Your Dismissive Ex: when you evolve past them ❤️‍🩹

Getting over a dismissive avoidant can feel horrific. It has taken me decades to truly understand and process what happened to me — the incredible connection, the passion, the intensity, followed by the discard, the confusion, the breadcrumbing.

My nervous system was shot to pieces. My mental health collapsed. I was prescribed psychiatric drugs that only added another layer of suffering through side effects, withdrawals, and emotional numbness.

For years, I lived in apathy. Completely disinterested in life, let alone my passions. Even the smallest things were marred by a black cloud — aching heartbreak, headaches, insomnia, fear, confusion. Every day felt heavy. Every thought circled back to him. I obsessed over what had happened, replayed conversations, analysed every moment, searched endlessly for answers.

I suppose the most painful thing about loving an avoidant is that you know the relationship didn’t end because of a lack of love - it’s the reverse with an avoidant - real love terrifies them. It was too real for them to hold.

Knowing that is brutal. And yet, recently, something shifted.

For the first time in years, I feel lighter. More able to engage with life again. With people. With piano. With gardening. With the things I used to love before heartbreak hollowed me out.

It sounds impossible when you’re in the thick of it, but healing from a dismissive avoidant relationship genuinely is possible.

For me, the process was brutal. There’s no glamorous version of it. It was hurt like hell, survive suicidal ideation, endure pills and withdrawals, navigate side effects while carrying heartbreak and a nervous system permanently on fire with fear of abandonment. It was limerent dreams, sleepless nights, emotional flashbacks, and constant rumination.

At first, I tried to understand it intellectually. Therapy helped me see the reality more clearly: he chose emotional safety over emotional depth. He chose a relationship where he could remain distant and unchallenged rather than risk true intimacy, vulnerability, and growth. He chose lower emotional stakes over passionate love.

That understanding mattered, but intellectualising alone did not heal me.

What finally began shifting things was learning to regulate my nervous system. Somatic shake therapy helped release years of stored fear, grief, and emotional trauma from my body. Slowly, my body stopped living in permanent survival mode.

At the same time, I wrote about my experience consistently on this blog for an entire year. Some days I hated him. Some days I loved him. Some days I longed for him to wake up, go to therapy, come back transformed. Other days I felt angry, betrayed, discarded. Acceptance came in waves, then disappeared again.

But throughout all of it, I made one decision that changed everything: I poured the love back into myself.

I did it alone. No rebound relationship. No searching for someone else to soothe the wound or validate my worth. I stopped looking outside myself to meet emotional needs that only I could truly tend to.

And somewhere along the way, I found my strength again.

I found me again.

I became stronger, more grounded, more whole.

Healing was not linear. It was ugly, exhausting, lonely, devastatingly painful and horrendously slow. But it was real.

This is the first time I can honestly say: I feel better.

I’m sure there will still be residual symptoms. Some headaches. Some grief. Certain memories that sting unexpectedly. Healing doesn’t erase what happened. But to wake up and have even one day where I’m not obsessing, not spiralling, not feeling like I might collapse under the weight of the pain — that feels extraordinary.

If you are in the middle of this kind of heartbreak right now, I want you to know something important: the pain is not permanent.

Your nervous system can heal. Your mind can quieten. Your identity can return. Your passions can come back to life. One day you may find yourself laughing again, playing music again, tending your garden again, breathing deeply again without that constant ache in your chest. Being able to go out for the day without battling through the pain.

And when that day comes, you will realise something profound:

You did not lose yourself forever.

You learned, you healed, you grew.

And that is worth everything.