Why You're Struggling to MOVE ON From Your Ex (Attachment Perspective)

Why is it that you can't just simply move on from your toxic ex-partner and you just keep obsessing about them and remain connected with them and others seem to move on so easily but it's been 3, 6 or 12 months for you and you are still stuck on them. They still hold significant real estate in your heart and they even affect the way that you date and show up in your new relationships. There is nothing wrong with you, you are not broken, there is just an attachment reason why this is going on and in this video today I'm going to unpack with you the origin story of this which is called a trauma bond and we're going to look at how to rewire the trauma mind and trauma body that's causing us to obsess and think about our ex so much and then we'll talk about how to move on from this and what this has to do with our inner child and healing that part of us and make sure you stick around to the end because I'm going to explain why it's impossible to move on unless you do this one thing. And if you're new to this channel, welcome, my name is Amy and I help women who are stuck in patterns of self-abandonment that keep attracting them toxic relationships and I help them to heal their trauma and learn the discipline of self-love so they can love themselves and learn how to be their true authentic self in relationship. And if you want more content on this topic, please click the subscribe button and hit the bell notification so you get notified of new lessons when I post them every week. Now before we begin, Heal Your Heart School is open for enrollment so if you'd like to know more about how to work with me, stick around till the end of the lesson and I'll show you then. Now it's important to distinguish toxic relationships from regular relationships, alright? Toxic relationships have a deeper dynamic where there's a deeper wounding that comes into play and causes us to have these amazingly deep, big, grandiose emotions for this person and when you break up from them, this affects your internal world significantly. Kind of feel like the rug has been completely pulled out from under your feet and you've just completely lost who you are. It feels like there is more at stake when a toxic relationship ends and it's because the origin story of the relationship is often a lot more dramatic than a regular relationship, right? You might have a narrative that they're your soulmate or a twin flame or that they were the one, whereas with a regular breakup without any kind of trauma, there's this kind of more grounded, healthy way that the relationship slowly and organically formed. There's compatibility there, there's a lot more friendship there and so there's a lot more foundation for you to rely on if there are any kind of points of conflict or issues that you have. Whereas a toxic relationship is defined by these rollercoaster emotions that go on and you might be breaking up and then getting back together on and off a lot of the time and there's a lot of hurt and pain that are coming up from old parts within you which we'll talk about in a minute and everything just seems more intense. So the origin story of that kind of a relationship is this intense romance and whirlwind at the start. There's maybe this love bombing which is an excessive amount of love and affection that's inappropriate for the early stage of where you're at and there's massive feelings of grandiosity from both or one or both of you about the importance of the other in your life. So you know, you are the one for me, you're meant to be and there's all this kind of narrative to kind of justify those feelings and then when you break up or where there's the first rupture, it is a massive betrayal, right? You had such high hopes all pinned on this one person and then they were just completely obliterated. You had such huge expectations for that person and for the relationship as well but you feel betrayed and what actually might have happened is really significant behavior that is unhealthy like gaslighting manipulation or even cheating. Ironically, even though the actual behavior that causes you to break up is so significantly bad, you struggle to leave, right? You struggle to move on because the origin story of the bond is so strong between the two of you and it often takes a very long time to break up. It might take months or years to break up. You know, I was on and off with someone for eight years in this kind of context. So what is actually going on? And we're going to unpack that today and it's important for you to know that your trauma body needs this bond to continue to be activated, right? That's what is actually happening that causes you to keep obsessing and thinking about your ex. It's allowing you to keep this connection going because there's a payoff in your body. Now these are all signs of a trauma bond if you've heard me talk about that on this channel. There is an entire video on that here that I'd love you to watch next. And this is where we bond with a person from an internal place of trauma. So embedded in our body originally, there's some level of trauma from our earliest relationships. It might be as early back as childhood where you didn't feel loved, fully seen, fully heard, or there was some kind of capital T trauma like a divorce or an abandonment of one person and you've carried that trauma through to your life. You learn how to attach through that in childhood and you learn how to attach through trauma in your adulthood and it creates this attachment wound or this attachment wounding where you need the stimulation of the uncertainty of the bond like the chemicals it produces, the dopamine of them contacting you, and that uncertainty gives you the adrenaline and it makes you feel that this bond is actually significant. So