Breakups suck but they don't have to ruin us

After a breakup, many of us spend our days in tense situations at home or at work, feeling stressed, harried and agitated. There's no time or space to take care of ourselves or to have our feelings. We can't nurture our hearts or heal. We have to force ourselves to get up, get going and get busy. It makes it hard to get through the day.

We struggle on, counting the minutes, feeling exhausted and unfocused, trying to hide our pain from those around us. When we finally get to our car or home at the end of the day, we crumble into a sobbing mess, letting loose of the emotional pressure we've held in all day.

That's no way to live.

There are thousands of women doing this every single day. For some, it's about survival. For others, it's about fear. Yet for all of us, it's about what we've been conditioned to do—be strong, carry on, hide our pain, do for others, put ourselves last.

The problem with this is that from a place of prolonged pain and self-neglect, we can't show up at our best for ourselves, in our lives or in relation to the rest of the world. And if we do this long enough, we will literally become sick. As the most dense part of ourselves, the physical body is the last place we experience the impact of prolonged distress.

First, we will experience it in our thoughts as negativity and blame, in our feelings as depression and anxiety. Then we'll feel it in our spirits as insecurity and diminishment. Finally we will feel it in our energy as exhaustion and deflation. Finding ourselves in this place doesn't mean we are failures or are broken. It means we've given all our power over to old wounds.

The irony is this—it is in facing our pain that we can finally move beyond it. If we continue to avoid or stuff it, we carry it with us and it owns us from the shadows, hijacking all of our experiences until we die. This is no way to live. If you find yourself in such a space, get help. Your life is too precious not to.

Remember if we change nothing, nothing changes.