by Natalie Lue
This is a classic bait and switch.
It’s this sense of the tables being turned that can really mess with your head. You chase, they initially appear to reciprocate, they run. You chase, they back away. You’re baited back to this dysfunctional dynamic on the premise of this person being the one near desperate for your attention and validation only to find yourself in that situation.
You back away, they chase, you then reciprocate, they back away. They chase, you ignore, they chase some more, you still ignore them, they chase some more, you start to believe that they must be really serious, you gradually start to respond but you have your guard up, they lay it on thick with a trowel, you gradually let your guard down, they seem to be right there with you, you relax some more, they back away. Can you see what’s happening here? No matter who does the chasing, the responding, the ignoring and whatever else, the net result if you respond is that maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow but soon (or maybe it is today or tomorrow!), things will go back to a bad situation and you can end up feeling or being treated as if you’ve been the driver of it all.
The bait and switch is probably one of the most frustrating things that can happen to you with a breakup, especially if you were beginning to feel like you were making strides with your sense of self and especially so if there was a part of you that liked being the one in the driving seat, even if it’s an NC one. Due to what happens in the bait and switch, you can be inclined to believe that your efforts have been wasted or that they have all of the ‘power’ now, but really, they don’t have anywhere near as much power as you think. If you heed the message from what they’re doing and stick with NC, you won’t fall for this situation again plus your priority will be ascending into your personal power, not vying for control of the ‘relationship empire’ with your ex.
NC is absolutely critical because there is no response whether it’s to chasing or backing away.
When there are ‘power issues’, it’s never a good thing for a relationship or your sense of self. You can be assured that if you’re concerned about power, whether it’s getting it back, why they have so much or concerns about the ‘upper hand’, this is a code red alert that something is seriously wrong. The only power you need to be concerned with is the power to meet your own needs, wishes and expectations while acting in your own best interests. Boundaries will give you the emotional backbone you need.
They can pursue but they’re going to be met with the proverbial closed door. It’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that they’ve changed because they’re pursuing you so heavily and seem so ‘genuine’ but if you ride this NC wave for long enough, you’ll see that nothing has really changed plus if you look at what is happening in the context of your overall relationship, you are likely to recognise a pattern to their (and your) behaviour including the relationship seeming to be at its most desirable to him/her when they’re in danger of losing it or they’re not sure of your feelings for them.
Self-Preservation Is Invaluable
Distance gives objectivity and perspective and the truth is that when you’re right in the thick of things, you’re up too close to see clearly. Too much of what’s going on gets tied to your worth or how best to avoid ‘unpleasant’ things like your feelings, conflict, criticism, disappointment and abandonment.
Things are only going to get better if you get out and by making an exit and establishing boundaries, you are protecting yourself from engaging in what can be embarrassing and self-depleting behaviour at best, and at worst, downright humiliating. I’ve found that when people who are recovering from an unhealthy relationship are struggling, it’s not so much with letting the relationship and the person go, but coming to terms with things that they’ve said and done. Next thing they’re wallowing in blame and shame and this can be very destructive to their mental health.
You’ve gotta know when to fold.
NC teaches you about limits – that’s imposing limits about what you’re prepared to put up with and saying ‘Enough!’, and imposing limits on the other party. You’ll re-establish your ‘powerbase’ and start creating a life with meaning… without them. That might be a tough thought to contemplate but a relationship without limits and your personal power is a massacre.
A key thing to recognise is that NC isn’t just about not communicating via the phone, email, Facebook etc – it’s actually about distancing yourself mentally so that you don’t make this person the focal point of your thoughts and activities, because when they are your focus, you’re inadvertently communicating with them and continuing to invest emotionally. You’re still prioritising this person.
You must communicate with your actions because communication is not all verbal and the object of your NC particularly takes their cues from your actions, or lack of them. If you cut contact but stay mentally connected to thinking about them and the relationship and obsessing over what coulda, shoulda, woulda been, you’ll find it all too easy to fall off the wagon. It’s extremely difficult to move on if you’ve brought your life to a complete standstill – you have to get on with things and push through the pain, or your perceived fear of the pain, to find freedom on the other side.
You need to give yourself time and energy.
Going NC made me recognise how much I had neglected myself and when a relationship takes you down this path, whether it’s at their instruction or your own unhealthy habits, the very act of cutting contact actually serves as a reminder that you actually have a ‘self’ to preserve in the first place. You will find that how you treat yourself during this process is critical to the success of not only cutting contact and moving on, but also to building your self-esteem.
UNDERSTANDING LOSS
IT’S A LOSS
Irrespective of the length and breadth of your relationship or even if it didn’t quite make it to turning into a relationship, you have experienced a loss. Many people who struggle with getting over somebody, haven’t fully acknowledged that they have experienced loss or they do, but then don’t know how to cope with it.
