Monthly Archives: July 2019

Jul 18 2019
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Heartbreak, Love, Recovery, Relationships, Sex

How to Stop Dating Someone Who Doesn’t Want to Date You

Four months ago my two-year relationship ended….but it wasn’t really a relationship. We didn’t call each other boyfriend and girlfriend. We didn’t meet each other’s families. We didn’t meet each other’s friends. We didn’t become “exclusive” until a year and a half in.

But we loved each other. We spent almost every weekend together. We shared something special, something that I still miss.

But it was unhealthy. Because we both didn’t really owe each other anything. He could go a week without speaking to me and I couldn’t say anything- he wasn’t my boyfriend, after all. I could sleep with other people and he couldn’t say anything- I wasn’t his girlfriend, after all. We constantly ended things because the dynamic became so toxic, but always came back because it was comfortable and easy.

For some people this kind of relationship might work, I thought I was one of them for a while. I thought I was being “progressive” and that labels were stupid. Who cares as long as I’m happy being with him? The lack of certainty only made the whole thing that much more exciting.

But it became like a drug addiction. I knew it was bad for me, I knew it was hurting me, but I couldn’t stop. I would beg him to just end it and leave me alone, but he wouldn’t let me go.

If you have found, or find yourself in a similar situation, just know that I hear you. I know your friends are telling you to just move on. They are telling you that you deserve more. They are telling you to stop settling. You probably feel crazy and stupid and ashamed. But you aren’t. And you aren’t alone.

My relationship only ended because it became so emotionally harmful for both of us that he finally pulled the plug. And the most painful part of the break-up wasn’t really that I was broken up with; don’t get me wrong, I was incredibly heartbroken, but actually slightly relieved it was finally over. The hardest part was that I was mourning a relationship that wasn’t even validated as an actual relationship. Even harder was feeling like an idiot for tolerating so much agony over something so ambiguous.

I am still processing my feelings about everything and am certainly not in a place to give advice with much authority. But with some time and distance from the relationship I want to share some advice for anyone that has gone through, or is going through something similar: do not put your standards in someone else’s hands. Do not prioritize the desires of someone else at the expense of losing yourself. Relationships are not 50/50. They’re 100/100. You have to give all that you’re capable of giving to your partner and expect that in return. Staying is a choice. I know you feel powerless, terrified, hopeless even when you know that it’s over but you stay and stay and stay and try and try and try some more only to come to the same heartbreaking conclusions. Love yourself above anyone else and love yourself enough to leave.

Jul 03 2019
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Addiction, Feminism, Heartbreak, Love, Online Dating, Recovery, Relationships, Sex

I Am an Exaholic: Part 3

Part one of this three-part blog post detailed why we fall in love, part two examined what happens in the aftermath of love lost, and the phases we all experience during a breakup. This final installment will detail the path to recovery, specifically: the stages of healing, how to cope while you’re recovering, and healing through the twelve steps of Exaholics.

The Stages of Healing

For most Exaholics, the hardest part of the healing process is just getting to the first step: admitting that your attachment to your Ex is unhealthy and needs to end.

It can take a very long time to come to grips with the reality that a relationship is over. Remember, this is how your brain works, and how you were built to bond, even if you know it’s over, you still don’t feel like it’s over. Your limbic brain is a wild creature and not subordinate to the will of your neocortex; it maintains your attachment to your Ex even when you don’t want it to. But even worse, because its hunger for reunion is so strong, it can trick your neocortex into believing that you should get back together with your Ex.

