If feelings for an ex are troubling you, try ‘opposite action’

Kiki Fehling

is a licensed psychologist, author, content creator (@dbtkiki), and Linehan Board Certified expert therapist in dialectical behaviour therapy. She co-wrote Self-Directed DBT Skills: A 3-Month DBT Workbook (2023) and specialises in emotional sensitivity, borderline personality disorder, self-harm, trauma, and LGBTQ+ mental health. They live in western Massachusetts, US.

Edited by Matt Huston

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Need to know

If you’re having trouble getting over an ex, you know exactly how painful lingering feelings of love can be. Love for an ex can prompt longing or deep regret. It can disrupt your sleep or appetite, or lead to jealousy, anxiety or self-loathing. You might not feel like yourself. It can seem as if nothing matters except the fact that this person is no longer in your life.

Loving a former romantic partner is especially likely when the breakup was unexpected. But, to be clear: you can continue to feel love for an ex even when you ended the relationship. You can love an ex even if you know they treated you poorly or that the relationship was not healthy for you.

What’s going on here? Why might you keep loving someone who doesn’t love you back, months or even years after the breakup? How can you make it stop? It’s tempting to try to ignore, suppress or deny the love you feel. But, in order to get over an ex, you must grapple directly with love.

Love for an ex is often misguided and unhelpful

Humans evolved to feel emotions, such as fear or loneliness, because they give us valuable information and motivate us to act. The emotion of love signals to you that you really like someone, that they provide you with important support, or that you feel safe with them. It may cause you to want to spend time with that person, share news and secrets with them, and do nice favours for them. These behaviours connect you to the other person. And when you love someone who loves you back and treats you kindly, your wellbeing benefits.

But, sometimes, emotions are prompted by old conditioning, inaccurate interpretations, or outdated information. These misguided emotions are often less helpful. Acting on them can cause problems. For example, let’s say you feel really down on yourself one day, and you decide to cancel dinner plans with your friends because you worry that you’ll spoil the mood. However, after spending the evening alone, you may find that you end up feeling more lonely, sad and down on yourself than you did before.

You can think of romantically loving an ex as misguided or unhelpful love. Love for an ex motivates people to see what their ex is up to on social media, to go to places they hope the ex will be, or to ask mutual friends how the ex is doing. All of these behaviours are natural and understandable responses to the emotion of love. But, in the case of loving an ex, following the emotion isn’t helpful. Acting ‘in love’ – searching for, thinking about and hearing about your ex – can make love stick around. In the therapy that I specialise in, dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT), we say that emotions love themselves: they often make us feel like acting in ways that strengthen them.

That’s where the DBT skill of ‘opposite action’ comes in. Opposite action is an emotion-regulation skill designed to help you reduce emotions that you don’t want to be feeling. Opposite action asks you to act opposite to what the unhelpful emotion makes you feel like doing.

Take the example above, where you cancelled plans with friends. If you instead acted opposite to feeling sad, you’d go out to dinner. You’d get support from your friends there, you’d be reminded that there are people who care for you, and you might even have fun. Even if you still felt sad while out, the experience would likely make you feel less down on yourself than you would otherwise.

You can think about emotions like they’re little fires. Acting on an emotion is like putting wood on the fire. If you stop putting wood on the fire, eventually the fire burns out. Opposite action interrupts an emotion’s self-loving cycle of behaviours, preventing it from feeding itself.

Before acting opposite to love, validate what you feel

Opposite action should be used only for emotions that you’ve decided are unhelpful for you right now. For example, if you broke up with your ex, it’s probably because they weren’t a good match for you or they weren’t returning love in the way you wanted. If they broke up with you, they likely weren’t a good match for you, even if you don’t yet agree. Either way, loving them (and acting on that love) likely doesn’t help you move on with your life.

In order to decide that your love is unhelpful, you first need to understand it. In order to understand an emotion, you have to feel it. Ignoring or avoiding painful emotions only makes them worse over time. Before practising opposite action, be sure to let yourself feel your emotion and validate it – whether that means writing in a journal about it (and why it makes sense that you’re feeling it), noticing how the emotion makes you feel in your body, or simply saying: ‘Of course I feel this way.’ Feeling and validating the emotion, even briefly, helps to make sure you’re not suppressing it. Relatedly, it’s important to make sure that you’ve taken time to grieve – a natural and helpful response to the loss of a relationship.

If you have felt and validated your feelings of love, and you recognise that your love is no longer helpful, it’s time to act opposite. While it can sometimes feel impossible to go against emotional urges – the urge to daydream about an ex, for example – my clients have found that opposite action works for them, at least when they practise it with patience and compassion. To get over an ex, you must act opposite to love all the way, against each of the ways that love is showing up. So, how do you do that?

