Today, we’re going to be talking about what to do if your relationship ended badly, if you should still be trying to repair that relationship, get that ex back or simply trying to move on.

So let’s tackle the big question first, should you get your ex back?

Can you get them back?

Well the truth is, yes, you can get them back, but only if you’re willing to lose them forever.

Now, this is an inherent paradox. Yes, you can get them back, but you have to be willing to lose them first.

Well, what I’d like to do is actually talk about this concept, and it’s relatively new concept that we’ve been exploring in our coaching practice and seeing really incredible success stories with.

So first, let’s talk about getting ex’s back, specifically taking stock on if the relationship that ended badly is even worth exploring or repairing.

So I think it goes without saying that you should not be trying to get an ex back in some circumstances, and this is maybe the hardest thing for people to hear, because there’s sort of an abuse cycle that can tend to happen when there’s emotional abuse or physical abuse involved.

So oftentimes we’ll see situations where someone is being physically abused or emotionally abused, and they don’t want to get their ex in trouble so they keep quiet about it.

These are circumstances in which we absolutely do not believe in trying to repair relationships.

So there’s an article on our website called The Red Flags of Not Getting Back With an Ex.

So this is kind of like looks through the big red flags that we see among relationships that are non-negotiable no’s for us.

So if you experience any of these big issues, you should not be trying to repair this relationship. You should be trying to repair your heartbreak and move on completely from this person.

So what are some of these gigantic red flags?

Well, I think there’s nine that I talk about on the red flag article, but I’m going to just talk about four of them.

These are the four most common ones that we see, and these are four in which we absolutely equivocally agree you should not be trying to get your ex back.

The first one, or the first two really are kind of intertwined, and that’s emotional abuse and physical abuse. If you’ve experienced any kind of physical abuse, you should absolutely run the other way.

You should not be trying to win this ex back. And I say that, because when we’re dealing with situations where your relationship ended badly, there’s usually a reason for why it ended badly.

Either you are being abused or you’re fighting all the time, and that’s where kind of the next abuse can kind of come into play, and that’s emotional abuse.

So what we tend to find happen is there is a progression towards physical abuse. It starts first with emotional abuse.

And emotional abuse can be anything like gas lighting to putting you down. We’re going to talk a little bit about controlling types of behavior, but we’ve noticed that this can kind of get looped into the emotional abuse cycle. And what tends to happen is as the person becomes more emotionally abusive, physical abusive type stuff can plague the relationship.

If you’re in a situation like this, you need to get help. You need to run away. You need to end the relationship with this person forever. And I realize we are a website that helps people repair relationships. And you know it’s pretty bad when I’m sitting here saying, if you are in a situation where you’re emotionally abused or even physically abused, you need to get away from this person.

This is a relationship that ended badly. Sure, you should not be trying to get this person back.

The next type of person you should not be trying to explore get back is the overly possessive individual.

This is very common behavior, I think in younger couples, but we even see it with older couples.

I think it’s mostly going to be based on attachment styles. Usually avoidant people don’t exhibit so much possessive behavior.

Usually it’s kind of the anxious avoidant, if that makes any sense. So maybe the fearful avoidant approach. What does a possessive behavior look like?

Well, it’s pretty standard. It’s usually where they’re trying to control you in all sorts of ways.

My wife tells the story about one of her first boyfriends ever, who was so possessive that she would go to the restroom and he would be standing outside the restroom knocking on it saying, “what are you doing in there?” And this kind of controlling, possessive behavior, clearly this guy was worried that she was texting someone else.

And I think the thing you need to understand about possessive behavior is it doesn’t easily go away.

Usually almost in all cases, any type of possessive behavior is based on anxious issues going on inside the individual. So if you take the example of my wife, where she’s in the bathroom, her ex-boyfriend comes over and knocks on the door and is asking what she’s doing, the reason he’s doing that is because he’s afraid that she’s cheating on him.

And she gave him no indication that she was interested in anyone else, but he is so afraid of getting hurt that he responds to that by doing everything he can to control and possess her. And that’s usually not a good sign. This is the kind of sign that kind of creates toxic relationships. Don’t try to get this person back.

