To Block or Not to Block, That Is the Question

Do not block for attention!

‘I’ll just block him!’ said my client with fire in her eyes.

She felt empowered and strong in the moment. She was not going to take any more crap from the man who had been messing her around.

I’ll even do it now, she said while decisively flinging out her phone from her bag. She was hurt, angry and felt like she needed to take control back.

When I saw her just one week later, she had already unblocked him. Her reasoning…well, she needed to check if the blocking had ‘worked’.

Surprise surprise- It hadn’t. There were no signs of him making any contact. Just crickets. She was even more devastated. She now felt like she had it confirmed that he never cared one bit.

That day, she realised something crucial: blocking him had been purely an attempt to validate herself and her feelings by making him feel all the hurt and pain she felt he had inflicted on her. She had wanted him to feel as blocked from her life and out of control as she had felt during the relationship.

She realised that blocking him was nothing more than yet another way to fixate on him and his reaction, although those had already revealed themselves clearly for some time.

If you are finding yourself blocking for a reaction, chances are that the relationship has already been lost a long time ago!

In the next few weeks, she instead took charge of her situation and decided that she deserved better than to be messed around.

She went on to block him again — this time from a place of clarity and self-respect, not anger and impulsivity. The second time it worked wonders.
Because it wasn’t about him anymore. The success of the strategy was no longer measured by whether he would notice and react or not.
It was about her need for certainty and to mark the beginning of her own healing journey. And she needed to take whatever steps necessary to provide that for herself.

When blocking becomes a form of holding on…

For many people I have met with in therapy, blocking has not only failed to achieve the job- it has actually made things worse! While this sounds a bit reverse, you only have to scrape the surface of the motivation behind the blocking to understand why this can at times be the case.

Blocking that happens for any of the following motives is destined to fail:

• To get a reaction, attention or to create a fear of loss in the other person.
• Blocking someone as a form of revenge with the hope that they will feel as rotten as you have been feeling
• Attempting to make a loud statement that you no longer care (only to then show you care a lot by blocking/unblocking)

In the unlikely event that you get the reaction you were seeking from the person you are blocking, you can bank on one thing: attempting to shock someone into positive change is rarely going to work in the long term.

Your thinking goes ‘once he/she realises what life without me is like, they will have learnt a valuable lesson. They will come back better…’

Do try to recognise that the very fact that you have to emotionally electrocute someone into realising your worth suggests they are highly unlikely to value you long term regardless of how much change you see in them in the immediate aftermaths of their return. Their lack of change is not the consequence of you not being worthy but a suggestion that somehow they are incapable of appreciating it. And it is not job to figure out why.

When blocking an ex is useful and leads to healing

Blocking will only help if the person doing it has an internal locus of control or is trying to cultivate it.

This is a fancy way of saying, the behaviour supports the belief that we have personal control over the outcome of stuff that happens in our lives. The reverse of this would be an external locus of control, where the ruling belief that drives behaviours is the idea that factors outside of ourselves are responsible for our happiness and welfare. A bit like handing over the power over your own life to other people and situations.

Cultivating an internal locus of control means taking charge of factors in your life that you do have control over.

In the context of a breakup, these can be summed up to:

• Your own peace, clarity, and boundaries. If you have been part of a lopsided, unpredictable dynamic or one where you are chasing after someone who is not emotionally available- you have likely habituated to a high level of uncertainty.
• You do it to regain emotional space and stop exposing yourself to triggers.
• You’re no longer waiting for a reaction; you’re choosing to create your own certainty by drawing a line in the sand and saying ‘enough of this’.

The long-term results: you feel empowered, self-directed, and genuinely free.

You do not need revenge or reactions; you need self-respect and to regain your ability to trust yourself

Many people believe that having power and achieving revenge is something that happens with a big bang and is dependent on how other people perceive them.

Like that slap that is going to make an already dead-end partner wake up from their coma and realise what they missed out on. They picture their ex weeping in emotional pain or ruminating nights away while longing for what they lost. The hope is that the regret will be the catalyst for change for them or that the pain they are now suffering will somehow validate their own experience to date.

This is quite a human reaction after all. If you have been hurt, you naturally want that pain to be validated and understood.

The feeling of wanting to inflict revenge can sadly inform behaviour in ways that backfire badly and continue to reinforce a state of fixation on ‘them’ instead of aiding detachment and refocusing on the self.

From a perspective where other people’s reactions drive your outcome, it makes sense to overexplain, try and convince or send that last dramatic ending text where you declare your need to block them.

This is where most people fool themselves into thinking they are embarking on a move of empowerment, only to realise they have just heightened their degree of obsession a notch and are now waiting for a counter-reaction to occur. One that usually does not materialise.

