Tips For Getting Away From Your Ex, According To Walter Riso

Walter Riso’s last book is entitled “I’ve already said goodbye to you, now I’m forgetting you” . Like all his works, this one promises to be a success. This psychologist had already written about several topics, but not about the relationship with an ex and love endings. For him, this emptiness is curious, since in his practice he often works with people who have difficulty facing the end of a relationship.

It’s true that many love relationships today are ephemeral. But it is also true that there are many people who live just the opposite: they remain attached for a long time to bonds that have already ended. Not only that, sometimes they get so obsessed that they can go on for months, or even years, depending on what their ex does or doesn’t do, or looking for him with any excuse, or simply insulting him in his loneliness.

Walter Riso comments that he had a patient who swore she had forgotten her ex. However, she slept every night with a teddy bear he had given her as a gift. With that simple gesture, he prolonged the agony of the end and closed all possible paths to advance in his love life.

Hope is the problem, says Walter Riso

Given the reason why many people have a hard time forgetting, Walter Riso points out that the key word is “hope”. At first, having hope is positive because it encourages you to act and persevere. But when it comes to romantic breakups, this great virtue can turn into your worst enemy.

As long as there is hope, it will be impossible to detach from that person, or from the memory of that person who has already left. The pain of loss can cause the perceptions of love to become distorted, and this is when facts begin to be interpreted in terms of desire rather than their real meaning. Hope helps to keep these misperceptions in force and supersize them.

The point is that this hope can be maintained even though there are already clear displays of disinterest on the part of the ex-partner. Basically, what happens is that the loss is not accepted. So, as is not admitted, hope comes to play the role of a smokescreen so as not to face reality.

Emotional forgetting from Walter Riso’s point of view

Walter Riso introduces the concept of “emotional forgetting” to differentiate it from cognitive forgetting. Emotional forgetting happens when remembering a person or a situation no longer provokes intense feelings. On the other hand, cognitive forgetting is the impossibility of remembering how the facts themselves happened.

In order for a person to break up permanently with their ex, emotional forgetting needs to happen. How does this happen? According to Walter Riso, the best way to achieve this is to break the chains of thought that tie to this past. If anything reminds you of that person, get it over with. If you don’t do this, a set of tied thoughts and feelings will be triggered that will always bring you to the same point: the impossibility of forgetting.

Currently, part of this emotional forgetting process includes eliminating that person from Facebook, WhatsApp, or any social network. These spaces were specially designed to be aware of other people’s lives. And if you want to forget, there’s nothing worse than keeping those windows open.

Dignity and post-traumatic growth

For Walter Riso, dignity is an expression of self-respect. And after a breakup, preserving dignity is a crucial factor in overcoming the situation. Falling into the begging, humiliation and constant harassment of the ex-partner not only heightens the feeling of self-disadvantage, it is also totally ineffective.

If the other is gone, but you keep insisting, what you will soon untie is deliberate discomfort. Nobody appreciates someone who doesn’t like themselves. It’s hard to respect someone who isn’t able to respect themselves. You can choose the most undercover ways to chase after your ex, but that person will always notice and, over time, will try to get further and further away.

So you’ll be walking behind him, thinking your footsteps bring you closer, when all they do is make you feel even more lost the day this mirage of hope finally disappears.

Walter Riso says that the process follows the sequence: self-control, resignation and creation of new goals and expectations. When you can stop the obsession, accept the loss and focus on seeking new motivations, that’s when your life will change and your feelings will change. Once you have overcome this tough test, instead of suffering a “post-traumatic stress” what you will achieve is a “post-traumatic growth”. In that sense, it will have been worth the effort.

Images courtesy of Kyle Mckharty, Margarita Kareva.