What to do

How to act opposite to romantic love

To figure out how to act opposite to your love for your ex, you’ll want to think about how the emotion manifests for you. Ask yourself: what does my love feel like? What does it look like? How do I act when I’m feeling love for my ex most intensely? What thoughts do I have? What sensations do I feel? What facial expressions or body language do I show?

While everyone’s experience of love will be unique – and therefore everyone’s opposite action to love will be unique – there are a few ways that love commonly shows up. Below, I offer seven techniques intended to help with reducing unwanted love. Not all of them will necessarily be relevant to your situation, but hopefully they will help get you started.

List the reasons your ex is not good for you

It’s very likely that you’re thinking about your ex a lot. It’s one of the more common experiences my clients tell me about. Perhaps you ruminate about how your ex was the only one who ever understood you, or how your ex is so smart/attractive/kind/funny/etc. To act opposite to this cognitive part of love, try intentionally focusing on the opposite of these thoughts. How did your ex not understand you? What were the things they did that hurt you? What did they do that annoyed the heck out of you? Write these things down. Make a list.

Your list does not need to be judgmental or mean. Sticking with the facts is often more useful, actually. Try clearly describing the pieces of your relationship that did not work or what benefits you get from not being in a relationship with them anymore. Rather than writing: ‘She was toxic,’ you could note: ‘I felt like I had to hide things about myself in order to avoid fights.’ Rather than: ‘He’s a bigot,’ you could write: ‘I hated talking to him about current issues, and the fundamental difference in our political views and values is not something I want in a partner.’ This list can be helpful to have in the situations I’ll discuss below. But rewriting or rereading this list is sometimes a useful coping skill by itself.

Avoid contact

This one is important. To decrease love for an ex, you need to stop acting on love’s urges to be close to them. Ideally, this means that you stop having contact with them, if you can. Avoid calling them, or delete their number from your phone. Unfollow, block or mute them on social media. Tell your friends you don’t want to hear about them. Do not go to certain places just because you hope you’ll see them there. You can also consider deleting old texts and photos, or donating their gifts or other things that remind you of them.

Keep in mind: all of these can be temporary choices! For example, if you think you’ll want those old love messages or photos in the future, just give them to a trusted friend for safe-keeping until your love has diminished. That way, you don’t lose those mementos forever, but you won’t be tempted to engage in behaviours that bring you closer to your ex while you’re still feeling quite emotional toward them. You don’t have to go scorched earth and avoid your ex forever (unless you want to). Just avoid them until your love diminishes.

Avoid warm or flirty interactions

Of course, sometimes you can’t avoid your ex completely. Maybe you work together, share custody of children, or live in the same small community. In those cases, act opposite to love urges as much as you can, deliberately shifting away from the sorts of behaviours that tend to reinforce unhelpful feelings of love. When around your ex, try reducing your interactions or eye contact. When interacting with them, don’t flirt, don’t provide detailed life updates, and try not to be intimate in other ways. You can try changing your body language to be more ‘cold’ around them, perhaps turning your body away slightly or crossing your arms. Be cordial and polite in the ways that the situation requires.

When you’re stuck in the same room as your ex, you can try to remain as physically distant from them as possible and to not look at them from across the room. Try to focus your attention on what you’re doing, or the other people around you, rather than on your ex. Keep practising opposite action to love’s physical sensations and thoughts, using the other ideas in this list.

Distract from obsessive thoughts

When you feel like you just can’t stop thinking about your ex, act opposite by filling your head with other thoughts. Revisiting that list from step one is a great option here for acting opposite all the way to love’s ‘my ex is wonderful’ type of thinking. But it’s OK if you don’t want to focus on negatives. There are lots of options.

You can perform times tables in your head, count the number of tiles on the floor, or find everything around you that’s the colour red. You can focus on the physical sensations of holding an ice cube, going on a run, or using a fidget spinner. One of my clients noticed that she always fantasised about her ex when she took the bus, so she made sure she always had something else planned for her commute, like playing a game on her phone, planning a vacation, swiping on a dating app, or making a list of the hobbies she now had time for post-breakup. Do anything to disrupt mindless rumination about your ex, when you notice it.

Calm your body

Romantic love, like many emotions, is physically activating. You might feel agitated or tense when you think you’re going to run into your ex, when you actually run into them, or when you’re ruminating about them. Whenever you notice intense physical sensations associated with love, act opposite by doing something to ground yourself. DBT has lots of skills for calming down intense emotions, but there are a few that are specifically designed to deactivate the body’s stress response.

