Love Life with Matthew Hussey - 251: "I Can’t Get Over My Ex...Please Help Me Move On!”

Episode Date: July 3, 2024

When you've made progress getting over someone, then they send you a text, how should you react? Or maybe they still like your instagram posts, respond to your stories, or you see glimpses of their life with a new partner and it triggers you... In this episode, Matt and Audrey talk about how to deal with triggers that derail your progress and what to do when you're trying to move on for good and want to TRULY get over your ex.  >>> Transform Your Relationship with Life in 6 Magical Days... Learn More About My Live Retreat at → http://www.MHRetreat.com   >>> Order My New Book, "Love Life" at → http:// www.LoveLifeBook.com   >>> FREE Video Training: "Dating With Results" → http://www.DatingWithResults.com 

It's not that you haven't gotten over them, it's that getting over them is a constant gradient where you will care less andsey and Audrey Hussey. Before we get into the episode, if you haven't already, make sure to go and sign up to my private email that I am sending every single Friday. If you enjoyed my book, Love Life, if you like my writing style, and if you like free stuff from me, every Friday, I send out a personal email from me talking about personal thoughts, ideas, strategies, and stories that can help you in your life that I don't put anywhere else. The people that I've been sending this to have had an incredible reaction. I get tons of replies every Friday that I read personally. So if you

want my personal writings every single Friday delivered straight to your inbox, go to the3relationships.com and sign up now. Well, we're back with another episode. And we wanted to do an episode on a question that I got asked recently. I was asked this actually by someone in a very kind of tight inner circle coaching group that we work with every year called Club 320. For anyone who wants to join the waitlist for that, join club320.com is the link. There are no spaces at present, but if they ever open up, you'll be on the waiting list. And the question that was asked was when an ex reaches out to you again and you become triggered emotionally by them reaching out, how do you deal with that trigger and i thought this is relevant to so many people

who find that months or even in some cases years later someone can still trigger them and they want to know what to do about it how to manage those triggers so i thought we could talk about that today we'll just have a great little episode and we'll just have a nice old time nice old time so what's i one of the things that i try to help people with when it comes to being triggered by an ex is to change the story that they're telling themselves about that trigger before we go into this can you set the scene for me of what you mean exactly by being and this doesn't have to be necessarily um you know this person's question but just what you mean by getting triggered let's say you've worked really hard to try to get over someone and you feel like you've

made progress maybe you've taken some steps but then they send you a text out of nowhere and all the feelings come flooding back or maybe you see a post of them online and immediately maybe you're laying in bed scrolling and you see a picture of them or you see them comment on your friend's latest post and i tell you a funny story you don't even know the story so i must have been 21 years old and this is back in the days of facebook when i used to be on facebook and i was sitting in my apartment scrolling through my facebook as you do eating a clementine you know like the peelers oh i know and i'm eating this clementine scrolling on facebook and a picture of my ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend pops up and and she's never eaten a clementine again no worse way worse i drop my a segment of clementine wait like usual suspects like at the end of usual suspects where he realizes that kevin spacey is kaiser soze and he drops his coffee cup

and it smashes all over the floor it was like slow motion you're just little segment of clementine just dropping and just bouncing off the boom boom boom i bloody wish it had done that it dropped directly onto my phone and liked the picture yeah how does a clementine i can't that's madness i know i didn't know i have a will i don't know you don't drop like if you drop something else on your phone it never likes a thing and it was a clementine and i literally it dropped and it liked what an evil little clementine yeah it was very upsetting because what do you do and you know you can't say i'll tell you what you can't do you can't send a message saying that wasn't me it was my clementine

you can't say that no you really you can't say I was just casually scrolling, minding my own business, doing my own thing. And a segment of my Clementine fell out of my hand and touched the heart on the phone. It was a like button. It touched the thumbs up and liked the post. You can't say that. Yeah. So anyway, I thought this story would be I remember I

remember being in high school and by mistake calling a like an ex like but genuinely just I don't know like a butt dial it was it wasn't even a oh maybe it was a butt dial I was scrolling or something and I called her and I I didn't realize I'd called her but I heard hello down the phone and it was her and my heart just sunk because I knew that out of that there would be an entire interpretation of what that meant and you know it wasn't I I wasn't the one like it's not like i ended it and now it would be seen as me coming back or something it was like didn't end very well i was kind of the i got a little bit hurt in the situation so i definitely wouldn't have wanted to like look like i cared oh and it really like i knew at that point, I was like, this is, now this is a story of how, like, he called me and hung up.

