more impulsive and your mind tells you to get back together because that will restore stability.
You are miserable (because breakups are uncomfortable, no matter what) and start to think that maybe because you’re miserable, it means you made a mistake.
Technology allows you to reach out and connect with your ex in this impulsive, frightened state.
You both make the irrational decision to give it another try (to avoid anymore of the discomfort associated with being broken up).
Stability is re-established, so anxiety and other emotions decrease.
You are able to use your rational mind and rationalize your decision to get back together.
Everything’s going well until it starts to fall apart for the same reasons it did in the first place (because you two didn’t actually fix anything).
You decide to break up.

And it starts all over again…

In another post, I’m going to tell you what you can do about this, but I’ll leave you here for now with the basic understanding of what the fuck is even going on! Sometimes a little insight is all we need to begin to take some steps toward change.

Can I Be Friends With My Ex?

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Julie

This is a question I hear often and something I see many clients and friends attempt to do. The answer is both a potential Yes and No.

Assuming you have just recently broken up, here is how I would answer that question:

Yes, you can be friends with your ex… Eventually.
No, you cannot be friends with your ex right now.

“No Contact? No Way!”

Being friends with an ex immediately following a relationship is rarely, rarely, rarely, rarely (did I mention, rarely?) something that can happen quickly after following a break up. Don’t for one second think that you are or will be the exception. The likelihood is that you’re not the exception and you might as well face the music like 99.9% of everyone else. You can’t be friends with an ex (and have it even remotely resemble a healthy friendship) immediately following a breakup.

In fact, I often tell my clients, if you really want to be friends with your ex, if that friendship is so important to you, then you would want to do it in a healthy way. A healthy way involves a chunk of time with absolutely NO contact. That’s right. No texting, no emails, no phone calls, no hanging out, no hanging out with and around the same friends, no chat apps, no video chats, no writing letters with a quill and ink. To sound like your grandma: no good will come of it!

Most of the time when I tell people this, especially women, they start to protest. I get it. Breaking it up is a hard thing to do. If it were easy, everyone would do it effortlessly and I wouldn’t have anything to write about it. You’re severing a tie with someone who was most likely one of the people in your life to whom you were the closest. You shared intimacy, love, dreams, your bodies, secrets, and toothbrushes (ok, that one time was an accident, but it didn’t wig you out that much because it was your boo’s). This person may have been your best friend and now that you’re breaking up, not only are you losing a romantic partner and lover, but you have to lose a best friend too? Yep. That’s the deal.

So, whyyyyyyyyyyyyyy (that’s supposed to sound whiny) do you need to have no contact with your ex?

The Long Answer

You probably knew that most therapists are not allowed to be friends with their clients. This is due to licensing boards that set rules and boundaries for therapists in order to protect the public. You may have even known that these licensing boards do not usually encourage any relationship between a therapist and a client other than that of the client-therapist relationship. Even finding yourself in the same yoga class as a client is considered a type of relationship (you’re both yoga class participants) and it is usually discouraged. Regardless, we’re all human, and sometimes therapists and clients develop feelings for each other, and I don’t even mean romantic or sexual feelings necessarily, they can be feelings of closeness akin to friendship. When I practiced traditional psychotherapy, I definitely had a handful of clients who I would have loved to be friends with. Having therapized some awesome women with similar interests, we would’ve loved to grab lunch or coffee on occasion and gab.

However, if a therapist and client decide they want to have a relationship other than that of therapist and client, there are rules that they must follow before they can do so or the therapist’s license could be in jeopardy. Each license has a different board, and each board has different rules. One of the rules that is standard throughout the boards is that there must be a time limit between the date that therapy terminates and the date the therapist and client become “something else” during which there is NO CONTACT of any kind. Each board has a different rule as far as how much time has to elapse. I can’t remember which is which, but one board says the amount of time of no contact must be two years, another board says one year, one board may even say 6 months, and one says never. However, what I think is significant is the fact that regardless of the time period, every single board agrees that there must be a significant chunk of time during which there is absolutely no contact.

Why the No Contact rule is Important

No contact allows us time for our emotions, bodies, and hormones to settle. It’s kind of like taking a time-out. It may be extremely hard at first since breaking up is like getting the wind knocked out of you or the rug pulled out from under you. However, we need to be able to ground ourselves back in rational thought and the only thing that can truly help us with that is time.

