The end of a marriage or serious relationship can be a catastrophic upheaval. It can feel like the end of the world. Or worse. Set yourself up for success by learning healthy ways to cope and reach that light at the end of the tunnel in one piece.
Let’s not sugarcoat it. Divorce sucks. Breakups suck. Losing a spouse or partner sucks. Dealing with the pain and figuring out how to move on can feel overwhelming sometimes. But why is that? Losing someone, whether to death or the end of a relationship, is a traumatic event that causes real pain. If the person is longer in our lives but is still out there somewhere, after a divorce or a major breakup, the grieving process can sometimes be even harder to recover from than a relative passing away.
But first, a little science…
Brain studies show that heartbreak and separation anxiety from a romantic partner can activate the same parts of our brain that make withdrawal so painful for cocaine and opioid addicts. When we fall in love we quite literally become “addicted” to them.
It’s no wonder the end of a relationship can feel like hell, like our world is over, like we’ll never be happy again. And it can make us think and do crazy things despite our otherwise rational minds.
That’s why it’s so easy for otherwise smart, rational people to fall into self-destructive behaviors and patterns to numb the pain or distract from the feelings.
For some people, such a dramatic upheaval can trigger depression, insomnia, loss of appetite, and even manifest itself as physical ailments and illnesses.
There’s a saying, “time heals all wounds.” That’s partially true. But as anyone that has pined over an ex for a month or a year or more, or turned to unhealthy or destructive coping mechanisms, or eventually ended up in yet another similarly bad or toxic relationship knows, time alone doesn’t necessarily do all the work.
A better way is to be proactive in our own healing process. Like going to the hospital and getting treatment for a wound, rather than hoping the broken knee, stab wound, or in this case the broken heart, will get better on its own.
Here are 9 tips to help deal with brief and pain after a divorce or the end of a serious relationship.
(For more about healthy ways to get back on your feet during and after the grieving and emotional recovery process, check out this post. )
1. First and foremost, allow yourself to grieve
The end of a relationship can be traumatic, and the grieving period is the toughest. We go through withdrawal, because a major part of our lives is now missing and we have a massive void formerly formerly occupied by someone we were very close and intimate with. And the void left in our dreams and plans for the future.
There are five stages of grief – denial, depression, anger, bargaining, acceptance – and you may go through some or all of them. You may jump between stages from moment to moment, hour to hour, or day to day. It’s perfectly normal to feel sad, angry, confused, frustrated, overwhelmed, even all of these at once.
The best thing to do is give yourself time and let the feelings pass through you. Don’t dwell too long on them, but don’t suppress and bottle them up either. Fighting or denying your feelings will delay the healing process and carry over into, and potentially sabotage, your future relationships. Like tossing junk in a closet so it’s not cluttering up the floor. The junk never goes away. Deal with it before it accumulates and starts to smell.
Conversely, if you knew for a while that things weren’t working or tried unsuccessfully to repair your relationship before the actual end date, you may have already started the grieving and/or emotional detachment process much earlier. In which case your post-split grieving and recovery may end up being faster and easier.
Don’t feel guilty if you don’t feel as bad or heartbroken as you think you should. We all handle grief and loss differently, and it’s different in every situation.
2. Take a deep breath, or 100
When we are in the throes of grief and emotional anxiety, it can manifest in our bodies as well. If you are starting to feel overwhelmed or panic-y, or just feel tightness in your chest, then take a deep breath.
And another one. And another one.
Breathing is a symbolic process. We breathe in new healing air, let it nourish our bodies, and we breathe out old negative waste. With each breath, we can expel the past, the waste, the things that no longer serve us.
We breathe out the garbage literally as well. The carbon dioxide we breathe out is a by-product of cell metabolism. We’re breathing out all the calories we burn, like exhaust pipes on our cars.
Deep breaths and sighing can also relieve stress. As in…”breathe a sigh of relief.” It’s true!
There is a major health benefit as well. Slowing down your breath, even doing some breathing exercises such as 4/7/8 (breathe into your lungs and stomach for 4 seconds, hold in for 7, and exhale for 8), can help reduce stress and physical discomfort, and restore the body to a state of calm.
This is because slow, measured breathing helps our bodies shift from our sympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for our fight or flight response and a heightened alert state, to our parasympathetic nervous system, which regulates our “rest-and-digest / feed-and-breed” basic body functions.
If this seems to help you, do it more often! Try doing it 3 times a day for five minutes for a week or as long as you feel you need it.
3. Remind yourself that…
Something that helped me make sense of and come to terms with the loss and grief of relationships is the saying…
Good relationships don’t end
And…
Divorce is not failure
These really helped me center myself and snap back to reality. When all else fails, I just remind myself of this.
If a relationship ended, that means there were things that weren’t working well enough to keep it together. And that’s okay. It’s okay if things end. There is no shame.
It’s an ending, and a chance for another new beginning, a happier relationship and happier future.
It’s better to be alone and have a chance to move on and find something truly wonderful, than to be stuck in a relationship that is unhappy, unfulfilling, or unhealthy. Give yourself closure by being thankful for the time and the good memories with that person for the gift that they were.
4. Chicken soup for the stomach
When you’re going through what feels like hell, like the end of the world, it’s easy to want to just stay in bed or not get up from the couch. Cooking and eating right might be the last thing on your mind. Or a half-eaten bag of chips might end up being “breakfast.”
This is the precise time you need to remember to take care of yourself.
Whatever you do, don’t neglect feeding your body. Your soul may need some chicken soup, but your stomach does too.
5. Check yourself before you wreck your…emotional progress
Come up with some sort of aphorism or action you can conjure up when you start to feel the waterworks coming, or even start to put back on the rose-colored glasses and drift back into la-la-it-wasn’t-all-that-bad-maybe-we-should-get-back-together-land.
