Moving on is not easy for some people because we all have bad times, problems, or stories that are very difficult to forget.
“Things I want to forget, I remember. Things I want to remember, I forget.”
Have we ever been stuck with the same old feelings, the same old thoughts, the same old memories?
The feeling is like chewing gum. No matter how you pull it, it won’t come off. Worse, it sticks to other places. Sometimes you want to spit it out and let it all out, but you can’t do it. Instead, you just want to keep chewing. Sometimes I secretly think that if I hadn’t picked up the gum to chew in the first place, it wouldn’t have ended up like this.
If we don’t want to be stuck there, we really want to get out, but why can’t we? Why can’t we get out of ourselves?
It’s a job we haven’t finished yet.
The story of chewing gum is also an allegory, comparing us to the condition of being stuck in a cycle of problems and not being able to move on from this cycle.
It may be seen as a “drama” symptom that occurs in our lives. I believe that everyone has experienced and must have gone through these things as well. However, there may be only a few people who can get out of these cycles.
If we want to be one of them, to be one of the few who can move on and start over, what should we do?
We need to finish reading this article. In this article, the admin will call this symptom “ Unfinished Business ” according to Antonio Pascual-Leone, a clinical psychologist and head of the Emotional Change Research Lab at the University of Windsor in Canada.
Antonio defines “ Unfinished Business” as the feeling of being stuck and unable to move on from the feeling that a relationship has ended. This can be a relationship of many kinds, such as lovers, spouses, pets, or even being betrayed at work.
In his TEDxUniversityofWindsor talk on How to get over the end of a relationship, Antonio said that most people think that moving on or pulling themselves out of negative feelings is all about time. As time goes by, these negative feelings will disappear. It may take different people different amounts of time. But it’s not like that.
“But it’s not as easy as falling asleep with a hangover after a heavy drink.”
Symptoms of two steps forward, one step back
Most people’s steps to overcome a bad feeling are similar to when they took a ballroom dance class in high school (if they took that class): two steps forward and one step back. The bad thing is that many people get stuck at some steps along the way, either stopping altogether or trying to get up and move on to the next step but can’t.
It’s similar to many people’s symptoms, sometimes we are one of them who want to get out of bad feelings even though we know it’s bad, but we want to get out but can’t. To make matters worse, we hold onto those bad things and bring them into our hearts even more.
Good news for those who want to move on . Antonio has found a 3-step method to get out of those negative feelings so that we can dance until the end of the song without getting stuck in any steps.
Step 1: What hurts us the most?
When we ask someone who has just ended a relationship how they feel, the answer is usually the same: “I don’t know.”
Mr. Antonio said that there was a businesswoman. She was very talented. She was dedicated to teaching and taking good care of her juniors. She taught her everything and tried to develop her juniors’ abilities. She felt that they could work together very well. That junior asked to work alone because she felt that she could do better if she worked alone. At this point, how do you think this businesswoman felt?
“I just feel embarrassed, I guess. If you were here, it would be awkward. I don’t know.”
This is what this businesswoman said. She said it after her working relationship with her junior ended in a way she never expected. But “I don’t know” was the first response she got from Step 1.
All we have to do in step 1 is figure out, we have to find out, and we have to tell what our “I don’t know” really is.
Every time we approach that feeling, we tend to avoid it without realizing it. For example, when we were dating and going to the same restaurant every day, but after breaking up, we avoid going to that restaurant again for fear of having to face that bad feeling or fearing that the bad feeling from the past will return.
But this method is the method that will give you the real answer. So don’t avoid situations, events or things that will make you say “I don’t know” again. Instead, go into the real problem, focus, think, and come up with the answer: What is our “I don’t know”?
Step 2: Understand what we really want.
After we pass step 1, in this process, the answer that some people get is to berate themselves, see their own faults, and so they feel that everything is right. Or what we get from step 1 might be hurtful words from an ex-lover who left you with “not interesting”, or an ex-boss who sarcastically looked down on us by saying “we look like a failure” or “not good enough”, or words from a co-worker who said “annoying”, or any words that you can’t get out of your head.
As the admin said in step 1, don’t avoid it and focus on it. In step 2, let’s ask ourselves what we really want. We might want to be interesting, successful, good enough for someone, or not annoying.
We will start to see the difference after we identify our needs and compare them to the results we get. For example, we want to be stable, but divorce makes us feel uncertain, makes us feel abandoned. When we find this conflict point, we start to think about when did this conflict start and what caused this result?
“Even if you feel like you can’t get what you want, say out loud what you really want.”
Step 3: Look back and see what we lost from the relationship ending.
At this final stage, many people often make mistakes because they focus on the good things that they had before the relationship ended, and they just get stuck, sad, sorry, and regretful about everything that they had and received, which is no longer there.
For example, we’ve gone on trips together, we’ve had dinner together, or we’ve had a great time together. One of the people Antonio heard his story from said that while he was in prison for treatment, he realized that his lover had left him. He was in prison with the thought that…
“We will never go on a holiday together again. Even the places we talked about going to, the brochures we used to keep and look at, will no longer exist.”
These thoughts are thoughts of good things that used to be there, but are no longer there. After that, we cry and grieve for the loss of those good things. But in this third step, on the contrary, we have to say goodbye and dig a hole to bury them. Try to look back at the relationship and see what you have lost to this day.
Although it is not an easy question to answer, because sometimes we choose to let go of the answer because we cannot accept what happened, but if we really try to do it, it will definitely be worth it for ending this relationship.
Conclusion
We can’t deny that we’ve had bad relationships and disappointing experiences before, right? It doesn’t have to be about romantic love, but love with friends, family, animals, or coworkers can also turn into relationships.
Because all humans are social animals, what we have to do is when a relationship ends, we have to survive without holding on to what has ended.
Try using Antonio’s 3-step method to move on from the bad feelings that arise when a relationship ends. It is an alternative that is worth trying for anyone who is still stuck in a cycle of unresolved feelings even though the matter is over.
There is no harm done. It is not difficult to move on. Just… “ Feel it, express it, and that’s it, we are done. ”
