So now it’s the crucial bit – getting over a breakup…. and making up!
There’s a crucial point in the process of breaking up and making up: the point where you no longer hold bad feelings like anger or rage towards your partner and you also feel you can live without them.
These things are key, because they signify your neediness has been replaced by a level of self-sufficiency which would enable you to get along perfectly fine without your ex. Why? Because that’s what you’ll need if your attempts to make up just don’t work.
Keep in mind that this isn’t about being indifferent to them. It’s about knowing that you can live comfortably without your ex, that your existence doesn’t depend on them being in your life. (Being so dependent is not an emotionally healthy place to live from!)
When you’re making the overtures for a relationship make up, you do need to ask yourself why you want your ex back? Boyfriend or girlfriend, what do you need from them? What do you want from them? What do you want to do to them?
The last question is particularly important, because if you’re trying to find out “how to get back with your ex” just to “get even with your ex”, perhaps by laying a guilt trip on them or by emotionally tormenting them, then you probably need to do some more anger work.
Sidebar: the way you respond to abandonment by your lover may mirror the way you responded to abandonment by significant others earlier in your life.
Therefore, if you continue to feel emotional pain associated with abandonment, and you sense there’s some link to your previous lovers, your parents, or anybody else, you might need to do some inner child work.
Inner Child Work
This isn’t the place to talk about inner child work; there are plenty of resources online you can look at if you’re interested. But one comment I will make is that my experience as a therapist has demonstrated many times that the best person to be a parent to your inner child is YOU. (Not your “ex”!)
You see, you can’t get this kind of nurturing from a partner and also be in an equal adult-adult relationship; it just doesn’t work that way.
What really works is to re-parent your own wounded inner child, constantly nurturing, holding, and talking to it, until your relationship with that part of yourself changes for the better.
To be honest, this is what people mean when they talk about self-love: you’ve heard the expression many times, I’m sure, that “you can’t love somebody else until you love yourself”.
This famous quotation means that you have to love yourself, you have to have an integrated personality, you have to be on good terms with your own inner child before you can express your love to somebody else.
You see, to the extent that you are at war with your own inner child, you will be at war with other people’s inner children. And inevitably, there are times in any relationship when the inner child of your partner will show itself, wanting love, affection, support, and nurture.
If you’re not able to provide it, and in particular if you treat your partner’s inner child with unkindness or cruelty, then war will surely break out in one form or another. And as you’ve probably seen, all children can express anger freely and ferociously. It’s not great being on the receiving end of your partner’s inner child’s anger!
Anyway, let’s work on the assumption that you’ve done some emotional work on yourself, and you know how to conduct yourself in relationship without becoming aggressive or defensive.
You may know how your previous emotional wounding has contributed to the difficulties you’ve had in your relationships; in any event you are probably somewhat wiser than you were when you broke up.
Seriously, trying to get your ex back without needing to make your ex want you back can be a really powerful growth experience. (I’m sure you know we’re talking about psychological growth here!)
Napoleon Hill, who was at the forefront of Law of Attraction thinking, way back in the early 20th century, once said that “in every adversity there lies the seed of a greater benefit.” He was absolutely right.
I agree with the philosophy that we are only given the difficulties we can handle, and if we handle them well, with wisdom and discernment, they can lead us in the process of growth to our next major developmental stage as human beings. Getting your girl back, getting your boy back, can definitely be a growth experience.
Rebuilding Trust
Obviously one of the big issues in a relationship that’s broken up is to find out 10 ways to get your ex back, rather than 10 ways to get back at your ex.
One of the most important steps before any reconciliation can happen is rebuilding trust. That’s especially true if you were the victim of a cheating partner.
Of course if you were the cheating partner then you might have a major task to win back your ex. And if you cheated, you probably don’t even know what to say to your ex to get them back.
Well, open and honest communication is always a powerful tool to use in any relationship situation. But when you’re getting back together with somebody who’s cheated you or on whom you have been cheating, the danger is that your hearts can get ripped apart again.
How do you get over this situation, no matter which side of the cheating you were on?
Let me say first of all that even if you still love your ex, the possibility of either of you taking the same SH*T back into the relationship second time around means you need to protect yourself from the possibility of being hurt again.
So let’s start here: by assuming you’ve decided you should get back with your ex (that’s why you’re doing this, right?) and therefore presumably you know exactly why you want to bring them back.
Hopefully the anger that fuelled your walking out or cheating has dissipated, and hopefully you are not blaming your ex by suggesting you wouldn’t have left if they’d been different or behaved differently.
What’s important here is to work out how you colluded in the breakup. In other words, what part did YOU play in the end of the relationship?
How were you helping your partner in failing to meet your needs? Are you ready to admit that part of the breakup was your responsibility? Ask yourself a few simple questions, perhaps including some questions about whether or not you pushed your ex away when they tried to get close to you.
If you did the cheating, how do you think your ex is ever going to trust you again?
If they’re taking you back out of desperate need, either theirs or yours, you’re not starting off on a good footing – you’re more likely to get back into the same dynamic you were in before the break up than anything else.
Truth is, if you did the cheating, you now have to demonstrate to your ex that you’ve changed and that you’re going to commit to doing things differently – such as discussing your feelings and issues with your ex so they can be resolved, rather than simply ignoring them.
That takes courage. But of course from the moment you attempt a reconciliation, your partner’s going to be watching you like a hawk as he or she tries to establish whether or not you can be trusted; so from the moment you start looking into how to get back with your ex, you behavior needs to be significantly different. And that will be the foundation of the trust you need and want to rebuild between you and your ex partner.