6 Warning Signs That You Are Still Hung Up on Your Ex

"The majority of us have experienced that feeling of the excruiciating  pain that comes with a broken relationship.  Listen to your mother who tells you that time is a great healer.  But when we are in pain we tend to console our broken hearts by reliving the misery of the breakup  over and over again. 

To speed up the healing process you have to break the cycle of the painful memories. This can be done by changing your habits.  For example remove and change things that remind you of your ex,  little things at home like changing your furniture around, but new bed linen, change the music you would listen to together, take up a new hobby, get rid of their telephone number.

Accept that the healing process will take time, but it will get better, most importantly banish any negative thoughts, only allow the positive thoughts to linger in your mind."   -  Susan

6 Warning Signs That You Are Still Hung Up on Your Ex

If you've been in a committed relationship, whether it was for months or for years, you know that breaking up is hard to do. For some, the official ending of the relationship is something they expected for quite a long time, and when it happens, they experience a sense of freedom and relief. Others are blindsided by the relationships end and experience more difficulty trying to cope. And when we have a broken heart, friends and family are quick to offer support and advice on how to heal. Caution: there are no immediate fixes for a broken heart!

You've heard the phrase, "If you want to get over someone, you've got to get under someone new?" Yeah, that's a bad idea! While dating again can be exciting and offer some temporary distraction from your grief, beginning too soon may set yourself up for more disappointment. And too many disappointing experiences will cause you to doubt the possibility of finding viable and better alternatives and keep you stuck on your last relationship. That's why it's critical to know when it's too early to think about someone new. Here are six signs you should put the brakes on dating. 

1) Communicating, Negotiating and Denial

The ending of a relationship means that two people who shared so much together must now untangle and separate so many parts of their lives. As you might expect, it's almost impossible for this to happen without a transitional period. Often, you have property to be exchanged and moved, as well as other loose ends needing to be tied up. These issues will require communicating with your ex-partner to accomplish the tasks of separating. Sometimes, these communications include negotiation and re-evaluation to confirm a separation is what you both want. This is also the time couples make another attempt at making a relationship work. If you are in this denial stage and still consider getting back with your ex-partner, dating a new person isn't something you should be doing.

2) Ruminating About Your Ex?

Psychologists define ruminating as passive and repeated focusing and thinking about a situation, its causes and its consequences. Ruminating is finding yourself caught in a loop, replaying memories and past conversations, or fantasizing about what you might say to your ex. If you catch yourself doing this, you haven't recovered enough to consider dating.

3) Anger and Guilt

Anger is the second stage after denial in the grief and loss process. We experience anger or guilt after our denial of the loss wanes and the pain of the breakup re-emerges. For most people, anger is directed at their ex-partner or at the circumstances that led to the breakup. For example, if your relationship ended because of infidelity, you might be angry with your ex-partner for cheating and angry with the other person for being a "home-wrecker." Or, if you were in a relationship with a person who was abusive, you might be angry with yourself for getting involved. 

On the other side of anger, newly single people experience a tremendous amount of guilt and blame for the relationship ending. This is true for those partners who are guilty of engaging in outside affairs, cheating, or emotional or physical abuse. Knowing they are most at fault for the relationship ending, they may frantically attempt to undo the damage or "make up" for what they have done and recover the relationship. When their efforts are re-buffed, they experience the most trouble recovering from the loss. If this sounds like you, avoid single's events for a while.

4) Hunting and Haunting

When a former couple gets past the negotiation stage and all communication has stopped, many single people find they are engaging in what I call "hunting and haunting." Hunting involves going to places where there is a high probability of running into an ex-partner. This might include frequenting restaurants, bars and nightclubs that otherwise haven't been part of your stomping grounds. In doing so, the Hunter fantasizes that their ex-partner will have a sudden and dramatic change of heart after a "coincidental" meeting. The "coincidental" meeting is awkward at best, and might even look desperate. Haunting refers to stalking behaviors like driving by the ex-partner's home or monitoring their social media sites hoping to see that nothing in their life has changed. 

Hunting and haunting is detrimental to your recovery for several reasons. First, it requires you to spend considerable time and energy thinking about your ex-partner and what they might be doing. And when you find evidence that your ex-partner might have moved on, you'll make unfavorable comparisons to your life and ruminate about your loss. Too often, the information you learn is incomplete, and you become more curious. Again, the focus is on your ex, instead of focusing on things you could do to speed up your recovery.

5) Desperation Dating

Sure, rebounding can help take the focus off of your ex-partner and provide a needed boost in self-esteem. But accepting an undesirable but available new partner could be even worse. If you are feeling desperate and you're uncomfortable with being single, then you are not ready to begin a relationship with anyone but yourself.

