My Ex Moved On First

Hi and welcome.  I know you want to understand him….because in your mind and how you operate, what he is doing doesn’t make sense so your brain is trying to figure out some way in which it would make sense.  First, let me reassure you that if he hasn’t done anything to address his insecure attachment issues (via therapy) he has not “changed”.  What he should have said to you is this person doesn’t give him any anxieties “yet”.  

I highly recommend you break all connections with him…defriend him on social media, remove his number….I know this is going to feel like torture to “not know”…but this is the very best way for you to start moving forward with your life.  That way, your therapy can be focused on you solely and not about you trying to get over or trying to understand him.  I also recommend getting your neurotransmitters checked to see if you have low serotonin or dopamine.  Having either of those can make the ruminations harder to break.   Lastly, remind yourself that you deserve someone who isn’t a serial dater…someone who doesn’t cheat….someone who is open and communicates well with you.  You are welcome to read my posts….it took me over 3 years to get over a guy I dated for 10.5 months so I get where you are coming from.  

I am sure in the moment to him what he said felt real…as real as he could be at that time.  To understand triggering, you have to know about his trauma…..how he was treated as a child and how that would impact how he views others and himself.  Triggers are actions that cause either deactivation or activation of his nervous system.  These are things that only he could really speak to.  I was reading your thread and I don’t see a comment about a switch going off…can you expand on the conversation that led to this comment.

Sorry also what does activation of his system mean? I think I understood deactivation.

Thank you, I’m reading a lot on here to try and learn and understand. You mentioned he have been having doubts. However just before we broke up, he introduced me to his parents and then also told me he’d fallen for me and had never felt like this way before whilst looking terrified as he said it. Again that’s what doesn’t add up for me how he could have felt one thing and then the opposite so quickly. Does the deactivation happen specifically concerning one person, example myself where he can’t be around me now? Because if he’s able to move on with someone else seemingly as if he’s fine, then that means he’s not deactivated by her as such?

About the desorganised attatchmentstyle:

We humans have two basic needs; the need for safety and the need for connection.

Mother and / or father or possibly siblings or other close family members have been overwhelming, painful, scary or mother and father's relationship has been. What has happened, has not made any sense to the child at all. The parents have signaled: "Come here and stay away!" Or have switched between extreme conditions without regard to the child's signals. It happens, for example, if the adults are toxicated. For children it is very scary with a alcoholic parent!

Parents may have put the child in situations, where the child had to chose, regardless of what it chooced - would feel wrong. For example, one could choose between taking care of her mother, making her happy while ignoring herself and her well-being. Or another example: That mother threatened suicide, or went away and maybe gone for several hours. Or a third example: to choose between mother and father and similar bad situations! Or there has been an abuse in the family, either something you've been exposed to, or something you've witnessed.

The child may suffer exposure to:

Loud voices
Explosive behavior
Emotional abuse
Physical abuse
Sexual abuse
A parent with a mental illness/depression/a parent with unresolved trauma
A parent with NPD, BPD, ASPD ect.
An alcoholic parent
Parents who argued a lot Infront of the child
A parent with stress
A parent with an unregulated nerveussystem
ect.

As an adult, love is therefore scary, while you need it. It shows up in the instinktive level of the brain/nerveussystem. It´s trauma. This is a level that lies deeper than both feelings and thoughts.

The parents themselves may be afraid, just generating “emergency room energy” from their own unresolved trauma in their past. They may not actually be doing something scary like yelling or hitting or being abusive, but they might also have those behaviors, so you have to look at what was the situation; in either case you get a strong overcoupling, a strong tangling-up of the attachment system trying to attach, and at the very same time, the survival system locking in, trying to get to safety and get away. So it creates a lot of internal physical, psychological, and emotional confusion, which then gets transferred into adult relationships;
and because so much of it is pre-verbal, sub-psychological and unconscious, you might attain a certain level of intimacy with your partner, and then – without having any clue why – just hit this terror, hit this disorganization and feel this strong need to get away. It’s really hard on adult relationships, because you or your partner do not really know why it’s happening. It was so deeply patterned in your internal relationship template before awareness was available to make sense of it – a conditioned, “reflexive” relationship pattern wrecking havoc years later, uninvited, into your intimate dyadic relationship.

