How can you tell your ex how you feel without risking scaring them away? That's what we're going
to be talking about in this video. But first, my name is Clay with modernlove.life, where we help
you get the great loving relationship that you're looking for without having to play mind games,
without having to play hard to get, and without having to pretend to be someone or something
that you are not. Because you of course deserve to be loved for the unique, amazing,
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Also, we are going to be talking about communication in this particular video. Of course,
if you do need help with communication, whether that's with your ex or with your
partner that you're not broken up with, we do have our course called Effortless Connection,
which you can find out more about down below in the description box below. It's specifically
about communication. But what we want to keep in mind here is a lot of times people
feel concerned about expressing their feelings to their ex. I think many of us have had that damage
control mode period after a breakup where we've poured our heart out, we've said we're sorry a
million times, we've contacted our ex way too often. We've told them point blank how we feel,
and it just hasn't gone so well. This has caused, I think, a lot of let's just say
not so thorough people in this space to say, "Okay, that means that emotions are the enemy.
We need to not talk about emotions ever. We need to hide them. We need to stuff them deep down,
deny them, pretend we have no emotions and be a robot because for certain, that
is how you get someone to love you." Right? It's certainly the foundation of a great relationship.
Obviously, I think we know that that's not true. But there are a lot of people out there
in the relationship advice space telling people that emotions are bad, emotions are
terrible. We should never have emotions and all that stuff, especially to the guys out there.
Obviously, I don't think that that's true for men or women, but it's probably going to stop you from
doing more damage by communicating to your ex or anyone else for that matter in the wrong way,
where you're highly attached to outcome, you're highly making them responsible for your
emotional state and wellbeing and all of that stuff. So what exactly are we supposed to do?
This is where the difference between good and bad vulnerability comes into play.
So we've talked about in the past good vulnerability versus bad vulnerability.
Bad vulnerability is when you are making someone else responsible for your emotions, right?
You're saying like, "Hey, I need you to be in a relationship with me so that I can stop feeling
bad and I can feel good about myself," right? That's oftentimes what a lot of this begging
and pleading and pouring your heart out after a breakup actually comes across as. It's like, "Hey,
wow, I feel really bad that we're going through this breakup. It's hurting me. I'm crying and I'm
not sleeping. I'm unproductive at work and all of this stuff.
I need you to get back together with me so that I can feel good
so that I can go back to normal life." The problem with this is that it ignores
your ex's emotional state. It ignores their concerns. It ignores their problems and all of the
things that happened and all that stuff. It's just saying like, "I need you to be
a means to an end for me to feel better." That's not something that feels good for them. It's not
going to really inspire them to want to be in a relationship with you again and it's going to
cause them most likely to say, "No, I don't want to be a part of this. No, it's too late, man."
So there's good vulnerability, which is the opposite of that,
which is being vulnerable and transparent about how you're feeling and what you're wanting
in a way where you're taking ownership of your own emotions. You're not using someone else as
a means to an end to feel good. You're not making someone else responsible for your emotions. You're
not saying, "You are causing me to feel this way," or anything like that. It's simply just
you owning how you feel and not making someone else responsible for it. It's you having an
emotion in the vacuum of your own experience, not making someone else take ownership of it for you.
So what we want to do is we want to obviously take ownership of our emotional experience. That is the
first thing we want to do when it comes to telling your ex how you feel without scaring them off. So
that will require us to go from being relationship focused, to being connection focused, like we
talked about in the past, obviously. But we also want to be careful about how we phrase things
as well, too, right? So we want to be careful about how we are phrasing. So there are there's
language that we can use. It's basically language is going to incite misunderstandings and difficult
situations. It's language where you are assuming someone else's intent. Okay, if you're assuming
someone else's intent, then you risk causing a lot of pushback, a lot of negative vulnerability
and a lot of scaring away kind of behavior. So when you say stuff like, "You completely
ignored me..." that assumes intent. Sure. Maybe you texted them and they didn't text you back,
but we're putting the intent, we're projecting the intent that they intentionally ignored you
on purpose out there, okay. That's going to stir something up. Whereas if you just
simply say something like, "I sent you that message and I never heard back from you."