If you look under the hood of these behaviours, you will probably realise that the very need to block someone to whom you are also needing to declare it to is more a bid for attention than a request to be left alone to heal.

You are seeking attention that you have already evidently not been getting, hence there is little point in blocking for this reason.

If you are blocking a person who has ignored you, given you less than you feel you deserve and/or made it clear that they are not valuing you, a blocking manoeuvre will achieve very little.

If it does achieve something, it is usually a sense of increased doubt in yourself and a sense of worthlessness when you realise that the person whom you are blocking would likely not be hounding you with messages anyway.

If those messages of redemption and reactions is what your revenge-dreams were made of you will be better of accepting the facts as they stand. Had you only paid better attention and allowed self-respect to dictate your actions — you would not have let things go this far with them.

You will be better off just letting it burn while reminding yourself that they do not define your worth just because they are not showing you any care.

Times when blocking can be useful:

On contrast, there are some situations when blocking someone after a breakup can be genuinely helpful.

Examples of such situations are listed below:

• When the goal is your own peace, clarity, and boundaries.
• When blocking is a way to regain emotional space and stop exposing yourself to triggers. A bit like an alcoholic tosses out all their bottles, you are taking external control to mark the end of something.
• You are putting a stop to abuse or random returns of people who are missing you for purely selfish reasons. This removes the risk that can be posed by half-hearted ‘check-ins’ and any attempts to use you as an ego-boost or inflator of self-importance on their part.
• You struggle to trust yourself and worry that you would fall prey for attempts from their end to make contact with you. In this situation, note that blocking is an act of self-protection and a way to ensure that you protect yourself from ending up in situations where you must not lose emotional control and write to them.
• In a nutshell: When you are blocking them because you are legitimately keen to move forward and move beyond the breakup!

Taking back control is not a loud act

Most people’s reactions are predictable once you get to know them. If you want to take your inner control back and create the type of empowerment and worthiness you are seeking, you need to do the hard thing that you have previously proven you struggle to do. (i.e., take steps to protect your self-worth and keep those boundaries tight).

The breaking down of self-respect is catastrophic for self-worth; hence, rebuilding this part of yourself needs to be made a priority. Staying focused on yourself and remaining absent and quiet is going to be challenging for anyone who is used to putting in too much effort and has a habit of overexplaining themselves! Yet, it is in this quiet space that healing can happen and you will be forced to face yourself fully. Although this step can feel very scary, it will be worth all the growth and empowerment in the long term.

How to act like a worthy person even if you don’t feel like one

I am often asked how you can start acting like a worthy person when you don’t feel like one. Or how to uphold great self-respect in the face of being disrespected. The answer is: it starts with the actions.

Use a role model, fictional or real, and ask yourself: What would a person with intact self-respect do now? Let this be your guide for now. Rest assured, the feeling will catch up so long as you take all the necessary steps to prevent yourself from sliding down the hole of self-abandonment. Blocking can certainly form part of a self-respecting behaviour when it is done in the context of setting a helpful boundary that illustrates that you are done.

In a nutshell: Blocking when done for the right reasons can mark a strong inner decision to pull your energy back from them and allocate it onto yourself. The feeling of taking proactive steps to return to yourself can help prompt your thoughts and behaviour to return to the controllables of your own life instead of wasting them on someone else’s unpredictability.

Regardless of whether you block them or not; Choose to create certainty by disallowing people and situations that leave you feeling unsettled

Control in a relationship is not gained by controlling someone else’s mind. You feel in control when you can endure other people’s provocations, attempts to make contact, and still feel indifferent and undisturbed.

Feeling like you have ‘moved on’ is a very different feeling from having access blocked.

If your blocking is a way to protect yourself from incoming disturbances that you feel might deter you from focusing on yourself, then blocking can have a positive function.

If it heightens your obsessionality and keeps you fixated on external validation, it will likely cause more harm than good.

Regardless of the method you use for achieving a full break from someone, your nervous system will go through a period of re-learning and adjusting. Have patience and tolerance during this period, as it inevitably involves processing painful emotions and coming to grips with the emotional drains and destruction you tolerated in the relationship.

Ensure you focus on allowing yourself to feel your feelings and provide yourself with the necessary space and validation. Our nervous system learns by experiential change, hence putting yourself through even the hard feelings is going to be useful for your healing and will gradually rewire your emotional responses. It teaches your body that safety and calm can exist even without the other person.

This is how genuine detachment takes root; not by avoiding pain, but by allowing yourself to move through it until it no longer defines you.

Last but not least, do not forget that self-respect is a reliable guide when doing your healing work. Feelings can fool you at times, but the more you objectify what self-respectful behaviours look like in this context and follow through with such, the better you will feel about yourself. Healing begins not when they notice your absence, but when you stop measuring your worth by their attention.

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