If you’re trying to move on from somebody who doesn’t wanna be with you, here are three things I want you to do to actually move on.
1. Go no contact.
The first one that makes the most sense is you gotta actually go no contact. And this means not looking at photos, not looking at their Instagram, not looking at text messages. Because every single time you do that, you’re reopening the wound.
It takes 21 days for you to withdraw from this person. You have to allow your dopamine receptors to balance back out. Because right now, your cortisol is high and your neurotransmitters are all depleted. So every single time you look at their stuff, you’re restarting the clock. It’s not punishment—it’s biology. Your brain is literally addicted to the highs and lows of that connection, and the only way to break it is to starve it.
2. Write it down.
The second thing I want you to do is get a piece of paper and write down all the ways they actually showed up—and the ways you needed them to show up. That way you can see, in black and white, all of the ways this person wasn’t there for you.
Because every time your brain wants to play that trick of, “Oh, if only I had done this, maybe I would have gotten them,” that’s just your brain’s way of trying to regain control. It thinks if it can figure out where the issues were—especially if you take accountability and ownership of them—then you had the control. That this could have been different.
Spoiler alert: that’s not how that works. You can’t “fix” your way into someone choosing you. The list is a reality check. It anchors you in the truth of what actually happened, not the fantasy of what could have been.
3. Create new meaning.
The third one is the most important. You have to create new meaning around the moments you shared with this person. So if at night, every single night, you used to speak to each other, and now you haven’t spoken to them in two weeks—do something for you. Maybe that means go for a walk, call a friend. Do something that fills your own cup.
That way you can give your nervous system a corrective experience. Because you don’t grow by just sitting in the pain. You grow by validating your experience, being there for yourself, and not talking to yourself like you’re the problem. The goal is to rewire your brain to associate those empty moments with self-care instead of loss.
