Why You Can't Stop Thinking About Your Ex

All right, welcome to the mantalks show. I'm Connor Beaton, and today I'm going to answer a question that I get all the time from men, from women, really. I mean, just, I get this question probably a few times a week. The question is, why can't I stop thinking about my ex? And sometimes it's a year ago, and the recent question that I got was, why can't I stop thinking about my ex from five years ago? They're always on my mind, and I can't seem to. Can't seem to move past the relationship. And so, as the Canadian poet Rupi Kaur says, and hopefully I said that, right? People go, but how they left always stays. People go, but how they left always stays. And so us not being able to move past a relationship, thinking about our ex years later is almost always indicative of the manner in which the ending of the relationship happened. So, for example, if your relationship ended in infidelity and your partner cheated or you cheated and there was not really a resolution to that infidelity, we can recall that relationship for years to come, ruminating on, what could I have done differently? What could I have said? Who could I have become? How could I have handled that differently? And that's just one example, right? Another example is maybe you didn't want the relationship to end and your partner at the time is the one that ended the relationship. We can again, our mind can cling to the fear of the unknown, the unknown variables. Maybe you didn't get closure in that relationship, and so your mind is continuously returning to that unknown variable, trying to solve some heart math, some emotional equation of why did this happen? I don't understand. And it's these mysteries that often cause us the most rumination in life. I mean, you think about the ponderings of existence in some way, or you think about the big questions that you have or that people philosophically chew on and try and maneuver through for their entire lives, right? Why are we here? What is God? These types of big questions, Is there a God? These types of big questions that we have, these mysterious questions, what is the meaning of life? We can spend an immense amount of time coming back to this question over and over and over again. And so, just like these big questions, when a relationship ends in a manner that we don't understand, that we are left reeling from, or that we feel ended too soon or ended for the wrong reasons, or we don't know why it ended.

All of these endings can leave us with a sort of. In a sort of quagmire Right. In a sort of paradigm where we don't know how to move forward. And so I'm going to just give you a few things. So number one is that we may be returning to that, to that relationship continuously because there's something fundamentally unresolved. There's something that we haven't forgiven ourselves for, forgiven them for. There's a sort of question that we don't yet fully understand. We haven't spent enough time sort of mulling through it or maybe working with somebody professionally to be able to understand how to find closure and resolution on that question. That's a big one. I would say the next one is that there's something about yourself that you attach to that person or that relationship that when they left, that part of you kind of went to and you haven't actually cultivated that part of you since the relationship. So I see this a lot of this. This happens a lot where, you know, somebody's confidence, somebody's value or worth gets attached to their partner because that person becomes so meaningful to them. And when that person leaves, their confidence, their value, their worth goes out the door with them. And so their mind, their ego, their identity is continually trying to return to the scene of that loss. And they are trying to figure out, how do I reclaim that? How do I get that back? So there might be something about yourself that you attach to that person, that relationship that you need to cultivate. The next one is that it's a very simple one. You may not have actually fully grieved the loss of the relationship. However it played out, why ever it ended, you may not have grieved that ending properly in all of its fullness. And this is a very common one that we return to that relationship because we haven't grieved the loss of that person or the intimacy that we had, or we haven't grieved how we acted in that relationship. Maybe we acted in a way that we're not proud of or respectful of. And so we need to be able to allow ourselves time to grieve that. And that might happen years later. That's fine. The last reasons are that they kind of go hand in hand. But the last reasons that you may have labeled that relationship as the best thing and so you keep returning to that because there's some quality about that relationship that you think is never going to show up again. This is very common. Or that relationship was damaging and maybe it was abusive, or there was some sort of trauma that took place in the relationship, like an infidelity. And infidelity can be a small T trauma, not an acute trauma, although it can be an acute trauma, but it can be a small T trauma. So you can be returning to that over and over and over again because there's pain and trauma stored in your body from that relationship. And the last thing is that that relationship may. There may be something in your life today that's missing that you need to focus on, that you need to cultivate in your life today that you are avoiding. We can use past relationships, the endings of past relationships, as a kind of blocker, as a kind of avoidance mechanism and tactic from dealing with the hard parts of our life today. So you might actually be using a form of relationship as an excuse from really having to be intimate in the relationship you're in now or having to be open and courageous enough to step into a new relationship now, fully, you know, fully open, fully ready, fully committed to the things that you want. And so just notice if that past relationship continues to come up and every single time you start to get close to a new person in your dating life or every single time that, you know, maybe you're in a new relationship, a committed one, and it starts to move in the direction of something more serious and that old relationship starts to come up, there's something, again, unresolved there that you are maybe avoiding facing in your life today. And that old relationship is a tool that is keeping you stuck or blocked. So thanks so much for tuning in. Comment below. If you think that I missed anything on the video, feel free to add in.

What you've seen in your own life where maybe you continue to go back to prior relationships. And don't forget to tag and share this episode, this little session with somebody that maybe is having trouble getting over a past relationship. It can give them some good context. So thanks so much for joining me. This is Connor Beaton signing off.