the stories you create in your mind are just stories to make meaning around the fact that your body and your trauma body is experiencing a significant chemical high when you're attracted to this person because they're producing the same feelings you experienced earlier on in your life and sometimes as early as childhood. Now the brain obsesses because of the physical state your body is in. Okay, so we are meaning making machines and when our body goes through a significant chemical state, our brain is going to try and figure out why. And that turns it into this kind of trauma mind where we're obsessing about things and actually the brain goes limbic. Our cognitive higher order thinking is offline at this point because we're just focusing on attachment. Attachment is our number one priority right now. We're concerned with our basic safety needs of that attachment and that attachment figure is still your ex when you're obsessing about them, right? They're still the primary person in your life. And that obsession is about getting to safety, trying to figure out basic survival needs to get your attachment needs met and still feel safe in your body. Even though they've done all these horrible things and the relationship has just been a complete steaming mess and you've broken up with them, right? That's still going on in your body and your mind. So the reason you obsess is because your ex is still your primary attachment figure to your body, to your mind. The body hasn't disconnected from that and this happens. It takes a while for our bodies to fully grieve and move on. And that's why taking time and time passing can be really helpful, but there are much more specific ways to actually go about doing this, which I'll tell you about in a minute. But we need to know that our trauma body and the way that it's wired to obsess about our ex is actually a pattern and a habit that we had learnt early on in childhood. So we were wired from an early age to experience this kind of trauma body and trauma mind. If we had any kind of disruptive or difficult dynamic in our family of origin, perhaps your caregivers were emotionally unavailable. Perhaps there was some kind of significant low-lying drama or dynamic that caused you to need to take the back seat because it was all about what was going on with them. Or there were significant things like divorce or abandonment or any kind of capital T trauma. So you didn't learn how to feel safe being yourself in your family of origin. You didn't learn how to feel safe to be on your own as well because you weren't getting those attachment needs met, allowing you to learn that kind of process of safety. And this kind of pattern causes a bit of a lifelong self-abandonment because you haven't learned that internal self-soothing and self-regulation that you would have learned if your family of origin dynamic had been healthy and there had been a lot of available love to you. And that also causes us to hold on to this kind of toxic person and to allow us to think that there's some significance they have in our life because how they make us feel is so familiar to how we felt when we were children. Now if you know that self-abandonment is a pattern that you have and you've had in your life, I have a guide that I'd love you to download and actually work through because it's going to give you the steps to self-love and how to actually get started with the discipline of it. So you can click the link below. There's three phases to the guide. It's a huge amount of information in there. It's really my number one primary resource on how to heal your self-abandonment. But let's actually look at how to move on from this pattern where we're obsessing about our ex, they're our primary attachment figure. Let's learn about how to do that. We need to understand that there are these internal parts at play within you that are causing you to keep attached to your ex and causing this pattern to happen. So there's the trauma mind, which is your obsessive inner critic, that part of you that's really critical of yourself and critical just in general. There's a part of you that is your deep wounded inner child, and this is the trauma you experienced in your body when you were very young. And there is the trauma body, which is your body stuck on the setting that you learned from childhood that this is what love is actually meant to be. So it's a baseline that our nervous system is at, and we need to learn how to work with our trauma body and reset that baseline so we can feel safe. So firstly, just be aware of these parts within you first, and I'm going to help you to unpack them and identify them so you can start working with them now. The trauma mind, our inner critic, this is the part of us that's obviously doing the obsessing, doing the thinking. It's the part of us that is hyperactive, and it's hyperactive in order to make sense of the physical state of our body, the potential danger of there being no connection with our primary attachment figure, which is our ex because of all the things that have gone on and we're trying to get rid of them in our life. And like I said, we are meaning making machines, okay? So our mind is trying to make sense of this state, and it's also trying to make sense of the scarcity of love that we've had existing in our life since we were young, right? Why were we not ever worthy of love? Why were we not ever receiving love? And it kind of creates this internal critical filter that it speaks to yourself and to others around you. So if you've ever noticed that you are hyper, hypercritical of yourself, or perhaps you've got close friends, and you can sometimes just turn into being hypercritical of them, that's when you're feeling vulnerable and when this internal part of you is trying to make sense of this vulnerable state you're in. You