Precontemplation 

This is the stage where you are not yet aware you have a problem; in other words, you are in denial that the relationship is over. If you can’t literally reconnect with them, you might try and stay connected to them with your thoughts, fantasies, rehashing, and following their every move on Instagram. You are still having a relationship with your internalized lover in your head. When you are thinking or fantasizing about your Ex lover, you are still feeling all the same feelings: love, excitement, despair, longing, hurt, anger, and rejection. Staying in contact with them through social media or texting is basically keeping an IV drip of dopamine in your arm. This stage will feel like purgatory- a mid-range ring of hell where you are not together, but not apart emotionally. You are still emotionally connected to your Ex, whether or not you are actually speaking. You can’t bear to delete their number or block them. Being in this space is very, very painful. You are deeply attached to someone you are not able to connect with. Or, if you connect with them, you get hurt. This stage is particularly difficult if your relationship ended with little to no closure. The good news is, after weeks or months or even years of this torture a small remnant of your healthy core will pipe up to say, “What the hell are you doing?”

 Contemplation

This stage is defined by ambivalence. You are aware that you are not being treated well and that your life is suffering as a result of your attachment to your Ex, but you still feel an enormously strong connection to them. You might be very angry and hurt, but you still love them. It’s a confusing, “I love you but I hate you” dance that pushes and pulls you one way and the other. You hate the way you feel, you hate what this is doing to your life, you hate how much power your Ex continues have over your life, and you might even hate them, but you still care about them. You want them to want you. Your self-worth is still caught up in their opinion of you, so it feels like the only way to get your self-esteem back is for them to desire you again. Many Exaholics feel the need to test the relationship before they can finally come to terms with the finality of the situation. So, they try to contact their Ex and talk “one last time” (hello breakup-sex). For Exaholics, bottoming out on your addiction to your Ex is usually subtle and ambiguous and builds over time. At this point, your neocortex begins to gain a toehold. Your rational self starts actively wrestling with your limbic brain for control of your mind and soul. Your thinking mind becomes increasingly clear about the fact that this relationship should be over and that the person you are stuck on is simply not able or willing to love you in return. You begin to understand that your emotional dependence on this person is ruining you. That maybe, just maybe, you want the relationship to be over too.

Determination

In the Determination phase of change, Exaholics feel motivated to change, and begin to plan how they will finally break free. Perhaps you will seek help from a therapist. solicit advice or look for resources (hi!). One of the most important and helpful things that an Exaholic can do at this point is connect with other people who are going through the same experience. When an Exaholic comes into contact with other people who feel the same things that they do, or even better- have begun to work the steps and heal- a major shift can happen: they can start to feel hope that they can change to. Your stages of change have already led you to this moment. The fact that you are reading this blog post is evidence that you are either in the contemplation or determination phase of recovery.

Taking Action and Coping

The path to reducing obsessions and starting to get control of your mind lies in mindfulness and learning how to be here now.

Stay in the present. Thoughts of your Ex are time travelers. They are memories of things that happened in the past or worries about things that could happen in the future. In the actual, literal, present moment, very little is actually happening. You’re breathing. That’s it. When an intrusive or triggering thought about your Ex pops into your head, simply being able to notice, “I am having a thought about something that is not happening right now,” and coming back into physical reality will help you step back and develop your metacognition (metacognition is your ability to think about what you’re thinking about). This strengthens your neocortex and helps build the ability to intentionally shift away from obsessive thoughts. Use the present moment as an anchor and steer yourself back into the present over and over and over again. Over time, your mind is freed from obsessive rumination.

Be tolerant of yourself. Just like if you broke your arm, healing is going to hurt. You have to respect your pain and allow it to guide you to do the work you need to do. You have been injured, and its okay to not be okay for a while. 

Avoid social media. At no other point in history has it been easier to torture yourself by spying on your Ex. Of course, you are craving knowledge of your Ex and social media might seem like a lifeline of connection to your lost relationship. Unfortunately, each “contact” with your Ex reinforces the biological connection and every morsel of information zings you with dopamine, creating an explosion of anxiety, torment, and longing inside of you. Having new information to obsess about is simply prolonging your madness. I cannot tell you what to do, but I am going to tell you what to do: block your Ex on social media.

