“I’m willing to kneel down to you if you can help me bring my girlfriend back. Without her, I feel meaningless to live. Please help me!” This is not an emergency ICU rescue for a girlfriend on the brink of death, but a request I received from a boy who had just broken up for a week. From an outsider’s perspective, it might seem exaggerated to feel like dying because of a breakup, but many of us can relate to this pain.
First of all, I want to acknowledge the emotions and feelings of every person who has gone through a breakup. Many people feel physical pain, depression, difficulty breathing, and even a sense of dying after a breakup. These feelings are not exaggerated.
Researchers at Columbia University believe that the pain we feel after a breakup can be as intense as a burn or losing an arm. Breaking up is definitely not a small matter, especially when we’ve invested so much in a relationship.
However, if you’re feeling like you can’t eat or sleep, emotionally overwhelmed, and obsessed with the idea of getting back with your ex, I must tell you that you’re in a dangerous situation, and I need to hit the pause button for you.
Please take less than 10 minutes to read the first article in this series. It will be the starting point of your scientific plan to get your ex back.
The Danger
Why is this situation so dangerous?
The first danger is becoming a hormone slave and destroying any chance of reconciliation.
“Your good memories are like addictive drugs.”
Love songs don’t lie. Love can be addictive, and there’s scientific evidence to back it up. Anthropologist Dr. Helen Fisher and others believe that from a neuroscience perspective, love is an addictive behavior.
When we first fall in love, the reward system in our brain is activated, and a neurotransmitter called dopamine is released. This hormone controls our “wanting” desires.
The reward system, as the name suggests, is what makes us repeat an action to receive a certain reward. When we fall in love, the reward system makes us feel like, “Being in love is so wonderful! I want to be happy forever like this.” To continue to enjoy this pleasure, dopamine continues to be released, and the reward system instructs us to invest more and more in this relationship, to the point of becoming infatuated and doing things we never thought we could. This is what we commonly call being “addicted.”
From a brain activity perspective, the state of being head over heels in love and obsessively wanting the other person is very similar to the principle of addiction to alcohol or drugs. Since love is an addictive behavior, the pain we feel after a breakup is just as excruciating as the withdrawal symptoms of drug addiction. Especially during the early stages of a breakup, dopamine, which controls our “wanting” desires, continues to increase, making us even more eager to win back our ex.
The idea of winning back our ex crosses the mind of most people during this period…
The second danger is being scammed by “relationship recovery” organizations, leaving you with nothing.
When we are in the depths of despair after a breakup, we are easily tempted to seek quick solutions. This gives so-called “relationship recovery” organizations, which charge exorbitant fees of thousands of dollars or more, a chance to take advantage of our vulnerable state. They use our weakened state of mind and our desperate longing for our ex-partner like a drug, to mercilessly scam us. The pursuit of relationship recovery has become a profitable tool for business people, rather than a topic for psychological discussion.
Are there any guidelines for recovering a relationship? Yes, there are. A scientific approach to relationship recovery should ultimately aim for a healthy, equal, and long-term relationship. I believe that every person who wants to recover their relationship desires a long-lasting, intimate relationship based on mutual effort, don’t you?
However, most of the teachers in relationship recovery organizations have no professional qualifications, there is no entry barrier, and they are not capable of developing a plan that promotes personal growth and benefits long-term relationships.
I once had a fan tell me that she spent 10,000 yuan on a relationship recovery organization, and the “teacher” in the organization only asked her to do two things: 1. Cut off all contact with her ex; 2. Improve herself. When she tried to reconnect with her ex, if he didn’t respond, the “teacher” would judge that “she didn’t improve herself enough, so she couldn’t attract him back.” Sometimes, the “teacher” even made insulting comments to boost her self-doubt and self-denial, causing her to become more anxious and feel that she was not good enough to deserve true love. Such “relationship recovery plans” not only have no effect on recovering the relationship but also harm our mental health.
I also know a boy who borrowed tens of thousands of yuan through Alipay to buy a relationship recovery service. After three months, he was left with nothing, which caused him to fall into deep depression. He even discovered that he could not afford to see a psychologist with the money he had left.
According to the information revealed by several of my fan friends who have worked in relationship recovery organizations, many of the teachers in these organizations were originally professional salespeople. For them, the most important task is to identify every emotional trigger point at each stage of the process, using various persuasive techniques to make you repeatedly pay for your impulses. This is like giving a child candy when they cry for it, temporarily stopping their crying, but not caring about whether the child brushes their teeth, gets cavities, or how to deal with cavities.
Moreover, one cruel and certain fact is that no matter how many “relationship recovery teachers” you consult, whether your ex-partner returns to you is not entirely under our control.
Think about it, your ex is just like us, a living human being. We have no idea what new experiences they will have, what new information they will come across, or what new ideas they will form after the breakup. Maybe today they watched an emotional video on TikTok and thought of you, or maybe they were persuaded by friends to give up the idea of reconciliation completely. Right?
All of these factors are entirely beyond our control. Acknowledging the uncertainty of the outcome of relationship recovery is the first step in deciding whether to pursue it or not.
To avoid blindly falling into the above two pitfalls and regretting it later, no matter how much attachment and reluctance we have towards the other person after a breakup, we must first wake ourselves up and understand that following our instinctive impulses to try to get back together cannot bring us the results we truly desire.
The urgent task for us after a breakup is to establish a thinking system that is not enslaved by instinct. This determines that before attempting to win back the other person, we must do a lot of cognitive rebuilding and mindset adjustments.
First, we need to understand ourselves, or rather, that everyone has two conflicting needs.
The first need is the instinctive impulse for immediate satisfaction, such as eating high-calorie food, sleeping in, and having sex. I like to call it “quick-consumption desire”: it is a strong desire that can be quickly satisfied, but the satisfaction will also quickly disappear, like a fast-moving consumer good.
The second need, opposite to the first one, takes a long time to establish and is not easily dispelled once obtained. For example, a healthy body, a good figure, a capable job, and a stable intimate relationship. To satisfy this second need, we often need to use our brains, plan, and use rational power to fight against the laziness, gluttony, emotional and other quick-consumption desires mentioned above, and learn to delay gratification, in order to obtain these more meaningful and long-lasting satisfactions, right?
It is obvious that using pitiful behavior, disturbing, or entangling the other person to force them to pay attention to us is to satisfy our first quick-consumption desire, which is to follow our instinct for momentary pleasure, as I mentioned earlier. This behavior will ruin our chances of winning back a long-term relationship.
Whether it is stirring up trouble and entanglement according to emotional instinct, or delegating the task of winning back to so-called recovery agencies, it is actually our laziness in thinking, our unwillingness to make practical efforts for self-growth and relationship management.
Actually, not only in the case of winning back, but also in most cases, the reason why our previous relationship broke down is that we only used our instinctive impulse to fall in love and did not use our brains to love.
For example, many people feel that “if you love me, you should tolerate everything about me,” so they throw an emotional bomb at the other person when they are dissatisfied, and finally drive them away; or they think they love the other person deeply and make a lot of self-moved sacrifices, but they fail to consider that this heavy love actually gives the other person a great sense of oppression, pushing them further away.
For example, many people have very idealistic standards for love and believe that “lovers should have understanding and empathy for each other,” and cannot accept disappointment and differences in relationships. They are more willing to end the relationship when problems arise than to work hard to repair it. They keep starting one relationship after another, and eventually become completely hopeless about love. Little do they know that the “right person” they want can only exist in their fantasies, and is impossible to appear in reality.
There are many such examples.
As a saying goes, “liking is indulgence, and love is restraint.” It makes sense.