How to re-discover yourself after a break-up
As the famous song says, breaking up is hard to do. Even if your head, family and friends all try to tell you it’s for the best, the agony of a break-up can be relentless. All breakups are painful, especially if you are the receiving partner and would rather stay together.
As a Clinical Psychologist this is something I see regularly, the internal struggle and pain that break-ups ignite. More than this, the stress, worry and mental health damage of break-ups is hugely multiplied by the involvement of money worries, children, perceived damage to social status and housing/living issues. So, how can you get through this time, find happiness again, pick up your self-esteem, repair your broken heart and re-discover yourself? There are a few tried and tested techniques, based in science and on research that can help.
The research
University of Arizona psychologists, Sbarra and Larson have found that broken-hearted ones who reflected more on their relationships over a nine-week period had a stronger overall recovery from their break-up.
An important part of this healing is a process called ‘self-concept reorganisation’, which involves rebuilding and strengthening the sense of who you are, independent of the relationship.
Relationships have a profound impact on the beliefs we have about ourselves, whether we realise it or not. During the course of a relationship, it’s very normal to ‘intertwine’ with a partner. Goals and directions change, as well as wants and needs for now and the future.
This isn’t because you lose yourself, though certainly that can happen, but because intimacy involves opening up to another person – opening up to their love, wants, needs, feelings, opinions, love, goals, dreams. When that happens, you can’t help but be influenced and eventually move in the same direction. Sometimes that involves adjusting your own sails. It’s all a healthy part of being with someone fully, and part of the unpredictable magic of relationships.
A break-up means the undoing of this merging, which is extremely painful to go through. However strong and independent a person may be, the fracturing of a relationship can also mean the fracturing of the self. One of the most painful parts of a break-up is that it up-ends things as you’ve come to know them. The familiar is gone, plans are changed and the future all of a sudden has too many blank spaces where happy things used to be.
How do we heal.
Part of the healing is re-establishing who you are without your partner. Anything that can repair and re-strengthen the self-concept, will accelerate healing.
So, here are some tips to help you on the path to a new, strong you after a break up:
1. Talk and think about it as much as you want.
There are a couple of ways that talking and thinking about a break-up might help to facilitate healing. The first is that talking about the relationship and thinking things through will help to bring a different perspective to things. Being in love can blur things, hide things and dress things up, sometimes at the cost of clarity. There will be a level of insight that will develop over time when you talk about the relationship and gain the perspective of others.
Don’t be afraid or ashamed of being heartbroken. It’s ok to see yourself as a victim, feel that life’s unfair and to wallow for a while but if you tell the story of your break-up as one of rejection and a lost happy ever after for too long recovery will be slow. It’s really easy to get stuck in this narrative when the thoughts are locked in your head and want to be with you at 2am. Talking to people in your tribe can help you find a way to understand your story from a position of strength; reframing the experience as an ending, rather than a rejection.
2. Journal.
Having an emotional release is an important part of healing. Journalling is one way to do this as it allows you to capture and give definition to the thoughts and feelings that are swirling around inside. Journalling doesn’t have to be done every day to have an effect. Even a few times a week will help. See my recent post on the art of journalling for more help.
3. Reclaim yourself.
Reclaiming a strong sense of self – establishing who you are outside of the relationship is really important. Remember that there were things about you that were beautiful, strong, vibrant and extraordinary before the relationship. Nothing has changed.
Think about the parts of yourself that might have been pushed aside during the relationship. When you’ve found these, find ways to build them and nurture them again.
As excruciatingly painful as it can be, a break-up is an ending of a certain part of yourself and stage of your life. It’s not the end of everything. You are not broken forever but on the road to finding a new version of yourself and your life, and that, dear humans, is a beautiful new beginning.