Now, I’m not implying that all your decisions need to be made from a place of rationality, but you need enough room in your body and brain for rational thought to at least make an appearance once in awhile. Emotions often consume our thoughts and bodies to the point that there isn’t any room for rational thought to come out to play. If you don’t let it play, all of your actions will be emotional, reactive, impulsive, and often unpredictable. Believe me, that’s not the way you want to live your life.

If you haven’t recently broken up with your ex, I will ask you to rhetorically answer the question of: did you two ever have a period of time during which there was no contact, and if so, how long did it last? If you didn’t even have one, or it didn’t last very long, chances are there are a lot of emotions still at play on one or both sides. This means the friendship isn’t healthy, it’s a front. Congratulations, you’ve done a great job of pretending.

Still think you can be friends now?

If you truly think you can be friends with your ex right now, I need you to ask yourself one question: Are you sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that your ex is capable of being JUST friends with you? It doesn’t matter how emotionally ready you are to begin a friendship with your ex, your friendship will never be healthy unless you both are emotionally ready. I’ve seen many exes claim to be ready, and I’ve seen many exes try, but I’ve seen very few succeed because usually one or both were not emotionally settled enough to begin that journey.

Even if you feel ready, it may be a selfish move to pull him or her into a friendship, especially if you know he or she still has romantic feelings for you. Try to be compassionate and look out for your ex. After all, you two used to be partners.

Trust Your Instincts

Break ups are hard because they are sudden and drastic. The human body and brain isn’t wired to like sudden, drastic changes. We like stable, gradual changes over a long period of time – sudden changes make us nervous. However, because life is just like that sometimes: sudden and drastic, the human body and brain is also amazing at adapting, and those are the skills you need to pull out now. Not communicating will be hard at first, no doubt! But you will get used to it as you adapt to it over time. Patience, dear one.

Should I Break Up Over Bad Sex? 5 Questions to Ask Yourself

Posted on January 1, 2016 by Julie

This is a great question, and like all great questions, it leads to more questions. Here are some questions you should ask yourself if you’re considering breaking up with your partner because the sex just isn’t cutting it.

1) Has the sex always been sub par?

I used to joke that it takes six times of sleeping with a new partner before you can evaluate if the sex is going to be good or not – and while this was a joke, as with all great jokes, there’s some truth to it. Six times was just a number I made up but it was emphasizing that you can’t judge sex after the first time with a new partner… or the second… or even the third. You’re getting to know someone new and that partner is getting to know you. You could be the stallion of all love makers, waltz into my bedroom, and I still wouldn’t be convinced you’d know how to fuck me well. Everyone has their own preferences, quirks, things they like and don’t like, and you have to figure that out. That will take a little time and experience with each other, and you have to allow your relationship not only an increasing sex tally, but also the closeness and comfort that comes with continuing to date and be together, romantically. As you continue to date someone and grow closer to him or her, you will feel more comfortable making adjustments in the bedroom or asking for pointers as far as what your partner likes. As your comfort level rises, usually your communication will improve, and hopefully this translates into the bedroom as well.

Now, if we’re talking about a relationship in which you’ve been together a couple years and have been having sex for a long time, we have a totally different issue at play. At the beginning of relationships you have all kinds of hormones working for you: dopamine to name one. When you first start dating someone new, biochemically speaking, you are literally high on natural drugs produced by your body. The sex is always going to be better at the beginning because of the pleasure inducers your body is shelling out. Further, it’s exciting and mysterious – you’re getting to know a new partner! Esther Perel, a world-renowned relationship and sex specialist, says that passion flourishes with mystery and comfort flourishes with intimacy. When we first meet someone, there’s a ton of mystery and passion levels are high. However, as we continue dating them, and oxytocin levels (the hormone that works in attachment and bonding) are flying high, we start establishing intimacy. Two years down the road and we’re convinced all mystery is gone, passion is dead, and intimacy is flourishing like the stupid cock block that it is. However, this is incredibly normal and to be expected in all relationships. Those hormonal levels at the beginning of the relationship do not, scientifically proven, sustain themselves. How to increase mystery through mindful sex is another blog entirely. Just do not fret and break up yet because there may be some alternatives, and if you do, you may find yourself in the same situation with a different partner five years from now.

2) How comfortable are you and your partner when it comes to discussing sex and things of a sexual nature?

