Why "Just Move On" Is the Worst Rejection Advice You'll Ever Get

Petra told me to move on approximately nine times.

I counted.

The first time was three weeks after I left Lukas. She’d made pasta — which was kind of her — and I was, for perhaps the eleventh time that evening, circling back to something small. A comment he’d made about the way I loaded the dishwasher that I had somehow still not finished understanding.

“Gisela,” she said, not unkindly. “You have to move on.”

I looked at the pasta.

I knew she meant well. I also knew, in some wordless way I couldn’t yet articulate, that what she was describing wasn’t what I needed. That “move on” was advice built for a different kind of loss than the one I was carrying.

It took me two more years and a very good therapist to understand exactly why.

The advice to “just move on” is not wrong for every situation.

A normal breakup — two people, genuinely incompatible, a relationship that ended with a coherent narrative — responds to that prescription. You grieve, you adjust, you eventually think about them less. The filing system works. There is a beginning, a middle, and a manageable end.

A narcissistic relationship does not end like that.

It ends with your filing system in pieces.

Because here is the thing about years with someone who rewrote your reality in real time: you don’t walk out with a coherent story. You walk out with a pile of fragments. Some genuine memories. Some memories he told you were wrong. Some events you can no longer trust your own version of. Some things you’re not sure happened the way you think they happened.

You cannot move on from something you haven’t finished processing.

And you haven’t finished processing it because the relationship itself was specifically, structurally designed to prevent you from doing so.

That is not a personal failure. That is a feature of what happened to you.

Here is what nobody says clearly enough:

When someone tells you to “just move on,” they are — however kindly — asking you to suppress.

To stop talking about it. To make your processing quieter, more private, less visible. To return to the composed version of yourself that is easier to be around.

This is not malicious. Most people who give this advice genuinely believe it helps.

But there is something underneath it worth noticing.

Petra is a good friend. She sat with me through some genuinely terrible evenings. I am not putting this on her. But I have thought, more than once, about whose comfort the advice to “move on” is primarily designed to protect.

The advice to suppress your pain arrives most reliably from the people who find your pain most difficult to witness.

The people who are comfortable watching you process — who don’t flinch, who don’t redirect, who sit with the circling — they almost never tell you to move on.

They already know you’re doing the work.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.