What My Therapist Told Me That Finally Got Me Over My Ex
By: Molly Godfrey
Tags: Women, Relationships, Feminism, Sexuality, Self

What brings you in today? Well, I can’t get over my ex-boyfriend.

I hired my therapist 8 months after my ex and I finally broke up. We had a painful 4 months of hanging on until the bitter end, ending our year and a half long relationship.

I couldn’t stop thinking about him. There wasn’t a single day he didn’t cross my mind. I did everything they recommended: deleted all my social media and traces of him, disconnected from shared friends, for the time being, all to the best of my ability but it wasn’t possible to erase him completely. I couldn’t stop myself from googling him or reading his blog.

I tried to find out information and often found out things I did not want to know. Replayed what-ifs, recalled old memories. “I bet if I tell him to get on a plane and book a hotel he’d come in a heartbeat.” I played out that fantasy for a while. What it would be like to reunite, reconnect, set new boundaries, create a new relationship over again. I pictured introducing him to everyone new in my life, that he’d be so happy I took him back. Maybe then I’d finally be able to tell him what to do, control him, have leverage. Couldn’t everyone see I was his purpose for existing, I was the only meaningful part of his life?

Delusion. Self-obsession.

I was trapped. I could not stop. Hour-long subway rides were consumed by these thoughts and fantasies. I shared in recovery meetings. I would tell anyone who would listen.

Then I hired my therapist.

She just listened for the first couple of months. She asked me about other boyfriends, past relationships. She’d always leave me at the end of our sessions with “take care of yourself”.

See, I didn’t want to give him up. She knew. She was a smart, skilled therapist. She wasn’t (and couldn’t) make me do something I didn’t want to. Holding onto him kept me safe. Idealizing the life we almost had together. Two creative 27-year-olds starting a new life together in NYC. It seemed so glamourous…until it wasn’t.

Finally, it’s 13 months after the breakup. I come in embarrassed to admit that I’m still thinking of him. I have a feeling she had been waiting for this window of opportunity for a long time. It was finally appropriate for her to say:

“Molly, are you still holding onto him because you’re too afraid of something good to come in? To be vulnerable with someone new?”

Stab to the chest.

I didn’t like it. I was completely nailed. Nailed to the coffin of this far-past -expiration-date-breakup. God damn it, I thought. My ego brain kept grasping for footing, to regain control. I didn’t want the conversation to take this direction.

“No… that’s not it. I’ve slept with other people and have been vulnerable since him.” (Lies) “Ok well… you know we’re meant to have multiple deep connections in our life, right?”

Now I’m annoyed.

“Yes, I do hear the words you’re saying (staring out the window and avoiding her gaze) and I know they make sense but I just don’t really want to hear that right now.”

We sit in awkward silence. She says a few more things — she doesn’t leave me there but I’m (probably quite visibly) still nailed.

“Ok, well, let me know when you’d like to come back in. Take care of yourself.”

God damn it. Why was it that simple? Of course, that’s what it was.

Our relationship ended in terrible flames.

I put up with 6+ months of poor treatment longer than I should have. I knew deep down it needed to end but I couldn’t let it go and I caused him a lot of pain in that process too. The thought of something loving, gentle, and wonderful again after so much torture and heartbreak felt totally foreign. I knew other people had figured it out but I cataloged it as “not for me”. He was my soulmate and I would now be eternally damned because we were disconnected, keeping each other away from one another.

It was a really lovely hole I was in.

I kept my therapist’s words with me though. They ate away at me.

She had landed the perfect stroke. The stroke that gets you free.