Communication in the bedroom is key for passion and healthy sex to sustain itself. If you or your partner have a difficult time discussing issues in the bedroom, this could mean you will have a difficult time on the road to GoodFucks town. If you have trouble with discussions regarding sex, are you in the minority? No way! You’re in the majority for sure! However, don’t celebrate your normalcy just yet because this majority is having trouble between the sheets, as you may have noticed. Being able to have calm, respectful, and even playful discussions about sex with your partner is extremely important. In order for your sex life to be good, you need to be able to tell your partner what you like and don’t like, and find out the same for your partner. I had one client who was bored out of her mind with the sex of a new relationship. Yet, when I asked her why they never tried different positions or discussed her lack of enthusiasm, she was overcome with anxiety and stammered that it just wasn’t worth it, she’d rather break up and move on. She was sure that good lovers naturally know their way around a woman’s body, I’ve heard they even cause their mothers orgasms on the way out of the womb, and she was determined to find one of these urban legend lovers so she would never have to speak about sex to anyone. Good luck, as I said before, because he can be the greatest lover, but he still doesn’t know your body, and every woman is different in what she likes. If he walks in sporting the skillset acquired from his last relationship, we definitely know he knew something about how to please her. However, with regard to his new partner, he could be spot on, kinda good, or even downright terrible. It all depends on how well you can communicate with him about issues in the bedroom.

3) How well do you know your own body and your sexual preferences?

Do you masturbate often? Do you have much experience masturbating? Have your taken a mirror and checked out all your hidden nooks and crannies? Do you feel comfortable touching your body… everywhere? Do you know how you like to be touched? Fast or slow? Hard or soft? Do you know if you like to be dominated or pushed to submit? Do you know if you like to do the dominating? Do you have a feel for how you like the power dynamic to be in the bedroom? Do you like biting or pain? Do you like props? Are you incredibly uncomfortable right now just reading these questions?

My main question is: how well do you know yourself sexually? If you don’t know yourself very well in the downtown-julie-brown department and can’t answer many of the above questions, then I must ask, my dear one, how well will you be able to communicate the answers to your lover? One step further, even if you don’t know, which is still OK, how open are you to exploring these questions with a partner and how open is your partner to doing that with you? How safe is the relationship for this type of sexual exploration? These questions will help guide you to figuring out what you need. But if the sex is bad and you have no idea what you like, how is your partner supposed to have the slightest clue either?

4) Are you and/or is your partner open to exploration?

I touched on this briefly in the question before this one, but I want to emphasize it because it’s an important question. If the sex is bad, and you’re with a partner that is too uncomfortable to explore new or other things, then, it’s quite likely that the sex won’t have the chance to improve. If sex is bad, it’s hardly ever a sign that two people aren’t supposed to be together, or that it’s never going to work. The same thing goes for if sex is amazing – it does not mean that you are in any way soul mates. However, if the sex isn’t grand, and you’re paired with a partner who is completely closed off to the idea of trying out things in an attempt to improve the situation, that does not bode well for the sex. You both have to be open to the idea of making things better or else how can anything change? You can’t sit around and wait for Syd the Sex Archer to come shoot you with his sexy-times-guaranteed arrow and watch gratefully as the sex miraculously changes from dull to dangerously dirty. Bad sex doesn’t mean either one of you is necessarily bad at sex, but it does require an open-mind on both ends if you want to make it better.

5) Do you and your partner have different sexual preferences?

Let’s assume that you’ve done a lot of exploration alone and with others – and so has your partner – but you’re finding that your preferences aren’t really meshing. There are a ton of examples I could give:

You both like to be dominant (or submissive) and neither of you gets off on playing the other role

One of you likes things a little rough (biting, pinching, slapping, etc.) and the other only gets off on the gentle stuff
One of you likes to play the slave while the other prefers things be equal between the sheets
One of you likes condescending dirty talk, while the other just can’t get into it or doesn’t feel comfortable degrading the other

This does not have to be a make-or-break situation, but it does require some patience and a unique brand of compromise. Firstly, if you’re committed to giving it a go despite sexual preference differences, you’ll need extremely open communication in the bedroom – there’s no getting around it. If you can’t talk about what you like and don’t like in a sex session, you’ll both just end up frustrated, resentful, or unhappy. Secondly, explore if you and/or your partner aren’t into something because you’ve tried it several times and you know you don’t like it – or maybe you’ve never tried it and are assuming you won’t. In this case, you might be wrong, and if you’re open to it, you might as well try it. Further, maybe you did something with an ex and didn’t like it, but there were a million confounding variables in that situation that aren’t necessarily present in your current relationship. Maybe your last ex was an asshole so when he treated you like a slut in the bedroom, it made you upset. However, if your current lover is a wonderful, gentle person, when he treats you dirty in the bedroom, you know its an act, and you actually start to enjoy the role he’s playing.

