Can you unlove someone you once loved?

While it may feel impossible and certainly takes time to stop loving someone, it's absolutely possible to do just that. In fact, you may find that in no longer loving this person you open yourself up to the possibility of loving others — and even yourself.

choosingtherapy.com - How To Stop Loving Someone: 11 Ways To Move On

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Promotion

Although it’s a difficult task, figuring out how to stop loving someone can be an important and meaningful choice — one that involves gaining distance and connecting with other people and activities in your life that bring you joy. While it may feel impossible and certainly takes time to stop loving someone, it’s absolutely possible to do just that. In fact, you may find that in no longer loving this person you open yourself up to the possibility of loving others — and even yourself.

Here are some practical tips to help you stop loving someone:

1. Accept That You Still Love Them

While it may seem counterintuitive, a helpful first step in ceasing to love someone is actually accepting that you love them in the first place. Research shows that avoiding your emotions can actually make it harder to cope and change your thinking patterns. This can, in turn, change the course of painful emotions like love.1 To accept your love for this person, carefully examine why you love them and how they make you feel without judging the fact that you still love them.

2. Consider the Relationship for What it Was

Once you’ve accepted that you still love this person and what it is about them you love, it can be helpful to explore other areas of the relationship, such as what needs of yours weren’t met and what you wish were different. List these out factually (for example, “This person avoided spending time with my family, and that’s something I love doing”) and keep the list somewhere you can return to if you need a reminder of why you need to move on.

3. Identify How Loving Them is Out of Line With Your Values

Considering the relationship for what it was often illuminates the ways in which loving this person is out of line with your values. To stop loving someone, identify your core values (e.g., “honesty” or “passion”) and list out the ways that loving this person doesn’t align with them. For example, “Loving someone who’s a homebody doesn’t align with my value of spontaneity.” Because one of the functions of values is to influence how you choose to live your life, looking at how loving the person doesn’t align with your values can help you move on from them.

4. Act Opposite to Love

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Promotion

All emotions produce “action urges,” which are behaviors you are called to act on following an emotional experience. When you feel love toward someone, you may have the action urge of reaching out to them or looking through pictures of them. To change an emotion, identify a close opposite of the action urge. The opposite of reaching out to someone could be reaching out to a close friend or turning off your phone altogether. Research shows that acting opposite to an emotion can interrupt an emotional cycle and even reverse it.2 Keep in mind that acting opposite to strong urges that aren’t in your best interest is something that needs to be practiced repeatedly and wholeheartedly in order to produce the desired effects.

5. Remove Reminders of Them

Another way to stop loving someone is by removing reminders of them. This will help you to stop thinking about them. Consider getting rid of or moving out of view items such as goods you’d purchased together and photographs. By avoiding as many reminders of the person as you can, you’re changing the way your brain experiences the love you’re trying to stop. Studies show that specific and unique areas of the brain become activated when viewing the face of someone you love romantically, and that this kind of activation is stronger than simply thinking about someone or hearing their voice.3,4

6. Get Physical Distance

It can also be helpful to set boundaries around engaging with the person you’re trying to stop loving. While it may not be possible to avoid the person entirely (perhaps you live in the same small town), consider other ways to get distance such as by going to a gym you know they don’t belong to. Having space between you will help you avoid cues (such as seeing their face) that might prompt feelings of love, and will also help you adjust to — and accept — life without them.

choosingtherapy.com - How To Stop Loving Someone: 11 Ways To Move On

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