When I was going through my divorce, I used to tell myself, “Good relationships don’t end. Good marriages don’t end. This is for the best.” This helped me stay strong in my decision and feel better that I made the right decision.
Or you might say, “remember how they used to treat you, you deserve better.”
6. Lean on your support system
Now is the time to fill the space left by your ex with other healthy connections.
Have a guys’ or girls’ night out, or call up a friend or cousin you haven’t spoken to in a while. Strengthen those friend and family connections. Find a new community to become a part of — a men’s group, or a support group, a supportive Facebook or Reddit group or community.
Take a class, reconnect with your cultural roots, join a crossfit or other kind of gym.
When I opened up to some friends during the early stages of moving towards a divorce, I discovered that several of them had also gone through divorces in the past. They shared their experiences with me, and that helped give me courage to move forward, let me know that I wasn’t alone, and that the pain and guilt I was feeling was normal and would pass eventually.
One caveat though — avoid getting caught up in trashing your ex with your friends. It won’t help in the long run.
To process and move on properly, you have to look at the relationship objectively and not unfairly pin all the blame on the other person (not any more than is deserved, anyway). And the longer you’re putting that much energy into your ex, the longer they are living in your head rent-free.
7. Time helps, but it can’t fix everything
The grieving process can take time, depending how long you were together, and how emotionally attached you were when it ended. It may take weeks, or months, sometimes a year or more, to cope and recover.
If you were together for 10 or 20 years, don’t be surprised if it takes a few years before you feel “okay” again.
But on the other hand, time doesn’t heal every wound. Some wounds are deeper and won’t go away on their own. If you’re not starting to feel better or make any progress, make sure you’re taking the right steps to process everything in a healthy way, and seek professional help if you feel stagnant or overwhelmed. There’s no shame in it.
In some cases, at the beginning, you may not feel much of anything. Men can often have delayed grief. It’s like DOMS (delayed-onset muscle soreness) when you do a heavy leg workout on Friday, feel fine Saturday, and then on Sunday or Monday you can barely walk.
For me, after a relationship that lasted a little shy of two years, I felt fine for the first two months. Then it hit me. Hard. And I was in a very dark, depressed place for close to four months before I felt okay again.
8. Face your feels head on (this is a big one!)
When you aren’t in control of your feelings and emotions, they end up controlling you. And not in a cool way like Ratatouille under your chef hat directing you to craft culinary masterpieces.
More like…crafting crazy coping mechanisms:
- Avoiding resolving your emotional issues and trauma
- Inability to emotionally connect with others
- Outbursts of anger, road rage, holes in the wall, and in some cases violence leading to jail time or worse.
Distractions alone won’t reduce the pain or help you move on, they’ll just help you forget for a while.
To get closure, you have to face your feelings and deal with them.
No other person can give you closure. Only you have the power to let yourself feel closure, accept the past as the past, and move on.
The more you bottle up and suppress your feelings of shame, anger, and fear, and the more relationships you go through without facing or dealing with them, the more they will build up and potentially sabotage future relationships.
Like an episode of “Hoarders” only with growing piles of emotional baggage.
This is true whether it’s feelings from a past romantic relationship, or unresolved issues or trauma from childhood or past experiences. It’s where issues surrounding trust, abandonment, closeness and vulnerability, self-esteem, anxiety, and more can often stem from.
At the same time, getting stuck on blame, anger, frustration, second-guessing, whether it’s directed at yourself or your ex, keeps you in a negative cycle and prevents you from healing.
Look for any other unhealthy coping mechanisms you may have developed, such as…
- deflection and jumping into new relationships without healing
- picking partners that are similar to past toxic relationships
- chemical/substance coping mechanisms
- addictions to substances or activities
- obsession with your ex, talking or thinking about them all the time, including blaming them and playing the victim for months or years)
- continued contact and codependency with your ex, or stalking (cyber/social or IRL)
If you find this part of the process to be overwhelming or too much to handle on your own, there are great books out there to start with. I’ll leave some links at the end of this post.
And sometimes books aren’t enough, which leads us to number 9…
9. Talk with a professional
When dealing with more serious and/or prolonged grief, there may be deeper issues that can’t be solved by just reading a well-meaning self-help book or by confiding in a friend or family member.
There’s no substitute for talking to a trained therapist or psychologist when the pain or trauma or work needed is deeper and/or heavier.
After my divorce, I thought I was doing okay, relatively speaking. But soon after moving out, I started seeing a therapist to deal with my internal shame and guilt, and to make sure I was handling and processing my divorce and my relationship and boundaries with my ex in a healthy way.
I went in every few weeks for the first four months until I felt comfortable and confident that I had the tools I needed to help myself when I was feeling down or overwhelmed. Later on I was able to go back to the same therapist at other times to talk after other breakups or to check in when I was going through other big inner work transitions.
Additional resources
If you’re going through a breakup and having a hard time with the grieving process right now, I hope this has helped. Just know that you’re not alone. And it gets better. If you take care of yourself, the process hopefully doesn’t have to be quite so painful.
If you are looking for more post-breakup resources, I have found these to be excellent.
Simple, no-nonsense book about healing and moving on after a heartbreak:
Getting Past Your Breakup – Susan J. Elliott
For more intense breakups, learning to re-calibrate your “chemistry compass” and stop the cycle of bad/toxic relationships and destructive habits, or just to read a really great and science-backed book about breakups and healing your heart, check out:
Breakup Bootcamp: The Science of Rewiring Your Heart – Amy Chan
For more about healthy ways to turn heartache into growth and get back on your feet, check out the companion post here.
