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Breakup advice from a relationship therapist

Hello all. Hopefully all of you have been doing well. Unfortunately, although im not clinically experienced in therapy myself(as you guys may have hoped), I have visited a relationship therapist who was a friend of my relatives back when I wanted to become a therapist myself back in 11th grade 4 years ago. After some general talks about this possible future career, I out of curiosity asked what the best breakup advice would be regarding if I had to encounter a future breakup if I were to enter a relationship with someone. He said that the first thing one should acknowledge is that love is an overwhelming emotion that defies rationality and logic. A breakup would bring even the emotionally strongest people on their knees, despite how many emotional struggles they have endured in the past with seemingly little effort. It brings even the most logical people into a great state of confusion. They may act on emotions rather than their own rationality, serving as proof that emotions can overpower logic. Not only do people struggle emotionally, but also physically. People suffer from a lack of appetite, breathing would be like inhaling toxic gas for them, and many patients of his would report body cramps all over. He told me that emotional strength is determined by how quickly one would strive to rebuild himself and focus on healing from a breakup. As much as time is needed in order to heal, effort is the main thing that heals one from any emotionally devastating experience, whether if it’s a breakup or loss of a loved one!

Here comes my own advice: Rather than trying to distract yourself in the toughest stages of a breakup, just grieve it out. Cry if you want. Grieve if you want. Smash everything you see if that is what helps you. Acknowledge that it requires time and effort to regain a positive and healthy mindset. Thinking about your ex often is normal. Feelings of anger and regret are normal. Having desire to stalk his or her social media is normal. If these thoughts are overpowering you, talk to a friend or family. Mental force alone does not overpower love. Therefore trying to force yourself to believe that the “past is just the past” will never work. We are humans, not androids or computers that can delete unwanted data from our memories. We need to stick and become one with our emotions and evolve with them. Apart from exercise and daily goals, focus on releasing oxytocin and serotonin. These activities can include a warm bath, hot coffee, writing a sad poem, etc(research this if you wish). A particular advice tho, is to call a friend or family. Talk about what made you feel grateful about their presence. Talk about any particular moments you guys had together. Try to establish the most heart-warming conversation you can attempt. Read books on character building. Grab sunlight and fresh air too. Practice tidiness and organization. Perhaps stop wearing shoes in the house if you are wearing them(I feel so much better not wearing shoes in the house lmao). What I would recommend for you guys is to start doing daily goals. Every morning when you wake up, the first thing I want you to do is to try and plan out how you will spend your day. Try to make it as productive as possible without making it too overbearing or inadequate. The key here is to gradually uplift your motivation and spirit without overstraining yourself. As you heal, gradually challenge yourself more and more. Push to your limits, but do not go beyond them. At the end of the day, I want you to reflect on how it was. How could you improve it? Was it helpful? Was it worth it? Additionally, prepare a list of daily triggers on a separate piece of paper. It is always helpful to write down your emotions as it can help process your thoughts better.

After a decent healing, consider doing long-term goals. try and Conquer any fears and insecurities you may have. Overcoming them helps build your self-worth as you recover from a breakup. Practice good character. Perhaps dedicate some time into supporting homeless children or pets by joining a particular group. Offer some change to the homeless too. Try new things in life. Hobbies are fine, but the problem is for hobbies is that you are repeating the same lesson you learned over and over. For many people, finding new ways to cope by building new skills and experiences does not only help one recover from a breakup, but also score points in life in general. Scoring points in life is not just about building new experiences and skills. It refers to emotional growth as a whole. Emotional growth is how we evolve as people. We become better at handling issues as well as developing good moments as we mature. Imo, everyone should strive to learn new things. This is because we share a planet with nearly 8 billion people who have went through different experiences. Therefore, there is always something we can learn from each other. Not only that, we then have the solar system which is outside earth. Then we have the galaxy, and then the universe, and lastly, a realm of space which humankind is completely unfamiliar with. Therefore, logic is infinite. It is impossible to learn everything. No matter how much we learn humankind will never be able to learn everything. This is why we take advantage of every opportunity to learn!

Finally see the breakup as an opportunity to grow stronger and wiser. As you heal, your heart grows stronger and stronger. Your outlook will improve! Look forward to seeing the evolved version of yourself! Hopefully this doesn’t trigger any of you, but a breakup might just be a blessing in disguise. Yes it is painful, but no one else was hurt. All that happened was that your heart was shattered into pieces. All that needs to be done is to recollect the shattered pieces of your heart and re-glue them. A recovery from a breakup will help you deal with other emotional challenges, whether if they are lighter or heavier. The thing that will score you the most amount of points is the recovery from the breakup! Completing day to day chores and everyday responsibilities to achieving major goals grants you new points in life! Scoring as many points in life as you can without unnecessarily overstraining yourself emotionally is the second best advice I can ever offer to one going through a breakup!

Another piece of advice i forgot to include is to let go of grudges against your ex, even towards anyone. Im not suggesting to let go because its wrong, but because it is unhealthy to a person as a whole. It can affect your relationships with others and overall all it will do is prevent you from having a positive outlook towards life. Build the time and effort to gradually let go of your grudges. I BELIEVE that one reason why people struggle on accepting and moving on is because they hold resentment towards their ex. Part of accepting and moving on is to let go of hatred. Hatred is never healthy at all. Try to see yourself as the bigger person and pity them for what they are if you were in the right.

Conclusion: Yes it is a hard and difficult road with many roadblocks and obstacles. A breakup will be like a rollercoaster. Some days are easier. Other days it may be a challenge getting out of bed! Remember that as you go through this you will grow. You will mature. You are in the process of overcoming one of life's most emotional challenges. You will grow stronger. You will be able to lead other people as well. See your breakup as a physical illness/injury that requires time and judicious effort to bring yourself up for recovery. Finally, I want you to scream at the sky. Scream and yell at the top of your lungs saying that you will not let the past cling onto you and you will be mighty and work on yourself to recover. To give you some motivation, think about the low economic status the poor residents of Africa suffer from. They go through so many fears. They lack housing, food, access to medical care, as well as lack of access to clean water. They have to go through the fear of losing someone dear to them and may have even lost so many loved ones from disease or poor living conditions. Despite these emotional challenges they struggle from, they are always up on their feet, working for survival, staying positive and happy. They are some of the mightiest people on Earth. If these people were able to achieve such emotional strength from these hardships, then why can’t you? To become strong like them, challenge yourself. Stop relying on simple everyday comforts such as Wifi and technology and strive to improve. Becoming stronger means extending your comfort zone. Everyday challenges was how the people of poor economic status stand mightier. My overall summarizing advice is to not try and simply “move on.” In fact, I encourage you to embrace your grief and grow from it. Every emotion serves its purpose in our hearts. Happiness brings us energy and motivation, but negative emotions such as anger and grief grant us exceptional emotional growth once we recover from them. Therefore it is at times of hardship, no matter how big it is, should be embraced. The summary of this post is: rest. Then cradle. Then stand. Then baby steps. Then walk. Then sprint. Then sprint faster. Finally. sprint as fast as you can.