He's still dealing with a lot of pain. No. Yeah, it was so annoying. Imagine that in high school as well. It's like the worst time. That's really annoying. That's really, that's actually really frustrating. Well, I suppose people should be careful eating fruits near their phone.

Is the lesson of this story. You were the one who sidetracked us well i thought it was relevant to what we were saying anyway so you were talking about getting triggered and so you see you were saying you see a picture of your ex yeah and you're scrolling and and you get triggered by that picture that's what you said i'm bringing us back And you get triggered. And I think for a lot of people, when they feel that, it's very deflating and demoralizing. And almost a bit like it can freak people out a bit because they're like, oh, I haven't, I'm still thinking about them. And when will it stop?

And when will I not feel this and it's very easy to think of how well we're doing measure how well we're doing by the intensity of this emotion right now yeah and whatever longing we feel whatever pang of loneliness it makes us feel, especially if it's because we see them with someone else, the feeling of either jealousy or the feeling of simply, oh, I get that sick feeling in my stomach because I'm thinking of this person again. It's really important to not see our journey in moving on from someone as this binary thing where it's just zeros and

ones yeah and you're either over them or you're not i think that's a really unhelpful fallacy when it comes to moving on like ah i finally moved on I think instead it always a kind of gradient. And over time, you're doing the right things that allow you to move on. And you start to, in the same way that I've spoken about chronic pain in the book, in my new book, Love Life, for those of you that don't know i shouldn't just say the book in case people don't know there's a new book the book the good book i talk about chronic pain and i talk about how what i would fight for initially with chronic physical pain was five minutes where i didn't think about my pain. Because there was a time where I thought about it 24-7. And it was like it truly monopolized my entire existence,

was thinking about my chronic pain, which is what happens to people in a terrible breakup. Heartbreak is centralizing. It's all you think about. But you look for those first five minutes where you manage to just enjoy something you're doing be absorbed in an activity have a fun moment of laughter with a friend or you see a movie and that movie distracts you for a time those moments are hard one but when you get them they're very

beautiful because they make you realize that oh i can make more of those if i didn't feel this for five minutes i can make more of those if i didn't feel it for an hour i can make more of those and the thing that is quite sad sometimes about these triggers that come up is that they make us forget how much progress we've made along that gradient yeah they make us forget that we now you know in the in a certain stage we go a whole day without thinking about a person and at a certain point we go a whole week without thinking about that person at some point we go three months and we mustn't let something that has pulled our focus towards that person make us think that, oh no, I haven't gotten over them. It's not that you haven't gotten over them it's that getting over them is a constant gradient where you will care less and

less and less and less and less and less and less but that doesn't mean something can't still come and you know blindside you yeah i think as well neurologically when you when you break up with someone you experience grief of some kind your brain is wired to look for that person because you know we're creatures of habits right our brain forms patterns that are habitual and that's the patterns that we go down every day we can drive to work without even really focusing on where we're going or what we're doing because we're so used to it our brain is just on this autopilot and it's the same with our emotions and when you lose someone that you really loved it's this feeling of your brain is literally searching

for them because those neural pathways are created to drive back to this person and it's like where are they they're not there and so you go oh my god i want to show them this i can't they're not there pain and that takes a long time to rewire and to build new reference points and new moments and new people that we get drawn to you can do it and actually it doesn't take as long as you think it's going to take in that moment but it does take it does take a little while so I think when you take that into consideration you just have to think about that to to realize that if somebody texts you and somebody you spent a long time with and you have a lot of memories with a lot of connection with a lot of kind of built-in reference points with even though you've made all that progress when they text you your

brain is still going back there it's going back down that path that it's used to go down and the end of that path is i don't have that person anymore and i'm in pain and that's what it's used to associating this person with which is why the first time you know someone breaks your heart and then they text you the first time they break your heart and you see a picture of them is always the most painful because then if you see it multiple times you build a new point of reference for it it doesn't hurt in the same way every time so we have to be really gentle with ourselves and really compassionate to ourselves when we get triggered because if you loved someone and they meant something to you your body has recorded that

