Hi Hella,

I don’t know if recounting a similar situation might help, but here goes.

My boyfriend left me for my best friend. I don’t know if you could actually call him a boyfriend – we hadn’t slept together, but had been gradually becoming closer. We moved in the same circles, we both went to the same kind of social events (it’s how we met) so we also had the same friends. We went out for meals, walks, and spent time together on our own, but we were both taking it slowly. I had hopes that we would eventually have a full relationship, and I felt this would happen when we were both ready.

And then, without any warning, he went off with my so-called best friend  2.5 years ago, and I never heard from him again until recently. I had ‘invested’, if you like to call it that,  12 months of my time with this guy, first a friendship for around 3 months, then a little more than that, then a little more. Taking time over getting to know each other as friends first, before any larger commitment.

It hurt like hell at first. The dialogue that went on inside my head was never ending. I didn’t sleep for a week from the shock, then afterwards it took a long time, over a year, to let it go. I avoided the places we used to go together, even though there were other friends there that would have been glad to see me, I never wanted to bump into him or the former best friend ever again.  So for a while there I was very isolated and pretty lonely.

I found an article ‘Forty Ways to To Let Go and Feel Less Pain’ and it was on the Tiny Buddha website somewhere here. I followed quite a number those 40 ways and found them very useful.

If what you’re going through is the same as I did, your brain, without any help from you, constantly revisits the past and tries to make sense of it. Of course, there is no sense to it, you don’t have the answers – so on it goes. Then it starts up with ‘what you are going to do next’, how you are going to handle any situation that you think might arise, and so trying to foretell the future.

Of course, the past has been and gone, it’s history. The future hasn’t arrived yet, so you can’t do anything about that either. So all you are left with is the present, which feels pretty empty, so your mind constantly tries to hang onto the past, and the happiness you think you had and which was stolen away from you, or envisage the future, what you will do or say if you ever meet up again – none of which you can do anything about right now. But still it goes on and on inside your mind, constantly taking your other thoughts over.

I don’t know what it’s called, but I think it has something to do with thoughts turning into an obsession which haunts you day and night.

Until you finally realise that you are allowing this to happen. You are giving your brain permission to carry on just the way it has been doing… and so the torture continues.

Occasionally you take a step backwards and wallow a bit. Feel sorry for yourself, feel guilty, feel angry, feel bitter. But eventually you have to move forwards. One step at a time, one less thought at a time.

I put a hairband around my wrist and ‘snapped’ it against my skin when I realised I had once more returned to the subject in my thoughts. I told myself, out aloud if there was no-one around – “OK. I hear you, brain. That’s enough on that particular subject for today, thank you.” “I cannot and I will not allow myself to think about that again today.”

Sometimes it didn’t work, but most of the time it did. Gradually the thoughts and emotions associated with the betrayal might be in my thoughts, but only in passing. Eventually I ceased to think on them at all. I built a new reality for me, and it didn’t include those two people or any thoughts about them either.

I don’t know if this will help you, but I hope you eventually succeed in simply shrugging when you think of him, and saying to yourself, That’s History. It’s in the Past now.

And eventually when you bump into him, you will simply say, Hi!… quickly followed by Bye!…. and turn away and talk to someone else. If you visualise yourself doing this, it will be easy to do just that one day.

Here’s that article I mentioned.. it helped me, and might help you too.

40 Ways to Let Go and Feel Less Pain

With best wishes

Jay x

• This reply was modified 5 years, 9 months ago by JayJay.