“My boyfriend’s past bothers me” is a recurring opening line in emails I receive.

In today’s reader Q and A video, I respond to Jasmin, who writes “my boyfriend’s past bothers me.”

She continues:

I bought and read your guidebook, and have gone into the website. Thank you for helping me through retroactive jealousy concerning the fact that my boyfriend’s past bothers me. My issue is that when I see mementos of my boyfriend’s past relationship with his ex, I feel very bad afterward. The problem is that I keep finding things left over from when his girlfriend lived with him. My boyfriend’s past bothers me and I do not know how to combat seeing these “triggers” so often.

Transcript below

Zachary Stockill: Thank you for your message, Jasmine. This general theme of being bothered by objects around your partner’s house or objects from his past, this is pretty common when it comes to retroactive jealousy. So you’re certainly not alone in struggling with this kind of thing.

I think there are a few ways that you can approach this. A few ways you could look at this issue, start putting in the work to overcome retroactive jealousy. When you’re at a point where your boyfriend’s past is just not a big deal anymore, you’re starting to see things clearly. The mental movies have started to disappear. The curiosity starts to fade. You start feeling great again, and your relationship improves and you’re sleeping better. And, all these things that we associate with retroactive jealousy with overcoming retroactive jealousy–once that process starts happening. These objects and their association with your boyfriend’s past starts to not become important anymore.

You might notice objects lying around the house or a certain object that has real meaning associated with your partner’s past and you just stop thinking about it. It’s just not a really big deal anymore.

So my biggest piece of advice is just start putting in the work toward overcoming retroactive jealousy.

And this problem will kind of take care of itself.

But in the meantime, another thing that you can think about is changing the story you’re telling yourself about these objects, trying to change the meaning they have in your life and in your partner’s life.

So for example, if there’s a kitchen table that you’ve associated with your partner’s past, maybe you and your partner can have some fun, get a bit wild and crazy on that table so you’re changing the meaning of that table, you’re associating a new, really positive memory with this object that will hopefully override any association that this object might have with your boyfriend’s past.

You can do this with clothes. If there’s a certain piece of clothing that you’ve associated with your partner’s past, maybe you start wearing it or … You can get creative with this. But the basic idea is just to try to start changing the memories you have associated with these items, creating new memories, creating new mental associations, and changing the overall story that you’re telling yourself about these items.

Remembering that they’re just items. They’re not living. Don’t have a memory.

They’re completely inanimate and you can create a new story around these items and change their m...