your brain has recorded that as something meaningful in your life and that's kind of it's really annoying when it doesn't work out but it's also very beautiful it gives us our ability to love and to pair bond with people when we feel that pain and it's connected to that person in that situation and it is there is this just pavlovian sense of now i see their name on my phone and it brings me this rush of pain always change their name by the way yeah change their name to something empowering or like never again or just say never again you know i love how i go like low frequency you go like hi i went a bit more involved i'm like change it to like douchebag something like that no you can change it to like

you know done someone i knew changed it to done you know someone put never again someone put you deserve better oh that's good you know these are great ways to take away that pavlovian conditioning that's associated with their name the letters that form their name yeah the concept because right now their name is a concept to you and that concept is pain and loss and heartbreak and you know maybe not feeling worthy but actually we can even go one step further than that which is right now when we feel that pain it's a reminder of something difficult but we do actually have the power to shift that this is what i said to the person in our coaching group and i was speaking to her personal situation when i said this so this was tailored to her but there's truth in this for

everyone i said i know that this x and all of the pain that this person caused you is a huge part of the reason, maybe the reason why you have been through these coaching programs. And I've worked with this person now for several years and I have watched her transform in that time. I've watched her create new standards for herself. I have watched her transform in that time. I've watched her create new standards for herself. I've watched her create new boundaries that she would never have had in her past. I have seen this person develop and blossom. And all of that, none of that was born out of a happy place. All of that progress in her life and her own development came from her being hurt by this person.

And then her saying, I need to do something in my life. And that was what meant that her and I crossed paths. And we got to work together. And she's now done all of this amazing self-growth none of that would have happened without the pain that this person caused her and so i reminded her that whenever he fires off a stray text which in her case was only happening once or twice a year but she was saying like even when this happens how do i deal with the negative trigger and what it does to me emotionally and i said well what a wonderful opportunity when this person's name pops up to remind yourself of everything that you have in your life right now everything you have done everything you have achieved all

the ways you have grown that would never have happened if this person hadn't hurt you and that actually this text is just it it has a direct link direct thread to something amazing to all of the things that hurt you then that led to all of these amazing things today it's all part of the same story that has led to the growth that you're proud of so you're saying replace a negative trigger with a positive one yeah you you can in a negative thought with a positive yeah like you don't even have to eliminate the trigger if you can turn the trigger into a trigger for all of these positive associations yeah because because of course you can block that person and i would argue that you should if that person won't listen to you

your requests to stop contacting you you know of course you can unfollow them on social media and make sure their stuff doesn't come up and you should do all of that you don't go out and stand in the thunder and lightning and cold just for the sake of it to play life on hard mode for yourself if you have a nice warm house to go into you should do that yeah right change their name to dung beetle dung beetle okay so not douchebag we're evolved to dung beetle i'm still working on it okay is this what you've been doing the whole time i've been talking i'm just waiting for my moment

but there are some things that we don't have the power to eliminate as triggers there are some things that will continue to be present because it's just life, right? We can't anticipate everything. But we can massively change the meaning of a trigger by actually connecting with all of the truths about what has come from that, what we're proud of? What parts of yourself wouldn't exist without the pain that this trigger is representative of? If you took away this trigger, you'd be taking away the entire thing. Yeah. The whole story that led up to it, that led to your growth. That's such a human way of thinking I think because I'm like I'm really I really like that

you said that because I think we do that with everything we do it with comparison don't we where we say like I wish I was like this person I wish I had their life I wish I had their body I wish I had their whatever and you don't take into consideration the fact that if you want that thing, you have to have all of it. If you want that person's life, you have to have everything that comes with that life and everything that comes with the way they are wired in order to have built that life. And like, you never take that full picture into consideration. We think that we can pick and choose the best of things and the worst of things but that's not real life and I think when you come to that realization that's also quite empowering because you realize that

everything is interconnected you can't choose your growth without having the thing that was the catalyst for it yeah and I think that is so true you know when when I look at you know my life and so many other people's that I know who I've spoken to you know so much of the pain that they've gone through in their lives whether it's heartbreak whether it's you know other pain in their life just whatever it is you know in that most moments you go oh my god I just I just like I can't believe this has happened to me I'll never recover from this this This is awful. And then you do look back on those things, whether it's five or 10 years later, and you say, I'm so glad that happened.

