In this video, we're going to be talking about the five stages your ex goes through in getting
back together with you. These are the five emotional stages that your ex could be at
on the process of getting back together, and it'll hopefully help you to understand what
your ex is experiencing emotionally, and more importantly, help you to understand how to
respond if your ex is at a certain stage. But first, my name is Clay with modernlove.life,
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. If you like what we're doing here, please
do me a favor by giving this video a thumbs up, and by subscribing to this YouTube channel
if you're not already subscribed, it does help us out. It helps to tell YouTube that
"Hey, this is good stuff and you should show more of Clay's videos to people out there."
Seriously though, it does help us out. Also, if you are interested in kind of learning
more about how to navigate this whole journey through your ex's five emotional stages, I
want you to know that we do have a course called the Ex Solution Program, I'll put a
link to that down below in the description box for this video. Not going to hard sell
you on it here, but it's right there if you want to check it out.
All right, so I've made videos on the five stages your ex goes through before in the
past and they've done really well, however I just want to make this video to kind of
simplify it a little bit. The one in the past that's done pretty well has this big question
and answer thing tacked onto the end that actually has nothing to do with the five stages,
and kind of because of that, a lot of people click off of the video, which doesn't really
help us so well with YouTube, so I'm just going to make this without the question and
answer at the end. So basically, if you're to think about this,
your ex goes on a certain journey emotionally following a breakup, and we've kind of isolated
five specific emotional stages that your ex could potentially be in following a breakup,
and on the journey towards getting back together with you. Now, it's important to know that
it's not like your ex always starts at the first stage and then kind of moves forward
from there. A breakup happens, and it kind of pushes your ex back a certain degree in
the scale from one to five, and kind of depending on what happened in the breakup, depending
on how your ex responded to things, depending on how intense it was, like was it just an
amicable breakup, or was it like a, "I hate your guts, you cheated on me" kind of breakup,
or something like that? That's going to set the stage totally differently.
But if I had to guess, probably most people initially start a breakup at riding the dragon,
which is the third, middle stage. We'll get into this more a little bit later, but kind
of based off of things that people do immediately after the breakup, like begging and pleading,
promising up and down that things are going to be different and so on, they may actually
end up backsliding even further, maybe more into test drive or wall of reactance. Don't
worry, we'll get into all of this later on, so if you have no idea what any of these terms
are, I'll explain that soon. But just for simplicity's sake, we're going to start at
the very far end of the spectrum, which is the wall of reactance.
Okay. This is the first stage that your ex might be in. This is honestly the... Probably
one of the hardest stages to be in, because your ex is probably not very communicative
with you. Wall of reactance... Reactance is a term that not a lot of people know, but
they do know the feeling, the emotion that comes with it, and that is typically a feeling
that someone has some sort of hidden agenda, that they're not really interested in understanding
you, they're not really interested in seeing things from your point of view, but they just
want to move things towards their own agenda, and for better or worse, if your ex thinks
that you have some sort of agenda of trying to get back together with them that is more
important to you than listening to them, understanding them, connecting with them and so on and so
forth, your ex may have a very heightened level of reactance.
And there are certain things that you can do, and certain things that you can not do,
that might increase your ex's reactance towards you or decrease your ex's reactance towards
you, and these things are going to, of course, help your ex to move further along through
these five stages or further back through these five stages. But if you're finding yourself
at the wall of reactance, your ex has very, very high levels of reactance towards you.