The walkaway point remains that bad sex in a relationship is disappointing, but it’s usually fix-able, and at the very least, worth a shot. I’m a firm believer that satisfying sex is a birthright, so you are more than deserving of it in your relationship. However, if the sex isn’t satisfying, that doesn’t have to mean that the relationship is over. Ask these five questions and be very honest in your answers. Your best sex might be just around the corner…

Eight Things NOT To Do After Ending A Relationship

Posted on December 1, 2015 by Julie

There is a lot of advice out there about what to do after ending a relationship, but there isn’t as much guidance on what NOT to do. Yet, after a a relationship ends, many of us can find ourselves engaging in actions that leave us feeling confused, sad, embarrassed, or even shameful ON TOP OF the pain we are already feeling from the break up itself.

Here are some things NOT to do after ending a relationship:

1) Do NOT reach out to your ex.

This is one that is definitely easier said than done, especially in this age of technology. With Wi-Fi, smart phones, and texting, quickly connecting to others is as easy as 1 – 2 – oh, hey! Before you have time to think (literally) you can shoot off a “miss you” text to your ex and start a conversation leading to a whole new cycle of craziness. I remember stories my mother told me about her dating experience back before the Internet or cell phones existed. Back when all they had were landlines to their parents’ homes or their college dormitory halls. (No, this hasn’t turned into a horror story.) Back in the 60s and 70s, while there may have been psychedelic drugs and rockstar humping (pun intended!), there was none of this constantly-connected to each other. After ending a relationship, no one had the ability to text or “drunk-dial” each other. You wouldn’t even make an impulsive call to your ex sober for fear of her father answering the line or having to go through 10 sorority sisters first (Ooo, there’s a good idea for an app: an automated ‘father voice’ picks up when your ex calls). If you were attempting to reach out to your ex, it was a gesture that at least a little bit of thought and time went into. These days, people can reach out to their exes in less time than a non-perfectionist takes picking what breakfast cereal to eat. IT’S TOO EASY. People feel one bit of discomfort and immediately do the worst thing they can do to not feel uncomfortable anymore: reach out to their ex.

It makes sense that you might want to reach out to your ex after ending a relationship, but in the end you’re just dragging out the pain and delaying the inevitable. Do you want to feel this pain now and get it done, or do you want to draaaaag it out and turn it into more suffering? Maybe you two can talk about how much you miss each other, or play The Obvious Game and talk about how “hard it is to NOT talk.” Maybe you can even talk about getting back together, and then maybe you guys can break up all over again. Does that sound good to you? I hope not, you masochist.

2) Do NOT reminisce about your ex.

Don’t look at old pictures of you two together or good times you had. Don’t “facestalk” your ex to see what she’s up to or to investigate to see if any cute, new people are writing on his wall. Don’t keep sleeping in his old college sweatshirt that’s over-sized, and comfy, or on the pillow she always slept on that smells like her favorite shampoo. Pack it up, throw it out, delete it, bury it in a file within a file within a file on your computer, de-friend, and disconnect. Believe me, you’re going to think about your ex enough after ending a relationship, probably once every 10th of a second at the beginning. Do you really need any memorabilia around (or much less, do you need to seek it out online!) to trigger more thoughts? When those precious ex-free seconds roll around, do you really want to glance at a stuffed animal he bought for you, and fall back into ex-obsession? No way. You don’t have to throw things away if you don’t want to (because I know that ticket stub from your first movie together that’s worth a lot of weight in gold is PRICELESS) but whatever you do, get it OUT OF SIGHT and out of plain view.

3) Do NOT isolate yourself.

This may seem like a no-brainer, but many people do it and rationalize that it’s OK, or even healthy. They’ll say things like, “right now, I really need to grieve, and, so, I need to be alone.” Now, that may be true, and taking time to be alone and grieve is incredibly essential to the healing process after ending a relationship. But you need to ask yourself (and be really honest): are you taking time to be alone because you legit need it, or are you starting to isolate yourself because being around others and smiling sounds hard and staying in your depression bubble, crying, sleeping, and not bathing is so much easier. I mean, look! You’re already doing it! Many people take ‘alone time’ to the extreme and start isolating. Grieving is important and necessary, but it also depletes and drains you, energetically. Think about it, right after a good cry you may feel cleansed to a certain extent, or maybe even refreshed, but you don’t usually feel full of energy. You’re usually tired or even exhausted.

