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Published by Chris Seiter: Self Help, Relationships, Dating And Sexuality
Getting Your Ex Back
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Today, we’re going to talk about why your ex pushes you away. And most importantly, figuring out what to do if you are in a situation where your ex has pushed you away. Now, I originally got this idea after I was going through our private Facebook support group of which there are 6,300 members, both men and women trying to get their exes back. Most of the time I’m dealing with women who are trying to get their ex-boyfriends back . Very rarely do I have a woman try to get an ex boyfriend back who’s actually broken up with that boyfriend. In other words, most of the times the clients I’m dealing with have been broken up with. Very rarely do I encounter a client who’s done the breaking up themselves. So I thought this would be a really great opportunity to dive into the female psyche of what’s actually going through a woman’s head when they push you away. I’m going through the private Facebook group and I stumble across this woman’s post, and she said some really interesting things that I think will really answer why women tend to push men away, even if they want that man back . So let’s tackle the big question first, which is why do women push men away when they break up with them? What Are Your Chances of Getting Your Ex Girlfriend Back? Take the quiz Understanding Exactly Why Your Ex Girlfriend Pushed You Away Ultimately what we found happening a lot when we encountered women who would push men away during a breakup was this push-pull mentality. One minute they would often push their exes away, and then the next minute they would kind of flirt back with them and then push them away again and flirt back with them. This is really interesting behavior. What’s interesting is when I went through the woman’s post on our private Facebook group, she basically says, “I just want to share an experience where I was on the other side of the equation. I was the dumper, so that we could kind of understand why men react a certain way after the breakup.” ” Now she’s writing this from the perspective of helping women, but I took it and I’m looking at it on basically someone’s honest opinion of what they went through when they went through a breakup. So in 2017, she breaks up with her guy after they’ve been together for seven years. She was absolutely sure of it. She knew for a fact, she wanted this breakup. She felt stuck. She felt suffocated in the relationship and she told him things that were not working out between them anymore. Now, while she did this, he was actually on vacation when she initiated the breakup. When he came back, her resolution for the breakup kind of melted away. So I’m assuming he came back into the picture after she exhibits this, I don’t want to be with you anymore, and tries to win her back. Just tries to beg for her back. And her resolution for the breakup kind of melts away.But when he asked me if I was going to change my mind , I said, no. At that point I just thought, if I were to ask him to stay while things were so emotional, the same thing might happen two months down the road. So I did not waiver. And to me, this is the important part of understanding why women end up pushing you away in situations where they are the dumpers. It all has to do with self preservation. Now I’ve long been a proponent of trying to help people understand that when it comes to relationships, we all are very self-interested. We don’t really care much about other people, and this is kind of a weird thing to admit, but we ultimately, all we really care about when it comes to our relationships, our romantic relationships, are how they are going to make us feel. Now it gets kind of complicated because someone who’s very philosophical can come and say, well, what about me? Because I care very deeply about what my partner feels. Well, I would actually argue that’s not the case. The only way you care very deeply about what your partner feels is weirdly enough if they feel bad, it makes you feel bad, because their opinion matters to you. So by making them feel better you in turn, weirdly enough, feel better, which is sort of a philosophical paradox in self-interest. So what’s interesting about this is if you look at someone pushing you away with the frame of mind that they’re being incredibly self-interested, they’re trying to protect themselves from being hurt, it makes a lot of sense. We often will talk about the emotional wall. Like I said, most of the time I’m dealing with women on a one-on-one basis. But one thing that I see a lot that is kind of universal among the human race is the idea of putting up the emotional barrier. We all have been there where we put up an emotional barrier, or we’ve been with someone who’s put up an emotional barrier. You can sense somethings off. You’ll oftentimes confront them about it and say, “Are you okay?” And they’ll say, “I’m fine,” but they’re keeping you distant because they’re wanting to protect themselves. They either don’t want to hurt your feelings, which in turn would hurt their feelings and make them feel guilt, or there’s something really going on in their head that they don’t want to share with you. It creates this weird scenario where they’re worried about your feelings. This is an important concept to help you understand why women often push men away. Because a lot of times men will come to me and they’ll say, Chris, why is my ex-girlfriend pushing me away when we shared everything so intimately from a physical standpoint and also an emotional standpoint? Why is she acting different now? Well, ultimately it’s self-interested. She’s trying to protect herself. But that’s not the whole reason for why women push you away. It’s just a reason for why women can push you away. Another huge reason for why women could push you away is they have a little bit of an avoidant mentality. Now, avoidance oftentimes… We talked about the core concept of why avoidance will push men away. It’s important to understand this. Someone who has avoidant attachment style tendencies will tend to value their independence a lot more highly than the average person. So anytime they’re in a relationship where they feel that that independence is becoming threatened, they push the other person away or they leave, which you take as them pushing you away. Now what’s important about this is it’s really important not to take it personally. What’s happening here is oftentimes after a breakup, your ex-girlfriend has pushed you away, and then they start to flirt with you. It’s important to understand the cycle of how this works, because when you actually study avoidant women, here’s what we learn. We learn that they actually don’t begin to reminisce or think about the good times until they feel you have completely moved on. At that point, they feel safe missing you. So what happens a lot of times is what we’re trying to teach our men and our women clients to do is to project this persona that you are moving on. And you can’t really fake it, you have to move on without moving on. That’s oftentimes what I tell my clients. So what happens is your ex is naturally drawn to this. So they’ve pushed you away and then what happens is they’re drawn to it and they want to live in the reminiscence of the relationship that the two of you had together . What ends up occurring though, is when you hit it off, and when things seem to be going well, they get freaked out again because they feel their independence is becoming threatened. They feel like they’re going to get hurt again, whatever the reason is, and that causes them to push you away again and you end up in this really difficult cycle. What happens with most people is they don’t recognize this pattern because it’s so personal. It hurts when someone we love so deeply is rejecting us, right? But if you actually are able to acknowledge, wait, this is what’s happening, what occurs is maybe the key to helping you understand what to do when an ex-girlfriend pushes you away. But let’s deal with something bigger first right now. Let’s try to answer the question, is your ex-girlfriend pushing you away because she’s scared ? Is Your Ex Girlfriend Pushing You Away Because She’s Scared? This is a big question that I noticed came up in Google searches a lot. When I started researching what I was going to say for this article, for this podcast episode, for this YouTube video, wherever you’re experiencing this content, I noticed that one of the big questions people were typing into Google was wait, is my ex-girlfriend pushing me away because she’s scared? And the answer to that question I think is ultimately yes, but not scared of the basic things that you would assume. You would assume that your ex-girlfriend is pushing you away because she’s trying to protect you from something she’s thinking. That can certainly be the case, but I don’t think that’s ultimately what it is. I think ultimately what it is, is she’s pushing you away to protect herself. Remember, if you operate under the assumption that every action that is taken during a romantic encounter is self-interested, it helps you understand your ex-girlfriend’s actions a lot more. Now what’s interesting is going back and trying to understand from a real life perspective of what an ex-girlfriend is going through when she pushes you away, I’d like to point you back to that client I talked about in the Facebook group, whose story we’re really using as a fuel to understand what’s going on when an ex pushes you away. Here’s something interesting that she had to say. She did not waiver. So ultimately she broke up with him, he tried to ask for her back, she pushed him away. Ultimately after that, he left to stay with a friend, and a few days later, he asked her out for dinner. It was good, but she still did not budge. A few days later, he told me he’d booked a flight and would leave the country for good. She was in shock, but yet she did not budge though I felt the pain. So what this does is basically illustrates the whole avoidant mentality that we’re talking about here. What’s occurring is she’s pushing him away to protect herself. He comes and chases her when she’s not ready because she’s worried of being hurt and she pushes away again. He does it again and the same thing occurs. All the while though, I felt sad. Yet at the same time, I felt relief for the space. I even told my friends that I really just wanted him to be happy and I would give him my blessing if he found another. Well, until I found out he had someone new two months down the road. That day I received the news, I kept feeling something really weird running down my spine. I tried to shake it off, but it kept piling. I only understood what I was feeling that night when I finally was engulfed by it. It was the sense of loss. I only felt the sense of loss when I realized he was gone. So it’s true, we really need to evoke this sense of fear of loss in our ERP exes, if not, they’re not going to budge. I’m not saying we have to find a rebound for that to happen, but we do need to evoke that fear in some ways. So, this is my hypothesis. Exactly What To Do When Your Ex Girlfriend Pushes You Away Well, we got an indication of what not to do. That particular ex of this woman kept trying to chase and fix things. This ended up causing her to just dig in and say, no, I need to protect myself, and she probably just gave him some fake reason why. She was not in love with him anymore. Things are not the same anymore, and he needs to move on. Ultimately he did. It took a couple of months, but he began to do what is commonly known or commonly referred to amongst society as the mature thing to do. To move on to someone new, to let go of the past, move on with the new. This evoked the fear of loss. This made her realize, oh my goodness, I could lose him forever. I had no idea how great it was. And this is completely in line with what we understand about avoidant attachment styles. Remember what I said. In our research, looking at what makes people who have avoidant attachment styles miss you, we have found that people with avoidant attachment styles end up only missing you after they feel that you’ve moved on. That’s exactly what happened here, but there’s a little bit more to it than that. So if you’re wondering, what do I need to do if my ex-girlfriend is pushing me away? How can I get her to not push me away? How can I get her to truly want me? The answer is actually pretty simple. What you need to do is understand the intricacies of how attachment styles work. I’ve talked a lot about this in the past on my other website, exboyfriendrecovery.com, and haven’t really talked much about it on exgirlfriendrecovery.com, so I’d like to give you a quick crash course on how attachment styles work. Here’s sort of the brief rundown. There are four main attachment styles. Secure attachment style, which is sort of like the holy grail. This is how you should always try to act. This is what you should always aspire to be. You deal with loss and breakups in a mature, healthy way. Then you have someone with anxious attachment style tendencies. Now somebody with anxious attachment styles, and I’m just going to use a breakup to illustrate my points, someone with an anxious attachment style is the type of person that will immediately try to fix the breakup as soon as humanly possible because their entire world is not right until that breakup is fixed. This often relates or ends up being where you encounter people who GNAT. They go nuts at texting. They show up at their exes work unannounced. They show up trying to find their ex in-person unannounced. They send their ex gifts. These are very anxious type things. Then of course you have the avoidance. Avoidance is basically what we’ve been talking about this entire presentation. Avoidance are people who value their independence so highly that they will push anyone away that they feel threatens that independence, but they have this competing need for wanting warmth and security. So they’re often stuck in this self-fulfilling cycle where they find someone that they think, oftentimes someone with an anxious attachment style, that will give them the warmth and the need and the love that they feel they deserve. But then when they get too close, they push that person away, and they’re just stuck in that cycle. Then of course you have the fearful attachment style, and the fearful attachment style is incredibly rare. We’re not going to talk a lot about it here because only 7% of the entire human race has it. It’s kind of like taking the worst combination of anxious tendencies and avoidant tendencies and flip-flopping them. Oftentimes people who have fearful attachment style are misdiagnosed as having a multiple personality disorder. This is how crazy these people tend to be. Now, what ends up occurring though is there’s this interesting fact that we’ve noticed occurs with attachment styles. If you have a secure attachment style, you have the also added benefit of creating gravity to the other attachment styles. So what ends up happening is the most common component for a breakup that we see is someone with an anxious attachment style, most likely you, is being with someone who has an avoidant attachment style, most likely your ex. I’m just using examples here. These two ultimately are not a great match for each other because they ultimately are the exact opposite of what each other needs. This causes a breakup. Yet when someone who has an avoidant attachment style partners with someone with a secure attachment style, an interesting phenomenon occurs, and we call this phenomenon secure attachment gravity. The way it works is the person with the avoidant attachment style starts to see, wow, this is what it’s supposed to be like when I’m with someone who is secure with themselves. And they start to actually subconsciously get rid of their avoidant tendencies and adopt more secure tendencies. So the key to handling an ex-girlfriend who pushes you away is to actually identify your own attachment style and work to shift it towards more secure behaviors. This will create the gravity that not only makes her notice, wow, something’s different about him, but it will also help her realize that she can be open with you. It also has the added benefit of creating a fear of loss, which is exactly what happened in the sort of phenomenon we talked about what the Facebook client. Why? Well, ultimately the main goal that you’re trying to get across here is you’re trying to exhibit secure tendencies after a breakup. This means handle the breakup in a healthy way, and someone who handles the breakup in a healthy way is someone who realizes, yeah, I would love to reconnect with my ex, but if I’m not able to reconnect with my ex, I’ll be okay. I’ll be able to find someone else . I’ll probably be able to find someone else just as good. And in some cases, they go and date other people with this mentality. This mentality is a healthy way to handle a breakup, and it’s the way you should be handling the breakup. It sounds weird when you’re looking at it from the watchtower 5,000 feet above ground, but I promise you, I’ve seen this happen time and time again. So here are the quick crash course rules for what to do if your ex-girlfriend pushes you away. If she pushes you away, give her space. Also, exhibit secure attachment style tendencies on social media. This means doing things that you should be doing after a breakup. Really focusing on your health, really focusing on your wealth, really focusing on relationships outside of your ex and also going on dates with new people. That’s an important component. Your ex does need to feel a fear of loss because they do need to realize you aren’t going to wait around for them forever. The post My Ex Girlfriend Pushed Me Away first appeared on Ex Girlfriend Recovery .
Today we’re going to talk about how to get your ex back if you live together with them. So, if you stick around until the end of this article you’re going to learn, Some of the common pitfalls our clients fall into when they still live with their exes. Our five step process for getting an ex back in this exact situation. Enough talk! Let’s get to it. What Are Your Chances of Getting Your Ex Girlfriend Back? Take the quiz How To Get Your Ex Back If You Live Together With Them Situations where you’re living with your ex are always difficult, because a lot of the times, the situations or the game plan that we’ve created is designed for more general purposes, and what I mean by that is it’s designed for situations where you’re not living with your ex, where usually cheating hasn’t been involved, or there’s no long-distance situation involved, so a lot of the core basic concepts that we come up with on Ex Girlfriend Recovery really don’t apply to situational circumstances. This is actually one of the reasons why we have so many articles, because there’s so many nuances to getting an ex back in this situation or that situation, and living together is no different. But what we’ve done is we’ve come up with sort of a five-step process for getting an ex back if you live together, so very quickly, here are the things that we want you to do, and what I’m going to do after I list these things is go in-depth on exactly what I mean by them. Have A Plan For Moving Out Go Out With Other People Begin Limited No Contact Until You Do Move Out Shift Your Anxious Attachment To A More Secure One Institute The Value Ladder If this sounds like rocket science to you, don’t worry, I’m going to make it make sense, so let’s just start from the top. Step One: Have A Plan For Moving Out The big one is step one, being the plan for moving out. So this is actually a difficult thing to maybe hear, but one of the things that we tested when we first started Ex Girlfriend Recovery , and even our first website, Ex Boyfriend Recovery, when we saw situations where people were living together with their exes, we actually tried to get them to just simply use what you’re going to learn about later, a limited no contact rule, and the value ladder, and the value chain, and concepts like that, but what we quickly found out was they were ineffective. Almost always, the concept of the value ladder and the value chain, which we will talk about as step five, was a lot more effective when you weren’t actually living together, so we tried to… We decided a few years ago to try, for our clients who were living together with exes, to advise them, “Hey, if it’s possible, move away from your ex, move out of the situation entirely.” So we started advising people to do this, and almost instantly we saw much better successes. In fact, one of the situations that… This is maybe a bit of a tangent off-topic, but one of the situations that we were encountering early on that we were really struggling with was what do you do if you’re living together with an ex, and your ex is dating someone new? And almost by accident, we advised this client, it was actually a female whose ex literally was with someone else at the time that they were living together, we advised this client to move out, and it actually helped spur us to realize, hey, number one, moving out actually really works, it kind of levels the playing field, but number two, for this particular situation, we actually advise longer periods of no contact, which kind of we’ll talk a little bit about when we talk about the limited no contact and sort of the concept with that, so we almost kind of stumbled upon these two insights just from our very first person who we advised to move out. So really step one is create a plan, if possible, for moving out, so if you’re living together with your ex, you need to move away from them. Now, this may seem like the worst thing in the world, because I think a lot of the misconception is, “Well, if I’m living together with my ex, that’s such an advantage,” but we find it’s actually not an advantage, it’s a disadvantage, so many things can go wrong, so what we try to do is we try to level the playing field by advising all of our clients who are living together with an ex, if possible, because some people, it’s just not possible, if possible, move out, get your own apartment, become more independent, that’s step one. Step Two: Begin Going Out With Other People Step two is begin going out with other people. Now, most of the time, this is not what you think. A lot of times, I think the natural assumption is, “Okay, so Chris wants me to go out with other people, I need to start finding dates.” Well, yes and no, it doesn’t necessarily have to be dates. What we’re trying to do is we’re trying to show your ex that you are not going to sit around and mope around about the fact that this breakup occurred. A lot of times, we’re finding… I’m going to admit something here, I probably shouldn’t admit this on air, but I’ve actually not done a study for the men on Ex Girlfriend Recovery, we have done studies for the women on Ex Boyfriend Recovery, we found that pretty much 95% of the clients there have been broken up with by their exes. Just from listening to the voicemails I get, most of the time, we’re finding ex-girlfriends are the ones to break up with our male clients, but I don’t have the proof to back it up, so that is just an assumption I’m rolling on, or rolling with here, but most of the time, when your ex-girlfriend has broken up with you, the narrative that she creates in her head is, “They can’t survive without me.” And there’s a lot of different reasons for breaking up, sometimes ex-girlfriends will make it seem like this is a mutual breakup, but almost always, it’s never very mutual. So by going out, you’re showing your ex that number one, they’re not your first priority anymore, number two, they’re nothing more than an acquaintance to you, and number three is you’re not sitting around, moping around depressed, you’re handling the breakup in a mature way. Now, does this mean you should be going out every single night and partying? No, that’s almost an over-correction, but we do advise you to go out with other people, all right? Friends, family members, even romantic interests if you want to try dating someone else , this is a good time to do that, because if they’re seeing you come and go at all hours of the night, it’s not as effective as just seeing you come and go from time to time, it just looks like you’re not sitting around moping about the breakup. What you’re trying to do here is you’re trying to make them have this paradigm shift where they literally start wondering, “Did I mean nothing to them?” Because this actually helps create value. Step Three: The Limited No Contact Rule Let’s move on to step number three. So step number three is doing a limited no contact rule until you do move out. All right, so this is where we get a little complicated. If you’re creating a plan for moving out, that actually makes doing a full no contact rule really well, so here’s sort of the controversial thing that we’re going to be saying today. When you are with your ex, and you’re living together with them, I mean, you’re going to want to do what’s called a limited no contact rule, so we are often talking about the no contact rule as being this period of time where you’re ignoring your ex on purpose, with the intent of outgrowing them. But when you’re living together with them, it’s kind of hard to ignore them, so you have to do kind of limited no contact, where if you see them, you’re not trying to be rude, you don’t try to start a conversation, but if they’re starting a conversation, you do engage with them, and then sort of give them the bare minimum, and then go back to business. Now, usually some people who are living together only think they need to do a limited no contact rule and that’s it, so once their 30 days of limited no contact are up, “Cool, that’s it, I’m ready to go, let’s begin talking again.” What we’re finding, and this is going to be hard to hear, is once you do a limited no contact rule, what you need to do is do a full no contact rule once you move out, so that plan for moving out is kind of important. Longer periods of no contact, we are becoming more and more fans of. We weren’t originally at the beginning, and this is kind of counter-intuitive, but what we’re finding is we’re noticing that a lot of times, exes who break up with you tend to have avoidant tendencies, and there’s almost this time dilation that exists with people who have avoidant tendencies in time during the no contact rule. So for a quick example, there are four basic attachment styles, you have secure attachment style, anxious attachment style, avoidant attachment style, and fearful attachment style. Let’s throw fearful out, because only 7% of the population has a fearful attachment style, it’s extremely rare for your ex-girlfriend to have one, so let’s just operate under the assumption that there’s three attachment styles, right? So let’s say you’re doing a 30-day no contact rule. For someone who was a secure attachment style, 30 days is going to feel like 30 days. 30 days will feel normal. For someone with an anxious attachment style, 30 days is going to feel like 60 days. For someone with an avoidant attachment style, 30 days is going to feel like a week to 10 days, so there’s almost this weird time dilation that exists in how we perceive time during the no contact rule, based on our attachment style. Now, we’re finding most ex-girlfriends tend to be avoidant, so when you’re doing a limited no contact rule, the mere fact that they’re seeing you almost allows that time dilation, even though you’re doing a limited no contact rule, to extend a little bit, which is why we recommend longer periods of no contact. So if you’re doing a limited no contact rule while you’re living together with them, we actually do advise to do a minimum of 30 days real no contact once you do move out. Again, not a popular thing to talk about, but that’s what we’re finding works the best. Step Four: The Anxious To Secure Attachment Movement Step four, which is moving your anxious attachment style to a secure attachment style, which really we should probably reframe this as a secure attachment gravity. This is a concept that I’ve talked a lot about recently, but basically I gave you kind of the rundown in the last section, or the last step, about the four major types of attachment styles, secure, anxious, avoidant, fearful. Really there’s only two categories of attachment styles, you have the secure attachment styles and the insecure attachment styles, so as you can imagine, if you have a secure attachment style, you are classified as having a secure attachment style category. On the other hand, if you have an insecure attachment style, that means you could either be an anxious attachment style, an avoidant attachment style, or a fearful attachment style. Now, we’ve talked about the 7% rule with the fearful, how it’s very rare, but what we’re finding is that most of the people who we work with tend to be anxious, or tend to have anxious personalities, whereas their exes tend to be avoidant. Now, this is a common theme among people with attachment styles, where anxious attachment style people will be attracted to avoidant attachment style people, and then boom, it’s just like two ends of the spectrum meeting, and it’s fire and ice, they just burn up, and it just doesn’t end well. Well, what we’re finding is the key to success in getting an ex back almost always relies in identifying your attachment style and moving it more towards becoming more secure. So what is a secure attachment style? Well, this is the type of person that when they go through a breakup, allows themselves time to grieve, but ultimately has the understanding that they’re going to be okay, that the world hasn’t ended, that no matter what happens, they’re going to be okay. Now, someone with an anxious attachment style, on the other hand, will think the world is ending, that they’re not going to be okay if they don’t get their ex back, the world will be over, blah, blah, blah, we get the whole spiel. Someone with an avoidant attachment style values their independence so much that they’re like, “No, I don’t want intimacy with someone, I don’t want a relationship with someone, I want to move on and find someone else that’s going to allow me to be independent.” So, here’s what we know. If you’re able to identify the fact that maybe you have an anxious personality, and you’re able to move your anxious personality more towards a secure one, there’s almost this gravity that exists towards your partner, where if your partner identifies, and they will know subconsciously, “Wow, there’s something different.” Well, the truth is, you’re just being more secure with yourself, you’re being more confident with yourself. Once they identify, “Wow, this change has occurred with them,” they begin to mimic those changes, because that’s what we do when we’re attracted to someone. So by simply moving your anxious attachment style, or your insecure type of attachment styles to more of a secure attachment style, you can have the marked benefit of doing the same thing with your ex. Now, it’s not a perfect science, it’s not really a science at all, but it is something we have noticed. Step Five: The Value Ladder So, doing those four things will help massively, but ultimately you still need to do step five, and step five is to institute the value ladder when you move out. So thus far, let’s kind of talk about, you’ve created a plan for moving out, but while you’re still living together, you’re going out with other people, friends, family, romantic interests. You are doing a limited no contact rule, and you’re doing that secure attachment work internally, but when you move out, that’s when you actually institute the value ladder concept that we’ve come up with. So, what is the value ladder? I’ve talked a lot about this, more specifically on Ex Boyfriend Recovery, because Ex Girlfriend Recovery, unfortunately, we haven’t updated some of the older pieces of content, but the value ladder is basically this concept, we tried to create this analogy for people that said, “Getting your ex back is a lot like climbing a ladder,” right? So each rung of the ladder, you are using a different medium of conversation, or different method of communication, in building value. So you do a no contact rule, and then the first thing you do is you initiate conversation with your ex-girlfriend. You do that through text messaging , this is the first rung of the value ladder. When you’re texting your ex, you’re building value to your ex. Once enough value has been built, you move up to the next rung, which is phone calls or video chat, or FaceTime, or I guess people are using Zoom now, Skype isn’t so much a thing anymore, you build value in there. Then you move up to the next rung, while still building value on the first rung. The next rung, of course, is meetups. Meetups are kind of in this gray area between your ex-girlfriend thinking, “Is this a date, or is this just sort of like a hangout?” That’s considered a meetup. You build value on enough meetups, and then you can begin doing romantic dates, which is the second-to-last value-added layer. Once you build enough value in the romantic date area, while building value in all those other previous rungs that created the foundation, then you move up to the final rung on the ladder, and that’s where you actually ask for your ex-girlfriend back. Now, I actually always think ex-boyfriends have a distinct advantage over our ex-girlfriend clients, because society dictates that men tend to have to be the ones that ask for their exes back, so guess what? You have the easy way out, you can just directly ask, but you never ever ask for your ex-girlfriend back until you have climbed to the top of that ladder. The post Can You Get Your Ex Back If You Live Together? first appeared on Ex Girlfriend Recovery .
