Recovering After A Breakup
Relationships start and end all of the time. Most of us enjoy the experience of connecting in relationships but dread even the idea of a relationship ending - especially if it involves conflict.
The experience of fun, excitement, and even euphoria associated with the newness of discovering meaningful connections with new people seems innate. Whereas, we don’t like to give very much thought to the circumstances under which we’d be willing to sever those connections - or to what we’ll do if someone we are in a relationship with chooses to sever their connection with us.
Part of being a well-adjusted adult is knowing under what circumstances you will choose to end a relationship - and how to recover after a breakup.
In this blog post, I’m sharing the one primary thing to focus on to help you recover as much and as quickly as possible after a breakup. In a future post, I’ll share my thoughts on how to know when you need to end a relationship.
Just Focus on Yourself
Many people give the advice that you should “focus on yourself” after a breakup. But what does that mean? Many people do not know. They confuse focusing on yourself with dating new people, partying, or engaging with drugs and alcohol. In reality, none of these behaviors represent focusing on yourself. Instead, they take the attention away from healing your inner self and place it on self-destruction and numbing the intense emotions often associated with the breakup.
“Focus on yourself means focus on your healing. You do that by allowing yourself to experience your emotions - not by avoiding them.”
That brings me to the one primary thing you need to focus on when you experience a breakup, regardless of the relationship context - whether romantic, platonic, or business. Generally speaking, the more invested you were in the relationship and the more intimacy, trust, or closeness you experienced, the longer the recovery process will take - but you will recover nonetheless, if you allow yourself to focus on this...
I’m not saying ending a relationship is suddenly going to become easy or pain-free, but I know that focusing on this can limit the intensity and longevity of emotional pain and suffering associated with a breakup.
The primary thing you need to focus on after a breakup is Grieving.
I know what you’re thinking… ‘it’s a breakup, not a death. Grief seems extreme..’
Yes, it seems that way until you realize that a breakup actually is a death. Let me explain why so that you can start to see it...
If a healthy relationship is associated with growth and thriving, and an unhealthy relationship is associated with devitalization and decline - then it’s easy to see how the ending of a relationship represents the death of that relationship and unit - it has ceased to exist in it’s previous form.
A breakup in a relationship represents the death of that relationship and of the hopes, dreams, aspirations, and vision you created in your heart and in your minds eye associated with that relationship - which included that specific person. That’s why you need to grieve the loss of the relationship and what it represented to you.
Once you can see this, then you understand why most breakup’s entail a great intensity of emotion and why those emotions tend to linger for long periods of time - even after you thought you “got over it”.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross developed the five stages of grief in her 1969 book, On Death and Dying. Grief is typically conceptualized as a reaction to death, though it can occur anytime reality is not what we wanted, hoped for, or expected. Grief occurs in stages and these stages are our attempts to process change and protect ourselves while we adapt to a new reality.
While there are consistent elements within each stage, the process of grieving looks different for everyone. Entering and leaving each individual stage is not linear. You may feel one, then another and back again to the first one. Each stage lasts a different period of time, and you can experience the entire cycle multiple times over the same circumstance, however, you must pass through each stage of grief and complete the cycle in order to heal.
Defining the The Five Stages of Grief™️
Denial - Denial helps us to survive the loss. In this stage, the world becomes meaningless and overwhelming. Life makes no sense. We are in a state of shock and denial. We go numb. We wonder how we can go on, if we can go on, why we should go on. We try to find a way to simply get through each day. Denial and shock help us to cope and make survival possible and helps us to pace our feelings of grief.
Anger - Anger is a necessary stage of the healing process. Be willing to feel your anger, even though it may seem endless. The more you truly feel it, the more it will begin to dissipate and the more you will heal. There are many other emotions under the anger and you will get to them in time, but anger is the emotion we are most used to managing but anger has no limits. Underneath anger is your pain.
