Could you use aversion therapy to forget about someone?

Answer 1

Well, Roz, I answered one of your questions glibly earlier (about jumping out of a 20-foot window). But then your face turned up on another question I was looking at and I went to your profile and here are all these questions starting with missing your ex and then the whole series about ways a person could kill themselves.

So I wanted to write and say, without prying, that so much seems about the same thing -- that lost love and not knowing what to do. I went through this and maybe can offer a suggestion.

Like you, I was with someone for a while (actually only four months). I thought I had at last found the person I had been looking for all my life. The One. So beautiful, so exciting. Every day, seeing her was like opening your window and looking out at a beautiful fountain -- always the same, ever changing. One day, she disappeared. Vanished off the face of the earth.

At first, I thought there was some mistake. Eventually, I found out she was with some other guy. Somebody nasty. It would have been OK if she was with somebody decent even, but he was just a pudgy daddy's-boy with some money, a shifty fox-like look on his face, and a handshake like a wet fish. It drove me nuts.

She refused to see me at all. She hid. Moved her address and changed her phone number. I didn't stalk her or harass her: maybe it was some sort of guilt that made her cut me out of her life as she did.

It took almost a year to hit bottom. I drank and screamed in the streets and alone in my room until the neighbors came. I lost weight uncontrollably, no matter how much I ate. It was horrible.

Sure, there were "hidden gifts". I became really more sensitive, even appreciating pop love-songs and movies that I always thought were stupid. I was able to really feel for starving people and things like that where I only felt kind of numbly sympathetic before. But in all, it was sheer hell.

Friends tried to help or didn't -- but they all got tired of hearing me talk about Susan. Psychologists, medication, relocated thousands of miles away, and went back again over and over. The whole nine yards. It was like being in the Twilight Zone all the time. I heard my own unborn children crying because thay hadn't been born. I screamed her name at the bottom of swimming pools and across the ocean in the direction of the continent where she lived. I followed hair like hers desperately through crowds, or sat watching the train to where she used to live go by. Mostly, people said that it was all a mistake. I couldn't believe that. People said I should find somebody else. So I did, but they never measured up.

All that to say I think I understand something of what you're feeling. So here's what helped. It may sound ridiculous, but it did help me. What I did, instead of saying that "She wasn't so great", was to think of a couple of CELEBRITIES that if I were to meet them would maybe replace her or make me feel as strongly -- at least at first -- as Susan Pickering did.

The two celebrities I chose (NOT one -- that would just be another obsession), were Jodie Foster and Kate Moss. You see they are very different people -- but I had to admit that each was so intriguing in their own way that if I was sitting across the table from either one, that for that time I would forget about everything else. Honestly, it really helped.

As one person I talked to among the MANY volunteers on SOS Suicide said. "It's like you've dropped a priceless porcelain vase, and it's broken." "THAT'S IT!!" I said, "She's so RARE!" Then he answered, "Yes, that's true. But there are others, and I wish you courage in your ongoing quest."

Finally, as a coda, I'll say that complete despair can blind you even if the miracle happens. Usually I could keep up a reasonable front. But one day I was in complete blackness. As it happened, I went to a discussion-meeting in a church basement in Paris, where I lived at the time. There was one free chair, and as I went to sit there, a pretty girl smiled up at me from the next one. Usually, I'd return a smile from a pretty stranger, or at acknowledge it happening, but that day no. I was just completely black. So I sat there and said all kinds off ugly things when my turn came to speak, and told the whole group that they were basically just whistling in a graveyard. Later, unbelievably, I found out that the girl who had smiled at me, the one that I had completely ignored was one of the two celebrities I'd dreamed about meeting. I mean she was actually either Kate Moss or Jodie Foster!!! I won't say which one, for the sake of Anonymity, as they say. But the point is that THERE was the actual miracle literally staring at me in the face and I didn't even see her.

So keep a tiny corner of your heart open, and also your eyes and ears, Roz. To help the healing, think of what it would be like to go out to dinner with Johnny Depp, or Lenny Kravitz, or whoever you think is just fabulous. To have him suddenly look at you THAT way.

While It may take some time, but you'll be OK, and this trick may help you in the meantime, as it did me. You may be different when you come out of it, but you will be happy again, unless you decide otherwise. I know when I did eventually meet Susan again -- and it happened a couple of times, that I was such a shell of my former self that it didn't work again anyway -- even though she got in my bed once. I won't say exactly what happened there -- but as bad as it seemed at the time, I treasure that moment along with all the others I spent with her. Every one gave my life a meaning that has lasted through time -- and that's the only real proof of value that anything has. She was capable of such cruelty: maybe that was one of the things that made me love her so. I still do, and it's been over ten years since I saw her last. At least I don't count the days any more.

Best wishes, really, Roz -- you're a beautiful girl.

Answer 2

Aversion therapy is a crime against humanity. You'll pay to suffer more in the long run.

Answer 3

Replay Ray has it right " Aversion Therapy ". Not good from what I hear.

Answer 4

If the person was an "A" hole or a scumbag or something of that sort. Aversion therapy .....would only remind you more.

Answer 5

No, there is a reason that isn't usually done. It doesn't work, and all it will do is put you through a lot more crap that you don't need.

Just hang out with friends for a while and don't dwell on the fact that you are single.

Answer 6

I suppose you could. But wouldn't it be better to find someone new? A new lover who totally turns you on and makes you forget about everything else? Yummm!!!

Answer 7

Please don't do it.
Let time take care of it. That therapy I read about in your previous questions, doesn't sounds right to me at all.

The last thing you need right now is more unnecessary pain

Answer 8

You may become a lumbering zombie but hell zombies are in right now, give it a wirl girl.

Answer 9

Never have never will
I just stop thinking about them or just occupy my mind thinking of other things/people

Answer 10

No, but what if you forget about someone, is it any better?