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.

Are you married and sometimes think to yourself “My husband hates me”?

Every so often, we explore what people are talking about around the web in regards to relationships and breakups. Well today, we came across an interesting discussion sparked by a woman who said just that – “My husband hates me.”

Now, that is a powerful and tragic statement. And yet there is no doubt that it expresses a painful truth:

There are many marriages in which a person perceives that they are hated by their husband or in which, sadly, it is actually true.

The natural next question if you find yourself in a situation like that is “What do I do?” So let me give some thoughts on that question.

The first step, as is so often the case with perceptions and feelings, is to take a deep breath and try, to the best of your ability, to figure out if what you believe is accurate or if perhaps you are misreading the situation. There are many reasons you might misread such a situation. For instance:

• You may be projecting. This happens when you actually are feeling the dislike for the other person, but cannot admit that to yourself. So instead your mind sort of reverses things and convinces you that the other person is the one that dislikes you. This allows you to see yourself as the good person or it helps rationalize why you might be justified if you do dislike them.
• You may simply be misunderstanding. Have you ever played that game of telephone where, as the message gets passed from one person to another, it becomes more and more inaccurate? Well a similar situation can happen even between just two people when communication isn’t handled well. Perhaps your husband is angry at someone else or upset about some situation separate from you and you are misinterpreting his feelings as being about you.

It’s important to at least consider that you might be misunderstanding. But it’s also important not to go so far that you invalidate yourself and lose trust in your perceptions completely. It’s best to take a balanced approach.

If you do this and still feel it is likely that your perception is accurate, then it’s time to take the next step.

The next step is to determine if it is safe to talk to your husband about this. Ideally, you could share with him your concerns and work things out together. It may not be an easy conversation to have, but it could be very beneficial. However, this can only happen if you trust that you would not be in any danger. If the relationship has been abusive or your husband has a bad temper and you are fearful, then there may be other steps to take first.

One good step that you might want to consider is to see a therapist to discuss what you are perceiving. A good therapist may be able to help you gradually separate fact from fiction, determine whether there is a chance to communicate with your husband about your feelings and decide how to do it, as well as help support you through the process.

Another step that we would recommend is reading the section in Getting the Love You Want that describes the Container Exercise. This is an exercise that may really help you better understand the role of anger in relationships. Hatred, such as that you perceive coming from your husband, almost always involves anger at the root. And handling anger in relationships is an important and valuable skill.

If your marriage, even if imperfect, is at least safe, there is a chance not only to resolve the anger, but to channel it into a better relationship in the long run. The energy trapped in anger can often be used for growth when it is released in a wise, controlled manner, as is done with the Container Exercise. Healthy, mature communication is the absolute essential key.

However, hatred involving a person with poor impulse control or who is capable of violence can be very dangerous. And if you feel you are in danger, then the most important thing is to first protect yourself. Nothing else beneficial can happen without a foundation of safety.

Here are just some of our favorite quotes on relationships.

• “The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed.” – Carl Jung in Modern Man in Search of a Soul

• “Seldom or never does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly without crisis. There is no birth of consciousness without pain.” – Carl Jung in “Marriage as a Psychological Relationship”

• “They say that breaking up is hard to do, but that is wrong. It’s easy to walk away before the going gets tough, to find another dreamboat – until the ship starts to sink again. It’s waking up that’s hard to do. ” – Harville Hendrix, Ph.D. in Keeping the Love You Find: A Single Person’s Guide to Achieving Lasting Love

• “Speculation about that elusive quality known as romantic chemistry has baffled scientists and poets alike. In my experience, ‘chemistry’ is based on a similarity according to where you fall on the emotional dyslexia continuum…People who don’t have adult skills haven’t transformed their childlike needs into adult needs, and they’re more likely to rely on superficial qualities in a partner. Basically, they don’t know what would satisfy them if their needs were ‘grown up.’ So they look for mates through a child’s notion of romance. They don’t know themselves well enough to pick partners with whom they’ll share something deep and lasting. ” – Helen Kramer in Liberating the Adult Within: How to Be a Grown-Up For Good

• “When a child is uncertain or pessimistic about his or her value, the child strives to understand and become what is perceived as pleasing to the parents. The normal need for approval becomes a craving and children take to heart extreme messages they are given about their worth. If a child is told, verbally or nonverbally, that he or she is of little value, young parts of the child organize their beliefs around that premise. They become desperate for redemption in the eyes of the person who gave these messages. Thereafter these parts carry the burden of worthlessness, which makes them believe that no one can love them – a belief they will maintain no matter what feedback is received from others…These burdened young parts exert a powerful influence over the person’s intimate relationships as they constantly seek redemption – the lifting of what feels like a curse of unlovability. They will return to the person who stole their self-esteem in this quest, or they will find someone who resembles that person. Often this results in a history of abuse or unsatisfying relationships.” – Richard C. Schwartz, Ph.D. in Internal Family Systems Therapy