After any period of grieving, it’s best to do something that re-energizes you. So, after taking a long nap, you need to get up and engage in some sort of pleasurable distraction, like going over to a friend’s house and watching a funny movie. The distraction serves to re-energize you, emotionally, so you are prepared when the next wave of sadness hits you. The problem comes when people take alone time to grieve, and naturally end up depleting themselves, but instead of recharging their batteries, they stay in that place of being alone and sad, and enter a downward spiral. This is not effective. As much as you’d rather die than do it (because depression makes easy things seem SO hard), get up, shower, put on some clean clothes, and go hang out with a good friend.

4) Do NOT distract to the point of avoidance.

Number 3 is such a great segue to number 4 that it makes me marvel at my writing organization skills. Distracting is OK, healthy, and even a necessity after a ending a relationship. As I just noted above, it helps to re-charge your batteries and re-energize you after a sad-face hurricane has swept through. However, when distracting is taken to the extreme and done constantly, it is no longer healthy or helpful. You know those people, and maybe you’re one of them, who seem to use a breakup as a reason to suddenly engage in every activity offered on this big, beautiful planet called Earth. They go out every night, sleep around, drink, drug, buy day-planners that allow them to schedule down to the minute, and keep their minds engaged and distracted with every possible remedy, in any single second. They are busy, busy bees working hard to keep from feeling and thinking about anything associated with the pain of the break up. When observing these remarkable creatures in their natural behavior of tornado-planning, it may even seem as if the break up was just a blip on their radars, barely noticing it as anything more than a speed bump they encountered on the way to work. With these people, it seems like they just can’t stop… and they can, but they won’t, because if they do, they will have to feel the pain and grief associated with the end of the relationship, and, sorry, Charlie, but they just don’t want to do that! (Key up Peaches’ Fuck the Pain Away).

There is no healthy way to get over a break up and heal without experiencing some amount of the grief, sadness, and discomfort that comes along with ending a relationship. That’s just the way it goes. The good news is you don’t have to feel pain all the time. The point is to think of grieving and distracting as a game of ping pong. You want to go back and forth. Grieve, feel your pain, and give it an outlet until you feel depleted (ping). Then, distract with something fun, engaging, or stimulating to recharge your batteries (pong). When you feel a grief wave coming on, and you’re alone and safe, take the time to feel it (ping), and then start again with a healthy, re-energizing distraction (pong). It’s a cycle, and the pain will work itself out of you in its own time. You just need to focus on being the ping pong ball. Does this mean that in order to distract yourself you have to throw on your party shoes and go paint the town red with 37 woo girls or frat brahs? Only if that’s your idea of re-energizing. You can also do much more low-key things like grab some coffee and catch up with a good friend. Or go engage in a hobby that you love, makes you feel good when you do it, and will keep your mind off the break up while you’re doing it.

5) Do NOT surround yourself with depressing entertainment

Do you remember the eighteen romantic comedies that at one point or another have a scene where a heartbroken girl is sitting in a room crying and eating ice cream while she listens to the song that was playing when she and her ex first kissed, or the one with the lyrics that seems as though it was written exactly to describe her pain? Here’s a perfect example – watch Michael Scott as he drearily replays James Blunt over and over. There’s no doubt that music and movies are powerful mediums and sometimes they can help us explore our grief in ways we wouldn’t be able to with out them. However, sometimes listening to sad music or watching sad movies can do something quite undesirable: it can KEEP US SAD.

A very powerful skill in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (or DBT) used to tolerate discomfort is the skill called Opposite Emotion, which says that if you are trying to feel less of a negative emotion, engage in activities that foster emotions that are the opposite of the negative emotions. Seems pretty duh, huh? You’d be surprised, however, by the number of people that keep themselves locked in the depression prison by surrounding themselves with grief-stricken forms of entertainment. If you’re sad, try listening to upbeat music and watch comedies. If you’re angry or anxious, listen to soothing music and watch slow, quiet dramas. However, you can imagine what will happen if you’re anxious or angry and listen to fast-paced music or watch horror/slasher movies, or if you’re sad and listen to melancholic music and watch sad, depressing dramas. Welcome to a lower-version-of-the-low you were already experiencing. You’ll only end up deepening whatever negative emotion you’re feeling.