I think that is the case with pretty much everything in life, because as long as you can embrace it, lean into it and learn from it, you actually always come out more peaceful, more conscious and just a better equipped version of you and it doesn't mean it doesn't leave scars hence the triggers by the way you don't even need to wait until the time where you have the treasure from that hard thing in order to actually look at that trigger with a sense of gratitude and positivity. I write in the book, for everyone who has the book, you'll know there's a chapter called Surviving a Breakup. And in the book, Love Life, I talk about, I say a few years years ago i found myself in one of the most difficult chapters of my life i was going through multiple losses all at the same time any one of which had

the potential to knock me on my ass on its own but instead all landed together like a tsunami in my life my life at the time seemed to be a cockpit where every button around me was negative, but they all triggered some version of the same thought. Now this was my trigger at the time. This was like a thought that I used to think that really triggered a lot of catastrophic thinking and pain. The thought was this, I wish this hadn't happened to me. I can't take how hard this is. Around that time, I called my boxing trainer, Martin Snow, and expressed this sentiment to him. He didn't miss a beat. In his perfect gravelly voice, thick with Brooklyn from another era, he said, it has to be this hard. If it wasn't, there would be nothing heroic about getting through it.

You have to go through this or you won't be able to show other people how to get back on their feet later on when they need it. People are going to need the version of you who gets through this. Keep going, kid. We've got fucking work to do. And I remember at the time that became this new idea, this new thought that got attached to the trigger. So anytime I thought to myself, I wish this hadn't happened to me. I can't take how hard this is. I would suddenly it that everyone else is going to need from you later on. Yeah. You know, in my case, that was a really powerful idea because I was like, oh, I am out there helping people. And if this was easy, what would I be able to help people? How would that help other people? If I came back from an

easy thing and said, Hey, let me tell you how, how I got through this easy thing. There would be no value in that, but there's something about going to hell and back and surviving and living to tell the tale that meant I had, I thought, Oh my God, I have so much to give from that place. And I hadn't even got through it yet. For me, I then started to think, oh, weirdly, the harder this is, the better. The stronger I'll be in the future. Like the harder this is, the more I'm going to have to dig deep for the hero. And the more I'm going to be able to give at the end of it. That's such a you way of thinking, which I love.

Well, it worked for me. That's the point. Like when we change these things, they don't have to work for anyone else. No, but I think the principle, the model will work for everyone. The model will work for everyone. The thought, no one needs to connect with the thing that Martin said to me. I mean, you might, you might be listening to this going, Oh my God, that was exactly what I needed to hear right now.

But that doesn't have to be the thought that changes your trigger. The point is that when you have a negative trigger, it feels like negative triggers are always bad, but actually you can, you can use them to your advantage by leveraging all of the good that either has already come from that thing that you're taking for granted when you get frustrated or upset by this trigger so if you had a breakup three years ago and you get re-triggered and it makes you miss that person or it makes you hurt go make a list of everything you've done in these three years

that you would never have done if that breakup hadn't happened. Go connect with every way you've grown that you wouldn't have grown had that breakup never happened. And if you're not at that stage, if you're at the point of a breakup where all the growth is ahead of you, not behind you, then when the trigger comes up, when you get upset, find a way to connect to what is going to come from this. Because what's going to come from this is amazing and profound and beautiful. And if you can connect with that, then all of a sudden, like me in that situation, I started thinking the worst part about this is how hard it is. That was how I started. And I grew to the point because of Martin, where I thought the best thing about this

is how hard it is. Like that's actually, that's actually where the treasure is, is is how hard it is. Like that's actually, that's actually where the treasure is, is in how hard this is. And, and that changed it for me. There's also something else that I think is really, really practical and useful that you actually said once, and it has always stuck with me.

And I use it actually, I would say I use it like at least monthly when I'm struggling with something, is don't follow your thoughts. So a lot of the time when it comes to our exes, we ruminate and we're not actually doing productive thinking and healing, it's just rumination. They text, we go, oh my God, look how, you know, great they look together. And this, I'm so alone and this sucks. And like, I'm a piece of shit. And actually I could have held onto this person had I not been such a piece of fucking shit, excuse my language, but this is what we think, right? And I'm worthless. I'm never going to meet anybody. Oh my God we go into this very negative like rumination of the negative emotion and that's not really productive that's not a different way of thinking about it it's not a new way of thinking

