10 Tips to Help You Heal After a Break-Up
Breakups are hard. This is obviously not news. But even though we already know that to be true, what we still often get hung up on (even if we’ve been through multiple breakups before) is: how in the world do I begin to get over it, move on, and heal after a relationship has ended? Here are some real tips, beyond making sure you “eat, shower, sleep, repeat” that will help you on your journey to reconnecting with yourself as an individual post-breakup.
1. Unfollow them on social media
I know, this one is tough, especially since the two of you probably are no longer talking and filling each other in on what your day-to-day looks like. Maybe you want to know if they are dating someone new already, or if they are suddenly living their best life now that the relationship is over. As addicting as it may be to soothe your curiosity and uncertainty by checking their social media pages and reading through old text threads looking for answers, stop yourself before you even start. Unfollow or block them so their newly single life is not as accessible as the tap of a fingertip. Here’s a hard truth: what they’re up to is none of your business anymore. And the same is true the other way around, that it’s not their business what you’re up to, either.
It also may be difficult to go to their profiles simply to unfollow them, but you know what will be much harder? Having a photo pop up on your feed of them smiling and holding someone new, when you were just beginning to feel better. Remove the temptation of checking their social media, or the chance of being triggered unexpectedly. You are not going to see what you’re hoping to see, which might be that they are grieving just as hard as you. Most people don’t post those things online. It’s only their highlight reels. Don’t subject yourself to that if you can help it.
2. Put away their things and your own personal items that remind you of that person
Maybe your ex’s sweatshirt is still your favorite, or there’s a gift on your dresser that makes you think of them just by looking at it. Put it away. I repeat, put it away. You don’t have to throw out your items in the nearest dumpster (although that is a possibility, too), but put it away where your eyes aren’t going to be bombarded by the sight of those things, flooding your mind with memories of happier days. If simply walking into your living space or your bedroom where the two of you often slept next to each other makes you sad, rearrange the room. Thinking back, how awesome did it feel to rearrange our rooms when we were kids? It felt like a whole new place.
Be honest with yourself and just know that hanging on to the nostalgic items are not helping you move on as fast as you could be. Put them away and revisit them later to see if they hold the same meaning to you.
3. Give yourself some space from that person, try to go “no contact” for a while
Raise your hand if a friend (or maybe you are that friend) has gone back to the same ex over and over and over, breaking up and getting back together a bunch of times, because they can’t stand to sit with their own negative emotions and would rather soothe themselves by going back to the person that hurt them. BREAKING NEWS: it typically doesn’t help repair the issues. Try to reduce or eliminate contact for a while (i.e. more than a few hours or days) and see what comes up for you. Giving yourself some time with your own thoughts will likely allow you to start feeling some relief, intermixed with the grief. Feeling both is absolutely normal, but let that relief tell you a new story, and take some time to explore that for a while before going back to the source of your grief in the first place. Amy Crichton, MFT, a fellow The Therapy Group therapist based in West Chester, PA, tells us that in the meantime, we should “take care of ourselves in the ways we wanted to be taken care of in the relationship.”
4. Allow yourself to grieve, without trying to “fix” or replace your negative emotions
There is no denying it - breakups are hard. They make you go through all sorts of uncomfortable emotions, such as shock, sadness, loneliness, anger, and confusion. Some of these emotions are what I like to call “intolerable emotions,” the one or two emotions that just feel absolutely unbearable to process. Most of the time, that stems back from emotions that weren’t nurtured or validated when we were kids or during times of trauma. We all have intolerable emotions, and it is our job to not run away from them, but start to process little by little and allow yourself to feel them, even if they’re incredibly painful. If yours is sadness, allow yourself to cry and grieve the small things first. If it’s loneliness, plan a solo date where you do things by yourself throughout the day, and remind yourself that being alone doesn’t have to mean that you’re lonely. If it’s anger, scream into a pillow, write the nastiest letter you could ever write, and then burn it (please do yourself a favor and do not send it to its intended recipient). All of your emotions are valid, and don’t need to be fixed or avoided. However, you are responsible for not harming others with your emotions, such as harassing your ex or expecting your loved ones to drop everything every time you’re feeling lonely. Sara Samuels, LMFT is a therapist in Philadelphia, and she says, “grief has no time limit and needing a support system is not only understandable but recommended.” Reach out to your people if it’s easy for you to isolate yourself, and lean on them during this difficult time.
5. Distract, but try not to “numb”
This one can be confusing, so let me explain. Processing a breakup can be a marathon, so distraction can be good self care in the right doses. Distracting yourself by running errands or walking around in public when you begin to feel down, calling a friend to talk about their day when you begin to self-blame for the relationship ending, or finding other healthy distractions (e.g., music, movies, art, reading, exercise) in order to self soothe yourself BETWEEN moments where you process your emotions can help you process the breakup much more efficiently. It gives you breaks when necessary, refueling your emotional energy. However, when it gets to an extreme that you turn toward overspending, over-exercising, binging, abusing drugs and alcohol, engaging in risky sex, or other numbing behaviors to avoid your emotions every time they come up, you never process through them and they start showing up in places they don’t belong, or being projected onto people that don’t deserve it.
