by Natalie Lue
Looking for validation and understanding is something that’s counterintuitive to doing NC. How are you supposed to cut contact, take care of yourself, grieve your relationship and begin to heal and move on if you’re still looking for something from that person and the relationship?
A need to be understood becomes a reason to make or accept contact. You want them to ‘get it’. You want them to ‘see’ you, to ‘hear’ you, to recognise your value. The more validation and understanding that you seek, the less positive validation that you get and the more questions are left unanswered, especially if you’re doing things that harm you emotionally. In cutting contact for whatever reason, this means that the relationship in whatever form it took is now over. If you weren’t able to get the validation that you think you need from this person before you went NC, you are unlikely to get it now. Even if you do get some level of validation, like many before you and many who will come after, you’re likely to find that it falls far short of what you expected you’d feel like when you got it. This is because the validation you actually need now that you’ve gone NC is from you.
Get behind your decision to cut contact so that you provide yourself with the validation. A breakup isn’t a democratic decision and neither is NC. When you break, you break. For the type of validation and understanding that you’re looking for to happen, they would have to understand not only what the issues were that led to the failure of the relationship, but they’d also need to have genuine love, care, trust and respect, along with the willingness and supporting actions to change for their own benefit, never mind yours. That’s just too much stuff that’s out of your hands so you have to get back to you.
BOOBY TRAP - LURED BY NOSTALGIA
You can end a relationship with damn good reasons, feel empowered and relieved, and then, the high wears off and BAM!, nostalgia beckons and if it’s allowed to overtake reality, you will convince yourself back into the relationship, likely using a fantasy of magical fixes as the basis.
Nostalgia is why people who have experienced severe abuse go back to their dangerous relationships. The very relationship that torments them can suddenly seem like paradise in comparison to having to face their life without this person who may have compromised them so greatly, they have no sense of who they are and their capabilities. Abusive relationships aside, nostalgia is why so many people not only break NC but they stay in relationships that aren’t working or go back to them, or even remain in a relationship based on the first days/weeks/months that they knew a person, even if much more time has gone by where they have shown themselves to be very different and they’re actually in love with the memory or illusions of that person.
Nostalgia tends to kick in when people are actually making real progress and it’s as if they become fearful of moving forward and so they try to turn back. Nostalgia can also be a response to fear, not knowing how to sooth, when for example, one is bored or lonely, or it can be down to another relationship prospect not working out, or just the natural pangs of missing this person. All of this is normal. Distance gives objectivity.
It’s understandable to feel a sentimental longing or wistful affection for a past that you have happy associations with but, and it’s a big but, by placing too much emphasis on these associations, you may forget about some more compelling negative associations that should keep you away from the fantasy. Whether you focus on ‘good points’ or you seem to have selective episodes of Relationship Amnesia, taming or even neutralising your amnesia will protect you from opening yourself up to further pain.
Most relationships have ‘good times’ and ‘good points’ although it’s not unheard of to remain in a relationship where the ‘good moments’ only lasted for all of a nanosecond. When you become hung up on these 'parts' of a person (or the times) which are treated as being more valuable than the whole, you end up minimising or even flat-out disregarding everything else because it contaminates your vision and plans.
Focusing on these ‘points’, you can put aside 80 or 90% of things that render the relationship a no-go because the 10% looks so attractive. It’s the false belief that the ’10%’ indicates what they and the relationship could be and that the other 90% can be ‘solved’. Unfortunately, if what makes up the remainder is what constitutes NC, it’s an unhealthy relationship. There are plenty of people who have been in an abusive relationship where for instance, they don’t get beaten every day but they do get beaten from time to time – that’s unacceptable. Once out of the relationship, nostalgia’s easy because you conveniently forget about the gnawing worry, the watching your p’s and q’s, the insecurity, the whole people pleasing and sometimes living on a knife’s edge not knowing whether to expect a hot or cold phase.
NC can be a struggle because buying into nostalgia helps to avoid the truth.
NC doesn’t mean that your ex doesn’t have these aspects to them that you value so dearly but the truth is, you overvalue those good points and good times because you are struggling with less palatable aspects. If you were being more realistic, yeah you might still have your nostalgic moments but you’d moderate them with the truth before you got sucked down the rabbit hole of making contact.
When your ex is able to play the ‘nostalgia card’, it’s because they perceive nostalgia to be your ‘hook’. They know that you have the relationship equivalent of anterograde amnesia, relationship amnesia, where you seem unable to recall more recent events beyond a particular nostalgic point in time where you’re ‘stuck’. This enables them to press the reset button, which is where they try to pick up from where they conveniently think that they left off. They’ll conveniently forget all of the shitty things that have happened during that time and will just think that they can swoop in and say, “I miss you” and shazam, pants down. They know that you would have told them to jog on long ago if you were more realistic.