• “Now we arrive at the heart of the matter. Our ‘free’ choice of a mate is, in the end, a product of our unconscious, which has an agenda of its own. And what the unconscious wants is to become whole and to heal the wounds of childhood. To this end, it is carrying around its own detailed picture of a proper match, searching not for the right stats, but for the right chemistry. And what is that chemistry? Nothing more than our unconscious attraction to someone who we feel will meet our particular emotional needs. Specifically, that need is to cover the ‘shortfall’ of childhood by having our mates fill in the psychological gaps left by our imperfect childhood caretakers. How do we go about that? By falling madly in love with someone who has both the positive and the negative traits of our imperfect parents, someone who fits an image that we carry deep inside us and for whose embodiment we are unconsciously searching. ” – Harville Hendrix, Ph.D. in Keeping the Love You Find: A Single Person’s Guide to Achieving Lasting Love

• “Marriage is the most complicated of all human relationships. Few alliances can produce such extremes of emotion or can so quickly travel from professions of the utmost bliss to that cold, terminal legal write-off, mental cruelty. When one stops to consider the massive content of archaic data which each partner brings to the marriage through the continuing contributions of his Parent and Child, one can readily see the necessity of an emancipated Adult in each to make this relationship work. Yet the average marriage contract is made by the Child, which understands love as something you feel and not something you do, and which sees happiness as something you pursue rather than a by-product of working toward the happiness of someone other than yourself.” – Thomas A. Harris, M.D. in I’m OK, You’re OK

• “When partners don’t tell each other what they want and constantly criticize each other for missing the boat, it’s no wonder that the spirit of love and cooperation disappears. In its place comes the grim determination of the power struggle, in which each partner tries to force the other to meet his or her needs. Even though their partners react to these maneuvers with renewed hostility, they persevere. Why? Because in their unconscious minds they fear that, if their needs are not met, they will die. This is a classic example of what Freud called the ‘repetition compulsion,’ the tendency of human beings to repeat ineffective behaviors over and over again.” – Harville Hendrix, Ph.D. in Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples

• “That rage is a vital expression of life energy is readily apparent. If we repress our anger, we become sick or depressed or condemned to a pale, muted existence. But, on the other hand, if we unleash our rage, we inflict physical or emotional damage on others. How can we release our anger and not hurt the people we love? The answer is a process called ‘containment.’”– Harville Hendrix, Ph.D. in Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples

• “The people you are attracted to may not be right for you emotionally, but you’re drawn to them anyway. Something about them – often something less than flattering – reminds you on some level of your father or mother. The person could be rejecting or critical, controlling or domineering, emotionally distant or unavailable. When you encounter someone like this as an adult, it arouses the feeling of longing and insecurity you experienced in your relationship with one of your parents – feelings of emotional hunger that you’ve come to associate with love…The antidote is to recognize this pattern and avoid recreating your emotional past. Your goal is to seek emotionally substantial relationships.” – Susan Anderson in The Journey from Abandonment to Healing: Turn the End of a Relationship into the Beginning of a New Life

• “Fortunately, we do have a choice about what kind of marriage we have. Most marriages fail because of the persistence of the unconscious aspects of the relationship. Any unfinished business we had with our caretakers becomes a compelling agenda with our partners. All too commonly, however, the partners never become aware of the hidden needs that drive their relationship and never learn the skills they need to successfully address those needs. As a single, part of your preparation is to understand and prepare for a conscious marriage in which you and your future partner can undo the damage of childhood and recover your true selves.” – Harville Hendrix, Ph.D. in Keeping the Love You Find: A Single Person’s Guide to Achieving Lasting Love

• “Romantic love is supposed to end. It is nature’s glue, which brings two incompatible people together for the purpose of mutual growth, and enables them to survive the disillusionment that they did not marry perfect people. Though romantic love is a foretaste of the potential in the relationship, that potential can only be reached through the valley of despair that is the power struggle. If we do not use the relationship to finish childhood, our marriages will get bogged down in the same issues we were stuck in as children. When romantic love dies, it clears the way for real love.” – Harville Hendrix, Ph.D. in Keeping the Love You Find: A Single Person’s Guide to Achieving Lasting Love

• “An ability to accept our ambivalence toward others may be an important ingredient in relationships that are healthy and lasting.” – Fred Rogers in You Are Special: Words of Wisdom for All Ages from a Beloved Neighbor

• “Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” – James Baldwin

We hope you’ve enjoyed and learned a lot from these quotes on relationships!