Remember there are other situations that can give trauma/push you int desorganized attatchment style (operations, bullying, accident, bad relationsships, a death early in life ect

As someone with desorganised attatchmentstyle, You are often locked in "Come Here - And Go Away!" patterns. You reach out for love -> you get frightened -> you pull away or attack -> then you will be calm again, when there is a distance -> you reach out, etc. Looks like the ambivalent pattern, but there are actually two different mechanisms. The disorganized form of connetcion is not about the accessibility of the other, as for the ambivalent / nervous attatched, but that you are overwhelmed at an instinctive level of contact. The close contact brings the old history into the system - and thus the old state of tension in the nervous system: Alarm! The ambivalent loses interest if the other is available. The disorganized runs scared back or attacks aggressively.

When we are in fight, flight, freeze survival mode - in the most primitive part of our brain (reptile / brainstem) we cant use our prefrontal cortex where Logic and reason sits.

Dan Siegels hand demonstration taking the low road - youtu.be/WkEcpBU3TpE

meiii, I'm sorry this happened. A lot of us on the board have actually been there because we've dated FAs. The most important thing to remember here as you seek answers is that what he did isn't about you. It doesn't reflect on you, you didn't cause it, it doesn't say anything about your value, and, while it's hard to believe, it doesn't even reflect his feelings for you! It's not intuitive, especially to someone who isn't FA, but it's true.

Each insecure attachment style tends to have some behavioral patterns. This is because the insecure attachment style developed in early childhood as a set of defense mechanisms in response to trauma or a general environment in which adult caretakers were not meeting a child's needs. But a child still needs to learn how to stay attached to adults because their literal physical survival depends on it. The child's nervous system doesn't get properly regulated and doesn't evolve in a healthy way, which is why activation and deactivation starts to occur, but again, the dysfunction is necessary to stay attached and accept a situation in which your caretakers can't meet your needs. Accepting the unacceptable.

The different attachment styles manifest as a combination of the type of upbringing plus genetic dispositions. Often, FA / disorganized attachment will develop from chaotic, unpredictable, and scary environments (usually FA has a childhood history with extreme abuse which may also be physical or sexual, though not always). DA generally develops from outright parental / adult neglect. And AP develops from inconsistent caretaking that sometimes meets a child's needs and sometimes doesn't.

If you don't take ownership over these issues and dysfunctional defense mechanisms and consciously try to heal as an adult, you don't grow out of them. They served a purpose as a child, but they seriously impair grown up and mature relationships, romantic and otherwise. Since they were intended to protect you so you could survive while relying on someone else -- but adults can take care of themselves, get food, water, and shelter on their own! So they no longer need those maladaptions, but it's so deeply pushed down and ingrained in the subconscious, that it just feels like who you are naturally. That's why we talk about people who are unaware, they don't know or understand anything about attachment theory, they are disconnected from themselves and don't understand their own behavior or negative feelings, and they often end up taking their own unprocessed pain out on other people (though they're not doing it on purpose!!! It's a matter of, hurt people hurt people).

What this all means is, you have someone who doesn't have good methods of coping with stress, doesn't have good communication skills, gets stuck and can't fully emotionally process things, has difficulty with emotional regulation (either needs external regulation, AP and anxiously-activated FA look to others to soothe them or validate them and cannot self-soothe, or shuts down totally because they can't process the overwhelm, which is what DA and avoidant-leaning FA do under stress), etc. This isn't because they are inherently bad people (though people are people, some do have bad character, so don't use attachment to make excuses), but it's because they never learned how to do any of those things. They only had unhealthy examples around them growing up.

So this all means that, your now ex is dating someone else because, as he already told you, this is what he does. This is how he copes. The wounds from earlier in are too painful for him to want to deal with. Instead, he goes in circles, starting new relationships over and over as a feel-good distraction. Sexual attraction and new relationship energy and honeymoon periods and idealized connections feel so good, that he can temporarily override his deep commitment issues, his distrust of others (especially women, in this case) due to his upbringing, his discomfort and unhappiness within himself. But it's only temporary. When the novelty wears off and things get real, he freaks out and shuts down so hard that he can't even feel his feelings anymore... so he assumes they went away. But just because you are avoiding something and disconnect from it without processing it doesn't mean it went away. It's still there: it comes out as stress in the body, piling on to the existing dysfunction, creating more and more stress and trauma to eventually deal with if he ever wants to heal while making it less and less likely he'll ever want to confront his feelings because more and more keeps piling on! This also doesn't mean the feelings and connection weren't real, but his fear of intimacy due to his associated pain and disappointment being projected is greater than his ability to stay present and show up for his partners.

