How To Not Let Your Past Affect Your Future?

Your old boyfriend may be out of the picture, but your memories of him can haunt the present in disturbing ways. Chirag Mohanty Samal tells you how to move on and trust again

- Chirag Mohanty Samal

He doesn’t find me attractive anymore,” Radhika Londhe confessed to her friend. The advertising professional was talking about her boyfriend of six months. “I just know it. He doesn’t get excited to see me. He stays lost, not keeping up with the conversation. He spends most of the time furiously typing something into his phone, even when I am telling him something important. This was the pattern with Ashok too, before he ditched me.”

Meanwhile, unknown to Londhe, her boyfriend Karan Kapoor, an engineer, was in the middle of a work crisis and was about to lose his job. He hadn’t discussed it with her for fear of stressing her, and wanted to deal with it alone. But she saw a more sinister pattern.

Dr Jyoti Kapoor Madan, senior clinical psychologist at Paras Hospital, Gurgaon, says, “Human interactions are based on experiences that feed into a database of presumptions in our brain. This allows us to immediately anticipate and respond in situations similar to ones we have faced before. But sometimes the wrong presumption can create misunderstandings.”

It’s not easy to trust again when you’re looking at the situation through the eyes of someone wounded from neglect and a lack of love. According to research conducted by Stanford University, rejection can severely dent a person’s self esteem. The same study also claims that the feeling of rejection can linger and will ultimately sabotage future relationships.

Women tend to be more negatively affected by breakups, found another group of researchers from Binghamton University and University College London. But the good news is while breakups hit us harder, women are also more likely to recover more fully than men, who simply move on.

To help you put the past behind, we get experts to list out the best ways to build a lasting relationship.

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