How to let go of your ex girlfriend with an attachment style perspective? After a breakup, it’s quite common to still be extremely attached to your ex-girlfriend, to the point where you just can’t or don’t want to let go at all. Moving on isn’t easy. So how can you find the courage to let go of the girl that you love the most? Well, since we’re talking about being too attached to your ex, maybe attachment theory can help you to move on.
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. Moving on from an ex, and of course, growing after the breakup is primarily a question of the right mindset and being able to understand yourself and your relationship experience so you can learn from all of it. Perhaps one of the biggest problems that you have to go through after the breakup is the massive amounts of confusion. Man, depending on how long the relationship was, the harder the fall. Of course, also in general, depending on how essential and integral you considered your ex-girlfriend to be a part of your life and your entire identity, the more you will be confused as hell.
And talking of breaking confusion, let me share with you an anecdote from my life in Bali. I used to live a while in Bali in Indonesia, and of course, everyone in the region loves to travel to beaches. And typically, what you’ll see very often on dating apps in Bali, is a girl who has some kind of profile description saying that she’s “going through her healing phase”, spiritual awakening, or something like that. Now, to be honest, often what that means is that they messed up in pretty big ways with some guys, probably were too promiscuous and now they’re trying to “make up for it”, but the general notion that I want to get to is that people go to Bali to heal themselves. Or at least, so they think.
Bali is probably among the worst places to go after a breakup. There’s just way too much craziness going on there in terms of parties, hookup culture, and so on. But you have all the temples there, the water fountain healing ceremonies, and so on from the traditional locals. It’s quite the interesting clash of values in Bali.
And so some people go to Bali, they travel because they’re lost. They don’t know who they are. They don’t know where they belong. They don’t know what they should do with their lives. And they believe that bathing in some temple water is going to help them solve their breakup problems. Quite frankly, to a degree, it actually will in the short-term.
Performing rituals has been found to help people feel happier, EVEN if they DON’T believe in the ritual. That’s kind of crazy if you think about it. So people who go to Bali will likely get a short-term emotional high. Bali is great, plus all the spiritual stuff going on, especially in the mountains. But, eventually, everyone has to come back to baseline and they’ll be back where they started: Confusion.
The only real way to overcome a breakup is to properly understand yourself, and there is no real shortcut, hack, or simple solution to quickly solve your problems. The fact that you are struggling with the breakup and that you miss your ex-girlfriend like crazy has deep meaning. And one way to look at the meaning of a breakup, or why you can’t let go of your ex-girlfriend is to learn to understand your own attachment style, which explains to you why you feel so attached to your ex-girlfriend.
Roughly speaking, your attachment style tells you whether you are more of a clingy type of man, whether you’re someone who needs a lot of space in a relationship, or whether you are neither of the two. You’re quite balanced, generally feel very secure in relationships, and don’t get too clingy, don’t need a lot of reassurance, but neither do you have random moments where you distance yourself from your partner. This attachment style is aptly called a secure attachment style, whereas the clingy type or the avoidant type are classified as insecure attachment styles.
The same type of behavior that we have in a relationship can even happen with your platonic relationships. For example, if you ever noticed that you sometimes withdraw from close friends, then you’re probably an avoidant-type man. If you often are too intrusive and ask for too much attention from your friends, then you’re probably an anxious-type man.
Or in more simplified terms, one could say that people with insecure attachment styles tend to have more drama in their platonic and romantic relationships. Where there is trauma, there is drama. So why do secure individuals not have drama in their relationships? Because they’re able to regulate their emotions well. This is the same reason why they move on quickly after a breakup. Once they feel their breakup pain, they are able to quickly come to terms with those emotions and then move on.
On the other hand, if you are insecurely attached, you will try to employ all kinds of coping mechanisms. For example, an anxious man is likely to beg his ex-girlfriend to take him back, chase her a lot, stalk her social media, and so on. An avoidant man is likely to start dating right away, hook up with women and not start a proper long-term relationship, go travel and just do his own thing, and so on. In a way, insecure individuals try to find ways to avoid their emotions, their pain, and the reality of their relationship having come to an end. The anxious person doesn’t want to let go. The avoidant person doesn’t want to grieve.
With a simple wild guess, I will assume that you are anxiously attached, after all, this is a post about letting go of an ex-girlfriend. You probably wouldn’t be searching for this if you’d be avoidantly attached, although there might be a chance that after a long time of denial, you’d finally face reality and still end up here to find ways to finally let go. And if you’d be securely attached, you might be in pain, but you might be able to get over the breakup quickly and so you also wouldn’t need this post.
So, let’s assume I am correct and you are anxiously attached, or maybe avoidantly attached. What can you do with this knowledge? Well, let’s go back to my Bali story. The entire idea of finding coping mechanisms after a breakup, such as being unwilling to let go, begging, and so on, or the reverse, withdrawing, traveling, dating other women far too quickly… All these behaviors are things that you do on purpose, albeit perhaps subconsciously, because you don’t want to face the truth that you are extremely confused. You don’t know how to cope. You don’t know what to do with yourself right now. And so you are looking for simple quick solutions to get over the heartbreak.
But just like some waterfall ceremony in Bali will not heal your heart overnight, nor will your heart heal overnight when you give in to your impulses. I have plenty of posts that go into detail about healing from breakups, and I encourage you to watch some of those to look into some actual strategies on how to let go of your ex girlfriend. The key idea that I wanted to share in this post is that there is only one true way to move on from an ex-girlfriend: You have to feel your feelings. You have to actually assess how you feel about your ex-girlfriend, the relationship, the breakup, and reflect on what all of it means to you.
How does it make you feel about yourself, and what kind of conclusions can you take away from everything that you are going through right now? It’s no surprise that it’s been found that those who move on faster are those who write down their thoughts about their breakups on paper versus those who don’t. Even just simple, fairly directionless journaling helps with overcoming breakup pain. I think one of the most powerful things that men could take away from women is their habit of journaling.
Perhaps women do it instinctively on purpose, because processing how they feel helps them relieve stress, and women tend to be higher in general anxiety than men, so it seems to me that women have learned to just let their emotions flow on the page, and this helps them in their daily lives. Again, it’s not a surprise here that women move on faster after breakups than women. It must be related to the fact that when they feel extremely confused after a breakup, they will process all their breakup pain faster than men do.
Therefore, the best advice that I can give you with this posts is to learn about your attachment style, learn how you generally feel as an individual, how you interact with your friends, parents, and of course, how you acted in your relationship and especially now, after the breakup. Analyze yourself, learn to understand yourself, write it down on paper how you feel, and how you can change how you feel for the better. Get rid of as much confusion as you possibly can, and you will eventually manage to let go of your ex-girlfriend. Of course, all of this sounds easier than it is done, but I know that you can do it.
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for you this time.
