I Humiliated Myself After The Breakup

If you humiliated yourself after the breakup, you probably begged and pleaded with your ex, showed up at your ex’s door/work, proposed to your ex, sent your ex gifts, got your ex’s family and friends involved, got caught pretending to be in love with someone else, or did something your ex found desperate and repulsive.

Whatever you did, you made yourself look committed to your ex and eager to work on the relationship even though there was no relationship left to work on. Your ex wanted you to acknowledge his or her decision and feelings and stay away.

But because you didn’t, you showed you couldn’t manage your emotional turmoil and projected your fears and insecurities onto your ex. By doing so, you proved you were prepared to do anything for your ex. You were okay even with abandoning your dignity and pride.

I don’t blame you for doing that as the breakup made you realize how important your ex was to you and triggered your biggest fears. It made you see your ex as someone who could help you forgive yourself for some of the mistakes you made throughout the relationship and mend your broken heart.

Sadly, though, your ex wasn’t keen on helping you cope with the breakup. He or she had emotionally checked out a long time ago and expected lots of space and understanding from you.

But because you were anxious and needed your ex to help you feel better, you did something you aren’t very proud of and pressured your ex into changing his or her mind about the breakup and made your ex want to run for the hills.

I don’t know what you did and if your ex responded maturely or not, but your ex probably felt unheard, smothered, and disrespected and perceived your desperation as… well… desperation.

It probably triggered your ex’s need for space and turned your ex off big time.

One thing you must understand before you think you completely ruined everything is that your ex already felt turned off. He or she didn’t fall out of love with you again because of your breakup mistakes. The detachment had already happened as your ex had lost feelings and the will to fight for the relationship while you were still together.

So if you think about it, your desperate attempts at reconciliation were too late. You should have shown a desire to bond and work through issues weeks or months prior to the breakup (depending on what the issues were and when they occurred).

If you didn’t know these issues existed, then your ex should have brought them up and begun working on them with you. Someone should basically have taken the initiative while the relationship was still going strong.

That’s how mature couples handle problems or differences and prevent them from snowballing into unresolvable incompatibilities.

You also need to understand that a little bit of begging, crying, or reasoning with the dumper doesn’t mean it’s impossible to get back together. It especially doesn’t mean it’s impossible if you made mistakes during the breakup because that’s when the dumper is typically more receptive, tolerant, and feels guilty for breaking up.

Breakup mistakes cause more damage sometime after the breakup when the dumper has stopped feeling bad for breaking the dumpee’s heart and started dating someone else. That’s when mistakes pressure the dumper and decrease the dumper’s respect for his or her ex.

If you said or did something that you’re not very happy about, try not to blame yourself for it. The things you did when you were extremely anxious and hurt don’t define you as a person. They’re a part of your past as they show you were hurt and that you wanted your ex to help you feel validated and secure.

Validation is what the majority of dumpees want, so there’s no point in feeling bad about it. Some dumpees just don’t actively pursue validation because they’ve been through a breakup before and/or have the knowledge, pride, and self-control not to act on instinct.

So if you humiliated yourself after the breakup, know that most dumpees do something humiliating. Most dumpees want their ex back very badly and engage in self-degrading behavior they think could reattract their ex.

But sadly, begging behavior is anything but attractive as it shows the dumpee is in denial and incapable of taking care of himself or herself.

If you think you’ve made some big breakup mistakes, this is good news! It shows you’ve made enough emotional progress to realize that self-humiliation isn’t going to make your ex value you and want to be with you.

Self-respect on your end and certain conditions on your ex’s end must be met before your ex can appreciate you and want to be with you.

In today’s article, we discuss what to do if you humiliated yourself after the breakup and made yourself look desperate to your ex.

Why did you humiliate yourself after the breakup?

Sometimes, dumpees are solely responsible for humiliating themselves in front of dumpees due to their low self-esteem and poor emotional strength.

But other times, dumpees are only half-responsible as their ex plays with their feelings and forces them to humiliate themselves. What I mean by that is that dumpers deny them closure, treat them poorly, talk badly about them, and rub a new relationship in their face.

Such behaviors don’t excuse dumpees’ reasons for getting angry and/or humiliating themselves, but they do explain why dumpees lose their cool and act out of character.

It’s easy to blame the dumpee (and many dumpers do just that), but you can’t blame yourself for being attached to your ex-partner and looking desperate. If your ex did something nasty and showed no care or interest in apologizing, you have every right to feel hurt.

It’s not like you asked your ex to ignore your existence and play with your feelings.

Why do things have to be so black or white? Why is an attached person in a relationship considered loyal and the same kind of person considered desperate when the relationship ends?

Sure, his or her confidence and self-esteem aren’t as high as they could be, but people don’t choose to feel hurt, abandoned, and miserable. Not everyone has good coping mechanisms and is capable of handling rejections like a boss.

Some people haven’t learned to value themselves yet and need to get broken up with to understand why they matter and how they contribute to society and relationships.

