How to get over your ex when you still love them?

Stopping love after a breakup isn’t easy and you can’t expect it to happen quickly. It takes time, it hurts, and in grief we probably remember all the good times we had with that person. How it made us feel loved, happy and content. And there, in this process, even if we have decided to end it for good reasons, sometimes we seek it again to feel that again.

However, When that person is emotionally unavailable and rejects you, the pain can be twofold. Although the process of getting over that person you loved so much is not linear, it can be navigated in a more compassionate and stable way.

Since meaningful romantic relationships provide us with emotional security and support, when we break up, it’s normal to feel bad emotionally and physically because we lost that security. And we can no longer emotionally rely on this person, explains Piedad Concha, clinical psychologist specializing in couples therapy (@ps.piedadconcha ).

The symptoms of a breakup vary in frequency, intensity and duration because they depend on each person and the context or causes of the end of this relationship, explains the specialist. “In general, we observe anxiety, worry, mood swings, sadness, memories of past moments, rumination, crying, guilt, hypervigilance, sleep problems, eating disorders, feeling like doing nothing and fatigue” .

Valentina Contreras (26) has long mourned the breakup of her five-year relationship. At first, since they had broken up by mutual agreement and without anything painful happening between them, they decided to be friends. And even though they were just that, they came together and acted like a couple, something Valentina realizes today has doubled her pain. “I realized he wasn’t sure what he wanted in life and I was. We had been dating for five years and I thought being alone might help him figure out what he really wanted, and then see if our plans coincided. I didn’t do it because I didn’t want to, on the contrary, I was in love with it and I thought it would be the best for our future,” she says.

“After we finished, we kept in touch. We looked like boyfriends for a whole year, until I realized we weren’t going anywhere. At first it was comforting because I felt like we were never really done, but then it became very painful because I didn’t know how to behave because we weren’t clear who we were. Even though we weren’t together, we still did things as a couple, but at the same time I knew we didn’t have the level of commitment that a couple has, so it was very painful not to knowing what the other was doing or sometimes when I went out with other people like that, I felt super guilty, so I limited myself a lot,” says Valentina.

Maintaining this dynamic was confusing and hindered his healing process. “I was still very much in love, but I felt he didn’t feel the same way about me. I had a lot of personal things happen to me where I didn’t feel his support and then I realized that loving him the way I wanted and not feeling that love in return made me feel really bad. I felt bad and I was very sad. I asked him not to speak anymore and that’s when we started zero contact, in one of the most difficult years of my life,” he says.

He zero contact It is a technique which consists of cutting off all means of contact and communication with the person from whom we wish to distance ourselves emotionally. While this can be a positive step for many ex-partners, as it allows them to grieve with enough space to heal, it does a disservice to others, the psychologist says.

For Valentina, deciding to end all contact and maintaining this agreement over time was very difficult emotionally. “At the beginning, just after zero contact, I suffered too much, I cried every day, I felt like I had made a mistake and I was frustrated. because even though it was me who decided not to speak anymore and he understood it, it made me very angry every time I saw him looking at my Instagram stories or seeing what I uploaded to my networks without doing anything to contact me again . It’s there, but being there He tells me he has no interest in getting back in touch and that hurt me too much. Since all I wanted to do was talk to him, I started socializing, but I realized that even if I went out and had a good time, I wouldn’t be able to be fully present because I kept thinking about him in my head,” he says.

The couples therapist explains that zero contact does a disservice to people with an anxious attachment style because it triggers separation anxiety. “They suffer a lot from the feeling of rejection and seek to feel close and to be able to count on the other person, which is why they will make attempts at contact and signs that will tell them that they are not abandoned. As many times as they have placed all the expectations on the other to meet their emotional needs, when that person is not there, it is as if they are falling into the void, so in order not to fall, they will try to hang on. this person again at all costs.

“Holding on” means looking for it again and that doesn’t always work well. “If you’re looking for him and he’s a loving, emotionally available person, you respond to him, you talk and calm him down in some way, it won’t hurt him because the desperate search for emotional containment will end. In exchange, If you are looking for Him and He is not available because you have an avoidant attachment of further emotional disconnection, it will hurt a lot and the suffering will become double because it will reaffirm the abandonment and rejection. “, says Concha.

Since we are all different, how we cope and manage emotional grief will depend on each person. For those of a more anxious attachment, explains Piedad Concha, It will be very difficult and even more painful for them to try to maintain zero contact rather than connect to their emotions and work to accept them rather than control them.

As a good strategy to “stay strong” in this process, the specialist recommends living and connecting with your emotions. “No matter how painful these emotions are, they allow us to connect with what is important to us and what we need. I believe that since we have built a giant wall against everything that makes us uncomfortable, we are not able to see that emotions are valid and have a purpose,” he explains.

There is no single way to face a breakup or to “stay strong” in this choice, explains the couples therapist. “The best tactic I usually recommend to my patients is to allow themselves to find their own protective strategies, which get them to where they want to be,” he says.

Many associate a certain amount of time with grieving after ending it. If we heal “early,” we are said to not really love it, and if we “delay” in doing so, we are being melodramatic. But the truth is that There is no specific time to experience loss. “Giving yourself the time and space to process loss and heal emotionally is essential. For some people, grief can last weeks or months, while for others it can be a longer process, sometimes lasting several years. Grieving is an individual process and cannot be forced or accelerated,” explains the specialist.

With a lot of guilt for the way she ended things with her ex and for the damage that breakup was doing to him, Valentina realized that she was idealizing and victimizing him too much. “In therapy, it helped me a lot to understand that expressing how I felt and being transparent with my emotions doesn’t make me the bad guy in the story and it’s not a reason to feel guilty. I communicated my needs and expressed how I felt and I can’t blame myself. I also understood that just because a particular person was not willing to receive the love I needed to give them at that time does not mean that I am not capable of giving love and to receive it from others. something that helped me a lot because I was very stuck in bonding for fear that my feelings wouldn’t be reciprocated, because I didn’t want to suffer anymore from what I had suffered and that’s why I had the habit of keeping what I felt to myself. ,” she says.

Her process was long and dizzying and, along the way, she was able to count on her friends, with whom she reconnected after her breakup with her ex. It helped her understand that if they loved her that much, anyone could love her too. “If my friends love me so much and think I’m so cool, it’s clear that the problem isn’t me and that I’m capable of loving and being loved, something I thought would never happen again.”

He recently realized he was finally done with it. “January was a very good month for me, with lots of calm, family and friends. One day, at the beach, I uploaded a photo of the sea to my Instagram stories. I saw that he saw her and I remembered him, but without sadness or anger. I just wondered what would happen to his life and hoped that whatever happened, he would be happy and calm. And then I realized I was overwhelmed,” he concludes.