How to let go of your ex girlfriend for good using attachment theory. If you can’t move on from your ex-girlfriend or if she’s moving on really fast, then this post is definitely for you to help with feeling messed up. So, let’s talk about it. 

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. I’m sure there are a lot of you guys who are having an extremely hard time to let go of your ex-girlfriend. Let’s be real… Moving on from an ex-girlfriend is not an easy task. Quite frankly, some breakups can feel like life-long endeavors. Almost like a Mission Impossible. No matter how hard you try to not think about her, you will keep on thinking about your ex-girlfriend over and over again. At the same time, for some of you, it may appear as if your ex-girlfriend doesn’t even realize that she just had a breakup. It’s like she has been single all along and her life looks as if it’s going on as usual. She’s like…

Nothing to see here. Keep walking. 

It’s crazy how two different individuals can have two completely different breakup experiences. And there’s not even just a difference between men and women. Sometimes two men or two women can behave completely differently. One guy is able to move on extremely quickly, whereas the other guy can’t get over his ex-girlfriend for two years.

I’ll never forget a girl that I once met at a beach bar, and she told me that she had not yet fully gotten over her boyfriend after two years. It’s not that I couldn’t relate to it, but two years sounds like an eternity when it’s not you who’s walking in those shoes. And perhaps, to her it felt even longer. But the striking thing that I remembered from that conversation was that she was talking about it as if it was completely normal to her. Her feelings for her towards her ex were still vivid. She still hadn’t fully been able to let go of the relationship.

Dude, breakups are tough. Some of us need a really long time to get over our exes. But why is that so? It’s really important to understand the psychology behind breakups, or rather, the psychology behind why we feel so attached to certain people. And attached is the right word to use here. In fact, scientists have long studied attachments between romantic partners, but also between people in general, such as parents and their children, or between friends. And as a result, they have discovered that there are four different types of attachment styles. Each person has a unique way of how they attach to the important people in their lives.

Some feel generally secure and rarely have any doubts in relationships. These are called securely attached individuals. All other individuals are called insecurely attached individuals. And among insecurely attached individuals, generally speaking, there are two main categories of attachments. 

Anxious individuals and avoidant individuals. Just as the name suggests, anxious people tend to feel anxious about their relationships. They tend to be clingy, aren’t sure whether they are loved by their partner, they require a lot of validation and attention, and so on. And the name of avoidant people also explains their tendency to be avoidant towards the people they love. They tend to need a lot of space in relationships, sometimes pull back and seem like they aren’t fully committed, they may not appreciate being pressured in relationships and often don’t even want others to see that they are dependent on others.

So, as you can see, we have two sides of the spectrum. People who constantly want affection from their loved ones, and people who often pull away to reclaim their autonomy. Breakups hurt a lot, and even a securely attached person with zero relationship doubts can miss their ex-girlfriend a lot and struggle with moving on. But it’s a lot more likely that such a person will recover much faster.

On the other hand, an anxious man who requires more validation than average, is much more likely to struggle with letting go of an ex-girlfriend. When you already have a lot of anxieties in relationships and require validation from an ex, then her leaving you and the relationship behind is the ultimate sign that your fears, anxieties and doubts were correct. And as a result, letting go of your ex-girlfriend becomes even harder than it already should be. An anxiously attached man may even struggle with a relatively short-term relationship because the relationship gave him a lot of reassurance.

My educated guess is that easily 70% of everyone who’s watching my YouTube channel must be anxiously attached. There may be a few securely attached people who are watching, but I guarantee you, they will overcome the breakup fairly quickly and they won’t come back to this channel in a few months from now. Shameless plug, this is by the way why you should subscribe to my dating and relationship science channel o read my main blog, where the topics never get boring. There’s always something new that I talk about so that no matter your stage in life, you can learn something new about relationships and the differences between men and women.

Cough Anyway, as I said… A lot of you who are reading are very likely anxiously attached. You know yourself best. Do some of you…

• Constantly check your phone and social media, hoping for a message or sign from your ex?
• Or during the relationship, did you often focus more on the negative aspects, and saw signs that your ex wasn’t happy with you, even though that may have been wrong?
• Do you feel a strong urge to contact your ex, even if you know it’s not a good idea?
• Do you often replay old conversations or arguments, and do you ask yourself what these all meant? Maybe even during the relationship, the slightest argument made you wonder if she is going to leave you soon?

Then you’re probably anxiously attached and you are overthinking more than usual about your ex-girlfriend. It’s really important to understand this behavior pattern of yours. Not just for the sake of learning to let go of relationships when they end. Sometimes, when you’re anxious, you spend too much time thinking about your ex-girlfriend, reasons why it ended, what you could have done differently, whether you will get a second chance, and so on, when you could have already started dating happily three months ago.

