There are plenty of relationships out there that have been doomed by cheating. When one finds out that his girlfriend cheated on him with someone else, this creates a world of hurt and strong emotions. Naturally, after a period of time, the man wants to know that his now ex-girlfriend will regret that decision and feel bad about losing what she once had. So, what’s the best way to make an ex-girlfriend feel pangs of regret? Should you even bother?
What’s the Goal?
Okay, you’ve been cheated on, and now you have the notion in your head that you need to make your ex-girlfriend regret doing so. May I raise the question as to why you want to make this happen?
I mean, I get it, it can feel good to show someone up or have an ‘I told you so’ moment…but what is it actually going to accomplish for you?
Cheating in relationships happens a lot. Trust me. From both my personal experience and from running this website, cheating is not a rare occurrence and you’re definitely not alone in your feelings towards it.
However, why do you honestly want to direct your life’s energy towards getting some real or perceived feelings of revenge or superiority against someone? She showed you her true colors by cheating, which got you out of a relationship that was going to break bad eventually. Now you have the freedom to pursue what you really want.
I know, I know, telling a guy who has been cheated on not to want to make his ex feel massive regret about it, probably isn’t going to work. BUT I will say that, the way to make her regret cheating is actually the same thing you should be doing after a break up and throughout your life anyway.
Success is the Best Revenge
There is this really strange psychological dynamic between the two parties after a break up occurs. It is a notion that someone has to ‘win’ the break up. Meaning, one person has to do better in terms of their lives and/or the person they decide to date next. A lot of women refer to this as ‘upgrading’ to another man, who they perceives as being of higher value than their ex-boyfriend.
I cannot even fully describe how much I hate this concept and yet how much I have to encounter it. In my view, the broken relationship is like a time capsule of the period of time in which it lasted. Yes, they may be a horrible fit for you now, but they were once great (in at lest some aspects). Would I want to now date girls that I dated in college? Hell no, but they were a good fit for me back then. People change and I don’t have the need to hold a grudge against them for it, even when it ended poorly.
Back to the stirring up of regret in an ex. Now, because people have the need to ‘win’ the break up, the best way to make the regret or get revenge or whatever is to improve your life and future prospects beyond what they thought you were capable of.
Understand that people will always form judgments about you and who they think you are and have the potential to become. When one doesn’t conform to those expectations, it is a blow to the other person’s ego, because they were wrong. If they could be wrong about that, then there is a good chance that they were wrong about cheating or destroying the relationship with you. It’s kind of like selling a stock, right before it triples in value, and then having to deal with the fact you missed out on all of the upside.
So, in order to stir up feelings of regret in her, you should focus on your life and goals. Go out and fucking crush it. Get your career and business going into high gear. Get in better shape. Get more dating options. Work on your self-esteem and feel great everyday.
People are naturally comparative. Most likely, she’ll pretty much be doing the same things a year from now, and her life will seem stagnant when looking toward yours. Don’t think she’ll notice, if your life is amazing without her? Of course she will.
Now, with this being said, I still think you should let go of the idea of wanting to make her regret cheating. Accept it and move forward. Focus your energy on you and not trying to make her feel something. Simply as a byproduct of doing the things you want to improve in your life, she’ll notice and feel regret anyway and you won’t have to carry around all the negativity.
A Quick Note
It is indeed possible that she already feels massive regret and guilt about cheating. Even when it appears she doesn’t, that might just be a front, and deep down she knows that it was wrong. People make mistakes and while you don’t have to forgive them, there’s no need to waste your time and try to make an ex-girlfriend express regret either. Try to close that chapter of your life and don’t let her come back, even if she wants to fix things. The short-term of getting cheated on sucks but you don’t need to let it dictate your long-term future or self-worth.
Getting dumped by a woman is a complete shock to one’s psychological and emotional systems. Not only does it bring one down and create a sense of longing for ‘better’ times, it can also raise doubts internally, about a man’s self-worth or how confident he should feel in his dating life going forward. Obviously, there are differing levels of impact on confidence. For some guys, it’s just a mere setback, while others experience complete destruction. A guy can also experience different hits to his confidence based on what girl in particular broke up with him and how long the relationship lasted. So, while we all know how it feels to have our confidence devastated post-breakup, how does a man begin to have confidence again? Does one need to start from scratch and build it back up or is there another way?