A nostalgic ex is very reactive and plays to the nostalgia hook when lonely, bored, in need of an ego stroke, they have to fill time in their schedule, or they want to be reminded of that feeling of talking to someone who adored them no matter how much they effed up. When they flick through their mental Rolodex of people who are most likely to respond to their ‘efforts’ they think of you. At some point, the backtracking begins by which time they may already have called or texted but they won’t let you know that the situation has changed. When you respond and they don’t meet your expectations, you’re left feeling confused, possibly very hurt, possibly feeling as if you’ve been pranked.
Really what you’ve experienced is called Failure To Think Shit Through. You’ve got to stop expecting change. You’ve got to be less reactive also. You can only fall for the same con more than once if you’re being reactive and excessively optimistic based on a fantasy. You need to sort out your relationship amnesia.
Nostalgia causes loss of perspective but is also interpreted as a cue to chase a feeling.
You’ll let your mind wander, you’ll remember the great sex on that weekend away, or that time when they said that they could see themselves getting married to you or swigging drinks in Shady Pines nursing home together, or when they told you that you’re the only person that understands them. The yearning will kick in and you’ll want to feel like you did at that moment, instantly forgetting the bigger picture and how you felt over the majority of the time.
Relationships aren’t about trying to recapture the good times; you’re supposed to be treating each other with love, care, trust and respect as well as living and loving together. You don’t have to keep trying to put the past on repeat and living in the past if you have a relationship in the present to work with.
You allow yourself to get caught up in nostalgia and to let them essentially use your own history to disarm you because of these positive associations that you have but, you’re forgetting that you also have negative associations and one costs you more than the other. Nostalgia in itself needs to be your cue that you need to practice being more in the present and to connect with what is
happening in your life now.
You may feel nostalgic but NC stops you from letting your feelings and imagination run the show, especially as you become increasingly aware that you don’t have the real relationship to substantiate these feelings and wishes.
NC, in teaching you to be self-aware and to be responsible and accountable, helps you to also become aware of the negative associations that this relationship represents. It allows you to see the wood instead of just the trees and it doesn’t take away from or even destroy the happy memories you may have of this relationship, but it also helps you to make sense of it all. When you break NC to rekindle positive associations, you end up adding to the negative association bucket. Part of the grieving process is remembering the good times but also reconciling what you feel with the big picture and letting go.
It’s not about censoring yourself from remembering the good but if this is the only thing you focus on, it removes perspective, making it easy to falter with NC because you’re obviously not thinking about what your motivations were for doing NC in the first place. Each time you allow nostalgia to blind you, you end up engaging in bullshit thinking that may lead to bullshit decisions that then lead to bullshit actions which will open you up to hurt and regret that can be entirely avoided, especially if you’ve fallen into this nostalgia trap before.
Nostalgia also provides a window into understanding yourself better and recognising where you can step up and meet your own needs, expectations and wishes, but also what you may want in a future relationship or even showing you where your blind spots are. I hear from people who feel nostalgic because when they were with this person, they felt so alive and full of plans. They miss what they thought that they were going to do or how they felt at certain times.
You can feel alive, you can have new plans, you can create these experiences in your own life both alone and with someone else, and your ex isn’t the only person on the entire planet that you can experience this with. They’re not.
When you’re in the midst of a relationship, it’s difficult to see these lessons clearly but when you’re out of it and NC, when you’re doing your best to come back to earth and move forward, you have the space to gain the clarity that you need. NC will neutralise the effect of the nostalgia so that it’s in its rightful place, not overtaking your ‘controls’ and keeping you living in the past or betting on potential in the future. It’s understandable to feel sad for what you’ve lost or even what you think you’ve lost, but all is not lost and actually, these relationships prove to be blessings in disguise that connect you with your authentic self, so don’t feel too sad as you may miss out on the undoubtedly better opportunities ahead.
BOOBY TRAP - GREAT EXPECTATIONS
In order to come down from the lofty heights of your illusions back to earth, it’s important to quell the sense of rejection, the desire for validation and understanding, and the lure of nostalgia with a reassessment of your expectations because it’s not adjusting or managing your expectations, whether that’s of you or partners, that repeatedly sets you up for disappointment.
Expectations are about having a strong belief that something will happen or be the case in the future and as with any belief, you align your thinking and behaviour around this, which may under-or overestimate yours or the capabilities of others. Behind every expectation are other beliefs and if they are unhealthy and/or unrealistic, you may be setting yourself up for a fall.
Once you embark on NC, unmanaged expectations can cause you to:
1) Expect things to be easier and less painful than they actually are or to expect things to be much harder and more painful, which basically sets you up to fail.
2) Expect too much or too little of yourself.
