If Your Ex Is Playing Mind Games with You: Change the Game

Manipulative “mind games” have become normalized mainly because they’re often repackaged as “get your ex back” strategies. It’s hard to find advice that doesn’t push one or more of:

• Go silent to make an ex anxious enough to come back.
• Pretend to move on to increase an ex’s desire.
• Pull back then reach out to keep an ex emotionally invested.
• Post photos with attractive people or talk about new dates to provoke jealousy.

The games they try to get you to play to “get your avoidant back” blurs the line between healthy boundaries and out right manipulation, making the behaviours seem standard rather than problematic. Even well meaning people desperate to get an ex back find themselves thinking: If everyone is doing it, then it means it works.

In reality, manipulative mind games during reconnection:

• Escalate uncertainty — neither person knows what’s real.
• Erode trust — leave both exes unsure whether the connection is authentic or engineered.
• Reinforce of avoidance — confirm fears of manipulation, leading them to disengage faster.
• Undermine any work towards becoming more secure.

So if your ex is playing mind games with you, remember this: you can’t control what your ex does, but you can control how you respond.

1. Respond not react

Mind games are about ’emotional power”. They’re like a puppet and puppet master, and the string is your emotions. The more your ex can manipulate your emotions, the more they can play you. They literally “own” you!

Learning to respond rather than react to your ex’s words and actions gives you more control. You control your responses and control your emotions as well. When they can no longer control your emotions, they can no longer manipulate you.

2. Tell them you know what they’re doing

Mind games work when the someone is not aware of how and when they’re being played. The person playing mind games assumes they’re smarter than the person they’re playing. If you know that your ex is playing mind games with you, the best antidote to mind games is to tell them that you know what they’re doing; and do not like it or approve of it.

A person who truly values a relationship with you will feel bad and stop the mind games. Someone who is immature and emotionally dysfunctional will just try and find another mind game to play; or give up and move on to somebody else.

3. Don’t play them back

We all have the capacity to be manipulative. When tempted to “give them a taste of their own medicine”, remember that the only person whose time and emotions you waste playing mind games is you.

I know that now, but back then as a dismissive avoidant, I played it back to the best of them. My thinking was “Play the Player!”, but the more “I played the player” the angrier I got (with myself). Not only was I wasting my time, but I was doing the very thing that I resented in the other person.

4. Work on improving your self-esteem and self-value

We’re all vulnerable to being manipulated, however, some people are more vulnerable than others. That is, they have insecurities that mind game players are able to take advantage of and exploit to advance their own agenda. It could be fear of rejection, fear of abandonment, fear of not finding someone else, feelings of inadequacy, fear of losing someone, e.t.c.

Since you can’t change someone else and can only change you, it’s up to you to assert your value by taking away whatever it is that makes you more vulnerable to mind games.

5. Walk away

Mind games players have one and only one motivation and that is to advance their own agenda. Thy don’t care if it is at the expense of the person being played. Most people are intuitive enough to realize when and how they’re being played and walk away, but even where the mind games “succeed”, the relationship will become troubled over time.

Someone who takes advantage of you and exploits your greatest fears, weaknesses and vulnerabilities does not “value you” (even if they tell you over and over that they love you). Your decision to enter or continue a relationship with someone who is into mind games (the game playing can at times offer some kind of “excitement” and edge to the relationship) should be weighed against the long term effects of the mind game playing – especially if you give in to the “head games” and the other person learns that playing mind games with you works.

In other words, refuse to play the game and there will be no game to play.

Refusing to engage in the mind games changes the dynamic

As I mentioned earlier, not everyone who is playing these “get your ex back” mind games does them to intentionally manipulate. Some exes are just so desperate that they follow advice because they think it’s what works.

Refusing to engage in the mind games and choosing to respond in ways that assert your value and the kind of relationship you want can change the dynamic.

1. The dynamic stabilizes

They stop playing mind games because they’re not getting the reaction they expect.

A lot of “get your ex back” mind games work — when they do — because they create confusion, uncertainty, and trickery. When you stop participating, you force the interaction to become more straightforward. An ex playing mind has not other choice but find healthier ways to get attention, communicate, and show up.

What’s left is something much simpler: either they become more direct and consistent, or they realize they can no longer keep the relationship going the way they used to.

2. The dynamic falls apart

Sometimes the dynamic stabilizes and becomes healthier. Sometimes it falls apart because it depended on confusion, uncertainty, and trickery to survive.

Either way, the dynamic changes because the games no longer set the rules — you do.

And this is what becoming secure looks like.

Secure people don’t let someone else’s behaviour decide how they engage. They decide how they want to engage first, and let the dynamic rise to meet them — or not.

RELATED:

When You Act Like You Moved On Avoidants Think It’s Over

The Cost Of Making a Fearful Avoidant Ex Fear Losing You

Reconnecting With an Anxious Ex? 5 Mind Games to Watch For