Managing Your Tumultuous Emotions, and What Not To Do When Your Relationship Ends
The loss of love is no small matter for our tender hearts.
Whether it’s the gradual realisation that your partner isn’t really there for you in any real meaningful way, or the sudden rejection of hearing your partner say that they don’t want you any more, or worse still, discovering that they have already found a new sexual playmate, the severing of a love relationship can break us to the core.
Something has been broken, and it can feel more than just your heart. It may be your feeling of being safe in the world, your ability to make sense of your life, and your faith in love.
You can feel acute anxiety, an obsessive impulse to connect with your lost love, vigilant scanning and blind hope of catching a glimpse of them somewhere, burning anger and outrage at being betrayed, and the frightening impulse to lash out and hurt yourself or others, or an abyss of despair and the desire to curl up and die. And then you may also feel some disturbing physical symptoms: a fast heart rate, sleeplessness, lack of appetite or hypervigilance.
The most important thing you can do for yourself when you’re heartbroken
“You know when you come across one of those empty shell people and you think, what the hell happened to you?” (From the movie “Under the Tuscan Sun”)
Do you know people who are like this? Never quite the same again after a bad breakup. Never get their mojo back, never feel fully alive, living a half dead existence with no vitality.
Being turned off ever loving again, or deciding it’s better to just have one night stands with no commitment, or half relationships where they don’t have to give much, and don’t receive much either.
Many, many people never fully recover from a bad break-up, and are destined to live the rest of their lives as a depressed shadow of their former selves.
It is so sad to see so many people wasting away their lives like this. And mostly they do this because they don’t know that there is actually a proven way to fully recover from their heartbreak and get your spark back.
In fact, as outrageous as it may seem at the moment, be wiser and in even better shape emotionally and in every other way than you have ever been before.
I will show you how.
To fully recover and live a vital life again
Full recovery comes about by doing 2 things:
1. Firstly the most important thing you can do for yourself as you are going through your breakup is to feel all of your feelings fully.
2. The other thing is to learn from what this relationship breakup is showing you. (more about this in the next section)
Fully feeling all your feelings
The most important rule is to allow yourself to feel all the feelings that are coming up for you, no matter how awful they feel.
Give yourself some time every day – an hour a day to start with, and after a month or so, a half an hour a day. To just sit somewhere comfortable and feel what you are feeling.
It can help to write these down in a journal, or share them with a friend who listens and supports you, and it can also be very helpful to find a Psychologist who specialises in relationships to share these with.
Time does not heal all wounds. If it did, there would be no unresolved grief, and no hurt from long ago that still upsets you from time to time.
When you don’t feel your painful feelings
Pain that is not faced and felt, DOES NOT GO AWAY. It stays inside and festers and grows, making each successive loss harder and harder to cope with.
So then your life becomes less trusting, less loving and compassionate, less hopeful, and narrower across the board.
You become afraid of being hurt, you feel less inclined to get close to people, or you could get close for a while, and then get frightened and run away, or you assume the worst in people and start behaving toward them as if it were true, or create arguments that don’t need to be had.
Where most people go wrong
Because it feels initially difficult to “go there” and actually feel your feelings, many people successfully avoid or numb many of them by downing a bottle of wine (or any alcohol), eating to excess, chain smoking or working non-stop hours.
Other forms of self-medicating are continual shopping sprees, watching endless TV, spending all your spare time on internet games or porn.
Be aware that these do not help your healing, and actually stall your recovery by many months or years even.
So be gentle with yourself and give yourself the biggest gift you could possibly imagine, by feeling all your feelings, through each of your 3 phases of grieving. (see next blog for the 3 stages of grieving when a relationship ends)
Your next full vibrant life with all manner of new possibilities is depending on it.
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