6) Making Comparisons

Dating too soon can also result in unfavorably comparing your new friend to your ex-partner, feeling disappointed, and result in an emotional set-back for you. That is, when you start to believe that no one can compare to your ex, your outlook for future relationships begins to look bleak. But disappointment isn't the only consequence! If your last relationship was unhealthy and problematic, you might make comparisons that idealize a potential date, because they seem to have the opposite qualities of your ex. While tempting, the fact you are even making such comparisons is a sign that it's still too soon.

The lesson here is a simple one: Dating again before healing from your last relationship isn't a cure for your broken heart. Remember, a breakup is a transitional period and should be a time for self-reflection and healing, not beginning a new relationship.

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How To Date A Co-Worker: Tips For A Successful Office Romance

[REX]

How To Date A Co-Worker: Tips For A Successful Office Romance

If you’re looking for love then meeting your Mr Potential at work is one of the top three ways singles hook-up. The other two are meeting through friends and online dating. 

Whichever way you meet, there are always potential difficulties to negotiate. For example, sometimes friends set you up with someone you can't stand and you're stuck having to be nice to them because you might bump into them again socially. And there's always the danger when meeting someone online that they'll turn out to be nothing like their dating profile.

eeting someone in the workplace has its own set of obstacles. At first it’s thrilling, exchanging glances over your desks and lingering in the staff canteen hoping to bump into each other. But it’s crucial to get clued-up and face the realities of these romances.

Dating a colleague can be tricky territory

Here are 10 top tips for a stress-free office romance:

1) Sounds a bit ‘Big Brother-ish’ but check your company’s policy on relationships between colleagues. Some bigger companies, especially internationals, forbid them. It might seem unreasonable, but you don’t want to break your contract any more than you want to get a broken heart. 

2) Even a decade ago it was easy to have a bit of banter and flirt at work. With sexual harassment laws now in place, be very aware of the difference between a little banter and ratcheting it up to full-on flirting. Remember, those laws are there for your own protection, so it's best to heed them.

Some people feel awkward seeing flirting going on in the workplace, so discretion is crucial. You can signal your interest to that Mr Potential with lots of flirting when others aren’t in earshot.

Keep your relationship subtle! [REX]

3) Let’s say you two have got it together and are now dating. While some will be happy for you, other colleagues won’t want their noses rubbed in it. You might want to show how loved-up you are, but keeping it low-key at work is better all round.

4) Being professional involves more than you two simply leaving the flirting and loved-up vibe at the office door. It also means taking care not to show favouritism to each other. Or overcompensating by going out of your way not to help each other. As a rule of thumb, use how you treated each other before you started dating, to guide your behaviour now.5) An excellent way to keep some professional distance is to keep liaising with other workmates about day-to-day decisions and issues at work. One thing people have confided in me, is they ended up using their new partner as a sounding board for everything to do with work. That doesn’t give you the full array of views available around your office.

6) It feels exciting now, but it’s far too easy to bring your work home with you when you work in the same office. Discuss setting boundaries on how much you talk about work - outside of work - to prevent any ‘boardroom-boredom’.

7) It might be a red hot fantasy sleeping with your manager, but when it comes to the real world of work, set ground rules if one of you has seniority. For instance, if you have less seniority you can’t expect them to give you a leg-up just because you’re getting your ‘leg over’ at the weekend together.

That would damage his position and undermine your own worth in the workplace. 8) Speaking of fantasies, many have exciting ones about getting frisky in the finance office or sexy in the stationery cupboard. And in my sex-tips articles I often recommend racy work-based fantasies for fun sex-chat. But the reality is, you need to keep it as a fantasy - you could face disciplinary action if caught in compromising circumstances at work. And it could seriously harm your career if you did.

9) Who doesn’t love having an office-gossip? Especially about colleagues’ love lives and your own? One study found nearly 80 per cent of office gossip was based on who was flirting with each other, who fancied a colleague, etc. 

It is one thing to share with workmates that you’re seeing Andy from accounts, but quite another to give intimate details. After all, he deserves privacy and you wouldn’t want him sharing gory details about your sex techniques with everyone in his department.

Leave your intimate relationship at the office door [Rex]

10) In Fifty Shades of Grey, Ana was swept off her feet by Christian in a workplace interview. But their relationship was far from plain sailing and emotions got tied up in knots… as well as other things!