In fact, they could be so high that your ex has just decided "Hey, I don't want to talk
to you, I don't want to interact with you at all. I'm just going to shut you out, I'm
going to ignore you, I'm not going to speak to you, I'm going to not reply to your messages,
or if I do, it's just going to be to lash out at you, it's going to be to say hey, stop
talking to me, there's no chance for us to ever get back together, leave me alone," or
something like that, right? Honestly, it sucks to be at this stage, to
have your ex at this stage in the journey. So, what do you do, right? Because it's like,
"Okay, we can't really communicate," what can you actually do to kind of lower that
reactance just enough so that your ex is open to talking to you again, and open to communicating
to you again? And what you want to do is you want to show your ex that you understand what
they're experiencing, you want to show them that you get how they're feeling, you want
to show them that maybe the things that you've done in the past, or the things that you did
that hurt them, or the things that you did that maybe even led to the breakup in the
first place, or maybe the things that you did after the breakup that made things worse,
that you understand how all of that affected them, and you want to of course apologize
for it, but you want to empathically show them how your actions affected them, and of
course tell them kind of what was inspiring you to do these certain things.
We don't just cheat on someone for the sake of cheating on them, we do that because we're
feeling certain things, because we're feeling unfulfilled in certain parts of our lives.
We don't hurt someone's feelings because we feel like being a jerk, we're doing it because
we feel maybe a little bit triggered ourselves, or because there's something that's going
on with us that's causing us to maybe lash out at someone. And so if you can express
this to your ex, you can often get that opening just enough that your ex kind of moves from
the wall of reactance stage into the second stage, and this one is called the test drive
stage. Now, at this point, your ex is able and willing
to talk to you, they're communicative with you, but they're not really opening up very
much. They're most likely giving you one or two-word short little answers, like "Hey,
how are you doing?" "Oh, I'm good, I'm fine, I'm okay," something like that, but there's
not much substance to it. Or maybe they're willing to talk to you about surface-level
things, like "Oh hey, I ran into so-and-so the other day," or stuff like that, right?
There's not really a whole lot of emotional depth to it.
This is the test drive stage, they're willing to talk to you, they're willing to interact
with you, they're willing to see what it's like, but they're not really willing to commit
in a deep, emotional sort of way yet, they're kind of holding themselves back, they're keeping
you at a distance, and what we want to do to get past this is to deepen the conversation
from surface-level communication, or from this one or two-word answer of like, "Oh,
I'm good, I'm okay," and all that stuff, we want to deepen that down into the emotional
world of communication. There are really two levels of communication,
at least in this regard. There's surface-level communication, we're talking about people,
places, things, news events, TV shows, sport, stuff like that, and then there's a deeper
emotional level of communication, which is how things affect us emotionally, what we're
feeling, what we're thinking, all of this sort of stuff.
And as we kind of pull the conversation down from surface-level to emotional communication,
we're able to actually invest more in the dynamic, invest more in talking to someone
else, invest more emotionally into connecting with one another, and this is what's going
to help to show your ex that it's safe to talk to you, it's safe to interact with one
another, it's safe for them to open up a little bit more, that you're not going to just try
and railroad them into some sort of relationship they don't feel ready for right now, you're
not going to increase their reactance, and that's the important thing, because as you
show them that it's safe to interact with you, that it's okay to disarm themselves,
to let down their armor and all that, their reactance is going to decrease, and they're
going to move from the second stage into the third stage, which is the middle one, which
we call riding the dragon. And riding a dragon is a difficult stage for
a lot of people. Your ex has a lot of hot and cold behavior at this stage, and it's
coming from a place of confusion on their part, they're confused about how they feel
about you. And when I said earlier that oftentimes immediately after a breakup, your ex ends
up at riding a dragon, it's because right after you break up with someone, there's maybe
a part of you that feels good about it, and a part of you that maybe doubts if you made
the right choice a little bit, so there's part of you that's waffling back and forth,
and that's why I say that after... At least immediately after a breakup, a lot of exes
find themselves at riding the dragon, but it's often things that we do afterwards, like
begging and pleading and stuff like that, that pushes them further back.
