I’m (22F) still attracted to my awful ex (29M), how do I get over this?

I have never so desperately needed advice. This feels so awful and gross right now I want to throw up about it.

TW: Rape

So I (22F) was in a horrible, short relationship with a guy (29M). We broke up in May 2025, had a lot of back and forth, officially broke things off August 2025. I can’t accentuate how horrible our relationship was. The short is he cheated on me a horrifying amount and lied to me about multiple rape allegations.

I’ve been doing really well recently. I started seeing a guy (26M) shortly after 29M and I broke up, and 26M treats me so wonderfully. He knows me like the back of his hand and I feel like a princess with the way her treats me. This isn’t about him, sadly.

Regardless, I had this old spam Instagram I hadn’t used in a while. 29M requested to follow me at 1 AM the night after Valentine’s Day. Word on the street is that he tried dating a 19 year old girl and she played him pretty hard, and isn’t coping well, so I wasn’t surprised, just kind of disgusted. I deleted the request. But, Instagram being an evil app, and presumably because the algorithm has caught wind of our familiarity or something, I was scrolling on my explore page and saw pictures of 29M. Professional photography, well done professional photography, that really looked like the man that I had fallen for prior. Recently he’s been looking bad to me, lost a lot of weight that took him from a passably young man to a middle aged man very quickly, but he looked good in these photos. God I want to throw up just saying that.

It feels disgusting, truly absolutely disgusting. Because I’m not just doing myself a disservice for this attraction, he treated me so awfully, but I’m doing 26M a disservice. A massive disservice. Because he had to basically save me from myself because of the state that 29M left me in. And now I’m looking at this man, this awful man, who treated me so horribly and so many other women so horribly, and I’m attracted to him? What kind of person am I? It’s literally the sick feeling you get from watching a car crash or a gore video. That I should’ve forced myself to look away and exit as soon as possible, and I didn’t, and I just looked with morbid curiosity and now attraction. To a man who doesn’t even deserve to be in the same room as me anymore, let alone occupy any space in my thoughts.

I need to fix this. I need to stop this. I need to not be attracted to this man anymore. I thought I had gotten over it, that maybe my self respect was at least a little intact enough to not want to fuck this man that sent me to the hospital twice for various reasons, and yet. And yet. Here we are.

How do I stop this? Please, any advice is welcome.