And then the final, big thing that we want to say you should take stock on and if this relationship is even worth saving is addiction, while it is socially acceptable to be there for someone who has an addiction.

What’s interesting is I don’t think someone with an addiction, I think a lot of the clients that I’ve experienced at least, and this is purely my speculation based on my experience coaching individuals for the past 10 years, in my experience, someone who comes to us wanting repair a relationship that ended badly and addiction was present in there within their exes, they kind of have this mentality that they can be the ones to fix them.

And the truth is that they can’t. And that might be a hard thing and not a socially acceptable thing to say.

But I think it’s kind of, the best way I can maybe describe this is someone with an addiction has to want to repair themselves. They are aware of the problem. Oftentimes they’re using the problem to mask how they’re really feeling about different situations in life.

And I think, I’m really big into triathlons right now.

And one of the top triathletes in the world’s this guy named Lionel Sanders.

He’s got a really interesting story, but he was someone who was addicted to … He started off just smoking marijuana and then eventually graduated up to taking harder drugs, like cocaine. And he literally, he went to college on a track scholarship, on a cross country scholarship so he’s a really good runner.

And he just let it go because he got so addicted to all these substances. And it got to the point where he was so addicted to so many hard things that he started hallucinating. He got a job. So he didn’t have to go outside of his house, so he got a job writing articles for some website or something.

He didn’t want to go outside the house. He was hallucinating.

He got to the point where he became suicidal. And what’s interesting about this is he was aware of the problems that was going on, and it wasn’t until he made a conscious decision himself to fix himself that strides were actually made. What worked for him, and I’m not saying this is going to work for everyone with an addiction, but what worked for him was taking this negative addiction and pouring it into something, pouring that energy into a positive addiction. So he became obsessed with finishing an Ironman triathlon and ended up sort of saving his life. And he’s very open about his struggles with substance abuse. And he took ownership of it and take stock of it.

And my point is, the thing I learned from him is someone with a serious addiction doesn’t really want to get rid of the addiction until they’re ready to, and nothing anyone says will change their mind.

So if you are in a situation where you’ve taken stock on a relationship and you’ve noticed that there’s any kind of emotional abuse, physical abuse, your ex is overly possessive or there’s addiction aspects, these are situations in which you should not be trying to win your ex back.

You should be pouring all of your focus and efforts into moving on. But what about situations where those aren’t present?

That’s where things get kind of interesting. So we know that this relationship ended badly.

Now, what does a relationship ending badly actually look like?

Well, usually there’s a lot of arguments at the end. I think most of the time when I think of relationships ended badly, I think back to my first relationship ever when I was in high school, an 18 year old kid, all the way up to 19, because I think that relationship at lasted maybe 12 months or something.

You’re immature, she’s immature.

You’re both making mistakes in the relationship. You’re not talking about what’s really bothering you. You let it boil up inside and then you just kind of argue. So it seems like every single week you’re together, you’re arguing about something. Eventually you just start arguing about stuff that you don’t even realize why you’re arguing.

You’re just arguing to argue.

These are relationships that end badly.

And I think when you’re dealing with this relationship, and the question ultimately here is can you still get him back if this relationship ended badly? And my answer at the beginning of this was yes, but you need to be willing to lose him forever.

So I’m about to kind of let you in on the secret that most of my peers aren’t willing to tell you, but I’m going to tell you for free.

So we often talk about these periods of no contact.

The period of no contact, this period of time where you ignore your ex with the intent of making them miss you and kind of going through this internal growth. Well, what’s interesting is I think a lot of people get the wrong idea with regards to no contact.

And what we’ve learned over the past few years after studying a lot of different success stories really is that the no contact rule isn’t the important part.

Yes, it gives you the opportunity to help make an ex miss you. But what’s more important is what you do with your time during no contact.

And what we’ve noticed consistently is there are very clear indicators that someone who is successful at preparing a relationship that ended badly does during no contact. And this is kind of the secret potion, if you will. If you’re ever looking for a magic bullet, and this is by no means a magic bullet, this is the closest thing I can get you to it.

