How to heal after a breakup (2/4)
Even if your heart tries to pull its broken self together to tell you, it’s for the best, and your head – foggy and sad – tells you the pain will pass, the agony of a breakup can be relentless. When you’re recovering from a breakup, it’s important not to hurry things along – it’s your time to reset, recharge and draw wisdom from experience – but what if your healing could be strong and complete … and quicker? Science may have just found the way.
New research has found that broken-hearted ones who reflected more on their relationships over nine weeks had a stronger overall recovery from their breakup.
An important part of the healing is a ‘self-concept reorganization’, which involves rebuilding and strengthening the sense of who you are, independent of the relationship.
Recognize that breakups are an emotional rollercoaster
You’re bound to experience a wave of emotions after a breakup. These emotions can be:
- Shock
- Anger
- Disappointment
- Rejection
- Embarrassment
- Disillusionment
- Guilt
- Betrayal
- Confusion
- Stress
- Fear
- Relief
- Denial
- Despair
- Hopefulness
- Loneliness
These feelings won’t all come at the same time. One day you may feel relieved; the next day, you may feel stressed again - the third day, you may feel angry at your ex or yourself.
And that's why healing after a breakup is a process that takes time. You have to go through all of these emotions and understand why you feel every one of them.
If you try to put the lid on your feelings and think, “Well, I’ll just move on. I don't need to deal with it. I’ll find another person and forget this ever happened,” you’ll only end up hurting yourself more in the long run. If you run into the next relationship before dealing with the issues created by this breakup, you risk projecting those issues onto your next partner. And that's not fair.
So, before anything else, you need to recognize this emotional rollercoaster and accept you’ll be riding it for a while.
But what if some feelings are negative? Like anger? Well, you still shouldn’t shy away from them. Negative emotions are still valid, and you should make room for them; acknowledge them. That’s the only way to move past them and move on eventually.
Accept that it takes two.
It takes two to tango. This means that whatever happened in your relationship, it was the result and the responsibility of two people, not one. So, it's both of you that created the relationship and both of you who didn’t manage to keep it thriving for x, y, z reasons. Even though you did your best and tried hard, there's a big percentage of a relationship that we cannot control or change.
So, don’t assign blame to yourself.
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