Today, we’re going to be talking about how to act when you see your ex at work. This is actually a topic that I was shocked that we hadn’t covered before, even though I’ve definitely talked about it on Ex Girlfriend Recovery and talked about it in even my other website, Ex Boyfriend Recovery, I haven’t actually put a podcast episode or a YouTube video, or even an article specifically dedicated to this topic. So I thought this is the perfect time to do just that since it is an issue that we find a lot of people having. Now before I get into the nitty gritty of exactly how you should act and giving you tactical advice. The one thing that I do want to say is if you’re a newbie listening to this podcast, or you’ve never been introduced to Ex Girlfriend Recovery , probably the best place to start is first by figuring out what kind of chance you have of getting your ex back. Believe me when I say there’s nothing worse than trying to get an ex back when you really don’t have a chance of getting them back at all. Now luckily for you on our website, www.exgirlfriendrecovery.com, we put together a special free two-minute quiz that’s designed to basically tell you what kind of chance you have. So you know whether or not you’re wasting your time. What Are Your Chances of Getting Your Ex Girlfriend Back? Take the quiz How Do You Act If You See Your Ex At Work? I think the first thing that you need to understand is where you stand throughout the process that we teach. So if you’re not familiar, we have a very strict process that we’d like to have our clients go through when they are attempting to try to get an ex back or even attempting to try to get over an ex. And that process always starts at the same place. It starts with the no contact rule . Now, if you’re not familiar with what the no contact rule is, it’s like the ultimate buzzword for breakups. You can’t pretty much go to any expert out there without hearing about it. There’s always several differences between each expert. One expert will talk about the no contact rule and say do it for 30 days. Another will say do it for 90 days. We have our own version of the no contact rule , but it’s based on what we’re finding actually works out on the field. So the no contact rule, you kind of need to understand where you are at throughout the no contact rule. The rules for communicating with an ex at work is different. If you’re in a no contact rule versus if you’re not in a no contact rule. So that’s a key component. You need to first figure out where you are in the midst of no contact. Now I’m going to go out on a limb here and just kind of assume that the people who are most likely to be searching for this topic are not basically using a no contact rule. They’ve probably either never heard about it, or they have heard about and thought, “Well that sounds too hard. I’m not going to try that.” You need to try no contact rule. That’s always the first step, pretty much in every single situation that we’ve ever found. It’s a great first step for a lot of different reasons. I don’t want to get into them here since I want to stick to how to act when you see your ex at work and on the topic with regards to that. But I’m going to go ahead and kind of assume that you’ve not tried a no contact rule, which means you’re going to try it, right? So here are the rules for how you should handle no contact when you see your ex at work. So one of the interesting nuances between the no contact rule and seeing an ex at work is there’s no way to, “no contact an ex at work,” especially if you work together, especially if you’re guaranteed to see each other so that no contact rule actually becomes something that we call the limited no contact rule, which means you’re essentially going to ignore your ex in every way that you would with a no contact rule. The only difference there is when you’re forced to see them at work, you’re going to act in a very secure way and more on the secure sort of way in a minute. But one thing I want to kind of get into here is this concept that we’re noticing of the doomsday clock. Now I made actually a really good friend. One of the people that I decided to help on Ex Girlfriend Recovery became my friend. And he was a really brilliant guy and he is the one who kind of came up with this doomsday clock thing. And I asked if I could borrow it. And he said yes. What Do I Mean When I Talk About The Doomsday Clock? Well, one really interesting thing that we noticed with regards to people who try the no contact rule is they almost like look at the no contact as a doomsday timer, right? So as each day goes, it’s like another day that they’re closer to losing their ex. And we found that, that’s the wrong way to look at it. So we don’t want you to look at the no contact rule. And the reason I’m really bringing this up is because a lot of people who are forced to see their exes at work are literally kind of having that tomb’s day clock sort of stuck on a 10. They’re seeing their ex every single day. They’re seeing how they’re not getting closer to getting them back there. They feel like they’re getting closer to losing their ex forever. They feel like another guy is going to swoop in and take the ex-girlfriend away. And that’s not how we should be looking at the no contact rule. Probably the best way I can explain how you need to look at the no contact rule is like you would look at Christmas morning when you were a kid. Now I want you to think back when you were like a little kid and you knew Santa Claus was coming. That night before you understood the truth about Santa Claus, you believed in Santa Claus, you knew he was coming. You knew he was bringing presents. You probably couldn’t sleep. In fact, your parents probably got really mad at you because you couldn’t sleep. They’re saying, “Go to bed, Santa Claus isn’t going to come if you stay up all night.” But what did you do? You stayed up all night anyways, and then you conked out and then you probably woke up early the next day because you were so excited to see what presents were bought. That is how you need to be looking at the no contact rule. You need to be excited. You need to look at this as sort of a countdown to Christmas, not the end of the world. No contact is not… So every day that goes through no contact shouldn’t be a day where you’re getting closer to losing your ex. It should be a day you’re getting closer to getting your ex back. That’s the mentality I think that you need to have, and this mentality can help extremely well. Especially when you see your ex at work. Now a lot of what we’re talking about here is sort of philosophical in nature. These are the mindsets you need to have in the no contact rule and where you’re at in the no contact rule should depend on or should dictate how you handle seeing your ex in person at work. We haven’t really talked about actionable ideas. So let’s talk about some of those actionable ideas. Tyler Ramsey Helps Us Understand How To Act At Work Lately, we’re on a kick and that’s because we hired actually a new coach on the Ex Recovery staff. His name is Tyler Ramsey and his background is in psychology. He’s actually in his last year of medical school and he’s very seriously considering starting a psychology practice, which I think is great. So I’m really happy to have him on the team and just hiring him and being super impressed with everything he’s bringing to the table. He’s talked a lot about attachment styles and lately… So I’ve been talking about this all the time, but I actually recently ran on our YouTube channel an interesting study where I was taking people who actually successfully got their exes back. And I was interviewing them for anywhere between 40 minutes to an hour. The main goal is essentially just asking them questions from start to finish on how the breakup occurred, how they got their exes back, what went right, what went wrong and trying to understand what are the differences between people who are successful and people who are unsuccessful. And what’s really interesting is the big difference we’ve noticed from people who are successful is that at some point throughout the process, they gave up on trying to get their ex back. And I found this kind of interesting, but I had no psychological way of understanding it until I met Tyler Ramsey and interviewed a few other people in the psychology space. And they introduced me to attachment styles. The Importance Of Attachment Styles Now, what are attachment styles? Well, generally speaking, there’s a lot of different variations and combinations of attachment styles. But if you want to get the bare basic minimum, there’s four type of attachment styles. You have, secure attachment style anxious attachment style avoidant attachment style fearful attachment style Now defining each is actually really simple. Secure attachment style is the kind of person that will have the… When they go through a breakup, they will have the fortitude to process the emotions, they’ll feel bad for themselves then they’ll kind of get over and be like, “You know what? I’m not going to obsess about this. I’m going to kind of move on with my life.” Anxious attachment styles has the opposite effect. They’re the type of people who go through a breakup. They stalk their exes. Their entire life is wrapped up into this relationship. They blow their ex’s phones up. There’s that funny meme that was going around when I first started Ex Boyfriend Recovery and Ex Girlfriend Recovery of the girl who like left 70,000 voicemails to her ex after he broke up with her, this would be an anxious attachment style person. And then you have the avoidant attachment style. It’s just like it sounds. They like to avoid conflict. Oftentimes they will just drop you and not give a reason. Understanding what we know about avoidant attachment styles. They’re really big into independence, meaning they feel that they should have the right to be independent from you and they feel you should have the right to be independent from them. And then you have fearful, fearful attachment style is the rarest type of attachment style, only 7% of the population statistically has it. We have seen it happen actually a little bit more than 7%, at least in our breakup space. But that’s probably just because we’re getting some of the extreme attachment styles, but fearful, it’s kind of a combination between anxious and avoidant. Meaning they’ll flip-flop between these behaviors. One minute, they’ll be extremely anxious and, and sort of hot making you think that they want you. And then the next minute there’ll be extremely cold, making you think that they don’t want you. The Trend We’ve Noticed From Our Successes And Attachment Styles This may be kind of weird hearing me talk about attachment style so much in something that seems super harmless. Like how do you act when you see your exit work? But I promise you, it relates because one of the big things that we noticed, especially when I did that study on YouTube and you can actually just go to my YouTube channel, just type my name in, Chris Seiter, C-H-R-I-S S-E-I-T-E-R. And just look at the success stories that I put there. And I noticed, the people who are successful seem to get over their exes. They seem to move on or not care about getting their exes back anymore. What they’re doing is they’re really mimicking or becoming secure. So most of the people that work with us have anxious attachment styles. They want their exes back. They’re the most likely people to be searching online for help on getting exes back. And our work kind of helps them act more secure. So they kind of change their attachment style to be this more secure attachment style. So that’s how you need to act when you see your ex in person, think of it like this. A secure attachment style is allowed to get bothered by things, but they don’t let it ruin their day. They don’t obsess about it. They don’t look at their ex’s profile on Facebook 50,000 times, they don’t stock their ex or read into every little movement they make at work. So if your ex is, let’s say flirting with a guy at work or flirting with a girl at work, a secure person will be, “Okay, they’re just going through their own process of handling the breakup. That’s fine. Let them have it. They can have it. I’ll be fine.” They understand and feel like they have the fortitude to handle it. And that sort of mentality needs to go through in every single action that you take. So you don’t overreact when they do things, you try to remain cordial as much as possible. If you’re in the middle of no contact, you’re not bringing up reasons to actually extend a conversation until after the no contact rule is completed, but it is okay to make eye contact with them. It is okay to smile at them or wave at them. We’re not telling you to be a robot. We’re telling you to be secure. Another way of looking at this is you need to be extremely comfortable in your skin. And I say that because a lot of men are not comfortable in their skin. There’s nothing more attractive to a woman when she can sense that the guy she previously dated is not only better than he was when he dated her, but also he’s extremely comfortable with who he is. And I think that’s a huge missed opportunity that a lot of our clients don’t really ever achieve because they don’t buy into the idea. The key here is getting you to buy into the idea of a secure attachment style. You need to become secure with yourself. You need to become secure with the fact that your ex-girlfriend is broken up with you. You’re not together anymore. She’s not your best friend anymore. She’s an acquaintance now. And she needs to be treated like an acquaintance. How would a secure attachment person treat an acquaintance? They treat them friendly, but they wouldn’t try to overstep their bounds. They give them space and feel like, “You know what? I’ll be fine on my own.” That’s the mentality that you need to have, even if you want her back. That’s how you need to act when you see your ex at work. The post How To Act When You See Your Ex At Work first appeared on Ex Girlfriend Recovery .
Today we’re going to be talking about what to text an ex who hates you or dislikes you. Basically, you ended on very contentious terms and you’re trying to figure out how you can kind of bridge the gap and get a conversation started. Now, one thing that we’re going to talk about today in this podcast episode is the fact that we may have finally found a way to do just that, and we’ve been looking for a very, very long time. But first things first, if you haven’t already, make sure you stop everything you’re doing and take the Ex Recovery Chances Quiz that we have on our website here. All you have to do if you want to take this quiz is simply click the prompt below. It’s free. It should only take you two minutes. And by the end you should have pretty much a good idea on whether or not you should be trying to get your ex back or not, or simply be moving on in your particular circumstance. What Are Your Chances of Getting Your Ex Girlfriend Back? Take the quiz What Do I Talk About With An Ex Who Hates Me? So let’s talk about ex’s who really dislike you and you’re having trouble with texting them or starting a conversation with them. So, always we’ve talked throughout the years … So I’ve been doing this for maybe, almost nine years now, which is a pretty long time because I feel like it’s just yesterday since I started this entire business up. But my theory from the get-go has still proven to be the most effective one that we found, and that’s simply when you are going through a breakup and you determine that you want to get your ex back, the number one thing you should do, the theory that we have is to find a way to start a conversation with them, build value and move up the value ladder and the value chain. So what are the value ladder and the value chains? Well, basically the value ladder and value chains is this concept that I created to show you how different mediums occur in relationships, where you’re talking to them through text message , talking to them over the phone, talking to them in person and what you should be doing during those events. And also the different types of conversations you need to be having with them during those type of mediums of conversations that you’ve been having. I know it’s a little bit complicated, but if you actually go to our website, I’m going to put sort of a picture that sort of defines what this looks like visually and that should sort of clear it up. And if you’re wondering what our results have been, for the most part they’ve been pretty overwhelmingly positive, but we’ve always had one fly in the ointment, and that is contentious situations. Now, we all know that when you go through a breakup emotions are bound to run high. And usually when emotions bound to run high, you’re going to say things that you don’t mean, your ex is going to say things you don’t mean. And of course when you say these things you’ll think you mean them, and when they see those things they’ll think they mean them. And of course, with the barriers of communication being what they are, it just leaves an icky feeling. Eh. But what’s interesting is, we view ex-girlfriend recovery not as a one size fits all situation, but as an organic process that’s constantly ever evolving. And that’s something and sometimes really hard for people to wrap their minds around. See, a lot of people think that I have all the answers to their problems, that because I’ve created Ex-Girlfriend Recovery and seem to know what I’m talking about, that I know every single situation in the history of man and how to handle it. And the truth is, I don’t. I know a lot of situations and how to handle them to give you the best chances of success, but even in circumstances where you do everything right you can still fail. And that’s a really hard pill for a lot of people to swallow, but it’s just simply the truth. And I’m not in the business of disguising the truth. The truth is that you can do everything right and still fail. But there’s always been one really contentious issue that we’ve had, and that’s with issues where you and your ex are constantly fighting, you left on bad terms. How do you handle that? And for years we didn’t really recommend anything different for people who are in situations where … And let’s kind of structure it in levels. Let’s say level one is like you just get into a little petty disagreement and you breakup. Level 10 is like you’re throwing things at the other person, and they’re throwing things back at you and it’s just really bad. Right? How To Handle Extremely Contentious Situations What is the best way to handle those contentious situations? And after eight, nine years of doing this, we think we finally found a way to diffuse those contentious situations. And the whole reason I’m recording this podcast, is because today in my private Facebook support group there was someone who went off script, and usually those people don’t fare too well. But in this particular case it was a woman, so it’s not exactly, for those of you who are men listening to this podcast, it’s not exactly a perfect fit to your situation, but I think the tactic and the technique still applies. And that is, she used a strategy. She went off script. She used a strategy that we don’t recommend because we haven’t tested it out enough, but I’ve been reading a lot about it called labeling. So let me set up the environment for you. So there’s a girl in our private Facebook group, she purchased my program, the Ex-Boyfriend Recovery Program. Also, if you don’t know, I own a website also called Ex-Boyfriend Recovery in tandem with Ex-Girlfriend Recovery, and as you can guess, it helps women try to get ex’s back, and Ex-Girlfriend Recovery helps men trying to get ex’s back. I know, very original. But anyway, she’s in the program, and you get access when you buy any of our programs to a private Facebook support group. And she said she did a no contact rule . She did 45 days no contact rule . This has been her third breakup. And she decided not to take our advised text messages , but to kind of do her own version of one. And I’m actually going to pull the text message up so that I can read it to you because I think it’s really interesting. Okay. So, here is her text message word for word. “Hey, hope all’s well, happy face. I was at work yesterday when a regular customer from Bridgewater came in. Reminded me to reach out to you and let you know I don’t hate your guts, laugh out loud. Hope you already know that. I truly pray that you’ll regain your blah, blah, blah,” and it just kind of goes on from there. I basically said the important part that you needed to hear. So what’s interesting is the reason this text message stuck out to me … And by the way, she got a response and it was a really, really good response. But the reason this text message stuck out to me is because I’ve been researching a concept. I’ve been reading a book called Never Split the Difference . It’s by Chris Voss, he was the FBI’s lead international hostage negotiator. So this guy was literally sent to hostage situations and forced to diffuse them. And one thing he talks about in the book is the fact that you’re a failure if just one person loses their life. So it’s kind of an all or nothing deal if you’re a hostage negotiator. And I figured, well, what a perfect thing to use for breakups, because many of my clients kind of put themselves in these all or nothing situations where they’re heartbroken if things don’t work out. And so, what is it that this FBI hostage negotiator’s doing to get people whose lives are literally on the line to actually pay attention and do what he wants? And what’s interesting is I read in the book, and just some of the things that he was talking about there is mind blowing, and he kind of equates our lives to negotiation and how every little act we take part of is a negotiation in its own right. And he has all these different rules and regulations for what works in different styles of negotiating. And one of the things that I really kind of gravitated towards or really resonated with, because I thought to myself, wow, I think that could work for my clients, is this concept of labeling. Understanding The Concept Of Labeling So what is labeling? Well, labeling is basically a way of validating someone’s emotion simply just by acknowledging it. So you give someone’s emotion a name and you show that you identify with how that person feels. And also gets you close to someone without asking about the external factors that you don’t really know anything about. So what good negotiators do when labeling is they address those underlying emotions, they label negatives, they diffuse them. So basically by labeling negative emotions that the person probably has, you diffuse them, or it can diffuse them. And then of course you have the flip side, labeling positive emotions reinforces them. So this is really interesting concept, because if you actually just look at that text message that I just talked about, there’s two things happening there. Number one is she didn’t even realize it, but she labeled her ex’s emotions. So they ended very contentiously, right? There was a lot of arguments back and forth to the point where she was saying things that she didn’t really mean , and she labeled that emotion. So I’m going to read it back to you and you tell me where you see the labeling occurring, or rather I’ll just stop and tell you. “Hey, hope all is well. I was at work yesterday when a regular customer from Bridgewater came in. It reminded me to reach out to you and let you know I don’t hate your guts. I actually really care about you. Hope you already know this.” There’s a label right there. So she’s making an assumption about her ex. She’s thinking her ex probably thinks about her, that she hates him. And by putting that on the table, she’s kind of diffusing the situation and calming the environment down so that they can actually have a conversation. Now generally speaking, Chris Voss in Never Split the Difference, he’ll talk a lot about this concept of labeling them by using the following phrases, it seems like or it looks like. So a great example, this is something that happens with my daughter a lot. She’ll get really frustrated, she’ll be playing blocks, for example, and she’s stacking blocks on top of each other. And as inevitably happens, the blocks get bigger, and bigger, and taller, and taller and taller, it becomes harder for the blocks to stay on and eventually it will fall. And when it falls, she’ll freak out. She’ll go, ahhh. She’ll scream. But the best thing you can do is not scream back at her, is to label her emotion. Is to say, “hey, wow, it looks like you’re really upset because the blocks fell down. Let me show you how you can do it so it won’t fall down next time.” It calms her right down because you’re showing that you understand their point of view. And this is particularly useful in contentious scenarios. So let’s use a pretend situation. A pretend situation is, let’s say you are trying to get your ex-girlfriend back and your ex-girlfriend does not like you. In fact, she says, I really hate you. So a really great way to diffuse that, because she’s thinking about the awkwardness of that statement as well. So let’s say you just normally use the original strategy we have, which is reaching out and trying to be witty and trying to start up a conversation. There’s still this awkwardness in the back of their mind. This can even apply to no contact rule as well. Sometimes people get so worked up over the fact that they’re doing a no contact rule because their ex is going to get mad at them. Right? And so, they reach out to their ex and their ex is like, whoa, whoa, what the heck? You just ignored me for like 30 days. What the heck? So one of the best ways to diffuse situations like this is by labeling the situation or emotion that the ex is likely to have. So let’s use the extreme case where your ex says they dislike you or hate you. Basically, you do an inverse of what I just read to you in the text message in our Facebook group. So where she says something along the lines of, “Hey, I wanted to let you know I don’t hate your guts, laugh out loud. I actually really care about you.” You can say, “well, I know you hate my guts and you don’t care about me, laugh out loud, but blah, blah, blah.” By doing that, it kind of puts it out on the table, it diffuses whatever aggravation so that you know you’re both operating under the same rules, and you can just kind of get into having a conversation that you want to have. Now, there’s another element that sort of works here in favor of this, because it can be extremely awkward, especially in text messages, if you just sort of start a text message out like that without camouflaging it. The Importance Of Camouflaging Your Labels Camouflage, I can’t give credit to this. This is actually one of my friends who came up with this concept when we were kind of game planning it back and forth. And he was talking about this need for camouflage where you label someone’s emotion. It can be a little awkward to that person and to you to label an emotion, something as strong as like an ex hating you. So you should do what this person whose text message I’m reading did, she camouflaged it as a joke. So here, let me read it to you again. “Hey, hope all is well.” That’s not a camouflage. “I was at work yesterday when a regular customer from Bridgewater came in here,” this is the camouflage, “reminded me to reach out to you and let you know I don’t hate your guts, laugh out loud. I actually really care about you.” She turned it into a joke. So basically someone from her job came in from a town that her ex is from, which of course reminded her to reach out to him and let him know that she doesn’t hate him, laugh out loud. That LOL is really important there, because it shows that she’s not taking it too seriously and he shouldn’t either. You should do this. This is a way of camouflaging and kind of getting your labeling attempt to blend into the text message. So, let me do a quick recap before we end this podcast, because this is a really advanced technique that I’m sure a lot of people are going to go crazy with, without even knowing how to do it properly. The first thing is you should really only do this in situations where you know for a fact there’s a contentious issue at the forefront. This is where maybe you’ve done a no contact rule and your ex gets really angry about the fact that you’ve done a no contact rule on them. This is also where maybe you guys ended on really horrible terms where your ex-girlfriend said some really mean things to you. This can also be a case where you said something really mean your ex, like this particular person did right here. So once you do that, once you identify or think like, hey, I’m in a situation where I think this could work, next you need to understand how to label the behavior or the emotion. So label it. Figure out exactly what it is that’s the stressor of the issue. And then once you figure out the stressor, you must find a way to camouflage it so that it sounds kind of not necessarily like a joke, but kind of like you’re not making it as big a deal as it seems. This will ease the tension and lower their guard to the point where they may engage you in a conversation. Now, this is something that we have not tested, it’s just an idea that we saw one of our clients implement in the Facebook group without any sort of prompting from myself, and it seemed to work positively. With that being said, it’s a bit of a wild card at this point because we don’t know, we haven’t tested it across the masses yet. But my gut tells me that it’s an extremely effective approach, especially if you’re looking to find a way to ease yourself into a conversation with your ex. The post What To Text An Ex Who Hates Or Dislikes You first appeared on Ex Girlfriend Recovery .