So I think the first thing I noticed when I talk to people that went through no contact successfully and ended up getting their exes back is they looked at failure differently.

They failed forwards.

And what I mean by that is, throughout life you’re going to be approached with failure or you’re going to experience failure. And how you react to that failure is going to tell you everything about the type of human being that you are. Most people when confronted with failure run the other way.

They won’t take chances. Think about it like this, if I were to sit here and ask you to date someone new right here, right now, you probably wouldn’t do it.

Number one, you would say you’re not in the right head space. But inherently there’s a contradiction inside with that. You’re lying to yourself. You are in the right head space to begin dating someone new.

And before you argue with me, here’s my point. I think if you go on a date with someone new, what you are afraid of is failure. Not with the new person, but failure with the previous relationship. It’s an acknowledgement of the failure that that relationship failed. It’s an acknowledgement that you are maybe by ceremony trying to move on.

It’s a worry that you’re going to fail to get your ex back.

You’re going to send off the wrong signals and you’re afraid of failing. That’s the truth. So there’s two ways that you can fail. You can either fail forwards or you can fail backwards. So what’s the difference between the two? Well, someone who fails backwards is someone who lets failure define them. So I think we can look at a breakup as failure. It is failure. Someone who lets that failure, lets that breakup define them, and impact them and impact every decision they make is ultimately not go going to do well.

But someone who is going to seek out more failures and learn from those failures, that person’s going to do well. So yeah, I think there is a certain amount of taking stock on what you could have done better in the relationship, what your ex could have done better in the relationship.

If the relationship is even worth saving is really important to figure out. That’s called failing forwards. That’s learning from the failure. But I think also the inherent issue that most people have is they’re afraid to seek failure out. They’re afraid to put themselves in opportunities where they can fail, because the feeling of failure is so strong within them they don’t want to ever feel it again. And maybe there’s an aspect of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in there.

So one of the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, when you look at it, one of the interesting aspects is at the bottom of the pyramid, things like your basic needs, like food.

A lot of people are afraid to go after that promotion at work because they’re afraid of offending someone and losing their job, or they’re afraid of doing something. And that’s a direct hit on their ability to feed themselves or shelter themselves and things like that. And so they become defined by this fear of failure.

And my point is, during the no contact rule, if you’re going to do this seriously, you need to reframe the way your mind looks at failure.

You need to look at it in this way, that it’s an opportunity for you to learn. People don’t like failures. I know it’s kind of hard to hear this, but people don’t like failures. Our society is built to reward winners. And yet, what’s interesting about the winners is, I’ve noticed the true winners in life are the people who have failed so many times and learned from those failures so many times that they begin to succeed.

Sports is a great way of showing this analogy.

I used to play tennis pretty competitively.

And what was interesting is when I first started to learn to play tennis, I was awful. When I first played my first match, I was physically in great shape, and I played this really fat looking guy and he wiped the floor with me. Why? I was just starting and I hadn’t failed enough. Now I could’ve let that failure define me, but I kept practicing, and practicing and practicing, and pretty soon I became really good. But you only become really good by failing, and then learning, and then failing, and then learning, and then failing and then learning. And I think a lot of times people get self-conscious about the failure and they don’t learn from it. So this is the first thing I want you to do during no contact. You need to learn from your failures and you need to seek it out.

The second big thing I would say to do during the no contact rule if you want to get your ex back is to really embrace this idea of the Holy Trinity.

Now, we’ve been talking about the Holy Trinity a lot throughout the history of this website. Health, wealth, relationships. But I’m going to add an addendum to it. I no longer think life can be divided up into three simple categories.

I think there’s actually four categories if we’re being realistic about it. There’s health, which is anything that impacts your health physically or mentally. So this could be things like working out, or seeking out a therapist to talk to, or seeking out one of our coaches to talk to. These are things that impact your health positively. Then there’s of course wealth. This is probably the most obvious and straightforward one. This is anything that gets you money. Anything that helps your wealth as a whole. This can be investment opportunities. This can be quitting a job and starting a new one. This can be starting a new business. This can be anything in those realms.

