When your ex is getting married
Blind Case Study: Part 01 to 04 combined
Below is the 4 week case study of one of my clients. The same has been conducted with consent. For anonymity, all the personal details are altered. The goal is to show how a session takes place and what difference 4 sessions that are a part of the monthly container can bring.
This case study will be especially relevant if you:
Are stuck on someone you know isn’t right.
Feel better but not free.
Understand your situation intellectually but can’t move emotionally.
Keep hoping time will fix something it hasn’t.
If you have been struggling with something too and would like to work with me privately on that, you can learn more about it here.
Or book a session by clicking on the link below.
Part 01
Name: Jane
Age: 27
Loop: Her ex is getting married in February and she is not completely at peace with it.
The beginning:
I asked her if she knew what she wanted to discuss or if hasn’t been feeling herself lately. The reason of her booking. She said that her ex was about to get married and she hasn’t been feeling completely at peace recently.
She explained that they were never really in a relationship. It was doomed from the beginning. Both of them knew that they wouldn’t get married but were together in the moment without the label of a relationship.
They lived together and had known each other for 7/8 years, first as friends and then romantically.
She described her relationship as one where she was never able to have a certain authority over him due to the fact that it was never going to work out. So, even when things bothered her, there were times when she would not even discuss them with him because she thought, ‘what is even the point?’
She had been grieving the loss of something that wasn’t hers to begin with. I wanted to know if she had ever considered the possibility of a forever. And if she had, did she really think they were compatible.
She waited and confessed that while there might have been a fleeting thought, she had never really considered the possibility which is why she needed some time to think if they were actually compatible long term.
This is what I wanted. To plant a seed of a different perspective.
I asked her, to list down the attributes she loved and the ones that got on her nerves.
She said that most communication was initiated by her and he wasn’t very expressive. For the days, when they weren’t physically close, she also felt an emotional distance. She knew he cared, but it was only because they lived together and he could show it.
She wasn’t very secure either. There were times when she doubted his love for her.
And ever since his engagement which happened 7/8 months back, she find herself wondering if she was the only one that was affected. It seemed to her that he remained unaffected and that their relationship had never been as important as it was to her.
Since the engagement, there have been a number of moments that she recounted which would be termed as emotional cheating.
I told her that she plays a role in it and that she is still choosing to stay attached to him. Her acknowledgement of her agency in the situation is very important since that is the one variable she can control. Till the time that she thinks she has no role in it, things will remain the same and she will be a victim of her circumstances.
The deeper we delved in the relationship, the more problematic it seemed and she had her answer.
They were not compatible.
At the end of the session, I asked her to create a list of attributes that she ideally wants in her significant other and how much her ex matched those attributes.
She had something to think about over the week. Between sessions, Jane stayed connected with me over text, so the work didn’t collapse back into overthinking once the call ended. This continuity is what allowed the shifts to stick.
Part 02
In the first week, I helped Jane see herself as an active participant in maintaining an emotional tie instead of a victim of her circumstances.
The second realisation we worked upon was for her to question the stability of the relationship if it was not doomed.
The session in the second week started with me asking if she wanted to share anything specific about her week. Any details or events that might have struck her as important to be shared and discussed.
She mentioned that while the week was uneventful mostly, there was an incident she wanted to discuss.
Trigger: She had been to a get together where her ex was also invited and she saw a woman’s helmet on his bike. When she questioned it, someone from the group said, ‘You are not the only one who rides the bike now.’
She said that it stung. She keeps saying to herself that things don’t bother her but it did. I appreciated the fact that she accepted it in front of me.
I, however, wanted to understand why she felt the need to say that it didn’t bother her.
‘Fake it till you make it, right?’
It can be a useful tactic for building confidence. But as a strategy for grief, it’s emotional fraud. Brushing your hurt under the mat doesn’t make it go away. It lays there in wait, only for you to stumble upon it on a lonely night free of distractions. Acceptance is the only way to move forward.
But, how do you accept something like this? A person that you loved and were living with just leaves one day to marry someone else. It doesn’t make sense.
It is definitely a frustrating experience but I wanted her to really think about what we had touched upon before. Was he even right for her? Or was it the fact that he couldn’t be hers that kept her attached?
We went back to the list I had asked her to make one about the values she wanted in her partner and if her ex had those qualities or not.
Attentive - No
Caring - Yes
Emotionally available- No
Spontaneous - No
Ambitious and street smart - Yes
Family oriented - Yes
Protective towards me - No
Loves to travel - Yes
A little sensitive - No
The list was a no after no with a splash of yes. I asked her if making the list made her understand something. She said that she wanted to not think about it more than she had to.
Problem: Another avoidant behaviour. She was constantly choosing to not think about it. Thinking that things will just heal on their own. I told her that I need her to think about it now.
