Today, we’re going to talk about why your ex pushes you away. And most importantly, figuring out what to do if you are in a situation where your ex has pushed you away.

Now, I originally got this idea after I was going through our private Facebook support group of which there are 6,300 members, both men and women trying to get their exes back.

Most of the time I’m dealing with women who are trying to get their ex-boyfriends back.

Very rarely do I have a woman try to get an ex boyfriend back who’s actually broken up with that boyfriend.

In other words, most of the times the clients I’m dealing with have been broken up with. Very rarely do I encounter a client who’s done the breaking up themselves.

So I thought this would be a really great opportunity to dive into the female psyche of what’s actually going through a woman’s head when they push you away.

I’m going through the private Facebook group and I stumble across this woman’s post, and she said some really interesting things that I think will really answer why women tend to push men away, even if they want that man back.

So let’s tackle the big question first, which is why do women push men away when they break up with them?

Ultimately what we found happening a lot when we encountered women who would push men away during a breakup was this push-pull mentality.

One minute they would often push their exes away, and then the next minute they would kind of flirt back with them and then push them away again and flirt back with them.

This is really interesting behavior. What’s interesting is when I went through the woman’s post on our private Facebook group, she basically says, “I just want to share an experience where I was on the other side of the equation. I was the dumper, so that we could kind of understand why men react a certain way after the breakup.””

Now she’s writing this from the perspective of helping women, but I took it and I’m looking at it on basically someone’s honest opinion of what they went through when they went through a breakup.

So in 2017, she breaks up with her guy after they’ve been together for seven years. She was absolutely sure of it. She knew for a fact, she wanted this breakup. She felt stuck. She felt suffocated in the relationship and she told him things that were not working out between them anymore. Now, while she did this, he was actually on vacation when she initiated the breakup. When he came back, her resolution for the breakup kind of melted away. So I’m assuming he came back into the picture after she exhibits this, I don’t want to be with you anymore, and tries to win her back. Just tries to beg for her back. And her resolution for the breakup kind of melts away.But when he asked me if I was going to change my mind, I said, no. At that point I just thought, if I were to ask him to stay while things were so emotional, the same thing might happen two months down the road. So I did not waiver.

And to me, this is the important part of understanding why women end up pushing you away in situations where they are the dumpers. It all has to do with self preservation.

Now I’ve long been a proponent of trying to help people understand that when it comes to relationships, we all are very self-interested.

We don’t really care much about other people, and this is kind of a weird thing to admit, but we ultimately, all we really care about when it comes to our relationships, our romantic relationships, are how they are going to make us feel.

Now it gets kind of complicated because someone who’s very philosophical can come and say, well, what about me?

Because I care very deeply about what my partner feels. Well, I would actually argue that’s not the case.

The only way you care very deeply about what your partner feels is weirdly enough if they feel bad, it makes you feel bad, because their opinion matters to you. So by making them feel better you in turn, weirdly enough, feel better, which is sort of a philosophical paradox in self-interest. So what’s interesting about this is if you look at someone pushing you away with the frame of mind that they’re being incredibly self-interested, they’re trying to protect themselves from being hurt, it makes a lot of sense.

We often will talk about the emotional wall. Like I said, most of the time I’m dealing with women on a one-on-one basis.

But one thing that I see a lot that is kind of universal among the human race is the idea of putting up the emotional barrier. We all have been there where we put up an emotional barrier, or we’ve been with someone who’s put up an emotional barrier.

You can sense somethings off. You’ll oftentimes confront them about it and say, “Are you okay?” And they’ll say, “I’m fine,” but they’re keeping you distant because they’re wanting to protect themselves.

They either don’t want to hurt your feelings, which in turn would hurt their feelings and make them feel guilt, or there’s something really going on in their head that they don’t want to share with you. It creates this weird scenario where they’re worried about your feelings. This is an important concept to help you understand why women often push men away. Because a lot of times men will come to me and they’ll say, Chris, why is my ex-girlfriend pushing me away when we shared everything so intimately from a physical standpoint and also an emotional standpoint? Why is she acting different now?

Well, ultimately it’s self-interested. She’s trying to protect herself. But that’s not the whole reason for why women push you away. It’s just a reason for why women can push you away. Another huge reason for why women could push you away is they have a little bit of an avoidant mentality. Now, avoidance oftentimes…

We talked about the core concept of why avoidance will push men away. It’s important to understand this. Someone who has avoidant attachment style tendencies will tend to value their independence a lot more highly than the average person.

So anytime they’re in a relationship where they feel that that independence is becoming threatened, they push the other person away or they leave, which you take as them pushing you away. Now what’s important about this is it’s really important not to take it personally.

What’s happening here is oftentimes after a breakup, your ex-girlfriend has pushed you away, and then they start to flirt with you. It’s important to understand the cycle of how this works, because when you actually study avoidant women, here’s what we learn. We learn that they actually don’t begin to reminisce or think about the good times until they feel you have completely moved on. At that point, they feel safe missing you. So what happens a lot of times is what we’re trying to teach our men and our women clients to do is to project this persona that you are moving on. And you can’t really fake it, you have to move on without moving on. That’s oftentimes what I tell my clients. So what happens is your ex is naturally drawn to this. So they’ve pushed you away and then what happens is they’re drawn to it and they want to live in the reminiscence of the relationship that the two of you had together.

What ends up occurring though, is when you hit it off, and when things seem to be going well, they get freaked out again because they feel their independence is becoming threatened. They feel like they’re going to get hurt again, whatever the reason is, and that causes them to push you away again and you end up in this really difficult cycle. What happens with most people is they don’t recognize this pattern because it’s so personal. It hurts when someone we love so deeply is rejecting us, right? But if you actually are able to acknowledge, wait, this is what’s happening, what occurs is maybe the key to helping you understand what to do when an ex-girlfriend pushes you away. But let’s deal with something bigger first right now.

Let’s try to answer the question, is your ex-girlfriend pushing you away because she’s scared?

This is a big question that I noticed came up in Google searches a lot.

When I started researching what I was going to say for this article, for this podcast episode, for this YouTube video, wherever you’re experiencing this content, I noticed that one of the big questions people were typing into Google was wait, is my ex-girlfriend pushing me away because she’s scared?

And the answer to that question I think is ultimately yes, but not scared of the basic things that you would assume. You would assume that your ex-girlfriend is pushing you away because she’s trying to protect you from something she’s thinking. That can certainly be the case, but I don’t think that’s ultimately what it is. I think ultimately what it is, is she’s pushing you away to protect herself.

Remember, if you operate under the assumption that every action that is taken during a romantic encounter is self-interested, it helps you understand your ex-girlfriend’s actions a lot more.

Now what’s interesting is going back and trying to understand from a real life perspective of what an ex-girlfriend is going through when she pushes you away, I’d like to point you back to that client I talked about in the Facebook group, whose story we’re really using as a fuel to understand what’s going on when an ex pushes you away.

Here’s something interesting that she had to say.

She did not waiver. So ultimately she broke up with him, he tried to ask for her back, she pushed him away. Ultimately after that, he left to stay with a friend, and a few days later, he asked her out for dinner.

It was good, but she still did not budge. A few days later, he told me he’d booked a flight and would leave the country for good. She was in shock, but yet she did not budge though I felt the pain.

So what this does is basically illustrates the whole avoidant mentality that we’re talking about here.

What’s occurring is she’s pushing him away to protect herself. He comes and chases her when she’s not ready because she’s worried of being hurt and she pushes away again. He does it again and the same thing occurs. All the while though, I felt sad. Yet at the same time, I felt relief for the space. I even told my friends that I really just wanted him to be happy and I would give him my blessing if he found another. Well, until I found out he had someone new two months down the road. That day I received the news, I kept feeling something really weird running down my spine. I tried to shake it off, but it kept piling. I only understood what I was feeling that night when I finally was engulfed by it. It was the sense of loss.

I only felt the sense of loss when I realized he was gone. So it’s true, we really need to evoke this sense of fear of loss in our ERP exes, if not, they’re not going to budge. I’m not saying we have to find a rebound for that to happen, but we do need to evoke that fear in some ways.

So, this is my hypothesis.

Well, we got an indication of what not to do. That particular ex of this woman kept trying to chase and fix things. This ended up causing her to just dig in and say, no, I need to protect myself, and she probably just gave him some fake reason why.

She was not in love with him anymore.

Things are not the same anymore, and he needs to move on.

Ultimately he did.

It took a couple of months, but he began to do what is commonly known or commonly referred to amongst society as the mature thing to do. To move on to someone new, to let go of the past, move on with the new.

This evoked the fear of loss.

This made her realize, oh my goodness, I could lose him forever. I had no idea how great it was. And this is completely in line with what we understand about avoidant attachment styles. Remember what I said. In our research, looking at what makes people who have avoidant attachment styles miss you, we have found that people with avoidant attachment styles end up only missing you after they feel that you’ve moved on. That’s exactly what happened here, but there’s a little bit more to it than that.

So if you’re wondering, what do I need to do if my ex-girlfriend is pushing me away?

How can I get her to not push me away?

How can I get her to truly want me? The answer is actually pretty simple. What you need to do is understand the intricacies of how attachment styles work. I’ve talked a lot about this in the past on my other website, exboyfriendrecovery.com, and haven’t really talked much about it on exgirlfriendrecovery.com, so I’d like to give you a quick crash course on how attachment styles work.

Here’s sort of the brief rundown.

There are four main attachment styles.

Now, what ends up occurring though is there’s this interesting fact that we’ve noticed occurs with attachment styles.

If you have a secure attachment style, you have the also added benefit of creating gravity to the other attachment styles. So what ends up happening is the most common component for a breakup that we see is someone with an anxious attachment style, most likely you, is being with someone who has an avoidant attachment style, most likely your ex.

I’m just using examples here. These two ultimately are not a great match for each other because they ultimately are the exact opposite of what each other needs.

This causes a breakup.

Yet when someone who has an avoidant attachment style partners with someone with a secure attachment style, an interesting phenomenon occurs, and we call this phenomenon secure attachment gravity. The way it works is the person with the avoidant attachment style starts to see, wow, this is what it’s supposed to be like when I’m with someone who is secure with themselves. And they start to actually subconsciously get rid of their avoidant tendencies and adopt more secure tendencies. So the key to handling an ex-girlfriend who pushes you away is to actually identify your own attachment style and work to shift it towards more secure behaviors.

This will create the gravity that not only makes her notice, wow, something’s different about him, but it will also help her realize that she can be open with you. It also has the added benefit of creating a fear of loss, which is exactly what happened in the sort of phenomenon we talked about what the Facebook client. Why? Well, ultimately the main goal that you’re trying to get across here is you’re trying to exhibit secure tendencies after a breakup. This means handle the breakup in a healthy way, and someone who handles the breakup in a healthy way is someone who realizes, yeah, I would love to reconnect with my ex, but if I’m not able to reconnect with my ex, I’ll be okay. I’ll be able to find someone else. I’ll probably be able to find someone else just as good. And in some cases, they go and date other people with this mentality. This mentality is a healthy way to handle a breakup, and it’s the way you should be handling the breakup. It sounds weird when you’re looking at it from the watchtower 5,000 feet above ground, but I promise you, I’ve seen this happen time and time again.

So here are the quick crash course rules for what to do if your ex-girlfriend pushes you away. If she pushes you away, give her space. Also, exhibit secure attachment style tendencies on social media. This means doing things that you should be doing after a breakup. Really focusing on your health, really focusing on your wealth, really focusing on relationships outside of your ex and also going on dates with new people. That’s an important component. Your ex does need to feel a fear of loss because they do need to realize you aren’t going to wait around for them forever.

Today we’re going to talk about how to get your ex back if you live together with them.

So, if you stick around until the end of this article you’re going to learn,

Enough talk!

Let’s get to it.

Situations where you’re living with your ex are always difficult, because a lot of the times, the situations or the game plan that we’ve created is designed for more general purposes, and what I mean by that is it’s designed for situations where you’re not living with your ex, where usually cheating hasn’t been involved, or there’s no long-distance situation involved, so a lot of the core basic concepts that we come up with on Ex Girlfriend Recovery really don’t apply to situational circumstances.

This is actually one of the reasons why we have so many articles, because there’s so many nuances to getting an ex back in this situation or that situation, and living together is no different.

But what we’ve done is we’ve come up with sort of a five-step process for getting an ex back if you live together, so very quickly, here are the things that we want you to do, and what I’m going to do after I list these things is go in-depth on exactly what I mean by them.

If this sounds like rocket science to you, don’t worry, I’m going to make it make sense, so let’s just start from the top.

The big one is step one, being the plan for moving out.

So this is actually a difficult thing to maybe hear, but one of the things that we tested when we first started Ex Girlfriend Recovery, and even our first website, Ex Boyfriend Recovery, when we saw situations where people were living together with their exes, we actually tried to get them to just simply use what you’re going to learn about later, a limited no contact rule, and the value ladder, and the value chain, and concepts like that, but what we quickly found out was they were ineffective.

Almost always, the concept of the value ladder and the value chain, which we will talk about as step five, was a lot more effective when you weren’t actually living together, so we tried to…

We decided a few years ago to try, for our clients who were living together with exes, to advise them, “Hey, if it’s possible, move away from your ex, move out of the situation entirely.” So we started advising people to do this, and almost instantly we saw much better successes. In fact, one of the situations that…

This is maybe a bit of a tangent off-topic, but one of the situations that we were encountering early on that we were really struggling with was what do you do if you’re living together with an ex, and your ex is dating someone new?

And almost by accident, we advised this client, it was actually a female whose ex literally was with someone else at the time that they were living together, we advised this client to move out, and it actually helped spur us to realize, hey, number one, moving out actually really works, it kind of levels the playing field, but number two, for this particular situation, we actually advise longer periods of no contact, which kind of we’ll talk a little bit about when we talk about the limited no contact and sort of the concept with that, so we almost kind of stumbled upon these two insights just from our very first person who we advised to move out.