And if you’re really young, let’s say you’re still early in college and you don’t really have much of a job, you can still work on this. There’s different things that you can do. And then of course there’s relationships. But the addendum here, or not the full addendum, but an addendum is with regards to the Holy Trinity, the relationships aspect, it’s outside of your ex. Too often we get clients who are so razor focused on the breakup they neglect all the relationships outside of that breakup. So this is friends. This is family. This is other romantic partners. Remember when I said people are afraid to go date new people because they’re afraid of failing, not with the new person, but failing with their ex. Well, this is kind of an opportunity to focus on those things.

And this is how you rebuild your life after a breakup. But the issue I had with the Holy Trinity, or the realization I had maybe last year or a couple years ago, was truly if you just live your life in a way … So I always try to practice what I preach. So I’m always, every single day try to function my time to where I’m doing something health wise, wealth wise, relationship wise, always seeking that ever elusive balance. And yet what I found to be fascinating was seeking that balance to not give my life meaning. Sure, I can easily argue that talking to you and helping people through their breakups and relationships should give me meaning, but it didn’t. Sometimes stuff like this feels like work to me because I have to do a lot of it every single day and put out fires every single day, and it kind of takes the fun out of it for me.

And it wasn’t until I found sort of the fourth pillar of the Holy Trinity that I began to realize this is fun again. And that’s sort of the Magnum Opus pillar. This is the pursuit of your life that you feel gives your life meaning. This could be anything. But the important part is that it gives your life a meaning. This is kind of the legacy component. So for me, it’s writing stories. I’ve always been incredibly passionate about that. For my wife, I think it would be creating something that helps parents with children. That’s something she’s incredibly passionate about. This could be anything. The important part is that you’re super passionate about, you can work on it. It’s almost like when you’re working on wealth based stuff, it’s the thing that you’re thinking about while you’re like, I just want to get this done so that I can work on that. And what we find is when I tell people to do this, all sorts of really interesting things come up with their Magnum Opus concept.

And really the Magnum Opus concepts is kind of the thing that you want to be remembered for when you’re gone, the statement you want to make on life. And it could be anything. It’s personal to you. And if your relationship ended badly, what you’re going to find happen is if you fail forwards, if you work on this Holy Trinity, health, wealth, relationships, Magnum Opus, a subtle shift is going to take in how you view, not only the past relationship with your ex, but how you view yourself. You create confidence for yourself. Other people start to notice that confidence and it creates momentum. The momentum eventually gets back to your ex. Your ex eventually wants to figure out what you’re up to. So this is kind of the first foundational of work that you do before you do any, any reach outs, or text messages, or sort of strategies or tactics.

A lot of people think if they say the right thing or do the right thing, that’s the key. Well, no, it’s kind of a combination of everything. Success is not linear. It’s a lot of ups and downs. It’s a lot of squiggles and circles. And it’s messy. It’s kind of like doing everything at once. The stoic philosophy, I think this is the old Roman Marcus Aurelius kind of was a famous stoic, and there’s something about it that I really like, and that’s the ability to focus on only what you can control. So the stoic man or female is only concerned with things that he has control over. He’s only concerned with, or she, she’s only concerned with reaching her maximum potential in all areas of life. And it’s kind of that statement where you have to check yourself, when you say, am I doing everything I possibly can in this area? And if you’re not saying yes, the stoic, that’s the thing that bothers them.

They’re not bothered by losing a job. They’re not bothered by losing a relationship. They’re not bothered, I don’t know, by something else that happens that they have no control over. They can’t control other people. They can’t control the weather. They can’t control society. What they can control is their soul. They can’t control their actions. And they are hyper, hyper obsessed with controlling their actions and maximizing their potential to help humanity. This is the kind of philosophy that you need to have when you go through a breakup, especially if the breakup ended badly, because the key thing that you need to hear, but no one ever wants to hear is the true secret to succeeding after all of this heartbreak is by focusing on yourself-