You can throw all your stuff in the back of your car and drive away. You can curl your texting-fingers into fists that you jam in your pockets. You can pack your calendar with yoga, coffee dates and cooking classes. You can buy a dog.
But you can’t stop thinking about your Ex.
Waking up from another nightmare in which you are victimized, abandoned, or ignored by your Ex you lay in the darkness. Memories of conversations you had, or wanted to have, play in your head like movies until it’s time to get up in the grey light of morning. Coffee. Shower. Driving. Working. No matter what you’re doing, throughout your day, the bulk of your mind is focused on your Ex. What they are doing, or not doing, or who they’re doing it with. The other ten percent of your attention steers you, on auto-pilot, through the rest of your life.
Your brain has been bound up in a tight, elaborate knot by an unsolvable riddle: “What the hell happened?” It works to free itself by wrestling with old memories or speculations, one by one. If it could only understand — emerge the victor from one of these skirmishes — you might be released from the cage of obsession. But there is no final victory. The memories are indestructible, and crowd together in a mob that has no end. Your mind is stuck, hemmed in on every side by ghosts of your former life.
I don’t have to tell you that moving on mentally and emotionally is very, very difficult. You want to stop, but you can’t. If you could take a big bottle scrubber to your brain, and be done, you would. But it feels impossible to get away from your Ex when they, and their army of ghosts, have taken up residence in your own head.
Step one in your recovery is understanding that the thoughts about your Ex are an addiction. An addiction that drains energy from everything else in your life. A torment that sucks the joy out of your days. An inner obsession that keeps you from connecting with new people. An addiction that traps you in sadness, and keeps you from moving forward.
Like all transformational growth work, your recovery is a process. Healing requires new understanding. Your brain is trying to do this work— make meaning from trauma, and put all the pieces together in a way that makes sense again. As you move through the steps with your community this will happen, so be patient with yourself.
This is a community of understanding. The tools you can use to move forward are found here in the EXaholics.com community. Understanding that you are not alone will help you feel connected to people who understand the intense feelings you're going through. Here you can share the battle going on in your mind on when you're fighting with the thought of reaching out to your ex or looking at his or her social media pages. Here we learn ex sobriety and watch instructional webinars and videos that delve deeply into what you, as someone with a broken heart, are going through.
Dr. Lisa Bobby is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Psychotherapist, and a Board Certified Life Coach. She is the author of "EXaholics: Breaking your Addiction to an EX Love" and a contributing expert to EXaholics.com. She is also the founder of Growingself.com