Okay, so today we’re going to do something a little bit different. Now normally what I do is I leave kind of the phone lines open. I let people leave voicemails to ask me a question, and then I answer those questions, but I thought I’d kind of flip the script a little bit and let you behind the scenes into one of my coaching sessions. So right now there’s just this really awesome guy that I’m coaching. And I asked him, I said, “Hey, if there was one question that you wanted an answer to more than anything, what would that be?” And so he wrote down the question for me. I’m going to read it. And after I read it, I’m going to kind of riff, kind of give you an idea, because I read his question obviously before I started recording. And I think it’s going to not only tackle a lot of the emotions that happen after a breakup, but also a lot of the doubt and the worry, and sort of how you kind of have to embark on this program with not a lot of faith that you’re going to succeed in the end. And that’s really difficult to deal with. So without further ado, here’s his question. What Are Your Chances of Getting Your Ex Girlfriend Back? Take the quiz What Can I Do If I Feel Like Getting My Ex Back Is A Lost Cause? So I ask him real quick, “If there’s one question that you wanted an answer to you more than anything, what would it be?” Here’s his response. “I just totally feel that it’s a lost cause at this point, Chris. I’m speaking from my head and not my heart. She truly loves this guy and only calls me when it comes to money situations. She has acknowledged multiple times that he can’t keep up with her bills and lifestyle, but that she truly loves him. Today is my 40th birthday. And her and I were supposed to spend some time together and she said that wouldn’t be fair to the other guy. The writing is on the wall. And it’s time for me to walk away. She said that she feels he is going to ask her to marry him eminently, and she is going to say yes. So I guess I don’t have any questions. I think it’s overdue that I walk away and understand it. I lost.” Okay. So I’m actually just going to talk directly to my client now. So I don’t want that to throw any of you off because essentially what this is is sort of like a little bit behind the scenes coaching call, where no names are going to be used, and we’re just going to be dealing with the situation at hand. So here’s what we got. Taking Stock Of What I’m Seeing With Success Stories We got essentially a situation where you’re sitting there, not necessarily feeling sorry for yourself, but you’re kind of wallowing in the despair because so much seems to be going wrong. So here’s what in your head is going wrong. Number one, she’s moved on to another guy, which was sort of happening even before you and I met. Number two, you’re worried that he’s going to pop the question, but she’s even admitted that he can’t keep up with her bills and lifestyle. N umber three is you feel kind of just defeated. And so I’m not going to sit here and tell you what to do, but here’s what I will say. For the past few weeks I’ve been doing this really interesting thing on my other website, Ex Boyfriend Recovery . So you found me through Ex Girlfriend Recovery . Basically the whole website is teaching men how to handle breakups , what to do if they want their ex back, or even what to do if they want to get over their exes. But believe it or not, Ex Girlfriend Recovery started after Ex Boyfriend Recovery did. Ex Boyfriend Recovery was for women basically in the exact same scenario. Now the real big difference between these two websites isn’t the fact that, hey, one’s for men, one’s for women. It’s the fact that there’s a lot more women that search breakup questions than men. So when I look at the vast majority of the success stories, people who have gone through my program, gotten their exes back successfully, I have mostly women to draw from. And this is a little difficult because there’s a lot of men wanting hope. And I think that’s kind of what you’re looking for. The breakups, you’re going to go through many different phases of one minute you’re going to be angry, the next minute you’re going to want them back, then you’ll be angry again. It’s almost like you go through the five stages of grief and then you have a relapse again. I’ve seen that happen multiple times. But I think when we look at your situation, I actually don’t see it as that bad. So if you remember, when we first started working together, you were paying for all of her bills. She was living at your house, she was dating some new guy, and you basically drew the line. You said, “No more. I’m not going to do that.” And she freaked out on you, like we predicted she would. And like we predicted, she and the new guy right now are in the midst of the honeymoon period. And that honeymoon period is going to end eventually. And that’s when the shine’s going to wear off when she’s got the expensive lifestyle with the bills and everything like that. And so as odd as it sounds, and the reason I bring up the success stories on the Ex Boyfriend Recovery is because I’ve been doing this really cool study for pretty much for every single week for the past two months, I’ve been drip feeding one large success story interview I’ve been having with women who’ve gotten their exes back on my YouTube channel . And ultimately I came into these success story interviews with zero ego. Meaning I didn’t really care what people did to get their exes back. All I care about is results. What is working? So, What Worked For Success Stories? And what’s really interesting is the normal things you would expect to work obviously worked, but there were a few things that shocked me. Number one was often times it was the women who literally got to this point where they just didn’t care about getting their exes back anymore, where they were willing to walk away, that all of a sudden their ex pays attention to them. And we can go into the psychology behind maybe why this works, but I guess here’s my point. When I look at your situation, and I’m not there like a fly on the wall to see how your interactions are going, or anything like that, but maybe there’s a certain amount of desperation that she senses from you. So you and her still talk, even though she’s with the new guy. And I guess my problem with that isn’t necessarily that it’s a problem. It’s that maybe when you’re talking to her, she can sense the desperation of how badly you want her back . I guess my point is, if you have a conversation with her where you are just literally like savage, you just don’t care if you get her back. I’m wondering if she has a different opinion. I also would make the argument that right now all seems lost, but it’s not necessarily lost. And the reason I say that, it’s because she’s in the midst of the honeymoon period. She’s still with the new guy. Things are still great with them. The honeymoon period can sometimes last as much as six months. And it takes forever, six months is a long time, before the shine wears off. In fact, I actually think with this particular person, if the guy does propose to her, it’s not going to be, it’s not going to be solidified. I kind of see it more as he’s going to do what he can to just sort of keep her happy, but I don’t think they’ll actually walk down the aisle, because we already know that your ex-girlfriend loves the lavish lifestyle and he can not provide it for her. So I guess my point is, there’s a point where you can sit and kind of wallow in the pain, and I think you’re allowed to do that. But if I was you, I wouldn’t look at it as this negative thing, like I’ll never get her back. That’s weird for me to say that, because usually I’m all for like, “Hey, it’s okay. If you want to move on, let’s move on.” But I honestly believe that sort of just standing up for yourself, showing you have a spine, basically not caring for her anymore, is the key to getting her. And I think you kind of saw that happen a little bit, because you would talk sometimes to her friends. Immediately after you essentially kicked her out of the house, because she was basically mooching off of you, she goes berserk because it’s a clear indicator that you’re like, “I don’t care anymore. I’m not going to put up with your stuff anymore.” And I guess my point is, I’m wondering if you’ve regressed a little bit, because you went through kind of this no-contact period, and then you got back in touch with her, but you didn’t get back in touch with her the correct type of way . You got back in touch with her, you saw her in person, and she can see how much you still want her back. Even if you’re hiding it, I think she can see, because I don’t think it’s something that you can fake. And sometimes the smartest, and I was talking to a professional psychologist the other day, I was interviewing them for my podcast. And they said something really fascinating to me. It was this woman, her name’s Antia Boyd. She’s really good. She only really specializes in helping women get men, but it was kind of really fascinating because she talked a lot about how she broke up with her husband before they got married, and why she did it, and how he got her back. And the real thing I took from it was she’s really big into the attachment styles and how we grow up with these different attachment styles, you have insecure attachment, you have anxious attachment, avoidant attachment. Sometimes you can have combinations, anxious/avoidant, but the Holy Grail, when it comes to attachment styles is secure attachments. And so I can’t remember what she said she was, I think she was like an anxious/avoidant. So things were going really, really well with her and her soon to be husband. And then she breaks up with him because it’s like, “This is going too well. I can’t deal with this.” And so she just avoided the problem. She broke up with him. And he did something kind of brilliant. He was like, “Okay.” And just went on with his life. And that made her sit back and think, “What’s going on? Why isn’t he acting like he cared at all?” And it kind of intrigued her. It took her like a few months, but she came back to him and things just kind of started up real naturally again with them. And then when they were kind of together, she asked him, she said, “Hey, when I broke up with you, what were you thinking?” And he was a secure attachment style, by the way, his response was essentially, “Well, I just thought you needed time , so I was going to give you the time, and I just sort of didn’t care.” And I guess my point is, that’s how you need to act. Any time someone goes through a breakup, they don’t really act secure. They act insecure, they act anxious, they act crazy. And as much as you may feel in your interactions that you knocked it out of the park, and I don’t know every single interaction that you had with her in the past few weeks, but any type of interaction you’ve had with her, I think honestly, she’s sensing maybe the inherent want that you have to get back with her. So as odd as it sounds, having you say at the end, “Yeah, I think I just walk away and understand I lost it.” I think that’s actually kind of the correct attitude to have, but I would make one small alteration. I wouldn’t sit there and say, “I lost it.” I would stare and say, “Okay, I’ll walk away give her time, whatever. I don’t care. I can find someone better.” That’s the attitude I think you need to have to make her sort of come back , because she’ll just be drawn to you naturally. I know it’s kind of cliche advice, but the psychology behind it is essentially you’re going to be acting like a secure individual. It’s almost like, “Hey, if you need to find this thing out with this other guy, go for it.” And be cool with it because no guy is like that. So that is my initial response to kind of feeling like you’re losing hope. And like this is a lost cause, because I think in many times when you feel like it’s a lost cause, I think you need kind of the paradigm shift. And the paradigm shift is it’s not necessarily a lost cause, I think if you feel like it’s a lost cause then you’re not doing the Ex Girlfriend Recovery program aspects right, because the goal is to get you to a place emotionally where you’re like, “I don’t care if it’s a lost cause. I’m so secure and confident with myself that I just know she’ll be drawn back to me. And if she isn’t, whatever.” What we’re finding in success stories just from interviewing them is almost all of them have this attitude. I will say there’s a few outliers who I think sometimes say they have the attitude, but don’t really have it or they just got lucky. But the ones who have the most difficult situations where their ex has moved on to someone new like your ex has moved on to someone new, I think this attitude is what you need to have. And it’s a hard thing because it’s not something you can fake. You need to be so secure with yourself that essentially just by being, just by being you, being who you are, she’ll be drawn to you. The post I Feel Getting My Ex Girlfriend Back Is A Lost Cause first appeared on Ex Girlfriend Recovery .
Hey there and welcome to another episode of the Ex Girlfriend Recovery Podcast. Today, we’re going to be taking on one of the arguably, the most difficult situation you can find yourself in if you are going through a breakup and have decided that you want to get your ex girlfriend back. And that’s what to do if you have cheated on your ex girlfriend and your relationship has been extremely toxic. How do you overcome that? So we’re going to be hearing from a man named anonymous. He didn’t want to be named, who’s going to give us kind of a breakdown of his situation. And his situation is really, really heavy. There’s a lot going on there. In fact, generally speaking, when I post these voicemails I get, I usually only give people about a minute and a half to talk. He was still talking after that minute and a half. So I had to cut him off for brevity’s sake, but pretty much got what we needed to know to help him on what to do going forward. What Are Your Chances of Getting Your Ex Girlfriend Back? Take the quiz Without further ado, here is his message. His Ex Girlfriend Broke Up With Him Because He Cheated Me and my girlfriend been broken up for about maybe two months and a half, three. It all happened over a dumb fight. And we’ve been toxic, we’ve argued a lot. I’ve cheated because I was insecure and I thought she was up to no good. Then I found out the truth after she broke up with me, she wanted to tell me the truth. We had sex, but she’s like hot and cold and then now she hates me, spreads all these rumors about me in town and she’s dating some other guy who I guess has money. I don’t know if I’ll ever have a chance to get her back, I don’t hear from her, I haven’t spoken to her, I haven’t broken no contact. I think I’ve been in no contact for almost like a month and a half. I’m willing to at least talk to her and try to figure something out or, I don’t know, fix things, but I don’t think she wants to speak to me at all. I don’t think I have a chance at all. I don’t think she really likes me too much anymore. So I don’t know. She just went straight up cold and distant and just talk smack and I’m waiting for the gym to open so I could work workout. But we were together for basically like three years. We did everything together. Cook, hang out, play video games, everything. Now she’s just stuck up that guy’s ass and she won’t even take care of her son and she’s keeping like a fake image. Here’s How To View A Situation Like This Okay. So there’s obviously a lot going on here to unpack. And before I really start advising, I want to kind of explain to people how I typically view situations like this. So generally speaking, when I’m working with a client, the very first thing that always enters my mind is understanding that they are in a highly emotional state. And sometimes this emotional state can creep in sometimes in their explanations and I feel that’s what happened here. So what you’re getting, when … And just from the 30,000 foot perspective, so you can actually see how I handle situations like this. What you’re getting here as someone who’s in a highly emotional state that’s trying to quickly describe everything that’s going on, but they can’t really put concrete words to it. So you’ll notice his explanations are all over the place. He had a girlfriend who broke up with him for two and a half months, no, wait, three months. Then it happened over a fight, then cheated on her, then they slept together again, now she’s being hot and cold. Now she’s dating someone with new money. I haven’t heard from her. It’s been no contact from one and a half months. Doesn’t want to speak to me at all. We’ve been together for three years, he’s jumping all over the place. And it’s hard to kind of put a timeline on exactly what’s happened. And if we can guess when we’re looking at this situation is like putting it in a timeline. To me, I would say, “Okay look, they probably broke up. And the catalyst of the breakup is him cheating on her.” And then after that, they started talking again, back and forth and it looks to me like they had makeup sex or they had some type of rekindling, but ever since then, she’s been hot and cold. So he read about no contact somewhere, whether that’s on ex-girlfriend recovery or somewhere else and decided to implement it for one and a half months, but she hasn’t been reaching out to him at all. And now that he sees he’s been in no contact she’s with some other guy. So there’s a lot to unpack here. How To Work On Rebuilding Trust So I think the number one thing I would point out here is when you’re dealing with a situation with cheating involved, there’s multiple layers that you need to peel back. And the first layer I think is, it’s a huge broken aspect of trust. And what really we need to understand about cheating is how men perceive cheating and how women perceive cheating. And it’s interesting if you guys have any time, one person I would really recommend you follow and listen to, especially if you have cheated on your ex girlfriend and you’re trying to get her back, which is arguably, I would argue it’s probably the worst situation to be in. That broken trust is just not easy to earn back and usually it doesn’t happen overnight. So I mean, it could take years to recover a breakup or recover a situation like that. But one person who I consider to be one of the more foremost experts on it is a woman by the name of Esther Perel. And so if you actually listen to Esther Perel’s talks about cheating. She has some really interesting insights like relating around guilt. So for example, one thing we know about men and women who cheat is they do feel a certain amount of guilt afterwards, but not for the act itself. The act itself, even if it was kind of a spontaneous type of thing, was exciting to them. They feel guilt because they don’t want to hurt their partner. And then another thing we’re learning about how men and women cheat in one of the big differences is oftentimes when men cheat, they can still be pretty much in love with the person that they’re with. So it’s almost like they’re a slave to their emotions or they’re slave to their hard wiring. The whole aspect of men are kind of meant to spread their seed to as many hosts as possible because it’s how evolution works and how our human race will survive. And what’s interesting is you can even see this in marriages. A lot of times marriages end after about seven years, what happens is, you’ll get married, then you’ll have kids, right? And usually they stay pretty faithful to the woman for about seven years until the kid can fend for himself. And then that’s when a lot of marriages break up, they go on and they find a new partner, impregnate them, rinse and repeat. Now it doesn’t always work that way, but this kind of explains to you, maybe the thinking behind evolutionary feelings and how cheating works. The Differences In How Men And Women Cheat The other interesting thing is actually how women cheat. So women cheat, not usually because they’re still in love with the person they cheated on with. It’s the exact opposite. In fact, women often who cheat are so checked out of the relationship, they feel trapped. They’re just looking to get away. So oftentimes they’ll cheat if they have no romantic connection with that person they’re with any more. And what we have here is a guy who cheated on his ex-girlfriend. So and what’s interesting, it almost seems kind of a revenge type of a vengeance approach to it. Almost like, “Okay, well things are going bad, I’m not liking how she’s treating me in this relationship. So I’m going to show her, I’m going to go sleep with so and so.” And it seems to me, that’s the approach he took. And also you look at the relationship, self admittedly he mentions it was a very toxic relationship, so they’re fighting a lot and there’s lots of fight about anytime cheating gets involved, anytime other, she’s dating another guy now, he feels like he’s being pulled hot and cold. And I feel like one of the big issues is this is the classic case of the on-again, off-again relationship where nothing ever changes. So, it’s like they’re moth to a flame constantly just drawn back to each other, but nothing changes. And I think that’s the issue I see with the on-again, off-again relationship relationships is the fact that, a lot of times when people enter into these situations, when they hit the off again phase, they don’t really set pause or hit pause and do some soul searching and try to understand like, “How can I be better?What can I do so that this doesn’t happen again?” Instead they just jump in very emotionally to the relationship again, nothing has changed and you expect different result. It’s the whole Einstein quote, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. Well, something needs to change. And really this is the most challenging part about the whole situation. It’s the fact that he doesn’t just need to change his approach, but she needs to change her approach as well. But he can be the catalyst for her change. And what I mean by that is, obviously she’s upset about the fact that he cheated on her. But that didn’t stop them from rekindling and getting back together. But I think part of the issue, the reason why they broke up again is because he didn’t change his behavior maybe in the on again phase. And she’s like, this is the same old stuff breaks up with him he’s there hot and cold. Be The Catalyst For Change And now he’s just confused as like, “Okay, what do I have to do?” And if you want my honest advice on what you should do in situations like these, it is to literally do a long period of no contact like 45 days, 60 days and be focusing on not your ex-girlfriend, but something you’re extremely passionate about. Something that has nothing to do with romantic relationships. And a lot of times I think people, men specifically take like, “Hey, take some time focus on yourself.” They take it as like, “Okay, well I’ll just go out and I’ll just date a bunch of other girls.” No, this is all about you finding something that you’re passionate about outside of relationships. Now, why should you do that? Well, it’ll do a couple of things. It will harbor change within you, but it will also kind of be like, “Wow, he’s not dating. He’s not doing what I would expect him to do.” You specifically mentioned you have a really toxic relationship where you cheated on her. So immediately her red flags are up. She’s thinking, okay, he’s just going to go sleep with as many girls as possible. And I guess my point is, you shouldn’t do that if you’re serious about getting her back. The other thing is, she’s dating someone new and you mentioned he’s got money, but in the end, I think that matters a little bit, I’m not going to lie, but it doesn’t matter as much as the connection you have with a specific individual. So how do you deal with someone who’s, you have an ex who’s moved on to someone new? And this is a problem that plagued us for a very long time when I first started my coaching business on ex-boyfriend recovery and ex-girlfriend recovery. So if you’re not aware of the history, basically I started ex-boyfriend recovery to help women get their ex’s back or move on from their relationships in 2012. And in the first year we got so much traction. I decided, “Hey, this would be kind of a cool thing to do for men.” So bang here we are. And what’s really interesting is one of the biggest fears we’d noticed that men and women would have after breakups is, what happens if my ex moves on to someone new? And we didn’t really have a way or an approach to attack that, to make progress and figure out here’s what you need to do. Instead, we gave all the wrong advice. But slowly but surely, we started kind of understanding what works and what doesn’t work. So we came up with something called The Being There method. So here’s how The Being There method works or essentially how it’s meant to work. And it really only works if you have a secure attachment style. What do I mean by that? Well, there’s different types of attachment styles and really our upbringing and our environment and how we react to all sorts of different situations will create our specific attachment styles. So you have insecure attachment style, you have anxious attachment style, you have avoidant attachment style, you have secure attachment style. So if you want The Being There method to work, I really think that the prerequisite needs to be that you have to be extremely secure with yourself. You have to own all of your insecurities. You have to embrace your insecurities. You have to be okay with losing your ex-girlfriend completely. You just need to be like the ultimate alpha male who won’t react or overreact to ridiculous things. Once you have that mentality, you are specifically going to friend zone yourself to your ex-girlfriend. So you’re specifically just going to be that ex-boyfriend that she has, that she talks to and can rely on emotionally. Because what’s going to happen is more often than not, you are testing the connection that they have and it’s really, and I’ll admit it, it’s kind of a morally gray approach. But you’re testing this connection that your ex girlfriend has with this new guy. And chances are the new guy won’t be super secure. He will be insecure. He will cause fights. And it will be this really interesting juxtaposition where she’s looking at how you’re approaching the situation and she has a direct comparison with how her current boyfriend is approaching the situation. She Won’t Want To Come Back To A Toxic Situation And naturally speaking, I think the other aspect of it is, no girl is going to want to come back to a toxic situation. That’s not going to be what they’re going to be drawn to. And I think this is why The Being There method can work so well. If you really have that secure vibe, she will only feel like security, love and warmth from you essentially. Whereas if you’re insecure about how you approach it and you’re toxic in how you approach it, and you’re fighting all the time, it’s kind of like you’re drawn away from that. You don’t want to enter into a situation where it’s going to make you feel bad. It’s a whole good feelings versus bad feelings theory. We are drawn naturally to things that make us feel good and we repel things that make us feel bad. And you’re putting your ex’s connection on the hook here for that. And hopefully naturally she’s drawn to you and you have kind of a weird, unfair advantage because it seems like you were together with her for over three years and she had a lot of highs with you, but she’s also had a lot of lows. And so I guess the trick is to get her to figure out those highs. But also I think the other aspect is you need some sort of ace in the hole. And so the best ace in the hole, if you’ve cheated on someone is complete trust. So if you get them back, what you need to do is institute something where like, “Look, I understand that’s going to take a long time to rebuild trust with you. So here’s my recommendation. I think that anytime you feel that something’s amiss, you can come over to my house, unchecked, unsupervised, pick up my phone and look through it. I will not delete anything, I want you to see everything. I am an open book.” And by offering that to her, it’s a change. She’s like, “Oh, that’s new. I can’t believe that.” And it also shows that you’re really willing to make that work almost to the point where you’re willing to have no privacy with her, and you’re allowing her to have her own privacy. And I think that’s a good way to approach to build a good relationship on how to handle cheating. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Ex Girlfriend Recovery Podcast. Make sure you subscribe to us on iTunes and leave an honest rating and review. Also, don’t forget to take the free quiz to show you what kind of chance you have with your ex on our website, www.exgirlfriendrecovery.com. We’ll see you next week. The post He Cheated On His Ex Girlfriend And Now He Wants Her Back first appeared on Ex Girlfriend Recovery .
