You’ve probably heard of Feng Shui.
Rooted in ancient Chinese culture, specifically in Taoism, feng shui is the arrangement of furniture and objects and the organization of space within a room to create harmony and balance.
Transforming the energy in the room can thus shift or turn around your internal energy force, help you look at life differently, and bring benefits like feelings of safety, calm, peace, support, and more power or control in your life.
People who follow the principles of feng shui attest to creating this welcoming energy in their home, and this in turn is thought to support their emotional wellness. Overall, the goal of feng shui is to design an environment that promotes psychological well-being,
Well, right now in your home, in your phone, in the center console of your car…. There are probably some very big Feng Shui blocks being reminders of your ex.
You know what I’m talking about.
The sweatshirt that you borrowed that still smells like him, the photos around the house…. all of that stuff is going to have to go because having constant physical reminders of you being booed up is not going to help you with your healing progress.
When we unmerge our lives there is a fair bit of untangling to do and in your highly activated and emotional state- you wont be thinking straight.
Think of me as your breakup Marie Condo. I’m sweet, I’m empathetic, I’m little and cute….. and I’m also bloody ruthless about getting rid of anything that in the words of Miss Condo…. “DOESN’T BRING YOU JOY” (or evokes painful reminders).
Look- I know this shit isn’t easy. If it were as easy as shaking off a flu and you skip off happily after a week in bed completely healed there would be no need for breakup advice like mine.
This is tough love… I get it….. but it IS a MASSIVE hack in your recovery process. So lets dive in.
THE PHYSICAL STUFF
we’re going to need three boxes.
The first one is the RETURN box, the stuff that you need to return to your ex. Put everything in it that you think you need to go into the box and we’re going to seal it up and put it right near the front door.
Once you’ve finished with your return box, tape it up and have a good think about the best way to deliver that.
It may be that you can send it by courier or it may be that you leave it in a safe spot in your garden or backyard and ask them to pick it up when you’re not home. This is not an opportunity to meet up with your ex, particularly if you’re in no contact. Please do not blow all of the good work. But it is the polite thing to do, and we are doing this the classy way, to return items that are not yours.
The next box is the KEEP box.
This is all the sentimental items from your time together. The photos in frames you have around your house, the ticket stubs you kept from your first date, the seashells you collected on holidays…. All that stuff.
Its painful to pack up reminders of the good times (because lets face it- we don’t put photos of you arguing over stacking the dishwasher in frames on display) so remind yourself these items are the “highlights reel” of your relationship.
This one will bring on nostalgia, tears and maybe anger. If anger is your emotion you may be reaching for the kerosene and matches but I urge you to not go down this road today. You will regret it a year or two down the track with the clarity of hindsight and healing.
This doesn’t mean you can leave it in easy reach though. Oh hell no! Up the top of your wardrobe it goes!
You don’t need it in easy access, but one day you might want to look back. I do remember an episode of the Kardashians where Kourtney pulled down her ex-box where she kept all of the letters, photos and mementos from her ex-partners and she had a pretty good time looking at it with the benefit of years of distance. That will be you one day, but for now, out of reach, out of sight, out of mind.
The third box is the THROW box and the stuff that you really do want to get rid of. This might be a painful letter from your ex or something that really triggers you, you do want to get that into the trash and out of your house as soon as possible.
Assign yourself a day to do this (preferably with a good supportive friend) and allow the emotions to pass through you as you experience them. Its not going to be a day at the fair by any stretch of the imagination but its healthy and necessary to your healing. It also saves you from seeing those things as you for example run out the door for work that will bring on a painful reaction at a MOST inconvenient time and ruin your whole day.
If you’re a bit spiritually inclined- a good saging of your bedroom and living space is always a good thing. New scents and fresh linen or new cushions is a great way to change up your space so that its not exactly the same as the last time your ex was in your home…. If everything stays the same their absence is even more in your face.
Come on now. Big girl pants on. You got this.
DIGITAL DETOX
Next, we’re going to want to have a bit of a digital purge. I will get to social media in a little while. That is a whole different beast. But for now, what we’re going to do is unlink ourselves digitally from your ex.
NETFLIX AND NO CHILL
Now, you need to make sure that all of your streaming services are disconnected. If it was theirs, sign out of it. If it was yours, change the password. You don’t need to see what they are watching when it comes up on your feed. And I speak from experience when I tell you that even an innocent shared streaming service can bite you in the butt. After sharing my binge password one Saturday night, probably four weeks after our breakup, I decided to put on the Sex in the City movie and really get into my feels and empathize with Carrie when she got dumped by Mr. Big. Everyone remember that? Only to be interrupted by obviously my ex at his place wanting to stream another show, which kept kicking me off my own stream.
It was a very stark reminder at nearly midnight that he still lived and breathed and walked the earth. It was a connection you see, and those things needed to be severed if I was to shake this awful heartbreak.
CALENDAR KABOSH
One thing that is prudent to do is to unsubscribe from any sort of shared calendar because the reminders about what’s going on in their life will pop up on your phone at inopportune moments which isn’t great for your mental health and you probably don’t want a reminder of all of the events that you were supposed to attend as a couple.
Its not fantastic to be reminded of their little sisters birthday or stress and catastrophize when you see a doctors appointment pop up in the shared calendar. Do they have a terminal illness? Should you reach out? NO. No you should not…. And at the risk of sounding horribly harsh…. Its really none of your business what they are up to. Conversely- silence and mystery are golden for you. They wanted the breakup? Good for them. Access to your life is hereby denied. You may think because they broke up with you they wont care. Ohhhhh they will look- not because they want you back, not because they have changed…. But because they are nosey little bastards. And them knowing your movements might come back to bite you.
