Hey there, this is Clay with Relationship Inner Game.
Now I got an interesting question from a viewer and I wanted to make sure that I addressed
this in a complete and fully comprehensive video.
So this question is from Autumn, who writes in that some experts say that if you were
the one who was dumped that you should never initiate contact after a breakup.
It should always be the dumper who initiates.
So you're saying it's okay for the one who was dumped to initiate communication, should
this be after at least 30 days of no contact?
Uh, first of all, Autumn, thanks for writing in and sharing your question.
This is actually a very interesting topic because I know that there are a lot of people
out there who offer others, you know, breakup advice and stuff like that online, on Youtube
and uh, you know, other mediums as well.
And I know that some of them do actually advocate that you never contact your ex.
That it should be your ex who initiates contact with you.
And that doesn't really go with my line of philosophy.
And I'm going to explain to you why that is and maybe even get you to, to my side of thinking
about things.
Okay.
So when you go through a breakup, it's a very fundamentally disempowering feeling, especially
if you didn't want the breakup and it causes a lot of people who, maybe want to work things
out with their ex or maybe want to get back together with their ex.
It causes them to feel a little bit out of control in their life.
I know it was definitely that way when I was going through my breakups with my ex many
years ago and I know from working with people over, you know, countless years that, uh,
it's also a very common situation that they find themselves and maybe they're not able
to vocalize it in those words, but I know that a lot of people do definitely feel disempowered.
And so when you come across things like, you know, don't ever contact your ex, force them
to miss you and force them to come crawling back to you.
It can make you feel a little bit more empowered.
Okay, because suddenly, you have this thing that you can control that is whether or not
you contact your ex and um, oftentimes people will believe that if you just don't contact
your ex, they will eventually reach out to you.
I want to first address a this point that if you don't contact your ex, they will not
necessarily always reach out to you.
Okay?
Again, I don't know the specifics of your breakup.
I don't know your ex's mindset, their emotional signature, their history, their views, their
limiting beliefs, all of these things.
Um, so I don't know if your ex will actually reach out to you.
It's very common for people's ex to not to reach out to them.
Okay?
Um, and second of all, this whole idea of a of reclaiming your power by not contacting
your ex, you know, sure, it might make you feel better.
It might make you think that you have some degree of control over your life or something
along those lines.
But ultimately people come to me so that I can deliver them results.
That is to say, help them get back together with their ex, help them work things out with
their partner or something along those lines.
Right?
People don't come to me because they want to feel empowered.
Right?
And so my goal in giving you advice is not to help you feel empowered, not to boost your
self esteem or anything like that, although that is a helpful thing to do at times.
But my goal is to actually help you get results with relationships.
Okay.
And if you walk away from a breakup and you are just passively waiting for your ex to
contact you, then that is not likely to get you results.
Okay, sure.
Maybe some people's exes will crack under the pressure and come crawling back over broken
shards of glass or something like that.
But that's not guaranteed, right?
That's not guaranteed.
Right?
Like, like if you cheated on your ex or something like that and they left you, they might have
some sort of belief that once a cheater, always a cheater you know, once people break up,
it's over for good and you should never contact them again.
Right?
And so they might not contact you, they might not contact you no matter how long you do
No Contact.
If you do No Contact for one month, two months, three months, six months, a year, two years,
10 years, they might never contact you.
And so that is a very poor strategy because in effect, you're actually not empowering
yourself.
You're actually empowering your ex because they actually control whether or not the two
of you are going to interact, whether or not the two of you are going to get back together,
whether or not the two of you are going to...
Anything at all because they are the one at complete choice as to whether or not they're
going to contact you.
And so I find that particularly disempowering.
If you are waiting for your ex to contact you, if you are walking away and playing some
sort of game where you are saying, okay, I read somewhere on the Internet, I heard some
psychologists somewhere say that, you know, you should never contact your ex, so I'm just
going to sit here and wait for my ex to contact me.
Now, the thing with that is that, you know, obviously your ex may not contact you, but
beyond that you have to own the fact that maybe you do want to get that together with
your ex.
And if you do want to get back together with your ex, obviously your ex doesn't want to
get back together with you.
Otherwise they wouldn't have broken up with you.
Right?
But if you, as the dumpee wanting to get back together with your ex, you are going to have
to do something to change your ex's mind.
Right?
They left you, they walked out of the relationship, they dumped you.
And so they did that because in their mind they had this concept that being out of a
relationship, you is going to be better than being in a relationship with you.
Now if you want to change their mind and show them that being in a relationship with you
is a great idea, then you're going to have to do something to change their mind.
You can't just wait.
You can't just play the waiting game or anything like that besides, you know, uh, this whole
don't contact your ex, wait for them to crack under the pressure and come crawling back
to you over broken shards of glass.
That whole act is really nothing more than a mind game.
You know, it's a power play.
It's trying to get some sort of status in some sort of relationship, kind of, you know,
one upsmanship and you know, if you want status, that's okay.
You can go ahead and do status.
I'm not in the space of giving advice on how to gain status.
I am in the space of advice on how to help you get the outcomes in relationships that
you want.
Okay, so if you want status then you know, go play mind games or something like that.
Go watch some other youtube channel, I don't know, but uh, if you want to actually work
things out with your ex then you're going to number one, have to drop the mind games,
number two own the fact that you want to change your ex's mind about being in a relationship
with you, which means that, number three, you may actually have to start initiating
contact with them at some point.
Okay.
Um, in regards to your second part of the question, which is, should you initiate contact
after a period of 30 days of No Contact?
We get into this more in other videos, but there are actually multiple types of No Contact,
right?
There's not just one No Contact rule, just like how there's multiple types of diets out
there.
There's not just like one diet it's not like, you know, Oh, I'm overweight, I'm going to
go on "the Diet," right?
Like, it doesn't, it doesn't work that way.
There's all kinds of diets.
There's, you know, low carb diets, there's fruit diets, there's vegetable diets.
There's a, you know, high protein diets, there's, there, there's all kinds of diets, right?
You need to be understand that, that there are different types of No Contact and if you're
just gonna cut contact for 30 days, uh, it really depends on what happens during those
30 days.
Right now.
Oftentimes a lot of people just spend those 30 days staring out the window, counting the
hours and all of that stuff, in which case it's pretty much a waste of time.
Other times people will focus on healing.
You know, that's great.
I think that healing is a great thing that you should be doing after a breakup because
of breakup is a traumatic experience that does impact you on an emotional level.
However, just healing emotionally is not going to convince your ex that getting back together
with you is a great idea.
What I actually advocate is to do what we call Active No Contact, which is to spend
your No Contact period actively acquiring what we call Advanced Relational Skills to
help you bond, connect and, um, you know, create positive emotional interactions with
your ex or with other people.
And what this is actually doing is it is improving your ability to connect on an emotional level,
which, uh, you know, you can bring that into your interactions with your ex, which will
improve their perception of you and make them actually want to spend more time with you
and maybe even actually want to get back together with you.
Okay.
So Autumn, I hope this answers your question.
I hope this gives you permission to contact your ex, uh, and to not play this, you know,
waiting game kind of thing, which is actually, in my opinion, much more frustrating than
being willing to initiate contact with your ex and, you know, a reasonable, a way that
is conscious of their emotional state, right?
Not this whole like, you know, texting them 20 times a day kind of thing that a lot of
people sort of do immediately after a breakup.
So with that being said, I want to thank you again for your question.
If you have a question, uh, out there, please go ahead and submit that in the comment section
a, if it's an interesting good question, we will go ahead and, uh, discuss that in a future
video.
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Take care.
This has been Clay Andrews.