When your Ex is sleeping with someone new… this is a toughie. Even if you are doing okay, there is still something about knowing that your Ex is with someone new that will send you into a frenzy of emotional pain, craving and desire. In your mind’s eye you play out scenes of your life with your Ex, except your role is being played by someone who might be sexier, more fun, or more interesting. You see your Ex- the happy, sweet, fun one you first fell in love with- sharing the best parts of themselves with someone else. This all feels incredibly unfair. Being victimized by these intrusive images is incredibly traumatizing. Ruminating does not bring any value to your healing process, it only keeps you from moving forward. In order to rescue yourself from the impotent madness of this obsession, you must differentiate between what you are thinking about and what is actually happening. Shift your awareness and distract yourself by practicing mindfulness, using a mantra or making plans. You have to get unstuck from the obsession phase in order for healthy new growth to occur. 

Healing Through the Twelve Steps of Exaholics

If you are ready to admit that your continued attachment to your Ex is a problem, you have arrived at the doorstep of healing.

Step One: Radical Honesty

Accept the truth: the relationship is over, it needs to be over, and it’s time to move on.

Step Two: Grieving and Reaching out for Support

In some ways, a literal death can be easier to accept and deal with than the loss of a cherished primary relationship with your partner. When you want desperately to be with someone who does not want to be with you, losing them feels like a statement of your worth. It’s personal. Once Exaholics have given up the fantasy of reunion and accepted that their lover is not returning, does not love them back, or is simply not the person they hoped they were, grief, fear, and despair close in. During this time it can be tremendously comforting and healing to connect with other people who have genuine empathy and respect for your experience. A simple Google search for “breakup support groups” or “divorce support groups” will turn up options in your area. There are also various online communities available to you, including forums through http://www.exaholics.com (and the Instagram @onceuponatimeonhinge). Find your people, and let them be there for you now.

Step Three: Renewing Faith in Other people

This third step feels good. It feels good to reconnect with people, and it feels good to be validated and understood. You know you can’t connect with your Ex, but you still need connection. Your need for secure attachment is basic and primary, and it doesn’t go away just because you don’t have anyone to attach to. When you connect with a community, you begin to attach to them. Your attachment-craving reunion with your Ex is soothed, somewhat, by nurturing human contact with others. Your attachment is transferred from a dangerous place to a safe one.

Step Four: Reclaim Your Worth and Value

It might be hard to believe that you weren’t rejected by a really great person because you weren’t good enough. Or that the love you had wasn’t the most passionate and intense thing you’ll ever know, and you’re doomed to a life of isolation or settling. None of this is true, and it is important to revise your story about what happened. You shift from being the victim, or the unlovable ogre, into just another person whose relationship didn’t work out. As you develop a new story about what happened, you begin to experience an emotional shift. You begin to reclaim your self-esteem. You realize that your story is not that special or unique. Pain is pain. Loss is loss. Rejection is rejection. Just because you are going through it doesn’t mean that you are a broken person.

Step Five: Growth

Most Exaholics, around this stage, notice a marked shift in the way they feel. Some call it the “pivot point”. They begin thinking less about their Ex and more about themselves. I think a great way to work through this step is to either engage with a group who is willing to ask you hard questions, or to do some journaling and reflecting. Questions to include asking yourself during this step are:

“What were my circumstances before I got involved in this relationship?”

“What attracted me to this person?”

“Were there early red flags I chose to ignore?”

“Did I confuse passion for a healthy, secure attachment?”

“How did I handle my anxiety in this relationship?”

“Am I dependent on the good opinions of others for my own self worth?”

“Were there mistakes I made that impacted the quality of this relationship?”

The true opportunity of loss and pain is growth. The goal of step five is to begin to understand the vulnerabilities that allowed you to become so deeply addicted to an unhealthy relationship and learn from that experience.