That's just a simple statement of what happened. There's no intent behind it.
That's a very valuable thing that you can do when it comes to communicating in ways that are
less likely to scare someone away or be too much. Also, what we want to do as well is we want to get
real about all of this. We're not just trying to get into a relationship for the sake of being
in a relationship. We're not just trying to get somewhere for the sake of getting a connection,
updating our Facebook status or whatever the case might be.
We want the relationship because we think it's going to give us something specific. We think it's
going to give us some sort of connection. We think it's going to give us something else like that,
right? When we start to express our emotions in a way that's outcome focused, relationship focused,
what we risk doing is we risk a scaring the other person away. We risk overwhelming them,
especially if the emotional connection isn't there to support that degree of conversation.
So if you're just getting back in touch with your ex, you haven't spoken for a while or something,
and you're just getting back in touch and you say, "I really want us to be able to get back
together. I really want us to be able to work out. I really want us to be able to
work things out and start a new relationship or something." That's probably too much too
fast. You don't have the emotional foundation in place to support that kind of conversation. Sure,
it's a different story if the two of you have been kind of like seeing each other for several
months and you've been building up the connection and all of that. Yeah, that could make sense.
But if you're just getting back in contact, there's probably not that emotional foundation in
place, so there's nothing in place to support it. So it's going to probably scare them because it's
going to make them think, "Okay, you're using me as a means to an end to help you feel better. You
don't care about where I'm at emotionally." Right? Whereas if you simply just say something like,
"You know, it's really nice being able to talk to you like this again, I really love being able to
connect with you like this again." That's probably not going to scare them off because there's no
relationship focus in it. There's no outcome focus in it. You're just simply saying, "I really
love being able to talk like this." Okay? First of all, you're taking ownership of
the experience and you're also keeping it connection focused rather than saying like,
"Let's get back together." You're just simply saying like, "This is great. Let's keep this up."
The good news is that as you continue to talk like this, as you continue to bond and create that
emotional connection like this, you're going to organically let the relationship come out of it.
This is another point when it comes to a relationship focused connection versus
connection focused connection is that we often want the relationship because we think it's
going to give us the connection that we want. We think it's going to give us the closeness,
the trust, the intimacy, the passion, whatever, right? But really it's the other way around.
It's actually the connection that we have, the focus that we have, the bonding that we have,
the passion that we have that organically gives rise to the relationship. Usually,
people have this great emotional connection. They'll get along well. They'll have a lot
of things in common and all that stuff and then they'll say, "This is going really well.
Maybe we should be in a relationship." Right? It very rarely works out the other way.
So what we want to do is we want to focus on the organic connection between the two of you
and let the relationship naturally emerge out of that rather than trying to force the relationship
and hope that the connection comes with it. It's a lot easier to do. Second of all,
you don't have to scare away someone by being too relationship focused and saying something
that's a little bit over the top or a little bit more than they are emotionally ready to
deal with at any given point in time. Second of all, it also is much more enjoyable as well, too,
because you're actually meeting them where they're at emotionally. You're taking ownership for your
emotional experience and all that good stuff. Okay. So if you do want to learn more about how
to connect with your ex, how to communicate with them, how to talk to them in ways that
foster better connection and better all that stuff, you might want to check out our course
called Effortless Connection. Once again, that is available down below in the description box. If
you did like this video, please help me out with this YouTube channel. Hit that thumbs
up button and subscribe to this channel as well too, and leave a comment down below.
I've only actually been really serious about this YouTube channel for maybe like a year or so.
Before that I just filmed videos about whatever and then just posted them.
We got some okay results, probably because I was mostly in the early days of YouTube,
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bit of a message and say, "Hey guys, Clay's not so bad. Let's give him a little bit of a lift."
Okay. So that would be really great. It would be greatly appreciated if you'd do that.
If you do want to learn more about connecting more with your ex, we of course have this video
series over here on advanced relational skills, or we have this video right over
here that you can check out. Anyway, please take care and I'll talk to you next time.