One of the most accessible of these skills is paced breathing. To practise, place your hand on your belly and take a deep breath through your nose. You want your breath to be deep enough that you feel the hand on your belly move as your lungs fill with air. Then, slowly breathe out through your mouth, making sure that your exhale is longer than your inhale. Breathe this way for as long as you’d like. Reducing your physiological activation with paced breathing (or other nervous-system regulation skills) can make it a bit easier to avoid reinforcing your feelings of love.

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Consume content that is ‘anti-romantic-love’

Sometimes, it’s helpful to act opposite to emotions proactively, going out of your way to do things that are opposite to the emotion you want to reduce. When you’re trying to get over an ex, one technique is to read, watch or listen to content that is ‘anti-romantic-love’ in some way.

Read empowering memoirs of people who build more meaningful and enjoyable lives after divorce. Watch TV shows about people enjoying being single. Listen to empowering songs about breakups and self-love. (Think: ‘Flowers’ by Miley Cyrus, ‘Forget You’ by CeeLo Green, ‘Sue Me’ by Sabrina Carpenter, or other songs from this playlist.) Read about other people’s experiences of overcoming limerence, unrequited love or domestic violence. Learn from people who have found joy and fulfilment not in spite of but because of being single. Doing one (or more) of the above can help distract you from thinking about your ex, strengthen your willingness to practise opposite action to love when it gets tough, and inspire you to create a life you love that doesn’t include your ex.

Pursue other kinds of love

Humans thrive in community. Relationships are good for our health, and love helps us strengthen relationships. When someone gets stuck in romantic love for an ex, it may be because the body is trying to motivate them to get the kind of support that’s been lost because of the breakup. While it can be very helpful to act opposite to love for an ex by dating other people, romantic love is not the only kind of love relationship that supports us.

Another way you can practise proactive opposite action, then, is by prioritising other kinds of love. Try increasing your experiences of self-love by practising self-encouragement, self-validation and self-care more intentionally. Try increasing your experiences of platonic and familial love by seeing friends and family, doing favours for loved ones, or volunteering in your community. Doing so will likely help you to challenge any romantic-love-inspired thoughts such as ‘I need my ex to be happy.’ Increasing your experiences of helpful love will reduce the amount of room for experiences of unhelpful romantic love for your ex.

Key points – If feelings for an ex are troubling you, try ‘opposite action’

Love for an ex is often misguided and unhelpful. And it makes you feel like acting in ways that strengthen it, like putting wood on a fire. The skill of ‘opposite action’ is designed to disrupt this cycle so that the emotional fire can burn out.
Before acting opposite to love, validate what you feel. Avoiding a painful emotion will only make it worse, so take the time to process it, whether that means writing about it or noticing how it feels in your body.
List the reasons your ex is not good for you. To act opposite to love’s urge to ruminate on positive memories of your ex, write down aspects of the relationship that didn’t work or the benefits of not being with them anymore.
Avoid contact. Delete their number from your phone, unfollow them on social media, and get rid of things that remind you of them – at least until your love diminishes.
Avoid warm or flirty interactions. If you can’t avoid your ex completely, deliberately shift away from behaviours that tend to reinforce feelings of love, such as eye contact, physical closeness or intimate conversations.
Distract from obsessive thoughts. Fill your head with other thoughts, such as by playing a game or focusing on the physical sensations of going on a run.
Calm your body. Whenever you notice intense physical feelings associated with love, practise paced breathing or other nervous-system regulation skills.
Consume content that is ‘anti-romantic-love’. Empowering books, TV shows and songs about life after a breakup or being single can help strengthen your resolve to move on and build a life without your ex.
Pursue other kinds of love. Try to increase your experiences of self-love as well as experiences of platonic and familial love. This will reduce your perceived need for unhelpful romantic love.

Learn more

Keep acting opposite, over and over

Opposite action can sometimes take many repeated practices to work. You may have to try lots of different ways to act opposite. Love for an ex, like any intense emotion, can take time to reduce. It may take a particularly long time if your breakup was a surprise, or if your relationship was years-long. Be compassionate toward yourself. If you keep practising, and stop putting wood on the fire, your love for your ex will fade with time.

Keep in mind: it’s possible you’ll always feel some level of love for your ex, and that’s OK. They impacted your life and likely offered you at least some positive things. Relatedly, you may even choose to be friends with your ex in the long run, and some type of love would be helpful in that case – just not the romantic kind.

There’s no universal sign that you’re ‘totally over’ someone and can stop acting opposite to love. Opposite action is a skill for when your emotions and their action urges are unhelpful, when they’re causing you problems. When you can think of your ex without intense pain or pining, when you’re living freely without even considering your ex, or maybe when, as in the lyrics of Lennon Stella’s song, you don’t feel guilty kissing other people – these are some potential signs that you can stop practising opposite action and just focus on enjoying your life, with or without your ex in it.