Today, like always, we’re going to be taking a listener question. Now, if you didn’t already know the format of the show is basically we take listener questions, we’ll take like a minute-and-a-half question, and then I just riff and give my thoughts on the situation based on what I’m seeing because I’ve dealt with so many breakups situations from people who want to get their exes back and even for people who want nothing to do with their exes. I give my best piece of advice to the person on how they should approach their situation going forward. Now, the number one question that people tend to ask is what kind of chance do I have of getting my ex girlfriend back? I think probably the better thing to do when you find yourself asking this question is to actually just hop over our website and take a special quiz that I put together that’s designed to answer this question for you. Now, all you have to do if you want to take that quiz is simply just stop everything you’re doing, go to Google or just type in your phone exgirlfriendrecovery.com. Then right there on the homepage, there’ll be a little ad to take this free quiz. The free quiz basically will give you an idea of where you stand with your ex so you’re not wasting your time, because believe me when I say there’s nothing worse than wasting your time in a situation where you really don’t have a great shot. Okay, with all of the precursor-type stuff out of the way, let’s actually talk about what we’re going to be talking about today. What Are Your Chances of Getting Your Ex Girlfriend Back? Take the quiz What Do You Do If Your Ex Girlfriend Has The Grass Is Greener Syndrome? What’s up, man? Long story short, since I only have 90 seconds, my girlfriend broke up with me about a month and a half ago. We were dating for two years. She just said that she seems really confused and she doesn’t know what she wants. At first, I thought there was another guy in the picture or another guy that she possibly started to like, but I know for a fact there’s not now. It’s funny because her behavior on social media, just you can tell that she’s confused. Even my friends are like, “What’s she doing?” She’s just posting a bunch of stories on her Instagram, which she never really has done before. I actually saw her a few nights ago and she came over and she gave me a big hug and was flirting with me. She just said she feels really weird, but even when she came over, it seemed like we weren’t even broken up. We still acted like a couple. I’ve been going no contact and it seems like every four or five days she’ll reach out to me and tell me she misses me and all that. Yeah, I’m just, I guess, just trying to give her her time and space and hopefully she figures out what she wants soon, but yeah, it’s just a confusing situation. If you have any input, that’d be great. Okay, let’s take it from the top. The first thing I like to do typically when people leave questions is to just summarize them so we’re both working from the same page. I was actually trying to pick a question, and for those of you who want to be featured on the podcast, my best piece of advice to you is to be clear and concise like this message. This message from Anonymous, you’ll notice he wasn’t all over the place. He spoke very clearly, he had a very good connection, and his question was something that I feel like a lot of people struggle with. Let’s summarize his situation. Him and his girlfriend broke up about one and a half months ago, so it’s been about 45 days since they broke up, after dating for two years. Now, the reasoning she gave for the breakup was pretty standard. She broke up with him saying that she’s confused and she doesn’t know what she wants. I have some thoughts on that, but I’ll save that for later. At first, he was worried there might be some other guy, but after some time he realized, no, there’s not some other guy. His ex-girlfriend seems to be acting very odd on social media , posting things that she typically didn’t post when they were together. He also said he’s trying the no-contact rule, but he’s also seeing every few days she’ll reach out to him. A few nights ago he actually saw her in person, she came over and said she feels really weird. They’re still acting like a couple and he’s just confused about the whole situation to begin with, and he wants my thoughts. Here are my thoughts, Mr. Anonymous. First things first, let’s go back to the start and talk about this breakup. Does His Ex Girlfriend Have GIGS? Typically, what I tell my clients is that when a girl breaks up with you, she’s not going to often tell you the real reason she broke up with you because she’s worried it will hurt your ego or hurt your feelings. On some level, even if there is a lot of anger and maybe even hatred, they don’t want to hurt you deeply. I find women are especially sensitive to a men’s feelings. When she says she’s confused and when she says she doesn’t know what she wants, that is technically a lie. The fact is, she does know what she wants, she just thinks it isn’t you. I’m also getting vibes here of the grass is greener syndrome. If you don’t already know, the grass is greener syndrome is this very common thing that people go through when they’re with someone for enough time to feel like they peeled back all the layers and understand everything they need to know about the relationship and what’s in the relationship and so on and so forth. I noticed you said that you’re dating her for two years, and then this breakup occurs where she says she’s confused and she doesn’t know what she wants, which is basically an admission that, “Hey, I don’t want this. I want something else.” You also are immediately worried that there may be some other guy, so instinctively you kind of understand she’s looking for other people, thereby she has a bit of the grass is greener syndrome. Typically, there’s one of two reactions that will occur when you have the grass is greener syndrome. Number one is you essentially learn the grass is greener on the other side. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, what I mean by that is let’s say you had, Anonymous, broken up with her, and the whole reason is you think you can do better than her. You go out, you go on a few dates, and you realize you can do better than her. You find someone else who’s better than your ex. That’s outcome number one. Outcome number two is the grass is greener syndrome and the grass isn’t greener on the other side. I actually tend to think this is the more common thing that happens, and it’s interesting if you look into the psychology behind why it happens. Especially in long term relationships, and granted, dating for two years can be a pretty long time I think, especially with our attention spans now. With the millennials going into the dating age so much, we have been almost structured in a way where we expect instant results in our lives. Oftentimes, the number one thing that always pops into my mind or the number one anecdote is my dad, when he used to go on trips, he would literally have the map out. He’d mapped the trip out on the map with the roads and everything. Now, if you asked me to do that, guess what’s going to happen? I’m going to get lost because I don’t know how to do that. I’ve been trained by my phone to use GPS. You get instant, quick results. This is really great because people often pay for convenience, right? We pay to have things delivered quicker to us, but it’s not very good or it doesn’t have really any applications to relationships. What I mean by that is oftentimes our quick results mentality can come into relationships where you expect everything to happen really quickly. When dating for two years, while that doesn’t seem like enough, your ex-girlfriend may feel like she knows everything there is to know about the relationship, everything that it has to offer, and it gets boring to her. Therefore, she goes and starts dating someone new or starts looking for someone new. But a really funny thing happens. Why Letting Her Date Others Might Work In Your Favor They do say absence makes the heart grow fonder, and that has been my experience as well. You can even see the recent … I was reading some really interesting articles over the weekend on the psychology of playing hard to get and why it works and how it still works even in today’s day and age. What’s really interesting is when your ex-girlfriend breaks up with you, assuming you had a good body of work in the relationship to draw from, assuming there was lots of good memories, assuming you were a great boyfriend and all of that stuff, the longer she spends away from you and starts experiencing going on dates with other people, she doesn’t have to sleep with someone, she doesn’t have to even go get a new boyfriend, just simply going on dates with other people, she will begin to romanticize the past. This is where that grass is greener syndrome comes into play, where she realizes, “Hey, maybe I had it better than I thought.” What’s really interesting is I can’t help but notice that your specific ex-girlfriend, she’s coming over and acting like you’re still dating. This to me indicates that she does have a bit of this grass is greener syndrome, where she’s gone out maybe to experience life and it’s not going as well as she thought. Now, you can also take the devil’s advocate side of that and come into it from a perspective of, oh my goodness, she is settling. She’s going back into old routines because she’s scared of going out there and she wants to go to someplace safe, where she feels you’re safe. What do you do if this happens? Because this is certainly a worry that you have to worry about. Well, I couldn’t also help notice that you said you’re trying the no-contact rule. The paradox is you said you’re trying it, but it seems like you’re breaking it, so you’re not really trying it. One thing that we do know is the more times you do the no-contact rule, meaning you try it and then you fail it, the less effective it can become. Now, is that the be all, end all? Will it fail every single time? Let’s say you fail eight times, will it fail the ninth time? Not necessarily, but for the most part, it will become way less effective the more you have to do it. it’s almost better to just go in and kind of go and skate. You’re not going to really give your ex a chance to properly miss you unless you are willing to make that commitment and do that no-contact rule, and it seems like you haven’t done that. That’s where my tweak of advice should, would come in for you, because yes, you’re getting some kind of positive results. I mean, she’s acting very odd on social media. This is, to me, not that crazy, right? A lot of people hyper obsess about the likes they get on social media or what your ex-girlfriend is posting or things like that because they’re paying attention. I actually think her acting really weird on social media is normal breakup behavior. But in order for you to build the foundation of starting over, you need to take a situation with your ex-girlfriend and get through a full no-contact period without seeing her or talking to her. That’s going to be hard because especially in your situation, where you have an ex-girlfriend this volatile who will literally come back and she will probably confront you about the fact that you’re ignoring her, your brain and your worry is going to take hold. Your fear will take hold and you’ll be thinking, “Oh my God, what if I lose my chance of getting her forever?” The thing I always like to remind people of is you’ve already lost her. What you’re doing is you’re trying or you’re taking a calculated risk to improve your position. You’re taking a calculated risk by using an action to show her that you’re not going to allow yourself to be used emotionally. What You Are Doing During Your No Contact Rule Matters That’s the other, and final, thing that I’d like to talk to you about. We talked so far about the grass is greener syndrome, Mr. Anonymous, and we’ve talked a little bit about why you say you’re doing the no-contact rule but you’re really not doing the no-contact rule. You’re consistently failing it and why you should not fail it. But there’s a third thing that I want to talk to you about, and that’s being the emotional crutch for your ex-girlfriend. One of the big things about breakups that not a lot of people realize is the routine that we get into. Routines, we’re slave to our routines, but we have more routines than even we realize. For example, you have a talking routine, you have a certain way in which you communicate with her. Most of us it’s through texts nowadays. Some people, especially in long distance relationships , it will be through phone calls. Other people, it will be just seeing each other in person, they communicate better that way. Those are routines. Then of course you have the frequency routine. How frequent are you guys talking to each other? Then you have the emotional support routine, which is your ex-girlfriend coming to you or your girlfriend coming to you and talking to you about her day and you lending support. What we tend to see happen, especially in long term relationships … I can classify yours as a long term relationship, two years is a long time to be with one person, specifically when you’re not married. When you’re married, the rules shift and the dynamic shifts, but you’re not married, you’re just dating. Two years is a pretty long time to be with someone. After two years, she’s probably so used to coming to you and relying on you for emotional support. She always has this innate feeling that she can always rely on you, so when times get tough she’ll come back to you and try to get that emotional support. This is the challenge, because men, we often fall victim to the hero complex. We always want to be the problem solvers. We want to be God in their minds. We want them to be coming to us for their problems. Yet, the difficult part is after a breakup you need to basically say, “I’m not going to do that for you anymore.” What I’m thinking is happening here is she’s got a bit of the grass is greener syndrome, she’s coming back to what feels familiar with you, and she feels that she can rely on you for emotional support. Maybe it seems like there might be some physical aspects to it as well. I mean, you didn’t get into that, probably because you were embarrassed to talk about maybe you slept with her. It does seem like you were alluding to that, because she came over a few nights ago and you were acting like a couple. I can only imagine that means you guys got physical. This revolves around the same idea as well. She’s coming back into what feels familiar physically and emotionally . My point is, if you want your ex-girlfriend back, if you really truly want her back, you don’t want to be the same guy she fell for. Now, that’s weird because most of us want that, but what my point is is you want to be the guy that she literally looks at with a new twist. Yes, you have the ability to offer all these old things, but there’s a new side to you, something new that she can look at you for and say, “Wow, that’s different. I like that.” Think of it like the sequel to a movie. Let’s say there’s a beloved movie that you watch in the movie theaters and you’re like, “This is like the best movie I’ve ever seen.” What’s interesting is a lot of times people will go and watch the same movie over and over and over again. It doesn’t really hold the same punch that first time that you watched it, the second time you watch it. It’s still really good, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not as good. Well, if you’re with someone for a long time, it’s kind of like watching the same movie over and over and over again, until the sequel comes out, and then the sequel comes out and you get real excited. Think of this like your sequel. It’s going to have a lot of the same elements of that first relationship, but you want to add new elements, new layers for her to peel back and be fascinated by. I think this analogy, it’s a really great allegory for being in a long term relationship as well, because the number one issue long term relationships face is growing stale. It’s because it feels like you’re watching reruns over and over and over again. That’s why you need to add a sequel in every once in a while. That’s my advice to you, Anonymous. Be the sequel, not the original. The post My Ex Girlfriend Has The Grass Is Greener Syndrome first appeared on Ex Girlfriend Recovery .
Today we’re going to be doing something a little bit unique. You see, most of the times when I start these podcast episodes I have a really clear idea of what I’m going to say whenever I take a voicemail from a listener. But today I listened to this voicemail from Brian, I believe his name was, and I came up blank on exactly what he should do. And I thought this is a perfect opportunity for not only me to challenge myself but for you to maybe get an insight into how my brain works and how your brain should be working if you’re going through a breakup. What makes Brian’s situation unique? Well, essentially he’s not only trying to get his ex-girlfriend back , he’s trying to get his Fiancé back. His Fiancé essentially left him, moved out of the state and blocked him. What is he going to do? Well, that’s what we’re going to try to organically come to a conclusion about today. But first things first, the number one question that I’m always getting on my websites and on my YouTube channel and even on this podcast is, “Chris, what kind of chance do I have of getting my ex-girlfriend back? Should I be trying to get my ex-girlfriend back or should I be trying to move on?” What Are Your Chances of Getting Your Ex Girlfriend Back? Take the quiz Why Did His Ex Fiancé Break Up With Him For Flirting? Hi Chris, my name is Brian. I’m a follower of your channel and I just had a quick question for you about my breakup. Me and my ex-fiancée have been together four years and we broke up two months ago because she found out that I had been talking to an old girlfriend online, an emotional affair type of thing. Never met up with her, never done anything with her outside, just had a short little conversation with her. She got mad, she moved out of our home, left the state that we lived in to go live with her sister, changed her phone number and blocked me on all platforms of communication. We’ve been at no contact for two months since this happened. I was wondering what the chances were of trying to rekindle this. I have to say that without a doubt Brian is in one of the most difficult situations that you can imagine. You see, one thing I always tell people is they need to get comfortable with this idea of no, embracing the no, embracing rejection, because ultimately rejection is where you learn but it also opens up some type of communication with an ex. If you reach out to them and they’re angry at you for example, that’s a lot better than you reaching out to them and they block you completely. Let’s get an accounting of Brian’s situation. Brian basically is trying to get his ex-fiancée back and she broke up with him because she caught him flirting with his ex. Now, the flirting with his ex maybe, he says there was nothing physical there so it seems like it’s more emotional support than anything. He says that he just had a short little conversation with his ex-girlfriend, but obviously this made his ex-fiancée mad. She moved out of state with her sister and blocked him. Now, I don’t know the extent of the block fully but we’ll get to that later. And essentially he’s wondering what are the chances to try to rekindle this? Let’s Talk About His Ex Blocking Him First Okay, there’s a lot to go on here, there’s a lot to unfold. And I think I’d like to first start with the blocking bit , because ultimately what you need to understand from what we’ve learned about when exes block you, it is almost always an emotional response to the breakup, that seems to be what happens here. Most of the times, I would say probably above 80% of the time, when you actually go through a situation where you’ve been blocked, guess what’s going to happen? Your ex will unblock you at some point. They’ll just get curious to see what you’re up to, they’ll just not be able to help themselves and they will unblock you. But I will say that there is also a percentage of exes who are, or subscribe to that theory of one and done, like, “Hey, this is it. You had your one chance and that will be it for everything,” and they won’t unblock you. Time’s going to have to tell to see which of the situations Brian has found himself in. Personally speaking I like to believe in statistics and the statistics do say that Brian’s ex will unblock him in any way, shape or form in the future or in some way shape or from, excuse me, in the future. It’s just a matter of being patient and waiting. Yet, what do we mean by wait? I mean, what happens if she has him blocked for a year? What does he do then? Well, it’s a good question. That’s where I’d like to maybe talk about the differences between a hard block and a soft block. A hard block is where your ex girlfriend maybe blocked you in every way you can potentially communicate with her. And a soft block is where she blocks you in most ways in which you can communicate with her, but there are a few still open like Instagram DMs, or Facebook messages, things of that nature where you can still maybe have some type of a reach out. He didn’t really specify what that is but my first advice to him would be figure out where you are, are you in a hard block, are you in a soft block? Because if you’re heard a soft block, don’t worry so much about her unblocking you because guess what? She will probably be responsive towards you if you try to reach out to her in one of those methods of communication that she has still left open. But that’s not really solving the deeper issue here because the deeper issue here has to do with cheating, and that’s the truth. The Differences Between How Men And Women Cheat Your ex-fiancée broke up with you for flirting with another woman and that is the truth. How do you handle that? Well, I think what we need to first do is educate Brian on the differences with cheating between men and women. There’s a lot of statistics out there that basically say, “Men cheat more than women,” but I’m here to tell you that it’s BS, women cheat just as much as men. In fact, it’s probably equal and I think you can even make the case that sometimes women will cheat more than men, but I would probably not put my name to that so I’m going to say it’s probably equal, as all things should be. But what’s the not equal are the reasons that men cheat and women cheat. Now, this is where the story gets interesting because the differences between why men cheat and why women cheat and the frame of mind they’re in are so staggering, it is shocking to me that not more people are talking about it. Okay. What do I mean by that? Well, let’s take a look at cheating from your ex girlfriend or ex-fiancée’s point of view, Brian. One thing that we do know about how men and women cheat or the reasons they cheat is that men will often cheat and can still be deeply in love with their partner. That sounds really interesting, doesn’t it? Something that probably you wouldn’t expect? I mean, why would you cheat on someone if you’re still in love with your partner? Well, it’s because biologically human beings are produced to spread their seed. I’m not a biologist but I think that’s pretty standard in the animal kingdom, survive and replicate. Those are our two functions in life and human beings are programmed to cheat. Now what makes us interesting as people is we also understand instinctually that if we bond we tend to live longer in life plus we also get more or sex, that’s also true. But we are programmed and men can sometimes fall victim to that programming. Now, I don’t want to chalk it up to biological programming at all, but the point I’m making is men are more capable of cheating while still being vastly in love with their significant other. Women are not. Now, this is where the big difference occurs. Women who cheat, they will usually only cheat, and remember, there’s always exceptions to the rules, but women who cheat will only usually cheat if she’s checked out of the relationship and doesn’t want to be in it anymore. One thing we also do know about people in commitment is times women will have a really hard time of getting out of a long commitment with a significant other if they have a lot invested into that relationship, so the interdependence theory is something that I’ve been positing or talking about for years. The interdependence theory basically posits that human beings basically make relationship decision on a cost and benefit scenario. Essentially they’re always making these little pros and cons lists but the criteria in which they make those pros and cons, there’s basically three big ones, satisfaction, alternatives, and investment. But what’s really fascinating when you look at those three factors is that even if you’re satisfied in a relationship and even if you feel that you have a better alternative in that relationship, you’ll still stay in the same relationship if you feel like you’ve invested too much. And that is a reason why I think women cheat. They feel they’ve invested too much in the relationship to just let it go but they’re emotionally checked out so they’re no longer usually in love with you. And I bring up this explanation, Brian, for one specific reason, because you and her have been operating on different wavelengths. To you this conversation you had with your ex-girlfriend was just more emotional support. It was a short little conversation with her, you didn’t meet up with her, nothing physical happened. To you, cheating is looked at in a different lens than your ex-fiancée. Your ex-fiancée is only looking at things from her perspective and her perspective and in her mind, she wouldn’t give a guy the time of day unless she was checked out of the relationship. And she took this as an indication that you’re checked out of the relationship, that you’re having cold feet, that you no longer want to marry her. And what does she do? She has an emotional reaction. She freaks out, she yells at you, she moves out of state, goes to live with her sister. Her sister of course isn’t going to be on your side. Her sister is going to be like, “Hey look, he was just talking to her.” Her sister is going to be like, “I’m on your side, I got your back, no matter what.” You’re not going to find any sphere of influence help there. But what’s important for you to understand is that if you do get the opportunity to talk to her by understanding her frame of mind, when you talk to her you can have that tactical empathy. You can literally parrot her emotions back to her and literally tell her what she’s thinking but too afraid to say. Maybe she’s not afraid to say it though, maybe she’s saying exactly what she’s thinking. “I think you’re checked out of the relationship because why would you be talking to this other woman?” Right? And what I think really is a huge indicator in big mistakes people make is when they do talk to their significant other, number one, they talk to their significant other when the emotions are out of control from both parties. This is one of the reasons why we love the no contact rule because it allows you to settle down, you to take stock and it also allows your ex to settle down, your ex to take stock. So that when you do talk, you’re not overly emotional yet this is an emotional decision so it’s an interesting paradox. Utilize Tactical Empathy We need to enter this negotiation where you’re basically negotiating over your relationship without her emotions being out of control and without your emotions being out of control, and yet the paradox is it’s an emotional decision so you need to touch her emotions, so to speak. That’s what will make her come back to you, that’s what will make her more interested with you. And one way that you can do that is with tactical empathy, by understanding her wavelength, by understanding her point of view. What I don’t think a lot of people also understand is the self-interest aspect of relationships. We usually only enter into relationships if we feel they benefit ourselves yet the interdependence theory basically said that it’s a pros and cons list. We always want to stack the odds in our favor so to speak with relationships. And we have different criteria in which we grade relationships with, but your ex doesn’t think it’s worth being with you anymore because she feels you betrayed her. And what I think is important is for you to acknowledge that to her when you do talk to her. Usually I tell people, “Hey, the first thing you want to do after a no contact rule is just start bridging the gap so that communication can be open.” And I still think that’s a good idea for you. I still think it’s a good idea to reach out to her and just get some conversation flowing. But at some point, what you want to do is you literally want to talk to her and tell her that you understand how she’s feeling but you need to do it in a very specific way. You need to do it like, “Hey, I know you feel I betrayed you. I know you feel like I shouldn’t ever do this and I shouldn’t ever do this and I shouldn’t ever do that.” And the more you do that the more she’ll be like, “Yeah, that is how I feel, that is how I feel. That is how I feel.” And she’ll start feeling that you understand her, which allows her to be more open for communication. Now, the challenge is picking your spot. Timing is just as important as the rest of this BS, because timing won’t work if you do that right out of the gate. What do we mean by that? Okay, you go through a no contact rule , you said you’ve been in no contact for two months. Let’s say she unblocks you or let’s say that you aren’t blocked everywhere but you decide, “Hey, let’s reach out to her.” So you reach out to her. Let’s operate under the assumption you’re in a soft block so you are going to reach out to her through Facebook messenger. You reach out to her. You don’t just start with this huge long de-vomit of text. What you do is you start with something that is going to intrigue her to want to respond and get the communication avenues open. And then you work on her very slowly, but very surely just getting back in the habit of talking every day and that is when you get her on the phone or you send a video where you basically talk to her about basically parroting her emotions back to her. But you can only do that if you look at it from her perspective. Because I think people when they communicate they’re doing things from a self-interested perspective, meaning you when you would talk to your ex-fiancée are probably only going to be talking to her from a frame of mind where you’re literally sitting there and thinking to yourself, “What’s best for me? I want to talk about things that interest me.” And what you need to do is the exact opposite of that, you need to go against your programming. But Chris, how do I know that she’s just saying things to be nice to me? Let’s assume that your ex-fiancée, Brian, does respond to you and she seems okay with it. She seems like she’s okay with engaging in a conversation with you. How do you know she’s just being nice and how do you know if she’s being serious or not? Learn To Spot A Lie In Harvard Business School, there’s a professor and I’m going to butcher his name called Deepak Malhotra, sorry if I butchered your name Deepak. Anyways, he actually created this study on the components of lying. And it’s something that I think we can use here for our purposes, Brian. Here’s what his study found. On average liars use more words than truth-tellers and you use far more third-person pronouns. They start talking about him, her, it, one, they, there, rather than I. And this is done very, very subconsciously, it’s a way for them to put distance between themselves and the lie. If you notice that your ex-girlfriend when she’s talking to you and she seems like she’s engaging is using a lot of third person pronouns, she’s saying a lot of him, her, it, one, they, there, as opposed to first person pronouns, I, me, things like that, it’s a good indication she’s not being truthful with what she’s saying. And this is something that she’s not going to be aware of and something you shouldn’t freak out about. It just means you haven’t touched her emotionally to the point where she’s willing to open up and consider your perspective because really this is a test of rebuilding trust. The best way to rebuild trust is to actually put your ex in a frame of mind where she’s open to considering your point of view, and the only way to do that is through tactical empathy not sympathy. Sympathy I’ve been talking about forever is basically not only feeling empathy but wanting to make the other person feel better by taking an action like giving them a hug or something like that, that’s not what’s going to work here. What’s going to work is you showing that you are listening on a level that no one else is, that’s it. It doesn’t have to be complicated but that is the overall general goal I will come up with for you, Brian. The post My Ex Broke Up With Me For Flirting With Another Woman first appeared on Ex Girlfriend Recovery .
