It's pretty natural to feel pretty pessimistic when you have broken up with your girlfriend.
You are not exactly in the best frame of mind.
It's natural to want to assume the worst, but that doesn't mean that you should.
Most of the time, what you assume is happening now that you are broken up, is not really happening at all.
I remember back several years ago, a good friend of mine was going through a break up.
He had dated his girlfriend for close to a year, and knowing him as well as I did, I knew that he was really smitten with her.
You would see his face light up the moment he mentioned her name and he would get excited if he got a phone call from her.
So, when i heard that they had split up, I knew that there was a chance he was not going to take it that well at all.
I called him up to see if he wanted to get together to grab some wings and shoot some pool.
He didn't want to.
I had to really persuade him that getting out would be a good thing.
All he wanted to do was stay in and feel miserable about things.
After a good half an hour of me doing my best to persuade him, he finally agreed to come out.
We met up at the pool hall and I could tell right away that he definitely needed to talk about things.
He had the classic post break up look: Sweat pants, old t-shirt and a look of sadness across his face.
He's my friend, so he needed some cheering up.
I tried to get him to laugh using an inside joke that always did the trick.
Nothing.
I knew it was going to be hard.
Of course, I knew that no matter what, he'd want to talk about her.
So, we did.
And he started to go on and on about his fear that this was it, it was really over.
He was afraid that she'd already found someone else and that she was probably off with that mysterious new guy and here he was, feeling sad and sorry for himself.
After we shot some pool and devoured our wings, we parted ways.
I was curious, I knew his girlfriend well enough to call her, so I did just that.
Turns out, my friend was totally wrong.
She wasn't seeing anyone.
She wasn't off and having fun with some mysterious guy.
She was in fact doing no better than he was.
She talked to me for about 10 minutes and then I knew I had to call my friend back.
Told him what I found out.
All of a sudden, I heard a change in his voice.
A little bit of new life in him.
He had hope.
What he had realized by my relaying the fact that his ex girlfriend was not seeing anyone else and she was not off having fun, was that it had been something that he had made up in his own mind.
A worst case scenario that was pure fantasy, not reality.
It took a while, but my friend and his ex girlfriend DID get back together.
They are actually married now.
Living in the suburbs with 2 kids.
A lot of the time, when you break up with someone, your mind makes up a story about what you assume is now going on behind the scenes with your ex girlfriend.
That doesn't mean that it is the truth.
It doesn't mean that the worst case scenario is something that you really have to worry about.
In a lot of situations, the worst is not happening at all.
Sure, sometimes, the worst is happening and that usually just means that you are going to have to accept the break up and move on.
More often than not, though, you don't really know what is going on and if you allow your mind to do it, it is going to come up with something that is not really going on at all.
My friend got new life when he realized that his worst fears were fantasy and not real.
It gave him the energy he needed to win back his ex girlfriend.
He had to let go of the worst case scenario to do that.
You might want to do the same.