Parting: go forward with a light soul

Few people perceive the word “breakup” in a positive sense. saying goodbye to someone or something is always difficult, although this very concept is present in our lives from the first breath – from the moment we are born, leaving the mother’s womb.

If you think about it, then the whole subsequent life is a continuous chain of parting: with childhood and youth, with your role in the parental family, with people and your own illusions. To be able to move from one stage of life to another is to learn the art of living.

At one of the trainings in dance movement therapy, participants are asked to perform an exercise: two people stand opposite each other, joining their palms. The coach asks each pair to come up with a dance in which only the hands are involved. The music changes – and the hands must say goodbye and part. One of the participants releases other people’s palms immediately, almost without looking at their pair. Someone can’t open their fingers for a long time, moving them away gradually, and someone, with difficulty breaking away from the partner’s palms, tries to find them again after a few seconds …

This simple exercise is a good metaphor for the strategies we use when we experience goodbyes. And which one we choose depends largely on the first experience that each of us receives in early childhood.

First breakup experience

“This process is very gradual, it begins in the prenatal period and ends at about three years of age,” explains Galina Filippova, a specialist in prenatal psychology and the psychology of motherhood, Doctor of Psychology. The first experience is birth, when the infant, previously a part of the mother’s body, his flesh and blood, is for the first time physically separated from him. But the mother and child are still tuned in to the same wave, and therefore they sensitively feel the mood and state of each other: the mother is worried – and her anxiety is transmitted to the child. The child feels discomfort – and the mother immediately guesses how to help him. Breastfeeding strengthens this bond and gives the mother-child pair a sense of harmony and peace.

“Such relationships at a certain moment are internalized, become part of the person’s personality,” says psychologist Inna Khamitova, a specialist in post-traumatic stress. “If in early childhood, in the first three years of a child’s life, there was someone next to him who gave him enough love and support, his personality is likely to form strong enough to withstand almost any life test.”

“It is in childhood that we “master” the first strategies of parting,” adds French psychiatrist Willy Pasini. “In other words, we learn to separate ourselves from others without losing our self-confidence.” Psychoanalysis suggests that in our individual experience of parting there is a “matryoshka effect”: the first episode leaves an imprint on all subsequent episodes, largely determining a person’s mental reactions.

Everyone has their own experience

“Those who have grown accustomed to depend on their parents since childhood, and later continue to believe that all the good things in their lives are contained in others,” continues Willy Pasini. – For such people, any farewell means the loss of all positive emotions – because their source is inaccessible to them. That symbolic umbilical cord, which guaranteed them emotional satisfaction, turns out to be cut, which means that it is likely that certain negative conditions, such as anxiety or depression, cannot be avoided by them.

In addition to the first impressions of childhood, traces remain in the human psyche that can affect his attitude towards separation. A series of traumatic events can leave them: premature loss of parents, sudden moves from one place of residence to another, emigration … This means that not everyone is equal in their ability to adequately meet the difficult turns of life. What about those less fortunate? And is it even possible to level the odds at all?

How to end a relationship

To gain vitality, you must stop feeling like a child. We are quite capable of doing this, even if the childhood experience was painful. Of course, we cannot change the past, but we can change our attitude towards it.

To end childhood relationships with parents means to stop being offended by them because they were once unfair or not kind enough to us. To say goodbye to the childish hope that one day the parents will turn into ideal ones and finally give us the love, care and understanding that we expected from them, but never did. This rejection of one’s own illusions, parting with them is a necessary and important stage in inner maturation.

Psychotherapy can help transform relationships, but you also need your own inner work. As we grow older and gain new life experiences, we can from time to time put ourselves in the place of our parents and try to understand the motives of their actions. Often, a careful analysis of family history helps to cope with resentment towards the mother or father. If we realize that the childhood of our parents was also far from cloudless, it will be easier for us to feel sorry for those offended children that they once were, to stop demanding love from them, which they have not learned to give. They, too, were not loved enough.

Feel inner freedom

“Release from childhood grievances helps to cope with later traumas and makes us freer,” Inna Khamitova is convinced. “Only under this condition do we begin to do certain things, meet and part, guided by real needs, and not by the desire to prove something to mom or dad, who, it seems to us, did not give us enough love.” Negative childhood experiences no longer distort communication – we see loved ones for who they are, and we do not overload relationships with feelings that we once experienced in childhood.

In other words, we learn to feel happy next to partners, friends, children and our own parents, while at the same time maintaining inner independence and spiritual strength in order to survive parting with them with minimal losses if necessary. To use the metaphor of the psychiatrist Marcel Rufault, such a connection can be likened to a sea knot that holds tightly, but is easily untied if necessary.

Slowly end obsolete connections

Parting, even when the relationship has exhausted itself, does not happen by itself. This is work, and it takes time and the application of mental strength. But it is necessary to fulfill it, because how we will live further depends on the result – whether we will be able to enter into new relationships and whether we will be happy in them. It is pointless to artificially maintain obsolete connections, but it is important to understand that the process cannot be fast. The psyche needs time to feel the essence of what is happening. Understanding whether separation is really inevitable is not always easy.

“Before making a final decision, try to do everything to save the relationship,” advises psychotherapist Elena Lopukhina. “If they really have exhausted themselves, you will understand it pretty quickly. Your efforts will free you from the guilt that we often feel in such a situation. You will have the right to say with a clear conscience: “We did everything we could, and now we can say goodbye consciously, without unnecessary pain.”

There is no need to try to break the connection with one sharp movement, trying to erase from the life of someone who was once dear to us. A breakup does not end a relationship, and there is no point in wasting energy on the impossible – on forgetting, erasing your past. These forces will come in handy to do the important work of parting and move on with a better understanding of ourselves and those we love.