So really step one is create a plan, if possible, for moving out, so if you’re living together with your ex, you need to move away from them. Now, this may seem like the worst thing in the world, because I think a lot of the misconception is, “Well, if I’m living together with my ex, that’s such an advantage,” but we find it’s actually not an advantage, it’s a disadvantage, so many things can go wrong, so what we try to do is we try to level the playing field by advising all of our clients who are living together with an ex, if possible, because some people, it’s just not possible, if possible, move out, get your own apartment, become more independent, that’s step one.

Step two is begin going out with other people.

Now, most of the time, this is not what you think. A lot of times, I think the natural assumption is, “Okay, so Chris wants me to go out with other people, I need to start finding dates.” Well, yes and no, it doesn’t necessarily have to be dates. What we’re trying to do is we’re trying to show your ex that you are not going to sit around and mope around about the fact that this breakup occurred. A lot of times, we’re finding…

I’m going to admit something here, I probably shouldn’t admit this on air, but I’ve actually not done a study for the men on Ex Girlfriend Recovery, we have done studies for the women on Ex Boyfriend Recovery, we found that pretty much 95% of the clients there have been broken up with by their exes.

Just from listening to the voicemails I get, most of the time, we’re finding ex-girlfriends are the ones to break up with our male clients, but I don’t have the proof to back it up, so that is just an assumption I’m rolling on, or rolling with here, but most of the time, when your ex-girlfriend has broken up with you, the narrative that she creates in her head is, “They can’t survive without me.”

And there’s a lot of different reasons for breaking up, sometimes ex-girlfriends will make it seem like this is a mutual breakup, but almost always, it’s never very mutual.

So by going out, you’re showing your ex that number one, they’re not your first priority anymore, number two, they’re nothing more than an acquaintance to you, and number three is you’re not sitting around, moping around depressed, you’re handling the breakup in a mature way.

Now, does this mean you should be going out every single night and partying?

No, that’s almost an over-correction, but we do advise you to go out with other people, all right? Friends, family members, even romantic interests if you want to try dating someone else, this is a good time to do that, because if they’re seeing you come and go at all hours of the night, it’s not as effective as just seeing you come and go from time to time, it just looks like you’re not sitting around moping about the breakup. What you’re trying to do here is you’re trying to make them have this paradigm shift where they literally start wondering, “Did I mean nothing to them?” Because this actually helps create value.

Let’s move on to step number three.

So step number three is doing a limited no contact rule until you do move out. All right, so this is where we get a little complicated. If you’re creating a plan for moving out, that actually makes doing a full no contact rule really well, so here’s sort of the controversial thing that we’re going to be saying today.

When you are with your ex, and you’re living together with them, I mean, you’re going to want to do what’s called a limited no contact rule, so we are often talking about the no contact rule as being this period of time where you’re ignoring your ex on purpose, with the intent of outgrowing them.

But when you’re living together with them, it’s kind of hard to ignore them, so you have to do kind of limited no contact, where if you see them, you’re not trying to be rude, you don’t try to start a conversation, but if they’re starting a conversation, you do engage with them, and then sort of give them the bare minimum, and then go back to business.

Now, usually some people who are living together only think they need to do a limited no contact rule and that’s it, so once their 30 days of limited no contact are up, “Cool, that’s it, I’m ready to go, let’s begin talking again.” What we’re finding, and this is going to be hard to hear, is once you do a limited no contact rule, what you need to do is do a full no contact rule once you move out, so that plan for moving out is kind of important.

Longer periods of no contact, we are becoming more and more fans of. We weren’t originally at the beginning, and this is kind of counter-intuitive, but what we’re finding is we’re noticing that a lot of times, exes who break up with you tend to have avoidant tendencies, and there’s almost this time dilation that exists with people who have avoidant tendencies in time during the no contact rule.

So for a quick example, there are four basic attachment styles, you have secure attachment style, anxious attachment style, avoidant attachment style, and fearful attachment style. Let’s throw fearful out, because only 7% of the population has a fearful attachment style, it’s extremely rare for your ex-girlfriend to have one, so let’s just operate under the assumption that there’s three attachment styles, right?

So let’s say you’re doing a 30-day no contact rule. For someone who was a secure attachment style, 30 days is going to feel like 30 days. 30 days will feel normal. For someone with an anxious attachment style, 30 days is going to feel like 60 days. For someone with an avoidant attachment style, 30 days is going to feel like a week to 10 days, so there’s almost this weird time dilation that exists in how we perceive time during the no contact rule, based on our attachment style.

Now, we’re finding most ex-girlfriends tend to be avoidant, so when you’re doing a limited no contact rule, the mere fact that they’re seeing you almost allows that time dilation, even though you’re doing a limited no contact rule, to extend a little bit, which is why we recommend longer periods of no contact. So if you’re doing a limited no contact rule while you’re living together with them, we actually do advise to do a minimum of 30 days real no contact once you do move out. Again, not a popular thing to talk about, but that’s what we’re finding works the best.

Step four, which is moving your anxious attachment style to a secure attachment style, which really we should probably reframe this as a secure attachment gravity. This is a concept that I’ve talked a lot about recently, but basically I gave you kind of the rundown in the last section, or the last step, about the four major types of attachment styles, secure, anxious, avoidant, fearful. Really there’s only two categories of attachment styles, you have the secure attachment styles and the insecure attachment styles, so as you can imagine, if you have a secure attachment style, you are classified as having a secure attachment style category. On the other hand, if you have an insecure attachment style, that means you could either be an anxious attachment style, an avoidant attachment style, or a fearful attachment style.

Now, we’ve talked about the 7% rule with the fearful, how it’s very rare, but what we’re finding is that most of the people who we work with tend to be anxious, or tend to have anxious personalities, whereas their exes tend to be avoidant. Now, this is a common theme among people with attachment styles, where anxious attachment style people will be attracted to avoidant attachment style people, and then boom, it’s just like two ends of the spectrum meeting, and it’s fire and ice, they just burn up, and it just doesn’t end well.

Well, what we’re finding is the key to success in getting an ex back almost always relies in identifying your attachment style and moving it more towards becoming more secure. So what is a secure attachment style? Well, this is the type of person that when they go through a breakup, allows themselves time to grieve, but ultimately has the understanding that they’re going to be okay, that the world hasn’t ended, that no matter what happens, they’re going to be okay.

Now, someone with an anxious attachment style, on the other hand, will think the world is ending, that they’re not going to be okay if they don’t get their ex back, the world will be over, blah, blah, blah, we get the whole spiel. Someone with an avoidant attachment style values their independence so much that they’re like, “No, I don’t want intimacy with someone, I don’t want a relationship with someone, I want to move on and find someone else that’s going to allow me to be independent.”

So, here’s what we know. If you’re able to identify the fact that maybe you have an anxious personality, and you’re able to move your anxious personality more towards a secure one, there’s almost this gravity that exists towards your partner, where if your partner identifies, and they will know subconsciously, “Wow, there’s something different.” Well, the truth is, you’re just being more secure with yourself, you’re being more confident with yourself. Once they identify, “Wow, this change has occurred with them,” they begin to mimic those changes, because that’s what we do when we’re attracted to someone. So by simply moving your anxious attachment style, or your insecure type of attachment styles to more of a secure attachment style, you can have the marked benefit of doing the same thing with your ex. Now, it’s not a perfect science, it’s not really a science at all, but it is something we have noticed.

So, doing those four things will help massively, but ultimately you still need to do step five, and step five is to institute the value ladder when you move out. So thus far, let’s kind of talk about, you’ve created a plan for moving out, but while you’re still living together, you’re going out with other people, friends, family, romantic interests. You are doing a limited no contact rule, and you’re doing that secure attachment work internally, but when you move out, that’s when you actually institute the value ladder concept that we’ve come up with.

So, what is the value ladder? I’ve talked a lot about this, more specifically on Ex Boyfriend Recovery, because Ex Girlfriend Recovery, unfortunately, we haven’t updated some of the older pieces of content, but the value ladder is basically this concept, we tried to create this analogy for people that said, “Getting your ex back is a lot like climbing a ladder,” right? So each rung of the ladder, you are using a different medium of conversation, or different method of communication, in building value.

So you do a no contact rule, and then the first thing you do is you initiate conversation with your ex-girlfriend. You do that through text messaging, this is the first rung of the value ladder. When you’re texting your ex, you’re building value to your ex. Once enough value has been built, you move up to the next rung, which is phone calls or video chat, or FaceTime, or I guess people are using Zoom now, Skype isn’t so much a thing anymore, you build value in there.

Then you move up to the next rung, while still building value on the first rung. The next rung, of course, is meetups. Meetups are kind of in this gray area between your ex-girlfriend thinking, “Is this a date, or is this just sort of like a hangout?” That’s considered a meetup. You build value on enough meetups, and then you can begin doing romantic dates, which is the second-to-last value-added layer. Once you build enough value in the romantic date area, while building value in all those other previous rungs that created the foundation, then you move up to the final rung on the ladder, and that’s where you actually ask for your ex-girlfriend back.

Now, I actually always think ex-boyfriends have a distinct advantage over our ex-girlfriend clients, because society dictates that men tend to have to be the ones that ask for their exes back, so guess what? You have the easy way out, you can just directly ask, but you never ever ask for your ex-girlfriend back until you have climbed to the top of that ladder.

Today, we’re going to be talking about how to act when you see your ex at work.

This is actually a topic that I was shocked that we hadn’t covered before, even though I’ve definitely talked about it on Ex Girlfriend Recovery and talked about it in even my other website, Ex Boyfriend Recovery, I haven’t actually put a podcast episode or a YouTube video, or even an article specifically dedicated to this topic.

So I thought this is the perfect time to do just that since it is an issue that we find a lot of people having.

Now before I get into the nitty gritty of exactly how you should act and giving you tactical advice. The one thing that I do want to say is if you’re a newbie listening to this podcast, or you’ve never been introduced to Ex Girlfriend Recovery, probably the best place to start is first by figuring out what kind of chance you have of getting your ex back.

Believe me when I say there’s nothing worse than trying to get an ex back when you really don’t have a chance of getting them back at all. Now luckily for you on our website, www.exgirlfriendrecovery.com, we put together a special free two-minute quiz that’s designed to basically tell you what kind of chance you have. So you know whether or not you’re wasting your time.

I think the first thing that you need to understand is where you stand throughout the process that we teach. So if you’re not familiar, we have a very strict process that we’d like to have our clients go through when they are attempting to try to get an ex back or even attempting to try to get over an ex.

And that process always starts at the same place. It starts with the no contact rule.

Now, if you’re not familiar with what the no contact rule is, it’s like the ultimate buzzword for breakups.

You can’t pretty much go to any expert out there without hearing about it. There’s always several differences between each expert. One expert will talk about the no contact rule and say do it for 30 days. Another will say do it for 90 days.

We have our own version of the no contact rule, but it’s based on what we’re finding actually works out on the field.

So the no contact rule, you kind of need to understand where you are at throughout the no contact rule. The rules for communicating with an ex at work is different. If you’re in a no contact rule versus if you’re not in a no contact rule.

So that’s a key component. You need to first figure out where you are in the midst of no contact. Now I’m going to go out on a limb here and just kind of assume that the people who are most likely to be searching for this topic are not basically using a no contact rule. They’ve probably either never heard about it, or they have heard about and thought, “Well that sounds too hard. I’m not going to try that.”

You need to try no contact rule.

That’s always the first step, pretty much in every single situation that we’ve ever found.

It’s a great first step for a lot of different reasons. I don’t want to get into them here since I want to stick to how to act when you see your ex at work and on the topic with regards to that. But I’m going to go ahead and kind of assume that you’ve not tried a no contact rule, which means you’re going to try it, right?

So here are the rules for how you should handle no contact when you see your ex at work. So one of the interesting nuances between the no contact rule and seeing an ex at work is there’s no way to, “no contact an ex at work,” especially if you work together, especially if you’re guaranteed to see each other so that no contact rule actually becomes something that we call the limited no contact rule, which means you’re essentially going to ignore your ex in every way that you would with a no contact rule.

The only difference there is when you’re forced to see them at work, you’re going to act in a very secure way and more on the secure sort of way in a minute.

But one thing I want to kind of get into here is this concept that we’re noticing of the doomsday clock. Now I made actually a really good friend. One of the people that I decided to help on Ex Girlfriend Recovery became my friend. And he was a really brilliant guy and he is the one who kind of came up with this doomsday clock thing. And I asked if I could borrow it. And he said yes.

Well, one really interesting thing that we noticed with regards to people who try the no contact rule is they almost like look at the no contact as a doomsday timer, right?

So as each day goes, it’s like another day that they’re closer to losing their ex. And we found that, that’s the wrong way to look at it. So we don’t want you to look at the no contact rule. And the reason I’m really bringing this up is because a lot of people who are forced to see their exes at work are literally kind of having that tomb’s day clock sort of stuck on a 10.

They’re seeing their ex every single day.

They’re seeing how they’re not getting closer to getting them back there.

They feel like they’re getting closer to losing their ex forever. They feel like another guy is going to swoop in and take the ex-girlfriend away. And that’s not how we should be looking at the no contact rule. Probably the best way I can explain how you need to look at the no contact rule is like you would look at Christmas morning when you were a kid.

Now I want you to think back when you were like a little kid and you knew Santa Claus was coming.

That night before you understood the truth about Santa Claus, you believed in Santa Claus, you knew he was coming. You knew he was bringing presents.

You probably couldn’t sleep. In fact, your parents probably got really mad at you because you couldn’t sleep. They’re saying, “Go to bed, Santa Claus isn’t going to come if you stay up all night.”

But what did you do? You stayed up all night anyways, and then you conked out and then you probably woke up early the next day because you were so excited to see what presents were bought. That is how you need to be looking at the no contact rule. You need to be excited. You need to look at this as sort of a countdown to Christmas, not the end of the world. No contact is not… So every day that goes through no contact shouldn’t be a day where you’re getting closer to losing your ex. It should be a day you’re getting closer to getting your ex back.

That’s the mentality I think that you need to have, and this mentality can help extremely well.