I used to have a song I called my depression song, click here to see what I mean (on an unrelated note: the video is awesome). However, I caught myself listening to it once when I was sad and remembered DBT’s Opposite Emotion. Unwillingly (because when we’re in that dark place, there’s a part of us that doesn’t want to leave), I switched it to something like this. For a moment, it did make me want to vomit. It was definitely the last thing I wanted to listen to and felt disjointed when paired with my current emotions (as it should have). However, after a few minutes I noticed that my sadness was subsiding a teeny, tiny bit… and thus began my S&M fetish (I kid, I kid).

6) Do NOT drink or drug to feel good.

I remember hearing a quote related to this that I always really liked, and it said something like: don’t drink to feel good, drink to feel even better. This means: if you feel bad, don’t drink to feel good. Drink when you already feel good, and drinking will only make you feel even better. Now, I’m not condoning or dissuading drinking in and of itself, but what I am suggesting is that you don’t drink or do drugs when you’re going through a bad break up. I have heard stories from far too many friends and clients of nights they went out to try to feel good and forget about their relationship ending, got way too drunk, and ended up sobbing at the bar, drunk-dialing/texting their exes, or getting in a fight with a complete stranger. Alcohol is a drug, and further, it’s a depressant. Most likely, it will make you feel worse right away or at least by the next day. You may get a temporary high for a little while or be able to forget about the pain for a small stretch of time, but when thoughts of your ex pop into your mind and you’re wasted, the alcohol or drugs can often take the associated emotions and make you feel them harder. So, as much as NOT drinking may NOT be something you want to do, be aware of the consequences and be prepared to face them in the cold light of day the next morning.

One of my clients, Jen, enjoyed toking on the MJ from time to time. However, as she knew marijuana usually caused her to feel things more intensely, which was one of the things she loved about it, when she was going through a break up or any other difficult life situation, she’d stay far, far away from her green buddy. As she once said to me after ending a relationship, “it might make me feel better, but I can’t risk it going the other way.” The pain was difficult to bear sober! She was not about to risk an intensification of it while high. The choice is yours, but beware of the gamble.

7) Do NOT throw away your values.

This one can be tough, but it’s important in terms of holding on to your integrity. Sometimes after a break up, we go through a phase called, ‘fuck it.’ I think you know what I mean. It’s that phase where your wiser voice asks you if you really want to do whatever it is that you’re thinking of doing, and the answer it receives is, ‘sure. Why not? Fuck it.’ This is the wonderful land of pain-driven apathy. Maybe you send an immature text to your ex, or maybe you finally accept that hookup invitation from the creepy neighbor down the hall. Regardless, it’s usually something that if you hadn’t been in a temporary state of break up-induced insanity, you would have never done it. While you think you don’t care at the time, and maybe you genuinely don’t, down the road, sometimes the very next day, you find that you care very much, and by that time you feel embarrassed and foolish.

After a relationship ends is the time that it’s the most important to hold on tight to your self-respect. With a break up, the stability in your life is shaken and a piece of it crumbles as your partner walks away. The last thing you want to do is something that adds to the instability you’re already experiencing. This is the time to keep your values close and protect your integrity hard. It will be what matters the most in the end.

8) Do NOT seek out revenge, jealousy, or more pain

I often get clients who want to enact some sort of revenge or inflict pain on their ex. Maybe they want to date or sleep with someone else to make their ex feel hurt or cause jealousy. Maybe they fantasize about keying his car, or calling his old girlfriends and telling them he has an STD. They just want to do something. I had one client, we’ll call her Katie, who wanted to do something to hurt her ex. When I asked her why, and got her to go deeper, she said, “because he hurt me.”

Me: “So, how will doing something to him change that?’

Katie: “He hurt me, so I want to hurt him back.”

Me: “Why?”

Katie: “Because he needs to know how much he hurt me. He needs to feel pain too.”

Me: “You feel pain because of the relationship ending. I get that. But will causing him pain make you feel any less pain?”

Katie: “I just figured I’d feel better if I knew he was hurting too.”

Me: “Maybe. Or maybe you’ll be temporarily distracted from the pain you feel by some sort of fleeting satisfaction of him feeling pain. In the end, you’ll still have to deal with your pain, it won’t be any less. You may even eventually have guilt or embarrassment on top of your pain for whatever it is you choose to do to him.”