3) Expect this person to do things in the way that you’ve mentally worked out.
Having a level of realism is something that while you can argue that it means that you’ll have to accept what may be some uncomfortable truths, it also makes for a far less stressful NC journey overall. Whether you convince yourself that it’s going to hurt too much for you to be successful at it, or you embark on NC thinking that what you feel when you’re on a high from standing up for yourself is going to last forever more, these expectations mean that you’re being unrealistic, which opens you up to thinking and doing things that are likely to come back to bite you later.
It’s going to hurt.
I could lie to you and tell you that this is going to be a piece of cake but I would also be lying to you if I said that this is going to be hell on earth although it’s possible that you’ll have moments where you do think that it is. The reality is somewhere in between the two. Some days will be harder than others but the truth is, if you embark on NC without game playing and by focusing your efforts on taking care of yourself, the net result is you will feel much better than you feel ‘bad’.
Yes making the decision to go NC may be a big one for you and very painful but that doesn’t mean that because you’ve made this decision that it’s job done and should be happy days from here on in. You didn’t get into this relationship in a hot minute and it’s totally understandable that if you’ve emotionally invested and had some difficult experiences and you’re feeling bruised in some way then yes, it’s going to hurt. It’s not going to hurt forever or even for a very long time but it is going to hurt.
Optimism is good but be careful of being so optimistic that you’re not being at least a little realistic about the road ahead. It’s not about forecasting doom (which is pessimism) but you can be optimistic and at the same time be aware of your vulnerabilities so that you can consider your plan A and plan B should these situations arise. On the flipside, planning for failure isn’t going to help you either because if you don’t believe that you can do NC, you won’t. If you believe that you’re going to give it everything you’ve got and that if you get knocked down, you’ll get up and live to see another day and try again, you’re in a better mindset. Expecting this all to fuck up is saying, “I don’t believe that this can end because I don’t believe in myself.” It doesn’t matter if you’ve struggled before – you can learn from these experiences and the ‘mistakes’ and bumps along the way are part of the learning curve to eventually making a success out of it.
You also have to recognise where you open yourself up to pain by expecting people to be or do certain things that are not in their character or their values. By evaluating your expectations, it helps to manage disappointment or to even avoid it, but you can also end up planning for success instead of quietly or even openly expecting this not to work out.
The trouble is that not all expectations are realistic.
It is realistic to expect to be treated with love, care, trust and respect within a relationship but it’s unrealistic to expect that someone who isn’t actually consistently behaving this way ‘should’ behave this way or that they will and ‘should’ give you the relationship that you expect because of your feelings and your hopes and your expectations. It’s not unrealistic to hope that somebody will be interested or that if they reciprocate your interest that it might turn into a relationship, but it is unrealistic to expect that because you have feelings that it most definitely will turn into a relationship where this and that will happen and you’ll both ride off into the sunset. I think it’s realistic to hope that you will see somebody again after sleeping with them but it’s unrealistic to think that it’s going to become a relationship or that they’re The One because you had a great date followed by even better sex on the first night. It is realistic to expect that a relationship that you’re putting your effort, emotion and time into should go somewhere but it’s unrealistic to expect that relationship to go somewhere if when you remove what you’re doing, there isn’t much left, or you’re engaging in unhealthy behaviour within an unhealthy relationship.
Bearing in mind that expectations are based on beliefs, it’s not uncommon for people to find themselves in relationships where they expect to get screwed over, often because they
recognise on some level that they’re with the type of person who is likely to screw them over based on some of their predictive behaviour or because based on their own self-worth and attendant beliefs, they just don’t believe that a relationship with them in it is going to go somewhere.
Be careful of using unhealthy and unrealistic expectations to set yourself up for a fall.
Whether you expect too much or you expect to fail, you’re going to be hurt and disappointed. If you expect too much, not because your expectations are ‘wrong’ but because it’s too soon or because these expectations don’t make sense with that person’s behaviour or even your own, that’s a recipe for pain. If you expect to fail, if you expect for it all to go to tits up, that’s still going to hurt because it will feel like confirmation of your worst beliefs and because you will have pursued a fantasy of not failing at the same time without truly supporting it with the healthy beliefs, actions and relationship.
You wanted this relationship to go somewhere. You expected this relationship to go somewhere… even if you had other concerns that meant that deep down, you didn’t really believe that this could go where you expected because you were aware of the issues that no doubt contributed to you having to do NC. You might have wanted to be wrong about them. You might have hoped that what you perceive as a ‘mistake’ would come good.
It’s entirely understandable to be hurt during NC because breakups hurt anyway and then when you have go an extra step with NC, it can feel as if the process contradicts every thought, feeling, hope and expectation you ever had for this relationship and it can accentuate this sense of rejection.