Especially when you see your ex at work. Now a lot of what we’re talking about here is sort of philosophical in nature. These are the mindsets you need to have in the no contact rule and where you’re at in the no contact rule should depend on or should dictate how you handle seeing your ex in person at work. We haven’t really talked about actionable ideas. So let’s talk about some of those actionable ideas.

Lately, we’re on a kick and that’s because we hired actually a new coach on the Ex Recovery staff.

His name is Tyler Ramsey and his background is in psychology. He’s actually in his last year of medical school and he’s very seriously considering starting a psychology practice, which I think is great.

So I’m really happy to have him on the team and just hiring him and being super impressed with everything he’s bringing to the table.

He’s talked a lot about attachment styles and lately… So I’ve been talking about this all the time, but I actually recently ran on our YouTube channel an interesting study where I was taking people who actually successfully got their exes back. And I was interviewing them for anywhere between 40 minutes to an hour. The main goal is essentially just asking them questions from start to finish on how the breakup occurred, how they got their exes back, what went right, what went wrong and trying to understand what are the differences between people who are successful and people who are unsuccessful.

And what’s really interesting is the big difference we’ve noticed from people who are successful is that at some point throughout the process, they gave up on trying to get their ex back. And I found this kind of interesting, but I had no psychological way of understanding it until I met Tyler Ramsey and interviewed a few other people in the psychology space. And they introduced me to attachment styles.

Now, what are attachment styles?

Well, generally speaking, there’s a lot of different variations and combinations of attachment styles. But if you want to get the bare basic minimum, there’s four type of attachment styles.

You have,

Now defining each is actually really simple. Secure attachment style is the kind of person that will have the… When they go through a breakup, they will have the fortitude to process the emotions, they’ll feel bad for themselves then they’ll kind of get over and be like, “You know what? I’m not going to obsess about this. I’m going to kind of move on with my life.”

Anxious attachment styles has the opposite effect. They’re the type of people who go through a breakup. They stalk their exes. Their entire life is wrapped up into this relationship. They blow their ex’s phones up. There’s that funny meme that was going around when I first started Ex Boyfriend Recovery and Ex Girlfriend Recovery of the girl who like left 70,000 voicemails to her ex after he broke up with her, this would be an anxious attachment style person.

And then you have the avoidant attachment style. It’s just like it sounds. They like to avoid conflict. Oftentimes they will just drop you and not give a reason. Understanding what we know about avoidant attachment styles. They’re really big into independence, meaning they feel that they should have the right to be independent from you and they feel you should have the right to be independent from them.

And then you have fearful, fearful attachment style is the rarest type of attachment style, only 7% of the population statistically has it. We have seen it happen actually a little bit more than 7%, at least in our breakup space. But that’s probably just because we’re getting some of the extreme attachment styles, but fearful, it’s kind of a combination between anxious and avoidant. Meaning they’ll flip-flop between these behaviors. One minute, they’ll be extremely anxious and, and sort of hot making you think that they want you. And then the next minute there’ll be extremely cold, making you think that they don’t want you.

This may be kind of weird hearing me talk about attachment style so much in something that seems super harmless. Like how do you act when you see your exit work? But I promise you, it relates because one of the big things that we noticed, especially when I did that study on YouTube and you can actually just go to my YouTube channel, just type my name in, Chris Seiter, C-H-R-I-S S-E-I-T-E-R.

And just look at the success stories that I put there.

And I noticed, the people who are successful seem to get over their exes. They seem to move on or not care about getting their exes back anymore. What they’re doing is they’re really mimicking or becoming secure. So most of the people that work with us have anxious attachment styles. They want their exes back. They’re the most likely people to be searching online for help on getting exes back.

And our work kind of helps them act more secure. So they kind of change their attachment style to be this more secure attachment style. So that’s how you need to act when you see your ex in person, think of it like this. A secure attachment style is allowed to get bothered by things, but they don’t let it ruin their day. They don’t obsess about it. They don’t look at their ex’s profile on Facebook 50,000 times, they don’t stock their ex or read into every little movement they make at work.

So if your ex is, let’s say flirting with a guy at work or flirting with a girl at work, a secure person will be, “Okay, they’re just going through their own process of handling the breakup. That’s fine. Let them have it. They can have it. I’ll be fine.” They understand and feel like they have the fortitude to handle it.

And that sort of mentality needs to go through in every single action that you take. So you don’t overreact when they do things, you try to remain cordial as much as possible. If you’re in the middle of no contact, you’re not bringing up reasons to actually extend a conversation until after the no contact rule is completed, but it is okay to make eye contact with them. It is okay to smile at them or wave at them.

We’re not telling you to be a robot. We’re telling you to be secure. Another way of looking at this is you need to be extremely comfortable in your skin. And I say that because a lot of men are not comfortable in their skin. There’s nothing more attractive to a woman when she can sense that the guy she previously dated is not only better than he was when he dated her, but also he’s extremely comfortable with who he is.

And I think that’s a huge missed opportunity that a lot of our clients don’t really ever achieve because they don’t buy into the idea. The key here is getting you to buy into the idea of a secure attachment style. You need to become secure with yourself. You need to become secure with the fact that your ex-girlfriend is broken up with you. You’re not together anymore. She’s not your best friend anymore. She’s an acquaintance now. And she needs to be treated like an acquaintance.

How would a secure attachment person treat an acquaintance? They treat them friendly, but they wouldn’t try to overstep their bounds. They give them space and feel like, “You know what? I’ll be fine on my own.” That’s the mentality that you need to have, even if you want her back. That’s how you need to act when you see your ex at work.

Today we’re going to be talking about what to text an ex who hates you or dislikes you.

Basically, you ended on very contentious terms and you’re trying to figure out how you can kind of bridge the gap and get a conversation started.

Now, one thing that we’re going to talk about today in this podcast episode is the fact that we may have finally found a way to do just that, and we’ve been looking for a very, very long time.

But first things first, if you haven’t already, make sure you stop everything you’re doing and take the Ex Recovery Chances Quiz that we have on our website here.

All you have to do if you want to take this quiz is simply click the prompt below. It’s free. It should only take you two minutes.

And by the end you should have pretty much a good idea on whether or not you should be trying to get your ex back or not, or simply be moving on in your particular circumstance.

So let’s talk about ex’s who really dislike you and you’re having trouble with texting them or starting a conversation with them.

So, always we’ve talked throughout the years … So I’ve been doing this for maybe, almost nine years now, which is a pretty long time because I feel like it’s just yesterday since I started this entire business up.

But my theory from the get-go has still proven to be the most effective one that we found, and that’s simply when you are going through a breakup and you determine that you want to get your ex back, the number one thing you should do, the theory that we have is to find a way to start a conversation with them, build value and move up the value ladder and the value chain.

So what are the value ladder and the value chains?

Well, basically the value ladder and value chains is this concept that I created to show you how different mediums occur in relationships, where you’re talking to them through text message, talking to them over the phone, talking to them in person and what you should be doing during those events.

And also the different types of conversations you need to be having with them during those type of mediums of conversations that you’ve been having.

I know it’s a little bit complicated, but if you actually go to our website, I’m going to put sort of a picture that sort of defines what this looks like visually and that should sort of clear it up. And if you’re wondering what our results have been, for the most part they’ve been pretty overwhelmingly positive, but we’ve always had one fly in the ointment, and that is contentious situations.

Now, we all know that when you go through a breakup emotions are bound to run high.

And usually when emotions bound to run high, you’re going to say things that you don’t mean, your ex is going to say things you don’t mean.

And of course when you say these things you’ll think you mean them, and when they see those things they’ll think they mean them. And of course, with the barriers of communication being what they are, it just leaves an icky feeling. Eh. But what’s interesting is, we view ex-girlfriend recovery not as a one size fits all situation, but as an organic process that’s constantly ever evolving. And that’s something and sometimes really hard for people to wrap their minds around.

See, a lot of people think that I have all the answers to their problems, that because I’ve created Ex-Girlfriend Recovery and seem to know what I’m talking about, that I know every single situation in the history of man and how to handle it.

And the truth is, I don’t. I know a lot of situations and how to handle them to give you the best chances of success, but even in circumstances where you do everything right you can still fail. And that’s a really hard pill for a lot of people to swallow, but it’s just simply the truth. And I’m not in the business of disguising the truth. The truth is that you can do everything right and still fail.

But there’s always been one really contentious issue that we’ve had, and that’s with issues where you and your ex are constantly fighting, you left on bad terms. How do you handle that? And for years we didn’t really recommend anything different for people who are in situations where … And let’s kind of structure it in levels. Let’s say level one is like you just get into a little petty disagreement and you breakup.

Level 10 is like you’re throwing things at the other person, and they’re throwing things back at you and it’s just really bad. Right?

What is the best way to handle those contentious situations? And after eight, nine years of doing this, we think we finally found a way to diffuse those contentious situations.

And the whole reason I’m recording this podcast, is because today in my private Facebook support group there was someone who went off script, and usually those people don’t fare too well. But in this particular case it was a woman, so it’s not exactly, for those of you who are men listening to this podcast, it’s not exactly a perfect fit to your situation, but I think the tactic and the technique still applies.

And that is, she used a strategy. She went off script. She used a strategy that we don’t recommend because we haven’t tested it out enough, but I’ve been reading a lot about it called labeling.

So let me set up the environment for you.

So there’s a girl in our private Facebook group, she purchased my program, the Ex-Boyfriend Recovery Program. Also, if you don’t know, I own a website also called Ex-Boyfriend Recovery in tandem with Ex-Girlfriend Recovery, and as you can guess, it helps women try to get ex’s back, and Ex-Girlfriend Recovery helps men trying to get ex’s back. I know, very original.

But anyway, she’s in the program, and you get access when you buy any of our programs to a private Facebook support group.

And she said she did a no contact rule. She did 45 days no contact rule.

This has been her third breakup. And she decided not to take our advised text messages, but to kind of do her own version of one. And I’m actually going to pull the text message up so that I can read it to you because I think it’s really interesting.

Okay. So, here is her text message word for word.

“Hey, hope all’s well, happy face. I was at work yesterday when a regular customer from Bridgewater came in. Reminded me to reach out to you and let you know I don’t hate your guts, laugh out loud. Hope you already know that. I truly pray that you’ll regain your blah, blah, blah,” and it just kind of goes on from there.

I basically said the important part that you needed to hear. So what’s interesting is the reason this text message stuck out to me … And by the way, she got a response and it was a really, really good response.

But the reason this text message stuck out to me is because I’ve been researching a concept.

I’ve been reading a book called Never Split the Difference. It’s by Chris Voss, he was the FBI’s lead international hostage negotiator.

So this guy was literally sent to hostage situations and forced to diffuse them.

And one thing he talks about in the book is the fact that you’re a failure if just one person loses their life.

So it’s kind of an all or nothing deal if you’re a hostage negotiator. And I figured, well, what a perfect thing to use for breakups, because many of my clients kind of put themselves in these all or nothing situations where they’re heartbroken if things don’t work out. And so, what is it that this FBI hostage negotiator’s doing to get people whose lives are literally on the line to actually pay attention and do what he wants?

And what’s interesting is I read in the book, and just some of the things that he was talking about there is mind blowing, and he kind of equates our lives to negotiation and how every little act we take part of is a negotiation in its own right. And he has all these different rules and regulations for what works in different styles of negotiating.

And one of the things that I really kind of gravitated towards or really resonated with, because I thought to myself, wow, I think that could work for my clients, is this concept of labeling.

So what is labeling?

Well, labeling is basically a way of validating someone’s emotion simply just by acknowledging it.

So you give someone’s emotion a name and you show that you identify with how that person feels. And also gets you close to someone without asking about the external factors that you don’t really know anything about. So what good negotiators do when labeling is they address those underlying emotions, they label negatives, they diffuse them.

So basically by labeling negative emotions that the person probably has, you diffuse them, or it can diffuse them. And then of course you have the flip side, labeling positive emotions reinforces them.

So this is really interesting concept, because if you actually just look at that text message that I just talked about, there’s two things happening there.

Number one is she didn’t even realize it, but she labeled her ex’s emotions. So they ended very contentiously, right?

There was a lot of arguments back and forth to the point where she was saying things that she didn’t really mean, and she labeled that emotion. So I’m going to read it back to you and you tell me where you see the labeling occurring, or rather I’ll just stop and tell you. “Hey, hope all is well. I was at work yesterday when a regular customer from Bridgewater came in.

It reminded me to reach out to you and let you know I don’t hate your guts. I actually really care about you. Hope you already know this.”

There’s a label right there.

So she’s making an assumption about her ex. She’s thinking her ex probably thinks about her, that she hates him. And by putting that on the table, she’s kind of diffusing the situation and calming the environment down so that they can actually have a conversation.

Now generally speaking, Chris Voss in Never Split the Difference, he’ll talk a lot about this concept of labeling them by using the following phrases, it seems like or it looks like. So a great example, this is something that happens with my daughter a lot. She’ll get really frustrated, she’ll be playing blocks, for example, and she’s stacking blocks on top of each other. And as inevitably happens, the blocks get bigger, and bigger, and taller, and taller and taller, it becomes harder for the blocks to stay on and eventually it will fall. And when it falls, she’ll freak out. She’ll go, ahhh. She’ll scream.

But the best thing you can do is not scream back at her, is to label her emotion. Is to say, “hey, wow, it looks like you’re really upset because the blocks fell down. Let me show you how you can do it so it won’t fall down next time.” It calms her right down because you’re showing that you understand their point of view.

And this is particularly useful in contentious scenarios. So let’s use a pretend situation. A pretend situation is, let’s say you are trying to get your ex-girlfriend back and your ex-girlfriend does not like you. In fact, she says, I really hate you. So a really great way to diffuse that, because she’s thinking about the awkwardness of that statement as well.

So let’s say you just normally use the original strategy we have, which is reaching out and trying to be witty and trying to start up a conversation. There’s still this awkwardness in the back of their mind.

