Breakup Advice

In the painful days right after a relationship has ended, it can be difficult to imagine how to get through a breakup. The pain can be so intense that some people believe it will never end. Others even feel that they want to harm themselves. It can be a serious time in a person’s life.

The most important thing in getting through a breakup is first to maintain basic safety. This means that if you truly feel like harming yourself or others, you should take steps to get the support you need. Your first step should probably be to find a good therapist in your area that can help you grieve and guide you so that you don’t do anything that you will regret later.

Once basic safety is in place, the next issue is persevering through the suffering itself. It is perfectly natural that, for some period after a breakup, you will experience pain. In fact, if you don’t experience any pain after a meaningful relationship ends, that itself may indicate a problem worth investigating.

Dealing with the pain of a breakup is a lot like dealing with the pain of any injury. If you hurt your arm, you need to take some time to relax where you don’t put too much pressure on it. Similarly, when your heart is hurting after a breakup, you may need to take some time to go easier on yourself.

Also like other injuries, depending on how serious it is, you may need to get it treated. If your arm is broken, you may need a cast. And if your breakup has triggered extremely sensitive areas for you, perhaps tied to past wounds, you may need treatment by a good therapist to help you heal up stronger than before.

The next level of getting through a breakup is learning. In many cases, underneath the pain that separations bring are important lessons about ourselves trying to come to the surface. Often the pain brings with it messages of past unresolved issues. If you express the pain through journaling, for example, you may find your mind wandering to past abuses or abandonments that you had long forgotten about. These events can be very painful to remember, but surfacing them gives you a chance to heal them and make your recovery even more full than it would have been otherwise.

Because breakups bring on periods in which we have so much to learn, it can be very helpful, at those times, to read good books about issues relevant to relationships.

The important thing to remember about how to get through a breakup is that things aren’t always what they seem. You may feel the pain will never end, but you know in your mind it will. You may feel that the person who broke up with you has hurt you like nobody before, when later you may realize that they actually triggered hurt that originates in your past more than in your present. You may feel that you have to be very strong and stoic, when in reality what you need most is to ask for help and finally let your pain out, perhaps for the first time in your life.

There is no one way to get through a breakup. We all grieve in slightly different ways. But if you follow these general guidelines, you will be able to forge your own path through the darkness and back to light and future love.

Many visitors come to our site wondering how to recover from a breakup. While there is no one formula that works for everyone, there are certain guidelines that are bound to help you come out stronger and healthier in the long run.

Recovering from a breakup is a healing process like most others. It takes time and it often happens in phases. Let’s take a look at each stage and what you can do to get through it optimally.

The Immediate Aftermath

Right after the breakup happens, you may be deeply wounded. Some studies have even shown that breakups can significantly impact our brains and hormones. So expect that you may not be yourself and that you may feel a lot of pain in the early stage right after the relationship ends. In most cases, this is normal.

Your main task in this early phase is really to simply weather the pain and grieve. And it can really be ok early on to do what it takes, minute to minute and hour to hour, to get through this step. Whatever comforts you without being overly unhealthy is alright.

It’s ok to have a little ice cream now and then. It’s ok to spend a day watching your favorite TV shows. It’s certainly ok to spend some time reading good books that can help you feel less alone.

This phase can last anywhere from a few weeks to months depending on how long and intense the relationship was. It may feel like it will never end, but know that it will eventually and persevere.

One thing to note is that if the pain seems abnormally intense or if you are feeling driven to do self-destructive things, you may want to seek professional help. There is no shame in seeking support and it may even help you grow more than you would on your own through this phase.

Readjusting to Life

In this phase, you begin to come out of the fog of the immediate aftermath. You still aren’t necessarily totally stable. You may get hit by heartbreak now and then when certain experiences trigger it. But you’re feeling more and more stable for longer periods of time.

In this phase, you will want to begin getting back to how life was before for you. Start going out more with friends. Start doing the things you’ve always enjoyed. You may find that sometimes you are fully invested in these activities and other times you are going through the motions. This is alright.

As this phase stretches out, you will increasingly find yourself getting lost in life again and only realize later that you forgot to remember to be hurt, so to speak. This is when you know you’re really getting closer to recovery.