When your hopes and expectations aren’t met, this is disappointment. You had hopes for this relationship, for this person and most of all for you.
When a relationship ends or the prospect for one doesn’t come to fruition, you have to acknowledge what you hoped and expected for the relationship, this person and even how you saw yourself in the context of these hopes. I think that the latter in particular, especially when you have low self-esteem, is what many people who reel from loss struggle with, because what they’d forecasted for themselves (which may have been an escape from a self that they didn’t like) hasn’t come to pass. Relationships and another people liking and loving us can represent our last hope when we’ve pretty much given up on ourselves. When we’re of a certain age, it can feel like the stakes are a bit higher so some of our hopes and expectations for ourselves can seem less likely once a relationship ends, which can make it all the harder to come to terms with.
This means that yes you’re grieving the loss of this person from your life, but you know what? I’ve heard so many stories about unhealthy relationships to know that when we truly struggle with letting one go, it’s very rarely about the person and it’s certainly not about the real person. It’s more likely that you’re struggling with getting over your version of that person (who you hoped they’d become or who you thought that they were) or for the future that you’d hoped for. Or it can be that you have to grieve for the future that you didn’t get to have and all of the things that you thought that this person and the relationship meant about you and your life.
Going through NC is about acknowledging, coming to terms with and accepting the loss.
You might want this loss to go away or to pretend that it hasn’t happened but this won’t serve you and will actually open you up to even more pain and ultimately delay the inevitable. There’s no getting away from it. I’ve spoken to people who have lost loved ones to a bereavement and due to refusal to deal with the loss, they’v
e thrown themselves into another person or engaged in destructive behaviour like drinking too much and doing drugs. As time goes by, though these activities might have served as a distraction, they find themselves facing much bigger problems dealing with a myriad of what can be seen as almost ‘dirty’ feelings and thoughts caused by the avoidance. On top of this, they still have the loss to deal with. When they face this instead of avoiding it, yes it hurts but it’s not anywhere near as awful as using a person, alcohol, drugs or whatever to avoid their feelings and to self-harm.
It’s better to feel your feelings and process this loss than to avoid it and clog up your feelings with the effect of the destruction.
If you struggle to deal with loss, it’s likely to be because you haven’t dealt with loss before. This doesn’t mean that you haven’t experienced loss; it means that you’ve tended to bury your feelings and throw yourself into distractions as your means of recovering. While this can be soothing initially, distraction becomes destruction when it impacts on your sense of self. If you’re no longer feeling your feelings you’re not emotionally available, plus how you go about self-soothing has a great deal to do with your recovery. Some people talk a lot, cry, take a lot of baths, walk, do lots of activities, go to support groups etc, whereas some people throw themselves into the next relationship or make, for example, substances the solution to their internal problems. They bounce around from person to person, relationship to relationship or crutch to crutch, or they just keep moving, changing jobs and basically doing whatever they can to distract, and then one day, they realise that they can’t run anymore and it’s likely to be when they just can’t get over somebody or they just can’t break an unhealthy tie.
Sometimes the struggle with loss is actually about being used to having everything go your own way so that when it doesn’t, you take it exceptionally hard because you haven’t learned to deal with disappointment and it takes on a disproportionate magnitude. It feels big because of the way that your ego has taken it, not necessarily because you truly felt deeply. This is why I hear from so many people who struggle to get over someone who, when it comes right down to it, they don’t like or are actually completely incompatible with. It’s “I can’t believe that they don’t want me.”
Loss is what you experience when you feel that you’ve been deprived of someone or something of value.
Recognising what you feel you’ve been deprived of or what you consider to be of value will go a long way to helping you come to terms with this loss and to make sense of where you may be stuck.
-- Have you been deprived of this person in their truest sense or is it that you feel that you’ve been deprived of the fantasy version? If it’s the latter, you’re valuing illusions over reality and this sets you up for extended pain because you’re tricking yourself while beating yourself up about something that you know not to be true.
-- Is it that you feel deprived because you received a NO, so it feels like you want it and it’s so much more valuable now that you know that you can’t have it? This is a good time for you to evaluate what you associate ‘no’ with because if you associate it with being denied something that you want or what people hear when they don’t ‘deserve’ yes, not only will you be particularly rejection sensitive, but you will also have a problem with having, sticking to and even respecting others’ boundaries.
-- Is it that you believed that you were going to ‘have’ this person or that they were going to leave and they didn’t and now you feel robbed or cheated? This is about coming to your expectations and disappointment. You will have to determine whether your expectations were realistic based on this persons actions and words as well as the situation but it’s also good to evaluate whether you were disappointed due to something that was out of your control, or whether you think that your disappointment was caused by you? If it’s the latter, you are likely blaming yourself for Other Peoples’ Behaviour. Instead of experiencing disappointment and recognising the truth of why it happened, you’re blaming yourself for whatever they’ve done as if you provoked the disappointment.
