How to Fully Move On from Your Ex:
without Feeling Overwhelmed by Fear
🔥 In this long-form article (11mins), you will learn:
✓ The 4 Stages of a Breakup
✓ Why You Ruminate about your Ex
✓ The 3 Things You Must Have to Move On
At the end, you’ll get the opportunity to learn about:
The Complete Path to
Recovering from Your Breakup:
A Step-by-Step Program for Healing your Breakup and Becoming Secure and Confident in Relationships
My Story
If you’re reading these words, I imagine you’re struggling to recover from the devastating loss of your relationship.
I know this struggle well, as I went through it for many years after my own breakup.
Most mornings I woke up feeling anxious and empty. I lost my appetite and motivation to go to work, or even see friends. The things that used to give me pleasure - like cooking, hiking, playing music, I couldn’t enjoy anymore.
Despite all the efforts I made to move on—all the books I read, all the friends and therapists I talked to, the new partners I dated—they never amounted to any real, meaningful change. They were just distractions from my uncomfortable emotions.
And it wasn’t until I had a week-long emotional breakdown that I realized I needed to deal with the unfinished pain of my breakup.
As difficult as this chapter was, I’m deeply grateful for it, because it led me to where I am today.
I can confidently say - I understand the entire experience of a breakup, from start to finish: what happens, why it happens, and most importantly - how to move forward and help others do the same…
The 4 Stages of a Breakup
From the moment a breakup occurs, a sequence of adaptive, behavioural responses get triggered in our bodies…
The key point to understand about these 4 Stages is:
🔥 They don’t lead to recovery, but rather prolonged suffering.
continue below…
-
Stage 1: The Fall
When we’re in a relationship with someone, it can feel like we’re on top of a mountain with them.
But after a breakup, we’re being pushed off a cliff by our ex into what I call the “Ocean of Emotion”
Here, we’re overwhelmed by panic, fear, and sadness, trying to keep our head above the water.
With no end in sight, we try to climb back up the mountain to the safety of our relationship and try to reunite with our ex.
-
Stage 2: Craving
We constantly think about our ex, check their social media or text to try to reestablish connection with them again.
These attempts at getting back with our ex often end in failure, hurt and rejection.
When we see that there’s really no chance of getting back together — we seek quick fixes to try to escape the Ocean of Emotion…
-
Stage 3: Hamster Wheel of Self-Improvement
We read books. Get fit. Change careers or cities to try to get a temporary boost of confidence.
But while our outer life seems to improve, it’s never enough. It’s an endless chase for external validation.
Usually, these efforts are attempts to cover up our insecurities or to show our ex what they’re missing.
-
Stage 4: The Wall
We hoped that setting goals and having accomplishments would help, but at the end of the day, we’re not any happier.
Some of us double down on self-improvement, hoping to break through, only to bang our heads against this proverbial Wall.
Others admit to defeat and burn out, ending up right back where they started: lost in the Ocean of Emotion.
Why You Constantly Ruminate about Your Ex
🔥 Each of these Four Stages is an attempt to feel SAFE again.
By “safety” I don’t just mean familiar comfort.
I’m referring to the deep, neurological state of SAFETY that we experience with people we deeply trust and connect with.
In the widely-popular book - Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel S.F Heller, the authors explain that over millions of years, our brains developed a mechanism called “The Attachment System” as a way of creating an emotional bond with our attachment figures (such as parents, children, and romantic partners) for the purpose of our survival.
This mechanism compels us to stay close to our loved ones so we can get our needs for safety and protection met. We achieve this goal by triggering certain emotions and behaviours when we’re separated…
For example:
“when a child gets separated from their mother in a grocery store, anxiety drives them to search frantically, or cry uncontrollably, until contact with their attachment figure is re-established”
🔥 This is why - when we separate from our partners, we constantly ruminate and crave to have them back.
The 2 Biological Responses with Breakups
This theory is also supported by the work of Dr. Helen Fisher, an anthropologist who studied the biology of love for over 50 years.
Fisher describes how we have two responses after a breakup: 🔥 Protest & Resignation
Response #1: Protest
✓ Dopamine levels rise, motivating us to reunite with our partner
✓ Common feelings: fear, anxiety, anger
✓ The main reasons why we ruminate and have the urge to search and chase (just like the lost child does in a grocery store…)
Dr. Fisher gives the example of a puppy that...