Step Six: Ask for Feedback

Step six involves asking trusted and emotionally safe people for their feedback. Think about the people who are most familiar with both you and your Ex. Consider asking them their opinions of what they witnessed as you went through the relationship, and be open to their answers. Taking feedback non-defensively is difficult. Try to resist the impulse to meet their feedback with a “Yes, but.” Rather, breathe and listen to what they are saying about how it looked from an outsider’s perspective.

Step Seven: Build a Different Future

The sweetest revenge there is is for you is to genuinely be happy and well, and to love your life. In step seven, you figure out what makes you happy and how to get better results in your life. It’s time to start asking yourself some exciting new questions:

“Knowing what you know now, what kind of person would you like to be in the future?”

“Who do you want to be in your next relationship?”

“How will you know if your next relationship is working? How will you know if it isn’t?”

Step Eight: Action

Practice your new skills on your friends, your family and with your community of support. Accept new ways of being to feel weird and unnatural at worst. Remember- act from your values, not your feelings.

Step Nine/ Ten: Make Amends 

You might feel really badly about things that you did to other people while you were out of your mind with toxic love. Remember that pain makes everyone self-focused. When you were in the depths of your Exaholism, you might not have been at your best as a friend, mom, dad, daughter, son, sister, brother, or co-worker. Make a list of people who have been harmed by your “addiction” and write your wrongs. When you are done, go back and write your own name at the top.

Step Eleven: Maintenance 

When you are in step eleven, all of the things you’ve learned come together. You are active out in the world, being a new you. You are maintaining the positive changes you’ve worked so hard to develop.

Step Twelve: Help Others Heal and Grow Too

Your ability to have empathy for the reality of the pain and trauma that others are currently enduring means more than you know. Your presence in the life of someone else can represent hope that they too may someday overcome their own pain. So seek out opportunities to connect with people who are hurting. Feel free to DM me (@onceuponatimeonhinge) if you feel you are struggling, and also if you feel you are in the emotional place to help someone else and I would be more than happy to make connections that way.

You are normal, and you are not alone.

DM me on Instagram @onceuponatimeonhinge with feedback, questions, or to discuss this post further!

 

Jul 02 2019
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Heartbreak, Love, Online Dating, Personal, Relationships, Sex

I Am an Exaholic: Part 2

Today’s post is going to start off where part one ended: what happens when love is lost.

Broken Attachment

Even before a breakup happens, most people can sense their relationship is failing long before it is officially over. The limbic brain senses that you are in one of the most terrible dangers a human can experience: disconnection. Anxiety flares. The neocortex tries to find evidence to make sense of your inarticulate emotional experiences, getting stuck on rational details like what exactly was said or done that indicates the attachment is being threatened.

When a romantic attachment starts to feel less secure, most relationships begin to polarize into a pursue/withdraw pattern. In other words, one partner chases and the other pulls away. The pursuer experiences the other as unavailable or unresponsive and attempts to seek contact and reconnect with increasing intensity. The withdrawer experiences the pursuer as emotionally unsafe and withdraws both physically and emotionally (which only heightens the pursuer’s anxiety). This cycle usually intensifies over time. Each spin around the cycle stretches the attachment ever further, until eventually, it breaks.

The Aftermath of a Breakup

Almost everyone in the aftermath of a lost cherished relationship describes the same experience: feeling devastated about the loss, being obsessed with thoughts of their Ex, feeling an overwhelming desire to reconnect, doing compulsive things in efforts to maintain proximity with their Ex, and feeling absolutely helpless to stop those feelings- even when they really want to and know they should. It’s even more terrible and confusing when their relationship seemed satisfying and meaningful.

All humans are terribly impacted by the horrible feelings that rejection creates. Many people describe the moment they realized their relationship was ending as having an unreal quality to it- like a nightmare. In these first moments when you are confronted with rejection or abandonment, everything in your body goes into survival mode. For humans, like most mammals, abandonment is a primary trauma. When you lose your partner, your body, mind, and emotions experience it as a direct threat to your survival and fundamental well-being. When loss is happening neurotransmitters like dopamine and norepinephrine soar, creating intense agitation and emotionality. When enduring the trauma of abandonment, you may be flooded with anxiety that can border on panic or terror.

