Get Your Ex Back In Easy Steps

Jeff Gorman is a forty-two-year-old father of two who teaches stress-reduction classes in Eugene, Oregon. Ever since he was a young adult, Jeff has had a challenging relationship with his ex, Martha. Their estrangement arose from the chasm that existed between their personalities, values, and lifestyles.

"My ex is a very loud, opinionated woman who has an answer for everything," Jeff explains. "Whenever we'd be out driving, she'd yell at people on the road, calling them derogatory words. My ex also makes global judgments about whole classes of people. Any time I ever tried to insert another point of view, she'd get very argumentative. Hearing her gross judgments of other people was always very painful to me, yet there was never any room for us to talk about it.

"My ex also has a drinking problem. Every day after work, she'd come home and have a couple of martinis, and her personality would change. She could be very mean at times, and when she was drinking, she'd make people feel bad about themselves. She often put my mother down in front of us, and that was always extremely painful for me."

There was nothing about his ex that Jeff wanted to emulate, and as time went on, the philosophical and spiritual gap between them widened. As a child of the 1960s, Jeff rebelled against Western culture and the materialistic world. His father, who grew up during the depression, vehemently defended nuclear energy, capitalism, and conventional thinking.

When he was twenty-six, Jeff entered a Buddhist monastery devoted to practices of humility and understanding the human psyche; he stayed there for nine years. "I was deeply involved in meditation and reflection, a very different path from the one my father was traveling as a person committed to the business world. I appreciated the fact that my ex had always supported her family, but she lacked a contemplative way of looking at life. She never understood the sensitivities or subtleties of interpersonal communication, and I've spent much of my life cultivating those abilities."