She took a few minutes and said that he lacked some of her non-negotiables.
I had to probe this further to make it stick. I tried to reframe this event in her life.
Reframe: I told her that the relationship was doomed. For the past 3/4 years, she had given him a lot of her time. And even if it was not doomed, it would not have worked considering her non-negotiables. His marriage is actually her way out of a relationship that had never been fulfilling.
She found it a little difficult to grasp. But for now, introducing this thought is enough. Something that she can sit with for a week before we meet again.
Action: For the next few days, I told her to think about the positives of this situation. What is the good that is coming out of it?
We ended the session with an activity for her to reframe her mind and come back next week clearer in her head.
Part 03
Development:
Earlier, she had very random thoughts of him, all the time, without even meaning to. But now, her mind went back to him only in the free moments and that too in an intentional way. It didn’t stop hurting, of course, but the pain wasn’t as sharp as before either.
I was very happy to know this. It was real change that she had noticed in her behaviour.
Reinforcement:
I wanted to reinforce the opportunity part in her mind though. Last week, it had been me who said that but I wanted her to own it.
The only way to do that was to know what she still thinks of as a loss.
She said that she had spent years with him. They had developed a language that only they could understand. She had spent so long and he finally knew what she liked, what she didn’t. His future wife will be the one who gets treated well because she was her predecessor.
She felt like only when she was about to get the fruit of all the effort they had put into the relationship, it ended.
I wanted to prod further and pointed out that she had always known that their break up was inevitable as mentioned in the first session.
This was when she realised that a part of her still believed that they would be together or that it wouldn’t hurt this much when it ended.
‘I was choosing to be happy in the present, I didn’t know it would hurt this bad’
But she had herself admitted that she was not happy in the present either. It was a compromise, the relationship. Habit disguised as living in the moment.
Breakthrough:
We continued further. I mentioned that the way she described her relationship sounded like she was coaching someone to be there for her. Not someone who was choosing to be there.
So, the language she had developed with him might have been love but it was not equal.
She had always suspected that but had never had the courage to actually say it out loud. Cause saying it out loud meant that it was the truth.
Accepting the truth of her relationship is what is going to set her free so I wanted her to completely acknowledge it.
I asked her to write three truths about her relationship. Three things that she was completely sure of and this is what she wrote:
1. It was not a relationship, it was ambiguity.
2. I didn’t feel secure
3. I loved him
These three things may seem contradictory logically but can coexist. The thing that I was happy to see was that she wrote ‘I loved him’ and not ‘I love him’
When I pointed that out, she said that she hadn’t even noticed when she wrote it. That was the biggest breakthrough we had. She does not love him anymore.
She just misses a presence. And that is something we can solve better than unloving someone.
Habits are breakable, love not so much.
Part 04
This was the last week of the monthly container and we had already seen a lot of changes in how Jane saw herself with regards to her ex.
The intent for these sessions was not to heal everything at once. It was to create enough space for her to heal. To be able to look at the problem from a distance and not be drowned in it.
This session was quite important as the wedding was only a week away now and since both of them shared a friend group as well, she had finally decided that she was going to go.
It was a very important decision. We had dawdled around it multiple times in the previous sessions. How she had been confused about it. Seeing him get married was obviously going to be difficult but it was also going to help her achieve the acceptance that she needed to move forward.
I asked her how she was feeling about the marriage. She confessed that when she came in,
She was worried that if she went, it would be too difficult for her. And now, she was worried that if she didn’t go, she would miss out on the fun that she would have with her friends.
For her priorities to change so significantly, it was more progress than I could have expected. She had moved from not being at peace with his marriage to thinking about enjoying it.
It was going to hurt, sure, but she was going to be with the people she loved and not at home alone. That mattered more.
I assured her that this was the right decision and I was really happy to see her reaching it. It took her 7/8 months altogether but she was finally at a place where she could see the good in the situation.
She said that she even found someone attractive in a get together recently. She had tried dating someone earlier also, right after the ex’s engagement but she didn’t feel anything. This was the first time since she had been with her ex that she actual felt attracted to someone, in a real sense.
We ended the session with me restating that she could always book another session whenever required. And that if she ever feels like she wants her ex back, she should refer to the list of her non-negotiables and remember that she doesn’t actually want him.
She was happy to have booked and left much lighter than when she came in.
Over four sessions, Jane didn’t move on or healed automatically.
She stopped negotiating with ambiguity.
She learned to tell the difference between love and habit.
And she reclaimed agency over where her attention goes.
This is the kind of work we do in sessions; slow enough to be honest, structured enough to create change.
If you recognise yourself in Jane’s loop, you don’t need to wait until it resolves on its own. You can read more about how sessions work here, or book directly from the link below.
You can also reach out with questions. Clarity often starts before the session itself.
