Having Nightmares About An Ex

Friday | April 23, 2021

Love Letters Breakups 🖤

Having Nightmares About An Ex

Tell me your love/relationship/dating questions. Send your letter to [email protected] or fill out this form.

This letter is about a bad boyfriend who died and is still haunting me. I dated this man about eight years ago. I broke up with him after about seven months, and learned about two years ago that he died of an overdose. While we were together this man was a complete nightmare – Jekyll and Hyde, jealous, paranoid, smothering. When it was over I felt grateful and happy to be out of it, and barely thought of this man. I met my long-term partner about 18 months after we broke up.

The issue is that ever since I found out he died two years ago, I have had regular dreams about this man. They are all horrible dreams and I cannot, for the life of me, understand why my subconscious mind is giving this guy any headspace at all. I do not miss him, I did not love him, I barely feel sorry he is dead. How do I rid myself of this ghost once and for all? It’s been two years since I learned about his death and more than eight years since I last spoke to him, and the nightmares are still a fairly regular occurrence.

– Dreaming

I feel like every day at Love Letters is “How about therapy?” day, but there’s a reason, right? When we can’t figure out why our brains are stuck in a pattern, we need to talk it through until we figure it out.

It’s possible you have more feelings about this relationship than you know. Maybe it’s something like, “Wow, I can’t believe I was so miserable with that man.” Or maybe it’s more about sadness … because whether it affects you now or not, it’s a terrible story. Sometimes we want to revisit bad experiences so we an contextualize them.

It could also be a symbol of stress and other things, your mind’s go-to topic for unpleasant themes. I don’t know.

The point is, please talk to someone, even if it means going to a group (meeting online these days) for those who’ve had relationships with people dealing with addiction. I know you’ve moved on, but the relationship was traumatic. So was the news of this man’s death. The value of the relationship doesn’t change your need to acknowledge that it happened.

I guess my advice is to listen to yourself. You seem to be fighting the message, and maybe if you allow yourself to interrogate it, it’ll change.

– Meredith

Readers? How do you stop a pattern of dreams or thoughts?

Breakups 🖤 addiction

Featured Comment

Sometimes dreams are not what they appear. In other words, your dream might not have anything to do with the man who died or that relationship. There is something to the dream, though. I’d talk to a therapist to unlock it. There is no point in doing this on your own.

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