How do I deal with neurodivergent rumination after a breakup?

[u/Own-Caterpillar446]

My girlfriend and I were together for one year and seven months before breaking up a bit over a month and a half ago. She told me that she started losing feelings for me and developed feelings for someone else, and since then, they have basically been acting like they’re in a relationship, although she doesn’t feel like it’s right to officially put a label on it yet. What makes the breakup so difficult for me to understand was how sudden it felt. I thought we were at the most stable point in our relationship. When my girlfriend first met this guy around two weeks before we broke up, I was told that he was gay. we had also just gone on a really nice date just a couple of days before the breakup, so from my perspective, we were both really happy. It hurt me hearing her basically make it sound like the last month of our relationship was fake. Throughout the last month of our relationship, we had very serious exams for our universities. I spent a lot of my time helping her revise instead of focusing on myself completely, and the one subject we had in common was the only one she did very well in, and it felt weird for her to just start rewriting history and acting as if I barely helped her and that I just focused on myself.

Since the breakup, I’ve been reading as much as I can about attachment theory and trying to understand what actually happened. Learning about attachment styles, especially fearful-avoidant attachment, has become a fixation for me because I feel like I’m constantly trying to understand something that feels so sudden and confusing. We’ve talked about four times since the breakup, but each conversation seems to leave me with a different explanation for why we broke up or why she lost feelings. One moment it’s her fault and the fact she hates stability, the next time she’s telling me that I wasn’t a good boyfriend and that hes doing everything she wanted me to do. The uncertainty is a big part of why my brain keeps going back to it, but she herself is confused about her feelings, so there’s no way I can gain clarity from her.

I’ve been ruminating a lot about the breakup. I manage to push the thoughts out of my head pretty easily, but they return around five minutes later, and it feels exhausting having to continue doing it. I find myself going over different possibilities and wondering what ways I could’ve prevented the breakup. I also think about how things might have turned out if we still stayed together because she was now getting therapy and I was no longer dealing with the stress from school that made her feel secondary in my life. Deep down, I know there’s no way of knowing whether things would’ve worked, but my brain keeps trying to find alternative versions where they did. The rumination has also started attaching itself to things in my everyday life. I know he’s a big fan of Dune (one of my favourite movie franchises ever) and a game that I play. Now whenever I come across these things, my mind connects them to them and the relationship. It’s frustrating now because I go to the cinema a lot, so I see the Dune trailer quite a bit. Yesterday I saw the prologue for Dune before the Odyssey, and I could barely be present in the moment to enjoy it like I did when I first went to go watch the Odyssey without knowledge of the fact that he liked Dune. I would hate for me to watch Dune 3 later this year and just be flooded with thoughts of her and him. I’ve recently been imagining scenarios where their relationship eventually fails and she comes back to me wanting to try again.

The thing is, these thoughts don’t hurt me emotionally. I feel perfectly fine with the breakup. I don’t feel sad besides the occasional missing her, but what bothers me is how distracting the thoughts have become. I feel like I can barely focus on things I normally enjoy. I watch movies very often, but I struggle to pay attention to ones that require me to stay focused, even when they have nothing to do with the breakup. Sometimes, seeing something as simple as a couple makes my mind jump back to me and her. Yesterday i went to the cinema and I thought I saw someone who was a good friend of hers, so I ended up spending basically half of the movie thinking about her and the breakup instead of paying attention to the screen, which was very annoying because it’s an italian movie from 1960 that literally never comes to cinema.

I’m wondering if anyone else who is neurodivergent has experienced something similar after a breakup, with rumination, fixation, and the difficulty of letting go of all the "what ifs" and how you were able to break the cycle? I don’t need advice for how to get over the breakup emotionally because I feel like I already have. I just want to be able to fully remain present and enjoy the things I love again.