The Fundamentals
The absolutely fundamental problem that most men have with their confidence is that it is almost entirely based on external factors.
What this means is that, when things are going well in life or when you had success or gotten a woman, you feel great. Really, you should feel great, as there are certainly pleasant experiences in life.
The problem comes into play when we tend to tie in these positive emotions into who we are (or more precisely, who we perceive ourselves to be). So, if we have social or business success, we feel good and then identify that positive boost to our self-esteem with being successful. Obviously, this creates a cycle of needing positive events or external validation to continue to have this level of confidence. Plus, whenever we get a negative experience (like being dumped), it immediately crushes us.
So, our lives then become this roller coaster of self-image. We ascend during the perceived good times and then come down with the full force of gravity during the perceived bad times.
If you get stuck in this paradigm, the only way out of it (and create confidence), is by chasing positive experiences. But as we’ve all experienced, it’s not a very stable way of going about things, and the lows can be extraordinary tough to get through.
Coming Off of a Crash
It’s getting closer to 10 years now, since I had my last major crash in confidence. In fact, it was the worst one I ever experienced, and forced me to have to change the way I dealt with confidence, self-image, etc.
There was no other way around it. I was highly depressed, could barely function in life, and began thinking of ending it all. I wrote about this experience in my book, Game without Games, and detailed how things fell apart for me.
I had grown up without very high self-esteem, which also meant few social and romantic opportunities, which fed into the low self-esteem. Later, I learned game (how to pick up women), and started to experience a lot of success. For a while, I felt amazing, my confidence got this huge boost based almost entirely on getting positive external validation from women.
Naturally, this wasn’t sustainable confidence. It was in fact, a complete fraud, there was no actual confidence. I learned this the hard way during the crash, when I had gotten dumped by two consecutive women, was broke, had no real future, and was almost flunking out of college.
For months, I sunk lower and lower, until I completely bottomed out during winter break that year. It was during these dark times, that I began to understand the problems with the popular notions of what confidence is.
Reading Stoic philosophy books, eventually allowed me to pull out of the negativity spiral and sort of reset my brain. The depression/sadness really wasn’t there anymore but for over a year, I felt very little emotion, and essentially rebuilt every aspect of my life. This metamorphosis shaped how I now approach confidence and has allowed me to let go of all of that old emotional baggage.
The False Internal Confidence
So, chasing external validation in order to gain confidence is a constant up and down experience. In fact, this is what gets us to this low point after a break up. This then leads to the other common aspect of trying to boost one’s confidence: having a high opinion of oneself in your own mind.
Now, while having a positive view of yourself is obviously a better option than having a low opinion, it is still flawed and can become quite out of touch with reality. I’m fairly sure that each of us has encountered someone, who has utterly convinced themselves of their own ‘greatness’.
They’ve amped up their own self-worth in their mind to unreal heights and then export that to the external world…which gets labeled as confidence, arrogance, egotism, etc. This method leads to a delusional sort of interaction with the world, in which any negative feedback or criticism is dismissed or ignored.
To me, basing your confidence on external sources is like constructing your confidence into a class mirror. It is easily shattered and difficult to pick up the pieces. Going the internal delusion route is like building a brick wall of confidence. Sure, it’s harder to penetrate, but it can still be busted through if the feedback you’re experiencing is bad enough.
Moving to Acceptance and True Confidence
I think that many people misconstrue self-confidence or social confidence with that of a skill based activity. We say that you must ‘build’ self-confidence, as if it is something that needs to be constructed, instead of being inherent in who we are.
For instance, if someone were to hand me a bow and arrow and told me to hit a target, I would not be confident in the outcome of that event. I might get lucky and pull off a positive result but I don’t have the requisite skills to have a high level of confidence. However, this use of the word confidence is not the same, as the one we are discussing here. As such, the prescription for improving confidence should not be entirely the same.
