Maybe you’ve worn out your friends, but most likely you’ve worn out your own brain and energy.
If you are currently in this position and are wondering how to stop overthinking after being cheated on, my sincere hope for you is that by reading on you will recover strong hope for yourself and your ability to recover from this.
Having experienced cheating myself, I know on a personal level how awful an experience this is. You can feel lost, depressed, and hopeless.
Perhaps worse than the pain, though, is wondering how to stop overthinking after being cheated on. Thoughts plague us, negative spirals loop round and round. We want to pull ourselves out of our negative overthinking, but we don’t know how.
Steps to recovering
I am going to go through the steps that I believe pull you out of this place you are in now . It can be an endless cycle of ruminating, overthinking, and paranoia. We will cover:
- How to let go of the ‘humiliation’ narrative you’re playing in your head
- How to identify the difference between pain and suffering
- How to drop your need for ‘closure’ in order to move on after being cheated on
- How to truly embrace the pain you’re experiencing and use it to propel you forward
- How to drop your fear of being alone
- How to reframe what has happened so you feel hopeful for your future
WHY am I overthinking after being cheated on?
I think it is because the pain and devastation you feel after being cheated on is not enough to cope with after being cheated on. The worst part is just how embarrassed you feel. You feel totally and utterly humiliated.
In life, when you are humiliated in other types of situations (you drop your bowl of soup walking up the spiral stairs in an open plan office whilst having a terrible day at work and burst into tears), there is a REASON. Generally, others are a bit embarrassed for you, and so your embarrassment is justified.
When you get cheated on, your humiliation belongs to you and you alone.
You can’t stop overthinking after being cheated on. Because, alongside the extraordinary pain you are feeling, you ruminate and ask yourself, ‘was it so obvious to everyone else that I fell for a lie?’
You feel like he made the life you lead look foolish as a result. You look and feel exposed and stupid, and your mind rolls over and over this.
Being aware of this and how to tweak your behaviour and thoughts can be the start of feeling better. By reading on, I hope to show you simple and tangible steps that will show you how to stop overthinking after being cheated on.
5 ways to stop overthinking after being cheated on
Let go of the ‘humiliation’ narrative.
I think that part of the pain of cheating is that you realise you have been making decisions based on a reality that didn’t actually exist.
You now feel like you were wasting your time, energy, and emotions on a past, present and future that was not even there. Understanding this is crucial to understanding why you feel so embarrassed and can’t stop overthinking after being cheated on.
I often write about intuition, and I think you may have known something was up with this cheating. Why does this then hurt even more? Because it is one thing to be mad at someone else, but it is sheer agony to be mad at yourself.
So now you’re stuck feeling humiliated and pushing yourself down further by your own thinking.
How do you change this?
You make a switch. You resent the fuck out of him, and you make the decision there and then to not resent yourself.
Resentment toward yourself and humiliation are a very natural outcome of not listening to your intuition. You might feel worried about not logging the red flags, or giving him the benefit of the doubt one too many times.
Yet, it sends you a reminder that you need to back yourself more both now and in the future. You didn’t get it wrong, you were not paranoid, and you knew in your heart something was changing.
1. Look back in hindsight
When I got cheated on a few years ago, we had been together for over a year, but looking back, I would say I had probably been close to ‘single’ for the last 2 months of that relationship.
The problem was that I just didn’t know it at the time. This was humiliating – I would look back on the things we were doing, saying, and planning and realise where he was mentally (and perhaps physically) during that time.
It can feel like you were living in a fantasy. But perhaps you are able to look at this differently in a way that is going to help you move forward. Were you telling yourself these stories to overlook behaviour from him that was clearly problematic?
I bet that there was writing that was very much on the wall, you just chose not to see it. I don’t say that in a way to criticise you. This is the beauty (and pain) of hindsight and an added layer of humiliation.
Drop this humiliation and place distance between the thinker (you) and the thought (‘I am such a fool and this will only happen time and time again’).
Now, feel the pain and feel the grief that the thing you loved is dead and is not there anymore. You asked how to stop overthinking after being cheated on – it’s feeling THIS pain that will stop the humiliation loop and move you forward.
2. Know the difference between pain versus suffering
If there is one sure-fire way to help yourself out when you want to know how to stop overthinking after being cheated on, it’s this.
Get very, very clear on the difference between pain and suffering. Know when to extend self-compassion, support, and kindness to yourself and when to give yourself a mental kick up the ass. Sometimes, you nee to tell your overthinking mind to shut the fuck up.