The 9 Phases of Post-Breakup Trauma 

Protest and Despair

Even if you are the one initiating the breakup, in the moment that you separate from the person to whom you have been so strongly attached you are still likely to have an intense emotional reaction. The emotions associated with a threatened primary attachment feel less like sadness and more like a threat to your very existence. This primal experience can be very confusing for people, and the fear and anxiety they feel at the moment of separation can make them think that maybe they should stay in the relationship after all (even if the relationship is very unhealthy for them). The drive to reestablish contact is so strong that it can feel absolutely overwhelming and impossible to resist. This is why people call and text even when they know they shouldn’t, stalk Facebook and Instagram pages, and arrange for unexpected encounters, even when the object of their affection no longer wants anything to do with them.,

Like protest, despair has very distinct characteristics and is a coherent physiological and psychological state. Despair begins as frantic efforts to reconnect collapse, single-minded hope is replaced with hopelessness and a new certainty that the beloved is not coming back.

Withdrawal

As I discussed in part one, romantic love is experienced through the same reward and motivation systems that illicit drugs hijack when you get high and falling in love is similar to having a fierce substance addiction. Therefore, when love is taken away, everything inside of you blazes into a fury of craving and need. The experience of jilted lovers is highly consistent with symptoms of withdrawal to addictive substances.

Obsession

Obsession fuels love. Early stage love is characterized by obsessions that percolate excited feelings and daydreams about your lover. Similarly, a bad breakup is defined by dark obsessions that spin out into nightmarish anxieties. One important thing to understand about obsessions after a breakup is that because losing an attachment triggers the biological, physiological experience of love, your thoughts about your Ex are much more likely to be focused on their positive qualities. This means you will once again begin to idealize your lover, downplay their flaws, and focus on the wonderful parts of your relationship.

Information Gathering

If you can’t communicate with your lover or have actual contact with them, gathering information about them is another way to keep your beloved close to you. You may watch their social media pages to gain insight into their state of mind, make sense of what happened, look for evidence of where they’ve been, who they’re with, and how they’re feeling. You try to interpret small clues and nuances from things they post about how they feel. Are they sad? Do they care? Do they still love you? You may personalize their online activity, interpreting posts and pictures as efforts to communicate with you.

Love and Hate

Interestingly, even when people are very angry with their rejecting partner, their brain scans still give evidence of much of the same activity as romantically attracted people. This implies that as intense as your hatred toward your Ex might be, it doesn’t necessarily extinguish feelings of love. The truth is, love and hate are close neighbors, neurologically speaking, occupying nearly the same small patch of real estate in your brain. They fuel each other and tend to go hand in hand- which may be why your partner can incite rage and irrationality in you in the way that no one else can. The true opposite of love isn’t hate at all, but indifference; heartbroken lovers are anything but indifferent.

Physical Symptoms

Studies have found that people in long-term relationships tend to impact each other physiologically. Stable relationships create a sense of security and co-regulation that has physical implications. When that security is disrupted, it takes a physical toll. Abrupt disconnection from a long-term lover creates changes in sleeping and eating patterns, affects your immune system, and triggers a stress response.

Loss of Self-Esteem

Breakups are so fundamentally traumatizing and damaging to your self-esteem because of the rejection at the core of the experience. If you are heartbroken, it means that you really loved your Ex. You believed they loved you. You gave yourself to them and trusted them to love you back. When they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, it feels like a statement about your worth. If you had been better, sexier, more fun, more accomplished, less difficult, or more lovable, you would have been enough for them. They would have loved you better. Instead, they hurt you, mistreated you, or simply rejected you. When the one person you totally opened up to changes their mind about you, it changes the way you feel about yourself. Self-confidence can feel shattered; when you lose value in the eyes of your Ex, you lose value in your own eyes as well.

