Can The No Contact Rule Work If You've Been Blocked? (2023)

Welcome to another episode of the Ex Boyfriend Recovery podcast. Today, we’re going to be talking about the no contact rule, specifically does the no contact rule work if you’ve been blocked?

We’re going to hear from a listener named Diana who has a question about just that.But before we hear her question, I first want to let you know that no matter what situation that you’re in, you’re always going to need a starting point.

Whether you want to get your ex back or you want to get over your ex, the best thing you should always do is start on our website, and take our ex recovery chances quiz.

Now, I know, I know I sound like a broken record always talking about this quiz, but that’s because I think it’s the perfect starting point for you to determine what you should be doing about your situation.

Most people, when they start trying to get exes back, have no idea where to begin. The first question they always have for me is,

“Chris, do I have a chance of getting back with my ex?”

Even if they’re a little on the fence about it, having that knowledge can help them make decisions going forward.

Now, I put together a special quiz designed to basically answer this exact question. It’s on my website. Again, exboyfriendrecovery.com.

All you’ve got to do is simply look in the navigation bar and click on the quiz tab. It’ll take you right to the quiz where you can take a two minute assessment where I’m going to ask you all sorts of questions about you, your ex, and your past relationship together.

Then based on your answers, I can give you an approximate idea of what your chances are.

If you’re interested in taking that quiz again, hop over to my website. But now that that’s out of the way, which I can’t tell you how glad I am that that’s out of the way, let’s hear from Diana.

The Listeners Question

“Is there a way for the no contact to work if he blocked me from his cell phone? I am one week into no contact, will this still work?”

Now, I chose this question not only because it’s shorter, which is always easy for me to handle because we get so many questions every single day, but because really what she’s asking here is two questions.

She first wants to figure out will the no contact rule work for her, especially if she’s been blocked. But also she wants to learn how to handle the no contact rule if she’s been blocked.

That’s what we’re going to focus our time on today. Basically, I’m going to teach you if the no contact rule will work, if you’ve been blocked a little bit, about how the no contact rule will work, and also what to do if you’re blocked during the no contact rule.

Let me first start off by saying, I think there’s a really big misconception about the no contact rule. Most people, when they hear about the no contact rule, they only focus on one aspect of it.

They focus on the aspect that can potentially happen where an ex will reach out to you.

Sometimes they’ll say, “Oh, I made a mistake,” or, “I miss you,” or they’ll reach out to you or get a little upset that you’re not responding to them.

But I think this is a really common misconception because people who only focus on this aspect of a no contact rule are kind of missing the boat of what the no contact rule is supposed to do.

Here’s the common misconception that I’m seeing time and time again, people believe that the no contact rule doesn’t consider or isn’t considered working if you don’t hear from an ex.

What you really need to understand is, technically speaking, the no contact rule can work if one of three criteria are met.

What are those three criteria?

Well, number one is by implementing a no contact rule, it’s supposed to give both you and him time to let your emotions settle. You see, usually during a breakup, there’s quite a bit of anger, resentment, and, quite honestly, genuine despair between you and him or her.

Now, these are all incredibly strong emotions, and emotions tend to override our ability to act and react rationally. We’ve all heard that phrase, when emotion runs high, logic runs low. That is sort of what the no contact rule can do, it can help kind of get your logic back in line and in control.

By implementing a no contact rule, if you stick to it for, let’s say, the entire 30 day rule that we recommend, and sometimes people will do the 21 day rule, the 45 day rule, depending on their situation. But, generally speaking, most people are going to fall in that 30 day time frame.

If you’re doing that 30 day rule, the no contact will can technically work because it will give you time, both him and you time, to settle down and let logic win out.

But there’s also a second criteria that can be considered working with the no contact rule. That’s it gives you a chance to evolve.

It allows you a chance to become a better version of yourself.

That’s never a bad idea, especially when you reconnect with your ex, when that time does come, you need to bring more value to the table than he expects you. I think that’s really what it’s all about, right?

Most of the people who focus on the no contact rule get so settled on what their ex is doing, they forget to kind of look internally.

I know it sounds very cliche, but sometimes the cliches are there for a reason, so that’s the second criteria that I would use to consider a no contact rule technically working.

