Hey there and welcome to another episode of the Ex Girlfriend Recovery Podcast.

Today, we’re going to be taking on one of the arguably, the most difficult situation you can find yourself in if you are going through a breakup and have decided that you want to get your ex girlfriend back.

And that’s what to do if you have cheated on your ex girlfriend and your relationship has been extremely toxic. How do you overcome that?

So we’re going to be hearing from a man named anonymous. He didn’t want to be named, who’s going to give us kind of a breakdown of his situation. And his situation is really, really heavy. There’s a lot going on there. In fact, generally speaking, when I post these voicemails I get, I usually only give people about a minute and a half to talk.

He was still talking after that minute and a half. So I had to cut him off for brevity’s sake, but pretty much got what we needed to know to help him on what to do going forward.

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Without further ado, here is his message.

His Ex Girlfriend Broke Up With Him Because He Cheated

Me and my girlfriend been broken up for about maybe two months and a half, three.

It all happened over a dumb fight. And we’ve been toxic, we’ve argued a lot. I’ve cheated because I was insecure and I thought she was up to no good. Then I found out the truth after she broke up with me, she wanted to tell me the truth.

We had sex, but she’s like hot and cold and then now she hates me, spreads all these rumors about me in town and she’s dating some other guy who I guess has money.

I don’t know if I’ll ever have a chance to get her back, I don’t hear from her, I haven’t spoken to her, I haven’t broken no contact.

I think I’ve been in no contact for almost like a month and a half.

I’m willing to at least talk to her and try to figure something out or, I don’t know, fix things, but I don’t think she wants to speak to me at all. I don’t think I have a chance at all. I don’t think she really likes me too much anymore. So I don’t know. She just went straight up cold and distant and just talk smack and I’m waiting for the gym to open so I could work workout.

But we were together for basically like three years. We did everything together. Cook, hang out, play video games, everything. Now she’s just stuck up that guy’s ass and she won’t even take care of her son and she’s keeping like a fake image.

Here’s How To View A Situation Like This

Okay. So there’s obviously a lot going on here to unpack.

And before I really start advising, I want to kind of explain to people how I typically view situations like this.

So generally speaking, when I’m working with a client, the very first thing that always enters my mind is understanding that they are in a highly emotional state. And sometimes this emotional state can creep in sometimes in their explanations and I feel that’s what happened here.

So what you’re getting, when … And just from the 30,000 foot perspective, so you can actually see how I handle situations like this. What you’re getting here as someone who’s in a highly emotional state that’s trying to quickly describe everything that’s going on, but they can’t really put concrete words to it. So you’ll notice his explanations are all over the place.

• He had a girlfriend who broke up with him for two and a half months, no, wait, three months.
• Then it happened over a fight, then cheated on her, then they slept together again, now she’s being hot and cold.
• Now she’s dating someone with new money.
• I haven’t heard from her. It’s been no contact from one and a half months.
• Doesn’t want to speak to me at all.
• We’ve been together for three years, he’s jumping all over the place.
• And it’s hard to kind of put a timeline on exactly what’s happened.

And if we can guess when we’re looking at this situation is like putting it in a timeline.

To me, I would say, “Okay look, they probably broke up. And the catalyst of the breakup is him cheating on her.” And then after that, they started talking again, back and forth and it looks to me like they had makeup sex or they had some type of rekindling, but ever since then, she’s been hot and cold.

So he read about no contact somewhere, whether that’s on ex-girlfriend recovery or somewhere else and decided to implement it for one and a half months, but she hasn’t been reaching out to him at all. And now that he sees he’s been in no contact she’s with some other guy. So there’s a lot to unpack here.

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How To Work On Rebuilding Trust

So I think the number one thing I would point out here is when you’re dealing with a situation with cheating involved, there’s multiple layers that you need to peel back. And the first layer I think is, it’s a huge broken aspect of trust. And what really we need to understand about cheating is how men perceive cheating and how women perceive cheating. And it’s interesting if you guys have any time, one person I would really recommend you follow and listen to, especially if you have cheated on your ex girlfriend and you’re trying to get her back, which is arguably, I would argue it’s probably the worst situation to be in.

