Recovering From a Break Up
Recovering from a breakup can be a confusing time in life as your head and your heart struggle to get on the same page. You may have started grieving the loss of the relationship long before it ended, while family members and friends are just beginning to deal with their own feelings of loss. Your heart may be telling you to try again, while your head is filled with fears about suffering another loss. When we lose a partner to death, we are often given the social permission to dismiss their flaws and focus on their virtues. Losing a partner to a breakup can feel like the opposite, where we dismiss their virtues and focus on their flaws. Doing so often makes the recovery process difficult and longer than it has to be. Here are some helpful suggestions for navigating the process of healing from a breakup.
1. Assume total responsibility for the break up. At first glance, this will seem counterintuitive. Here’s the logic: by taking 100% of the responsibility (not the blame) for the breakup, you assume 100% of the capability to heal from it. If your partner is even 1% responsible, that’s 1% of the recovery process that it beyond your control.
2. Acknowledge the grief. By calling those emotions what they are, you increase your ability to understand them. By understanding what you are grieving (loss of the ideal relationship, loss of companionship, etc), you are able to determine what may motivate you to enter a new relationship too quickly. Remember, grief is a process.
3. Normalize the experience. The reality is every relationship will end until you find the one that doesn’t. Each relationship will teach you something significant in preparation for the one that will last. As you approach each relationship as an opportunity to learn more about yourself and how to teach you to another person, you will realize that breaking up is as normal as students failing a class, even with a gifted teacher, if they don’t make the effort to learn the material.
4. Maintain an attitude of gratitude. Nothing helps in the process of healing quite like gratitude. Can you be grateful for the experience? Can you be grateful for what you’ve learned? Can you be grateful that you are no longer tied to someone who wasn’t good for you?
5. Treat yourself. Buy yourself one thing that represents all that you’ve gained from the experience. For example, get yourself that pair of shoes you’ve been wanting to remind you of all the strength it took to walk away or get yourself those Superman cuff links to remind you of the strength you’ve gained to reclaim your life.