Your relationship just ended, there’s already pain, on both ends, even if your partner isn’t showing it. There’s no need to add to the pain. Do whatever you need to do to take care of your own pain. Focusing on causing your ex pain is an unhealthy distraction and an attempt to avoid dealing with your shit. Man up, and back down.

Face it. Ending a relationship is hard to go through. It puts us in really precarious places where we think and act differently than we would under normal circumstances. Don’t be hard on yourself but do make yourself aware of that which you are capable and do your best to NOT do things that will only make it worse. You can and will get through it, but focus on one thing: minimizing damage done.

Five Common Experiences After Ending a Relationship that Do NOT Mean You Should Get Back Together

Posted on November 1, 2015 by Julie

Ending a relationship is hard and rarely enjoyable. Although you or your partner may try to make a break up as painless as possible, as one of my good friends once told me, “there’s never a good time for ending a relationship.”

No matter what you do, there is just no escaping the fact that after ending a relationship, there will usually be some degree of:

Emotional Pain
Awkwardness
Discomfort
Fear and Anxiety
Anger
Grief

One of the problems is that there isn’t a lot of information out there about common experiences after ending a relationship. You may talk to your friends or maybe a therapist, or you may surf the web for advice and guidance. Regardless, after ending a relationship, many people:

Struggle with thoughts and emotions that are contradictory and confusing
Feel alone and as though they have no one to talk to, or that they’ve exhausted their friends and family
Think something is wrong with them
Question their decisions
Do impulsive things that feel out of character

After ending a relationship, people can feel like a swirling tornado of thoughts, emotions, and impulses that leave them feeling unsettled, confused, insecure, and even crazy. This is because, IMO, there is a highly invaluable lesson that often goes unnoticed or unrecognized when attempting to cope with ending a relationship. That lesson is:

There are universal experiences, thoughts, and emotions that people encounter after ending a relationship.

Ok, so, what do I mean by this? When I say universal, I’m basically saying common, or NOT unique to you. These experiences I’m going to outline are experienced by the majority of people after ending a relationship. It’s part of how the mind works. If you were to take 10 minutes and close your eyes and just observe your mind, you would hear it chatter away to itself, relentlessly. It might contradict itself numerous times, go back and forth about what to do later that evening, or debate the pros and cons of a menu selection. This is what the mind does!

Why does this matter? Because you are NOT your mind. You are not your thoughts. Your thoughts are part of you, but they do not make up the whole of who you are. Somewhere, deep down, I bet you have an understanding (that you may not even be able to describe) that you are more than just your thoughts. But what happens when we forget that we are not our thoughts, and we listen to every thought that enters our minds? Well, welcome to crazy town, population: every mind.

Understanding that the thoughts you’re having around the end of a relationship are common thoughts helps you in many ways:

You judge yourself less
You stop thinking something’s wrong with you
You stop thinking your thoughts are special and that you should do something about them

These are all great things because after ending a relationship you will already feel anxiety and sadness. Having judgmental thoughts on top of the thoughts you’re having (that’s a mouth full) just kicks up the voltage on all the negativity. So, let’s talk about what some of these common, universal experiences are that many people have after ending a relationship.

1) You will miss your ex.

This is one of the most common things I hear from my clients, and it means you’re normal. OF COURSE you miss your ex! How could you not? You just severed a relationship with someone who you probably spent the majority of your time with, or at least a substantial portion of it. You just cut a tie to someone with whom you were intimate on usually at least two of the following levels: emotionally, sexually, intellectually, or spiritually. For some of you, your ex may have been your best friend, and how could you not miss your best friend? For others, maybe you lived with your ex, meaning you had established a comfortable daily living routine that felt safe and homey. Of course you will miss having that when the relationship is over! For all of you, after ending a relationship, a stability in your life known as your relationship just crumbled. We are wired biologically to feel anxious and uncomfortable when we lose any degree of stability in our lives. We are wired to miss that stability and it sends us packing to go find something to make it feel stable again. This causes many of us to think this means we should get back together with our exes, because getting back together with our exes is definitely the easiest way to regain stability. In caveman speak this sounds like, “partner is missing, insert ex here, stability re-established.” However, although getting back together with our exes may be the easiest way to regain the stability, it’s the wrong way. Just because you miss your ex, DOES NOT MEAN that you should get back together. It means that you miss them, and that makes sense, and that is all. Validate yourself and move on.