Control Alt Delete
PHOTO MEMORIES TO SPIRAL BY
The other little landmine that we need to navigate particularly if you are an Apple user, is iOS memories. Now the week after I broke up with my ex, iOS let me know that it had a slideshow video for me to view, which was full of wonderful memories of myself and my ex, specifically featured, which absolutely broke my heart. Now iOS 14 does have a feature that you can hit. You can’t get rid of them completely but what you can do is tell it to suggest less memories like this and eventually your phone will get the hint and start filtering out photos of your ex. On that note if every time you open your camera roll on your phone you are likely to see pictures of your ex or their friends and family. You may want to put them in a folder or download them to a computer where you can store them away from site and delete them off your phone so that you’re not carrying around a constant reminder of your ex and the good times.
LOCATION LOCATION LOCATION…
You’re also going to want to disentangle yourself from any location sharing apps that you might have. It’s really not your ex’s business where you are and what you’re doing and it is a type of cyber stalking to keep a close eye on where they are at any given time. What if you see them out the front of a house that you don’t recognize? Are you going to dive over there? No, of course you’re not, because you are a classy individual and that’s not how we’re doing things. So for your own safety in terms of them knowing where you are and your own sanity that you don’t ruminate where they are, disconnect all of the location sharing apps that you may share.
OUTSMART THE SMART DEVICES
Also think about smart devices in your home.
Perhaps you gave your ex’s phone permission to access your Alexa, for example. That device, once it’s actually been given access to a certain phone, can spit out passwords, location information, and so much more. So, we wanna be dealing with that shit REAL quick!
You will have to do them individually if you have more than one, but it is a good security measure and it’s not likely to spit that data about where your partner is either.
THE SOCIAL DILEMMA
Okay, we’ve got to talk about it.
Social media.
This is an extremely tricky one and I absolutely sympathize but you have a few decisions to make.
Let me tell you what’s happening in your brain when you continue to check your ex’s feed. So first of all the anticipation of checking their feed will actually raise your cortisol levels which is not good for your stress levels in general. Then you’re going to get onto the page and possibly see something that you don’t want to see. That could be anything from them hanging out with friends that you used to adore hanging out with right through to seeing them with somebody else. It really can’t come to any good can it?
So we’ve got to minimize the contact.
Again, not to be nasty, not to be vicious and not to be vengeful, but for our own healing and sanity. Every step that you take away from the life that you had with your ex is a step closer to your healing. Now let’s get on with it. What can we do with social media?
There is, of course, the hard block, where you can block them from seeing your stuff, you are blocked from seeing their stuff, and they can’t contact you in any way through social media channels. This is obviously the most hardcore, and what relationship coaches pretty much worldwide recommend that you do. It is a tough one, though, and it can be seen as a little bit hostile. So if you’re in a situation where you still have to have contact with them in some way, it can be awkward to actually have to interact with them face to face. For example, if you have a child or there’s a club that you’re both part of or something like that, with both of you having the knowledge that you have blocked them.
There is ways to minimize the damage though.
You can go into your Facebook and Instagram settings and take a break. This means that you will not see any of their posts pop up on your feed. This is fantastic self-preservation because you don’t have control over when your exes go to post and sometimes that can be at a really inopportune moment. I think back to a time when I actually opened my Facebook and saw a whole montage of my ex with friends that I absolutely adored and I was gutted. And I was at work behind the counter dealing with customers. Not the best time to fall apart. Not only did it really unseat me in the moment, but it threw me for the rest of the day.
You can’t afford for that to happen and you need to put barriers in place so that it doesn’t. You can choose to hard block on Messenger where they will actually get a notification to say that you are not available to chat right now so they will know that you have blocked them. Or you can archive the messages, which means that they will go into your message requests folder. It will also prevent you from seeing that pesky green light on their mug at the top of your messenger reminding you that you are two souls under the same moon (or some unhelpful wistful shit like that)
Again, you then have complete control over when you check those messages or not. You can update the privacy settings on your stories so that they can be excluded from seeing a story if you so wish.
And I would also recommend taking a break from family and friends as well. It’s painful to see statuses from people who you have built a relationship with that did mean something to you and maybe your heart just can’t take it right now. When is the right time to block though? Well, I can speak from bitter experience here. I didn’t block straight out of the gate and I found myself checking their page and them checking my page and my stories every time they went up. And I know because we’ve had a conversation about it that both of us used to sit looking at our little bobble heads in that messenger chat with the green lights on just so that we could feel connected to each other after the breakup. Emotional cutting at its best!
None of this is healthy. It’s not solving the problem. And there was no changes being made or any reversal on decisions. It was just prolonging the agony. Long story short (ill spare you the details) I DID learn my lesson and I did hard block because I needed that space and that clarity without his omnipresence online.
Again, it had absolutely nothing to do with him as a person, it just was necessary for me for my healing process to take those steps to separate my life from his.
As sticky and painful as it is- Id strongly encourage you to put yourself first and look at what forms of social media restrictions are going to work best for you.
A quick google search will reveal tutorials on hard blocking, restricting and taking a break across all social media platforms.
Don’t forget if you start off soft you can always go to the next level if needs be. If someone is not respecting your boundaries, if they are not giving you space and you are finding yourself that you are not healing and moving on from this breakup and individuating from your ex-partner, it might be what you need to do, a hard detox.
There may be a day down the track that an online connection may work once the pain of the breakup has settled but if it is going to hurt you- it has to go.
Feng Shui of your physical, energetic and digital world needs to be done so that you can usher in the new, craft a life you are proud of and to have a safe space you feel comforted by without reminders of your ex slapping you in the face.
I know its tough….. but so are you.
Big Squishy Hugs
Louise xo