Are you missing an ex who was bad for you? You’re not the only one. Most dumpees miss their ex, regardless of how good or bad their ex was for them. Dumpees miss their ex just for getting rejected and not having their ex around.
They think about their ex 24/7 and convince themselves they’re missing their ex because they truly love their ex.
The truth, though, is that they’re attached and got their self-esteem crushed. Because their ex was bad for them, they became even more dependent on their ex than dumpees who got what they needed in the relationship.
This may sound strange, but bad and toxic relationships are much harder to process than good ones. Bad relationships create unhealthy emotions such as fear and feelings of worthlessness. In other words, they make couples codependent on each other.
The longer they rely on each other for basic human things such as self-love, money, and a place to live, the more attached they get and the more they miss their ex after the breakup.
You need to understand that it’s completely normal to miss an ex who was bad for you. Throughout the course of the relationship, you bonded with your ex and created certain expectations of your ex. In a way, you idolized your ex and fell deeply in love with your ex.
Your ex may not have been the worst person on Earth, but because your ex cared about himself or herself a lot more than you, your ex starved you for validation and made you want him or her more than anything. Your ex hindered the relationship’s growth and made you want to fix the things that he or she wasn’t good at.
This made you feel neglected or not understood and forced you to form an unhealthy attachment to your ex.
Now that the relationship has ended, your brain is confusing you. It’s telling you that you miss your ex when in reality, you miss the little bit of security you had when you were still together. You miss talking to your ex and bonding when the relationship was fresh and exciting or when you were finally able to get some love and attention from your ex.
If you miss an ex who was bad for you, you miss both the lows and the highs in the relationship. You miss the feeling of fixing things with your ex and putting the relationship on the right track. When you resolved problems, you felt loved and hopeful and renewed your sense of direction.
Since there’s no relationship to work on and goals to strive toward anymore, things feel empty and uncertain. You don’t feel that your life is heading in any direction, let alone the right direction. For the first time in a long time, you feel stuck and dissatisfied with your life.
You know your ex isn’t the right person for you, but because you went through a lot with your ex, your brain is telling you otherwise. It’s telling you that you love your ex and that your ex was the person you should have tried harder with.
Your brain doesn’t tell you the full story, which is that there were big issues and that those issues will require a miracle to resolve. At the moment, you can focus on the good things for the most part.
You remember the celebrations, gifts, and even simple gestures of affection and cooperation that made you happy. Things like walking in the park, shopping, stargazing, and watching movies together. Such things make you feel bittersweet.
They remind you that the relationship wasn’t all bad and that you enjoyed certain parts of your ex’s personality. Nostalgia certainly isn’t on your side. It’s constantly reminding you that your ex was a good match for you and that you should ignore his or her red flags and shortcomings.
Sadly, that’s the opposite of what you should do. As someone who got dumped, you should focus on your ex’s negative traits. They will knock some sense into you and help you process the separation quicker than thoughts about your ex making you happy.
If you allow yourself to indulge in nostalgia, you’ll feel happy and sad at the same time. You’ll intentionally cling to hope and delay acceptance and healing. I know nostalgia is hard to avoid when every fiber in your body is telling you to obsess about your ex and the breakup.
But despite that, you must do your best to avoid it. You must learn to distract yourself and keep your ex out of your mind.
So if you’re missing an ex who was bad for you, know that it’s okay to miss your ex as missing your ex is unavoidable. Most dumpees miss their ex and wonder if their ex will come back. Many dumpees also contact their ex and try to reason with their ex.
What’s not okay, however, is to intentionally dwell on the past and tell yourself things like:
- I wish I could be with my ex again
- maybe my ex wasn’t that bad
- I messed up and caused the breakup
- I need to do something to make my ex notice me and want me back
If a part of you knows your ex was bad for you, you must resist the temptation to reach out. You must listen to the rational side of your brain and deal with the post-breakup blues.
Once you’ve dealt with them, you’ll become more rational and see that focusing on yourself rather than your ex was the right move.
In today’s post, we cast light on why you miss an ex who was bad for you. We explain what’s making you so nostalgic and what you should do to deal with it.
Why do you miss an ex who was bad for you?
One of the biggest reasons why you miss your ex who was bad for you is that your ex took personal power and importance from you. Through neglect or misconduct, your ex made you feel insignificant and reduced your trust in your abilities.
In other words, your ex’s unhealthy attitude and behavior impacted your self-esteem and made you see your ex as someone you needed to get by in life. Every time your ex disapproved of you, rejected you, refused intimacy, and failed to provide a healthy and safe environment to live in, your ex triggered your insecurities and made you more and more reliant on him or her.
This is especially true if your ex apologized or made it up to you afterward because that gave you a false sense of security and hope in your ex’s relationship-solving skills and ability to grow. It made you trust your ex and forced you to go through another rollercoaster of emotions the next time the same problems occurred.
All relationships have problems and difficulties. But couples who are a good match don’t let their emotions get the best of them. They don’t hit each other, destroy items, shout, call each other names, ignore or block each other, and let their relationship deteriorate.
Couples who understand the meaning of love increase their relationship standards. This means they set boundaries that mustn’t ever be crossed. Over time, they raise relationship boundaries and find healthier and more effective ways to communicate, bond, and get along.
Unhealthy couples, on the other hand, don’t have any boundaries. They say and do what they want and by doing so, react to each other. The longer they do that, the worst things they say and do. Eventually, they lose respect for each other and start pulling away and prioritizing themselves.