Today we’re going to be listening to a question from a guy who would like to remain anonymous, but he has a really interesting question because it’s kind of all over the place. And so I kind of just chalked it up to him, trying to … or him being felt left reeling by the fact that his girlfriend left him for no reason. She gave him a few reasons, but he’s sort of confused and maybe doesn’t even believe her. But before I play his question, and I think everyone should be listening to what advice I give him today, because it’s something that is applicable to all relationships. I want to first talk about the Ex Recovery Chances Quiz on our website If you don’t know, on our website, Ex Girlfriend Recovery, we put together this special quiz that’s designed to help you understand whether or not you should be trying to get your ex girlfriend back, because I think we can all agree, there are definitely situations where people should not be trying to get their ex girlfriends back. So we put together this ex recovery chances quiz. It’s a simple, free, two minute quiz designed to basically help you understand that. Now all you have to do if you want to take the quiz, it’s super easy. Just simply go to the website Ex Girlfriend Recovery, and instructions on the quiz will be there. So with that out of the way, let’s talk and here from the anonymous person’s question. What Are Your Chances of Getting Your Ex Girlfriend Back? Take the quiz Mr Anonymous Asks; My Ex Girlfriend Broke Up With Me For No Reason I’m dealing with a breakup. It’s been about two months. My girlfriend broke up with me and said she needs to figure herself out. She’s not going to date anybody else. She’s going to leave our pictures on the bedroom wall, and she can’t give me a timeframe and doesn’t want to hold me back. I tried doing no contact. For about two weeks I made it, and I started texting her about once a week. We started some minimal conversation. I probably screwed up when I sent her a love book, which is like a cartoon thing that tells all the ways I love her, which I probably should not have. That overwhelmed her a little bit I think. And then she ended up cutting me off on Facebook and Snapchat. And now I’m trying to actually do no contact. Hopefully it’s not too late. I’m hoping to get back together with her. And I’m going to wait a little bit to talk to her and see what happens then. Yeah, she kind of left it open ended, so … Okay, there’s a lot to unpack here. So ultimately this person who left this question is kind of left reeling because he feels like his ex girlfriend left him for no legitimate reason. Though he never spells that out, you can tell he’s sort of confused about how he should approach things. So let’s talk about his situation or his breakups so that we can kind of get … take stock of it. And then we’ll get into kind of the advice portion and I’ll tell you sort of what I think is wrong and what needs to get fixed and his approach should be. So his ex girlfriend left him. She gave the reason, she needs to figure herself out, which is the most generic reason ever. And what we have here is kind of the ultimate litmus test of someone who’s tried the no contact. Maybe they heard about it online, but they only made it two weeks into no contact before breaking down. He started a bit of conversation with her through text, where she was somewhat responsive. And then he sent her a love of book. This overwhelmed her quite a bit to the point where she cut him off on Facebook and Snapchat. And now he wonders, is it too late? So what’s going on here? Understanding Sympathy Vs. Empathy I think what we have here is someone who is struggling with the concept of sympathy versus empathy. What do I mean by that, sympathy versus empathy? Well, what I’ve thought a long time ago … when I first started Ex Girlfriend Recovery … I believe I started it in 2013, so it’s almost been seven years now … I believe that the key to winning exes back, if that was what you wanted to do, was sympathy, was understanding their worldview and trying to make them feel better, trying to fix things. But that’s not what worked. That’s the beautiful part about being kind of tenured in this program. We’ve gotten multiple people to come through the program and we’re able to see really what’s working. And it isn’t sympathy. Sympathy is him trying to understand that she was unhappy in the relationship and sending a love book. He thinks this will make her feel better. It has all the ways in which he loves her, but it had the opposite effect he was hoping for. It overwhelmed her and she cut him off on Facebook or Snapchat. Now he doesn’t really specify what being cut off on Facebook and Snapchat is or means , but we can assume it means he’s blocked or unfriended or something on that level. What we learned is that really the key to getting exes back is empathy, which is very similar to sympathy. Now, what is empathy? -Empathy is the ability to understand the emotions of someone else without actually feeling the emotions yourself. Sympathy, on the other hand, is the physical display of empathy. Empathy is what wins you your ex back . Why? Well it kind of all comes down to listening. Why I Believe The Key To Winning An Ex Back Comes Down To Listening I’ve often stated that I believe the key to winning exes back is identifying what your exes problems are and solving them in a way that no one else can. I’ve said that so many times, I feel like a broken record when I say it. But how do we identify the problems? Most of the time people come to me and they’re looking for tactical solutions, the no contact rule , “What do I text?” But really the work, the real secret sauce, is in teaching you to properly listen. And most of the time we think we listen when we really don’t. Most of the time we listen on a superficial level. We hear certain words just long enough to get the gist of what someone is saying, but we truly don’t dive down and understand what they’re saying. Once we think we know where they’re heading, our attention slips back inward, where we silently compare what we heard to our own logic and our own worldview. We put ourselves or make assumptions based on what we think as opposed to what they’re actually saying. And what I think we have here is a classic case of someone who believes that they’re listening to what their ex wants, but isn’t diving deep enough to truly understand what they want. She says she needs to figure herself out. He says, “Well, she left me for no reason. She gave this standard reason that she needs to figure herself out.” This tells me that they were on two different wavelengths the entire time. She was resonating at a higher frequency than he was, or rather the opposite. He was resonating at a higher frequency than she was. He was a lot more into the relationship than she was it seems like. Yet, it catches him off guard because it seems out of the blue. It seems like, “She’s not giving me a legitimate reason. She’s not describing why she broke up with me,” but it’s there if you know what to look for. You’ve heard of Freudian slips, right? It’s like you think of something internally and you’re thinking to yourself, “Oh, I can’t say that out loud,” so you start talking to someone and accidentally a small little piece, a sliver of it, slips into the sentence that you didn’t mean to say. And if someone’s careful enough, they can kind of peel back the layers and truly understand what you’re really thinking. This is probably what happened during this guy’s relationship with this ex girlfriend. She probably did give subtle cues that he didn’t pick up on because he’s not great at recognizing them yet. And that’s the beautiful part about this. He can become an expert at recognizing them. He can become an expert at identifying the problems and then solving them in a way that no one else can. But it all boils down to empathy, understanding ex girlfriend’s worldview. What Psychotherapists Say About Listening? Now, psychotherapy research shows that when individuals feel listened to, they tend to listen to themselves more carefully and openly evaluate and clarify their own thoughts and feelings. This is important. Everyone’s always looking for the magic bullet. “Chris, what do I say to her? Well, give me the exact phrase to say to her to get her to come back.” Oftentimes you can go on YouTube or even go to Google. Some of the most search phrases on Google are, “How do I make my ex girlfriend love me again?” (Yep, I totally wrote an article about that .) But there’s no easy way to do that. There’s no magic bullet phrase I can give you that will do that. You need to empathize with her. Yes, we do believe in the no contact rule . That is a tactical strategy we have found to be effective, but the no contact rule by definition is impossible to help you get your ex back . Sure, I mean, there’s some outliers where all it took was a no contact rule , of ignoring your ex girlfriend, and all of a sudden she comes back. But most of the time, that’s not what happens. Most of the time, you have to reestablish communication with her, and how you reestablish communication with her is so key. She needs to feel listened to, because if she truly feels you empathize with her, if she has these moments where she thinks, “You know what? That’s right. I do feel that. He’s right. He understands me,” then they think inwardly. They think about themselves a little bit more carefully, they evaluate your relationship, and to become less defensive. They don’t become oppositional. They’re more willing to listen to your point of view when you make a pitch. They get into that calm and logical place where they’re willing to accept you. So that’s what I think he should work on. I don’t think I should give him tactical advice other than, yeah, finish out a no contact rule. Obviously you screwed up because you didn’t finish or complete the no contact rule fully. But work on empathy, work on trying to understand what your ex girlfriend is going through. Real Life Applications Of Listening We see this all the time. I’m working with a client, who’s a female right now. She’s an extremely great communicator, and her ex-boyfriend is not a great communicator, but what’s really interesting is when it came time to craft the text message for her ex-boyfriend, she sent the text message to me. And I did kind of like a voice note recording, where I was explaining and reading the text message to her how I would read it if I was her ex-boyfriend. And she falls into the classic trap that I think 99% of people fall into, self-interest. You see, her text message had the word, I. Seems simple, right? I. “I feel … I think … I feel … I think.” I counted it up. There was seven uses of “I think,” or “I feel.” So I told her that when her ex reads this text message, he’s going to think you’re selfish because he thinks it’s all about you. So I said, “Go back to the drawing board. You don’t have … I like these parts of the text message, but you need to rewrite them in a way that you’re not using, ‘I think’ or ‘I feel,’ because it always makes it about you.” Relationships are supposed to be equal. They’re not supposed to be about you, they’re not supposed to be about your ex. They’re supposed to be about together. That’s the approach you need to be trying to kind of achieve. And today, she sent me the text message back , the amended text message, I should say, and it’s 10 times better. But I guess my point is when people actually do begin communicating with their exes, they don’t communicate with them in a way that gets them to open up because they start talking about things that relate to them, self-interest. Human beings by nature are self-interested. We’re tribal and we’re self-interested. So it’s kind of a breath of fresh air when you approach an ex girlfriend and don’t have that self-interest. You take more of an interest in what she’s interested in. You make the spotlight all about her. Why Sending Gifts To Your Ex Girlfriend Usually Fails Take the love book. The love book is a nice gesture. I like it. It’s sweet. There’s one little bit of a fly in the ointment though. It’s a love book about how you feel about her. It’s selfish by nature. You may not think it is, but she takes it that way. Crazy, right? I mean, it’s like, “Oh, I’m just doing this nice thing for you. Take it the right way. Come on.” But that’s not how she takes it. It’s all about, “I love you because of this. I love you because of this. I love you because of this.” Maybe it tries to talk about qualities that she has, but she doesn’t see past the selfishness. She sees only the selfishness. She sees the, “Oh my god, he’s making a book about, ‘I love … ‘ It’s all about him. Why can’t he make it about me?” I think that’s where he went wrong. He didn’t complete a no contact rule, true. He made a mistake sending a love book, kind of looks lame, not going to lie. It overwhelmed her, but it’s lame only because it feels selfish to her. She feels like, “This is always about him.” And I think if you look at your life in way … sit back, think of the times you’re communicating with your significant other. Watch how often you say I. “I feel, I think, I love … ” in a way, it’s to make yourself feel better. It’s talking about you. And watch the difference that occurs when you catch yourself and put all the attention on your significant other. They’ll be a lot more willing to listen to what you have to say. There’s a really great book I’m reading right now by a … I’ve talked about it before in the podcast, a hostage negotiator, one of the FBI’s lead international hostage negotiators. And I like this book because in the end, what we’re trying to do here is trying to get someone who doesn’t want to agree with our point of view to actually agree with our point of view of getting back together . How do you do that? Well, hostage negotiation is a great place to look. You have a hostage taker that does not want to give up the hostage. How do you get them to give up the hostage? And so what they talk about is empathy, talking to the hostage with their own worldview. But you don’t enter a hostage negotiation saying, “I need you to do this.” You don’t even ask them, “Can you do this?” You actually empathize with them. “It looks like you’re feeling this. It looks like you’re feeling that,” labeling their exact emotions so that they actually come to this epiphany internally where they think, “That’s right. I do feel that way.” But here’s where it gets kind of tricky. You fail if they think you’re right, because they didn’t come to the conclusion. You came to the conclusion for them and basically parroted it back to them. And I think that’s part of your problem, Mr. Anonymous. You’re sending a no contact … you’re finishing … you’re not completing your no contact rule, true. So you failed in that bit. But I think when you come to communicating with her, you’re communicating with her in a way to sympathize, to make her feel better, but she needs to make herself feel better, and the best way to do that is to make her feel heard, make her feel listened to, get on the same wavelength as her. Because once you do that, she will start to evaluate your relationship again. She’ll start to clarify her own thoughts and feelings, and once you have her doing that, you’re golden, brother. So that’s what I would do if I was you. The post My Ex Girlfriend Left Me For No Reason first appeared on Ex Girlfriend Recovery .
Welcome to another episode of the Ex Girlfriend Recovery Podcast. Today, we’re going to be tackling one of the most common questions that I tend to get, and you may be wondering after your breakup, which is the quandary of going through a breakup and having your ex girlfriend basically say, “It’s not you. It’s me.” We’re going to really dive down deep and explore what she means when she says that and what you can do about it. And in some cases, understanding or coming to the realization that there’s nothing you can do and being okay with that. So what I’m going to do, and if you don’t know, how this podcast typically works is I take questions. So basically, listeners of this podcast come, they’re able to film a quick question for me anywhere between usually a minute to a minute and a half. And I play the question, and then I answer it as organically as possible. But before I actually play the question from our listener, I would first like to say that if you’re going through a breakup, and you’re really determining whether or not you should be trying to get your ex-girlfriend back or really just moving on from your ex-girlfriend, probably the best resource that you can use is something called the Ex Recovery Chances Quiz on my website, www.exgirlfriendrecovery.com . It’s a simple two minute quiz designed to basically answer the question of whether or not you have a good chance of getting your ex back. And you can use that information to really determine whether or not you should be trying to get your ex back or should be focusing on moving on. What Are Your Chances of Getting Your Ex Girlfriend Back? Take the quiz A Listener Asks What It Means When An Ex Says It’s Not You, It’s Me? Hello, Chris? My question is the following. What does that mean when my ex… Or yeah, when a girlfriend tells you, it’s not you, it’s me? She says she is not in love with me, but she loves me. And how is that possible, from someone who loves you the previous month? And then the next month, they don’t love you anymore. Why is that? It’s not you it’s me. So first off, I want to say like always. Thank you so much for basically recording a question. I know sometimes it can be hard to put your heart out on the line and make yourself vulnerable, but you ask a really good. And the question is, what does your ex mean, essentially, when she says, “Hey, it’s not you. It’s me.” And what’s interesting is a few months ago, I actually wrote an article for Ex Girlfriend Recovery, entitled What She Says Versus What She Means . The article was entitled to be basically a starter article that, as time went on, I was going to add more to it, based on real life consensus from women. So if you don’t know, anyone who buys any of the programs that I basically have gets access to this special private Facebook support group. I believe there’s 4200, 4300 people in there, as of today. And what’s really interesting is it’s a really nice mix of women and men, but more so women because the group originally was started for women, and it gained so much traction and success that we opened it up for men. But what’s really cool is most of the time what I’m finding from our male clients who are going through a breakup , that get into the Facebook group, is they’ll actually use women to decipher, “Hey, what does it mean when my ex-girlfriend says this or this?” And so what’s interesting is that was kind of the approach I took when I was writing this article on what your ex girlfriend says versus what she actually means. And so essentially, what I did was I polled people in Ex Girlfriend Recovery and I asked them, “Hey, what is the five most important things that you want girls to decode for you?” What does my ex mean when she says this? And I came up with those five most important things, but what’s interesting is not one of them was, “Hey, what does it mean when my ex-girlfriend says, “It’s not you. It’s me.” But one of the things that men were wondering what women meant when they said it was, “Hey, what does it mean when my ex-girlfriend says that her feelings have changed for me, or she’s not into me so much anymore?” And I actually think that’s kind of close enough to what the it’s not you, it’s me type mentality that women have is. And what was really interesting is for pretty much all of the other four things that I had polled people that men wanted to know, there was a pretty clear consensus. Women were pretty united on what they thought. Maybe there was a couple of different meanings that women thought it could mean, but for the most part, it was pretty straightforward. Actually, you know what? It’s probably even helpful for me to just pull the article up for you, so that you can actually know what those five things were. Okay. So here they are. The five things, the five most important things that men really wanted to know what their ex-girlfriends meant. What does it mean when my ex-girlfriend says that she changed? What does it mean when my ex-girlfriend says that she hates me? What does it mean when my ex-girlfriend says it’s too late? What does it mean when my ex-girlfriend says we’re just friends? What does it mean when my ex-girlfriend told me to move on? And really, when I look at these five things, the one that really sticks out to me as closest to the it’s not you, it’s me mentality is, “Hey, what does my ex girlfriend mean when she says she’s changed?” Now like I said, for the other four things, the consensus was pretty standard. Women typically thought that those four things meant usually one thing. The one exception was number one, which is what does my ex-girlfriend mean when she says that she’s changed. And it’s interesting because that, I think, is the closest to the it’s not you, it’s me mentality phrase that your ex-girlfriend is saying. Here’s What Your Ex Girlfriend Really Means When She Says It’s Not You, It’s Me And there were actually three patterns that we noticed emerged from the women in this Facebook group, that basically just told me what they thought that it meant. And here were the three patterns. Number one is my feelings have changed for you, or I’m not feeling attracted to you anymore. So essentially, and I noticed in the listener’s question, he had mentioned that just last month, everything seemed normal. We were just going about our lives normally. She was saying, “I love you.” I loved her very much. And then all of a sudden, it just falls off. Well, it just seems like some type of catalyst caused her feelings to change, or maybe she was doing a good job of hiding the fact that she wasn’t as attracted to you as she thought. But that’s not the only thing women thought it could mean. They also thought it could mean, “Hey, I don’t like you very much.” And this is a typical thing that I’ve seen, actually, with women who are really angry about the fact that you’re flirting with other women. Not saying that’s what’s going on here. I’m just brainstorming, giving you kind of the broad view of what women thought it meant. And then I’m going to give you my thoughts on what I think you should do. But like I said, they thought, “Well, okay, well, they don’t like you that much anymore.” I’m not into you that much anymore. This is almost very closely related to the my feelings have changed for you type thing. The third one I think is probably the most insightful, and that’s the fact that she feels that she has outgrown your relationship. So she feels like maybe a month ago, you were in a good place, but sometime in that month she decided, or had some sort of epiphany and decided, “I’ve outgrown this relationship,” or “This relationship has beneath me.” And I think it kind of does stem from the fact that maybe she feels she can do better than you. And really all breakups are kind of an emission of that. All breakups, when your next girlfriend breaks up with you, is her basically admitting to the world and to you, “Hey, I think I can do better than you.” And some men take this really personally. They take it and make it into this attack on their ego and everything. And I understand. That’s a normal thing. And the number one thing they typically do when your ex-girlfriend says, “Hey, it’s not you. It’s me,” is they will try to counter it by saying, “No. I’ll change. I’ll be better.” They try to push. They push for her to change her mind. And what happens? Well, more often than not, she does not change her mind, and it almost reinforces the decision. The Mistake Most Men Make When Their Ex Tells Them This Now, here’s an interesting thing that you probably did not know. Why is it such a mistake to try to counter her saying, “It’s not you. It’s me,” by saying, “Oh, I’ll change. I’ll be better.” Well, it’s because constantly being pushed into doing something that she doesn’t want to do will make her, and really anyone, more defensive and less likely to give into what you want them to do. So pushing her for a, “Hey yes, let’s get back together,” constantly, is a turn off, and it makes her more defensive and almost puts her and you in the aggressor and defensive mode. So basically, she looks at you as this aggressive person who’s trying to force her into feeling this particular way. And sometimes, as men, we can be blind to this fact. We can be blind to the fact that maybe we’re being too aggressive in our approach. Society teaches us men that we need to be the aggressors. We need to be the ones who ask out girls. We need to be ones to ask girls for their numbers and set dates up and be the romantic gesture type thing. And sometimes we can take that too far, and we need to take a step back. So being constantly pushed to do something someone doesn’t want to do makes them more defensive. And ultimately, what’s interesting is the fallacy I think most people will run into here is thinking or saying that they’ll change and they’ll be better will make a difference. Studies constantly show… This is kind of a weird analogy, but it’s true. The kidney transplant list, the thing they always talk about on TV shows or movies, and you have to be super good behavior. You can’t drink it all. You can’t do what have you. If your kidneys or liver are failing and you need a kidney or liver transplant, you get put on this list. And this list is determined by how well of a lifestyle that you’ve lived. What’s interesting is they found that people who they’ve given these kidneys or livers to often will say, who have maybe smoked too much or drink too much or what have you, they’ll come back , and they’ll say, “No I’ll change. I’ll be better.” And sometimes people fall for it, and they put them or move them up the transplant list or what have you. And studies have consistently shown that they always, once they get their new kidney or whatever, they always go back to drinking. They always go back to smoking. So I guess my point here is that saying you’ll change and you’ll be better doesn’t mean anything . It’s not as powerful as showing that you’ve changed or showing that you are better. Writers are often told one of the first rules is to show, don’t tell. What does that mean? That means if you’re going to write a story, and you want to make the story appealing to an audience, it’s better to almost have the one plus one mentality as opposed to teaching someone one plus one equals two. And what do I mean by that? Well, Game of Thrones is really good at this. Game of Thrones is one of the best TV shows before the disaster of the final season. There’s many reasons we can talk about it was a disaster, but it was a really good show at dropping these little hints. So essentially, what they do is they give you a little piece of information in the show. And if you pay close enough attention, you can take this piece of information and add it to a second piece of information, and that will equate to this big reveal. But the show doesn’t tell you. It makes you do the extra work. People like that. They don’t like being told directly. And this is a problem. This is the reason that tropes in storytelling exists. It’s such a big trope because it’s been done so often, and people are often just telling you one plus one equals two, as opposed to just saying one plus one equals… And then you have to figure out what it equals. That’s the essence of showing and not telling. So how do you show your ex that you’re better or that you’re changed? Well, if your ex is saying, “It’s not you. It’s me,” you need to take the approach of, okay, this is an admission that she thinks she can do better than me. And you need to live your life in a way to make her regret that decision. And I think actually, the key… The more I study breakups and what works to get someone back, the more I realize that it’s really important for you to find something that you care more about than your ex. Not another person, but another thing. Often I call this the Magnum Opus. What do you want to be remembered by or for when you die? Do you want to be remembered for chasing this girl, looking super desperate, begging for her back? Or do you want to be remembered for this amazing story that you told or this amazing thing that you built? What Is Your Magnum Opus? What is that one thing that you care more about than your own life? Because if you can find that, getting your ex back becomes so much easier. It becomes a lot easier to level up your life in all of these different areas. Health, wealth, relationships can go through the roof, and you can show your ex. You can not tell her, but show her what a big mistake she made. Because eventually, and this is kind of a common thing that we see happen, whether you realize it or not, your ex will begin to romanticize your relationship at some point in the future. She will think back fondly on those positive memories together. This is often called the peak end rule. So when people remember experiences, they actually are really horrible at remembering all of the experience. Typically, they just hone in on two distinct points. The peak of the experience, the most exciting point, or the end of the experience, the last point. In your case, you’re going through a breakup right now. Your ex girlfriend is saying , “It’s not you. It’s me.” She’s focusing on the end of the relationship, how she felt, how badly she felt. But after enough time goes by, the romanticizing begins. And the once the romanticizing began, she starts thinking about those peak exciting, great moments. And then she’s thinking to herself, “Hey, what’s good old Oliver up to?” Or “What’s good old Alexander up to? Let’s check her social media profile.” She checks your social media profile. And if you look worse than you did when she broke up with you, it reinforces her decision to break up with you. But if she looks at your social media profile and sees you’ve basically become this ultimate, extraordinary person, she starts getting curious and thinking, maybe there was more to him than meets the eye. Maybe he was better than I thought. And then she contacts you. And it’s almost like you can play with an even playing field, not quite, but you can almost play with an even playing field. And that’s the key, I think, to ultimately trying to get someone back. You see a lot of people focus on the tactics and the techniques. What should I say to get them back? I learned a long time ago that what’s more important is what you’re focusing on with yourself. Because if you get that part right, you don’t have to play or pitch a perfect game with what you say or what you do. You are allowed a bigger margin for error, and that makes this process so much easier. The post What Does She Mean When She Says It’s Not You, It’s Me? first appeared on Ex Girlfriend Recovery .