It's very, very difficult to confront and heal trauma. It takes a strong will, a lot of self motivation, and often a couple years of hard effort. It is DOABLE, but not everyone wants to do it. Most actually do not (I can't find the citation now unfortunately, but I read some generally accepted research a long time ago that says about 25% of people will switch their attachment styles during their lives). What usually creates change is it being more painful to stay the same than to change. That's the biggest driver I've ever seen for change like this.

The reason I just wrote so much, and most of it about him, is to show you just how little any of this had to do with you! I understand wanting to understand the seemingly foreign behavior and wondering if there's anything you can do. But there isn't. The person is ready to grow out of it and change, or they're not and just want to distract themselves with the next partner until the same thing inevitably repeats until they deal with their issues on their own.

What you described is very typical FA, and typical of the FA-AP pairing. It may happen quickly, in a few weeks or months, or it may happen a few years down the road. But it almost always happens unless people are doing self-work to heal trauma and start earning secure.

The best thing for you to do now is mourn the relationship, but keep him cut off. And when you're ready, it's time to look at your own attachment style in depth. If you have any history of dating avoidants, switches getting flipped on you, chaotic relationships, then part of why that's happening is your own attachment style and issues are making you drawn to this type of guy. And that's no judgement on you, it's just a fact that like attracts like and insecure will subconsciously attract and be attracted to insecure, and these dating patterns will repeat endlessly until you introspect, heal, and can eventually break them.

Hopefully this all makes sense even though it is a long and dense novel!

Thank you so much for taking the time to write this Alexandra. I’ve read a lot of your posts on while I lurked, I saved a lot of them to refer back every time I find myself questioning or overanalysing. I know that I myself have a LOT of issues being AP. It was only when he broke up with me, it all came to me that I’m not healthy and none of my resulting behaviour reflected that despite me telling him he needed help. I never once considered that I may have contributed to it as we never argued and he never said anything. I’ve been going to a therapist who specialises in this area solidly since beginning of Jan and it’s so hard, and I don’t feel like I’m making progress at times. I’m not proud that my last msg to him lashed out, I was just so triggered when I saw him with his new GF and I wanted to know why he lied about not being ready for commitment. It seems so silly looking back but now as he clearly was never going to give me the truth on this nor would it help me in any way knowing. In the last reply before he blocked me, my ex stated he had met someone who no longer gave him anxiety and that his counselling sessions helped move him forward. I’m not totally sure I believe the weight of that. I could be wrong for assuming but would any professional encourage him to dive straight into another intense relationship? The fact he has such strong feelings to now block me makes he feel he never took the time to heal or process us. Either way I know I shouldn’t care and I feel this is finally my acceptance stage. I have been in denial for a very long time. When I last saw him in Dec it seemed like he had only finally recognised the link of his childhood trauma to his behaviour, but he didn’t seem to want to discuss it. He commented he realised he had no happy memories of his childhood and he couldn’t understand why he had this all blocked, I was really sad when he shared this but my hope is it means he may start to be aware. I notice you said here to mourn the relationship. The narrative I’m trying to stick with is that he did care for me and in that time he did feel all the things he said and did, but it became too much for him when the reality set it and he panicked as he always has. I tried the route of hating him and villianizing him and it doesn’t work. Now I realise why he acts like this and that he can’t help it, I feel much more empathy. Plus I know the connection we did have was real and I can’t believe he would have manipulated me in that way. My best friend is very secure and it’s so fascinating when I hear her opinions and views. When she met him and heard some of our dating period in the beginning, she was able to recognise red flags immediately whereas I blazed past them all. Post breakup and his push/pull behaviour that I tolerated, she wouldn’t have stood for this and constantly urged me to cut contact. I really do wish I could get to that stage but sometimes it feels really so far off.