This can even apply to no contact rule as well. Sometimes people get so worked up over the fact that they’re doing a no contact rule because their ex is going to get mad at them. Right? And so, they reach out to their ex and their ex is like, whoa, whoa, what the heck? You just ignored me for like 30 days. What the heck? So one of the best ways to diffuse situations like this is by labeling the situation or emotion that the ex is likely to have. So let’s use the extreme case where your ex says they dislike you or hate you.

Basically, you do an inverse of what I just read to you in the text message in our Facebook group. So where she says something along the lines of, “Hey, I wanted to let you know I don’t hate your guts, laugh out loud. I actually really care about you.” You can say, “well, I know you hate my guts and you don’t care about me, laugh out loud, but blah, blah, blah.”

By doing that, it kind of puts it out on the table, it diffuses whatever aggravation so that you know you’re both operating under the same rules, and you can just kind of get into having a conversation that you want to have. Now, there’s another element that sort of works here in favor of this, because it can be extremely awkward, especially in text messages, if you just sort of start a text message out like that without camouflaging it.

Camouflage, I can’t give credit to this. This is actually one of my friends who came up with this concept when we were kind of game planning it back and forth. And he was talking about this need for camouflage where you label someone’s emotion. It can be a little awkward to that person and to you to label an emotion, something as strong as like an ex hating you.

So you should do what this person whose text message I’m reading did, she camouflaged it as a joke. So here, let me read it to you again. “Hey, hope all is well.” That’s not a camouflage. “I was at work yesterday when a regular customer from Bridgewater came in here,” this is the camouflage, “reminded me to reach out to you and let you know I don’t hate your guts, laugh out loud. I actually really care about you.” She turned it into a joke. So basically someone from her job came in from a town that her ex is from, which of course reminded her to reach out to him and let him know that she doesn’t hate him, laugh out loud. That LOL is really important there, because it shows that she’s not taking it too seriously and he shouldn’t either. You should do this. This is a way of camouflaging and kind of getting your labeling attempt to blend into the text message.

So, let me do a quick recap before we end this podcast, because this is a really advanced technique that I’m sure a lot of people are going to go crazy with, without even knowing how to do it properly. The first thing is you should really only do this in situations where you know for a fact there’s a contentious issue at the forefront. This is where maybe you’ve done a no contact rule and your ex gets really angry about the fact that you’ve done a no contact rule on them. This is also where maybe you guys ended on really horrible terms where your ex-girlfriend said some really mean things to you. This can also be a case where you said something really mean your ex, like this particular person did right here.

So once you do that, once you identify or think like, hey, I’m in a situation where I think this could work, next you need to understand how to label the behavior or the emotion. So label it. Figure out exactly what it is that’s the stressor of the issue. And then once you figure out the stressor, you must find a way to camouflage it so that it sounds kind of not necessarily like a joke, but kind of like you’re not making it as big a deal as it seems. This will ease the tension and lower their guard to the point where they may engage you in a conversation. Now, this is something that we have not tested, it’s just an idea that we saw one of our clients implement in the Facebook group without any sort of prompting from myself, and it seemed to work positively.

With that being said, it’s a bit of a wild card at this point because we don’t know, we haven’t tested it across the masses yet. But my gut tells me that it’s an extremely effective approach, especially if you’re looking to find a way to ease yourself into a conversation with your ex.

Okay, so today we’re going to do something a little bit different.

Now normally what I do is I leave kind of the phone lines open. I let people leave voicemails to ask me a question, and then I answer those questions, but I thought I’d kind of flip the script a little bit and let you behind the scenes into one of my coaching sessions.

So right now there’s just this really awesome guy that I’m coaching.

And I asked him, I said, “Hey, if there was one question that you wanted an answer to more than anything, what would that be?”

And so he wrote down the question for me. I’m going to read it. And after I read it, I’m going to kind of riff, kind of give you an idea, because I read his question obviously before I started recording.

And I think it’s going to not only tackle a lot of the emotions that happen after a breakup, but also a lot of the doubt and the worry, and sort of how you kind of have to embark on this program with not a lot of faith that you’re going to succeed in the end. And that’s really difficult to deal with.

So without further ado, here’s his question.

So I ask him real quick, “If there’s one question that you wanted an answer to you more than anything, what would it be?”

Here’s his response.

“I just totally feel that it’s a lost cause at this point, Chris. I’m speaking from my head and not my heart. She truly loves this guy and only calls me when it comes to money situations. She has acknowledged multiple times that he can’t keep up with her bills and lifestyle, but that she truly loves him. Today is my 40th birthday. And her and I were supposed to spend some time together and she said that wouldn’t be fair to the other guy. The writing is on the wall. And it’s time for me to walk away. She said that she feels he is going to ask her to marry him eminently, and she is going to say yes. So I guess I don’t have any questions. I think it’s overdue that I walk away and understand it. I lost.”

Okay.

So I’m actually just going to talk directly to my client now.

So I don’t want that to throw any of you off because essentially what this is is sort of like a little bit behind the scenes coaching call, where no names are going to be used, and we’re just going to be dealing with the situation at hand.

So here’s what we got.

We got essentially a situation where you’re sitting there, not necessarily feeling sorry for yourself, but you’re kind of wallowing in the despair because so much seems to be going wrong.

So here’s what in your head is going wrong.

And so I’m not going to sit here and tell you what to do, but here’s what I will say. For the past few weeks I’ve been doing this really interesting thing on my other website, Ex Boyfriend Recovery.

So you found me through Ex Girlfriend Recovery.

Basically the whole website is teaching men how to handle breakups, what to do if they want their ex back, or even what to do if they want to get over their exes. But believe it or not, Ex Girlfriend Recovery started after Ex Boyfriend Recovery did.

Ex Boyfriend Recovery was for women basically in the exact same scenario.

Now the real big difference between these two websites isn’t the fact that, hey, one’s for men, one’s for women.

It’s the fact that there’s a lot more women that search breakup questions than men. So when I look at the vast majority of the success stories, people who have gone through my program, gotten their exes back successfully, I have mostly women to draw from. And this is a little difficult because there’s a lot of men wanting hope. And I think that’s kind of what you’re looking for.

The breakups, you’re going to go through many different phases of one minute you’re going to be angry, the next minute you’re going to want them back, then you’ll be angry again. It’s almost like you go through the five stages of grief and then you have a relapse again. I’ve seen that happen multiple times.

But I think when we look at your situation, I actually don’t see it as that bad. So if you remember, when we first started working together, you were paying for all of her bills. She was living at your house, she was dating some new guy, and you basically drew the line. You said, “No more. I’m not going to do that.” And she freaked out on you, like we predicted she would. And like we predicted, she and the new guy right now are in the midst of the honeymoon period. And that honeymoon period is going to end eventually. And that’s when the shine’s going to wear off when she’s got the expensive lifestyle with the bills and everything like that.

And so as odd as it sounds, and the reason I bring up the success stories on the Ex Boyfriend Recovery is because I’ve been doing this really cool study for pretty much for every single week for the past two months, I’ve been drip feeding one large success story interview I’ve been having with women who’ve gotten their exes back on my YouTube channel.

And ultimately I came into these success story interviews with zero ego.

Meaning I didn’t really care what people did to get their exes back.

All I care about is results. What is working?

And what’s really interesting is the normal things you would expect to work obviously worked, but there were a few things that shocked me.

Number one was often times it was the women who literally got to this point where they just didn’t care about getting their exes back anymore, where they were willing to walk away, that all of a sudden their ex pays attention to them.

And we can go into the psychology behind maybe why this works, but I guess here’s my point. When I look at your situation, and I’m not there like a fly on the wall to see how your interactions are going, or anything like that, but maybe there’s a certain amount of desperation that she senses from you.

So you and her still talk, even though she’s with the new guy.

And I guess my problem with that isn’t necessarily that it’s a problem. It’s that maybe when you’re talking to her, she can sense the desperation of how badly you want her back.

I guess my point is, if you have a conversation with her where you are just literally like savage, you just don’t care if you get her back.

I’m wondering if she has a different opinion.

I also would make the argument that right now all seems lost, but it’s not necessarily lost. And the reason I say that, it’s because she’s in the midst of the honeymoon period. She’s still with the new guy. Things are still great with them. The honeymoon period can sometimes last as much as six months.

And it takes forever, six months is a long time, before the shine wears off. In fact, I actually think with this particular person, if the guy does propose to her, it’s not going to be, it’s not going to be solidified. I kind of see it more as he’s going to do what he can to just sort of keep her happy, but I don’t think they’ll actually walk down the aisle, because we already know that your ex-girlfriend loves the lavish lifestyle and he can not provide it for her.

So I guess my point is, there’s a point where you can sit and kind of wallow in the pain, and I think you’re allowed to do that. But if I was you, I wouldn’t look at it as this negative thing, like I’ll never get her back. That’s weird for me to say that, because usually I’m all for like, “Hey, it’s okay. If you want to move on, let’s move on.” But I honestly believe that sort of just standing up for yourself, showing you have a spine, basically not caring for her anymore, is the key to getting her.

And I think you kind of saw that happen a little bit, because you would talk sometimes to her friends. Immediately after you essentially kicked her out of the house, because she was basically mooching off of you, she goes berserk because it’s a clear indicator that you’re like, “I don’t care anymore. I’m not going to put up with your stuff anymore.”

And I guess my point is, I’m wondering if you’ve regressed a little bit, because you went through kind of this no-contact period, and then you got back in touch with her, but you didn’t get back in touch with her the correct type of way.

You got back in touch with her, you saw her in person, and she can see how much you still want her back. Even if you’re hiding it, I think she can see, because I don’t think it’s something that you can fake.

And sometimes the smartest, and I was talking to a professional psychologist the other day, I was interviewing them for my podcast. And they said something really fascinating to me. It was this woman, her name’s Antia Boyd.

She’s really good. She only really specializes in helping women get men, but it was kind of really fascinating because she talked a lot about how she broke up with her husband before they got married, and why she did it, and how he got her back.

And the real thing I took from it was she’s really big into the attachment styles and how we grow up with these different attachment styles, you have insecure attachment, you have anxious attachment, avoidant attachment. Sometimes you can have combinations, anxious/avoidant, but the Holy Grail, when it comes to attachment styles is secure attachments.

And so I can’t remember what she said she was, I think she was like an anxious/avoidant.

So things were going really, really well with her and her soon to be husband. And then she breaks up with him because it’s like, “This is going too well. I can’t deal with this.” And so she just avoided the problem.

She broke up with him. And he did something kind of brilliant. He was like, “Okay.” And just went on with his life. And that made her sit back and think, “What’s going on? Why isn’t he acting like he cared at all?” And it kind of intrigued her. It took her like a few months, but she came back to him and things just kind of started up real naturally again with them.

And then when they were kind of together, she asked him, she said, “Hey, when I broke up with you, what were you thinking?” And he was a secure attachment style, by the way, his response was essentially, “Well, I just thought you needed time, so I was going to give you the time, and I just sort of didn’t care.”

And I guess my point is, that’s how you need to act. Any time someone goes through a breakup, they don’t really act secure.

They act insecure, they act anxious, they act crazy. And as much as you may feel in your interactions that you knocked it out of the park, and I don’t know every single interaction that you had with her in the past few weeks, but any type of interaction you’ve had with her, I think honestly, she’s sensing maybe the inherent want that you have to get back with her.

So as odd as it sounds, having you say at the end, “Yeah, I think I just walk away and understand I lost it.” I think that’s actually kind of the correct attitude to have, but I would make one small alteration.

I wouldn’t sit there and say, “I lost it.” I would stare and say, “Okay, I’ll walk away give her time, whatever. I don’t care. I can find someone better.” That’s the attitude I think you need to have to make her sort of come back, because she’ll just be drawn to you naturally.

I know it’s kind of cliche advice, but the psychology behind it is essentially you’re going to be acting like a secure individual. It’s almost like, “Hey, if you need to find this thing out with this other guy, go for it.” And be cool with it because no guy is like that.

So that is my initial response to kind of feeling like you’re losing hope. And like this is a lost cause, because I think in many times when you feel like it’s a lost cause, I think you need kind of the paradigm shift. And the paradigm shift is it’s not necessarily a lost cause, I think if you feel like it’s a lost cause then you’re not doing the Ex Girlfriend Recovery program aspects right, because the goal is to get you to a place emotionally where you’re like, “I don’t care if it’s a lost cause. I’m so secure and confident with myself that I just know she’ll be drawn back to me. And if she isn’t, whatever.”

What we’re finding in success stories just from interviewing them is almost all of them have this attitude. I will say there’s a few outliers who I think sometimes say they have the attitude, but don’t really have it or they just got lucky. But the ones who have the most difficult situations where their ex has moved on to someone new like your ex has moved on to someone new, I think this attitude is what you need to have. And it’s a hard thing because it’s not something you can fake. You need to be so secure with yourself that essentially just by being, just by being you, being who you are, she’ll be drawn to you.

Hey there and welcome to another episode of the Ex Girlfriend Recovery Podcast.

Today, we’re going to be taking on one of the arguably, the most difficult situation you can find yourself in if you are going through a breakup and have decided that you want to get your ex girlfriend back.

And that’s what to do if you have cheated on your ex girlfriend and your relationship has been extremely toxic. How do you overcome that?

So we’re going to be hearing from a man named anonymous. He didn’t want to be named, who’s going to give us kind of a breakdown of his situation. And his situation is really, really heavy. There’s a lot going on there. In fact, generally speaking, when I post these voicemails I get, I usually only give people about a minute and a half to talk.

He was still talking after that minute and a half. So I had to cut him off for brevity’s sake, but pretty much got what we needed to know to help him on what to do going forward.

Without further ado, here is his message.

Me and my girlfriend been broken up for about maybe two months and a half, three.

It all happened over a dumb fight. And we’ve been toxic, we’ve argued a lot. I’ve cheated because I was insecure and I thought she was up to no good. Then I found out the truth after she broke up with me, she wanted to tell me the truth.

We had sex, but she’s like hot and cold and then now she hates me, spreads all these rumors about me in town and she’s dating some other guy who I guess has money.

I don’t know if I’ll ever have a chance to get her back, I don’t hear from her, I haven’t spoken to her, I haven’t broken no contact.

