When You’re Tempted To Text Them But Know You Shouldn’t, Do This Instead

We’ve all been there. We’ve all experienced that overwhelming urge to send that certain person a paragraph of our emotions relating to them or a relationship that may have recently ended. In some cases, it needs to happen and it can be cathartic to be honest and let everything out in the open. Other times, however, silence is your best option.

Distraction might seem like an obvious answer, but the problem with being distracted is you cannot be distracted all the time. You might buy some time by going to the gym, leaving the house with some friends, or having a really long movie marathon, but it’s not sustainable. There will always be a lapse in judgment that will erupt, either one time late at night when you’re looking at old photos and videos of the two of you together or reading old text messages that elicit these powerful feelings.

The issue is you want to feel heard. You need your emotions to be validated. If that person can’t give it to you, this is what you need to do:

Every time you have the overwhelming urge to message or call that person, write what you would say to them in your notes app on your phone or record a voice memo of yourself speaking to them. You could see which one you prefer or even do a mixture of both.

Getting your feelings out will instantly lift a weight off your shoulders. Now, every time you feel tempted to contact that person, a good idea is to look back on those notes you wrote and listen to the voice memos. Your notes may be filled with colorful language. The voice recordings may be audibly painful to listen to, but by revisiting the way they made you feel, you will feel less compelled to reach out to them the more time goes on. Those emotions will be reprocessed again and again until you finally move on from them and become tired of associating them with negative feelings that they can’t even be there to clear up.

You see, the right person won’t make you feel like you need to contain your emotions. By using this method and allowing yourself to cry as loud as you want and recount the way they treated you, it allows closure to ensue once you realize their memory becomes associated with one that is causing you nothing but heartache.