But the third one is the more kind of common one that you would think of. The no contact rule can allow you to turn your ex’s mindset against him, so he’ll expect you to contact him and, when you don’t, his thoughts become, “Well, why isn’t she contacting me?”

Technically speaking, these are the three criteria that can dictate whether or not the no contact rule is working, but I think what you probably also need to learn is a little bit about the psychology behind how the no contact rule works because it’s not just hitting these criteria that matters in the grand scheme of thing, it’s also gaining understanding about why we implement the no contact rule.

Why We Implement The No Contact Rule

Now, there’s been this alarming trend lately where we’re having some ‘experts’ out there say that the no contact rule is a bad idea and that it doesn’t work. But all of our research psychology wise says something different.

What I’m going to point to today is two psychological researches that I often point to to prove to people, yes, this is something that you should be doing and using.

What are those two specific psychological ideas behind how the no contact rule is meant to work?

Well, there’s one, which is the theory of reactance, and there’s two, which is the information gap theory.

What are those two things?

The Theory Of Reactance.

The theory of reactions refers to the human need to react when someone or something interferes with things that come naturally, also called behavioural freedoms. You see, when you implement a no contact rule, you’re taking away your ex’s ‘free will’, the choice to talk to you or not talk to you was his and someone has taken it away, you.

Now, ideally this will cause him or raise the chances that he’s going to react. He will try and force you to talk to him. It’s a little bit of this idea of like, hey, I’m going to take your cookie away, now all of a sudden, you want your cookie back.

But of course that’s not all that sort of powers the power of the no contact, rule, we also have information gap theory.

Now, information gap theory is a little bit harder to describe because you kind of need some visualisation to sort of fully understand it, but I’m hoping that you can open your minds to maybe visualising some of the things I’m going to be talking about.

What is the information gap theory?

Well, the information gap theory basically states that when it feels as if we are missing out on something, the mind seeks to fill the void. Imagine that there’s a triangle, right?

We all know what a triangle looks like, but let’s say that the bottom of the triangle isn’t closed, it’s just an upside down V. You look at that, and your mind just gets a little annoyed by it. Every so often you just kind of want that bottom of that triangle to close.

Another really great example is, let’s say that you and I are best friends and I invite myself over to your house one day. I knock on the door, you say, “Hey Chris, what’s up?” I say, “Hey, can I come in?” You’re like, “Oh yeah, sure. Come right on in.” You invite me in and I don’t close the door, I leave it open.

You, in the back of your mind are like, I want to close that door, but I take you away from the door. I take you into your living room and say, “Hey, this is a really cool painting. Tell me about who painted that painting,” all the while you’re sitting there, obsessing about the fact that the door is open, it’s annoying you.

You have to close it.You can’t focus on anything else.

The no contact rule acts as the ‘open door’ for your ex. There’s unfinished business that needs to get finished.

Now, that we understand a little bit more about how the no contact rule works psychologically and even how you can look at the criteria to determine that it works, let’s switch focus on what you’re probably dying to learn about, and that’s what to do if you’ve been blocked during the no contact rule.

There Are Four Points

There’s really four points that I want to leave you with on this particular section. Let’s go down them one by one, and then we’ll define each one of them later.

Point number one, it’s that over 70% of exes who are blocked get unblocked at some point.

Point number two is understanding what soft blocks are versus hard blocks.

Point number three is learning to create mystery on social media to capture your ex’s attention.

Point four is sending them a text from a new number, which I have some interesting thoughts on, but let’s start from the top and go through it.

Point number one with what to do if you’re blocked by your ex is understanding that over 70% of exes who are blocked get unblocked at some point. What we learn is that oftentimes when an ex blocks you, it is usually due to a knee jerk reaction. Most of the time breakups don’t go really well.

There’s a lot of anger involved from your side, anger involved from his or her side. You’re just kind of fighting a lot, right?

Sometimes our fight or flight response gets triggered, and the people who are ‘fighting’ from this situation will block you because they don’t want to deal with you anymore. But that’s the brilliance of the no contact rule. Sometimes just ignoring your ex is enough to null, kind of inception yourself into their mind, so they start wondering what you’re up to, what is going on.

