# Is your ex thinking about you after the breakup?

> By Benny Lichtenwalner, breakup coach and author of "How to Get Your Ex Back".
> Canonical: https://bennylichtenwalner.com/videos/ex-psychology/

**Short answer:** Whether your ex is thinking about you depends on their attachment style. Secure exes make peace and move on without desperation. Anxious exes are thinking about you constantly. Fearful-avoidant exes miss you but keep walls up. Dismissive-avoidant exes repress the thoughts for around three months while they watch your social media from a distance.

"Is my ex thinking about me?" is one of the questions Benny Lichtenwalner hears most from people deep in no-contact, and the honest answer is that it depends entirely on attachment style, not on how strong the relationship was.

A secure ex does think about you, but from a place of acceptance rather than longing. An anxious ex thinks about you constantly, often to the point of distress, though it's rare for an anxious person to be the one who initiated the breakup. The complicated cases are the two avoidant styles. A fearful-avoidant ex misses you and loves you but keeps walls up out of fear of getting hurt again. A dismissive-avoidant ex has the same underlying feelings, but represses them, sometimes for around three months, because that's the coping pattern they learned in childhood: stuff the feeling down and keep moving.

During that suppression window, a dismissive-avoidant ex will often check your social media quietly, sometimes from a second account, while giving no outward sign that you're on their mind at all. That's not the same as having moved on. It's avoidance doing its job.

Benny frames the emotional arc after a breakup as three stages: relief, curiosity, and then anxiety. Holding no-contact well is what moves an avoidant ex from the relief stage, where the breakup feels like relief and freedom, into curiosity about your life, and eventually into the anxiety stage, where doubt about the decision sets in. That's the stage where reengagement actually has a chance of landing.

## Full transcript

Is your ex thinking about you right now, after the breakup? I'm Coach Benny, and I help people get their exes back. Before this I was a dating coach for five years, which means I spent a lot of time paying attention to what brings people closer versus what pushes them away.
If you want to know whether your ex is thinking about you during no contact, the first thing that helps answer that is understanding their attachment style. If your ex is secure, they might be thinking about you, but it's more that they've made peace with things and they're intentionally moving on over time. Even if they're thinking about you, there's no desperation in it.
If your ex is anxious, there's a small chance they're the one who broke up with you to begin with, since that scenario isn't common for this style. But if they did, they're absolutely thinking about you. They're going nuts in the time apart, and you can often go to them after a certain period and work it out.
Here's where it gets trickier: if your ex is fearful-avoidant or dismissive-avoidant, yes, they're thinking about you, but there are complications. A fearful-avoidant ex is absolutely thinking about you. They miss you, they love you, they wish things were different, but they're scared you'll hurt them again, or they feel unheard, so they've got walls up. Even so, they're still connected to you.
A dismissive-avoidant ex struggles with communication and their instinct is to avoid. When they break up with you over something that could have been worked through by talking, they're running away from someone they love, and that's emotionally painful. So they repress the feelings. Yes, they'll have automatic thoughts about you, since you were their person and the relationship was real, but they push those thoughts down, and that suppression tends to last around three months. During that stretch they might watch your social media quietly, often from a distance, trying to control their own narrative rather than reach out.
Eventually your ex moves out of the relief stage of the breakup into curiosity: watching your stories, asking mutual friends what you're up to. If you hold your ground during this window, curiosity can turn into anxiety, and that's the stage where you actually start to have an effect on them again.