•Is it that you feel like you’ve compromised yourself so greatly in your quest for love that you almost feel entitled to be with this person as they ‘owe’ you for the sacrifice? It’s tough, but you’re not owed a relationship or change from somebody because you were willing to suppress your needs, desires, expectations and basically yourself. That’s not a gamble or investment that will ever pay off. It’s like expecting to be rewarded for being willing to disrespect yourself, but that’s not how you show somebody that you love them.
•Are you overvaluing this person? Do you have them on a pedestal? Are you almost worshipping a false idol and believing that they had something that would have made you feel worthwhile? What is it they have that you wanted? Understanding what you’ve overvalued can be a reality check but it can also show you where you need to cultivate the things that you want from others in your own life.
•Is it about you feeling broken by this involvement? Is it that you felt like you had value in this relationship and now you deem you have less due to it being over? This is about the loss of the hope that you had for yourself inside this relationship. The thing is, you don’t need this relationship to have hope so how can you put yourself and your life back together and feel valuable on your own two feet whether you’re in a relationship or not?
YOU WILL RECOVER FROM THIS
Every day, people experience unimaginable loss in the form of losing a loved one to bereavement. There’s a lot that we can learn from this because there are people who are in loving relationships for a number of years and lose their partner suddenly or to a painful illness. Many of these people get back up over time and many live to love and smile again. If people can find meaning in themselves and in their lives after losing a loved one after a relationship spanning fifty years, we can recover from involvements that span anything from days to years and we can live to love again.
It doesn’t mean that these people forget who they loved and it doesn’t invalidate the memories. They learn to live with their loss so that they can occupy their lives and even honour the memories of those that they loved who likely wouldn’t expect their loved ones to bring their lives to a standstill because they’ve passed on.
Loss of a loved one whether it’s through a breakup or bereavement is scary. It makes us feel insecure and distrusting. We become afraid of allowing ourselves to be vulnerable for fear that if we were to lose someone else from our lives, it would hurt too much. Then we protect ourselves from this by only being involved with people who allow us to remain emotionally safe by letting us love and admire from a distance. And then we end up experiencing even more hurt.
We sometimes judge a current loss on a previous loss even though they may not actually be comparable. While a loss, whether it was someone you dated briefly, experienced unrequited love over, or who you spent many years with, is a loss, the individual loss experiences are different. If, like rejection, we fall into the trap of regarding and treating all losses the same, we trick ourselves into thinking and feeling based on false evidence. We may also do things that we later come to regard as being unproductive and possibly entirely unrelated because we were reacting based on a prior loss instead of the current situation.
It’s very possible that this loss may hurt a lot due to previously unprocessed losses so by trying to feel the feelings of this loss it’s as if you’re opening up a dam to feeling the other losses. So you keep trying to avoid the feelings. It’s why you may feel like you’re madly in love and in so much pain over this person, not realising that actually, it’s not that; it’s that you’re experiencing the sum total of all avoided losses.
This loss might feel very big because it’s resurrecting other unprocessed losses – a wound is being reopened.
The grief I experienced with the guy at work felt horrific because it was grief over each of my parents, a number of exes and a number of childhood wounds. It explained why he felt so damn
critical to my existence. My involvement with him activated something in me and for a period of time, it’s like I went to another planet in the pursuit of some fantasy with him that was going to right the wrongs of the past. When things weren’t going my way, I came back to earth with a bang and the pain of those realisations and feelings was awful. I felt so unwanted, so unloved, so discarded and like anything of value had been lost because this guy wouldn’t leave his girlfriend and pick me.
Loss is very much governed by how you feel about yourself and your life.
People experience a myriad of emotions while going through the grief stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Whether they have good self-esteem or not, these stages will happen, it’s just that grief takes on a very different form when you really don’t like yourself and your life. You may not get to the acceptance stage, or end up accepting the wrong things (false and negative beliefs that can have far-reaching consequences) if, due to being unrealistic about the other party and blaming yourself for what happened, you then internalise these judgments. This will fuel your mentality and actions particularly with regard to how you treat and regard yourself in the future as well as what type of relationships you get involved with.
Right now it might seem unimaginable that you would love someone again or that you would even attempt to date, or just that you will be happy in the future, but you can’t know what you’re going to feel or experience unless you’re planning to remain exactly the same in thought and action as you are right now. You cannot know that this is your only relationship or your only love or that the amount of happiness you experienced in the past is as good as it gets because you haven’t lived all of your life yet (unless you take your dying breath at the end of this sentence) and there isn’t a cap on how much happiness you can experience, unless you put that cap there yourself.