Let’s differentiate between the two:
- Pain: I’ve lost someone I loved. I’ve lost the friendship, the affection, the intimacy, the future I thought I’d have with him. I’ve lost someone to spend my weekends and evenings with. I’ve lost the possibility of having a family with him and growing old together. I’ve lost the person I thought he was, and the couple I thought we’d be.
- Suffering: This only ever happens to me, and I’m so left behind. I’m an idiot for getting this wrong and thinking I was going to get all my dreams this time around. I’m doomed to only have this happen on repeat, and it’s just never going to work out for me. I tried, and I failed – there you go. Point proven.
3. Know the two, and stop being your own co-conspirator
If you’re struggling to get perspective on where you are at with pain versus suffering and extend compassion to yourself, tell that cheating story about your best friend, instead of you.
How would you be treating her right now? How would you be telling her story about what’s happened here?
Do this to launch yourself out of the suffering hole. Suffering is like pouring dirty gasoline into a car to get it to run again, when in fact it needs to go to the garage and have time off the road for some deeper repair work.
Embrace this awful period
Wondering how to stop overthinking after being cheated on is like piling pain on top of pain, so why not go a little further?
Embrace the pain of the things he was doing that were holding you back. I think almost every relationship in some way holds us back. They stop you making autonomous decisions, and that constant compromising can be interesting to look back on.
I think that whoever caused you to seek out this article was holding you back from SOMETHING – and maybe that thing is as simple as feeling calm. Maybe he was holding you back from feeling calm because he constantly acted unpredictably, and your anxiety was constantly on a mid-level hum in the background.
EMBRACE what you suffered with him and shine it up into the open. It takes you out of a fantasy spiral and is a very effective way to stop overthinking after being cheated on.
4. Drop your fear of being alone (the worst already happened)
One negative thinking loop that tends to really stick around and cause a lot of unnecessary pain after being cheated on is the fear of being alone.
Here’s the thing, though: nearly all the things you are scared of now, you were already experiencing when you were with him.
He had already checked out. He wasn’t 100% committed to you on Tuesday, and then decided to cheat on Wednesday and was 100% checked out by Thursday. You were already alone, and the worst had already happened.
Stop thinking that this dramatic shift happened with him, and you got taken from one state of relationship bliss to emotional Siberia.
You can’t stop overthinking after being cheated on because you are stuck in a fear narrative of being alone forever. The thing is, though, you were NOT ‘not alone’ when you were with him – the worst already happened, because look at the state you’ve now found yourself in.
I think we all have this idea that if we can just climb one level up on a relationship sliding scale, we’ve somehow secured relational security.
When you’re dating, you become exclusive. You’re in a relationship, and you become engaged. You’re engaged; you finally exchange vows. There is no guaranteed security at either point, and the ‘threat’ of being ‘alone’ is always there in some way. The good news is that these states are temporary. And the periods in-between being ‘alone’ don’t need to be like sitting in a life waiting room.
5. Map out what you want from your life
When I get asked how to stop overthinking after being cheated on, people often go on to tell me about all the things they’ve done in their attempts to feel better.
They can rattle through a whole list. And this is when I tend to suggest that instead of swinging wildly from one end of the spectrum to another, they try to reframe what happened in order to move forward. For example, stop spending time and energy on endeavours which don’t actually make them feel better.
How to reframe
I often think that the image of an arrow being stretched backwards before it gets shot forward. That visual is profoundly useful for what you should do in this stage after your breakup.
Stretching back? Get clear and make a list of all things your ex was holding you back from when you were together. Rather than jumping into the narrative of him cheating and the relationship breaking, focus on you. Get clear about YOUR role within that too, and where you let yourself be put last.
You could look at what happened to you as the worst thing. Or you could look at this as a wonderful reset for yourself. All those things you had accepted in your relationship which you didn’t like, you could actually find in a relationship where you don’t need to accept them.
The time in-between relationships can sometimes feel like you are stuck sitting in God’s waiting room.
Life crawls by at a snail’s pace, but this time can instead be the ultimate launching pad for where you go next. Get a little bit excited about that. The worst already happened, he revealed his true colours, you’ve learnt more about your own behaviour. But you’re also learnt what drives you in relationships. You have every chance AND some at getting everything you ever wanted, probably sooner than you think.
If you need someone to talk to, to unpick all of these complicated emotions – reach out to me.