Checklist: 5 Signs That You Still Hold On To Your Past Relationships
Text: Yana Shagova
Parting is a painful process which, however, it is important to live in full. Those who go through a divorce or break up in a relationship want to quickly jump out of this painful period and never again find themselves in it, but this is a trap. If you fully experience the event and summarize the results, then the experience gained will be useful (even if it was painful, there was probably something valuable in it), you can change and take a new approach to new relationships.
If a person hastily “jumps out” from a painful experience, denying feelings, with the help of a new novel, alcohol anesthesia and other methods of escape, there is a great risk of being back in the old scenario. You can start a new relationship and even remarry, but still not complete the emotional breakup with your former partner. The more difficult and painful the relationship, the slower this process. We tell how to understand that your emotional separation is not yet complete - and what to do about it.
1
You convince friends that you can (and should!) Invite you to general parties.
The problem of separation can be formulated as follows: the former partners are trying again to become each other's strangers. The only exception to this rule is parenthood: after a divorce, spouses who have a common child cease to be wife and husband, but still remain mom and dad. Normally, they are friendly and cooperate when it comes to a child. It must be admitted that this makes the parting difficult - but still feasible. If nothing binds you, but you persistently continue to search for meetings, it means that there is still a need to preserve the illusion of community. This is not very useful, because in such a situation you deny reality.
Do you communicate with your ex-wife or partner as if nothing happened, laugh at common jokes, and after the party get into various taxis looking out of the window languidly? Usually, after such meetings, there is a feeling of sadness or even despair. Denial does not carry anything good, and people who have broken off after a long relationship rarely become friends. For this, in any case, you need a period of "quarantine" when you will not see each other: it will allow you to rebuild the role. If after this you still want to be friends and communicate - please: then it will no longer bring pain and inspire unnecessary illusions.
2
You are still angry at the relatives of the former partner
Or friends who have a bad influence on him or her. Or the person whose affair destroyed your union. Such feelings are understandable, but they show that the emotional separation has not been completed, and one can even say that it has not even been practically started, because the responsibility for the relationship was not returned to the participants - you and the former partner. Even if every weekend the boyfriend went to his mother instead of spending them with you, then it’s not the mother who emotionally blackmailed him forever, but the act of the boyfriend who still chose to go to his relatives and not go to the movies with you . An adult decides on his own what distance to keep with his parental family.
If the former wife has gone to another, then in general it doesn’t matter what kind of person it is. It is important that the wife made the decision not to be with you - this is sad, painful, but the identity of the person to whom she went, in general, does not matter. Oddly enough, such a third person in a relationship is a secondary, auxiliary person. Over time, it will come to an understanding that it is necessary to make a complaint to the former partner. And then comes the next phase - anger, when you want to get angry and tell your mutual friend what kind of monster your ex was or was. About this next point.
3
You use any opportunity to discuss him or her.
If you want to know the news about the former partner, to wonder whether he or she meets with someone how bad or well he lives without you - perhaps you have not fully accepted the fact of separation. This is an attempt to continue the relationship at least that way, mentally.
Oddly enough, talk in the spirit of "Well, he was a scoundrel!" or "Well, she is a reptile!" mean you are already a few steps ahead. At some point, when you live through any loss, there is a phase of anger, when you want to remember all the mistakes of the former partner and the offenses caused to them. This is an important process: if the relationship broke up, it means that for some reason they turned out to be unviable. Anger helps to learn lessons for the future, so it is not necessary to suppress it.
In this case, pouring anger on the former partner is also not worth it: it does not bring relief, but there are reasons for new conflicts, and it turns out that the relationship continues. Complain to friends who are willing to listen to you. It will be a good tone to warn you that you want to speak long and emotionally, and ask if the interviewee has the resource to listen to you and sympathize (or even scold the former partner with you - sometimes it is necessary).
Instead of anger, feelings of guilt can flood; you can start counting your own mistakes and regret not having done everything differently, although you could. This is typical of situations when the initiator of the separation was not you - it is true, sometimes those who left themselves begin to regret and be bored. Again this is normal. When bad relationships end, everyone imagines freedom and new dizzying novels. No one dreams of tears, lonely evenings in an embrace with a pillow and a sense of abandonment.
Sometimes these painful insights are useful: you can really see some mistakes. But it is important not to bump into samoing and remember that every act has a reason and exactly half of the responsibility lies with the second person. Have you provoked noisy quarrels? Perhaps your partner was emotionally closed and the scandal followed by reconciliation was a rare opportunity to feel intimacy with him. This is a toxic way, but intimacy is still better than its absence. Probably, in this case, it’s worth thinking not about your own hot temper, but about choosing a more responsive person next time who hears you before you start screaming and crying.
4
You go to the account of the former partner how to work
The emergence of social networks has complicated the process of healthy separation from a former partner. It’s better to unsubscribe from your former or former account - this will make your life much easier. Every time you want to go in and promontor who your ex-wife or ex-boyfriend likes, ask yourself: what is happening in my life now? Why did it suddenly become important?
It is likely that you still have feelings for your former partner: jealousy, anger, resentment, and maybe you have not completely stopped loving him or her and are very bored. It is important to relate these feelings with the time to which they relate. Now you are no longer together, and if you don’t see with your former partner or partner, then you are angry or offended by something in the past. We will discuss below how to deal with difficult feelings left after the break. But first you need to recognize: if you decide to share your lives, then the actions and events in the life of your former (or former) are no longer important. And the strong emotions that they cause, in fact, belong to a departed relationship.
5
You need to compare your former partner with the current one.
In general, it does not even matter in whose favor. The very need to prove (at least to ourselves, but often to others) that the current relationship is better, or to regret the lost opportunities of the past, indicates that the gap is not over. This competition can last a long time. The more grievances left to the former partner, the stronger will be the desire to “beat” him.
Some, on the contrary, are stuck in a feeling of sadness, when it seems that no one can compare with the lost love. Unfortunately, both options have a bad effect on current relationships and are painful for self-esteem.
What to do
The feelings that left the gap, you need to live. It sounds mocking, because what we experience during parting is one of the most painful things in the world. For example, a divorce on the scale of stress Holmes and Ray is in second place after the death of a partner: death is estimated at one hundred points out of one hundred, divorce - at seventy-three. Parting is a real grief, and nothing but time and honest living of this grief will not change the feelings associated with it.
If you have not yet had a new relationship, give yourself time to be sad. You can declare an official mourning (seriously) and tell your friends that for some period you do not want to go to parties and dates or, for example, drink. Assign yourself any funeral ritual - ask yourself honestly what you absolutely do not want to do now. Do not be afraid that now you will always want to sit at home and feel sad - this will not happen. The traditions of mourning in our culture are lost, and people live with huge lumps of unlived feelings in their chests. This does not help at all, as they say in American films “to move on” - on the contrary, it makes you walk in a circle and paradoxically get into the same traumatic situations again and again.
It helps a lot to keep a diary or write to the person with whom you broke up without sending him these messages. In these letters it is useful to remember the joyful and painful moments, to say what you liked and what infuriated, what you are grateful for and are still angry with. This is a kind of diary, and it helps to complete the ongoing mental dialogue that is still spinning in my head.
The help of a psychotherapist can be useful at any phase of separation, including to complete the gap, if after a few years strong feelings still do not let go. I often advise clients of Daphne Rose Kingma's book How to Survive Parting - this is an interesting and unexpectedly positive guide to living through all phases of the gap, including “sticking” into an emotionally incomplete divorce.
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