Do you have a concern that you may have taken up with your current partner on the rebound? Do you worry that he may have taken up with you on the rebound? How can you make sure you don’t enter into an unhealthy rebound relationship?
Unresolved Issues
In a rebound relationship, the new relationship is affected by an earlier but significant relationship. The unresolved issues of the earlier relationship have an effect on your current relationship or they may affect the way you view your new partner.
One way to know you’re in a rebound relationship is that you spend a great deal of time thinking about your old lover. You dwell on coulda, shoulda, woulda: the relationship could have been great, you should have taken different actions, and you would have been willing to change to make him happy. You try and try to understand what it was that went wrong and you wonder whether if you’d done something else things would have worked out better. In fact, you wonder about a whole bunch of things.
Meantime, you may be draining all of your resources needed for the new relationship by spending them on the already-spent relationship with your ex. This is not a recipe for success.
In Synch
The reason you spend so much time thinking about your old relationship is because you have questions that haven’t been answered to your satisfaction and because you are still in pain over the events that took place in regard to the ex-relationship. This is due to the fact that you didn’t devote enough time to working things through so that your mind and your heart are whole and in synch. You took on a new relationship without resolving the old.
Think you may be on the rebound? Ask yourselves these questions:
*Do you think of your ex each day?
*Are you still feeling lots of deep pain, anxiety, and regret in regard to your ex and your relationship with him?
*Do you keep thinking over specific issues or events from the prior relationship?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, and you’re already in a new relationship, then Honey, it’s time to get your head together and stop jerking around the new partner. He deserves to be your focal point. If you can’t focus on him with a whole heart, you should let him go.
How can you tell if the shoe’s on the other foot and it’s your partner who’s on the rebound? This is a much more difficult task. Men don’t talk much about their feelings so there won’t be many clues.
Perhaps the only thing you can do is to establish a time frame before getting involved. How long is it since the breakup of his previous relationship? A rule of thumb is that a guy needs one month for each year of relationship to resolve the issues.