Re-Emerging Stronger than Before

At a certain point, you will realize that not only are you going for almost all of the stretches of time without feeling intense grief, but you are even feeling stronger than you were. This is because a breakup can help you go through a form of detoxification. You cry. You process issues both current and past, conscious and unconscious. And after that takes place, just like after you’ve digested a good meal, you feel even better than you did previously.

If you want to know how to recover from a breakup, the answer is to accept that it is a process and focus on doing each step of the process to the best of your ability. Even though a breakup can feel like the end of the world at first, it can ultimately prove to be the beginning of a new and better world.

If you’re visiting our website, there is a good chance that you’re wondering how to get over a bad break up. You were recently dumped or felt that you had no alternative but to finally dump your significant other. Or perhaps it was a mutual, but very painful, split.

Now you are stuck in the aftermath. It hurts…badly. And you’re wondering what to do next.

While there is no single answer for getting over a broken heart in every situation, there are some guidelines that you can use in approaching the situation. Let’s take a look at some of these.

**Don’t Focus on “Getting Over It”** – As we talked about in our piece “How Long to Get Over a Break Up?”, one of the worst things you can do to get over a break up is, paradoxically, to try to get over it. Just like the watched pot never boils, healing from a breakup doesn’t happen optimally when you are focused on the endpoint. So if you shouldn’t focus on getting over the breakup, what should you focus on?

**Focus on Processing the Break Up One Step at a Time** – Though you may not think of it this way, healing from a relationship is a process. You can sometimes rush through the feelings and bury them, but if you do you will likely pay a price down the road. It is much more healthy in the long run to allow yourself the time to go through the process step by step and come out on the other side stronger for the long haul. So what should you focus on? Focus on what you need to do at each step. And the first step is…

**Survive the Pain without Running Back or Doing Damage** – Early on, the most difficult struggle will be to simply handle the pain without doing anything that will be more detrimental in the long run. If the relationships is clearly over, or if you know deep down that it should remain over, then your first task is simply to withstand the pain. It is difficult because, for most of us, everything in our being tells us to run to drown out pain as fast as we can. But think of the pain as a sort of exercise. You’re building your ability and confidence in your capacity to tolerate your feelings without running from them. For some of you, this will be the first time you’ve ever truly done this.

Now if you were just going to sit in pain and suffer, that would be masochistic. And this is not about masochism. So what do you do once you are surviving the pain?

**Seek Insight into what the Pain is Telling You** – The pain of your breakup is a messenger. It has within it lessons about your past and who you truly are. Once you are surviving, the next step is to mine the pain for its wisdom. This is best done with guidance from those who have experience at interpreting this kind of pain. I highly recommend you check out the books that we recommend and read them while the pain is fresh. They will teach you things you will carry with you for years to come. You may also, at this time, seek guidance in support groups online or in person or by finding a therapist, possibly one that specializes in relationship issues, who can advise you personally on how to get over a bad break up.

**Begin to Gradually Participate More in Other Activities** – There will come a point where you are able to return more proactively to your work, hobbies and social life, yet may not want to do so. It is a good idea not to push yourself too hard, just as you don’t want to jump into a rigorous exercise program while you’re still injured. But you also should push yourself a little bit, a step at a time, to get back into the action again.

**Make the Changes Called for By What You Have Learned** – Having mined your pain and started to return to life again, it’s time to grow. If you’ve read the right books or sought help from the right people, you will surely have some new ideas about how to change some of your character traits or behaviors to get out of the patterns that led to this particular breakup. When you make those changes, you are using the lessons of this breakup to improve your future life and relationships. Everything comes full circle.

At this point you are ready to throw yourself back into life, hopefully even stronger than before.

What you’ll notice is that the more you focus directly on getting over the break up, the harder it will be to move on. When you instead simply focus on each step of the process, after a while you’ll sort of lose track of time and notice more and more spurts where you forgot to think about your ex or to feel the pain. It’s a tricky, magical sort of thing.

And now you know a little more about how to get over a bad break up….by not trying to get over it at all.