haven't been able to like integrate what feelings are coming up, and the automatic kind of go-to setting is the internal critic. That is the trauma mind. It's come from the fact that we haven't been able to grieve the loss of healthy relationship through our life, grieve the fact that we didn't get what we needed at really significant developmental stages during our life. So we haven't actually allowed ourselves to grieve, and it's a justification of that strong trauma body that has been kind of stuck on this setting to experience everything as potential danger, including and especially romantic relationships. And the trauma mind is often getting stuck on stories. It's obsessing with stories about the ex or about previous partners and what they did, what they didn't do, what they should have done, what they might do. All of these past and future and present stories get repeated, and it can be like a loud internal radio that you just can't turn off. It's crazy making, right? And interestingly, sometimes our trauma mind gets stuck on trying to replay and rewrite memories to make us feel better, and that's when the self-soothing kicks in. If only he'd done this, that would make me feel better, and it actually soothes us a little bit in our body as well. So there's an interesting link between the trauma mind and the trauma body in this. But really know that your mind is trying to give you relief by overthinking. Obviously, it's not working. It's bringing us a lot of anxiety, but it's trying to bring relief by either feeling more connected to the person, because thinking about a person actually makes us feel more connected to them, even though we're hating on them and being critical of them, or to justify the breakup, right? Oh, of course, he was, you know, he was an asshole and all those kinds of things, right? Makes us feel better about ourselves that we did the right thing. So this is a kind of self-soothing mechanism, the inner critic, the trauma mind. And that informs and is like informed by the trauma body, which is our body being in a state of hyper arousal or activation or being in fight, flight, freeze, fawn. And this is often low level activation that's been going on our whole lives. We might have never actually really been able to not experience our body without feeling some level of anxiety or stress when it comes to relationship because our baseline is stuck at a high level and we don't know how to reset it. And this is a physiological state. Our body just gets frayed by years and years of this overthinking and this anxiety and this pattern of unhealthy relationships and scarcity around love and not being fully seen, heard, loved and understood and all of that trauma. It's just literally wearing away at the nerves in our body and at our physiological state and we're just feeling more and more stressed all the time. It also limits our body to be able to experience and process stronger emotions as well, right? So we actually might notice that we get to a point where we can't even have something bad happen to us. The tiniest little bad thing will happen. Someone says the wrong thing and it's just like a wildfire in us, it just sets us off. That's a sign you've had this underlying baseline that's been stuck at a high level through most of your life. And it often makes us feel very fatigued, very lethargic and we just feel tired a lot of the time and it's very difficult to actually do things in life, okay? And the other kind of thing that can happen when our body is existing in this trauma state is we can feel completely shut off and disassociated. And this is a trauma response that can be really dangerous because we actually lose touch with ourselves. We lose touch with our reality, our emotions, ourselves. And we might engage in a lot of self-numbing activities, overeating, over-drinking, obsessions with certain things like sex, whatever it might be, because we just want to stay in this numb, disassociated state. So paying attention to the importance of the trauma body and the nervous system is a part of moving forward in healing. Now the third part is our wounded inner child. And this is actually the part of us that experienced the deepest amount of abandonment, wounding when we were young. So the origin of all of these other things I've mentioned are actually coming from this wounding and this is the key to healing once we get to know and understand this part of us. So this is a young part of us that is actually frozen in time, frozen when the initial trauma occurred at the developmental state or stage that we're at when we first experienced it. And then when we re-experience any kind of rejection or abandonment, this wound gets bigger and bigger and grows and grows. So through all those unhealthy relationships you might have had, or a friendship broke up when you were in primary school, or any kind of like a pet died, all those kinds of things allow this abandonment wound to grow more and more. Inside this wound is this part of us that feels deep, deep hurt, deep sadness, deep loneliness, and often we just don't have the tolerance to really recognize and deal with the emotions in here. But this part of us is desperate to feel connected because it's disconnected from the world because it doesn't feel safe. The trauma body and the trauma mind is doing that to create separation and safety. But there is a desperation for connection in here. And if you ever feel like in any time in any of my videos I say something and it really just makes you cry instantly, it's this part of you, it's your abandonment wound that is something's been said to trigger it and it's just burst out with this emotion. So what we're actually doing is we're working really hard to keep it protected, keep it kind of covered and closed over because it's where the deepest, darkest kind of