To not humiliate yourself, you essentially needed to have the knowledge, strength, and mentality you have today. And that just wasn’t possible because desperation made you reflect on your worth and transformed you into the person you are today.

I don’t see a reason to put yourself down for that. I see a reason to celebrate and be glad you got an opportunity to discover your worth.

Yes, your desperate actions didn’t make your ex find you more attractive. But then again, who said that avoiding every single mistake would have brought your ex back?

Many dumpees exude confidence and handle breakups like pros but still don’t reconcile with their ex.

It takes much more than confidence for the dumper to experience remorse. It takes some kind of failure and a dumper capable of forgiving, letting go, and changing perceptions of the dumpee.

Mainly mature dumpers or dumpers who become mature come back and stay. Of course, immature dumpers come back as well (probably even more often), but such dumpers leave again because they don’t make the change they need to.

Keep in mind that two kinds of dumpees embarrass themselves. Some dumpees reach out to their ex and beg for another chance because their ex painfully rejected them and showed no care and sympathy.

And some dumpees beg for a second chance even if their ex let them down gently, expressed emotions empathetically, and offered his or her support.

Regardless of which category you fit into, you shouldn’t feel ashamed for acting desperate. What matters is that you’ve discovered your mistakes and that you’ve started no contact. This self-imposed rule will heal your wounded heart and help you forgive yourself for making desperate mistakes.

You just need to be patient with yourself and prepared to let go.

Dumpees often ask me how much begging and messing up is too much to get back with an ex. Are two weeks too much? The answer I give depends on each couple as every dumper has a different tolerance to pestering, self-degrading behavior.

Some dumpers can put up with weeks of begging and attention seeking and others get tired of responding to their ex and caring about his or her well-being the moment the breakup occurred.

I suppose it depends on each dumper’s values, maturity, and empathy.

If a dumper understands why his or her dumpee is saying and doing desperate things, the dumper can be compassionate towards the dumpee and offer support.

But if the dumper lacks empathy, blames the dumpee, and thinks the dumpee deserves to suffer, then the dumper is probably going to be short-fused and highly reactive to unwanted emotions caused by desperate breakup behaviors.

Proving your worth to such a person would be impossible and a complete waste of time.

That said, here are some possible explanations as to why you humiliated yourself after the breakup.

How to stop being ashamed of the things you did after the breakup?

You can do quite a few things to stop feeling ashamed or embarrassed of your post-breakup behaviors. The first thing you can do is admit you did the things you’re not proud of because you were in immense pain.

You didn’t expect to get dumped and treated the way your ex treated you, so you instinctually reacted to shock and anxiety. That doesn’t mean you’re a bad person but that you put your heart into the relationship and couldn’t react better.

You were in too much pain to accept the end of the relationship and control your emotions.

Once you’ve come to terms with the breakup and accepted that you behaved in unattractive ways because anxiety overwhelmed you, you should also understand that you’re not the only dumpee who makes mistakes.

Millions of dumpees each year repeat the exact same mistakes as they assume dumpers want to see their determination and ability to improve.

Such dumpees lack the breakup knowledge and self-control necessary to respect their ex’s need for space and keep their emotions and cravings to themselves.

I want you to write down or tell yourself that the person you were before didn’t know what to do and not to do after the breakup. You didn’t need to know because you had no idea you would break up. You thought your ex was committed enough to talk about the things that bothered him or her.

That’s why when the breakup happened, it caught you off guard and gave you very little time to improve your self-esteem and give your ex the space he or she wanted.

To forgive yourself for doing undesirable things, you need to allow yourself to be human. Think of yourself as a person who needed to make mistakes in order to learn from them. That will allow you to boost your self-esteem rather than make it worse by putting yourself down.

It will also prevent you from making the same mistakes in the future.

Right now, you feel regretful and ashamed. But as time goes on, you’ll heal and probably just cringe at your behavior. You’ll wonder why you acted so desperately and why you even cared that you cared.

This will happen because time away from your ex will help you see your ex from a different perspective and give you a chance to focus on the life ahead of you.

In the meantime, try not to worry about what others think. Those who love you and deserve a spot in your life accept you for who you are. They don’t care if you made desperate mistakes and humiliated yourself. They just want you to accept them and carry on.

How you forgive yourself for making breakup mistakes is entirely up to you. Just know that you won’t always care about your and your ex’s perception of you. Eventually, the mistakes you’ve made will pale in comparison to how badly your ex hurt you and/or treated you.

Time is the best healer. So it’s only a matter of time before you distance yourself from your ex emotionally and agree that the best way to deal with the breakup is to let bygones be bygones.

Did you humiliate yourself after the breakup? How did you do that? Comment below and let us know.

And if you’re looking for 1-on-1 breakup coaching, click here to get in touch.

Zan

My name is Zan and I’m the founder of Magnet of Success. I enjoy writing realistic relationship and breakup articles and helping readers heal and grow. With more than 5 years of experience in the self-improvement, relationship, and breakup sphere, my goal is to provide advice that fosters positivity and success and avoids preventable mistakes and pain. Learn more about me or get in touch today.