2) If you were the initiator, it will be difficult to remember why you decided to end the relationship in the first place.

Isn’t this one funny?! Before you broke up, it was crystal clear why you definitely needed to do the deed. You could list off the reasons as if you were presenting to a dissertation committee, and you could do it in your sleep. Yet, suddenly, as soon as the relationship ends, all the reasons why you did it seem to totally pale in comparison to the reasons why you were together. It becomes difficult to remember why you broke it off because you can’t see through all the good times you had, all of your partner’s amazing qualities, and all this new found enthusiasm to make it work because we can do it. While there are definitely times that we make mistakes and end relationships for wrong reasons (by the way, you only get to make this mistake once in any relationship, if at all. Not 5 times), the majority of the time this is just another common experience. I’ll explain, again: you have removed a security from your life, something that made you feel more stable. It’s natural that when that security is removed you’re going to feel more insecure and grasp for something to bring that security back. This is your mind trying to be clever but not being intelligent. Yes, getting back together with your partner will ease that insecurity, but it won’t solve your overall problem: that when you were in the relationship, you wanted to end it. You do have the ability to sit with discomfort and do nothing, and this is one of those times to exercise that ability. Notice the urge to get back together, label it as a universal, common experience, and refocus your attention on something else.

3) You will be uncomfortable at the thought of you ex with another person.

Many people have this experience and think it must mean that they made a mistake, or that they still have feelings for the other person. Then, they take that to mean that maybe they should re-evaluate ending the relationship. Wrong. This is another no-brainer, common experience, and it doesn’t mean anything. We’re wired to be territorial and our minds can be very possessive. You can have years go by between you and a break up with someone, be 100% sure you no longer want to be with them, not have any romantic feelings for them, be in a loving and totally committed relationship with someone new, and still be uncomfortable thinking of that ex with others. That’s just called being normal. It doesn’t mean anything past you being a human being. It’s a universal, common experience.

4) You will want to know what they’re up to, how they’re doing, etc.

You just ended a relationship with someone who you probably talked to and spent more time with him or her than any other person in your life. Most likely you knew everything that was going on with your partner: hopes, dreams, endeavors, fears, what’s for lunch, and the latest gossip at his or her workplace. Human beings are a species that love routine, habits, and, as I’ve said, stability. After ending a relationship, a HUGE chunk of your life shatters to the ground, leaving you grasping to fill in all the missing pieces your partner used to fill. Wondering about your ex is totally normal and does not necessarily mean you want to get back together with him or her. It’s a common experience related to habitual interactions, and as the saying goes, “old habits die hard.”

5) When meeting other people, it will seem as though you don’t have the same level of connection with them as you did with your ex.

Mmmm, another no-brainer. This is a common misconception that is, quite honestly, unfair to the new person you met. You can’t compare a relationship of however long (3 months, 5 years) to a conversation or a couple dates with someone you just met. Of course you won’t have the same level of comfort with that person as you did with your ex. Not YET, at least. Now, yes, I know that sometimes, when you meet someone, you just know whether or not it’s going to work, and to address that is another blog entirely. However, many people go on a few dates with someone and get discouraged when they don’t feel as comfortable or as at-ease with the new person as they felt with their ex. They might even say, “well with my ex, we were laughing immediately, and with this new person? Not so much.” I will let you in on a little secret, this new person is NOT your ex. He or she is a completely different person altogether. I know, it’s shocking. I’m telling you this because no one is going to be as good at BEING your ex as… you guessed it, YOUR EX. In other words, no one is going to be as good at being Bobby as Bobby. So, yeah, if you have Jimmy and Bobby there and ask them both to be Bobby, Bobby’s going to do it better. You’ve got to let Jimmy be Jimmy. If you’re trying to get people to fit into the mold of your ex, no other person is EVER going to fit well, because it only molds to your ex. You have to let people be who they are and develop new relationships if you want to move on. If you keep comparing people to your ex, they will ALWAYS come up short, because no one’s as good at being your ex as your ex.

The most important thing to gather from this post is that these are universal experiences. The majority of people experience these after ending a relationship. These experiences don’t mean you need to get back together or that you made a huge mistake. Experiencing them means that you’re normal.

So, congratulations! You are normal. Stop thinking something’s wrong with you, or that all these thoughts require action because 99% of them do not. They’re just thoughts, and thoughts no longer control you, because now you know that what you’re experiencing are just common experiences after ending a relationship.

Rude Science

Author: Julie