emotions that we experience and feel are. So knowing these three parts, we can actually start to work with them in order to heal and move on, to detach our ex as our primary attachment figure, and also to actually start to address the patterns that are causing us to attach to the wrong kinds of people as well because they wouldn't be your ex if they were the right person for you. So the first thing we need to learn is how to rewire the trauma mind, right? This part of us that's really obsessive, that's really kind of creating meaning around why our body is experiencing this trauma in this way. So know that this process is about taking your ex off the pedestal you've placed them on to stop idolizing and remembering all the good parts about them and to really remember and remind yourself of all the reasons why they're your ex, okay? So you might picture ways that make them really human, like the realness of their parts that are just really not attractive at all and specifically, like think about all the ways they let you down, all the way, all the negative traits that came up during the relationship and of course, the things that were significant enough for the relationship to break down. I recommend you write a list of 10 of them just on the back of like a card and keep them in your wallet. And anytime you notice yourself in fantasy thinking or obsessing about them or longing for them, just to pull that card out, just remind your mind of why they're your ex and why all the reasons exist that they are not a healthy and safe attachment figure for you to feel connected to anymore. So notice again also, what are the attributes that you were drawn to about your ex? What are the qualities that you really loved as well? Because there's a type of transference that goes on when we break up with someone and when we're attracted to someone, there are qualities in them that we actually want to have ourselves, okay? So when we break up with someone and we keep idolizing them, often what we're doing is we're actually doing this transference where we're actually really desiring to have those qualities ourselves. So find those things that you're projecting onto them and really missing about them and actually work to embody them yourself. So for example, you might have loved how social they were, right? So you yourself are longing to be more social in that. So think about finding new friend groups, trying new hobbies and joining clubs or whatever it might be to actually embody what it is you are transferring from your ex and wishing that you could have more because you wanted to have them but actually you can just have that for yourself. Another example is you might have loved how playful they were and that's because you're lacking kind of a playful quality in yourself and of course they would have brought that playful quality to the relationship as well. You can encourage and embody your inner playfulness without the presence of your ex in your life by actually integrating play into your life, taking up a creative hobby or getting into art and really allowing yourself to have that and separating this kind of projection that you need to have your ex to have those qualities in your life because guess what? You don't. Secondly, we need to learn to look and deal with our trauma body and this is all about internal safety because at the moment, as I said, our body is at this baseline where it's kind of wired in fight flight and you might have had that as a chronic state in your body your whole life and we need to learn how to lower and reset your baseline. So firstly what you're going to do is you're going to learn something called emotional sobriety because when you think about your ex and when you obsess about your ex, it brings with that a flood of emotions and a flood of chemicals that keeps you activated and keeps you in this state. We need to learn how to experience less emotions and allow ourselves to actually have pretty dull emotional lives when we're single, when we're on our own and to be okay with that. So it's a bit of a withdrawal process. It's a bit like any kind of other sobriety where you really miss that internal state and when I've done this in my past, I've noticed from feeling like my internal world was all multicolored and exciting and then all of a sudden it kind of got monochrome and was a bit boring but in that boringness was emotional sobriety that allowed me to be less activated all the time and to actually to feel safer in my body because I wasn't trying to get from hit to hit from dopamine hit to dopamine hit by trying to get my ex to reply or whatever strategy I was trying to use at the time to actually feel connected to them because of all the things I've mentioned. So this detox is actually kind of detoxing dopamine and you obviously don't have to completely detox from dopamine. There are lots of healthy substitutes of dopamine so instead of needing to think about your ex or contacting your ex, think about the great things you can do like going out on solo dates to the movies or having fun with friends or whatever the things are that can bring you dopamine in a healthy way or things that you can really replace with what gave you that dopamine in your past and the most important aspect of lowering that baseline is something I talk about on this channel and it's called self-soothing and this is when you go from this hyperactive state of being activated all the time to allowing yourself to detach from your ex as your primary attachment figure and you might feel lonely and really notice that you feel single and alone and a really great way to replace that is to get a little pet and have that pet as your primary attachment figure. I might laugh but honestly it works. It's worked for me as well and that primary attachment figure can bring us a lot of safety and a