Getting over the past

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Laughing about it does not mean you view the person as horrible. I mean laughing over it as in you look back and realize how you liked someone who may be a good friend, but not right for you in a relationship way.

You mean an ex wouldn't be? All mine are.



You mean you select your loved one's from friends or acquaintances? I never did, so I didn't have to see them after things went wrong.

Thank you all for your posts, they're all helpful, and I didn't expect so many people to reply either

Not quite. What i meant was: as an aspie, i don't grieve like an NT. I grieve in ways that don't fit the pattern that is usually given to an NT as "the stages of grieving." Mine are all mixed up and i don't feel things the same way as an NT. I have feelings; very strong ones; but NTs usually don't understand my feelings because they follow different patterns and have different triggers.

For example, when my hubby's best friend's mother died (she was very close to our family and her loss was very sad for me), i could not shed a tear at her funeral. I sat with the family for hours during the days between her death and the funeral; helped look through pictures for display at viewing/funeral...not a tear. I couldn't feel pain at the time. Later...buckets of tears at a weird time. Probably more aspies out there would understand this; NTs don't seem to get this. I can't copy their "stages of grief" and find help there. It helps now, to know that grief is different for me. Does that make any more sense?

There is some material out there on autism and grief--googling that may be helpful for an aspie dealing with loss.

I know my grieving for dead ones has always been a little strange, similar to how you describe. At first you don't feel nearly as bad as you think you should, and feel bad about "not feeling enough", and then later your emotions eventually bubble up in strange ways, sometimes without you even realizing why you're feeling the way you are.

Absolutely. That makes a lot of sense to me. However, I still don't understand how it relates to getting over relationships, as I don't think this is related to grief over dead for me. The problem for me with ended relationships has always been my inability to get over the infatuation, and not the loss of a partner. The loss of a partner means nothing to me at all. I could live on my own just as well as in a marriage. It's the infatuation and attachment that is problematic when it suddenly ends, and especially if I see her regularly and I'm expected to ignore her.

Grieving over love and death are definitely different, while the pain might feel somewhat similar I think the emotions and psychology behind them are pretty different. If a person or a pet dies it's not a betrayal or someone trying to hurt you (unless something very bad is going on) and you have pretty different things that you're feeling about what happened. Well actually this is a pretty interesting subject that deserves more than 2 sentences but I don't want to write a lot about it.

How to you forget about your old attachments for someone? There's time, waiting until your feeling about things have dulled and been mulled over by you and your unconscious mind; there's finding a new person, which could fill the "hole in your heart" but that's not something you can really control; and there's also meditating and such I suppose, trying to deal with your emotions that way, which theoretically could work really well.

What do I know though, there are so many different ways to look at things, so many in fact that it's easy to get lost and just do nothing.

I agree; grieving over death and getting over infatuation are 2 different things. I threw the grief thing out there simply because I know that, being autistic, my grieving is totally different than most people i know and this has caused me much distress at times before I understood it. i thought that clarifying this might be germane to the discussion, as there is grief involved in many failed relationships.

However, on the topic specifically of getting over a failed relationship i am probably not much help--i married my high school sweetheart and we have been together ever since. I am sorry if my posts led you to believe otherwise--i did not mean to sound misleading.

I did experience infatuations with multiple people as a teenager but nothing that led to a relationship other than the one with my hubby--and those other infatuations went away in time. I don't really remember doing anything that helped, other than just waiting it out and trying to distract myself in the meantime with other activities. Kind of like other times when my brain gets stuck like a broken record--you just have to lift the needle off the record and put a new record on the turntable. It doesn't always work, but it helps to try.

There is no easy way out, time is the only thing that helps, and even then it only manages the pain. Just don't do something stupid like revisit them on social media or linger in those thoughts. If you find yourself awake in the morning thinking about it, nip that one in the bud RIGHT AWAY by getting up, preparing breakfast/shower and going along your day -- KEEP BUSY -- and eventually enough time will pass where it doesn't hurt as much.

I think the main problem is that our brain doesn't want to stop the infatuation, so we are fighting ourselves. I suppose the intention is not that infatuations should come and go like acquaintances, rather are supposed to be long-term. Thus, when we meet somebody that doesn't have such preferences and do dating and relationships more for fun or as social games, we get stuck in the infatuation process.

Other than time, I think hate is a way to get out of it quicker, but that will create a hostile memory of the person, and if you want to continue to like them, that is not an option. A hostile attitude is both an effective relationship killer as well as an infatuation killer.

I've changed my mindset about it (somehow), and it doesn't bother me really anymore. It's complicated, but I've managed to move on mentally, which is really a relief.

...That is a horribly unhelpfully short post, let me add more detail.

I'd like to say that a lot of the things people said here were helpful, especially rdos, it's really nice to have people being so helpful, so thank you all

Personally whats going on with me right now is that I realized that I don't really care for the person I was infatuated with, it mostly hurts to feel that infatuation gone, and there were certain things in that relationship that for whatever reason I thought would be difficult to find elsewhere. I realized that I don't like her as a person anymore, and that she might even have some sort of narcissistic thing going on*, and that it does no good to miss her because things are so far gone. There are so many other people out there and that there is someone out there that I could have a really good relationship with, I just need to find them and try not to be sad about things is the past.

That's a really bad habit of mine, dwelling on things that make me unhappy, and it applies here. Trying to stop that and looking towards the future is very helpful for me, I'm not saying I feel 100% okay all the time about it, but I think I feel better most of the time.

*I hope I don't get in trouble for saying that, but I'm not naming anyone.

It sounds like your outlook will be much healthier from here on out. I too have the struggle you refer to about dwelling on things that make me unhappy. It has frustrated me in the past when i have been told i am just a "negative person" but i am sure this is where it comes from. It is a can't win situation at times--the person who referred to me as a "negative person" is most likely an NT from all i have seen of her; NTs do not understand you can't just turn it off like a switch. It really takes effort for me to push away an unhappy situation and move on. My guess is that, because my brain gets stuck like a broken record, it is harder for me to do this than the average person. But it can be done, and i need to do it to have a healthy outlook on life.

All the best to you.

Thanks

I have the same exact problem, anything that bothers me goes round and round in my head and it is very hard to make it stop. And I usually can't just make it stop unless I put a lot of effort into suppressing those thoughts. I had to do that a few years ago because I was depressed and I needed to stop going in a downward spiral, the things that bother me are still there but I manage to usually not get as depressed as I was before. It seems to help to state that you are going to try and change your outlook because you go back to that statement when those thoughts and feelings come up.

I've had the same experiences with NTs acting like I'm being negative because I sort of latch onto things that bother me, maybe that does make me a little bit negative. I think that it just means I think too much, about things that really don't need to be constantly thought about. What's really ironic is when you feel bad about something, and you get too wrapped up in that feeling that you don't do what you need to do to make things better for yourself.

That's all sort of rambling, hopefully it's slightly coherent and makes a little bit of sense though.