Normal human brain function is to grief and then let go of something that has ended. There is a normal, healthy grieving process that takes place subsequent to any type of death – whether it is a person that died or a relationship or circumstance that has ended.

Jumping out the wagon of this normalcy, there is what we call looping. If you have lost a person, a relationship, a circumstance in your life and your mind is still constantly, relentlessly, involuntarily triggered into thinking about that circumstance, you have to at least contemplate that you are functioning out of normalcy paradigms. This is a key understanding and awareness that needs to take place before any healing or moving forward can occur.

You need to understand that your very looping (yep, you’re going to see this word repeatedly in this post, but no more than it takes place in your own mind) about how that person or that circumstance was truly the “perfectest” of them all, that right there is what makes your emotional life dysfunctional, stuck and painful. This is the only place where you can be empowered to change your experience or to keep..yep, you got it: LOOPING!! By the way, this is the case for any type of relationship that has a “dream quality” about it – be it a future dreamy relationship, a potential dreamy relationship with the girl next door, etc.

There is no way in this world that you will ever be able to look at an experience that your brain has encoded as perfect, in a way that it becomes less than that. The red flag tho is that, when you really think about it, that person or that circumstance is not even THAT perfect for you, or not even concretely possible within the circumstances of your life without you sacrificing big chunks of yourself that you value. Even with this valuable understanding, your mind cannot seem to unwind itself from looping around that “thing” being what you long for, what you crave, what you so deeply desire. And this is your signal that something is out of normalcy here, and by normalcy I mean health. Think about a fire alarm that keeps ringing to announce you that somewhere in your home there is something that is threatening to your wellbeing. Your brain has encoded that person as being the fire alarm and it keeps presenting it to you in that manner, regardless of the understanding that the fire alarm isn’t what you should fix, but your attention needs to be pointing towards the fire that triggers it.

Another marker for the dysfunctionality of our emotional patterns is the constant urging, the constant focus and a certain amount of anxiety that starts, usually, within the first 10 seconds of our awake day and seems to pop out of nowhere, or at any trigger that might happen. Everything and anything reminds you about her her her her her… him him him him him… you keep wondering what they are doing, where they are, what’s in their life and so on even after months and years of both of you (or life) deciding that this cannot work! If you do not see this as dysfunctional and you keep looping into how this is just your way of paying tribute to something/someone that was the epitome of your emotional/sexual/financial life, you are then setting yourself up for a lifetime of being fooled into living a fantasy symbolism, similar to a dream.

Have you noticed how dreams work in symbols? Our brain is wired to extract meaning out of symbolic images that, sometimes, appear in such a poignant way, that they stick with us for a long time. I think most people have at least one dream that has stuck with them for a long time. And the symbol might be a fire, a monster, a falling, a scary creature, anything really, but the dream isn’t about that symbol per se, but about the emotional signature that derives from it – usually that of fear or some type of discomfort. This is exactly what has happened with “the one that got away”. Our brain has encoded the image or the symbolism of that person into the looping around the feeling of not having love, not having enough connection in our lives, not having the necessary nourishment that leads to health. Our brain has coded and linked to the other person as the source of acceptance, validation, love, warmth, home-like feeling that, because the person is not there, we simply cannot have. This is the most direct way that our brain can signal to us: hey, there is a lack of connection and love in your life! This is dangerous and scary! You need to look at your profound grief and despair around that lack, instead of keeping looping into this idea of how amazing that person/circumstance was. So instead of the brain constantly saying: danger, warning, I don’t have enough love in my life, it is saying: I lost that person, I lost that circumstance, I want that thing back! … which, to add pain to the injury, isn’t even true if you manage to be REALLY honest with yourself.

Because the mind is not being that direct with language, it summarizes that feeling of lack of emotional connection into the image, into the symbol of the other person. Why isn’t the mind able to be clear? Because clarity over that matter means to be directly confronted with the profound grief and pain of not having love, simply put. What’s actually getting churned, is our unsettled grief that we do not have an emotional connection in our life. This is where I want to link back into the avoidant coping mechanism, which makes matters a bit worse: this is the person who actually finds it dangerous TO HAVE intimacy and therefore will create the circumstances necessary to do exactly that: avoid it! What better way to avoid intimacy than having your mind looping into a dream-type relationshp with the dream-type person?

If you pull the projection out of the symbol and realize that you need to focus on your unmet needs, on your grief, on your history of abuse, on feeling disconnected, on not belonging and not having enough, you will CLEARLY see how this is really not about the other person, but it’s really about how you are being mesmerized into looping in not having meaningful relationships or not having relationships with people who offer a level of engagement that YOU need to feel nourished in this world.

The healing comes from the understanding that we’re actually obsessing about the feeling underneath that’s too painful to look into, that is floating in our subconscious and it’s bubbling up in our consciousness as the image or symbol of “the one who got away”.

Have you been inspired by this post? Then please