That broken trust is just not easy to earn back and usually it doesn’t happen overnight. So I mean, it could take years to recover a breakup or recover a situation like that. But one person who I consider to be one of the more foremost experts on it is a woman by the name of Esther Perel. And so if you actually listen to Esther Perel’s talks about cheating. She has some really interesting insights like relating around guilt.

So for example, one thing we know about men and women who cheat is they do feel a certain amount of guilt afterwards, but not for the act itself. The act itself, even if it was kind of a spontaneous type of thing, was exciting to them.

They feel guilt because they don’t want to hurt their partner. And then another thing we’re learning about how men and women cheat in one of the big differences is oftentimes when men cheat, they can still be pretty much in love with the person that they’re with.

So it’s almost like they’re a slave to their emotions or they’re slave to their hard wiring.

The whole aspect of men are kind of meant to spread their seed to as many hosts as possible because it’s how evolution works and how our human race will survive. And what’s interesting is you can even see this in marriages. A lot of times marriages end after about seven years, what happens is, you’ll get married, then you’ll have kids, right?

And usually they stay pretty faithful to the woman for about seven years until the kid can fend for himself. And then that’s when a lot of marriages break up, they go on and they find a new partner, impregnate them, rinse and repeat. Now it doesn’t always work that way, but this kind of explains to you, maybe the thinking behind evolutionary feelings and how cheating works.

The Differences In How Men And Women Cheat

The other interesting thing is actually how women cheat. So women cheat, not usually because they’re still in love with the person they cheated on with. It’s the exact opposite. In fact, women often who cheat are so checked out of the relationship, they feel trapped. They’re just looking to get away. So oftentimes they’ll cheat if they have no romantic connection with that person they’re with any more.

And what we have here is a guy who cheated on his ex-girlfriend. So and what’s interesting, it almost seems kind of a revenge type of a vengeance approach to it. Almost like, “Okay, well things are going bad, I’m not liking how she’s treating me in this relationship. So I’m going to show her, I’m going to go sleep with so and so.” And it seems to me, that’s the approach he took.

And also you look at the relationship, self admittedly he mentions it was a very toxic relationship, so they’re fighting a lot and there’s lots of fight about anytime cheating gets involved, anytime other, she’s dating another guy now, he feels like he’s being pulled hot and cold. And I feel like one of the big issues is this is the classic case of the on-again, off-again relationship where nothing ever changes.

So, it’s like they’re moth to a flame constantly just drawn back to each other, but nothing changes. And I think that’s the issue I see with the on-again, off-again relationship relationships is the fact that, a lot of times when people enter into these situations, when they hit the off again phase, they don’t really set pause or hit pause and do some soul searching and try to understand like, “How can I be better?What can I do so that this doesn’t happen again?”

Instead they just jump in very emotionally to the relationship again, nothing has changed and you expect different result. It’s the whole Einstein quote, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. Well, something needs to change. And really this is the most challenging part about the whole situation. It’s the fact that he doesn’t just need to change his approach, but she needs to change her approach as well.

But he can be the catalyst for her change. And what I mean by that is, obviously she’s upset about the fact that he cheated on her. But that didn’t stop them from rekindling and getting back together. But I think part of the issue, the reason why they broke up again is because he didn’t change his behavior maybe in the on again phase. And she’s like, this is the same old stuff breaks up with him he’s there hot and cold.

Be The Catalyst For Change

And now he’s just confused as like, “Okay, what do I have to do?” And if you want my honest advice on what you should do in situations like these, it is to literally do a long period of no contact like 45 days, 60 days and be focusing on not your ex-girlfriend, but something you’re extremely passionate about.

Something that has nothing to do with romantic relationships. And a lot of times I think people, men specifically take like, “Hey, take some time focus on yourself.” They take it as like, “Okay, well I’ll just go out and I’ll just date a bunch of other girls.” No, this is all about you finding something that you’re passionate about outside of relationships. Now, why should you do that?

Well, it’ll do a couple of things. It will harbor change within you, but it will also kind of be like, “Wow, he’s not dating. He’s not doing what I would expect him to do.” You specifically mentioned you have a really toxic relationship where you cheated on her. So immediately her red flags are up. She’s thinking, okay, he’s just going to go sleep with as many girls as possible. And I guess my point is, you shouldn’t do that if you’re serious about getting her back.