If you leave a puppy alone in the kitchen, she says, “...it begins to pace. Frantically, tirelessly, it combs the floor, scratches at the door, leaps at the walls, barks and whines in protest…”
Like this example, when levels of dopamine and stress hormones increase, we obsessively fixate and think about our ex, scroll their social media, and claw to get them back.
🔥 When we realize our ex isn’t coming back, we redirect our energy to improving other areas of our lives - to try to “feel good” again.
These moments of accomplishment bring a sense of relief, but in the long-term, Dr. Fisher says, our nervous system switches gears from the first response, into…
Response #2: Resignation
✓ Dopamine levels drop below normal…
✓ Common feelings: fatigue, hopelessness, despair
✓ We lose our self-esteem, succumb to resignation and feel lost in life
Expanding on her puppy analogy, Fisher says, “When you isolate [the puppy] in the kitchen, at first it protests. Eventually, however, it curls up in the corner into a despondent heap.”
Many of us stay stuck in this nervous system state of hopelessness and resignation because we don’t know what to do when we get here.
🔥 What you’re going through is normal. How you’re responding is not wrong and you’re not broken because of it.
It’s important to understand that the problem is with the nervous system. Therefore, that is where we will find the solution.
💡Actually, I’m curious about: The Complete Path to Recovering from Your Breakup:
What Happens to The Nervous System?
The nervous system has Three Pathways, which you can picture as a ladder with three rungs…
✓ SAFETY - (ventral vagal)
When you feel Safety in your nervous system, you feel connected to the people in your life and the world around you. This is often what we experience when we feel connected to our partners when we’re in relationship.
✓ACTIVATION - (sympathetic)
But in a breakup, we can “fall” to the second rung, called Activation, where we enter a fight-or-flight mode of survival in the nervous system. The world begins to feel like an unsafe place. We become fearful and anxious - and want to get our ex back.
✓ SHUTDOWN - (dorsal vagal)
But if this stress continues, and we’re unable to cope with the overwhelm, our nervous system resorts to the last rung called Shutdown. People report feeling frozen in their body or desperately alone. There’s the sense of just going through the “motions of life.”
It’s not a bad thing to experience this, it’s what our nervous system is designed to do.
🔥 The problem is when we don’t have the tools or capacity to climb back up the ladder and feel SAFE again.
Instead, we resort to the survival mechanisms of our nervous system: constant rumination, emotional attachment, and isolation - when we can’t climb back up.
🔥 Therefore… returning to SAFETY in the nervous system is the KEY🔑 to breakup recovery
3 Things You Must Have
to move on from your ex:
🔥 An Experienced Mentor
🔥 Somatic Tools
🔥 Community Support
all to bring you back to a place of safety in the nervous system so you can emotionally detach and let go… more below
1. An Experienced Mentor
An experienced mentor is someone who’s gone through the hardships of a breakup and understands the emotional pain of this experience. They have successfully recovered and can provide a clear and deliberate path forward to help overcome the chaos and uncertainty.
Coaches and professionals who don’t specialize in breakup recovery (particularly surrounding the nervous system) have difficulty understanding what to do because they are unaware of the unique and nuanced challenges that we face.
This is also why recorded programs or over-simplified breakup courses tend to not work because breakups are highly individual and it requires real-life, experienced guidance to address the emotional and physiological nature of this experience that will help you feel safe again.
2. Somatic Tools
Tools like journaling, mindset changes, and even some forms of meditation help “make sense” of your breakup, on an intellectual level. But a breakup is an emotional experience - and so we require tools that address that.
The ones I’ve researched and continuously use are known to do exactly that - help regulate the nervous system and tend to our emotions. Letting go is not something we think about, it’s something we feel in the body.
The most important thing with self-care is you need to do them in order to experience safety in the nervous system.
This is why an experienced mentor and community support is so vital to the Journey - they offer encouragement, motivation and accountability in you actually making the necessary changes in your life.
3. Community Support
When I refer to community support, I don’t just mean any group of people. It must be with people who can relate with your experience and understand what you’re going through. This provides a level of emotional safety that allows you to actually grieve the loss of your relationship.
According to leading nervous system researchers, it is a biological imperative that we connect with trusted people in our lives (co-regulation) as this is the primary way we regulate our nervous systems and return to safety.
We can’t recover from our breakups by just reading a PDF or watching pre-recorded videos on our own - we need to recover with community.
Being held by the strength of a mentor and a community, you can feel more at ease being alone and experience what emotionally detaching and letting go really feels like.