That is probably similar to the story of the girl that I met at the beach bar. Maybe she was anxiously attached, and this is why she took quite a long time to let go of this relationship. Of course, it could also have just been that the relationship was extremely serious, but you get the idea. If you have a personality trait that reinforces a behavior that is already likely to happen anyway, then you are more likely to double down on such a behavior.

Likewise, if your ex-girlfriend is moving on as if it was nothing, it may be the case that she is doubling down on her behavior traits. There’s a chance that she is avoidant by nature, and having a breakup is like a return to her natural state, where she feels justified in being fairly autonomous as a woman. And in such a case, a lot of guys may again overthink like crazy, and ask themselves how she could move on so decisively, when you could have probably predicted her post-breakup behavior if during the relationship you would have seen that she is of an avoidant nature.

This is why it’s a great idea to take an attachment style test, just so you know what type of attachment style you have. These tests are scientifically based, and use evaluation methods that are generally used in scientific studies. So they aren’t scams. Don’t worry. I’ll leave a link in the description to a popular attachment style website. 

Please keep in mind that you probably want to re-take such a test again in the future, when you are no longer coping with the breakup. There’s always a slight chance that your current experiences are influencing the responses that you give on such a test. But let’s assume you took the test, you got your assessment of what your attachment style is.

Now, you may be wondering… Ok, what now? What if I am anxiously attached? What if she’s avoidantly attached? Well… What now? Kind of… Nothing. Now, don’t get me wrong. If you’re anxiously attached and you were easily freaking out when you hadn’t heard from your girlfriend while you were still dating, then you should work on that anxious and clingy behavior.

Likewise, if you were always annoyed when your ex wanted to spend time with you on the weekends, then you should work on being more inclusive in your relationships. It’s a good idea to balance our behaviors in relationships to be somewhere in the middle. But in the end, we are who we are. Even though I have massively changed my character in the last 10 years, I will always be fundamentally an anxiously attached man.

Being insecurely attached is actually due to trauma. The way we were raised determines how we attach to other people. If your parents for example never were there for you when you were young, then you will always require a little bit of extra validation from your girlfriend. It is what it is. You can only influence this to a certain extent. 

The point of this post wasn’t to get you to completely do a 180-degree change in your personality traits and values, and all of a sudden no longer miss your ex-girlfriend as if it’s magic. You can’t just flick a finger and overnight, all your problems are solved. If you miss your ex-girlfriend, then you miss her like crazy. Knowing about your attachment style won’t change any of that.

But at the very least, it helps you to put your feelings into perspective. It helps you understand yourself better. If you are always seeking validation in your relationships, then first of all, it may be among the reasons why the relationship didn’t work out, but more importantly, it tells you that you are probably focusing too much of your energy on worrying about the breakup, your ex-girlfriend, and perhaps your fears of being alone. 

For example, some anxiously attached men may very quickly jump back into a new relationship simply because they need that validation. Simply by being aware that this is a behavior pattern or a personality trait of yours, you are much more likely to be able to control yourself and not start dating the next-best girl. And when you don’t impulsively date the first woman who seems like she could become a great new girlfriend, you may actually prevent yourself from dating the wrong type of woman. Understanding your attachment style is a great tool to put into perspective why you do the things that you do after a breakup. 

For example, if you’ve been messaging your ex-girlfriend a lot after the breakup, then I assume that there is a very high chance that you are anxiously attached. An avoidant man probably would have gone on with his life very, very quickly. A secure man probably would have struggled for a short time, may have messaged his ex once or twice, and then he’d have moved on with his life.

So take the attachment style test, and then try to put the result into perspective to see how you’ve been coping with the relationship so far. Did you do extremely impulsive things after the breakup? Did you lose your self-control at times? Do you feel extremely insecure right now or do you obsess a lot about your ex girlfriend? 

There are a lot of things that you can learn about yourself and how you may not be handling the breakup by simply learning how your attachment style impacts your behaviors. Will you fully let go of your ex-girlfriend just because you learn about your attachment style? No, of course not. 

But I am sure it will help you to gain a better understanding of yourself, which is the most important thing for a man to do after a breakup. The more you learn to understand yourself, and then use that knowledge to create a new plan in life, the easier it will become for you to move on from your ex girlfriend. Because without a plan, you can’t take smart action. So try to assess whether you might be anxiously attached, and as a result, most likely, you might be clinging a bit more to your relationship than you should.

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