Breakup Advice

In the painful days right after a relationship has ended, it can be difficult to imagine how to get through a breakup. The pain can be so intense that some people believe it will never end. Others even feel that they want to harm themselves. It can be a serious time in a person’s life.

The most important thing in getting through a breakup is first to maintain basic safety. This means that if you truly feel like harming yourself or others, you should take steps to get the support you need. Your first step should probably be to find a good therapist in your area that can help you grieve and guide you so that you don’t do anything that you will regret later.

Once basic safety is in place, the next issue is persevering through the suffering itself. It is perfectly natural that, for some period after a breakup, you will experience pain. In fact, if you don’t experience any pain after a meaningful relationship ends, that itself may indicate a problem worth investigating.

Dealing with the pain of a breakup is a lot like dealing with the pain of any injury. If you hurt your arm, you need to take some time to relax where you don’t put too much pressure on it. Similarly, when your heart is hurting after a breakup, you may need to take some time to go easier on yourself.

Also like other injuries, depending on how serious it is, you may need to get it treated. If your arm is broken, you may need a cast. And if your breakup has triggered extremely sensitive areas for you, perhaps tied to past wounds, you may need treatment by a good therapist to help you heal up stronger than before.

The next level of getting through a breakup is learning. In many cases, underneath the pain that separations bring are important lessons about ourselves trying to come to the surface. Often the pain brings with it messages of past unresolved issues. If you express the pain through journaling, for example, you may find your mind wandering to past abuses or abandonments that you had long forgotten about. These events can be very painful to remember, but surfacing them gives you a chance to heal them and make your recovery even more full than it would have been otherwise.

Because breakups bring on periods in which we have so much to learn, it can be very helpful, at those times, to read good books about issues relevant to relationships.

The important thing to remember about how to get through a breakup is that things aren’t always what they seem. You may feel the pain will never end, but you know in your mind it will. You may feel that the person who broke up with you has hurt you like nobody before, when later you may realize that they actually triggered hurt that originates in your past more than in your present. You may feel that you have to be very strong and stoic, when in reality what you need most is to ask for help and finally let your pain out, perhaps for the first time in your life.

There is no one way to get through a breakup. We all grieve in slightly different ways. But if you follow these general guidelines, you will be able to forge your own path through the darkness and back to light and future love.

Many visitors come to our site wondering how to recover from a breakup. While there is no one formula that works for everyone, there are certain guidelines that are bound to help you come out stronger and healthier in the long run.

Recovering from a breakup is a healing process like most others. It takes time and it often happens in phases. Let’s take a look at each stage and what you can do to get through it optimally.

The Immediate Aftermath

Right after the breakup happens, you may be deeply wounded. Some studies have even shown that breakups can significantly impact our brains and hormones. So expect that you may not be yourself and that you may feel a lot of pain in the early stage right after the relationship ends. In most cases, this is normal.

Your main task in this early phase is really to simply weather the pain and grieve. And it can really be ok early on to do what it takes, minute to minute and hour to hour, to get through this step. Whatever comforts you without being overly unhealthy is alright.

It’s ok to have a little ice cream now and then. It’s ok to spend a day watching your favorite TV shows. It’s certainly ok to spend some time reading good books that can help you feel less alone.

This phase can last anywhere from a few weeks to months depending on how long and intense the relationship was. It may feel like it will never end, but know that it will eventually and persevere.

One thing to note is that if the pain seems abnormally intense or if you are feeling driven to do self-destructive things, you may want to seek professional help. There is no shame in seeking support and it may even help you grow more than you would on your own through this phase.

Readjusting to Life

In this phase, you begin to come out of the fog of the immediate aftermath. You still aren’t necessarily totally stable. You may get hit by heartbreak now and then when certain experiences trigger it. But you’re feeling more and more stable for longer periods of time.

In this phase, you will want to begin getting back to how life was before for you. Start going out more with friends. Start doing the things you’ve always enjoyed. You may find that sometimes you are fully invested in these activities and other times you are going through the motions. This is alright.

As this phase stretches out, you will increasingly find yourself getting lost in life again and only realize later that you forgot to remember to be hurt, so to speak. This is when you know you’re really getting closer to recovery.

Re-Emerging Stronger than Before

At a certain point, you will realize that not only are you going for almost all of the stretches of time without feeling intense grief, but you are even feeling stronger than you were. This is because a breakup can help you go through a form of detoxification. You cry. You process issues both current and past, conscious and unconscious. And after that takes place, just like after you’ve digested a good meal, you feel even better than you did previously.

If you want to know how to recover from a breakup, the answer is to accept that it is a process and focus on doing each step of the process to the best of your ability. Even though a breakup can feel like the end of the world at first, it can ultimately prove to be the beginning of a new and better world.

You’ve been single for a while now. Or you feel yourself approaching or are in the middle of a breakup. And you start to wonder…“Will I ever find love?”

This is one of those haunting questions. Even when we are not focusing on it consciously, it is in the back of our minds. And it has a huge impact on how we think about and act in relationships and in the rest of our lives.

The fact is that there is no guarantee that any of us will find love, especially the kind of love we fantasize about. And that is a very tough reality to accept.

However, like so many dynamics of relationships, there is a paradox here.

You might have heard the old cliché about how a watched pot never boils. In other words, sometimes when you focus too much on the endpoint of a process, it makes that endpoint much harder to achieve. Yet when you focus instead on the process itself and let go of the endpoint, suddenly it can happen before you know it.

Imagine two weightlifters.

• Weightlifter A stares at the weight for hours wondering “Will I ever be able to lift this weight?”
• Weightlifter B looks at the weight, wonders for a few minutes, and then spends the next couple hours working out.

Which one do you think has the better chance of ultimately lifting the weight?

The lesson about relationships here is that, when it comes to love, although it is tempting to fantasize and hope and wonder “Will I ever find love?” in the long run that activity, in itself, doesn’t really help us. I’m not saying you shouldn’t think about that now and then. But there are things you can do that are more likely to benefit you.

So when that question pops in your head, as it naturally will from time to time, it’s OK to let it linger for a bit. You might even want to get out your journal or diary and write out your feelings about it. But then, it’s good to get in the habit of making the switch from focusing your energy on the endpoint to investing it in actions that will actually help you develop.

With practice, you might even be able to create a sort of reflex where each time you think “Will I ever find love?” you more and more quickly switch that thought in your mind to “What can I do to increase my chances of finding love?”

It’s a sort of replacement maneuver.

“Will I ever find love?” —-> “What can I do to increase my chances of finding love?”

The questions you ask help determine which direction you go in. The second question is often a more constructive one than the first.

Nobody knows if or when you or anyone else will find love for certain. But what we do know is that the more you work on the things that ready you for love, the better off you will be. Hopefully the many tools and resources available – such as those that we recommend in our store – can assist you in making the best use of that time that, until now, you spent just hoping, fantasizing and dreaming.

Be like Weightlifter B in the earlier example. Take a moment to let yourself feel your feelings. Don’t run away from them. But also don’t dwell on them forever. Build the habit of making that switch from “It’s time to experience the curiosity and concern about my future.” to “It’s time to get to work!”

The best part of that plan is that, ultimately, even if you don’t find the love you want, you will still end up a better person. You might even discover that there are other things in life that you value in addition to that kind of love that you’ve always wanted. Or you might develop into someone whose idea of what love is all about is different than it was before.