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Your couple is no more. You are bitter, hurt and do not understand what to do now. How to come to terms with the new reality and move on? Start with these steps.
“It’s been six months since our relationship ended, and I still can’t think about him without tears,” complains 39-year-old Yulia. “It seems that I deleted the joint photos from the phone, and cleaned the contact list, but nothing helps.”
They say out of sight, out of mind. Why doesn’t this saying always work? Because freeing the outer space is easy, but the inner one is not. It is more complex and subtle. Throwing away things that remind you of an ex-partner, going to work, forgetting – these are ways to distract yourself, a painkiller that gives a temporary effect. So?
Existential-humanistic psychotherapist Anna Kozlova offers several steps for effective self-support.
1. Admit your pain
We drive away from ourselves the thoughts of someone who was close to us just recently, so we protect ourselves from the feeling of loss that tears us apart, because we do not want to be wounded, vulnerable. But in doing so, we also suppress our feelings, devalue them, put on a mask of indifference, as if the ended relationship was not so important and necessary. This is self-deception.
The pain returns because the other one has taken a place in your heart. Any pain relief measures will work only after you honestly admit to yourself: “This relationship was, we used to be very good together, but that time has passed.”
2. Boost your self-esteem
When you acknowledge the loss, it will be easier for you to focus on yourself and see how you can take care of yourself. The gap somehow hits our narcissistic part – we feel unloved, imperfect, unworthy.
You can compensate for these feelings with a sense of self-worth, an increase in self-esteem. This will help you to realize yourself, to feel like a professional. Learn something, upgrade yourself in some area, or return to activities that you once left.
3. Accept support
Sometimes in difficult moments you don’t want to talk to anyone, the only desire is to hide under a blanket and get out when all this passes and it becomes easier. But the “I can do it myself” attitude is not always effective. Trauma makes us weaker, especially if we are prone to self-flagellation.
Therefore, do not run from those who want to support you. Meet with those whom you trust, who are ready to listen to your story for the hundredth time, hug, cry or laugh together and will not try to calm you down with banal phrases.
4. Pamper yourself
Have you broken up. This is your new reality, but life goes on. Start filling it with something good. Get into self-investment. Say to yourself, “I can afford to do things for myself. Because I am! I don’t disappear because someone left. I continue to be valuable to myself.”
Existential psychotherapist and philosopher Amy van Dortzen calls this “the work of love,” the most important thing in it is to turn the focus of attention from whoever your thoughts are now on to yourself.
5. Go to your favorite places
“It was“ our ”cafe, and now I don’t even have a foot there, although it pulls,” survivors of a breakup often argue like this. What if it’s the other way around? Listening to the same music, going to the same places – it will help not to hold on to the past. The memories we run from still catch up. But if you live them, they will be filled with a different meaning.
One day you will notice that your favorite place is no longer so charged, because there is no longer the one with whom it was associated. And you can choose to forget it or go there quietly.
6. Give yourself time
On average, it takes a year to rethink a breakup. We need the first experiences of living bright moments in a new status: the first New Year without him/her, the first birthday, the first vacation. There are relationships that are so filled with meaning and values that it takes more time for self-transformation.
The collapse of a reality in which you have long invested entails deep disappointment. And it takes time to feel worthy of love and want to build new relationships. To come to the discovery that I will still be loved and I can love.
7. Take back your future
Often we devalue our life to relationships that ended, it seems that nothing happened before them. And then the trauma is perceived especially painfully, it fills everything, and it is difficult to discern new meanings behind it.
Remember yourself before this relationship: what thoughts, desires, goals you had. Admit to yourself that the period when you were together has boundaries, it is not your whole life. And this could be a very big discovery.
Maybe ending a relationship is the best thing that has happened to you at the moment, but not the only good thing that will happen in life. At least if you choose to.