Hey there and welcome to another great episode of the Ex Girlfriend Recovery Podcast. So if you don’t know how this podcast works, it’s pretty straightforward. I essentially take listener questions and answer them to the best of my ability. Usually these questions relate to breakups, wanting an ex back, trying to get over an ex, everything in that realm. And today we’re going to hear from a guy named Sebastian who has a question about jealousy, specifically, what kind of jealousy works, if you should use it and the personality types that it will work on. But before I actually do play Sebastian’s question, my recommendation for you if you’re going through a breakup is to first gauge your situation and figure out if you even have a chance of getting your ex-girlfriend back. And luckily for you, we put together a special resource on our website, which has been newly redesigned www.exgirlfriendrecovery.com. It’s a special quiz designed to tell you what kind of chance you have of getting your ex girlfriend back, it’s free and it only takes two minutes to take. So my biggest recommendation for any newbie out there who’s just starting to listen to the podcast is you stop by our website and take our quiz because it will give you the ultimate starting point for what you should be doing going forward. What Are Your Chances of Getting Your Ex Girlfriend Back? Take the quiz Sebastian Asks When It Is Appropriate To Use Jealousy On Your Ex? Hey Chris, this is Sebastian. It was actually difficult to come up with a question that you haven’t maybe previously answered in one of your podcasts, YouTube videos, articles, or even eBooks. So my question is, when is it appropriate to make a jealousy post for social media ? A little bit of background about me. I dated for four and a half years, she fell out of love with me, and she broke up with me. Three weeks later, I successfully did a 30 day no contact and then we’ve been texting ever since. We’ve had 16 text exchanges so far, six of those she’s initiated, but I’ve gotten to the point to where I’m trying to build attraction, I’m sending some flirty texts and I’m getting neutral responses. And I even got a no response once. So I’m wondering if a jealousy post will help me cross that line to where she’d be more receptive of the flirting and the attraction text. Let me know what you think. All right, Sebastian, thank you so much for your question. There’s a lot to unpack here. So ultimately I want to kind of divide up this podcast episode into three distinct categories, which is, Is sending kind of a jealousy text message or trying a jealousy ploy a good idea? What types of personalities will jealousy actually work on? Because sometimes it can backfire. And then, what types of jealousy tactics or techniques should you actually be trying? The last time I actually wrote about jealousy was maybe about four or five years ago. And we’ve learned a lot more since then about what works and what doesn’t work. So let’s look at this podcast episode as kind of the more updated version behind what we’ve learned about jealousy. So let’s hit the ground running. Is Using Jealousy On Your Ex Girlfriend A Good Idea? And ultimately it depends. So, what do I mean by that? Well, I think a lot of people misinterpret jealousy because they only look at one singular strategy as the be-all end-all. We see this commonly with the no contact rule . You’ll hear people talk about the no contact rule and how important it is to use the no contact rule, but they have kind of this false belief that all they need to do to get your ex backs is just implement the no contact rule. And it’s a lot more complicated than that. Jealousy is kind of within that same category of complication. Jealousy where you’re finding is a great enhancer to your overall strategy assuming that you want your ex back. We do notice from interviewing many different success stories that there are many different factors that are patterns that the people who are successful are exhibiting that the people who aren’t successful aren’t exhibiting. So what are some of those patterns? Well, the first pattern we see is they’re using a no contact rule and they’re extremely disciplined with that no contact rule. Generally speaking, they don’t break it. The second thing is they’re using the time during no contact wisely. In other words, oftentimes you’ll hear someone who gets their ex back get to this place emotionally where they just don’t even care about getting their ex back. It’s almost like, “Hey, that would be great if I got them back, but I’ll live without them.” And achieving that frame of mind we’re finding is more and more important the more success stories we get a chance to interview, but we have also noticed a pattern of fear of loss. Generally speaking, when you have the first two factors, when you are implementing a no contact rule and when you are really working on that mindset of basically not caring, I call it the devil may care attitude. It’s just sort of like, “Eh, you know what, whatever happens happens.” That sometimes isn’t enough in and of itself to make your ex girlfriend want to come back. Oftentimes she, excuse me, needs an urgent reason to want to come back . And that is given to her through a fear of loss. Feeling like she’s going to lose you forever. And that’s by seeing other women quote unquote, come in on her territory. So, I think jealousy can work if it’s not the only strategy that you’re using and you know that her personality type will take it seriously. So let’s talk about the personality types for a little bit now. What Types Of Personalities Will Jealousy Work On? And this is a really complicated question because we find that jealousy works really well on these types of personalities, but it’s not always a good idea if you know your ex girlfriend can’t handle the jealousy in a mature way. Okay. So what are the personality types? And ultimately, if you’re looking for me to say, “Hey, this is attachment style,” I’m not going to do that. I’m going to actually just do what we have noticed work on, for our clients on different exes, right? So the first type of personality that we find jealousy works extremely well on is women with low self esteem. So if you know that your ex girlfriend has a low self esteem, jealousy tends to be a lot more potent for that. Also, if she has exhibited a aspect of insecurity or possessiveness over you throughout the relationship, jealousy can work extremely well. You’ll also notice that jealousy works extremely well if she was overly dependent on you for the relationship. And oftentimes people who come to us that want their exes back where their ex was overly dependent on them, are the ones to break up with those exes because they just couldn’t take all of the dependence. And then finally, if you want the attachment style, we’re finding anxious attachment styles, jealousy works extremely well. But that doesn’t necessarily answer the question, if we should be using jealousy in those particular personality traits. And for this, I’m just going to tell you to be practical and use your gut. Sometimes and I believe if you look at the reality of the situation, when you’re looking at jealousy, you need to approach it from the perspective of, is this going to help me achieve my goal? I’m not here to help you try to make your ex girlfriend angry, to manipulate her, or anything like that. I’m here to help you rebuild a relationship with her. So if you know that jealousy on your particular ex girlfriend works too well to the point where she can’t contain herself and will grow furious, it’s probably just not a good idea to use it. It’s not that important of a strategy to the overall success rate to be the essential. If you’re finding your ex girlfriend just cannot handle jealousy in a mature type of a way, then maybe don’t use it on her. This of course leads us to a more interesting question. What is considered a mature type of way of handling jealousy? Personally speaking, I think jealousy and feeling jealous over your partner talking to a member of the opposite sex is natural and even encouraged because it kind of tells both parties, hey, I care and they care. But I’m going to tell you what’s not natural, is if your ex-girlfriend has literally gotten in a fight, like a physical fight with you or the other woman that you’re just talking to, that’s maybe very platonic, that’s not a healthy way or a mature way for that matter of handling jealousy. So use your gut and use common sense. But, now we come to the more interesting question and that is, what type of jealousy do we see work? How You Should Be Using Jealousy When I first started out, I don’t know if any of you know my history because the Ex Girlfriend Recovery Podcast here is pretty new. My other podcast, the Ex Boyfriend Recovery Podcast , I know very [inaudible 00:10:19] is a lot older, it has over 150 to 200 episodes, a lot of the listeners there know me, they know my history and everything, but the backstory behind when I first started, I first started in, I think 2012, the years just blend together for me now. And I was just a college kid who was just giving people particularly women advice on trying to get their exes back that I thought would work on me. But the cool part about having people listen to you is you get more data, right? And you actually get to see what’s really working for real people. And one thing we learned, and one thing I learned right off the bat was, really in your face type of jealousy isn’t a good idea. Generally speaking, I advise you, if you want to use jealousy to use the less is more approach. Now, what is the less is more approach? Well, let’s use two different types of conversation mediums. We’ll use social media and we’ll also use text messaging. How should you use jealousy in these two particular types of conversation mediums? Social media is probably the easiest one to use jealousy in. We find statistics cite close to about 88% of exes will pay attention to their partner’s profile after a breakup within the first three months. So it’s a pretty good bet that your ex girlfriend is going to be paying attention to your Facebook profile, Instagram profile, whatever you’re posting on Snapchat, whatever, whatever social media platform is normal for you. It’s pretty good that your ex-girlfriend’s going to be paying attention to you. So what you need to do is try the less is more approach. And what I learned is probably the best way of approaching the less is more approach is to literally take another girl out on a date and take a picture of the food with her arm in it, or take pictures of you clinking wine glasses. This is the less is more approach. Essentially by putting yourself in a situation that seems more romantic by nature without actually showing you and the other person. Because what we found is generally speaking, our minds are our own worst enemies. This applies more to my clients who are just heartbroken and desperate to get their exes back but it also applies to your ex, her wondering if you’re with some other woman. That is going to be even more complicated if she can’t confirm if you’ve got another woman. And what the cool part is, I get to see both sides of the coin, right? So I work with both men and women. And I can tell you, women are overly obsessive about this if you do it correctly. But that’s the less is more approach on social media. You can post pictures . What’s the less is more approach on text messaging ? Now, this is a really interesting thing. Ultimately, you’re going to have to use the elude strategy, essentially alluding or putting yourself in a romantic environment when you’re talking to your ex-girlfriend and mentioning that you’re in the romantic environment with a friend. You don’t tell her what gender the friend is. You see if she’s willing to fish. We’ve actually seen this work extremely well for some of our clients on the Ex Recovery Program Facebook group. If you don’t know, we have a flagship program, there’s no pressure whatsoever, I usually never even talk about it on the podcast, but anyone who buys access to this entry level $47 product, this digital product gets access to our private Facebook support group, which I believe actually, I’m recording now and I can give you exact numbers so I don’t have to beat around the bush. I believe right now the Ex Recovery Program has about, it looks like 4,175 members, all men and women, there’s 24 people waiting to join the group. So it looks like I need to accept some people, but here’s the point. Last week, there was a girl who literally tried the less is more jealousy sort of texts with her ex and her ex literally came back and the first question was, “Is your friend a guy?” Implying that he’s very interested if she was on a date with someone else. So the best way to approach this is, if you’re texting your ex pretty consistently, and then maybe you stop texting your ex for a two hour window and text her back after that two hour window and basically say, “Hey, sorry. I was out at a movie with a friend.” That’s a good example of a less is more approach because you never imply if the friend was a guy friend or just a friend that you’re taking out on a date and you just kind of give her enough rope to kind of come to the conclusions on her own. And that’s how we typically approach jealousy, which is a little different because a lot of guys or a lot of other gurus, I guess would say, “Yeah, yeah. Get the hottest girl at the bar, take a picture with the hottest girl in the bar.” That can work sometimes, but more often than not, we find the less is more approach works better. The post When Should You Use Jealousy On Your Ex Girlfriend? first appeared on Ex Girlfriend Recovery .
Hey there, and welcome to another episode of the Ex-Girlfriend Recovery Podcast. We’ve got a real interesting one scheduled for you today where we’ve got a guy who’s asked a question about what his ex-girlfriend means when she says that they’re being too dependent on each other. Before I play Mr. Anonymous’s question, because he wanted to remain anonymous, I feel it’s important that if you’re listening to this podcast and you’re struggling through a breakup, probably the first thing you should figure out is whether or not you even have a chance of getting your ex-girlfriend back. What’s funny is actually the voicemail that I’m about to play literally ends with the guy asking, “Should I give up or not?” And a really great way to get a quick answer on if you should give up or not is to stop by our website and take our ex recovery chances quiz there on the homepage of the website. What Are Your Chances of Getting Your Ex Girlfriend Back? Take the quiz Anonymous Asks What His Ex Girlfriend Means When She Says He’s Too Dependent Hi, Chris. This is from Anonymous. But me and my girlfriend of three years, three and a half … just recently broke up … and she said that she wanted to find her own happiness, that we were becoming too dependent to make ourselves happy when we should be doing it on ourselves. And now that we’ve broken up, I really see what she means and says by all that, and we still care about one another. At one point in time, we were thinking about getting engaged, so it was pretty serious. I don’t want to walk away from it. She really does feel like the girl from me. She says I feel like I’m the guy for her, but we just were working on ourselves and trying to better, but she doesn’t want to give me a promise for a future because she doesn’t know the future or how long she’ll need. I really don’t know if I should just pack up and just move completely on or if I should try to work on myself and hope to win her back over and just any advice on what to do. I feel like I’m just stuck in limbo right now, but I appreciate it. Okay. There’s a lot to unpack here. Even though it’s not that long of a voicemail, there’s some really interesting things that we can talk about with his situation. And before I really do that, I want to give a quick synopsis of what’s going on here with him, really what he’s trying to get at. It looks like him and his ex-girlfriend were together for three and a half years, which is a long time. He didn’t really tell me their ages, but I’m assuming they’re probably somewhere in their mid 20s. It’s a relatively serious relationship, especially if they’re talking about getting engaged and things of that nature. They were together three and a half years. They recently broke up. His ex-girlfriend cited the reason as they were being too dependent on each other to make themselves happy. In other words, she is coming under the conclusion that being together is a function of not deriving happiness from the other person, but deriving happiness from themselves. He says they still care about one another. I’m assuming they’ve been talking ever since the breakup , and she seems confused about whether or not she wants to get back with him. Ultimately, the way I’m going to structure this podcast episode is by talking about what she means and what approach should he take. What His Ex Girlfriend Actually Means What does she mean, right? His ex-girlfriend literally sits there and says, “We’re being too dependent on each other,” for the breakup. But the trick is, I know what men mean when they say things a lot more easily than what women mean when they say things. Luckily for you, Mr. Anonymous, I called in my secret weapon to help you out. I thought I had maybe an idea of what your ex-girlfriend meant, but I don’t want to tell you anything without verifying it by asking real women first. And so if you don’t know, anyone basically buys any of my programs, the Ex-Boyfriend Recovery Program or the Ex-Girlfriend Recovery Program, get access to this really cool private Facebook support group community where there are over 4,000 members currently. Most of them are women because we haven’t really launched it to men yet, but we will. Don’t worry, Anonymous. We will launch it. Anyways, what I did is I basically took notes on your situation. I went to the private Facebook group and I asked the women there, “Hey, what does it mean when a girl says during a breakup that you’re being too dependent on each other?” And within about five minutes, I got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven responses, which is mind-blowing. What that tells me is that most women know exactly what it means and also they don’t tell you exactly what they mean in person when they actually say it. I am just going to read word for word what each of the responses are to you and I want you to stop me when you notice a trend. Okay. Sarah says, “Well, it means he’s trying to do everything she does. He needs his own hobby and she needs her girl time.” Tamara says, “Well, it means they’re becoming codependent and losing their sense of self. She wants space and time for other things perhaps. Miss working on things by herself like her Trinity.” Kristen says, “I would say something like that if I was feeling suffocated in a relationship, like we spend too much time together, or the relationship was moving too fast for me and getting too serious.” KN says, “In my opinion, it might mean that they didn’t give each other enough space.” Isabella says, “They are codependent and he is being clingy. This is exactly what my ex-boyfriend said when I was being codependent with him.” Amanda says, “My guess is she needs space. She probably feels like she’s losing her identity or independence in some way. And I usually say we meaning you. I just don’t want to come off mean, so I’m trying to say it’s our issue, but really it’s his issue.” Zoe says, “Their lives are merging into one no time away from each other, no time to miss each other, no hobbies of their own, no girl time or no boy time.” The trend is very clear already and I put it to the whole 4,000 members of the group, so I’m pretty sure there’ll be like 150 comments by the end of the day. But after the first seven comments were pretty consistently on point, I don’t think we really need to dive too much deeper into what your ex-girlfriend really means when she says that you’re being too dependent on one another. It means that she feels you are crowding her too much. Therefore, she broke up with you. But that really doesn’t tell us what you should do, does it? What You Should Do When Your Ex Says You’re Too Dependent I’ve been working with a guy and he is among one of the smartest guys I’ve ever worked with. And him and I were talking about his situation with his ex-girlfriend. And he was talking about this concept of how, when you date someone long enough, they just create this perception of you. And this perception is what eventually becomes their reality when it comes to thinking about you. For example, your ex-girlfriend probably thinks you’re this super clingy guy. I don’t know if she thinks you’re insecure, but she thinks that you don’t really have enough swagger on your own, I guess is the way to put it. And so I was talking with my coaching client and we were basically going through, “Okay, well, what can you do if your ex-girlfriend thinks these kinds of things about you, if you have this negative perception?” And ultimately I told him this story, and he told me this really interesting story about exes running into each other. He told me this really interesting story about one of his ex … Well, I don’t know if it was his ex-girlfriend, but it was this girl that he had run into suddenly. After talking with her and after she saw him for who he really was, and was able to peel back the layers, she actually made some really interesting comment. And every once in a while, if you listen to a female long enough, they do put hints of the truth in their mischievous, little game-playing aspects of communication. And she said this to him. She said, “I thought you were really different than you actually are.” And then I said to my client, I said I was interviewing a success story. It was a female. But what was really interesting is she told me that her ex ran into her suddenly. It was a genuine run in. It wasn’t staged or anything like that, but she was out and about. She was doing the no contact rule and things of that nature. Her ex just suddenly runs into her and he gets to see what she’s actually been up to because when you go through this breakup, you are apart from each other and your ex will have certain thoughts about you. She’ll think something along the lines of, “Yeah, well, he’s partying,” or, “He’s doing this,” or, “He’s doing that.” And she said that when her ex ran into her, he literally said something along the same lines of, “Wow, I just wasn’t expecting you to be doing so well after the breakup.” And what this is is kind of the thing I think you’re going to have to do, and that’s rebranding yourself. How do you rebrand yourself? Well, what you need to do is something called an accusation audit. This is something that I’ve recently learned about. I’ve been reading this really, really fantastic book called Never Split the Difference . It’s by one of the FBI lead hostage negotiators. And he’s talking about what are the skill levels that work when you apply them to hostage negotiation? And essentially I think, “Oh, this is perfect.” Your ex isn’t taking you hostage or anything like that but it’s about trying to convince someone who doesn’t want to do something to actually do what you want them to do. What actually works to do that when you’re dealing with hostages and lives are on the line? And so he talks about this concept of labeling and this thing called an accusation audit. The Accusation Audit The accusation audit is basically really being honest with yourself and thinking about all the specifics things that are negative that your ex could say about you. But I think in your case, Anonymous, which you need to do is do an accusation audit on the negative perception she has of you. Just looking at the seven women who were the first to respond to my little Facebook group inquiry, it’s pretty clear that they think that you don’t have enough of a life on your own, that your whole identity is wrapped up into this entire relationship with your ex-girlfriend. I think on your accusation audit, you could say something along the lines of, okay, well, she thinks that there’s nothing more to me than this relationship or she thinks that I’m too attached to this relationship. And once you have this accusation audit, I’d say think of the 10 worst things that she could think about you. What you want to do on social media is try to rebrand yourself and directly show that there’s more to you than meets the eye. It sounds kind of simple, but it’s not, because really the key lies in two aspects. Number one is the accusation audit where you’re literally sitting down, you’re thinking to yourself, “Okay, what ways can I think or be super harsh about myself and understand my ex’s negative perception of me?” And this also requires you to have some empathy, which is different than sympathy. Sympathy is trying to make your ex feel better. Empathy is trying to understand her world. And that’s what you need. You need to understand things from her point-of-view. And that’s why I went to the women to ask them these questions, “What does his ex-girlfriend mean when she says this?” And basically, I mean, “Oh yeah, I’m feeling suffocated in the relationship. We spend too much time together. I feel like he doesn’t have any hobbies of his own.” Well, these are perfect things for you to put in your accusation audit. You’re going to be better than me at coming up with your own accusation audit because you know what your ex-girlfriend has told you and you can kind of get the vibes from her. But the second part of what you really need to do is try to find a way to show and don’t tell. The number one mistake I see with men is when they see their ex-girlfriends after a breakup , the first thing they try to go into is this tell mentality, “Oh, I’m so much better,” but it’s almost always more powerful for her to come to the conclusion all by herself, like, “Oh, wow, he’s different.” I mean, it’s like a positioning thing. And one of the best ways to do that is utilize social media to show all of the new hobbies you have. And really this is the key to our program. Our program emulates moving on. I talk about this concept of moving on without moving on all the time and really our program is designed to emulate that aspect where you’re trying to move on, or at least show that there’s more to you than meets the eye. And I think that’s what you’re missing, Anonymous. I totally get where you’re coming from and how you want her back really badly. And a lot of times I tell my clients to do counterintuitive things, but they work. I wouldn’t advise anyone to do anything unless there was real life applications. And if you don’t believe this accusation audit or this idea of tactical empathy or trying to understand your ex’s worldview and how important that is, I highly recommend you check out that book called Never Split the Difference by Chris Foss. Incredible book. I’ve only gotten about 25% of the way through it because I have to work during the week, but during the weekends I’ve been pouring through it and I cannot recommend this book enough. Just with the 25%, a lot of the stuff I’m thinking is game changing. A lot of the stuff I already recommend just naturally because I found it works in the field of breakups generally, but there’s just a lot of stuff that are new, like this accusation audit and talking to your ex from her perspective and her worldview and understanding the difference between empathy and sympathy and how most of our clients are literally focused on sympathy or making their exes feel better when that’s not what will get them back. What gets them back is understanding their point-of-view and making them feel heard. Get Hobbies Of Your Own And the best way, Anonymous, that you can make her feel heard right now is to get some effing hobbies of your own. As weird as that sounds and as counterintuitive as that sounds, the consensus in just the first seven comments I got on that thing were pretty much like, “Look, she feels smothered by you. She feels like you don’t have enough hobbies of your own.” And maybe you do have hobbies of your own. But what you need to do is really go all in on showing them and show her new depths to you. Women are just like men when it comes to relationships. They can get bored in relationships. She should always feel like there’s new layers and new depths to you. And sometimes it’s hard to create those new layers to yourself after three and a half years of being together for a really long time. But this is a good time as any to get some new layers. That’s going to do it for this episode. If you haven’t already, I would recommend that you take a listen to the podcast episodes I’ve released so far. And if you like what you’re hearing, please leave an honest rating or review on our iTunes page. I would really highly appreciate that. And if you want to see the actual responses from the women in my little mock ask of them, just go to the show notes of this episode, pull up this episode, this podcast episode and I will literally put that in there. I’ll see you next time. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Ex-Girlfriend Recovery Podcast . Make sure you subscribe to us on iTunes and leave an honest rating and review. Also, don’t forget to take the free quiz to show you what kind of chance you have with your ex on our website, www.exgirlfriendrecovery.com. We’ll see you next week. The post My Ex Girlfriend Says I’m Too Dependent first appeared on Ex Girlfriend Recovery .