Social and Other Losses

In the midst of your inner torment, the outside reality of your life may be in shambles as well. You lose so much when a relationship ends. Your other friendships may be strained, attempts to spend time with friends you knew as a couple may be awkward. You are decimated by pain and may be in the grips of a feverish compulsion to know everything about your Ex, making interactions uncomfortable for everyone. The loyalties of your friends may be divided. Losing your relationship may make you feel like you have lost your entire life.

Relapse 

Months, even years after a breakup, a chance run-in with an Ex can trigger all the old desires and longings. Often, Exaholics in recovery are also triggered by seeing certain people, being in particular places, or hearing songs that remind them of their Ex. Such exposures can bring about a new round of craving and obsessive thinking, and even trigger a new flurry of texting, calling, and lurking around in efforts to reconnect with their lost love.

is-the-notebook-on-netflix

If you are reading this wondering, “Is this ever going to get better?”- the answer is yes. The next blog post will be focused on the path to recovery: the stages of healing, how to cope while you’re recovering, and healing through the twelve steps of Exaholics.

DM me on Instagram @onceuponatimeonhinge with questions, comments, or just to discuss this post further!

Jul 01 2019
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Books, Heartbreak, Relationships, Sex

I Am an Exaholic: Part 1

I recently read, Exaholics: Breaking Your Addiction to an Ex Love, a book recommended to me by a lovely Instagram follower (@alyssadigges). The author, marriage and family therapist Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby, ties scientific research into the addiction physiology of love and explains why many of us experience heartbreak, obsessive thoughts, social media stalking, and longing for an Ex that lasts long after the relationship ends. The book helps you understand what is happening to you, why you feel the way you do, and how to take your power back.

Before I break down the main points of the book, I am going to include a “yes”/”no” quiz that will indicate whether you qualify as an “Exaholic”. If you answer “yes” to some or all of the below questions, you might just be one of the chosen ones.

Tally how many “yes” or “no” answers you have, and pay attention to any patterns in the themes of the questions where you answer “yes”. I am going to fill in my answers below:

  1. Are you longing to get back together with someone who has rejected you?
    1. Yes.
  2. Are you struggling to finally let go of an unhealthy relationship?
    1. Yes.
  3. Are you obsessed by thoughts of your Ex?
    1. Yes.
  4. Do you feel compulsions to search for information about your Ex?
    1. No.
  5. Are you afraid that you will never find another relationship that is as meaningful and special as the one you lost?
    1. Yes.
  6. Do you feel that your self-worth has been badly damaged in the aftermath of your relationship?
    1. No.
  7. Are you feeling isolated and alone, and that your friends and family don’t understand what you’re going through?
    1. Yes when it comes to certain important people in my life.
  8. Is your emotional pain so great that you are having difficulty in functioning?
    1. No.

If, like me, you identify with some or all of the above criteria, my hope is that this post eases your frustration and shame you might be experiencing. When people fall in love, it is like their rational minds fly out the window. They seem intoxicated by their lover and become deeply and emotionally bonded to them. You may think that only flawed or emotionally vulnerable people could become an Exaholic, but this is simply not true. The truth is, there is a biological basis for the feelings of love you have for someone, or the anxiety and despair you experience at the thought of being without them. Being in love is akin to being in an altered state of consciousness that can lead you to do things you never would have thought possible in your more normal, “rational” state.

Being in love creates a biologically based madness that only makes sense when you are in it or using your emotional mind to understand it. To an observer lacking empathy, an Exaholic will not listen to reason, continues making self-destructive choices, and then complains about the outcome. But inside of them, a deep and difficult emotional process is occurring: the process of severing their primary attachment. Observers should challenge themselves to reconnect with the pain, madness and obsessive longing they likely experienced when it was their turn to go through this and have patience for the Exaholic’s healing process.