But anyway, you will probably at some point need to experience the riding the dragon stage,
unfortunately, and this can be tough, because you are going to get these hot and cold behaviors
from your ex. They might be warm towards you at certain points in time, which is great,
it feels good to have them tell you, "I miss you, I think we made a mistake in breaking
up. I just miss talking to you. Maybe I want to do something physical with you, I don't
know." But it also sucks to have the cold side of that, where maybe they're saying like,
"Oh, I don't think that we should actually be friends anymore. I don't know why I said
that I missed you the other day, we should just totally not talk to each other anymore,"
or something like that. But it's this hot and cold behavior, this back and forth behavior,
that can be very confusing for you obviously, but it's also confusing for them as well too.
They don't probably want to string you along, they don't want to be this sort of hot mess
that can't make up their mind, but they're going through this confusing process themselves
of trying to make sense of how they feel about you, and so they're waffling back and forth.
And the important thing at this point is to realize that yeah, they're confused, and if
you can relate to that confusion rather than taking their word at it and thinking that
they're just, I don't know, playing some sort of sick mind game with you, that's going to
help you through this. Also, letting it be okay that they are confused
can help them to work through this issue as well, too. It's going to allow them to see
that it's okay to show up with you however they're feeling. If they're feeling confused,
it's okay. If they're feeling uncertain about the future, it's okay too. If they just want
to talk, that's okay too. The more open and accepting you can be, the better of an effect
you're going to have with them at riding the dragon.
And just so you know, riding the dragon was actually the initial stage that we came up
with. People ask about this sometimes, and basically I was in the middle of doing something
like, I don't know, cooking, or washing dishes or something like that, and my wife was checking
our email, and she had gotten a message from one of our coaching clients, and...
This is way back when we were first getting started, and she said, "Oh hey, so-and-so
sent this message, his ex is taking back everything nice that she said the other day, what does
he do?" And I was in the middle of doing all this stuff, so I just said, "Yeah, just tell
him he has to ride that dragon." And she's like, "What does that even mean?" I said,
"Don't worry, he'll know what it means," and he did, so we stuck with riding the dragon,
and that's where it comes from. But if you're able to do this, you're actually
able to get to the fourth stage of your ex getting back together with you, and this is
where... This is called the crisis point, by the way, but this is where things go from
an intellectual process towards actually getting real. Up through this point, through wall
of reactance or test drive or riding the dragon, this has been kind of an intellectual exercise
for your ex. It's been like, "Well, what would it be like for me to talk to my ex again?
What would it be like for us to maybe meet up in person again? What would it be like
for us to text again, or for us to spend some time together? Would it be interesting, would
it not be interesting? I don't know." But at this point, since we're through that
confusion stage of riding the dragon, we're now at what we call crisis point, your ex
is confronting the fact that they... That they're no longer confused about you, that
they actually like spending time with you, that there's a good connection between the
two of you, and it's no longer just an intellectual exercise, but it's like, "Oh. I still have
feelings for my ex right now. What does that mean?"
Now, this is where your ex is confronted with the practicalities of potentially having feelings
for you or getting back together. If they're in a rebound relationship, they might have
to start thinking about like, "Does this mean I need to go through the process of breaking
up with my rebound? We just got together, is that going to make me look like I'm one
of those hot mess people? Oh my goodness, I'm going to break up with my ex. Oh my goodness,
I'm going to get back together with you. Oh my goodness, I'm going to break up with you
and get back [inaudible 00:14:21] my ex again," and nobody wants to do that, so your ex is
concerned that they're starting to actually have these real feelings, and what does this
mean practically? Does this mean that they're going to need
to tell all of their friends and family that the two of you are dating again? Maybe it
was embarrassing or hard for them to tell them in the first place that the two of you
broke up, and now they want to make sure that this is real before they go through the process
of saying, "Hey, actually we're kind of working through some of this stuff." This is the issue
of the crisis point. Your ex is at this crisis. Your ex is at this crisis of, "This is becoming
something real. What does that mean?" And so because your ex is at this crisis point,
they may do certain things to actively discourage you from connecting with them or being with
them. Now, this is very different from when they're just totally pissed off at you, maybe
at wall of reactance or something, but they're actually discouraging you, saying things like,
"You could do better than me, you're so attractive, tons of people would want to date you," or
"We should see other people," or things like that, because they're kind of up against a
hard spot here. It's like, "What do I do? I have feelings for my ex, but I'm in this
rebound relationship," or "What do I do? We just moved out and now I think I still love
you and I want to get back together with you. What do I do? I just told all my friends and
family that we're broken up, and now I think we might be getting back together, and it's
going to be really weird for me to go back and tell them."