Today, we’re going to be hearing from a listener named Daniel, who has an interesting situation. He’s in a long distance relationship and he sort of reeling from the breakup and as you listen to his voice message, you’ll notice that he’s a little noncommittal on whether or not he wants his ex-girlfriend back. It seems like, and this is a sentiment I can totally understand. It seems like he doesn’t want to put in the work if there’s not going to be a guaranteed result. And that’s probably the most difficult thing for a lot of people when they begin this process, whether they want to get their exes back or not. When they’re making that decision, a lot of it’s going to be based on, well, what are my chances? How good of a chance do I actually have? Is this going to be a waste of my time? And unfortunately getting your ex back from what we understand is an inexact science. In other words, there’s nothing I can say that will guarantee your chances of success. But what we can do, is lay out the options for you and give you a clear idea of what we think might be best for you in the long run. And Daniel is going to tell us about his situation in a minute here. But one thing I think is important to mention is, when you’re trying to make this decision of whether or not you should be getting your ex-girlfriend back, you should first figure out what kind of chance you have of getting her back. Now, luckily on Ex Girlfriend Recovery I’ve put together a special quiz. And this quiz is special because it’s designed to make you or ask you questions. And I want you to be brutally honest as you answer these questions. And then we’re going to take your questions, we’re going to run them through what we see between our success stories and the people who aren’t succeeding, and we’re going to spit out a score for you that will give you an idea of where you stand with your ex. So you know if you’re wasting your time or not. So if you want to take that quiz, it’s pretty simple. Let’s hear from Daniel! What Are Your Chances of Getting Your Ex Girlfriend Back? Take the quiz Daniel Wonders How To Get His Ex Girlfriend Back In A Long Distance Relationship “Hey Chris, my name is Daniel from San Diego. I recently got out of a relationship that was about a year and a half to two years long. And how it went about is, I was in a really tough spot emotionally, my dad passed away and I lashed out on other people through cynicism. And so, it ended up to the point where my girlfriend couldn’t really take it anymore. We were doing long distance by the way. And she just needed like, as she put it, to be selfish. So, I wanted your advice on whether or not I should try to give her the upper hand and say, she’s justified in doing that, and try to re-establish at least a friendship with her. Or if I should just let it go and accept that she wasn’t really justified in doing so. Just let me know. Thanks.” What To Do To Get Your Ex Girlfriend Back In A Long Distance Situation All right, Daniel from San Diego. I want to talk about your situation quite a bit. Because there’s a lot of parallels that I’m seeing between the women who were trying to get their ex-boyfriends back through the Ex Boyfriend Recovery Podcast , and what you’re saying as you went through your breakup with your ex-girlfriend, right? So, let’s first recap Daniel’s situation. So, Daniel says that he recently went through a breakup after about one and a half or two years with his ex-girlfriend. And what he believes the catalyst for this breakup is, is the fact that his father passed away. And of course, this just devastated him emotionally and caused him to view the world in a very cynical lens, right? So, by doing this, he pushed his girlfriend away , and then he mentions an interesting piece of information that I think is essential. And that’s the fact that they’re long distance, right? And so, I actually think that can play into breakups a lot more than you would actually believe. And I’m going to explain that in a little bit. He also said that one of her reasonings when she broke up with him was that, she deserved the right to be selfish. And he’s wondering if he should tell her that she’s justified, and play into purposely friend zoning himself. So, there’s a lot to tackle here, but ultimately what I’d like to do is start by talking about some of the differences I’m noticing between men and women. So, as you probably have heard, if you listened to the first few episodes of this Ex Girlfriend Recovery Podcast, I also run another podcast that’s quite a bit bigger, on the bigger website Ex Boyfriend Recovery. Essentially thousands of women come every single day to the website, Ex Boyfriend Recovery, and basically try to get their exes back, their ex-boyfriends back. And what’s interesting is, you get to notice after you interact with men who are trying to get their ex-girlfriends back and women who are trying to get their ex-boyfriends back, you notice some differences between how they interact or how they approach the situation. Now, these are broad strokes. So by no means are they indicative of fact. I’m a big believer in that every single situation is unique, and it is in a way impossible to hit a one size fits all situation, but we can get close. Looking At Success Stories So what I’m looking at all of the data in front of me, the one thing I noticed about the big differences between men and women is how serious they are about getting their exes back. Women, what I notice, when you talk to them, especially success stories, and I’m actually going to talk a little bit about this in a second. Lately we’ve been doing this thing on the other podcast, we’ve being interviewing a lot of the success stories that are going through the program. And I’ll actually come into the conversation blind so I don’t know anything about their situation. And I like this because, ultimately if I don’t know anything about their situation, I can literally think to ask them some of the first thoughts that pop into my head. And by doing this, the goal is to get closer and closer to understanding what the people who are succeeding are doing versus what the people who aren’t succeeding, well, they aren’t doing. And what I’ve tend to notice is that women tend to be very, very focused from the get go on them wanting their exes back. Now, what’s interesting is today we don’t have a ton of conversations with men who have gotten their exes back because we didn’t have this podcast until just now. The podcast is an invaluable tool, in my opinion, because it allows me to have conversations with men who are wanting to try to get their exes back succeeding and also failing. So that we can understand some of the subtle differences and basically understand what works in this process. But there was one time in our private Facebook group. And if you go to the show notes of this episode on the Ex Girlfriend Recovery website, I’ll actually post the interview I did with the guy. But there was one guy that I did interview a couple of years ago who got his ex-girlfriend back. His name was Aaron. And what I noticed is, even though he got his ex-girlfriend back, he seemed to be a little sort of iffy about whether or not he wanted to continue the relationship, or even totally put his all into it. And that’s actually a sentiment I noticed by a lot of men. Women, when they go through the breakup, they want their exes back right away. Not all of them, but the ones who do, they know right away, there’s no if’s, ands, and buts about it. They want the exes back. Men on the other hand, they know internally they want their exes back, but they have a hard time convincing themselves that that’s the right approach. And so, I couldn’t help but notice that Daniel has that same feeling. He sort of half in half out about it. He doesn’t know. You could tell he’s reeling, he’s been through a lot emotionally with the passing away of his father and now the breakup. So, for him, he’s definitely in this mentality, at least from my view, he’s in this mentality where it’s like, when it rains, it pours. He’s thinking to himself, well, when things go bad, my father passed away and then she breaks up with me. And so, it’s really easy to get into this victim mindset as a male. And I would actually encourage you not to do that. Because one thing that we’re doing right now is actually revamping our entire program for men. And so, in doing that, what we’re doing is basically giving people PDF courses, audio courses, and I’m filming video walk throughs as I go through my programming, trying to figure out what works. And recently I just, and this is why it’s so on the forefront of my mind, but recently I just recorded this video walk through where I’m talking about downward spirals. Downward spirals is essentially something that we noticed a lot of men go through after a breakup. And that’s the fact that, when it rains, it pours. So essentially, like one bad thing goes wrong and then another bad thing goes wrong. And next thing you know, you look at life in this very cynical way, which I think is what happened to Daniel. And what’s interesting about this, is there is a way to get yourself out of it, but ultimately before we talk about that, you need to first understand the mindset of someone who actually has what we call a downward spiral. Where they let things go out of control and they have the victim mentality in how it goes. But ultimately there’s like a self fulfilling prophecy that goes with these downward spirals. So, imagine for a moment that you have this limiting belief, you think to yourself, you know what? My life sucks. And so, as you tell yourself this, you go through life and something bad happens to you. This further reiterates this negative internal belief you have that your life sucks. So you further believe that it’s true. Your life really does suck. So you go through the next few days and you think to yourself, my life really does suck. Remember that one thing that happened to me? And then another bad thing happens to you, which further reiterates your internal belief that your life sucks. And next thing you know, you just have this downward spiral where the more your internal thoughts, even when you think they don’t really matter that much, the more you tell yourself that your life sucks, it becomes this thing where you actually start believing it. And so, what you need to do to get out of this self fulfilling prophecy, this negative belief system, I’m not saying Daniel has this totally, but he’s got a bit of this I think. Is start looking at the glass half full, which is a hard thing to do for people like Daniel, maybe, when they’re going through a hard time. But try to find small wins to get yourself on the board, and then start feeding into those wins and believing that. Because it will interact with all sorts of areas of your life. So instead of thinking your life sucks, correct yourself into thinking, my life sucks right now but it’s going to get better. And then when something good happens, start believing that, you know what? This is proof. It is going to get better. And the next thing you know that will interact with all the other areas of your life that you wouldn’t expect it to interact with, which is a cool thing. And we can create what we’d like to call an upward spiral. So you go from the downward spiral and you turn it into an upward spiral. And so, I think part of the issue Daniel’s having with whether or not he wants to get his ex back, is he’s in the midst of this downward spiral, he’s reeling. The other problem, I think, with Daniel’s relationship, is I happen to notice that he mentions he’s in a long distance relationship. And this is where I think there’s a big disconnect between a lot of people who go through breakups that are long distance relationships . Because ultimately long distance relationships , and I will go to my grave saying this, they’re destined to fail, every single one of them. All Long Distance Relationships Will Fail Unless You Do Three Things Even long distance relationship marriages are destined to fail unless you have three things. So, I’ll go from least important to most important. What are the three most important things that you need in order for a long distance relationship to survive? Time Money A Plan Let’s dissect! Time The first thing you need is time. So, think of it like this, long distance relationships, one of the things that the two of you don’t have a lot of is time to be together. So you have to make time out of your day. She has to make time out of her day. And then you also need to make time especially, and I only know this because I was in a long distance relationship before i got married to my wife. And so, what we would do is often, since I worked from home and I run my own business, and this is my gig, the breakup thing. I could make my own hours, so I could basically do whatever I wanted when I wanted, but she didn’t have that ability. She had a normal job. So she would have to go to her boss and ask for time off. And then I would have to go and travel to see her or she would travel to see me, but time was an essential component. And sometimes time isn’t the easiest thing to get, especially if there’s kids involved. Because kids take up time. You have to find someone to watch them. It can be a complicated thing. So some people, and this is just the hard truth. Some people can’t make long distance relationships because they don’t have time. The other thing and you need is money. Now, this is an odd one, but it’s an important one as well. So, I’ll use myself as an example. I only know this because I went through a long distance relationship before my wife and I got married. We had the time thing sorted out, because I was able to be patient and she could get time off of work every month or something. She’d get like three or four days and I’d go see her for three or four days or she’d come see me for three or four days. And then we’re apart again. But in order to see each other, even if you’re not like super long distance, you have to just drive to each other. Money You need money. I had to buy plane tickets to go see her. She had to buy plane tickets to go see me. Even if we were driving to each other, you’d have to pay money to get gas. You’d even need to pay money especially if you decide to get a hotel together or something along those lines. Money is an essential thing. And it’s one of the things that no one ever talks about with long distance relationships. But again, if you don’t a lot of money, especially if you’re just coming out of college or you’re just in college and you don’t have a lot of money, you’re going to have a hard time making a long distance relationship work. But those two things, time and money, pale in comparison to the third thing. A Plan The third thing you need to make a long distance relationship work is a plan to close the distance. So ultimately, what I’m wondering when I look at Daniel’s situation is, he’s in the long distance relationship for one and a half to two years. But in that time he didn’t mention like, oh yeah, we moved in together. He’s still long distance. So my point is, both of you need to be working towards a plan where you close the distance and are together. You don’t need to be living together , but you need to be moving close to each other to the point where it’s not long distance anymore. I mean, ideally you would like to move in together. But long distance relationships, I can only see truly being successful for, and this is maybe a hot take, feel free to disagree with me. But I only see them typically being successful for people who are a bit older, who have money, who have time, and are willing to basically move in together to close that distance. And sometimes even when you close the distance you find you’re not the right match when you get together. My wife and I, we decided to move in together. After about seven or eight months, we decided, let’s give this a try. We both had time, money and a plan. We both worked towards that plan tirelessly. And so, what I’m wondering Daniel is, if you didn’t have a plan to close the distance with your ex-girlfriend, you’re going to have a hard time even trying to get her back because something needs to change the second time around if you even try to get her back. And these are things to keep in mind. I would say, the plate is like the ultimate hope that you’re looking forward to throughout the long distance relationship, is the thing that keeps you going, that you’re both working towards a way to be together where you don’t have this distance, where you can see each other more consistently. And if you don’t have that plan, if you don’t have that thing to look forward to, you’re going to have a hard time, maybe even convincing her to get back with you. Now, there are certain ways in which you breach conversations like that, of course, Daniel. But I think those are the things I would keep in mind for you. Generally speaking, your situation is not like… The strategy I would recommend for you is the general long distance breakup strategy. But the reason I’m harping in so much on this time, money and plan ideal, is because that’s the part that no one ever focuses on. They only focus on the strategy, like, okay, I’ll use the no contact rule for 30 days and then I’ll start texting my ex, and then I’ll start phone calling my ex, or then we’ll start working towards that meet-up. And it’ll be this big romantic meet-up once enough value has been built. And once I see her in person, that will be enough to have her ask for me back or have me ask for her back. But it doesn’t matter if you don’t have those three things. You need time , money, and a plan. The post Getting Your Ex Girlfriend Back In A Long Distance Relationship first appeared on Ex Girlfriend Recovery .
Today, we’re going to be taking another listener question that we got. Actually, it was the very second question that we got when I actually started launching the podcast. And a lot of it is going to be focusing on the reasons why ex-girlfriends break up with you and what to do about them. So I’m going to play the question. It’s from someone who wanted to remain anonymous. What he said resonated with me because you could just tell the defeat in his voice. And what I’d like to do is by the end of this podcast episode give him and some of the listeners some clarity on what ex-girlfriends really mean when they say you’re being too pessimistic or that they’ve changed or that you should move on because that’s something that not a lot of women will really sort of tell you what they really mean by. What Are Your Chances of Getting Your Ex Girlfriend Back? Take the quiz What Does My Ex Girlfriend Mean When She Said That She Changed So without further ado, let me play Mr. Anonymous’ question. “My girlfriend left me a few weeks ago. She said that I was too pessimistic, which I suppose I was, but none of the reasons she gave were really a deal breaker in anyone’s mind, I wouldn’t think, and I haven’t contacted her since the breakup. And I still have deep feelings for her. And she said that she wanted to be happy, or she said she needed to do what’s best for her. And that’s why I let her go so easy. But since then it hasn’t been so easy, and I just don’t know what direction I need to take it. It’s been almost a month now since I’ve spoken to her, and none of the guides I’ve read have really hit my breakup specifically. And I was just looking for advice on that.” Okay. There’s a lot to unpack here. So what I’d like to do typically when I get questions is to sum them up so I can hit the bigger points and sort of help you. So the person who left this voicemail just had his ex-girlfriend break up with him a few weeks ago. He hasn’t talked to her at all since then. It looks like it’s been about a month since they’ve talked. And the reason she gave was, or initially that he was being too pessimistic, I guess, about the relationship. But ultimately she kind of backed that up a little bit by giving him other reasons for the breakup occurring, but none of those rules reasons were really deal breakers in his mind. So again, they haven’t contacted each other since the breakup. She said that she wanted to be happy and do what’s best for her, which is why he kind of didn’t fight for her. And what I think is interesting about this particular situation is the fact that we got a guy who’s struggling clearly, but hasn’t fought for the girl yet because he’s falling into this victim mode of thinking what is best for the girls that he backs up. And what I guess the thing that I would want to combat anyone who’s listening to this that they have is that anytime someone says that they’re going to do what’s best for them, or being away from you is what’s best for them, they really do mean it in the moment. That’s an important thing that a lot of people don’t quite understand. My Theory On Self Interest I’ve been a long proponent of the fact that human beings are self-interested. So especially when it comes to relationship decisions, they make self-interested decisions. In other words, they’re going to do what they think is best for them. So at this point of her life, your ex-girlfriend, Mr. Anonymous, she thinks that being away from you is what’s best for her. So your overall game plan needs to be, how can I take that preconceived notion and prove it wrong? And so what I thought I’d like to do is not only tell you how to do that, but also explain a little bit about what she meant when she said that you’re being pessimistic. And essentially what she meant when she say that she’s changed or something along those lines. And what’s really interesting is a few weeks ago, I actually wrote this article called What Your Ex Girlfriend Says Versus What She Really Means . Now. I don’t understand women like I can understand us guys because we’re guys, I’m a guy. I can pretty much understand, hey, this is what a guy is thinking. But women are still sort of a mystery to me. But one thing I’m lucky to have is actually a larger website than Ex Girlfriend Recovery. So a lot of you coming here and listening to this podcast are probably doing so on my website, exgirlfriendrecovery.com. And what’s interesting is exgirlfriendrecovery.com wasn’t the very first website I created in the relationship space. It was actually a website called exboyfriendrecovery.com, helping women try to get back with their ex-boyfriends. I think you can see where this is going. But what’s interesting about this is there’s been a lot more women clients that have had than men clients. And so one thing that we do is anytime we get a coaching client or anyone who buys our program, we let them into this private Facebook support group. And this private Facebook support group is essentially the people that we view as like, hey, these are the people that are going to try our ideas out. They’re going to report back to us. And a lot of times people will come to me and they’ll say like, “Hey, the reason I bought your program is you were actually showing real life success stories. I mean, you sat down and interview these people for hours trying to figure out like, hey, what worked for them and what didn’t work for them.” And the reason I can do that is because of our private Facebook support group. So anyways, a few weeks ago, I got this idea for an article. So I actually surveyed the men on Ex Girlfriend Recovery and said, “Hey, what are the five biggest questions that you want answered about what your ex girlfriend says? When your ex girlfriend says this, what is it that you want to understand what she really means, or the frame of mind she’s in when she says that thing?” And the five responses we got were, hey, what does my ex-girlfriend mean when she says that she’s changed? Or what does my ex girlfriend mean when she says that she hates me? Or what does my ex-girlfriend mean when she says it’s too late? Or she says, we should just be friends or she tells you to move on. And I was not going to tackle that alone because I don’t know. That’s the honest truth. I’m not some soothsayer, like people believe I am, which always kind of bothers me because it’s sort of like, well, I’m a human being too. I make mistakes and I don’t know everything. But what I can do for you is I can show you my data. So I went anyways to the private Facebook support group and I polled all the women I could find there. I basically put up a post and said, “Hey, I’m writing an article for my website, Ex Girlfriend Recovery, trying to help men understand what women really mean when they say X, Y, or Z.” And the response we got behind that article or behind that poll was really amazing. We got all sorts of really interesting insights and some of it really shocked me. And so it’s sort of been my go to article anytime men asked me questions about like, “Hey, my ex-girlfriend said that she’s changed.” And I think that’s kind of the situation that you’re in here, Mr. Anonymous. The fact that your ex-girlfriend’s says that you’re being too pessimistic and that she gave you all these sort of blanket reasons for why she wants to go through the breakup. Ultimately the bottom line is she’s saying that she’s changed. She’s moved past the relationship. And what’s interesting is we asked women in our private Facebook support group. And if you actually go to my website, exgirlfriendrecovery.com and find this episode, just look in the show notes area where I basically transcribed these episodes. I’m actually link you to that article so that you can actually read it. And you can actually see these screenshots that I posted to prove, hey, real women said this, and this is what they said. And what’s interesting is when you look at when ex-girlfriends say that they’ve changed, that they’ve moved on or they give you some reason, that’s ultimately sort of like amounting to the fact that they’ve changed or their feelings have changed for you, what they mean is usually one of things. This is what shocked me. So ultimately I was just going to tell people initially like, “Hey, when your ex girlfriend says that she’s changed, it means she’s moved past the relationship or feelings for you have changed. She means it.” But when we actually polled real life women and asked them, “Hey, when you’ve said this in a relationship, what did you really mean?” women kind of came down in three specific camps, right? The Three Things Your Ex Girlfriend Could Mean When She Says She’s Changed The first camp was pretty obvious. Her feelings have changed for you. She’s not feeling attracted to you anymore. So to put it bluntly, the group of women said that it means that when your ex-girlfriend says this to you, her feelings for you really have changed and she doesn’t want to be with you anymore. So obviously that’s not great for you, Mr. Anonymous, especially if you still have strong feelings for her. But really it was the second patterns that we saw emerge in her polls that shocked me. So pattern number two was she wants you to change your ways before you try again. So basically these women think that not all hope is lost for getting back together . You just need to show her that you’ve changed. And the third pattern was she doesn’t like you that much anymore. So this group of women believe that your ex-girlfriend means she has outgrown your relationship. And as a result, her feelings for you have changed. So when I hear your ex-girlfriend’s pessimism towards you, it seems to me like she follows either in pattern two, pattern three. My guess is you want to operate on the assumption that it’s pattern two. She wants you to change your ways before you try it again. So that sort of changes the narrative for you in a big way, because in my opinion, your entire goal should be about how can I take her preconceived notions and flip them on their head? What To Do If Your Ex Girlfriend Says She’s Changed So let’s use an example using her own words. She thinks you’re pessimistic. So a lot of times when I explained to men like, hey, what you need to do is you need to create this internal paradigm shift for your ex-girlfriend, so that when she thinks of you, she doesn’t associate you with pessimism. She associates you with the opposite of pessimism. Positivity, right? So a lot of times, when I tell that to men, they take it the wrong way and try to directly approach their ex-girlfriend about it. They say, “Okay, you want me to be more positive? Well, whatever I talk to, I’m going to be more positive. I’m going to be happy all the time.” But it’s not enough just to directly talk to your ex-girlfriend about this stuff. You need to actually indirectly talk to her as well as directly talking to her. So I’m a big believer in sticking to the general game plan most of the time, right? So anonymous here has said that he hasn’t talked to his girlfriend in a month. Well, that’s perfect. He’s already done basically a no contact rule . But when it comes time, what a lot of men especially fail to realize is that the no contact rule , a lot of people only think it’s for getting their ex back or making their ex miss them. But it’s actually so much more deeper than that because it’s also an opportunity for you to change your ex-girlfriend’s perceptions of you. So if she perceives you as this pessimistic sort of a homebody, socially awkward person. One of the best things you can do is actually utilize social media to combat that assumption of you. So here’s kind of a shocking statistic. We’ve found that close to around 88% of exes will Facebook-stalk after a breakup. So there’s a pretty high probability, like almost 90% chance that your ex-girlfriend will be paying attention to what you’re posting on Instagram. If you’re a Snapchat person, what Snapchat stories or Instagram stories you’re posting, what you’re posting on Facebook or any other social media platforms that you guys would consistently communicate on. It’s a pretty good guess that she’s going to be watching you. So you need to tell or cultivate the story that you want cultivated so that she looks at you and doesn’t think, “Oh, wow, same old, same old.” She looks at you and think, “Hey, this is different. This is new.” It’s important that you do that, especially before you get back in touch with her. And a lot of people, a lot of men when I explain this to them, they don’t buy into it. So they nod their heads. They’re like, “Yeah, yeah, I get it, Chris. I get it. I’m totally cool.” And then they disregard everything I say. And then they contact their exes. And they come back to me and said it didn’t work. Well, it didn’t work because this is not the kind of situation where you’re going to get immediate results. This is the kind of thing where it’s a month long process of you cultivating the image and then getting back in touch with her and cultivate the image even further. And what’s really great at some men who are really, really great at doing this will actually get her friends talking and her friends will tell her. And it’s even more powerful then because there’s a difference between her friends saying like, “Hey, have you seen Brad’s post on so and so, and such and such? It looks like he’s doing some really cool things.” Or like, “Have you seen what he’s doing?” It makes her pay attention more to what you’re doing. And I think maybe that’s what’s missing because if your ex-girlfriend views you as pessimistic, if she views you as being this guy who always sort of shoots down ideas, and I think someone who’s pessimistic is someone who’s like… Maybe she wants to be spontaneous. And you’re kind of like shooting that idea down and you just want to stay in. Maybe a great way of combating that is to do something wild seriously on social media. Not wild in the fact like, hey, let’s go out and take part in some nutty sort of like cult. I don’t mean it in that way. I mean, it like, hey, let’s say she doesn’t ever view you as taking a big risk. So maybe your big risks could be like, let’s go jet skiing or let’s go on a hot air balloon or let’s go do something kind of like, let’s do something that takes her preconceived notions about you being a home body and kill it. And sometimes the hardest part for men when it comes to this is stepping outside of their comfort zone. A lot of times their comfort zone will say, “No, no, no, no, don’t do that. Don’t do that. Don’t do that.” But you need to step outside of your comfort zone. I’ll never forget one of the first times that I got featured on a national level was someone wanted to do a piece on me for Fox News, right? And so what was interesting is it frightened the hell out of me. I’m not going to lie to you. I said no. My wife, she came to me and she was like, “Hey, these people, they want us to go on Fox News.” And I said, “I’m not doing that” because I was scared. It was outside of my comfort zone. But after a while, I really just thought and said, “You know what? I needed to take chances. This could be a good opportunity for me to get some national exposure and talk and show people like, yeah, I know what I’m talking about. I am an expert in my area or my field.” And if you want to watch that Fox News thing of me, I’ll just post it in the show notes of the episode so you can actually see what I’m talking about. But ultimately it took all these steps to get me outside of my comfort zone. And I’m glad that I did it, even though it didn’t really give me great national exposure, to be honest with you. But other than that, my point is, don’t be afraid to take a risk. And a risk is only really a risk if you don’t know what you’re doing. And you know what you’re doing here, at least you have my sort of stamp of approval of, hey, let’s do something to catch your attention. Now, a lot of times when people listen to these podcasts episodes, they want step by step game plans of like, hey, this is what you do here, here, here, and here. But I’m actually not a fan of giving those because I feel like they’re counterproductive in the fact that he should only… This is really one of the situations where if you’re a huge planner and you’d like to plan ahead from point A to point Z. It doesn’t really work out that way so much. Because I find if you plan a perfect plan, something along the way will go wrong and you will have to start over and reshape your plan continually. So I only like to plan the next step ahead at a time. And I think right now, your step, shouldn’t be like, hey, let’s start practicing and planning when I should text her. I think before you text her, you should prime the new you so to speak. I’m not saying change your personality or anything like that. But I’m saying combat whatever preconceived notion she has about you. Turn them on their heads so that she doesn’t really view you as the same pessimistic guy that she may have viewed you as in the beginning. Step outside your comfort zone. Your comfort zone is great to have, but this is one of those areas. If you want to win her back , you have to be willing to take a risk. But remember a risk really isn’t a risk if you know what you’re doing, and you know what you’re doing here. The post My Ex Girlfriend Said That She Changed first appeared on Ex Girlfriend Recovery .
