Sometimes all you want to do after a relationship is forget your ex and everything associated with your relationship together. While temporary measures such as having girls’ nights with lots of ice-cream can help for a bit, today, I’m going to walk you through the best way to do that for good without hurting yourself in the process.

They say that “time heals all wounds” but that doesn’t really give us the full picture and still leaves much to be answered.

For example, how much time will it take to forget your ex and fully heal the wounds of your breakup?

Will time heal your wounds on its own, or do you need to do something else to help the process along?

This article will help you answer all these specific questions that old sayings just can’t help you with.

Society Has Unrealistic Expectations About Breakups

The one thing that no one acknowledges is the fact that society has unrealistic expectations for how long it should take you to get over a breakup.

I see this a lot when I’m working with clients, and they express embarrassment if they’ve been hung up on their ex for “too long “.

Who defines what’s too long to be sad about a past relationship?

For the most part, its peer pressure from friends and family members who constantly push you to “move on” and keep asking questions about why you haven’t gotten over it yet.

These questions can get annoying really quickly and may actually push you into thinking about your ex more, which is not the goal.

It’s impractical to expect someone to get over a breakup before they’re truly ready to do so. So, don’t let others push you into healing from a wound that they can’t even see and have no idea about.

If it isn’t obvious yet, I do not agree with the famous “time heals all wounds” quote.

It is too arbitrary and vague to actually help anyone.

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Two Fundamental Questions We Need To Answer

But today I’m going to take the guesswork out of this idea and help you answer two fundamental questions:

1. How long should it take for you to forget your ex?
2. Is time alone all it will take?

Ultimately, these are difficult questions to answer because no one can truly tell you when you’re ready to get over a breakup. That’s something super personal to you, so only you can truly know when.

I know that’s probably not what you wanted to hear, but deep down, I’m sure you know that it is your decision alone, and no one can guide it because they are not in your shoes.

As far as the second question is concerned, time is NOT the only thing necessary to forget your ex.

Simply having time go by won’t cure your wounds even if it’s been years. You need to use that time well to enhance the healing process, so what you DO with that time is much more important than just letting time pass.

Putting Your Ex On A Pedestal Is A Mistake

Whenever I work with clients who want to get over their ex, I notice a clear lack of discipline and confidence, stopping them from being successful. They lack the discipline or the confidence to prioritize themselves over their ex.

So, the question I put to you is:

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Are you placing your ex on a pedestal they do deserve to be on?

As humans, we tend to obsess about things that we hold in high regard, and this applies to people just as it does to tv shows or books.

However, the feeling gets magnified when you’re dealing with someone that you are deeply in love with or were deeply in love with.

You might look back at your time with your ex as this amazing experience that you’ll never be able to replicate after your breakup.

Such feelings of reminiscence become a self-fulfilling prophecy that makes you constantly think about them and put them on a pedestal.

This then seeps into your dating life because no matter how hard you try to like someone else; you keep comparing them to your ex. Thus, an endless cycle of self-sabotaging begins.

So, the million-dollar question is, how do you get your ex off that pedestal and stop thinking about them 24/7?

The Three Layers of Confidence

The answer is deceptively simple – confidence.

I know it sounds vague because people always say that becoming more confident will make your life better, but I’m going to show you how to be confident.

Let’s get philosophical for a bit.

When I say confidence, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind?

Will power?

Strength?

Often times, confidence-building does not work that simply.

In my opinion, there are three layers of confidence.

The three are like layers on a cake as each one builds off the other to enhance your confidence.

Let’s start from the top outer layer and go down to the foundation:

1. Surface layer:

This is all about perception and how you come across to others. The goal is to always exude a positive perception about yourself by carefully controlling what you post on social media, how you look, and how you walk, etc. This is definitely the most superficial and easy to achieve layer, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important. People’s perceptions of you are incredibly powerful and can influence your day to day mood.

2. Lifestyle layer:

This layer goes deeper than outward perceptions and is all about what you DO as opposed to how people view you. What skills and hobbies do you have? What are your friends and family like? How do you spend all your time? This layer revolves around your surroundings, and how you choose to live your life, so it goes beyond just the impressions you give on social media, etc.

3. Internal layer.

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Mastering this internal layer of confidence can make you feel emotionally invincible. It gives you the belief of knowing that no matter what hardships you face, you WILL get through it. This is the layer where you purposefully prioritize yourself and your well-being over your ex so you can forget about him.

Now that you know that prioritizing yourself means having a robust internal layer of confidence, you might be asking how do I even create that strong layer?

In my experience of years of dealing with clients going through rough breakups, there are two ways to affect your internal layer of confidence: to work from the outside in and have a paradigm shift.

Working from the outside means improving the surface and lifestyle layers and letting the trickle-down effect from those two enhance your internal layer of confidence and self-image.

But only doing those two will not bring about the kind of change you need in your internal layer to fully forget your ex. For that to happen, you need to have a paradigm shift.

A paradigm shift might sound complicated and difficult to achieve, but it basically just means being able to look at your life a little differently.

You know how the brightest minds of ancient Greece used to think that the sun revolved around the earth, and it was just a universally accepted “fact” until science taught us otherwise? That’s a perfect example of a paradigm shift where looking at a situation in a new light can help you understand things you couldn’t before.

As far as your relationship with your ex is concerned, you need to do the same thing – change the way you think so your ex is no longer your number 1 priority. Once you do that, it’ll be so much easier for you to move on from them.

Conclusion:

Now that you’ve made it to the end of the article, you’re doing one thing right and one thing wrong.

What you’re doing right is that you’ve decided you’re ready to forget your ex.

What you’re doing wrong is deliberately TRYING to forget them, and that’s making you think about them even more.

The key to forgetting an ex is putting yourself first and building up your confidence to the point where your ex is no longer a priority for you.

Don’t ever let anyone rush you into forgetting your ex either because, more often than not, peer pressure to forget an ex doesn’t actually help.

So, don’t be afraid to acknowledge that you’re on your own timeline, and there is no point in rushing yourself into something until you have the confidence and resolve to see it through.