Recovering from a broken relationship: what you need to know
When you come to the end of your life and look back, perhaps the most painful moments in your memory will be the breakups in your relationship, especially if you didn’t want the breakup.
It is common to feel that there is no way to look to the future as always by being able to be as good as you were during the relationship, or struggling to find ways to cope and ‘be okay’ without the relationship. This is because during a relationship, other people’s lives become part of ours and vice versa. The relationship becomes part of our identity, so when it ends, it feels like a part of us has died inside.
Many people experience so much emotional damage from a breakup that they wish they could completely erase the relationship and their former partner from their memory, as in the movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” Some people become obsessed with their ex or have a hard time accepting the finality of the situation, while other people feel deep resentment towards the other person that they feel has been “ emotionally scammed ”, as if the ex had left better . leaving them heartbroken and unable to continue life adequately.
Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said that “what does not kill us makes us stronger” but the reality is that when people do not deal effectively with traumatic experiences such as breakdowns in relationships, they can leave them permanently scared. Some people never recover properly from a relationship breakdown, unfortunately, not because of the circumstances surrounding the relationship, but simply because they don’t know how. However, with the right coping skills, the pain of a breakup can help us write a new chapter in life, and can actually make us much stronger mentally as a result. Whether the pain of a breakup makes us stronger or weaker will depend on how we deal with it during the process, which is where personal therapy can be most effective.
Each person’s situation will be exclusively personal, so, unfortunately, there is no generic guide that works for all cases to recover from the pain of a breakup. However, the simplest way to think about it is as follows:
Imagine that you’ve been living your life, assuming everything is going to be okay. You learn to trust someone by opening your arms to hug them, only to have them hit you terribly. You are left hurt and vulnerable, so now, instead of holding your arms out to your sides, you keep your hands at eye level as in a fighting stance, to protect yourself from being hit again. You may even start hitting people unnecessarily when you overreact, thinking you are being attacked again, with the traumatic memory of the fight unable to leave you. While this self-defense mechanism is done with the intention of protecting him, his unconscious mind does not realize that the fight is long over and his wounds must be bandaged and healed for him to heal. You cannot treat your wounds because your hands are too busy protecting them. The infection that is building up cannot be drained or treated until you can let your guard down. To do this, you must trust that you are safe, by diverting your attention from the outside world that you fear will hurt you and instead directing your attention inwards towards those wounds, which can be very painful to deal with at first, but must be treated appropriately to avoid permanent scar tissue.
The lesson here is that focusing your thoughts on your ex or other people is not helpful during the healing process. Learning to support yourself emotionally during this process is the only way to recover, and to do so, you need to allow yourself to feel a bit vulnerable at first as you let your thoughts go to others and instead focus on your own healing. For this to be effective, a part of you must be sure that everything is going to be fine so that you let your guard down. Obviously this is difficult because you don’t have a crystal ball and you can’t see into the future and you know for sure that everything will be fine, so giving yourself encouragement, support, and compassion is essential to the healing process. In other words, you need to take a leap of faith and allow yourself to act like everything is fine.
This is an unconscious process that many people perform more easily than others, depending on how well they received emotional support during difficult times in their early years of life. While some people can naturally do this easier than others, it is still a process that anyone can learn to do, taking the unconscious mechanisms we use to deal with difficult moments of thought (such as our internal dialogue) and taking conscious control over them. .
To explain what I mean by this: when we focus our anger or resentment towards the partner who has hurt us, without realizing it, we are telling ourselves that our self-esteem depends on that other person. We tell ourselves that we need that other person to love us in order to have permission to love ourselves. This is not only false, but it is also destructive to our own self-esteem.
However, when we focus on our own feelings, we send the message that we are important enough to be worth caring for. While this can make us feel vulnerable at first, it sends the right signals deep down to the unconscious level, facilitating more effective healing, as well as better coping skills to handle difficult life circumstances the next time they arrive.
It is true that this process is very difficult to carry out on your own without support and guidance, so personal therapy may be more valuable in facilitating the healing process after a breakup. In other words, while focusing on your own feelings is vital, you don’t have to do it on your own.