Gisele Bundchen is back to modeling two months after her split with Tom Brady. She went topless, holding merchandise to her chest to cover up, leaving the rest to the imagination….which brings us to the imaginations of an ex after a breakup.
Most of us are not celebrities and most of us will not see an ex resurface topless in a major designer ad. However, try as we may to avoid the images of our exes, our brains tend to lead us to peek on social media/dating sites to see what they’re up to. Why do we do this? In part, we do it for the fix. Our brains get flushed with chemicals that make us feel something, even if only fleeting. And we do it in spite of the fact that once the fix is over, we’ll feel an Olympic sized pool of pain.
Now, why do exes seem to flaunt themselves on social media and elsewhere, perhaps knowing full well that it could deeply hurt an ex? For one, it would be unfair to ask them to stop living just because we’re hurt. Second, and perhaps more insufferable, is that they do it to purposely project success in moving on. That can cut both ways as they could indeed be genuinely moving on, or could be putting on a good face while themselves hurting inside. To add more of a twist, they could be doing it to cause jealousy or envy.
You see, post-breakup psychology is a complex web of emotions which have the potential to spiral out of control. To deal with it, an EXaholic will have hell of a lot of work to do. ( For more on the so-called work, check out EXaholics Fundamentals on EXaholics.com).
Speaking of spirals, lets turn to legendary spiral master Tom Brady, who by the sound of it chose football over Gisele. In a sideline rant during a game, Brady told poor performing players he didn’t give up his family for “this sh*t.” Whatever our thoughts about his choices, it’s clear from his own words there is an emotional component to his “tradeoff.” We don’t have the complete backstory here. Any conclusions we draw would be uninformed.
What we do know is that Gisele is modeling and Tom is playing playoff football. They’re not together and we can only speculate as to their feelings. When it comes to our own situations, we don’t need to speculate. We know how we feel when apart from someone we loved in a relationship. Like Gisele and Tom, they may be publicly taking steps forward as may we be. It could also be that only one of our parties is public about it. Circumstances aside, this is a difficult part of the post-breakup process because life doesn’t stop. And we ought to acknowledge this and take the necessary steps to cope.