That’s why we see a high level of people who have been blocked by simply doing nothing will get unblocked just by being patient.

Now, it’s one of the hardest things to do because when you’re blocked and you are basically being no contacted by your ex, that reactance kicks in, you start to basically get really upset by the fact that you don’t have an ability to talk to your ex.

Usually, most of the time, you need to understand that you will get unblocked simply by doing nothing, just by playing the odds in your favor, but we don’t want to just play the odds in our favor.

We want to go a little bit deeper and come up with a plan for grabbing an ex’s attention to get him to unblock you or, barring that, finding some way of communicating, right, so that’s really the first point that I want you to understand.

The second point is understanding the difference between soft blocks versus hard blocks.

When there’s these knee jerk blocking reactions by your ex, there’s also knee jerk reactions that you guys tend to have when you’re talking to me or Coach Anna or even my wife sometimes.

You’re saying, “My God, he’s blocked me on Facebook. My God, he’s blocked me on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, whatever.” I don’t know many guys who use Pinterest by the way.

What you need to understand is that there’s a difference between soft blocks and hard blocks.

Soft blocks are pretty simple. It’s meaning you’re blocked maybe on Facebook, but you can still talk to him or communicate with him through cell phones.

Hard blocks is the exact opposite. You are blocked everywhere imaginable.

Now, let’s go back to soft blocks a little bit. If you are soft blocked by your ex, maybe you’re blocked to communicate on the phone with him, but you’re still able to communicate with him through Facebook.What you need to first do before you start figuring out how to handle being blocked by your ex is figure out which category you fit into.

Are you a soft block or are you a hard block?

Usually most of our clients fall in the soft block category, but if you are stuck in kind of the hard block category, what can you do?

Well, that’s where step number three really comes into play here, and that’s creating mystery on social media to capture their attention.

Now, you’re probably sitting there and wondering, well, why? That doesn’t even make any sense because if you’re ‘hard blocked’, how would your ex even see your social media account?

Well, what we’ve learned through research and also our own personal findings is that most exes, in fact, research has the number up to 90% of exes will Facebook creep or stalk their ex digitally after the breakup, they get curious to see what you’re up to.

Now, the issue most women have is they don’t really have a good way of creating enough mystery or intent or reason for an ex to want to reach out. I’ll give you an example, most people and women who are going through breakups sometimes don’t want to deal with social media.

They just want to lock themselves in a room and feel sorry for themselves, and that I totally get, believe me, I get that more than you probably realize.

But the smarter thing to do is actually to use social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, all of the tools in your tool belt, even if you’re blocked, to create the narrative that you want to have created about you.

If your ex broke up with you because he thought you were too stable, do something adventurous. If your ex thought or broke up with you because you were too adventurous or too mysterious, do something stable.

Find a way to reshape his perception,to change the paradigm in your favor.

All right, now we get to the final one

This is something that I don’t love to recommend to people, but I feel a need to mention its existence because we have had clients do this, though, I will say not many of them have been successful, and that’s sending an ex a text from a new number.

There’s a very specific way to do this, and I’m going to go on the record right here, right now, I say more times than not, 9.5 times out of 10 do not do this, but if you have for six months you’ve been blocked, you’ve tried everything to not seem like a creepy stalker, to not show up your ex’s door.

You’ve done everything we’ve recommended. You’ve learned that you’re in a hard block, you’ve waited enough time, you’ve created that mystery on social media, you’ve gone out, you’ve improved your life.

If you’re still blocked and you still are just dying to hear from your ex, one thing we have seen our clients do is to go out, buy a new phone, get a new number, and text their ex with the following text,

“Hey, I’m just letting you know I got a new number. I didn’t know if you would need it. This is like a mass text I’m sending out to everyone.”

We have had a few clients who haven’t gotten much overall success but have gotten responses from exes who have done that. Now, here’s the issue with this, sending a new text from a new number. Sometimes it is enough to creep an ex out to where you lose your chance forever, right?

But it is the only option we see for people who are hard blocked to find a way to kind of throw that last hail Mary. I want to reiterate, this is something I actually would not recommend, but it is kind of my duty to show you every possible thing that you can do.

Now, when you take all that into account, Diana,

Yes, the no contact rule can definitely work if you’ve been blocked.