When you’ve left an abusive relationship, the common theme of the day will be constant, intrusive and obsessive thoughts about your past relationship. The thoughts are more of a tape playing in your head about what could have been or what you could have possible done to fix the relationship and other endless questions that have no answers.

These questions even keep you from taking action in your present life and you might not even want to get out of bed because the thoughts are just driving you crazy. You may have also overheard that they have a new catch and your thoughts are now looking like:-

“What if their new partner is now having the best version of him/her”, “What if I did the wrong thing by leaving early” or “What if I had listened to the promises that he/she will change their behavior.”

The fact that they’re moving on so fast may also make you feel like, “What if you’ve been the problem all along”, or, “What if you were not just understanding enough and you were just overreacting.”

There are just these endless thoughts and replayed scenarios which just take a toll on your day. Those emotions may leave you feeling sad, hopeless and depressed. You may try to distract yourself by thinking about something else but the thoughts are not stopping. One thought comes and you follow along with it.

Your overthinking self is just glued in the past even when logically you understand that you cannot fix the relationship, but you still feel that there’s still something you could have done and no one can convince you otherwise. You’ve consumed tons of information about narcissism but you still feel that there was something you could have done. Logically, you know you could not change or fix the relationship but it’s still not stopping those thoughts of ‘what if.’

How Do You Cope with Those Negative Thoughts?

We have to understand that all thoughts are anchored in the past or the future. The other thing is your mind will always come up with the worst-case scenarios of the situation. It will feed you with the scenario of saving the relationship instead of feeding you with scenario of you saving yourself from the relationship (why? because you believe you’re unworthy).

So, what will help you cope with negative thinking is of course shining some light or awareness to those thoughts. That’s where journaling comes in handy. What you can do is journal all those intrusive thoughts of what you could have done or what if you were wrong or all those kind of thoughts about your relationship. Take some time each day to analyze what those thoughts are feeding you with.

Do not analyze in your head, because to the mind will trick you. It’s more like cornering the mind, in such a way that the moment it comes with negative thoughts you’ve already analyzed all possible scenarios and it won’t feed you with many unreasonable scenarios. So, instead of going along with those negative thoughts, take out your phone or piece of paper and journal about them. Journaling just exposes you to more of the reality of the situation.

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The other thing you can do to cope is to of course practice mindfulness. You can have a daily meditation practice or do some breathwork just to bring you back to the present moment especially when your mind is spiraling with a million scenarios which don’t make sense at all. There are a number of free resources on mindfulness on the web that can help you. So, you can check them out.

The key to all this is not to follow along with those negative thoughts but instead bring them to your awareness. All those coping mechanisms may of course not address the problem permanently or may take longer time but they still help. You’ll move from feeling overwhelmed by those negative thoughts to at least feeling a certain level of control. This will massively improve your mental health and you’ll feel less stressed.

You’ll not be crippled by the negative thoughts and you will even be able to validate your strengths which will lessen the painful intrusive thoughts.

How Do you Permanently Stop Negative Thoughts?

Aside from coping, you can permanently address those negative thoughts by having a shift in your inner identity. Negative thoughts are always anchored in your identification with a past event. When you still identify with a past event, you develop subconscious beliefs about who you are as a person.

Those subconscious beliefs can be something like “you’re unlovable”, “you’re unworthy” or “you always ruin things.” So, when you’re still carrying those false beliefs about yourself, you’re not in touch with your present self. Our subconscious mind is where our emotional information and memories are stored, including memories of our trauma, our wounds and our deeply-rooted worries.

So, those thoughts you have are just a fruition of what you feel about yourself on the inside. The moment you clear those subconscious patterns on an inner level, those thoughts will start dissipating or will lose the strength. They will not have a foothold in who you are. The soil and manure for your negative thoughts are just your unhealed wounds.

For instance, if you deeply know you’re good enough, and you experience a thought like ‘I should have done ABCD to save the relationship.” The thought will not have an anchor to support it because your healed self will be like, “I did my best and there was nothing more I could have done” because you deeply believe in yourself.

But if you do not believe in yourself on a deeper level, that belief will go along with those thoughts and be more of a self-fulfilling prophecy of your unworthiness. Then it will now come up with a million other thoughts from the past on how you are really such an unworthy person. Hope that makes sense.

So, what you believe about yourself has a huge impact on giving power to those negative thoughts and emotions you’re experiencing as a result of your past experiences. So, once you clear those false beliefs in your head, you’re transformed and you’re just in touch with your authentic self.

Note from the Author

If you’re ready and you’d like my help with healing, finding peace in life and breaking free from these toxic patterns (in less than 2 months) , then you can book a FREE BREAKTHROUGH CALL with me HERE. Happy healing 💙💙. Feel free to share and comment! Use this information with caution, it comes from my own thoughts & bias, experiences and research😊.