I think I’ve been in no contact for almost like a month and a half.

I’m willing to at least talk to her and try to figure something out or, I don’t know, fix things, but I don’t think she wants to speak to me at all. I don’t think I have a chance at all. I don’t think she really likes me too much anymore. So I don’t know. She just went straight up cold and distant and just talk smack and I’m waiting for the gym to open so I could work workout.

But we were together for basically like three years. We did everything together. Cook, hang out, play video games, everything. Now she’s just stuck up that guy’s ass and she won’t even take care of her son and she’s keeping like a fake image.

Okay. So there’s obviously a lot going on here to unpack.

And before I really start advising, I want to kind of explain to people how I typically view situations like this.

So generally speaking, when I’m working with a client, the very first thing that always enters my mind is understanding that they are in a highly emotional state. And sometimes this emotional state can creep in sometimes in their explanations and I feel that’s what happened here.

So what you’re getting, when … And just from the 30,000 foot perspective, so you can actually see how I handle situations like this. What you’re getting here as someone who’s in a highly emotional state that’s trying to quickly describe everything that’s going on, but they can’t really put concrete words to it. So you’ll notice his explanations are all over the place.

And if we can guess when we’re looking at this situation is like putting it in a timeline.

To me, I would say, “Okay look, they probably broke up. And the catalyst of the breakup is him cheating on her.” And then after that, they started talking again, back and forth and it looks to me like they had makeup sex or they had some type of rekindling, but ever since then, she’s been hot and cold.

So he read about no contact somewhere, whether that’s on ex-girlfriend recovery or somewhere else and decided to implement it for one and a half months, but she hasn’t been reaching out to him at all. And now that he sees he’s been in no contact she’s with some other guy. So there’s a lot to unpack here.

So I think the number one thing I would point out here is when you’re dealing with a situation with cheating involved, there’s multiple layers that you need to peel back. And the first layer I think is, it’s a huge broken aspect of trust. And what really we need to understand about cheating is how men perceive cheating and how women perceive cheating. And it’s interesting if you guys have any time, one person I would really recommend you follow and listen to, especially if you have cheated on your ex girlfriend and you’re trying to get her back, which is arguably, I would argue it’s probably the worst situation to be in.

That broken trust is just not easy to earn back and usually it doesn’t happen overnight. So I mean, it could take years to recover a breakup or recover a situation like that. But one person who I consider to be one of the more foremost experts on it is a woman by the name of Esther Perel. And so if you actually listen to Esther Perel’s talks about cheating. She has some really interesting insights like relating around guilt.

So for example, one thing we know about men and women who cheat is they do feel a certain amount of guilt afterwards, but not for the act itself. The act itself, even if it was kind of a spontaneous type of thing, was exciting to them.

They feel guilt because they don’t want to hurt their partner. And then another thing we’re learning about how men and women cheat in one of the big differences is oftentimes when men cheat, they can still be pretty much in love with the person that they’re with.

So it’s almost like they’re a slave to their emotions or they’re slave to their hard wiring.

The whole aspect of men are kind of meant to spread their seed to as many hosts as possible because it’s how evolution works and how our human race will survive. And what’s interesting is you can even see this in marriages. A lot of times marriages end after about seven years, what happens is, you’ll get married, then you’ll have kids, right?

And usually they stay pretty faithful to the woman for about seven years until the kid can fend for himself. And then that’s when a lot of marriages break up, they go on and they find a new partner, impregnate them, rinse and repeat. Now it doesn’t always work that way, but this kind of explains to you, maybe the thinking behind evolutionary feelings and how cheating works.

The other interesting thing is actually how women cheat. So women cheat, not usually because they’re still in love with the person they cheated on with. It’s the exact opposite. In fact, women often who cheat are so checked out of the relationship, they feel trapped. They’re just looking to get away. So oftentimes they’ll cheat if they have no romantic connection with that person they’re with any more.

And what we have here is a guy who cheated on his ex-girlfriend. So and what’s interesting, it almost seems kind of a revenge type of a vengeance approach to it. Almost like, “Okay, well things are going bad, I’m not liking how she’s treating me in this relationship. So I’m going to show her, I’m going to go sleep with so and so.” And it seems to me, that’s the approach he took.

And also you look at the relationship, self admittedly he mentions it was a very toxic relationship, so they’re fighting a lot and there’s lots of fight about anytime cheating gets involved, anytime other, she’s dating another guy now, he feels like he’s being pulled hot and cold. And I feel like one of the big issues is this is the classic case of the on-again, off-again relationship where nothing ever changes.

So, it’s like they’re moth to a flame constantly just drawn back to each other, but nothing changes. And I think that’s the issue I see with the on-again, off-again relationship relationships is the fact that, a lot of times when people enter into these situations, when they hit the off again phase, they don’t really set pause or hit pause and do some soul searching and try to understand like, “How can I be better?What can I do so that this doesn’t happen again?”

Instead they just jump in very emotionally to the relationship again, nothing has changed and you expect different result. It’s the whole Einstein quote, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. Well, something needs to change. And really this is the most challenging part about the whole situation. It’s the fact that he doesn’t just need to change his approach, but she needs to change her approach as well.

But he can be the catalyst for her change. And what I mean by that is, obviously she’s upset about the fact that he cheated on her. But that didn’t stop them from rekindling and getting back together. But I think part of the issue, the reason why they broke up again is because he didn’t change his behavior maybe in the on again phase. And she’s like, this is the same old stuff breaks up with him he’s there hot and cold.

And now he’s just confused as like, “Okay, what do I have to do?” And if you want my honest advice on what you should do in situations like these, it is to literally do a long period of no contact like 45 days, 60 days and be focusing on not your ex-girlfriend, but something you’re extremely passionate about.

Something that has nothing to do with romantic relationships. And a lot of times I think people, men specifically take like, “Hey, take some time focus on yourself.” They take it as like, “Okay, well I’ll just go out and I’ll just date a bunch of other girls.” No, this is all about you finding something that you’re passionate about outside of relationships. Now, why should you do that?

Well, it’ll do a couple of things. It will harbor change within you, but it will also kind of be like, “Wow, he’s not dating. He’s not doing what I would expect him to do.” You specifically mentioned you have a really toxic relationship where you cheated on her. So immediately her red flags are up. She’s thinking, okay, he’s just going to go sleep with as many girls as possible. And I guess my point is, you shouldn’t do that if you’re serious about getting her back.

The other thing is, she’s dating someone new and you mentioned he’s got money, but in the end, I think that matters a little bit, I’m not going to lie, but it doesn’t matter as much as the connection you have with a specific individual. So how do you deal with someone who’s, you have an ex who’s moved on to someone new? And this is a problem that plagued us for a very long time when I first started my coaching business on ex-boyfriend recovery and ex-girlfriend recovery.

So if you’re not aware of the history, basically I started ex-boyfriend recovery to help women get their ex’s back or move on from their relationships in 2012. And in the first year we got so much traction. I decided, “Hey, this would be kind of a cool thing to do for men.” So bang here we are. And what’s really interesting is one of the biggest fears we’d noticed that men and women would have after breakups is, what happens if my ex moves on to someone new? And we didn’t really have a way or an approach to attack that, to make progress and figure out here’s what you need to do.

Instead, we gave all the wrong advice. But slowly but surely, we started kind of understanding what works and what doesn’t work. So we came up with something called The Being There method. So here’s how The Being There method works or essentially how it’s meant to work. And it really only works if you have a secure attachment style. What do I mean by that? Well, there’s different types of attachment styles and really our upbringing and our environment and how we react to all sorts of different situations will create our specific attachment styles.

So you have insecure attachment style, you have anxious attachment style, you have avoidant attachment style, you have secure attachment style. So if you want The Being There method to work, I really think that the prerequisite needs to be that you have to be extremely secure with yourself. You have to own all of your insecurities. You have to embrace your insecurities. You have to be okay with losing your ex-girlfriend completely. You just need to be like the ultimate alpha male who won’t react or overreact to ridiculous things.

Once you have that mentality, you are specifically going to friend zone yourself to your ex-girlfriend. So you’re specifically just going to be that ex-boyfriend that she has, that she talks to and can rely on emotionally. Because what’s going to happen is more often than not, you are testing the connection that they have and it’s really, and I’ll admit it, it’s kind of a morally gray approach.

But you’re testing this connection that your ex girlfriend has with this new guy. And chances are the new guy won’t be super secure. He will be insecure. He will cause fights. And it will be this really interesting juxtaposition where she’s looking at how you’re approaching the situation and she has a direct comparison with how her current boyfriend is approaching the situation.

And naturally speaking, I think the other aspect of it is, no girl is going to want to come back to a toxic situation. That’s not going to be what they’re going to be drawn to. And I think this is why The Being There method can work so well. If you really have that secure vibe, she will only feel like security, love and warmth from you essentially. Whereas if you’re insecure about how you approach it and you’re toxic in how you approach it, and you’re fighting all the time, it’s kind of like you’re drawn away from that.

You don’t want to enter into a situation where it’s going to make you feel bad. It’s a whole good feelings versus bad feelings theory. We are drawn naturally to things that make us feel good and we repel things that make us feel bad. And you’re putting your ex’s connection on the hook here for that. And hopefully naturally she’s drawn to you and you have kind of a weird, unfair advantage because it seems like you were together with her for over three years and she had a lot of highs with you, but she’s also had a lot of lows.

And so I guess the trick is to get her to figure out those highs. But also I think the other aspect is you need some sort of ace in the hole. And so the best ace in the hole, if you’ve cheated on someone is complete trust. So if you get them back, what you need to do is institute something where like, “Look, I understand that’s going to take a long time to rebuild trust with you. So here’s my recommendation. I think that anytime you feel that something’s amiss, you can come over to my house, unchecked, unsupervised, pick up my phone and look through it. I will not delete anything, I want you to see everything. I am an open book.”

And by offering that to her, it’s a change. She’s like, “Oh, that’s new. I can’t believe that.” And it also shows that you’re really willing to make that work almost to the point where you’re willing to have no privacy with her, and you’re allowing her to have her own privacy. And I think that’s a good way to approach to build a good relationship on how to handle cheating.

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Ex Girlfriend Recovery Podcast. Make sure you subscribe to us on iTunes and leave an honest rating and review. Also, don’t forget to take the free quiz to show you what kind of chance you have with your ex on our website, www.exgirlfriendrecovery.com. We’ll see you next week.

Today, like always, we’re going to be taking a listener question.

Now, if you didn’t already know the format of the show is basically we take listener questions, we’ll take like a minute-and-a-half question, and then I just riff and give my thoughts on the situation based on what I’m seeing because I’ve dealt with so many breakups situations from people who want to get their exes back and even for people who want nothing to do with their exes.

I give my best piece of advice to the person on how they should approach their situation going forward.

Now, the number one question that people tend to ask is what kind of chance do I have of getting my ex girlfriend back?

I think probably the better thing to do when you find yourself asking this question is to actually just hop over our website and take a special quiz that I put together that’s designed to answer this question for you. Now, all you have to do if you want to take that quiz is simply just stop everything you’re doing, go to Google or just type in your phone exgirlfriendrecovery.com.

Then right there on the homepage, there’ll be a little ad to take this free quiz.

The free quiz basically will give you an idea of where you stand with your ex so you’re not wasting your time, because believe me when I say there’s nothing worse than wasting your time in a situation where you really don’t have a great shot.

Okay, with all of the precursor-type stuff out of the way, let’s actually talk about what we’re going to be talking about today.

What’s up, man? Long story short, since I only have 90 seconds, my girlfriend broke up with me about a month and a half ago. We were dating for two years. She just said that she seems really confused and she doesn’t know what she wants. At first, I thought there was another guy in the picture or another guy that she possibly started to like, but I know for a fact there’s not now.

It’s funny because her behavior on social media, just you can tell that she’s confused. Even my friends are like, “What’s she doing?” She’s just posting a bunch of stories on her Instagram, which she never really has done before. I actually saw her a few nights ago and she came over and she gave me a big hug and was flirting with me. She just said she feels really weird, but even when she came over, it seemed like we weren’t even broken up. We still acted like a couple.

I’ve been going no contact and it seems like every four or five days she’ll reach out to me and tell me she misses me and all that. Yeah, I’m just, I guess, just trying to give her her time and space and hopefully she figures out what she wants soon, but yeah, it’s just a confusing situation. If you have any input, that’d be great.

Okay, let’s take it from the top. The first thing I like to do typically when people leave questions is to just summarize them so we’re both working from the same page. I was actually trying to pick a question, and for those of you who want to be featured on the podcast, my best piece of advice to you is to be clear and concise like this message.

This message from Anonymous, you’ll notice he wasn’t all over the place. He spoke very clearly, he had a very good connection, and his question was something that I feel like a lot of people struggle with.

Let’s summarize his situation.

Here are my thoughts, Mr. Anonymous. First things first, let’s go back to the start and talk about this breakup.

Typically, what I tell my clients is that when a girl breaks up with you, she’s not going to often tell you the real reason she broke up with you because she’s worried it will hurt your ego or hurt your feelings. On some level, even if there is a lot of anger and maybe even hatred, they don’t want to hurt you deeply. I find women are especially sensitive to a men’s feelings.

When she says she’s confused and when she says she doesn’t know what she wants, that is technically a lie.

The fact is, she does know what she wants, she just thinks it isn’t you. I’m also getting vibes here of the grass is greener syndrome.

If you don’t already know, the grass is greener syndrome is this very common thing that people go through when they’re with someone for enough time to feel like they peeled back all the layers and understand everything they need to know about the relationship and what’s in the relationship and so on and so forth.

I noticed you said that you’re dating her for two years, and then this breakup occurs where she says she’s confused and she doesn’t know what she wants, which is basically an admission that, “Hey, I don’t want this. I want something else.”

You also are immediately worried that there may be some other guy, so instinctively you kind of understand she’s looking for other people, thereby she has a bit of the grass is greener syndrome. Typically, there’s one of two reactions that will occur when you have the grass is greener syndrome.

Number one is you essentially learn the grass is greener on the other side.

