After yet another dating disaster I have been struggling lately to come to turns with truly being on my own. As I have mentioned before, I was in a relationship for quite some time. 2 years on and another 6 on and off so for nearly a decade I always had someone to fall back on so to speak. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my ex boyfriend more than anything but we got to a point in our relationship where we simply stayed together out of habit. When life threw us curve balls we continuously ran into each others arms because that’s what we had done for so long. The comfort we got from each other, no matter how temporary, was addictive.
You hear a lot about addiction these days wether it’s gambling, smoking or drugs but not so much about emotional addictions. Addictions that we have to people and the feelings they give us. Take my past relationship for example. We were the complete opposite of one another and had different standards of where our lives should be so over the years we fought each other constantly because we just weren’t on the same page and were never going to be. Despite all this, we always ended up back together because we had practiced the same habit for so long it became a dangerous addiction. No amount of fights or harmful words were ever enough for us to give each other up and I am surprised that I didn’t notice this destructive pattern until shortly after we broke up for good.
It would all start when things were going smoothly. When our relationship was good, it was amazing and it felt as though nothing or no one else mattered. But just as quickly as we reached that high, the lows would come. We would become strangers who didn’t know if we really did love the other and usually break up for a brief moment but our road back to each other was always the same. All it had to take was for something in our lives to happen (a small or big crisis) and we would give in and call. We would play on the others compassionate side and the cycle would start again. This cycle was so destructive because we never really faced our issues, both in or out of our relationship. Like any other addict, we fed our addiction and then brushed it off because this was what we had always done. We were well and truly in denial.
So how does one get over this kind of addiction? Unfortunately, you never really do. Addictions are something that will follow you for your entire life but they can managed by breaking the habit that put you in this position in the first place. My first step was to move away to a tropical island to live and work. Far enough away from my ex that I could start learning new ways of dealing with everything life threw at me without feeling tempted to jump in my car and see him. At first, this was not easy. Mobile phones and Facebook make it increasingly difficult to cut ties with people these days so it took me another year to finally change my number and block him on Facebook. Even though I have taken some major steps in trying combat this addiction, each time life throws me those curve balls my first instinct is still to call my ex. It sounds crazy I know and maybe it is because it has been over a year since we last spoke but this is what having an addiction is like. You have your triggers and when they appear you will always be tempted to fall back into old habits. What you have to do is create new habits.
When creating new habits you need to be truly honest with yourself and pinpoint what your triggers are and then try and find new, more positive ways of dealing with them. What works for me is when I have that first initial thought about contacting him I push it out of my mind and think of something else. It doesn’t matter what that something else is just as long as it’s not him. In doing this, I have learnt how to face my issues head on instead of hiding behind someone. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still hard and there are still times when I feel I could easily fall back into my old pattern but I make a conscious effort not too. It’s often a struggle, like anyone with an addiction would know but it’s one I am not afraid to fight and you shouldn’t be either because the struggles we face today equip us with everything we need to succeed in the future.
Miss Rossi xxo 