Breakup Advice

Coping with breakups can be challenging. Breakups have the potential to simultaneously crush our hopes and dreams and trigger our deepest insecurities and fears. Yet, while some are lucky enough to marry their first love and stay married for life, most of us will at some point have to face the prospect of coping with breakups.

There are several factors that can help make the process of dealing with a breakup as optimal as it can be, including:

• Take the time and have the necessary communication to decide if you want to attempt to restore the relationship or begin the process of moving on. It will be easier to cope once you’ve made a final decision on this matter, however you will need to strike a balance between cutting off a potentially salvageable relationship too soon and dragging out a hopeless one too long.

• Expect the breakup to bring an array of emotions and allow yourself to grieve.

• Be aware that within the emotions raised by a breakup there often lie extremely important lessons about you, your identity, your past, and how you should proceed in the future. Try to look more deeply into and underneath these feelings to explore what messages they are trying to bring to your awareness.

• Use the period in which you are coping with a breakup as a time to potentially slow down and seek resources that you might otherwise not at other times. These can include finding healthy support groups, a talented therapist, or books that can give you insight into your relationship patterns right at the most teachable moment. We especially recommend Keeping the Love You Find as an excellent resource to read during any breakup period.

This is not an exhaustive list and, of course, much more can be shared about each of these points. But if you consider these factors and approaches, it can make coping with breakups, while still painful, a process that can ultimately improve your life.

Can we save marriage from divorce? In a society in which nearly half, if not more than half, of marriages break up, this is a question with huge implications. It affects not only the couple themselves, but their children, their extended families, and even the community at large.

There are situations where divorce is the best option. In those cases, it is wise to aim for the healthiest divorce outcome for everyone involved.

However, there are also situations where divorce can be avoided to everyone’s benefit.

How do you know which situation you are in? Is yours a situation where you should attempt to save marriage from divorce?

First you want to ask some key questions

• Is the relationship abusive physically, emotionally or otherwise?
• Are there serious addictions involved?
• Are there serious personality disorders involved?

If any of these issues are present, then divorce is a much more likely option. However, even in these cases, there is sometimes a chance to save the marriage if both partners are willing to commit to seeking professional help and making fundamental changes.

If none of the factors above are present, then ask yourself these questions:

• What are the main factors causing us to consider divorce?
• In what ways might these surface factors actually be stand-ins for more fundamental underlying personality clashes?
• How might each of our childhood experiences have played into the way these issues affect us?

You see, many divorces are caused by the interaction between the unconscious childhood wounds of the partners involved. And, if the partners are willing to become conscious of these issues, and wisely use tools and resources – such as those provided in Getting the Love You Want – to help them do so, they can turn the clashes into an opportunity to grow even closer than before.

If your relationship is on the brink, but you want to try to save marriage from divorce, we will be sharing tools and ideas to help you do so.

Can research data help you stop a break up?

That is a fascinating question raised by this interesting piece, which many people are tweeting about and sharing links to in the last couple of days:

Amazing Facts About Facebook and Breakups

Basically, writer and designer David McCandless – author of Information is Beautiful – scanned thousands of Facebook status updates, seeking patterns regarding when people’s relationships most often break up. And he found some very specific patterns.

While the patterns are interesting in themselves, what may be most interesting are the questions they raise about how we can use this kind of information. For example, if we know there are times that we are most likely to breakup, can we then do something to change that pattern for the better?

I think it’s very possible, but may require more insight on why people break up during these periods. Are these breakups that were inevitable and just seem to have their last straw broken at those specific times? Or are these relationships that, if they were able to get through those pivotal times, could then go on to be more successful?

It seems we don’t yet know the answers to these questions. But this very interesting study raises a lot of possibilities for becoming conscious of relationship patterns and using that awareness to act more wisely and intentionally – and perhaps to stop a break up altogether.