# Is My Ex Thinking About Me as Much as I'm Thinking About Them?

> By Benny Lichtenwalner, breakup coach and author of "How to Get Your Ex Back".
> Canonical: https://bennylichtenwalner.com/answers/is-my-ex-thinking-about-me-as-much-as-im-thinking-about-them/

**Short answer:** Almost certainly not — and that asymmetry is working in your favor. You're generating a crisis in your own head while your ex is living their life. Benny Lichtenwalner, breakup coach and author of *How to Get Your Ex Back*, calls this a thought control problem: you're sitting with a problem that exists only in the future.

# Is My Ex Thinking About Me as Much as I'm Thinking About Them?

Almost certainly not. And once you understand why, that stops being bad news.

While you're running a loop about every signal, every silence, and every imagined scenario, your ex is going about their life. They're not sitting there at that exact moment building the same catastrophe in their head. Benny Lichtenwalner, breakup coach and author of *How to Get Your Ex Back*, names this directly: you're thinking about a problem that exists only in the future. Your ex, at that moment, is probably not thinking about it at all.

That's not evidence you don't matter to them. It's evidence that you're the one manufacturing the emergency.

## Why Is the Thought Gap Between You and Your Ex So Large Right Now?

Anxious preoccupation works by pulling your attention forward into what might happen and backward into what went wrong. Your ex doesn't have that same hook running right now. They processed the breakup to whatever degree they did, and they're living in the present.

You're sitting with what they might be doing, thinking, feeling, all of it spun from incomplete data. None of the scenarios you're building have happened. Most of them won't.

| What you're telling yourself | What's actually more likely | What to do with that |
|---|---|---|
| "They hate me by now" | They've moved on from the immediate emotion | Stop feeding the story |
| "They're with someone else right now" | Maybe, but your plan is the same either way | Stay in your lane |
| "They never think about me" | Impossible; you were significant to them | That fades if you keep inserting yourself |
| "They're laughing at how desperate I've been" | They're not tracking you at that level | You don't exist as much in their head as you think |

## How Does Overthinking Become the Actual Problem?

When anxiety about your ex drives decisions, it produces the outcome you're afraid of. The worry doesn't stay in your head; it goes out and *does something about it*. That something is almost always a rule-break:

1. Sending a check-in text because silence felt like confirmation it was over
2. Posting something designed to provoke a reaction to see if they care
3. Reaching out before the window is right because the spiral got unbearable
4. Dropping in with a "casual" message that's actually a temperature check

Your ex reads the pattern these behaviors create. They don't see your inner state; they see the evidence of it. For a dismissive-avoidant ex especially, anxious energy signals exactly the dynamic that pushed them away in the first place, and accelerates their withdrawal.

## What Do You Do When the Loop Starts?

1. Name it immediately. Call it what it is: overthinking. You can't course-correct what you won't identify.
2. Check whether the problem is present or future. Ask: has something actually happened, or am I projecting a feared outcome onto neutral data? Almost always it's the latter.
3. Get out of your head physically. Stop sitting with the thought. Move. The thought only has power because you keep feeding it.
4. Do nothing impulsive. Don't test your ex, don't post bait, don't reach out before the window opens. Actions taken from anxiety break rules. Every rule break you avoid is ground you keep.
5. Stay strong. The question is whether you're worried or staying strong, not what your ex is thinking. Those two paths lead to completely different outcomes.

## What Should You Avoid When You're Spiraling?

- Don't try to resolve anxiety by gathering more information about your ex. That feeds the loop.
- Don't reach out to "see if they care." That's a temperature check regardless of how it's framed.
- Don't manufacture jealousy triggers from a panicked state; it reads as desperate, not attractive.
- Don't replay ambiguous signals looking for a meaning that will make the fear go away. There isn't one.
- Don't catastrophize your ex's silence. A dismissive-avoidant not reaching out yet isn't confirmation it's over; it's confirmation they're a dismissive avoidant.

## What Does This Look Like in Practice?

Two situations from coaching illustrate the pattern. In one case, someone had been in no-contact for several weeks and was fixating on a snap story view — convinced it meant their ex was monitoring them and that silence was deliberately hostile. They were about to post a photo with someone else to "test" the reaction. In another situation, someone read a two-day text gap as definitive proof their ex had moved on and was seconds away from sending an explanation message.

Neither ex was running that loop at that moment. Both clients were generating an emergency from ambiguous, neutral data, and were on the verge of creating the exact outcome they were afraid of.

When both clients paused and asked themselves "is there an actual problem right now?" the answer was no. The only problem was the one they were building in real time.

The rule breaks that cost the most ground almost never come from bad strategy. They come from anxiety convincing someone their situation is the exception.