The other thing is, she’s dating someone new and you mentioned he’s got money, but in the end, I think that matters a little bit, I’m not going to lie, but it doesn’t matter as much as the connection you have with a specific individual. So how do you deal with someone who’s, you have an ex who’s moved on to someone new? And this is a problem that plagued us for a very long time when I first started my coaching business on ex-boyfriend recovery and ex-girlfriend recovery.

So if you’re not aware of the history, basically I started ex-boyfriend recovery to help women get their ex’s back or move on from their relationships in 2012. And in the first year we got so much traction. I decided, “Hey, this would be kind of a cool thing to do for men.” So bang here we are. And what’s really interesting is one of the biggest fears we’d noticed that men and women would have after breakups is, what happens if my ex moves on to someone new? And we didn’t really have a way or an approach to attack that, to make progress and figure out here’s what you need to do.

Instead, we gave all the wrong advice. But slowly but surely, we started kind of understanding what works and what doesn’t work. So we came up with something called The Being There method. So here’s how The Being There method works or essentially how it’s meant to work. And it really only works if you have a secure attachment style. What do I mean by that? Well, there’s different types of attachment styles and really our upbringing and our environment and how we react to all sorts of different situations will create our specific attachment styles.

So you have insecure attachment style, you have anxious attachment style, you have avoidant attachment style, you have secure attachment style. So if you want The Being There method to work, I really think that the prerequisite needs to be that you have to be extremely secure with yourself. You have to own all of your insecurities. You have to embrace your insecurities. You have to be okay with losing your ex-girlfriend completely. You just need to be like the ultimate alpha male who won’t react or overreact to ridiculous things.

Once you have that mentality, you are specifically going to friend zone yourself to your ex-girlfriend. So you’re specifically just going to be that ex-boyfriend that she has, that she talks to and can rely on emotionally. Because what’s going to happen is more often than not, you are testing the connection that they have and it’s really, and I’ll admit it, it’s kind of a morally gray approach.

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But you’re testing this connection that your ex girlfriend has with this new guy. And chances are the new guy won’t be super secure. He will be insecure. He will cause fights. And it will be this really interesting juxtaposition where she’s looking at how you’re approaching the situation and she has a direct comparison with how her current boyfriend is approaching the situation.

She Won’t Want To Come Back To A Toxic Situation

And naturally speaking, I think the other aspect of it is, no girl is going to want to come back to a toxic situation. That’s not going to be what they’re going to be drawn to. And I think this is why The Being There method can work so well. If you really have that secure vibe, she will only feel like security, love and warmth from you essentially. Whereas if you’re insecure about how you approach it and you’re toxic in how you approach it, and you’re fighting all the time, it’s kind of like you’re drawn away from that.

You don’t want to enter into a situation where it’s going to make you feel bad. It’s a whole good feelings versus bad feelings theory. We are drawn naturally to things that make us feel good and we repel things that make us feel bad. And you’re putting your ex’s connection on the hook here for that. And hopefully naturally she’s drawn to you and you have kind of a weird, unfair advantage because it seems like you were together with her for over three years and she had a lot of highs with you, but she’s also had a lot of lows.

And so I guess the trick is to get her to figure out those highs. But also I think the other aspect is you need some sort of ace in the hole. And so the best ace in the hole, if you’ve cheated on someone is complete trust. So if you get them back, what you need to do is institute something where like, “Look, I understand that’s going to take a long time to rebuild trust with you. So here’s my recommendation. I think that anytime you feel that something’s amiss, you can come over to my house, unchecked, unsupervised, pick up my phone and look through it. I will not delete anything, I want you to see everything. I am an open book.”

And by offering that to her, it’s a change. She’s like, “Oh, that’s new. I can’t believe that.” And it also shows that you’re really willing to make that work almost to the point where you’re willing to have no privacy with her, and you’re allowing her to have her own privacy. And I think that’s a good way to approach to build a good relationship on how to handle cheating.

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Ex Girlfriend Recovery Podcast. Make sure you subscribe to us on iTunes and leave an honest rating and review. Also, don’t forget to take the free quiz to show you what kind of chance you have with your ex on our website, www.exgirlfriendrecovery.com. We’ll see you next week.