How to let go of past hurts and move on from an ex-girlfriend? Breakups with a lot of drama or hurt feelings can be really rough… Not only did you lose the woman that you loved more than anything, but sometimes it can be accompanied with a lot of feelings of betrayal, disappointment, and maybe even a bit of hopelessness towards the future. When an ex-girlfriend has hurt you a lot, it’s not easy to let go of the pain. Well, pain in general, can be extremely tough to let go of. Sometimes we just don’t know how to look forward with a positive mindset… It’s strange, isn’t it? We all want to be happy, but often, we can’t let go of the things that hurt us. Sometimes, we even consciously hold on to them, knowing they are bad for us. So let’s talk about how you can let go of your ex-girlfriend, but more importantly, how to let go of how she hurt you during the relationship.

Hey guys, welcome back to the Breakup Corner, I’m Andi Galster, and here I teach men how to move on from their ex-girlfriend. Well, letting go of pain from the past with an ex girlfriend. It’s a bit of a personal topic for me. Not because I’ve been deeply hurt by an ex-girlfriend… Well, I have… But rather because I know how difficult it is to let go of pain in general. Sometimes, when bad things happen to us, we don’t even realize that we’re slowly getting stuck in a loop of constantly reliving the pain that’s been inflicted on us. For certain, when you had a breakup with an ex-girlfriend, and especially if she’s done something extremely hurtful, I am sure you have to relive the past quite often. Whether your ex-girlfriend cheated on you, insulted you and made you feel inferior or she made you think that you were a bad boyfriend, maybe she has been verbally abusive after the breakup and made others think that you’re not a good guy, or anything else that may be hurtful — it’s never easy to let go of all the pain that’s associated with it. 

And I think that’s perhaps the core problem of the issue. What we resist tends to persist. If you’ve ever read the book “Man’s Search For Meaning”, which is a psychological exploration by Viktor Frankl, who used to be a Nazi prison inmate in Auschwitz, then you may have heard of what he called paradoxical intention. He considered paradoxical intent the act of not achieving the outcome that we actively pursue. So for example, if you know that you have to go to sleep because you have to get up early, then you’ll focus on falling asleep, and the very act of trying to fall asleep will hold you back from sleeping. But if you’d be doing anything else, such as reading a book, or watching a movie in your bed, you’ll eventually grow tired and fall asleep without even realizing it. 

Overcoming breakup pain is just like that. The harder we try to get over the hurt, the harder we often cling to what’s hurting us. For example, if you’ve ever been cheated on by a woman, then you probably experienced it yourself that you became more obsessed and thought even more about your ex-girlfriend or how she cheated on you. But of course, you’d assume that you would move on quicker because you’d try to focus on the negative aspect of your ex-girlfriend. After all, she’s an awful woman and a cheater. But sometimes, trying so hard to move on from what hurt you, can make it harder, not easier, to get over it. Of course, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try hard and actively to get over your pain, but you need the right approach for it.

I think one of the reasons why we struggle more to move on when we try so hard, aside from paradoxical intent holding us back from achieving our goal, we also tend to forget to live our lives and let happier things make us forget the bad things that happened to us. If there’s one thing that I’ve learned from a lot of pain in my life is that we can move on from extremely big hurts very easily — if only we’d stop trying to move on from the pain and instead, just do things that make us enjoy our lives. Trying to let go of hurts from the past is effectively like an act of not living in the moment. And as a result, we can’t even enjoy the things that are right in front of us.

Now, that’s not to say that you shouldn’t feel hurt, betrayed, used, and so on. I am sure to most of you, whatever happened to you, that pain is extremely real. And what your ex-girlfriend did to you seems hard to move on from. But sometimes the best medicine is not to try and move on from what she’s done… Some of that pain will stay with you for quite a while. But in the long-run, when you replace the pain with good things, one day you will ask yourself why you even bothered to think so much about what she’s done to you, when your life is so great and there are a lot of things that you are now enjoying without her.

This is why the most common advice for moving on that you will see on this channel is about learning to enjoy life again without an ex-girlfriend. Whether you’ve been hurt, whether there was drama, whether your breakup was harmless or had no fighting involved and you both wanted to split up — in the end, the best way to move on from the loss of a relationship is to find something new in your life that brings you so much happiness that you slowly begin to no longer think about your previous relationship, your ex-girlfriend, and whatever pain that comes along with it.

I think as humans, we are pretty good at compartmentalizing the things that happen to us. As of posting article, I am 35 and I honestly cannot properly remember a lot of things that happened around my relationships during the age of 20-25. Of course, occasionally I remember a lot of good things, and yes, I even remember some of the bad ones, but they rarely come to mind in a strong, emotional way. They are just memories, afterimages of what once was, and they don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things related to my current life, aside from the lessons that they taught me over the years.

Once a little time passes, and a bit of the initial deepest pain fades, given that we have found new things to enjoy with our new life, we tend to hardly think about the pain from the past. But this only works if what we have in the present is more positive and emotionally strong than the pain from the past. That theoretically, should not be so hard to achieve. Psychologically, we are wired to forget negative emotions and memories quite fast over time. And with the influence of good experience sprinkled through your life, they should slowly fade into the distance.

So, the best way to get over a lot of hurt from the past, is essentially just a lot of positive energy so you can replace the pain. You need to enjoy life. And, no, of course, that doesn’t mean you need to become bubbly, and act as if none of the pain never happened. And it doesn’t even mean that you need to be pursuing fun and pleasures. For example, you don’t have to have fun at parties or do other things that may bring other people a good time, but maybe they’re not right for you. What matters is that YOU are having a good time. So it’s not about fulfilling the social expectation of what’s considered having fun. 

For example, I actually believe that this is what women do after breakups because they are more concerned about how they look to their social circle than men. So you often see women being at parties, taking the most beautiful IG-worthy pictures, the occasional bikini photo, and so on. Anything to look good to the social circle. And of course, to a degree there’s nothing wrong with it. It feels good to feel close to your social circle and to be liked by your friends. But there’s something deeper to pursue.

Seriously, having fun could be extremely simple. Perhaps it sounds extremely boring to many of you, but someone watching this would probably enjoy going to a chess meetup once in the park to play chess with random people. The key is to find something that you enjoy doing, that makes you forget the bad things for a while. The more good things that you find that make you focus on the good and help you compartmentalize, the better. Remember the concept of paradoxical intent. When you, in quotes, “forget” that you’re letting go, that’s when you finally get over your ex-girlfriend. The goal is to occupy yourself, so you don’t constantly try to actively forget your ex-girlfriend of the pain. The harder you try to not think about her, the more you’ll remember her. But if you are doing things that YOU really enjoy, time begins to fly, and sometimes, you might be surprised and happy that for a while, you didn’t even have to think about her. Being busy is the best way to achieve this.

So I would encourage you to not try to focus on the hurt of the breakup or whatever your ex-girlfriend has done because it’s impossible to just magically wish for pain to disappear. We may be able to gain some perspectives on it… In fact, in my book “No Contact Myth” I have many worksheets designed for this based on breakup science. But in the end, the best thing to do is to not force the pain to fade away. Instead, by enriching and revitalizing your life and finding new aspects of your life to enjoy, you will paradoxically heal the breakup pain without even realizing it. So please spend some time reflecting on what you could do on a daily basis, or monthly basis, to find something that’s fun for you to do. This will help you let go of the pain the most, especially because you’ll no longer actively be focused ON the pain. Rather, your thoughts will be focused on anything BUT the pain, and that’s how it will slowly fade into the background, in time.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for you this time.