How Hanging On To Your Ex Is Totally Messing Up Your Life.
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I wish I could tell you that I learned everything that I write about from books and other people’s mistakes. But that would not be true.
I know what it is like to lose a relationship that you lost yourself in. I know what it’s like not being able to put your shattered life back together as fast as they did and wondering why.
I am also familiar with how a part of you wants to hang on to them along with the painful memories, and then being mad at yourself for it all. I wish I had only read about these in self-help books.
After I went through the break-up that almost killed me (literally!) and wrote about it to share the wisdom I extracted from the experience, I had many people contact me telling me that they had been broken up for 2-3 years and they still wait around for their ex to come back. Their life was on hold.
As I listened to their stories and read their emails, I felt like I was hearing my story told back to me. I had never been good at letting go. Maybe I didn’t know how to process the relationship in the aftermath, or I did not know how to integrate what I had learned.
I spent months of my life staring at the rubble in front of me, waiting for it to go back to the tall, beautiful building it used to be. That was as successful as reviving a dead fish by just looking at it and wishing it was alive.
As someone who had come out of the dark tunnel, and is tanning herself in the new-found light after all that darkness, I am here to give you a little tough love.
If you still want to believe that holding on to your ex is going to make you happy, purposeful, joyful and creatively fulfilled, the rest of this article is not for you. If you are sick of the waiting for the refund of your emotional and mental investment in the relationship, then please read on.
You might have heard about the concept of soul mates and twin flames, and how they are the perfect partner for each other, and how being with them sends you to all heights of ecstasy. Read that again. Doesn’t that sound like an adult version of a Disney tale?
The princess kisses the frog and the frog becomes the prince of her dreams. She gets rewarded for looking past appearances, impossibility of the relationship and opening her heart with reckless abandon.
Isn’t this so tempting? It breeds so many other beliefs in it that contribute to our inability to move on from past relationships.
We learn to put anyone we have an emotional or sexual attraction to into the soul mate box and neglect to see that the unique relationship brought its own set of lessons, most of which are designed to lead to self-love.
Now, I want you to feel the disappointment and anger of having been brainwashed against your will (you were born into it). Be bitter about it for a while. Feel the pain and the loss of how your expectations were shaped by these urban legends.
Just long enough so that these old fantasy-based relationship expectations and patterns burn through your system.
If you are starting to feel like a deer caught in headlights by now, you are on the right track.
We are taught to look for the highest form of love in another person. It is undeniable that human connection is a big part of happiness. To me, running off to a mountain to meditate and eat rice for the rest of my life is not the solution to avoiding the pain caused by human interaction.
I believe that the real genius and spiritual service lies in being the God and the human that I am (as you are) on planet earth, doing earth stuff by following my soul’s guidance. That is why we are all here putting up with crap on earth.
Anytime we escape the responsibility of that through an addiction — drugs, love (romance), TV, sex or anything we do too much of and don’t have control over, we are giving up on two things: our God self and our human self.
The key to happiness is not in the hands of another person or hanging onto a lost potential of a perfect relationship that replaces all the other addictions.
If you’re nodding by now, then you’re on the right track.
Maybe I sound as if I am being callous, as if I don’t know the pain of living in the past while your future self keeps tugging at you, first gently, then with impatience — which leads to deep depression or tremendous guilt if you are lucky.
If you think that you are hurting because you aren’t with your ex anymore, answer this question: Can you separate the pain you feel from the loss of your ex (and everything they represented) from the pain of your inability to actualize who you are on the earth plane?
Can you feel the creative swelling in your ankles that weighs you down more and more every day? Which addictions do you lean on to avoid feeling that?
Can hanging on to your ex, and the dreams of him or her waking up to his grand loss and running back to you, be one of the ways you numb feeling the ache of your soul?
If you are crying by now, you’re on the right track.
This is your life. Only you can build it, live it, share it! Get with it. If your ex comes back, he or she will find a person better than the one he left. In the meantime, your life won’t feel like you’re just doing time on planet earth until you get too old to care.
If you hate me by now, then you’re on the right track.
*****
Banu Sekendur is an intuitive coach and a healer. Her passion is removing mental, emotional and energetic blocks that hold people back from the ultimate joy of living. You can connect with her on Facebook and her website.
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