Technique training and practice would solve my archery practice, but not help me be at ease with my internal self. This is true at least past a certain point, as their may be some learning and practice required to truly internalize and make a shift on how self-confidence is viewed.
For me, I boiled down my lack of self-confidence to a non-acceptance of what is. Meaning, I was always chasing or trying to live up to a narrative of what me and my life needed to be instead of just allowing it to be. So, if I didn’t have a girlfriend, I felt like a loser or like I wasn’t ‘enough’.
I realized more and more how approaching my life in this way was having absolutely terrible results. Why in the hell did I need to become something in order to feel normal? Why was it that when I reached a certain level of social or financial success, I could still feel inadequate? Why should I keep believing this narrative in my mind about what I need to do to feel confidence, if it keeps leading me astray? What if I were to stop following these old ideas and just accept the fact that I am enough as is and don’t need to keep chasing some vague ideal self?
Learning to accept each moment of my life as it came about was a huge and life altering shift in perspective. I no longer needed anything to feel confident because I just trusted that I was already enough. Sure, I could make my life more enjoyable and pleasurable by having a girlfriend or getting a lot of dates or making money or whatever…but they were no longer requirements that I had to fulfill in order to be content with my self.
It’s a freeing experience because once you accept that you’re enough, you become free to explore the world around you without reservation. Criticism and rejection don’t make you feel low or terrible about life because there isn’t an attachment to some narrative in your head about what you’re ‘supposed’ to be.
You simply exist and can determine whether criticism is legit or if it is simply someone projecting their problems on to you or trying to hurt your feelings. You no longer internalize these supposed negative experiences, as there isn’t a self-image or narrative that you need to protect.
And, no, it doesn’t make you lazy or stop striving in life. On the contrary, I’ve gotten better results in every area of my life since the shift, because I can be completely honest with myself. I don’t have to deny reality in order to spare my feelings. If things aren’t going well with women or in social interactions, I can make adjustments to how I approach things, and not fly into a depressive episode because “nobody likes me”. It’s more of an “Oh, I should probably speak slower and more clearly in future conversations” or “Try to listen more and be more empathetic with others”.
It’s an amazing way to live because you start to get good at the things you do at a much faster rate.
The Post-Breakup
It gets lonely sometimes
The unique part of the time period after getting dumped, is having to deal with the strong emotions. These are going to be there no matter what, since our brain likes to develop an addiction like attachment to our girlfriends, and so we experience these intense withdrawals.
While the physical sensations will still be there, we don’t have to follow the negative thought patterns that seem to accompany the intense emotions. I always like to disrupt the negative thought as it arises and then question its validity. Why am I thinking this way? What purpose it is serving? Is it only reinforcing this low confidence narrative?
Things can become much easier to deal with once you can recognize thoughts as simply thoughts and not take them as some sort of gospel truth. Our mind can lead us down rabbit holes and have us endlessly repeat the past, even when it serves no actual learning purpose…it’s like a TV show playing on a loop, at some point it’s been enough and time to move on.
Here are some posts about the post-breakup period:
In order to let go and accept things as they are, one has to be able to constantly recognize and let go of the thought patterns which help cause poor confidence. Daily meditation is the best way that I have found to pull myself out of the internal narrative and view things from a more objective point of view.
The daily shift in my mindset is what allowed me to really make the change in perspective permanent and then no longer need the constant validation to derive some confidence. There are plenty of guided meditations on YouTube and other platforms that can get you started. It can take some time to fully take hold and shift one’s perspective, but it can be totally worth it in the long-term.
The time after a break up is obviously pretty tough. If it wasn’t, you wouldn’t be online searching topics about it, and instead be watching some random YouTube clips. It can be doubly hard to deal with, when you have to see an ex-girlfriend on a regular basis. Sometimes, we dated someone that we work with, go to school with, or have a lot of common social connections and avoidance becomes super difficult. Fear not, I am going to reveal the main tool that I use to not only deal with having to see someone each day, but even getting to the point where it causes zero bother. Oh and it helps in the rest of your social life, as well.