6. Realize that the two of you weren’t a match, even if you still consider your ex to be a good person
If there was betrayal, abuse, or neglect that lead to the demise of the relationship, it can be easier to point the finger at whoever was “the bad guy,” and move forward being fueled by the anger of being manipulated or abused for however long you were in that relationship. However, if the relationship wasn’t toxic, and one person just fell out of love, or you both realized that your visions of the future didn’t align (i.e., to have kids or not, to settle down in the city or the suburbs long term, etc.), sometimes it can be harder to move on because you don’t necessarily have a major reason to despise your ex. It is okay to realize there doesn’t have to be a “bad guy” here. After breakups, we tend to want to point the finger, so if we find ourselves not having a solid reason to point it at our ex, sometimes we point it at ourselves. Why wasn’t I good enough to make compromises with? Should I just have agreed to have children? Maybe I should have just had more sex with them and they wouldn’t have fallen out of love with me. Instead, let’s try to land on an answer that is less shaming and self-blaming, or critical and judgmental, and reframe those thoughts that the two of you just might not have been a great match, and that’s a good enough reason that it didn’t work out.
7. Reflect on what that person represented in your life
In most romantic relationships, it’s inevitable that people begin to envision a future with that new person and assign them roles for who they will be to them in that future. Were they supposed to be your spouse, who greets you at the end of a long day with a smile and a hug? Were the two of you supposed to raise children (or fur-children) together in a tight-knit family, maybe the type of family you never had for yourself? Were they supposed to be your forever travel buddy? Reflect on the life you anticipated with that person, or maybe even a life you were promised. “I’ll never leave you,” - does that sound familiar? You’re allowed to grieve that, too. Having to not only grieve the absence of your former partner, but also the idealized, “mutually beneficial” future the two of you were supposed to share, is an absolute double whammy. We beat ourselves up for being hung up on an ex (especially when they were crappy partners) but you have to realize you’re also mourning a promised or expected future, too. Give yourself some grace, and then think about how you can achieve that life on your own, or with someone else in the future. Your ex is not the only person who can share a life you love and deserve with you.
8. Lean into the things that have historically brought you joy
It can be virtually impossible to feel moments of joy during sad and difficult life transitions like breakups, but it’s imperative that you reconnect with the activities and hobbies that make you feel like you again. Samuels suggests that it’s critical to “allow for space to recognize your own worth outside of being a partner.” Maybe in the relationship, you stopped creating art as much because you were busy being social, or just Netflixing with your partner. Maybe you didn’t cook as much because you fell into a habit of getting takeout, or they were the primary cook in the relationship. Or maybe what brings you joy is a hobby that the two of you did a lot together, and you feel like it would be too painful to do it without them. Whether it was hiking, or cooking, or making music, or playing video games - whatever brings you joy, or historically has brought you joy, begin to engage in those things again. They are a part of who you are, and they don’t belong to your ex, even if they’re the one who introduced it to you.
And if you’re stuck with not knowing what hobbies you might like, look back to when you were a child. What did you enjoy doing before you had to worry about what was cool? Were you always outdoors on your bike and climbing things? Maybe get into hiking or rock climbing. Were you writing songs or poems or performing dance numbers for your family members? Maybe take a class, or at least have solo dance parties in your living room. Maybe you were constantly creating art that hung all over the fridge and walls of your bedroom? Go to the art supply store and pick up a few items and see what happens. If you can’t remember what you enjoyed, reach out to your parents, siblings, or friends who knew you as a child and ask what they remember you doing during play time. Chances are that part of you still lives inside you and would still enjoy doing those things again.
9. Be patient
Healing takes time, whether it’s from a breakup or other traumatic event. If you’ve been with your former partner long term, no matter if you knew for a while that it might be over or if it’s a total shock, the change in daily life is new. We live in systems, and our brains love homeostasis, meaning we like to keep things how they always have been. When those systems change, such as switching careers, or the death of a loved one, or having a new baby, or breaking up with a partner, our brains are wired to make us crave the old routine. Be patient with your emotions, as they aren’t always based in logic and truth, and they often come in waves. The best analogy I’ve heard for this is: “I am the sky and my emotions are the weather.” Sunny days come and go, rainy days come and go, and sunny days come again. The same is true for your happiness and sadness.
10. Create closure for yourself
We often feel that we won’t be able to move on from the relationship until we have that final, tell-all conversation that answers every question we’ve been ruminating on, and we have clarity on what exactly went so wrong. Here’s one more hard truth: it might not happen. Just because you are sad about the end of a relationship doesn’t mean that it’s a sign that the relationship was meant to be your forever. You may not find out why they fell out of love with you, or why they decided to pursue someone else, or why they aren’t outwardly grieving the same way that you are. You might not get to say a final goodbye to their friends and family, many of whom you may have adopted as your own. That’s an especially painful pill to swallow. As mentioned before, you might find it helpful to write letters to the people you’d like to say goodbye to, and maybe even find some peace along the way - even though you don’t send them.
Lastly, you may feel you’re deserving of an apology from your ex, but may never have the opportunity to hear those words come out of their mouth. That forgiveness may need to come from within you, and Samuels suggests that “forgiveness for yourself or your ex does not mean allowance or that what happened was acceptable.” Just because we reach acceptance that it did happen, doesn’t have to mean how things ended was okay.
Just know that eventually, you’ll recover from this and be better for it. I can’t tell you how long it will take, and unfortunately no one else can either. If you invest in yourself, remove opportunities of being triggered wherever you can, and give yourself grace and patience, you will come out on the other side of this pain you’re feeling. Nobody changes overnight, so the delayed gratification of healing yourself over time will feel a whole lot better than the instant gratification of jumping back into a broken system that doesn’t work anymore. Rebuild your life again by taking what you loved about your old one, leaving the rest behind, and finding new things that bring you joy and peace.
About the Author: Kaitlyn Peabody, LMFT is a licensed marriage and family therapist at The Therapy Group specializing in relationships, domestic violence and helping clients heal after break-up.