They're going to want to make sure that this is the real deal before they make that step,
so they're going to kind of test you a little bit. Not necessarily intentionally testing
you, like they're some sort of evil, Machiavellian super villain or something, but more like
they're just kind of giving you an out if you're not serious about this. If you're not
serious about this, and they say, "Well, I think you could do better than me," and you
say, "I think I could too, see you," then they're like, "That's great, I didn't have
to risk embarrassing myself by ending my rebound relationship for someone who wasn't serious
in the first place. I didn't have to risk embarrassing myself by telling all my friends
and family that we were seeing each other again when this guy wasn't serious in the
first place," right? And so your ex is going to try and relieve
that pressure through the crisis point, and what you want to do is you want to not let
them relieve that pressure. What you want to do is you want to let them know that you
actually are serious about the two of you working things out, you actually care about
them, you actually want to be close to them. This is where all that stuff that you're not
supposed to do can actually work, like being open and very forthright with your emotions
and all that stuff, letting them know that you're serious about getting back together,
letting them know that you're committed and all that stuff, this is where this can actually
work out really well, because it's going to show your ex that if they take that step over
the threshold and actually start to rearrange their life in practical ways for the two of
you getting back together, that there's going to be something substantial for them to land
on, there's going to be a good, nice cushy pillow for them to land on.
And once that happens, they're emotionally ready to go into that fifth stage, which is
what we call new beginnings, and new beginnings is a great place to be. Basically, you are
essentially back together. Maybe you haven't had that conversation yet, and I would highly
recommend that you have that conversation, don't ever just assume you're back together
without actually having a conversation about it, leads to lots of disappointments and upset
feelings and all that. But at new beginnings, now is the time where
you're essentially on great terms emotionally, there are no more practical obstacles keeping
the two of you apart, and now you can just go ahead and just seal the deal and say, "Hey,
have you ever thought about us being together again?" And then chances are they'll say "Yes,"
then you say, "What do you think about that?" Then you can just have a conversation about
it. If there's any concerns that they have, like "Oh, I'm worried that it might end up
being like it was before and we're going to end up fighting again, or things might get
weird again" or whatever, talk about it, and co-create some sort of strategies for making
sure that things don't go that way in the future, for making sure that you create a
new beginning together that's not just kind of reviving the old relationship, but it's
a completely new dynamic that works better than whatever clearly didn't work in the past.
And if you're able to do this, you'll be able to create a new dynamic, a new relationship,
something that both of you can feel excited about, and you'll be able to do it together.
It's not just a matter of you kind of begging and pleading and saying, "Hey, please take
me back," but it's actually both of you co-creating something together that works great for both
of you. And then of course when you're back together, keep the relationship strong, that's
a whole conversation for another video. But anyway, this has been our video on the
five stages your ex goes through emotionally. Once again, if you do want to learn some of
the practicalities about how to apply this, how to navigate all of this, we do have our
Ex Solution Program course, info on that is down in the description box below this video.
Once again, I hope you've enjoyed this video. If you did, please do me a favor, hit that
thumbs up button, it really does help us out, and subscribe to this channel if you haven't
already. You may also want to check out this video playlist that goes into the five stages
in much more detail, or you might want to check out this video over here, but once again,
my name is Clay, thanks so much for watching this video, and I'll talk to you next time,
take care.