Bargaining - After a loss, bargaining may take the form of a temporary truce. We become lost in “If only…” or “What if…” statements. We want life returned to what is was. We want to go back in time. Guilt is often bargaining’s companion. We may even bargain with the pain. We will do anything not to feel the pain of this loss. We remain in the past, trying to negotiate our way out of the hurt.
Depression - After bargaining, our attention moves squarely into the present. Empty feelings present themselves, and grief enters our lives on a deeper level than we ever imagined. This depressive stage feels as though it will last forever. It’s important to understand that it is not a sign of mental illness. It is the appropriate response to a significant loss. If grief is a process of healing, then depression is one of the many necessary steps along the way.
Acceptance - Acceptance is often confused with the notion of being “all right” or “OK” with what has happened. This is not the case. This stage is about accepting the reality that we’re in and recognizing that this new reality is permanent. We might never like this reality or make it OK, but eventually we accept it. We learn to live with it. It is the new norm with which we must learn to live. Finding acceptance may be just having more good days than bad ones. We can never replace what has been lost, but we can make new connections, new meaningful relationships, new inter-dependencies. Instead of denying our feelings, we listen to our needs; we move, we change, we grow, we evolve. We may start to reach out to others and become involved in their lives. We invest in our friendships and in our relationship with ourselves. We begin to live again, but we cannot do so until we have given ourselves time to process our grief.
Why are some breakup’s so much harder than others?
Consider what was going on in the relationship context in the weeks or months before it occurred. When you combine experiences of stress and trauma to grief, it can be overwhelming. It takes a toll on your mental and physical health. Your mind and body is consistently being impacted by the stress response, a nervous system reaction to feeling threatened. It triggers the release of adrenaline and cortisol, impacting sleep, appetite, making it difficult to function at your best. Symptoms of anxiety and depression may develop, as well as trauma symptoms like intrusive thoughts, nightmares, feeling disconnected from self.
When we are not in the stage of acceptance, then we are in some way fighting against or avoiding reality. This resistance to our current state of affairs keeps us attached to our negative thoughts and suffering emotions about our circumstances rather than directing us toward healing.
Open Mind + Open Heart
While we cannot control the fact that we will go through each stage, when we approach our grief with intentionality, we can bring self-awareness and self-compassion to the experience.
It’s important to remember that just because you grieve the loss of your hopes, dreams, aspirations, and the vision you created in your heart and in your minds eye associated with one specific relationship, it doesn’t mean that you will never have those things or that you are not worthy of having those hopes and dreams manifest.
You can still bring them into your reality with a new and different partner who is not only better suited for you, but one who desires to create shared hopes, dreams, aspirations, and a new relationship vision together with you! Grieving the end of a relationship doesn’t mean that you agree to the terms of what occurred - it only means that you value yourself more than to hold yourself emotionally hostage to a relationship that came to an end.
Don’t let unresolved grief and unforgiveness stand in the way between you and the opportunity to create new meaningful connections so you can let love and infinite possibilities into your life again.
If you’ve been in several short-term relationships after a major breakup but you keep hitting what feels like an emotional wall that keeps you from experiencing greater closeness and intimacy, and instead you’re experiencing fear and a desire to withdraw (maybe this has even become a pattern for you) that is a telltale sign that you have unresolved grief that is causing you mental and emotional blocks in new relationships and it’s stealing your joy.
Seek the counsel of a professional coach or therapist to support your ability to move through your grief so that you can attract and keep the love that you desire - because you are worthy.
If you’re looking for a place to find like-minded individuals to collaborative with and get support for your relationship and business pain-points, we invite you to become a member of the Edgy Entrepreneur Community on Facebook and join us for Unf*ck Your Mindset Friday at 12:30pm ET on July 29th where we’ll discuss this topic in more detail, answer your questions, and help you unpack this topic further.
Stay Edgy-
Coach Oriana Guevára, MHR, MBA
Co-Founder, The Edgy Entrepreneur
© Edgy Entrepreneur, LLC. • 51 E. Jefferson St. #3292, Orlando, FL 32802 • www.edgyentrepreneurs.com