Now, what do I mean by that? Well, what I mean by that is let’s say you had, Anonymous, broken up with her, and the whole reason is you think you can do better than her. You go out, you go on a few dates, and you realize you can do better than her. You find someone else who’s better than your ex. That’s outcome number one.

Outcome number two is the grass is greener syndrome and the grass isn’t greener on the other side. I actually tend to think this is the more common thing that happens, and it’s interesting if you look into the psychology behind why it happens. Especially in long term relationships, and granted, dating for two years can be a pretty long time I think, especially with our attention spans now. With the millennials going into the dating age so much, we have been almost structured in a way where we expect instant results in our lives.

Oftentimes, the number one thing that always pops into my mind or the number one anecdote is my dad, when he used to go on trips, he would literally have the map out. He’d mapped the trip out on the map with the roads and everything.

Now, if you asked me to do that, guess what’s going to happen? I’m going to get lost because I don’t know how to do that. I’ve been trained by my phone to use GPS. You get instant, quick results. This is really great because people often pay for convenience, right? We pay to have things delivered quicker to us, but it’s not very good or it doesn’t have really any applications to relationships.

What I mean by that is oftentimes our quick results mentality can come into relationships where you expect everything to happen really quickly. When dating for two years, while that doesn’t seem like enough, your ex-girlfriend may feel like she knows everything there is to know about the relationship, everything that it has to offer, and it gets boring to her.

Therefore, she goes and starts dating someone new or starts looking for someone new.

But a really funny thing happens.

They do say absence makes the heart grow fonder, and that has been my experience as well.

You can even see the recent … I was reading some really interesting articles over the weekend on the psychology of playing hard to get and why it works and how it still works even in today’s day and age. What’s really interesting is when your ex-girlfriend breaks up with you, assuming you had a good body of work in the relationship to draw from, assuming there was lots of good memories, assuming you were a great boyfriend and all of that stuff, the longer she spends away from you and starts experiencing going on dates with other people, she doesn’t have to sleep with someone, she doesn’t have to even go get a new boyfriend, just simply going on dates with other people, she will begin to romanticize the past. This is where that grass is greener syndrome comes into play, where she realizes, “Hey, maybe I had it better than I thought.”

What’s really interesting is I can’t help but notice that your specific ex-girlfriend, she’s coming over and acting like you’re still dating. This to me indicates that she does have a bit of this grass is greener syndrome, where she’s gone out maybe to experience life and it’s not going as well as she thought.

Now, you can also take the devil’s advocate side of that and come into it from a perspective of, oh my goodness, she is settling. She’s going back into old routines because she’s scared of going out there and she wants to go to someplace safe, where she feels you’re safe.

What do you do if this happens?

Because this is certainly a worry that you have to worry about. Well, I couldn’t also help notice that you said you’re trying the no-contact rule. The paradox is you said you’re trying it, but it seems like you’re breaking it, so you’re not really trying it. One thing that we do know is the more times you do the no-contact rule, meaning you try it and then you fail it, the less effective it can become. Now, is that the be all, end all? Will it fail every single time? Let’s say you fail eight times, will it fail the ninth time? Not necessarily, but for the most part, it will become way less effective the more you have to do it. it’s almost better to just go in and kind of go and skate.

You’re not going to really give your ex a chance to properly miss you unless you are willing to make that commitment and do that no-contact rule, and it seems like you haven’t done that. That’s where my tweak of advice should, would come in for you, because yes, you’re getting some kind of positive results. I mean, she’s acting very odd on social media. This is, to me, not that crazy, right? A lot of people hyper obsess about the likes they get on social media or what your ex-girlfriend is posting or things like that because they’re paying attention. I actually think her acting really weird on social media is normal breakup behavior.

But in order for you to build the foundation of starting over, you need to take a situation with your ex-girlfriend and get through a full no-contact period without seeing her or talking to her. That’s going to be hard because especially in your situation, where you have an ex-girlfriend this volatile who will literally come back and she will probably confront you about the fact that you’re ignoring her, your brain and your worry is going to take hold. Your fear will take hold and you’ll be thinking, “Oh my God, what if I lose my chance of getting her forever?” The thing I always like to remind people of is you’ve already lost her. What you’re doing is you’re trying or you’re taking a calculated risk to improve your position. You’re taking a calculated risk by using an action to show her that you’re not going to allow yourself to be used emotionally.

That’s the other, and final, thing that I’d like to talk to you about. We talked so far about the grass is greener syndrome, Mr. Anonymous, and we’ve talked a little bit about why you say you’re doing the no-contact rule but you’re really not doing the no-contact rule. You’re consistently failing it and why you should not fail it. But there’s a third thing that I want to talk to you about, and that’s being the emotional crutch for your ex-girlfriend.

One of the big things about breakups that not a lot of people realize is the routine that we get into. Routines, we’re slave to our routines, but we have more routines than even we realize. For example, you have a talking routine, you have a certain way in which you communicate with her. Most of us it’s through texts nowadays. Some people, especially in long distance relationships, it will be through phone calls. Other people, it will be just seeing each other in person, they communicate better that way. Those are routines. Then of course you have the frequency routine. How frequent are you guys talking to each other? Then you have the emotional support routine, which is your ex-girlfriend coming to you or your girlfriend coming to you and talking to you about her day and you lending support.

What we tend to see happen, especially in long term relationships … I can classify yours as a long term relationship, two years is a long time to be with one person, specifically when you’re not married. When you’re married, the rules shift and the dynamic shifts, but you’re not married, you’re just dating. Two years is a pretty long time to be with someone. After two years, she’s probably so used to coming to you and relying on you for emotional support. She always has this innate feeling that she can always rely on you, so when times get tough she’ll come back to you and try to get that emotional support. This is the challenge, because men, we often fall victim to the hero complex. We always want to be the problem solvers. We want to be God in their minds. We want them to be coming to us for their problems. Yet, the difficult part is after a breakup you need to basically say, “I’m not going to do that for you anymore.”

What I’m thinking is happening here is she’s got a bit of the grass is greener syndrome, she’s coming back to what feels familiar with you, and she feels that she can rely on you for emotional support. Maybe it seems like there might be some physical aspects to it as well. I mean, you didn’t get into that, probably because you were embarrassed to talk about maybe you slept with her. It does seem like you were alluding to that, because she came over a few nights ago and you were acting like a couple. I can only imagine that means you guys got physical. This revolves around the same idea as well. She’s coming back into what feels familiar physically and emotionally.

My point is, if you want your ex-girlfriend back, if you really truly want her back, you don’t want to be the same guy she fell for. Now, that’s weird because most of us want that, but what my point is is you want to be the guy that she literally looks at with a new twist. Yes, you have the ability to offer all these old things, but there’s a new side to you, something new that she can look at you for and say, “Wow, that’s different. I like that.”

Think of it like the sequel to a movie. Let’s say there’s a beloved movie that you watch in the movie theaters and you’re like, “This is like the best movie I’ve ever seen.” What’s interesting is a lot of times people will go and watch the same movie over and over and over again. It doesn’t really hold the same punch that first time that you watched it, the second time you watch it. It’s still really good, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not as good. Well, if you’re with someone for a long time, it’s kind of like watching the same movie over and over and over again, until the sequel comes out, and then the sequel comes out and you get real excited.

Think of this like your sequel. It’s going to have a lot of the same elements of that first relationship, but you want to add new elements, new layers for her to peel back and be fascinated by. I think this analogy, it’s a really great allegory for being in a long term relationship as well, because the number one issue long term relationships face is growing stale. It’s because it feels like you’re watching reruns over and over and over again. That’s why you need to add a sequel in every once in a while.

That’s my advice to you, Anonymous. Be the sequel, not the original.

Today we’re going to be doing something a little bit unique. You see, most of the times when I start these podcast episodes I have a really clear idea of what I’m going to say whenever I take a voicemail from a listener.

But today I listened to this voicemail from Brian, I believe his name was, and I came up blank on exactly what he should do. And I thought this is a perfect opportunity for not only me to challenge myself but for you to maybe get an insight into how my brain works and how your brain should be working if you’re going through a breakup.

What makes Brian’s situation unique? Well, essentially he’s not only trying to get his ex-girlfriend back, he’s trying to get his Fiancé back. His Fiancé essentially left him, moved out of the state and blocked him.

What is he going to do? Well, that’s what we’re going to try to organically come to a conclusion about today. But first things first, the number one question that I’m always getting on my websites and on my YouTube channel and even on this podcast is, “Chris, what kind of chance do I have of getting my ex-girlfriend back? Should I be trying to get my ex-girlfriend back or should I be trying to move on?”

Hi Chris, my name is Brian.

I’m a follower of your channel and I just had a quick question for you about my breakup. Me and my ex-fiancée have been together four years and we broke up two months ago because she found out that I had been talking to an old girlfriend online, an emotional affair type of thing.

Never met up with her, never done anything with her outside, just had a short little conversation with her. She got mad, she moved out of our home, left the state that we lived in to go live with her sister, changed her phone number and blocked me on all platforms of communication.

We’ve been at no contact for two months since this happened. I was wondering what the chances were of trying to rekindle this.

I have to say that without a doubt Brian is in one of the most difficult situations that you can imagine.

You see, one thing I always tell people is they need to get comfortable with this idea of no, embracing the no, embracing rejection, because ultimately rejection is where you learn but it also opens up some type of communication with an ex. If you reach out to them and they’re angry at you for example, that’s a lot better than you reaching out to them and they block you completely.

Let’s get an accounting of Brian’s situation.

And essentially he’s wondering what are the chances to try to rekindle this?

Okay, there’s a lot to go on here, there’s a lot to unfold.

And I think I’d like to first start with the blocking bit, because ultimately what you need to understand from what we’ve learned about when exes block you, it is almost always an emotional response to the breakup, that seems to be what happens here.

Most of the times, I would say probably above 80% of the time, when you actually go through a situation where you’ve been blocked, guess what’s going to happen? Your ex will unblock you at some point. They’ll just get curious to see what you’re up to, they’ll just not be able to help themselves and they will unblock you.

But I will say that there is also a percentage of exes who are, or subscribe to that theory of one and done, like, “Hey, this is it.

You had your one chance and that will be it for everything,” and they won’t unblock you. Time’s going to have to tell to see which of the situations Brian has found himself in.

Personally speaking I like to believe in statistics and the statistics do say that Brian’s ex will unblock him in any way, shape or form in the future or in some way shape or from, excuse me, in the future.

It’s just a matter of being patient and waiting.

Yet, what do we mean by wait?

I mean, what happens if she has him blocked for a year?

What does he do then?

Well, it’s a good question.

That’s where I’d like to maybe talk about the differences between a hard block and a soft block.

He didn’t really specify what that is but my first advice to him would be figure out where you are, are you in a hard block, are you in a soft block?

Because if you’re heard a soft block, don’t worry so much about her unblocking you because guess what? She will probably be responsive towards you if you try to reach out to her in one of those methods of communication that she has still left open. But that’s not really solving the deeper issue here because the deeper issue here has to do with cheating, and that’s the truth.

Your ex-fiancée broke up with you for flirting with another woman and that is the truth.

How do you handle that?

Well, I think what we need to first do is educate Brian on the differences with cheating between men and women.

There’s a lot of statistics out there that basically say, “Men cheat more than women,” but I’m here to tell you that it’s BS, women cheat just as much as men. In fact, it’s probably equal and I think you can even make the case that sometimes women will cheat more than men, but I would probably not put my name to that so I’m going to say it’s probably equal, as all things should be.

But what’s the not equal are the reasons that men cheat and women cheat.

Now, this is where the story gets interesting because the differences between why men cheat and why women cheat and the frame of mind they’re in are so staggering, it is shocking to me that not more people are talking about it. Okay. What do I mean by that? Well, let’s take a look at cheating from your ex girlfriend or ex-fiancée’s point of view, Brian.

One thing that we do know about how men and women cheat or the reasons they cheat is that men will often cheat and can still be deeply in love with their partner.

That sounds really interesting, doesn’t it? Something that probably you wouldn’t expect?

I mean, why would you cheat on someone if you’re still in love with your partner?

Well, it’s because biologically human beings are produced to spread their seed. I’m not a biologist but I think that’s pretty standard in the animal kingdom, survive and replicate. Those are our two functions in life and human beings are programmed to cheat. Now what makes us interesting as people is we also understand instinctually that if we bond we tend to live longer in life plus we also get more or sex, that’s also true. But we are programmed and men can sometimes fall victim to that programming.

Now, I don’t want to chalk it up to biological programming at all, but the point I’m making is men are more capable of cheating while still being vastly in love with their significant other. Women are not. Now, this is where the big difference occurs. Women who cheat, they will usually only cheat, and remember, there’s always exceptions to the rules, but women who cheat will only usually cheat if she’s checked out of the relationship and doesn’t want to be in it anymore.

One thing we also do know about people in commitment is times women will have a really hard time of getting out of a long commitment with a significant other if they have a lot invested into that relationship, so the interdependence theory is something that I’ve been positing or talking about for years.

The interdependence theory basically posits that human beings basically make relationship decision on a cost and benefit scenario. Essentially they’re always making these little pros and cons lists but the criteria in which they make those pros and cons, there’s basically three big ones, satisfaction, alternatives, and investment. But what’s really fascinating when you look at those three factors is that even if you’re satisfied in a relationship and even if you feel that you have a better alternative in that relationship, you’ll still stay in the same relationship if you feel like you’ve invested too much.

And that is a reason why I think women cheat. They feel they’ve invested too much in the relationship to just let it go but they’re emotionally checked out so they’re no longer usually in love with you. And I bring up this explanation, Brian, for one specific reason, because you and her have been operating on different wavelengths. To you this conversation you had with your ex-girlfriend was just more emotional support. It was a short little conversation with her, you didn’t meet up with her, nothing physical happened.

To you, cheating is looked at in a different lens than your ex-fiancée.

Your ex-fiancée is only looking at things from her perspective and her perspective and in her mind, she wouldn’t give a guy the time of day unless she was checked out of the relationship. And she took this as an indication that you’re checked out of the relationship, that you’re having cold feet, that you no longer want to marry her.