The Object vs. The Concept
Why is it painful or aggravating to have to see an ex-girlfriend all of the time after a break up?
Is it due to her actual physical presence being around you? Nope.
It has nothing at all to do with her. Rather, it has everything to do with how you view her in your mind.
Think about it. If you suffered some sort of amnesia or short-term memory loss, an ex-girlfriend could sit right next to you, and it would have none of the same effect that it currently does. It once again, has nothing to do with her, and is all in how your mind is perceiving and making judgments of her and the past relationship.
This is a huge breakthrough to come upon because you no longer have to ‘get away’ from an ex, in order to feel good about your day to day life. You can see them at work or school or socially and be completely indifferent about it.
What you actually must do is to learn to let go off the conceptions that you have of her and the attachment to the now defunct relationship. Once this is achieved, you get some serious mental freedom, and zero fucks given if she is around or not.
Letting Go of the Concept
A lot of other people will suggest that you distract yourself or turn your attention towards someone else. To me, that doesn’t really help at all. You then, just allow attachments to grow for another girl or you just bury feelings in work or some other distraction.
I have found that the only true way to let go is through meditation techniques. Also, you can supplement this with readings in Stoic philosophy, if you really choose to do so.
People inexperienced with mindfulness meditation and breathing techniques can often not see how such a practice would benefit them. It doesn’t have to involve any religious aspect or mysticism. Meditation can be used to clear one’s mind, let go of negative emotions, and stop the stream of thoughts that can make a guy feel trapped that he has to see his ex-girlfriend.
Not only that, meditation can begin to effect every other part of your life in a positive way. For me, it allowed me to fully let go of my anger issues, depressed feelings, and always having to compare myself to other people.
Socially, it allowed me to stop feeling so self-conscious and helped tremendously when approaching/picking up women. When you meditate on a regular basis, you reach such clear and vibrant states of mind, it becomes very difficult to become flustered by life. If you can play it cool around women, their attraction towards you will often go through the roof.
You stop having the same level of attachment to things or thoughts. You no longer feel as if you need to chase or follow your thoughts down a rabbit hole. In terms of having to see an ex-girlfriend, this means a reduction of: worrying about what she thinks of you, reminiscing about old times, feeling desperate longing to get back together, etc.
Again, I know a lot of people who have preconceptions about meditation or don’t get why it is helpful…but it can be an absolute game-changer. It can take time to properly learn how to focus one’s mind, so stick with it, and the benefits will come.
Get Started
Since I can’t really teach you directly, how to meditate. I am instead going to post a number of videos that I’ve used and continue to refer back to. Using guided mediations can be useful at first, like training wheels, until you become comfortable doing everything on your own.
The great thing about mediation techniques is that they can be done at any time, eventually. You have to first learn how to do it, but as your practice deepens, you can bring yourself into the present moment even in a loud/crowded room. I do brief meditations to focus myself all the time, even when in a bar, and I have to go approach some woman that I’m interested in.
I literally cannot stress enough to you, how much making mediation a regular practice, made my social anxieties drop away. This has been my greatest freedom.
I am going to start off with the first two videos. They are short and I use them back to back, when I can’t seem to focus myself. Both techniques start about midway through each video, so, the actual meditation/breathing techniques should last 12-15 minutes combined.
Start off doing these twice a day, if possible. Either once in the morning or at night. Or right before you have to see the ex or go out and socialize. If not, just find time when you can do it, and be consistent.
Both of the first two videos are short and allow a letting go to take place by focusing on the breath. Once comfortable and seeing progress with those two videos, you can move on to a longer meditation session (or just do one of these later in the day, if you have time).
There you have it. These should get one started on the path and allow for a significant reduction in the obsessive thoughts, if not an outright freedom from the mental anguish of seeing an ex-girlfriend on a daily basis. If you can change or alleviate the thoughts about a person, their presence around you will have very little negative effect. I’ve used this for many years now, with amazing personal success…so hopefully it helps others too.