lot of happiness and also we of course want to learn the most important attachment figure, primary attachment figure for ourselves which is us, our adult self, the internal part of us that knows how to self-soothe, that knows how to make decisions and choices that are right for us, how to set boundaries that are right for us like we know that our internal self will show up when we're needing it. That is what's going to give us that real internal sense of safety and allow our body to reset and calm down. Now the third piece here is obviously then to actually deal with the core driver of this kind of state and that is our inner child, that is our original wounding that I mentioned and if you want to know more about how to do inner child work, I have an entire video on that here that you should watch next but pretty much the gist of it is that you need to listen to the emotions and feelings of your inner child, whatever the inner part of you that's come up and that's really loudest. So open up a space for this part of you to be heard and if you don't know your inner child's voice or if you really struggle to discern between different parts of you internally, just focus on the deepest level of sadness and grief that you might feel and that might be a really strange thing for me to say but actually all of these problems are occurring because we don't now have to experience our own sadness and grief so you got to go there at some time and as you allow your trauma body baseline to reset and you're rewiring your trauma mind, you are going to be able to increasingly feel the strong emotions of this deeply sad part of you that needs to grieve. So when you start to feel this, sometimes I notice with my clients in Heal Your Heart School, there's a lot of internal shame that happens because they start to feel feelings of grief and sadness and they immediately make it about themselves, start to attack themselves and that is the last thing you want to do. So when you do inner child work, you need to bring with it internal compassion for this part. This part actually served you. This was a very safe part of you that allowed you to experience connection when you were young, when you were growing up but it doesn't serve you anymore obviously but we need to have compassion for why that part of us exists there. So when we work with our inner child, we need to learn that this part of us is going to appear as quite a young, hurt, fearful part of us and there's another part of us which is our inner parent, which is our higher self, the part of us that knows what is right for us and what isn't and we want to develop our inner parent to actually re-parent this inner child within us. So that's where you encourage an internal dialogue where when you feel feelings of sadness, you say to that part of you, thank you for being here, I love you, I won't leave you again and that part of you can start to feel safe that you, your higher, your true self is really like helping it and is there for you and is not going to abandon it anymore because self-abandonment in our past is us totally ignoring that wounded part of us pushing it down and just going along with our merry way and getting stuck in toxic relationships. So this internal part of us is carrying a lot of grief and a lot of sadness so we actually need to allow it to feel seen and heard and understood, all of those things that it didn't experience when it was really young. Now this work takes time, it's not an overnight thing, you certainly probably can't access it right now just listening to and watching this video. Allow yourself to sit with and experience these emotions and obviously I teach specific tools to do all this, in heal your heart school but really notice the difference between the internal parts and how they feel. If you can get started on recognizing those and get started on the work in each of those, that's going to make a significant change but it's going to be very, very hard to move on until you do this one thing and that one thing is to heal your abandonment wound and your abandonment wound is the core wounding that happened at the place of your initial abandonment and if you want to know more about what an abandonment wound is, I want you to watch this video next but for now, know that that young part of you, that inner child actually carries with it this wound, this belief and the belief is either going to be, I'm not good enough, I'm not lovable enough, I'm broken. This part of you, this belief is deeply, deeply locked away, there's a lot of shame around this part of you and we need to allow it to be acknowledged and move it into the light and really get to a place where we are in relationship with our abandonment wound and I unpack a lot of things about how to do that in that video I mentioned but I do have a complete three-step webinar that goes for an hour on how to heal your abandonment wound and the steps around it and the actual steps that do work to heal so I really recommend you watch that if this is work that you're interested in doing. I also have a Facebook group, I'm really in there quite regularly, I'd love to see you in there, you can join in the link below and if you'd like to submit your application to work with me inside Heal Your Heart School, you can do that, there's a calendar link below as well. Please click the like button on this video, it will really help this channel out and if you have any questions or comments about this video and any follow-up requests, just jump down to the comments below, I will be in there, I would love to see you as well and for now, here are some next step videos to help you move one step closer to having an incredibly beautiful relationship with all of your parts and to showing up as your true authentic self in relationship and for now, I'll see you in the next video.