And what does she do? She has an emotional reaction. She freaks out, she yells at you, she moves out of state, goes to live with her sister. Her sister of course isn’t going to be on your side. Her sister is going to be like, “Hey look, he was just talking to her.” Her sister is going to be like, “I’m on your side, I got your back, no matter what.” You’re not going to find any sphere of influence help there.

But what’s important for you to understand is that if you do get the opportunity to talk to her by understanding her frame of mind, when you talk to her you can have that tactical empathy. You can literally parrot her emotions back to her and literally tell her what she’s thinking but too afraid to say. Maybe she’s not afraid to say it though, maybe she’s saying exactly what she’s thinking. “I think you’re checked out of the relationship because why would you be talking to this other woman?” Right?

And what I think really is a huge indicator in big mistakes people make is when they do talk to their significant other, number one, they talk to their significant other when the emotions are out of control from both parties. This is one of the reasons why we love the no contact rule because it allows you to settle down, you to take stock and it also allows your ex to settle down, your ex to take stock. So that when you do talk, you’re not overly emotional yet this is an emotional decision so it’s an interesting paradox.

We need to enter this negotiation where you’re basically negotiating over your relationship without her emotions being out of control and without your emotions being out of control, and yet the paradox is it’s an emotional decision so you need to touch her emotions, so to speak. That’s what will make her come back to you, that’s what will make her more interested with you. And one way that you can do that is with tactical empathy, by understanding her wavelength, by understanding her point of view.

What I don’t think a lot of people also understand is the self-interest aspect of relationships. We usually only enter into relationships if we feel they benefit ourselves yet the interdependence theory basically said that it’s a pros and cons list. We always want to stack the odds in our favor so to speak with relationships. And we have different criteria in which we grade relationships with, but your ex doesn’t think it’s worth being with you anymore because she feels you betrayed her. And what I think is important is for you to acknowledge that to her when you do talk to her.

Usually I tell people, “Hey, the first thing you want to do after a no contact rule is just start bridging the gap so that communication can be open.” And I still think that’s a good idea for you. I still think it’s a good idea to reach out to her and just get some conversation flowing. But at some point, what you want to do is you literally want to talk to her and tell her that you understand how she’s feeling but you need to do it in a very specific way. You need to do it like, “Hey, I know you feel I betrayed you. I know you feel like I shouldn’t ever do this and I shouldn’t ever do this and I shouldn’t ever do that.” And the more you do that the more she’ll be like, “Yeah, that is how I feel, that is how I feel. That is how I feel.” And she’ll start feeling that you understand her, which allows her to be more open for communication.

Now, the challenge is picking your spot. Timing is just as important as the rest of this BS, because timing won’t work if you do that right out of the gate. What do we mean by that? Okay, you go through a no contact rule, you said you’ve been in no contact for two months. Let’s say she unblocks you or let’s say that you aren’t blocked everywhere but you decide, “Hey, let’s reach out to her.” So you reach out to her. Let’s operate under the assumption you’re in a soft block so you are going to reach out to her through Facebook messenger.

You reach out to her. You don’t just start with this huge long de-vomit of text. What you do is you start with something that is going to intrigue her to want to respond and get the communication avenues open. And then you work on her very slowly, but very surely just getting back in the habit of talking every day and that is when you get her on the phone or you send a video where you basically talk to her about basically parroting her emotions back to her.

But you can only do that if you look at it from her perspective. Because I think people when they communicate they’re doing things from a self-interested perspective, meaning you when you would talk to your ex-fiancée are probably only going to be talking to her from a frame of mind where you’re literally sitting there and thinking to yourself, “What’s best for me? I want to talk about things that interest me.” And what you need to do is the exact opposite of that, you need to go against your programming. But Chris, how do I know that she’s just saying things to be nice to me? Let’s assume that your ex-fiancée, Brian, does respond to you and she seems okay with it. She seems like she’s okay with engaging in a conversation with you. How do you know she’s just being nice and how do you know if she’s being serious or not?

In Harvard Business School, there’s a professor and I’m going to butcher his name called Deepak Malhotra, sorry if I butchered your name Deepak. Anyways, he actually created this study on the components of lying. And it’s something that I think we can use here for our purposes, Brian. Here’s what his study found. On average liars use more words than truth-tellers and you use far more third-person pronouns. They start talking about him, her, it, one, they, there, rather than I. And this is done very, very subconsciously, it’s a way for them to put distance between themselves and the lie.

If you notice that your ex-girlfriend when she’s talking to you and she seems like she’s engaging is using a lot of third person pronouns, she’s saying a lot of him, her, it, one, they, there, as opposed to first person pronouns, I, me, things like that, it’s a good indication she’s not being truthful with what she’s saying. And this is something that she’s not going to be aware of and something you shouldn’t freak out about. It just means you haven’t touched her emotionally to the point where she’s willing to open up and consider your perspective because really this is a test of rebuilding trust.

The best way to rebuild trust is to actually put your ex in a frame of mind where she’s open to considering your point of view, and the only way to do that is through tactical empathy not sympathy. Sympathy I’ve been talking about forever is basically not only feeling empathy but wanting to make the other person feel better by taking an action like giving them a hug or something like that, that’s not what’s going to work here. What’s going to work is you showing that you are listening on a level that no one else is, that’s it. It doesn’t have to be complicated but that is the overall general goal I will come up with for you, Brian.

Today we’re going to be listening to a question from a guy who would like to remain anonymous, but he has a really interesting question because it’s kind of all over the place. And so I kind of just chalked it up to him, trying to … or him being felt left reeling by the fact that his girlfriend left him for no reason.

She gave him a few reasons, but he’s sort of confused and maybe doesn’t even believe her.

But before I play his question, and I think everyone should be listening to what advice I give him today, because it’s something that is applicable to all relationships.

I want to first talk about the Ex Recovery Chances Quiz on our website

If you don’t know, on our website, Ex Girlfriend Recovery, we put together this special quiz that’s designed to help you understand whether or not you should be trying to get your ex girlfriend back, because I think we can all agree, there are definitely situations where people should not be trying to get their ex girlfriends back. So we put together this ex recovery chances quiz.

It’s a simple, free, two minute quiz designed to basically help you understand that. Now all you have to do if you want to take the quiz, it’s super easy.

Just simply go to the website Ex Girlfriend Recovery, and instructions on the quiz will be there.

So with that out of the way, let’s talk and here from the anonymous person’s question.

I’m dealing with a breakup.

It’s been about two months.

My girlfriend broke up with me and said she needs to figure herself out. She’s not going to date anybody else. She’s going to leave our pictures on the bedroom wall, and she can’t give me a timeframe and doesn’t want to hold me back. I tried doing no contact.

For about two weeks I made it, and I started texting her about once a week. We started some minimal conversation. I probably screwed up when I sent her a love book, which is like a cartoon thing that tells all the ways I love her, which I probably should not have.

That overwhelmed her a little bit I think. And then she ended up cutting me off on Facebook and Snapchat. And now I’m trying to actually do no contact. Hopefully it’s not too late. I’m hoping to get back together with her. And I’m going to wait a little bit to talk to her and see what happens then.

Yeah, she kind of left it open ended, so …

Okay, there’s a lot to unpack here. So ultimately this person who left this question is kind of left reeling because he feels like his ex girlfriend left him for no legitimate reason. Though he never spells that out, you can tell he’s sort of confused about how he should approach things.

So let’s talk about his situation or his breakups so that we can kind of get … take stock of it.

And then we’ll get into kind of the advice portion and I’ll tell you sort of what I think is wrong and what needs to get fixed and his approach should be.

I think what we have here is someone who is struggling with the concept of sympathy versus empathy.

What do I mean by that, sympathy versus empathy?

Well, what I’ve thought a long time ago … when I first started Ex Girlfriend Recovery … I believe I started it in 2013, so it’s almost been seven years now … I believe that the key to winning exes back, if that was what you wanted to do, was sympathy, was understanding their worldview and trying to make them feel better, trying to fix things.

But that’s not what worked.

That’s the beautiful part about being kind of tenured in this program.

We’ve gotten multiple people to come through the program and we’re able to see really what’s working. And it isn’t sympathy. Sympathy is him trying to understand that she was unhappy in the relationship and sending a love book.

He thinks this will make her feel better.

It has all the ways in which he loves her, but it had the opposite effect he was hoping for.

It overwhelmed her and she cut him off on Facebook or Snapchat.

Now he doesn’t really specify what being cut off on Facebook and Snapchat is or means, but we can assume it means he’s blocked or unfriended or something on that level.

What we learned is that really the key to getting exes back is empathy, which is very similar to sympathy.

Now, what is empathy? -Empathy is the ability to understand the emotions of someone else without actually feeling the emotions yourself.

Sympathy, on the other hand, is the physical display of empathy.

Empathy is what wins you your ex back.

Why?

Well it kind of all comes down to listening.

I’ve often stated that I believe the key to winning exes back is identifying what your exes problems are and solving them in a way that no one else can.

I’ve said that so many times, I feel like a broken record when I say it.

But how do we identify the problems?

Most of the time people come to me and they’re looking for tactical solutions, the no contact rule, “What do I text?”

But really the work, the real secret sauce, is in teaching you to properly listen. And most of the time we think we listen when we really don’t. Most of the time we listen on a superficial level. We hear certain words just long enough to get the gist of what someone is saying, but we truly don’t dive down and understand what they’re saying.

Once we think we know where they’re heading, our attention slips back inward, where we silently compare what we heard to our own logic and our own worldview.

We put ourselves or make assumptions based on what we think as opposed to what they’re actually saying.

And what I think we have here is a classic case of someone who believes that they’re listening to what their ex wants, but isn’t diving deep enough to truly understand what they want.

She says she needs to figure herself out.

He says, “Well, she left me for no reason. She gave this standard reason that she needs to figure herself out.”

This tells me that they were on two different wavelengths the entire time. She was resonating at a higher frequency than he was, or rather the opposite. He was resonating at a higher frequency than she was. He was a lot more into the relationship than she was it seems like.

Yet, it catches him off guard because it seems out of the blue.

It seems like, “She’s not giving me a legitimate reason. She’s not describing why she broke up with me,” but it’s there if you know what to look for.

You’ve heard of Freudian slips, right?

It’s like you think of something internally and you’re thinking to yourself, “Oh, I can’t say that out loud,” so you start talking to someone and accidentally a small little piece, a sliver of it, slips into the sentence that you didn’t mean to say. And if someone’s careful enough, they can kind of peel back the layers and truly understand what you’re really thinking.

This is probably what happened during this guy’s relationship with this ex girlfriend.

She probably did give subtle cues that he didn’t pick up on because he’s not great at recognizing them yet. And that’s the beautiful part about this.

He can become an expert at recognizing them.

He can become an expert at identifying the problems and then solving them in a way that no one else can.

But it all boils down to empathy, understanding ex girlfriend’s worldview.

Now, psychotherapy research shows that when individuals feel listened to, they tend to listen to themselves more carefully and openly evaluate and clarify their own thoughts and feelings.

This is important.

Everyone’s always looking for the magic bullet.

“Chris, what do I say to her? Well, give me the exact phrase to say to her to get her to come back.”

Oftentimes you can go on YouTube or even go to Google.

Some of the most search phrases on Google are, “How do I make my ex girlfriend love me again?”

(Yep, I totally wrote an article about that .)

But there’s no easy way to do that.

There’s no magic bullet phrase I can give you that will do that.

You need to empathize with her.

Yes, we do believe in the no contact rule.

That is a tactical strategy we have found to be effective, but the no contact rule by definition is impossible to help you get your ex back.

Sure, I mean, there’s some outliers where all it took was a no contact rule, of ignoring your ex girlfriend, and all of a sudden she comes back. But most of the time, that’s not what happens. Most of the time, you have to reestablish communication with her, and how you reestablish communication with her is so key.

She needs to feel listened to, because if she truly feels you empathize with her, if she has these moments where she thinks, “You know what? That’s right. I do feel that. He’s right. He understands me,” then they think inwardly. They think about themselves a little bit more carefully, they evaluate your relationship, and to become less defensive.

They don’t become oppositional.

They’re more willing to listen to your point of view when you make a pitch.

They get into that calm and logical place where they’re willing to accept you.

So that’s what I think he should work on. I don’t think I should give him tactical advice other than, yeah, finish out a no contact rule.

Obviously you screwed up because you didn’t finish or complete the no contact rule fully.

But work on empathy, work on trying to understand what your ex girlfriend is going through.

We see this all the time.

I’m working with a client, who’s a female right now.

She’s an extremely great communicator, and her ex-boyfriend is not a great communicator, but what’s really interesting is when it came time to craft the text message for her ex-boyfriend, she sent the text message to me. And I did kind of like a voice note recording, where I was explaining and reading the text message to her how I would read it if I was her ex-boyfriend.

And she falls into the classic trap that I think 99% of people fall into, self-interest.

You see, her text message had the word, I. Seems simple, right? I. “I feel … I think … I feel … I think.” I counted it up. There was seven uses of “I think,” or “I feel.” So I told her that when her ex reads this text message, he’s going to think you’re selfish because he thinks it’s all about you.

So I said, “Go back to the drawing board. You don’t have … I like these parts of the text message, but you need to rewrite them in a way that you’re not using, ‘I think’ or ‘I feel,’ because it always makes it about you.” Relationships are supposed to be equal.

They’re not supposed to be about you, they’re not supposed to be about your ex. They’re supposed to be about together. That’s the approach you need to be trying to kind of achieve.

And today, she sent me the text message back, the amended text message, I should say, and it’s 10 times better.

But I guess my point is when people actually do begin communicating with their exes, they don’t communicate with them in a way that gets them to open up because they start talking about things that relate to them, self-interest.

Human beings by nature are self-interested. We’re tribal and we’re self-interested.

So it’s kind of a breath of fresh air when you approach an ex girlfriend and don’t have that self-interest. You take more of an interest in what she’s interested in. You make the spotlight all about her.