If they don’t realize their mistakes and resolve their problems quickly, they fail to give each other what they need and break up. That’s when dumpees not only feel abandoned but also neglected and incapable of taking care of themselves.
Anyway, you probably miss an ex who was bad for you because you tried so hard to please your ex. You put blood, sweat, and tears into the relationship just to get broken up with in the end. All this wasted effort makes you feel ridiculous for working on the relationship and staying committed till the end.
Your ex wasn’t doing anything to get the relationship back to the way it was and was planning his or her way out of the relationship while you were still fully invested and unaware of his or her detachment.
You especially miss your ex if your ex jumped straight into a new relationship and showed you how little you meant to him or her. Monkey branching should be punishable by law because it causes severe and overwhelming shock and grief even to the most confident people.
As long as a person is attached (and most dumpees are, especially when the dumper starts neglecting the relationship), the dumpee is forced to suffer and question his or her worth. The dumpee goes through powerful withdrawal stages and initially engages in self-blame.
It normally takes the dumpee a few months to get back on his or her feet and rebuild self-esteem.
So if you’re missing your ex who treated you poorly, know that your ex’s pre-breakup and post-breakup behavior is responsible for your nostalgia. It’s one of the most common and reasonable explanations for missing an ex who clearly isn’t good for you.
It’s also possible that you miss your ex because you never got closure. If your ex ghosted you, ignored you, blocked you, or made you feel responsible for the breakup, your ex made you rely on your own understanding of the relationship for answers.
This, in turn, hindered your ability to see clearly and prevented you from healing at the speed that you could heal if your ex talked to you and answered your concerns.
If it’s been a while since you broke up, then you’re probably missing your ex like crazy because you haven’t been happy recently. Your life isn’t going the way you expect it to go, so you’re remembering the past and wondering if you used to be happier.
Once again, your brain doesn’t remind you of all the bad times. It just wants you to know that you could stop suffering (skip dealing with pain) if you had a backup plan. You could be with your ex and not have to worry about your current problems.
Your ex doesn’t have these problems, so you think that your ex could help you deal with them or ignore them. Either way, you see your ex as the solution to your problems even though the opposite is true. Your ex can’t help you and probably doesn’t even want to.
You have to do this alone and find happiness on your own.
That being said, here are 7 reasons why you miss an ex who was bad for you.
I remember missing an ex who was bad for me too. Even though I knew my ex was far from being my ideal partner, I still missed the romantic aspect of the relationship. I valued what we had and was afraid of never seeing her again.
But as I stayed in no contact, I detached and realized my ex did me a huge favor. She helped me see what she saw – that we weren’t a great match and that we’d be happier with other people.
To this day, I’m still extremely grateful she left me and allowed me to realize the relationship wasn’t as great as I had thought. Sure, I felt angry, nostalgic, and desperate beyond belief at first and would only read hope-giving articles.
But when I got out of depression, stopped feeling hurt by rejection, and learned that I was missing her immensely because she was bad for me not good for me, things started to make sense. Suddenly, I no longer craved her good personality traits because I could finally see her bad ones.
I was far from perfect, but I rebuilt my self-esteem, understood she treated me badly, and realized that I didn’t want an ex back (or in my life) who has no sympathy toward struggling dumpees. That was when I stopped obsessing about her and viewed her as someone who has nothing valuable to give to me.
What to do when you’re missing an ex who was bad to you?
If you’re missing an ex who was bad to you, the first thing you must do is give it time. Don’t expect to process trauma and various post-breakup problems in a matter of days.
It will take a long time for you to get out of denial, regain your rational thinking, and see your ex differently. I’m talking about months of time because that’s how long healing takes for the average dumpee. While you’re recovering, expect to have good and bad days. Good days will let you focus on yourself whereas bad days will make you think about your ex and wonder how you could have avoided the breakup.
No matter what kind of day you’re having, persevere and give yourself time to grieve. It will take a while to deal with separation anxiety and improve your self-esteem. But eventually, you’ll pull through this. You’ll recover and wonder why you even missed an ex who didn’t care about you.
How long this whole ordeal takes depends on your experience with breakups, copings mechanisms, the things you think and do, the mistakes you make, the things your ex does, and whether you got closure.
When you’re missing your ex who was bad for you, you should take a pen and paper and write down your thoughts and feelings. Write down everything that comes to mind, including your ex’s good and bad points.
At first, you’ll remember mostly your ex’s good points. But if you give this exercise another try a couple of weeks later, you should see that your thinking has changed and that your ex isn’t the perfect person you thought he or she was.
You should basically notice progress in your mentality and the way the breakup makes you feel.
When you think about your ex and miss him or her, try to also distract yourself. Most dumpees find socializing to be one of the best ways to deal with unwanted thoughts and feelings. Friends, family, and people in general force them to focus on more important things than their ex, so they spend time with them whenever they feel nostalgic and tempted to contact their ex.
You can also sign up for therapy. Talking to a professional will help you process the things your ex didn’t or couldn’t. Don’t hesitate to seek professional help as it’s truly one of the best ways to get through a breakup.
Always remember that you’re missing a person who was bad to you because he or she was bad to you. If your ex treated you well, you wouldn’t be so nostalgic and dependent on your ex.
You’d know that you can get the things you want in life on your own and with other people. You just need to be patient and do what it takes to disconnect from your ex.
Are you missing an ex who was bad for you? What exactly do you miss about your ex? Let us know in the comments section below.
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