You can tell a lot about how your ex is feeling and what he/she needs, not by the number of contacts/no contacts but HOW he/she says certain things is the theme of all my articles on attracting back your ex and also my eBook. I’m excited to see that there is research to back me up on this.

A new study from the University of Arizona shows that people in the midst of a divorce typically reveal how they are handling things — not so much by what they say but how they say it.

The study (Science Daily Sep. 4, 2010) recorded men and women who had recently experienced a romantic separation. The recordings of a stream-of-consciousness thoughts and feelings about their former partner and former relationships were saved as sound files and written transcriptions.

A group of students were recruited into the study to judge the subjects’ reactions. Two groups of judges — those who only read transcripts and those who only listened to recordings — evaluated the ability of the subjects to control their emotions, cope with their separations, handle stress and negative aspects of post-separation life and the subjects’ thoughts about the relationship. None of the judges had any visual contact with the subjects.

“We wanted to know how much information people actually need in order to know how another person is coping,” said Ashley Mason, a UA doctoral student who conducted the research. “There’s been a lot of person-perception research in terms of perceiving a stranger’s personality or intelligence. And data have shown that we really don’t need much.”

In fact, data revealed that even complete strangers were able to figure out how people were coping with their emotions using relatively small amounts of information.”

“It’s important to know that it is not about what people are saying. It’s how they’re saying it that is tipping us off to how they’re doing, and more importantly, how they’re going to do,” Mason said.

“That gives us insight that may affect how we interact with these people,” she said. “Do I need to call more often or provide more social support? Should I recommend psychotherapy? Not everyone has an organized social support system, and these data shed light on how we interpret what others need from us.”

So let me say it again, it’s NOT the exact number of contacts/no contacts that tells you how your ex is doing, what he/she is feeling and what he/she needs from you.

In other words, if you’re trying to attract back your ex, focus more of your time, energy and emotions on the QUALITY of contact more than on the QUANTITY of contact. Instead of wasting so much time, energy and emotions playing “No Contact” mind games, “LISTEN” to HOW your ex says what he/she says and use that “limited” information to guide you in how you interact with him/her. It’s in those moments of QUALITY contact that new emotional bonds are formed and old positive emotions reactivated.