Moving through a breakup

Look, breakups can be tough and messy. If you've been through one, and most of us have been, you know what I'm talking about. Breakups are hard; they hurt. We get slammed with truths we didn't know, surprises we never imagined, and jabs from someone who is supposed to love us. No wonder we call this getting dumped—because we get crap dumped all over us!

How we make it worse

And then in the middle of our pain and sadness, we beat ourselves up for not being perfect. We beat ourselves up for crying all the time, for feeling overwhelmed and exhausted, sad and angry. We beat ourselves up for struggling at our job, not being able to focus, and wanting to just stay home.

We beat ourselves up for thinking about it all the time, talking about it too much and wearing out our support systems. We beat ourselves up for every little thing that may have contributed to it, for not seeing the red flags, for being too trusting or naive or controlling or pleasing or independent or clingy or whatever. And we may even beat ourselves up for loving someone who treated us badly.

And then we wonder why we struggle to get over it.

Loss means grief

No matter what the circumstances, moving through a breakup is a loss. And depending on the details of the relationship, it can be a big complicated loss. It's not something we can generally just get over and get on with our lives after, acting as if nothing changed...because everything changed.

Breakups put us straight into the stages of grief because breakups are the loss of someone close to us and significant in our lives. We grieve that loss just as we do a death, but they are still around which can make the letting go even harder. And you know what? It doesn't matter if our relationship to the person lasted six months or six years, we grieve it all the same.

Feelings come in waves

The loss of someone significant to us sets off a wave of feelings that drop like dominoes once the first one is pushed: sadness, anger, hurt, betrayal, anxiety, fear, etc.. Then we get dragged into confusion, disbelief, overwhelm, self-doubt, desperation, panic, pain.. Sound familiar?

As if all that isn't enough, we shift into self-judgement, beating ourselves up for every little thing we don't do perfectly as we wind our way through the breakup, trying to find our footing and make sense of things. It's no wonder we struggle.

Feel what you feel

So let's do ourselves a huge favor and stop beating ourselves up. Instead, let's agree to feel whatever we feel because it's our truth...at least, in the moment. Like everything else, feelings don't last forever. Nor do they define who we are or how the rest of our lives will be. But they can if we don't give ourselves the space we need to feel them and heal them as they arise.

It's much easier to embrace and heal our pain than it is to keep holding onto it and trying to pretend we're fine. We don't have to keep our best face forward like a social profile. It takes a ton of energy to hide our true feelings. And the reality is we aren't very good at it anyway, so they come flying out when we don't really want them to, maybe in hurtful ways we may later regret.

We also don't do ourselves any favors by indulging in our pain. Feeling our pain as it arises is one thing. Indulging in it is another that keeps us caught in suffering for far longer than is healthy and helpful. Indulging our emotional dramas is draining, exhausting and hard on us. While honoring our emotions is a necessary step in our healing, indulging in them delays our healing and can isolate us from our support systems, our friends and family.

We know we are inadvertently indulging our emotions if we spend hours upon hours sobbing by ourselves, slipping into self-pity or even despair. The natural rhythm of an emotion is that it arises, exists and falls away again, all within about 90 seconds. If an emotion lingers more than 1-2 minutes, it's a sign that our conditioned mind has taken over and is cycling painful thought streams that are keeping us emotionally over-stimulated. You can witness this truth for yourself.

Give yourself a break

Let's do better than that. Let's take care of ourselves by honoring our feelings without indulging in them. Let's stop beating ourselves up for all the ways we think we messed up or aren't perfect and accept that we are healing, learning and growing. Let's cut ourselves some much-needed slack and give ourselves a chance to find our footing.

And then, let's ditch the perfection measuring stick and accept ourselves just as we are, for who we are, in all our mental-emotional messiness right now. Not that we will be this way forever, but let's allow ourselves to be this way for now. No matter what our struggle is, this will give us the space we need to let things air out so we can see more clearly what our next right step is in getting through the breakup. Most of all, let's be gentle and patient with ourselves through this challenging life change.