Hello there, and welcome to our first official episode of the Ex Girlfriend Recovery Podcast. Today, we’re going to be talking about a situation where you think you really have a chance, but your ex girlfriend has moved on and is now dating another dude. We’re going to be talking about what the chances are of getting your ex back in that particular situation, as well as really what we’re seeing working and what’s not working when your ex girlfriend has moved on to another guy. And really, before I really get started, the first thing I want to always tell everyone who is starting this process out is you really need to figure out if you have a chance of getting your ex back before you even embark on the adventure of trying to get your ex girlfriend back. Luckily for you, we get asked this question so many times that on my website, Ex Girlfriend Recovery, I put together a special quiz that’s designed to basically answer that exact question for you and give you a few next steps on what to do going forward. What Are Your Chances of Getting Your Ex Girlfriend Back? Take the quiz Tom Has A Question About His Ex Girlfriend Moving On But this podcast, like many others of its kind, it’s going to be taking listener questions. And today, we’re going to be hearing a question from a man named Tom, who has an interesting situation where his ex girlfriend has moved on to another guy. But his ex girlfriend, now that she’s with the other guy has a bit of the grass is greener syndrome and is thinking maybe it’s not going to last with the new guy. So you’re going to get my thoughts on Tom’s situation, as well as exactly what I think he should be doing to give him the best shot of getting his ex girlfriend back. So without further ado, let’s just hear from Tom. “Hello. My name is Tom. My girlfriend and I broke up about nine months ago. And during that time she got with another guy, but it’s been rough for her. She says it’s been ups and downs. Recently we’ve reconnected over text and she said that she doesn’t know how long this is going to last, but hasn’t given me any indication. I told her that I really want to give it another shot, and then she started to ask me to help her sister with an issue, so I did. Then she started to send me some pictures over texts of just fun pictures of her, and then she was reminiscing our relationship, joking about how I have long hair now and she always insisted that I have short hair. So, I’m wondering what the chances are of us getting back together . Bottom line is she’s with a guy that she told me she doesn’t know how long it’s going to last, and then she’s given me these hints over text about reminiscing, and then sending me pictures of herself doing fun things like walking the dog. What does that mean? Do I have a chance? Thanks very much. Bye.” His Ex Girlfriend Said She Doesn’t Like The New Guy She’s With So Tom is in one of the more interesting situations that I’ve heard in a long time, and that’s where his ex girlfriend has moved onto someone new and has basically come back to him and said, “I don’t like the guy I’m with,” but she still hasn’t broken up with the guy. What’s up with that? It looks like her breakup with him was around nine months ago. He didn’t give us much details on what caused the breakup , which in my opinion or in my experience rather, usually there’s always a big catalyst for what causes a breakup when women initiate it. But I’d actually be interested to figure out if she initiated the breakup or he initiated the breakup. So she gets with this new guy, but she’s messaging him constantly saying that she doesn’t think it’ll last with the new guy, and what does it mean when she’s sending him pictures and everything like that? The Being There Method The first thing I want to point out to Tom is this concept of the being there method. This is a concept that we accidentally stumbled upon in our private Facebook support group, and that’s essentially we had a situation where my wife was essentially coaching this woman. T his woman had been in this situation where she had been broken up with by her ex boyfriend. I realize it’s not totally relevant here, but it’s the thing that we stumbled across that really makes the difference. She ended up coaching this woman and she asked for me for help. So this woman who had been broken up with by her ex boyfriend, her ex boyfriend had moved in with another girl and was with that other girl and living with her. She came to us and she was like, “How do I get him back?” Before we accidentally stumbled upon this technique, we would look at each other, my wife and I, and we would be like, “Let’s try this, let’s try this, let’s try this.” And oftentimes, our efforts were not yielding many great results. So out of the ordinary, one day, I don’t know if it was her or if it was I, but we came up with this drastic idea of, “Hey, let’s just recommend her go into a super long period of no contact, a longer period of no contact. And then when she gets done with no contact, let’s purposely get her to friend zone herself and see if the new guy or the new girl gets intimidated.” That’s almost exactly what happened. So it’s a little bit more of the gray, I’ll be the first to admit that, but my job isn’t necessarily to find out people’s morals. It’s to test and see what works in helping you reconnect with your ex if that’s the thing. If it’s morally gray to you, hey, that’s on you. That’s not on me, don’t blame me. So anyways, what we learned is oftentimes what happens is when your ex moves on to a new guy, you need to actually have a longer period of no contact and actually get back in touch with them, but without any kind of dating involved. You need to purposely friend zone yourself so that the new guy becomes intimidated and bam, it’s just like things. What’s interesting is I maybe feel that’s what Tom here did without even realizing it. But he still hasn’t gotten enough to push her over the hump. She still hasn’t broken up with the new guy, even though she’s saying, “He’s not treating me very well.” And I feel like the reason that Tom is getting these reach outs from this girl is because this girl is starting to have a bit of the grass is greener syndrome. This is maybe an odd analogy, but it’s the most relevant one I can think of. So those of you, and I realize I have another podcast called the Ex Boyfriend Recovery Podcast, it’s got over 150 episodes or something. So a lot of the listeners there know me and they know how nerdy I am. Leaving Your Ex Constantly Wanting More But since this is technically episode one of the Ex Girlfriend Recovery Podcast, you guys aren’t really familiar with me, but I’m a nerd, super big nerd. I will read epic science fantasy or science fiction and fantasy books. I’m all over that stuff. I’ll play video games in my free time. I find out I don’t really have much free time anymore. But anyways, my birthday was a few weeks ago. Right. And because of the pandemic and everyone being stuck inside, no one would ship me anything other than they gifted me an Amazon gift card. So what was fun is with this Amazon gift card, I’m thinking, what do I want to buy? And I ended up just buying books. I ended up stumbling across this book and I knew I figured with $300 worth of an Amazon gift card, if I can’t find at least one book that interests me … and I promise, it sounds like I’m going in the woods here but I’m not, I am going to get back into the ex-girlfriend’s situation. But let me make the analogy first. So anyways, I thought if I can’t find one book, writers must really suck by now, or I’ve read everything that’s any good. So anyways, I went through and just for two days straight, anytime I had free time, I would go through Amazon and try to bookmark books that I thought might look good before I made my purchase. And eventually I came across this book that I was thinking, “Okay, yes, I’m sold. I want to read that.” So I read it the first night and I maybe read it for an hour and I thought, “Okay, that’s okay.” I read it the second night. I read it for maybe two hours and I was like, “Okay, it’s heating up. I see where this is going.” Then I read it the third night. And the third night I just couldn’t put it down. I just kept reading and reading and reading. The next thing I know, I had been spending five hours reading at night. It was like 4:00 AM in the morning and I’m thinking, “I need to sleep.” So anyways, it was like, I would work really hard all day. I would come to read the book at night and I get really excited when I would read the book, and it got to be like this for a week straight. That’s all I would look forward to at night. I would like wait til my wife and daughter were asleep, then I’d go and read this book. I would read it for as long as humanly possible because it was like, I was thinking, “This is the best thing I’ve ever read.” Then I finished it and then it was like a hole in my heart happened. I couldn’t find anything else. And the first thing you do when you read a good book is you go and see if there’s a sequel. Well, the sequel hasn’t been written yet. So it’s like, “Well, what do I do? Well, I’m going to find a book just like it.” What I think a lot of people don’t realize is going through a breakup and having the grass is greener syndrome is just like that. How The Grass Is Greener Syndrome Plays A Role Especially when women go on the rebound, they go through this breakup where they actually reminisce on the past. There’s this theory called the peak end rule, and the peak end rule states that, “Human beings actually have horrible memories.” We tend to categorize memories based on two distinct points. The peak, the most exciting part of the experience, and the end of the experience. So at first, we’re only thinking about the end of the experience. The end tends to be pretty bad when you go through a breakup . But after some time goes by, you reminisce and you start thinking about the peak. You just start thinking about the good parts and you start forgetting about those bad parts at the end. So what ends up happening is you have these knee jerk reactions from women who move on to new guys. They’re only thinking about the end. They’re thinking about how bad it was at the end, but then they get into the new relationship with the new guy and everything’s great for a little while, until the honeymoon period subsides. You start peeling back all the layers, you don’t really like what you find and you get bored. And it’s just like, “Oh, what have I gotten myself into?” So what I think is happening here is maybe your ex girlfriend had that book, knee jerk reaction where she has this really great relationship with you, where she’s now beginning to romanticize the past of that relationship. She’s moved on to a new guy because she’s trying to find something to fill the void that relationship left and realize that the new guy can’t fill the void. So she’s maybe trying to connect with you on the way things used to be. But also at the same time, she’s caught in between a rock and a hard place, because I think she’s scared to break up with the new guy. Here’s another example. One of my good friends is actually going through a breakup right now. He said to me, he was dating this girl and he said, “I really liked her, but now I don’t like her so much, but I’m just going to see what happens.” And I said, “Well, why don’t you just break up with her right now?” And he said, “Well, I’m afraid of hurting her feelings.” Women are especially conscious of your feelings. Men tend to be a little bit more primal, women tend to be a little bit more nurturing in general. So they are a lot more concerned with your wellbeing. So sometimes if she’s caught in between a rock and a hard place, Tom, she’s going to be sitting there and thinking, “Well, you know what? I don’t want to deal with it right now because I know it will hurt the guy.” And maybe there are some good aspects about the new guy, but what your job should be, assuming you want her back, is to try to find a significant enough reason to give her an urgent reason to break up with the new guy. The Importance Of Scarcity So here’s what you can do. In order to get that urgent reason, because I already think you’ve done pretty much your job when it comes to getting her to want you back , she’s already showing some signs of that, and I think you’ve made progress where I’m like, “Hey man, you almost got this in the bag.” But what you need to do is get her to commit to you and you need a scarcity or urgent reason … a scarcity. You need an urgent reason to cause her to want to break up with the new guy, and sometimes that’s you getting hit on by other women. Sounds as weird as it possibly can, but she needs to realize … and I think part of the problem too, is this is a concept I see a lot more with men than women, where men, my men clients, if you’re going to ask me the difference between the women clients and the men clients, I would choose men as having an easier time of getting their exs back than women. But I think men fall susceptible to being used more often than women do. That’s an interesting statement, but think about it. A lot of times women will use their ex boyfriends for emotional support to get through whatever hard times they’re having with the new guy. And that’s what you got to be careful not to fall into. You got to be careful not to be the hero all the time. You got to be careful to stoke some of her mothering instinct, but not stoke it enough to where she’s getting enough from you in return. Because there needs to be something that you’re holding back from her before she’ll actually … You’re only going to get me listening to your problems all day, every day, if we’re in a relationship together. So let me give you a quick crash course on what we found works to gain commitments from human beings. There’s this concept called the interdependence theory, which posits that human beings, we make commitment decisions based on a pros and cons list, essentially. And the pros and cons list is made up of basically three distinct aspects; how satisfied we were with the relationship, if there’s a better alternative out there and how much we’ve invested in the relationship. But over the years, I’ve actually amended and added to the list because I find that the interdependence theory gives you the why people commit, but they don’t give you the what makes them commit. What I mean by that is you can make every interaction you have satisfying with her, you can become the very, very best alternative to the new guy that she’s with, you can even become this superstar where you’re getting her to invest a lot of time into you, but it still won’t be enough to get her to take action. What gets people to take action in my experience is fear of loss and urgency. And often, the two there’s this interconnected relationship between the two, where if you create enough fear of loss, where if she thinks she’s going to lose you as a staple or as an option, that will get her to wake up and realize, “You know what? I need to be with the guy.” Some Homework For Tom So here’s the homework I would give to you, Tom. Think of it like this. You’ve done a really great job with the being there method. You’ve been there, you’ve been this constant presence. She’s already showing some signs of cracking, but what you probably need to do is create a bit more urgency through fear of loss, and also make sure that you’re ending conversations first. That’s a big thing, especially I think a lot of women take advantage of men when they’re going through breakups. Women want emotional support from their ex boyfriends. And what they end up doing is they’ll come, and it’s often a sign that things aren’t going well in the current relationship they’re with, if they’re asking you for emotional support, and that’s what looks like what’s happening here, Tom. But what I notice is oftentimes, men can leave themselves open to being taken advantage of. What I mean by that is if you’re giving only emotional support and she’s getting that aspect for you, she’s got no reason to leave the guy because she’s got you to rely on. So sometimes, it’s important for you to end conversations first. You want to have a satisfying conversation, but you don’t want to make it to where you’re taking care of her every single problem. It’s okay to listen, but don’t offer advice. That’s an important distinction because you don’t want to put yourself in a … you want her to be miserable with the new guy. That’s the important thing, and this is that morally gray area we’re talking about here, but that’s what works. The other thing is ending conversations first leads you into this pattern where she’s always seeking more validation in another conversation with you, which could only lead to more investment, and more investment can often lead to more satisfying interactions, and more satisfying interactions can often lead to you being the best alternative. And then if you are the best alternative and you create a fear of loss and she sees that you’re not going to be around forever, guess what happens? You’ve got the momentum rolling. You’ve got the snowball effect going. She breaks up with the new guy. It takes a little bit time and then starts flirting with you. That’s what we want to have happen. That’s what we see happens. Now, here’s the other piece of advice I’m going to give you, Tom. No matter how well you plan, something is going to go wrong. It just always does. The number one skill that you probably need to master is adaptation and also calmness, being calm in the face of basically all the chaos that occurs when you go through this situation is the best thing for you. So that’s it. Do that, Tom. Good luck. The post How To Get Your Ex Girlfriend Back When She Has A New Guy first appeared on Ex Girlfriend Recovery .
Welcome to the very first episode of the Ex Girlfriend Recovery Podcast. Today we’re going to talk about what this podcast will be, my vision for it and when you can expect episodes to drop, but first things first. After years of debating on whether or not I should have a podcast for my website, Ex Girlfriend Recovery, I’ve decided now is the time. So, What Is This Podcast? Well, this podcast is going to be taking many different routes on helping you go through your breakup, whether that’s you trying to get your ex-girlfriend back or you trying to move on from your breakup, or even you not really knowing what you want to do. We’re going to be talking about all areas of breakups that you can possibly imagine, the good aspects of them, the bad aspects of them. But most importantly, we’re going to be telling you exactly how you should be handling breakups from real life success stories. The First Type Of Content This Podcast Will Feature Well, it’s going to feature, in my opinion, three types of content. Number one is going to be the most common type, and that’s going to be listener questions. On our website, exgirlfriendrecovery.com, we have a special area designated where you can actually ask us questions and you can leave sort of a voicemail and ask us a question about your situation. Now, the one constraint I put in there is that the voicemail can be no longer than 90 seconds long. Sometimes people have a tendency to get wordy and, while I love having details, what I don’t love is having too many details. The episodes would be 50 minutes, if that was the case. What we recommend you do, if you want your question answered about your breakup and what you should do to get your ex-girlfriend back , or how you can get over the way you’re feeling right now, is to actually leave a voicemail on our website. Basically, all you have to do if you want to do this is just simply go to the podcast section on our website and we will get you taken care of. You can leave that 90 second voicemail and then, if your voicemail is interesting enough, or if it’s on a topic that I think I haven’t covered before, I’ll feature it. I’ll always make sure your name remains anonymous. I’ll even give you the choice on whether or not you want to name yourself. I’ll never say your last name. I’ll always, if you don’t name yourself, just say, “This is from anonymous,” or I’ll say, “It’s from Brett,” for example, if you wanted to be called Brett. It’s up to you, truly. That’s the first type of content you can experience here on the Ex Girlfriend Recovery Podcast. The Second Type Of Content This Podcast Will Feature The second type of content will be just natural ramblings of things I’m noticing are working in the ex recovery space. You see, a lot of people think that the art of reconnecting a couple after a breakup is sort of a set in stone type science where there’s one set of rules that work universally. But I have found the opposite is true over my past decade of researching this concept. What tends to happen over the years is that there’s certain trends and some things that we learn we couldn’t learn before because we didn’t have enough of a customer base to actually try things out on to see what was working. So every once in a while, I may do an episode where I just talk. I talk about, “Hey, I’ve had coaching clients and this is what we’re seeing is working.” I’m a big believer in not just being derivative with our conversations. I’m a big believer in always trying to add something new to the phrase that you always have something new to think about. Oftentimes what’s interesting is when you have real life success stories, you can learn about what they did and use those techniques on your clients and get them to see success. Sometimes some of the things we learn shock us. So every once in a while, when something like that shocks me, I’ll come on here and I’ll tell you about it. The Third Type Of Content This Podcast Will Feature The third type of content that this podcast is going to feature is interviews. I’m going to be going out and interviewing some of the best minds with relationships, self-confidence, basically anything you can imagine that I think will be helpful to you. Now, these interviews will tend to be about an hour long, and sometimes I’ll even interview our success stories, men who have gotten their exes back, or men who have not gotten their exes back, but have moved on, or even sometimes men who just want to be featured and sometimes have sort of a live coaching session over the podcast. We’re going to be giving a wide variety of content to you through this podcast and it’s really important that you pay attention to when these episodes come out. We’re trying to make this a weekly episode type situation where every week we have a new episode coming in. I’ll never be able to know ahead of time with regards to interviews or listener questions, because it’s an organic thing. Sometimes the interviewer’s schedule will have to fit up with my schedule, so there’s never going to be like, “Hey. We’re going to do two interviews and then one podcast.” It’s going to be organic, but what I can promise you is that every single piece of content that will drop on this podcast will help you in whatever your quest is going to be. Now, if you’re like a lot of the people listening to this podcast, the first thing you’re going to be sitting there and wondering is, “Well, I just want a podcast that can help me get my ex-girlfriend back.” Don’t worry. A lot of the content that’s going to be featured on this podcast will be in that vein, but we’re also going to be talking and tackling problems from different things that sort of have a relation to getting your ex back. It’s important that you keep that in mind as you’re listening. I can’t tell you how often people will come back to me and say, “You know what, Chris? I really didn’t think what you said would work, but I tried it out and it made all the difference in the world.” So what you need to do is just keep an open mind if you notice I’m interviewing someone about clothing, for example. The other thing I want to say is that this is going to be the second podcast that I have. The very first podcast that I have is called the Ex Boyfriend Recovery Podcast. I’ll let you take a minute to figure out what that one is about. But essentially this podcast, the Ex Girlfriend Recovery Podcast, is going to be set up much the same way. Now, I can happily say the Ex Boyfriend Recovery Podcast, which is listened to by thousands of women every single day, has been very helpful. In fact, we find that most of the people who visit our websites actually love listening to that podcast. I’m hoping to actually match the intensity and quality of that podcast with this podcast. So if you want more of me and you want to hear maybe the female side of things and what you should be doing if you’re a female, you can even come to our other podcast and listen, if you just want more content. But here’s the one thing that I’m going to ask for you. I’m going to ask that you always keep an open mind with whatever piece of content that you’re listening to. Listen to the end, because knowledge is power, especially when it comes to getting your ex-girlfriend back . Please Leave An Honest Rating And Review One last thing, this podcast is going to be featured on iTunes, and even all the other podcasting platforms that you can imagine. So, it would really help us out, since this is our very first episode, and this is more of a sort of teaser episode for what’s to come, if you could subscribe to this podcast and leave an honest rating or review on iTunes. The reason I pick out iTunes is because 70% of our podcast listeners will always come through iTunes because they’re the king of podcasts, and so how we rank in iTunes is really important. I’m not sitting here and saying, “Give me a five star review and glowing reviews,” I’m sitting here and saying, “Give me an honest review with what you think about the podcast. If it’s a three star review, that’s fine with me. If it’s a five star review, thanks. That’s fine with me too.” But what we do want you to do is just take a minute and just leave an honest rating and review because it can really help our podcast show up in the algorithms and we can help more people get their eyeballs on the podcast. The final thing is on our website we have a special quiz that’s designed to help you understand what kind of chance you have of getting your ex-girlfriend back. A lot of people sit there and try to figure out, “Well, what kind of chance do I have of getting my ex-girlfriend back?” And they don’t know. We got the question so many times that I personally developed a simple two minute free quiz to help you understand sort of where you stand so that you know you’re not wasting your time in your situation. Now, all you have to do if you want to take that quiz is to simply go to the homepage of our website, www.exgirlfriendrecovery.com, and there will be a prompt to take the quiz right there. So that’s pretty much going to do it. That’s what to expect from the Ex Girlfriend Recovery Podcast. I’ll see you next time. The post Introducing The Ex Girlfriend Recovery Podcast first appeared on Ex Girlfriend Recovery .
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