This introductory, first post is going to introduce you to three concepts: What is love? What happens when one falls in love? What is the tragedy of the Exaholic? The next blog post will explain the processes that occur when love is lost, and the third installment will offer the path to recovery (stages of healing, how to cope while you are recovering, and healing through the Twelve Step of Exaholics).

Part 1: What is Love?

Evolutionary speaking, humans simply do not survive as individuals. The success of our species is largely due to our collective nature. We need one another. But even more vital than our need to bond with a tribe or clan is our need to bond with a partner- a mate. Because this type of love is so vital to every aspect of our reproductive processes, we have love-inducing machinery hard-wired in our brains. When the light of romantic love begins to glow in our brains, it is very, very difficult to turn it off again.

When you fall in love, you go through a process in the limbic system of your brain that essentially addicts you to another person on a primary level, and this part of your brain is much deeper and older than the neocortex (the limbic brain is the seat of your primal emotions and motivational attachment drives, while the neocortex is the part of the brain that allows you to plan, make decisions, and anticipate consequences). So, your neocortex can tell you, rationally, that the relationship is over. It can produce evidence as to why the person is not good for you. But it doesn’t really matter. Even with your neocortex shrieking at you to stop stalking your Ex’s instagram and behave yourself, your limbic system takes over.

Part 2: Your Brain on Love

Researchers have explored brain activity in cocaine addicts and found activity in the same brain regions of people in love, because both of these areas lie deep in the limbic brain. When they are activated, they bathe your brain in dopamine. The other thing falling in love does to your brain chemistry is drop your serotonin levels. Serotonin is the neurotransmitter responsible for feelings of peace, satisfaction, and well-being, As romantic love increases dopamine, it also reduces serotonin. This love-cocktail of neurotransmitters- high dopamine and low serotonin- does a few things to you. First of all, it gives you a sort of ” love high”. You feel incredibly energized, restless, and euphoric. You may become entirely focused on your lover, to the point where you might even feel distracted or have a hard time sleeping. You think about them obsessively, fantasize about your next encounter, planning trips and outings, and experience a surge of giddy excitement with every call or text from the object of their affection.

Part 3: The Tragedy of the Exaholic

When people get addicted to a substance or experience that triggers reward systems and attachment machinery that nature designed for your survival in unnaturally intense ways, it overwhelms their ability to control themselves. Alcoholics might walk into a bar knowing full well they are not going home that night. Gamblers gift with guilty hope clean out the last of their kid’s college fund at the casino. Meth addicts drive past their social services office for the supervises visit with their kids to their dealer’s house instead. Exaholics feel like slaves to their frantic, raging, despairing, single-minded craving for emotional connection with their Ex. They churn with anxiety in the blue light of their cell phone, knowing that whatever they are about to see on their Ex’s Instagram account will devastate them for days, but they cannot stop themselves from looking. They have trouble focusing on, much less emotionally connecting with friends, family, children or potential new and healthy lovers. They lie awake at night, ruminating. They may engage in stalking or illegally break into private email or phone accounts. They beg for more changes to allow themselves to be abused by their Exes. They hate themselves for what they do, but they do it anyway.

The compulsions and cravings of an Exaholic are often so intense and out-of-control they can feel frightening. Sadly, the potentially severe and crippling addiction Exaholics struggle with is not recognized as such. Most addiction counselors, mental health counselors, nor the general public conceptualize people struggling in the aftermath of a failed relationship as having a biologically rooted addiction. While other addicts have the support of their anonymous meetings, caring therapists, intervention by family and friends, and our sympathies for their struggle, Exaholics get invalidating advice such as: “You have to let it go”, “There are lots of fish in the sea” “You have to move on”. The true tragedy is that in their darkest hour, at the time they are in the most need of support or compassion, they are often made to feel ashamed for not being okay.

The first step in developing compassion for the plight of Exaholics is recognizing what an unwanted relationship loss actually does to us. More on that in post number two…

Want to talk more about this topic? DM me on Instagram: @onceuponatimeonhinge 

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