Take the love book.

The love book is a nice gesture. I like it. It’s sweet. There’s one little bit of a fly in the ointment though.

It’s a love book about how you feel about her.

It’s selfish by nature.

You may not think it is, but she takes it that way. Crazy, right? I mean, it’s like, “Oh, I’m just doing this nice thing for you. Take it the right way. Come on.” But that’s not how she takes it. It’s all about, “I love you because of this. I love you because of this. I love you because of this.”

Maybe it tries to talk about qualities that she has, but she doesn’t see past the selfishness. She sees only the selfishness. She sees the, “Oh my god, he’s making a book about, ‘I love … ‘ It’s all about him. Why can’t he make it about me?” I think that’s where he went wrong.

He didn’t complete a no contact rule, true.

He made a mistake sending a love book, kind of looks lame, not going to lie. It overwhelmed her, but it’s lame only because it feels selfish to her. She feels like, “This is always about him.” And I think if you look at your life in way … sit back, think of the times you’re communicating with your significant other.

Watch how often you say I. “I feel, I think, I love … ” in a way, it’s to make yourself feel better. It’s talking about you. And watch the difference that occurs when you catch yourself and put all the attention on your significant other. They’ll be a lot more willing to listen to what you have to say.

There’s a really great book I’m reading right now by a … I’ve talked about it before in the podcast, a hostage negotiator, one of the FBI’s lead international hostage negotiators.

And I like this book because in the end, what we’re trying to do here is trying to get someone who doesn’t want to agree with our point of view to actually agree with our point of view of getting back together. How do you do that?

Well, hostage negotiation is a great place to look.

You have a hostage taker that does not want to give up the hostage.

How do you get them to give up the hostage?

And so what they talk about is empathy, talking to the hostage with their own worldview.

But you don’t enter a hostage negotiation saying, “I need you to do this.” You don’t even ask them, “Can you do this?” You actually empathize with them. “It looks like you’re feeling this. It looks like you’re feeling that,” labeling their exact emotions so that they actually come to this epiphany internally where they think, “That’s right. I do feel that way.”

But here’s where it gets kind of tricky. You fail if they think you’re right, because they didn’t come to the conclusion. You came to the conclusion for them and basically parroted it back to them. And I think that’s part of your problem, Mr. Anonymous.

You’re sending a no contact … you’re finishing … you’re not completing your no contact rule, true. So you failed in that bit. But I think when you come to communicating with her, you’re communicating with her in a way to sympathize, to make her feel better, but she needs to make herself feel better, and the best way to do that is to make her feel heard, make her feel listened to, get on the same wavelength as her. Because once you do that, she will start to evaluate your relationship again. She’ll start to clarify her own thoughts and feelings, and once you have her doing that, you’re golden, brother.

So that’s what I would do if I was you.

Welcome to another episode of the Ex Girlfriend Recovery Podcast.

Today, we’re going to be tackling one of the most common questions that I tend to get, and you may be wondering after your breakup, which is the quandary of going through a breakup and having your ex girlfriend basically say, “It’s not you. It’s me.”

We’re going to really dive down deep and explore what she means when she says that and what you can do about it. And in some cases, understanding or coming to the realization that there’s nothing you can do and being okay with that.

So what I’m going to do, and if you don’t know, how this podcast typically works is I take questions.

So basically, listeners of this podcast come, they’re able to film a quick question for me anywhere between usually a minute to a minute and a half.

And I play the question, and then I answer it as organically as possible.

But before I actually play the question from our listener, I would first like to say that if you’re going through a breakup, and you’re really determining whether or not you should be trying to get your ex-girlfriend back or really just moving on from your ex-girlfriend, probably the best resource that you can use is something called the Ex Recovery Chances Quiz on my website, www.exgirlfriendrecovery.com.

It’s a simple two minute quiz designed to basically answer the question of whether or not you have a good chance of getting your ex back. And you can use that information to really determine whether or not you should be trying to get your ex back or should be focusing on moving on.

Hello, Chris?

My question is the following. What does that mean when my ex… Or yeah, when a girlfriend tells you, it’s not you, it’s me? She says she is not in love with me, but she loves me.

And how is that possible, from someone who loves you the previous month? And then the next month, they don’t love you anymore.

Why is that?

It’s not you it’s me.

So first off, I want to say like always.

Thank you so much for basically recording a question. I know sometimes it can be hard to put your heart out on the line and make yourself vulnerable, but you ask a really good. And the question is, what does your ex mean, essentially, when she says, “Hey, it’s not you. It’s me.” And what’s interesting is a few months ago, I actually wrote an article for Ex Girlfriend Recovery, entitled What She Says Versus What She Means.

The article was entitled to be basically a starter article that, as time went on, I was going to add more to it, based on real life consensus from women.

So if you don’t know, anyone who buys any of the programs that I basically have gets access to this special private Facebook support group.

I believe there’s 4200, 4300 people in there, as of today. And what’s really interesting is it’s a really nice mix of women and men, but more so women because the group originally was started for women, and it gained so much traction and success that we opened it up for men.

But what’s really cool is most of the time what I’m finding from our male clients who are going through a breakup, that get into the Facebook group, is they’ll actually use women to decipher, “Hey, what does it mean when my ex-girlfriend says this or this?” And so what’s interesting is that was kind of the approach I took when I was writing this article on what your ex girlfriend says versus what she actually means.

And so essentially, what I did was I polled people in Ex Girlfriend Recovery and I asked them,

“Hey, what is the five most important things that you want girls to decode for you?” What does my ex mean when she says this?

And I came up with those five most important things, but what’s interesting is not one of them was, “Hey, what does it mean when my ex-girlfriend says, “It’s not you. It’s me.”

But one of the things that men were wondering what women meant when they said it was, “Hey, what does it mean when my ex-girlfriend says that her feelings have changed for me, or she’s not into me so much anymore?”

And I actually think that’s kind of close enough to what the it’s not you, it’s me type mentality that women have is. And what was really interesting is for pretty much all of the other four things that I had polled people that men wanted to know, there was a pretty clear consensus.

Women were pretty united on what they thought. Maybe there was a couple of different meanings that women thought it could mean, but for the most part, it was pretty straightforward. Actually, you know what? It’s probably even helpful for me to just pull the article up for you, so that you can actually know what those five things were.

Okay. So here they are. The five things, the five most important things that men really wanted to know what their ex-girlfriends meant.

And really, when I look at these five things, the one that really sticks out to me as closest to the it’s not you, it’s me mentality is, “Hey, what does my ex girlfriend mean when she says she’s changed?”

Now like I said, for the other four things, the consensus was pretty standard. Women typically thought that those four things meant usually one thing. The one exception was number one, which is what does my ex-girlfriend mean when she says that she’s changed. And it’s interesting because that, I think, is the closest to the it’s not you, it’s me mentality phrase that your ex-girlfriend is saying.

And there were actually three patterns that we noticed emerged from the women in this Facebook group, that basically just told me what they thought that it meant. And here were the three patterns.

Number one is my feelings have changed for you, or I’m not feeling attracted to you anymore.

So essentially, and I noticed in the listener’s question, he had mentioned that just last month, everything seemed normal.

We were just going about our lives normally. She was saying, “I love you.” I loved her very much.

And then all of a sudden, it just falls off. Well, it just seems like some type of catalyst caused her feelings to change, or maybe she was doing a good job of hiding the fact that she wasn’t as attracted to you as she thought.

But that’s not the only thing women thought it could mean.

They also thought it could mean, “Hey, I don’t like you very much.”

And this is a typical thing that I’ve seen, actually, with women who are really angry about the fact that you’re flirting with other women.

Not saying that’s what’s going on here. I’m just brainstorming, giving you kind of the broad view of what women thought it meant.

And then I’m going to give you my thoughts on what I think you should do.

But like I said, they thought, “Well, okay, well, they don’t like you that much anymore.” I’m not into you that much anymore. This is almost very closely related to the my feelings have changed for you type thing.

The third one I think is probably the most insightful, and that’s the fact that she feels that she has outgrown your relationship.

So she feels like maybe a month ago, you were in a good place, but sometime in that month she decided, or had some sort of epiphany and decided, “I’ve outgrown this relationship,” or “This relationship has beneath me.” And I think it kind of does stem from the fact that maybe she feels she can do better than you.

And really all breakups are kind of an emission of that.

All breakups, when your next girlfriend breaks up with you, is her basically admitting to the world and to you, “Hey, I think I can do better than you.” And some men take this really personally.

They take it and make it into this attack on their ego and everything. And I understand. That’s a normal thing.

And the number one thing they typically do when your ex-girlfriend says, “Hey, it’s not you. It’s me,” is they will try to counter it by saying, “No. I’ll change. I’ll be better.” They try to push. They push for her to change her mind. And what happens?

Well, more often than not, she does not change her mind, and it almost reinforces the decision.

Now, here’s an interesting thing that you probably did not know.

Why is it such a mistake to try to counter her saying, “It’s not you. It’s me,” by saying, “Oh, I’ll change. I’ll be better.”

Well, it’s because constantly being pushed into doing something that she doesn’t want to do will make her, and really anyone, more defensive and less likely to give into what you want them to do.

So pushing her for a, “Hey yes, let’s get back together,” constantly, is a turn off, and it makes her more defensive and almost puts her and you in the aggressor and defensive mode. So basically, she looks at you as this aggressive person who’s trying to force her into feeling this particular way.

And sometimes, as men, we can be blind to this fact. We can be blind to the fact that maybe we’re being too aggressive in our approach. Society teaches us men that we need to be the aggressors. We need to be the ones who ask out girls.

We need to be ones to ask girls for their numbers and set dates up and be the romantic gesture type thing. And sometimes we can take that too far, and we need to take a step back. So being constantly pushed to do something someone doesn’t want to do makes them more defensive.

And ultimately, what’s interesting is the fallacy I think most people will run into here is thinking or saying that they’ll change and they’ll be better will make a difference. Studies constantly show… This is kind of a weird analogy, but it’s true.

The kidney transplant list, the thing they always talk about on TV shows or movies, and you have to be super good behavior.

You can’t drink it all. You can’t do what have you. If your kidneys or liver are failing and you need a kidney or liver transplant, you get put on this list. And this list is determined by how well of a lifestyle that you’ve lived.

What’s interesting is they found that people who they’ve given these kidneys or livers to often will say, who have maybe smoked too much or drink too much or what have you, they’ll come back, and they’ll say, “No I’ll change. I’ll be better.” And sometimes people fall for it, and they put them or move them up the transplant list or what have you. And studies have consistently shown that they always, once they get their new kidney or whatever, they always go back to drinking. They always go back to smoking.

So I guess my point here is that saying you’ll change and you’ll be better doesn’t mean anything. It’s not as powerful as showing that you’ve changed or showing that you are better. Writers are often told one of the first rules is to show, don’t tell.

What does that mean? That means if you’re going to write a story, and you want to make the story appealing to an audience, it’s better to almost have the one plus one mentality as opposed to teaching someone one plus one equals two. And what do I mean by that?

Well, Game of Thrones is really good at this. Game of Thrones is one of the best TV shows before the disaster of the final season. There’s many reasons we can talk about it was a disaster, but it was a really good show at dropping these little hints.

So essentially, what they do is they give you a little piece of information in the show. And if you pay close enough attention, you can take this piece of information and add it to a second piece of information, and that will equate to this big reveal. But the show doesn’t tell you. It makes you do the extra work. People like that.

They don’t like being told directly. And this is a problem. This is the reason that tropes in storytelling exists. It’s such a big trope because it’s been done so often, and people are often just telling you one plus one equals two, as opposed to just saying one plus one equals… And then you have to figure out what it equals. That’s the essence of showing and not telling.

So how do you show your ex that you’re better or that you’re changed? Well, if your ex is saying, “It’s not you. It’s me,” you need to take the approach of, okay, this is an admission that she thinks she can do better than me. And you need to live your life in a way to make her regret that decision. And I think actually, the key… The more I study breakups and what works to get someone back, the more I realize that it’s really important for you to find something that you care more about than your ex. Not another person, but another thing.

Often I call this the Magnum Opus. What do you want to be remembered by or for when you die? Do you want to be remembered for chasing this girl, looking super desperate, begging for her back? Or do you want to be remembered for this amazing story that you told or this amazing thing that you built?

What is that one thing that you care more about than your own life? Because if you can find that, getting your ex back becomes so much easier. It becomes a lot easier to level up your life in all of these different areas. Health, wealth, relationships can go through the roof, and you can show your ex. You can not tell her, but show her what a big mistake she made. Because eventually, and this is kind of a common thing that we see happen, whether you realize it or not, your ex will begin to romanticize your relationship at some point in the future. She will think back fondly on those positive memories together.

This is often called the peak end rule. So when people remember experiences, they actually are really horrible at remembering all of the experience. Typically, they just hone in on two distinct points. The peak of the experience, the most exciting point, or the end of the experience, the last point.

In your case, you’re going through a breakup right now. Your ex girlfriend is saying, “It’s not you. It’s me.” She’s focusing on the end of the relationship, how she felt, how badly she felt. But after enough time goes by, the romanticizing begins. And the once the romanticizing began, she starts thinking about those peak exciting, great moments. And then she’s thinking to herself, “Hey, what’s good old Oliver up to?” Or “What’s good old Alexander up to? Let’s check her social media profile.” She checks your social media profile. And if you look worse than you did when she broke up with you, it reinforces her decision to break up with you. But if she looks at your social media profile and sees you’ve basically become this ultimate, extraordinary person, she starts getting curious and thinking, maybe there was more to him than meets the eye. Maybe he was better than I thought. And then she contacts you.

And it’s almost like you can play with an even playing field, not quite, but you can almost play with an even playing field. And that’s the key, I think, to ultimately trying to get someone back. You see a lot of people focus on the tactics and the techniques. What should I say to get them back? I learned a long time ago that what’s more important is what you’re focusing on with yourself. Because if you get that part right, you don’t have to play or pitch a perfect game with what you say or what you do. You are allowed a bigger margin for error, and that makes this process so much easier.