Mar 24, 2019

Do You Regret An Entire Relationship? Here’s What’s Actually Going On

I was talking to a client the other week, and he mentioned that he regretted a year long relationship that had recently come to an end in his life.

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard someone saying that they wished they could undo the fact that an intimate relationship had taken place.

If this is a thought that you’ve had about a specific relationship, then this short, dense article is going to be a bit of a mind fuck for you.

Alright, no more pre-amble. No foreplay. Here’s what’s up.

What It Means If You Regret A Relationship

One of two things is going on if you wish you could take back a relationship.

1. Either you aren’t finished processing your pain, or

2. You haven’t given up the victim mentality, taken responsibility, and gleaned your lessons from the relationship yet.

Every relationship we ever engage in… no matter how frustrating, tumultuous, or painful it is… was attracted into our lives to teach us something specific.

It doesn’t matter if the relationship lasted for a day, or for 100 years. It’s all valuable content for your never-ending character growth.

So if you’re in a place where you’re telling yourself you wish you could strike a relationship from your mental records, you either need to process your hurt, or search for the lessons.

Ways To Process The Hurt You Still Carry

Still hurting? Try the following.

1. Set aside an hour to listen to sad songs, look at photos of you and your ex, find the hurt in your body, and breathe deeply into it. Give the hurt your full attention and tell it, ‘Pain, you have a home here. It’s okay that I feel this way.’ Cry as much as you can, then take another deep breath and go about your day.

2. Write an angry letter to your ex where you let it all hang out. Embrace the victim mindset and say all of the nastiest shit you can think of. Then, burn the letter. Or rip it up into tiny pieces and throw it in the recycling bin. No, you can’t send it to them. Your pain is your pain. The point isn’t to externalize your pain and make others hurts… the point is to be responsible with your emotions and give them a healthy outlet.

3. Vent all of your residual pain, frustration, and thoughts to a close, trusted, non-shaming friend who can hold space for you. Tell them what you want from them up front (most likely, not to have them offer any suggestions or advice, but simply to hear you out fully until you’re done), and then purge the words out of your mouth. There’s a therapeutic benefit to being witnessed in our truth… even if our truth is temporary and being shared through the lens of our hurt. Share your thoughts, release any emotions that come up if that occurs… and then take a deep breath, hug your friend, and move forwards.

Ways To Extract Lessons From A Relationship

Still can’t find any tiny sliver of potential benefit that could have come from the relationship? Totally at a loss for why you had to go through it? Try the following.

1. Is one frustrating aspect of the relationship that it was similar to other relationships you have had in the past (either in how the relationship was day to day, or how it ended)? Then there must be a lesson that is trying to make itself known to you.

As Pema Chodron once said, “Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.” If you keep finding yourself in the same type of relationship, or suffering from a similar style of relationship ending, then there is a pattern that is trying to emerge in your conscious mind. Take out a journal, and write about the trend that you see emerging. Then ask yourself, ‘What lesson do I need to integrate from what this pattern is trying to show me about myself?’

2. In the earlier years of our dating life, we often need to go through a series of partners in order to simply learn more about ourselves – what we like, and what we don’t like in a romantic partner. Maybe you dated someone who was extremely similar to you in many ways, and found that this lack of sexual charge wore on you. Or perhaps you dated someone who was too different from you, and the lack of overlap was too challenging. Sometimes, the relationships we attract into our lives are simply mirrors for us to look into, realize something new about ourselves, and then, armed with our newfound increased self-awareness, we take that lesson and find a more highly aligned partner.

3. Finally, some relationships come into our lives just so that we know to avoid that type of relationship in the future. I say this point last intentionally because a lazy mind can want to race towards this solution when, in reality, they’re just bypassing their lessons and avoiding looking inwards in an honest way.

If someone rushed into a relationship and then broke your heart by leaving abruptly, look at your relationship to time, intimacy, and your own anxiety, to see how you could have attracted such a partner. Or, if you attracted someone who was highly vain and superficial, and you found yourself both being attracted to their charm and put off by it, look at your own propensity for superficiality.

In all of these instances, the master question is, “How am I like that?”. When we honestly look at the overlap that we had with our ex, we stop giving up our power and putting the blame on them, and we take responsibility for ourselves and move forwards with increased clarity and emotional freedom.

Dedicated to your success,

Jordan

Ps. If you enjoyed this article, you will likely also love checking out:

Are You Willing To Be Awake In Your Relationship?

The Shadow Doesn’t Want To Be Seen

How To Own Your Shadow Before It Owns You

How To Fully Release Difficult Emotions That Hold You Back

How To Harness And Heal The Pain Of A Breakup

Jordan Gray
About Jordan Gray

Jordan Gray has been a sex and relationship coach for over 15+ years, with his work reaching over 200 million people worldwide. His writing has been featured in Vogue, GQ, The New York Times, Cosmopolitan, Women’s Health, and countless other publications around the world. When he’s not working with 1-on-1 coaching clients or writing a new article, he’s most likely to be found reading, chopping wood, or spending time with his wife on a little island off the west coast of Canada.

Blog

Related

See All
30 Pieces of Advice From 30 Couples Married 30+ Years
Dec 16, 2018
Jordan Gray
30 Pieces of Advice From 30 Couples Married 30+ Years
Ever wanted to hear from a trusted board of advisors on the topic of sustaining long-term love? Well, you’re in luck. I searched high and low to find thirty couples who had been happily married for over thirty years, and asked them what one piece of advice they would give to anyone who...
Continue Reading
Being A Healthy, Balanced Adult Is Sexy As Fuck
Dec 10, 2018
Jordan Gray
Being A Healthy, Balanced Adult Is Sexy As Fuck
Self-destruction gets a lot of air time in mainstream media. "Look at this nihilistic badass! He’s constantly shit faced, and smoking a cigarette while he looks off camera left at nothing in particular… because, don't you know, nothing’s worth anything anyways." Nihilism gives...
Continue Reading
The One Thing To Remember When You’re Dealing With Any Person, Ever
Oct 4, 2015
Jordan Gray
The One Thing To Remember When You’re Dealing With Any Person, Ever
There’s a coffee shop down the street from where I live that I frequently go to get some writing done in the morning. I went there a few days ago and something strange happened. The barista behind the counter was the same one I interacted with almost every time that I came in. We were on a first name...
Continue Reading
How To Get Rid Of Your Repressed Anger
Nov 6, 2016
Jordan Gray
How To Get Rid Of Your Repressed Anger
Left unprocessed, repressed anger will wreak havoc on your happiness, your relationships, and your overall life. "But I'm not an angry person. I never get angry!", say most people everywhere. If you found your way to this article, there's some repressed anger buried somewhere deep inside of you. And...
Continue Reading
How To Stop Being Run By Your Most Deeply Ingrained Patterns
Dec 24, 2016
Jordan Gray
How To Stop Being Run By Your Most Deeply Ingrained Patterns
There are certain unconscious patterns that have been running you, your entire life. These patterns have tapped your energy. They have exhausted you. They have cumulatively wasted precious years of your life. And not until you become aware of these patterns and work through the beliefs that are propping...
Continue Reading
What Ancient Tribes Knew About Being A Man That You Don't
Jan 27, 2014
Jordan Gray
What Ancient Tribes Knew About Being A Man That You Don’t
For thousands of years of human existence in ancient cultures across the world, there have been rites of passage that made boys into men. During these rites of passage boys would overcome fear, anxiety, and death in order to shed their boy-like way of thinking and more fully mature on a mental and...
Continue Reading