It can be really tough if things start going downhill with your relationship. In this case, you both must agree to keep personal difficulties out of the office. You might feel you can't wait until you clock out to tackle your differences, but if your personal life starts getting caught up in your work or, even worse, if you start being petty at work in order to teach your other half a lesson, it’ll reflect very badly on you.

By Dr Pam Spurr, sex, relationships and self-help expert. Catch her on Twitter @drpamspurrand the author of The Emotional Eater’s Diet. 

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How to Trust Someone Again After You've Been Hurt In Love

Photo: Nicolas Raymond

How to Trust Someone Again After You've Been Hurt In Love

Have you ever been through one of those terrible relationships or break-ups that leave you doubting whether or not you'll be able to trust someone again?

I have. And so have countless other people.

In fact, fear of trusting someone again is such a common reaction to being hurt in love that it has its own name: pistanthrophobia.

As anyone who's been through it will agree, it's a very difficult thing to get over. However, if you want to be in a happy, healthy relationship again, then you do need to overcome it. The four suggestions below helped me, and I think they'll also help you get past the things which are holding you back from a brighter future.

1. Don't assume that the future will be the same as the past

My first proper relationship ended when I found out that my girlfriend was cheating on me with one of my best mates; then afterwards--perhaps to get back at me for breaking up with her--it got back to me that she'd been spreading the (extremely false) rumor that I'd raped her. I was shattered. Combined with some other things that were taking place in my life, the experience plunged me into a crippling and near fatal depression, and my ability to trust another girl was destroyed.

Over the next few years, I brought my pistanthrophobia with me on every date I went on, and suffice it to say, there weren't a lot of second dates. My inability to trust another girl was ruining any chance I had of being in a functional relationship, and I wondered if I'd ever be able to overcome it and make things work with a woman.

Eventually however, I started seeing a therapist for my depression. Everything that happened with my ex inevitably came up, and my psychologist gave me a piece of advice that helped me immensely:

"Don't cast dispersions on the entire female population because of one bad experience with one bad girl."

I think casting such dispersions is the root cause of the vast majority of people's pistanthrophobia; because we've been hurt by one person--or in some people's cases, a number of people--we become conditioned to believing that the next person will hurt us too. But projecting this assumption onto the next person isn't being fair. Unless that person has done something to make us wary of trusting them, then they deserve to be given an open-minded chance. It's important that we start each relationship with a clean slate, and not let it be poisoned by our past.

2. Learn from the past: what were the warning signs that your ex was untrustworthy?

In my case, my ex would constantly break promises, lie, say one thing then do something else, and continuously do things that she knew would bother me. With the benefit of hindsight, it's not surprising that she ended up seriously hurting me. People who have certain self-centred, manipulative and malicious traits are not worthy of your trust. If you can learn from your past relationships to identify said traits and the types of people who aren't to be trusted, then you'll be better at picking a lover the next time around--and knowing that you're wiser and more likely to pick a better lover will make you less scared of getting hurt.

3. Learn from the past: what were the things that you could have done differently?

The way my ex used to look at my mate, the amount they used to talk to each other on the phone, the amount of time they'd always spend together ... I was always suspicious that something was going on. But whenever I'd bring it up with her, she'd always stress that they were just friends, and feeling guilty for raising it, I'd always let the matter drop--even though my gut was telling me that something wasn't right. In the end of course, I ended up being correct.

The key lesson I learned from this was to trust my instincts. Where there's smoke there's usually fire, so if something seems off to you, then it probably is. Part of the lesson I learned is that my girlfriend should have addressed my fears and not dismissed them. As a result of learning this lesson, I now have confidence in myself that should a similar situation present itself, I wouldn't make the same mistake. And once you trust yourself to be able to make better decisions, it becomes much easier to trust somebody else.

4. Give yourself time to heal

After a difficult break-up, I think it's extremely helpful to take a timeout from dating and try to grow in your pain. I myself rushed back into things when in hindsight I wasn't ready, which led to more failed relationships, which led to more heartache, which led to more pistanthrophobia, which led to more failed relationships ... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. I think it's important to learn everything you can from your previous relationships, and work to arrive at a place where you feel like if you were to meet someone else that you're interested in, that you'd be able to start fresh. Once you've done that, then you're ready to start dating again.

The best revenge is living well

As the saying goes, once you're bitten, you're twice shy. The natural intention is to put up barriers around you and try to protect yourself by refusing to open up and trust anyone again-but if you do that, you could miss out on the joy of spending your life with someone great. Don't let that happen. An ex's untrustworthiness does not have to have a permanent impact on your ability to trust another person, and it doesn't have to destroy your future relationships.

After all, your ex has already hurt you enough. Don't let them hurt you anymore.

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