How to Forget About Your Ex, Bounce Back, and Move On

“Trying to figure out how to forget your ex” should be the definition of lost insanity.

Whenever I went through a painful breakup, I would Google “how to forget your ex,” and besides “stop stalking” (yes, that’s right), “get a hobby,” “remember who you are,” “volunteer,” “travel,” there was nothing. And I couldn’t do any of those things. I was emotionally obsessed and heartbroken.

You can’t invest in anything when all your emotional currency is already invested in a nonexistent return. All the suggestions seemed to confirm my loneliness and make me miss my ex even more. For a long time, I was convinced that the only way I could move on with my life and forget him was if I suffered some kind of brain damage.

Your thoughts, actions, level of control, and life are no longer yours. Friends and family start to get annoyed and avoid you. You’re exhausted. All you want at this point is comfort through a magic eraser.

It’s impossible to completely forget someone. This post is not about memory loss.

Related : Hopeless Romantic? Calling all Hopeless Romantics

It’s about forgetting all the toxins weighing you down so you can remember how to swim back to land.

In this post, I’m going to focus on how to forget a toxic ex – someone who insulted you, belittled you, lied to you, and made you feel like loving you was hard. While it may seem easier to forget and move on from abuse, these are the hardest types of exes to forget.

Even though compassionate and connected people are extremely difficult to forget, they always leave with respectful transparency. The breakup is still very painful but it’s clear. There’s no confusion, ambiguity, or bullshit with these people. Ten times out of ten, they speak up with a generous act and stay on their white horse. Losing someone like this is incredibly painful, but at least there’s nothing unknown because of the clear actions that follow the clear communication.

Toxic exes are especially hard to forget because of their ability to confuse signals, lie, contradict, be disrespectful, insensitive, and negatively pull your strings by parading around on social media. It’s bullshit art at its finest.

I’ve tried everything to forget toxic exes – hypnosis, spells, meditation, the law of attraction, yoga, face tapping techniques, acupuncture, Ayurvedic enemas, rebound relationships, going out with friends, dancing the night away, planning dates, random kissing, blocking/unblocking, following/unfollowing, tagging/untagging, new hairstyles, posting “detox my life” quotes… etc. Nothing worked.

In the end, I hated myself even more as I watched my emotional and financial wallets drain away.

This left me with no choice but to magnify, honor, and romanticize someone whose absence I was more afraid to accept than the toxicity I was afraid to acknowledge.

Acknowledgment is scary because it goes hand in hand with acceptance. Once you accept what someone has revealed, you have to refocus on yourself and identify your dysfunction that got you to this point.

I think back now on those exes I worked so hard to forget, and honestly, I’m glad I didn’t find a way to impose selective amnesia.

Without my memories, I wouldn’t have this blog.

I blame my inability to forget exes for most of my success in relationships, career, and love. It’s not about obsessing over the past. It’s about setting yourself up psychologically to forget what you need to forget so you can refocus and reclaim your life.

Memory is like gasoline—if you drink it, it will make you sick, but if you allow the fuel to enter your emotional tank, it will give you the energy, faith, and confidence to push yourself out of the wreckage.

While it is impossible to completely forget someone, it is possible to disconnect from your source of power. It is possible to allow an indelible memory, however painful, to push you out of helplessness and back into control.

Related : One Night Stands: The Do’s, Don’ts & Keeping Your Dignity In Tact

Want to know how to forget your ex?

Here are 3 simple rules that are better than amnesia.

Remember that amnesia makes you helpless. Action empowers you.

How to Forget Your Ex Rule #1: To forget, you have to remember.

You will never be able to accept what is until you recognize what is not. It is the same with forgetting. The more you focus on forgetting, the more you will remember. And you will never be able to forget what you need to forget until you make the effort to remember what you need to forget.

The only way you will truly forget to the point of indifference and peace is to remember your ex’s character flaws and what he or she did or did not do that took them away from you.

What you’re doing now—blaming yourself, believing the unfounded belief that he’s changed (he hasn’t), fearing he’s forgotten you, etc.—is much harder than what I’m suggesting here.

All I’m asking you to do is remember what your eyes, ears, and gut have seen and experienced in real-time. Don’t believe your insecurity plays.

Replace fear with facts and allow the facts to disgust you. Allow your ex’s fake portrayal to disgust you. They came to the table representing themselves as relationship-ready people and ended up screwing their feelings. That’s not a sign for them to change, it’s a sign for you to disgust an adult who isn’t toilet trained. It’s disgusting.

Disgust is a powerful emotion. If you’re truly disgusted, you don’t want to think about what disgusted you. You want to forget about it as quickly as possible. Disgust also prevents despair.

How to Get Over Your Ex Rule #2: Know the meaning of no contact.

No contact is about creating space so you can gain perspective, heal, redirect your energy, and rebuild.

At first, it may seem like a diet, and we all know why diets fail—they make us focus on avoidance and subsequent lack more than the reason we need to avoid in the first place. This makes us feel like we’re being punished and deprived. And no one likes to be reduced to an emotional childhood.

I was diagnosed with celiac disease over 10 years ago. There were times when I missed bread and gluten-containing foods so much, I would give up. Gluten is in everything. How would I keep going? I tried to focus on the one thing my doctor told me I should avoid—gluten.

But the more I focused on avoiding gluten, the more I missed it and the more depressed I became. After some time, I realized that I needed to focus on alternative food options rather than missing the one option that many people with this condition live happily without.

The few times I did end up eating gluten, it made me very sick and caused bad acne, and I quickly lost interest because I realized I couldn’t afford it anymore. I can’t eat gluten because it’s bad for my health and also because I work hard to keep my skin clear and healthy – breakouts and eczema blemishes are no fun.

Related : Does He Like Me? 30 Signs That He’s Serious About You

Understand that disconnection is for your emotional health and also, it’s okay to be superficial/arrogant about it too – breaking it is just a bad look, all around.

When I tried to forget about gluten, all I could do was remember it. Instead of making my life revolve around assuming a gluten-free identity, I started focusing more on the reason I couldn’t eat it in the first place – my health and well-being. The same goes for not contacting your ex.

I always say – inconsistency is the root of all misery. You can’t spend your time focusing on not contacting/thinking about your ex and then blame yourself for obsessing and not being able to forget them.

How to Forget Your Ex Rule #3: It’s Not About Erasing, It’s About Graduating.

Trying to erase your ex from your mind is not only unreasonable, it’s holding yourself to a standard of emotional perfection and perfection will ruin your life. The more you look for an eraser, the more signs you’ll find (of your ex’s absence).

It’s okay to not be able to forget your ex. What’s not okay is remembering them through a filter that caters to your fears and cuts you off at your emotional weak point. You have the power to undermine others. You are the CEO of your company and only you can decide who deserves a promotion, a demotion, a hire, or a firing.

You can do it.