about it that's helping you and you once said you know something that's really really good to do is to just before it happens and this requires a level of consciousness and awareness of your own thinking, if you can do it, it's very powerful. Before you're even kind of held captive by that thought, you stop yourself and you go, I'm not going there. I'm not following that thought. I'm scrolling past. I'm thinking about something else. I'm going to text a friend telling them I love them. I'm going to, I don't know, go for a walk. I'm going to call my mom. I'm gonna text a friend telling them I love them I'm gonna I don't know go for a walk I'm gonna call my mom I'm gonna do whatever just something pet my dog I don't care anything that means I don't go down this very very kind of familiar and quite frankly you know painful way of thinking that I'm addicted to because I'm so used to thinking in that way

and in the beginning you don't do it because it's really really hard to do so you struggle and then you know you might do it one time out of 50 and then you might do it two times out of 50 and then before you know it it's five times out of 50 and that's quite significant and then you can do it 10 times out of 50 oh my god suddenly you're literally doing it 20% of the time and the more strict you are with yourself the more regimented you are with this the more you're actually able to stop yourself from thinking that way and actually just just creating enough space between the thought and the reaction that you can catch it and not indulge it unnecessarily and I think I think that's a very very useful and very practical thing

for anyone who is in that place right now and who feels himself getting triggered by something it can kind of be anything as well it doesn't actually have to be your ex it can be anything in life just not following the thought you know if the question that you wanted to write to us was, how do I get over my ex? I can't seem to get over my ex. I think there are three answers that have come out of today's episode for that. is to not actually tell yourself a catastrophic story about how you can't get over your ex just because you've been triggered in the moment that actually if you look at it i bet you despite this moment where you've been triggered you have made massive progress you go much longer periods of time without thinking about them than you used to. And there are many new aspects of your life, many new stories in your life that have started to

take the place that your ex once occupied. That someone came back into your head or you saw a picture of them or they texted you and you got triggered does not change any of that. So just because you're missing them is suddenly at level nine in this hour. It doesn't mean you should forget all the times where it was a three in the three months before that. It doesn't mean you're not over your ex because there's no binary nature to this where you're suddenly over them. It's all a gradient and you're making progress all the time.

So celebrate the progress. Don't create a story of I'm still not over them. I must be doing something wrong. The second is when the trigger happens, remind yourself that you can actually turn that trigger into something very positive if you decide to connect to all of the good that has come from the pain that that person has caused you, from the relationship that wasn't, from that heartbreak. There is much treasure, many flowers that have bloomed as a result of that pain. Connect with that. And by the way, if you're earlier in the process, connect with all of the things that are going to happen as a result of this pain. And you can choose that, by the way. You can literally choose. I'm going to make all of these

wonderful things happen in my life from this pain and know that they were things decisions you never would have made things you never would have done if you weren't in that pain so change the trigger which doesn't mean it it doesn't have to not hurt i'm not even saying it doesn't have to not hurt i'm saying you can literally take the hurt that it makes you feel and let the hurt be a reminder of all of the amazing things that have come from this or will come from this and that ironically will actually start to lessen the hurt that that trigger makes you feel because it will have a different color to it. And the last thing that you said, Audrey, was don't follow the thought. You don't have to go where the thought is trying to take you. You can say, no, I'm not going to go there with you. Before we go, I wanted to let everyone

know there are only 35 spaces left on our retreat program this September from the 9th to the 15th in Florida. It's going to be an amazing time. We normally have more spaces by this point. We don't this year. I think with the new book coming out, a lot of people have found out about the retreat that didn't know about it before. And there's been a lot of demand. So if you do want to come and join us, we are down to the last few places now. Don't know about it before. And there's been a lot of demand. So if you do want to come and join us, we are down to the last few places now.

Don't sleep on it. I don't want you to miss it. There's only so much space in the room. So go to mhretreat.com to go and find out more. And I hope to see you there in Florida. And also I should tell you, we have a brand new free guide out called Spark and Connect, and you will find it at whattosaynext.com. This is a brand new free guide where we give you nine

different ways to spark up a conversation with someone you see out there. You know, you're in your coffee shop, you see someone you like, you want to know how to connect with them, how to say something instead of doing nothing. And you're sick and tired of having to rely just on dating apps to meet people. You want to actually be able to spark up a conversation, a connection with someone anywhere, anytime. This is for women. This is for guys. This will help everybody.

So check it out. Whattosaynext.com is the link for that new free guide. And thank you, as always, for checking out the Love Life podcast. We will see you in the next one. Be well and love life. Bye.