November 20, 2025 • 46 mins
Going through a breakup is always going to be devastating. Heartbreak is one of the most gut-wrenching human experiences: it affects our brain, our body, our routines, our identity, and our sense of the future. Why does it hurt so much, and how do we actually get through it?
In this episode, we break down the psychology of surviving a breakup: the science, the emotions, and the practical tools that help you heal, find clarity, and eventually believe in love again.
We explore:
- The story of my TWO big breakups
- Why heartbreak activates the same neural pathways as physical pain
- The three psychological “waves” of a breakup and what to expect in each
- Why “what ifs,” longing and mind-pops keep us stuck
- How to support your healing with five research-backed strategies
- The psychology of rebounds, moving on, and knowing when you’re ready to date again
If you’re feeling lost, devastated, or convinced you’ll never love again, this episode will help you understand your pain, soften it, and slowly rebuild your sense of self.
Follow Jemma on Instagram: @jemmasbeg
Follow the podcast on Instagram: @thatpsychologypodcast
For business: psychologyofyour20s@gmail.com
The Psychology of your 20s is not a substitute for professional mental health help. If you are struggling, distressed or require personalised advice, please reach out to your doctor or a licensed psychologist.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello everybody. I'm Jemma Spake and welcome back to the
Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through
the biggest changes, moments, and transitions of our twenties and
what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back
(00:24):
to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. New listeners,
old listeners. Wherever you are in the world, it is
so great to have you here. Back for another episode
as we, of course break down the Psychology of your twenties. Today,
I want to talk about heartbreak. I want to talk
about why it is so hard, but also give you
(00:46):
kind of a guide based on psychology and my experience
on how to get over it. Maybe that's not even
the best way to say it. How to get through it,
how to process the loss, to still feel strong enough
to believe in love, how to find love again. I
want to begin by telling you all the story of
(01:10):
my worst breakup. And when I say breakup, I should
actually say breakups as in plural. In twenty twenty one,
I went through two breakups in one year, one with
a person that I was in a long term relationship
with a serious relationship with, and another with someone you know.
And the relationship was a lot less serious, but someone
(01:31):
who I deeply cared for and I can admit to
myself now like definitely loved very very much. Let me
describe kind of like the circumstances of the two in
one year breakup situation of the very tragic year that
happened to me. I had been dating my first very
(01:52):
serious boyfriend for about two years when I think I
just realized, you know, I think we both realized we
just weren't right for each other. I actually remember him,
I distinctly remember him trying to break up with me
a few months before we actually did, because he was like,
I'm writing my thesis and I'm just going to be
too busy for you, and like I need to focus
(02:13):
all my attention on my writing and I won't have
time to be with you. And I don't know why,
but I like stayed with him, even though that was
like the beginning of the end, and eventually I was
the person to break up with him two days before
Valentine's Day, I should say, because of course that was
my luck. But it wasn't gonna work, and I think
it was for the best. And after we broke up,
(02:34):
we did this like on and off again thing for
a few months before I realized he actually had a
new girlfriend he wasn't telling me about, and it was
very embarrassing. And I was in this small college town
and everybody knew and I kept telling people like, we're
going to try and make it work. Meanwhile he was
completely like he was seeing somebody else. It was terribly painful,
(02:55):
and it kind of took four months for me to
like officially begin to caree our relationship because of all
that happened, and because there was this delayed emotional reaction,
it took me a while to realize, like, oh, this
is it. We actually aren't getting back together, and that's
when the grief really began. I'm also very grateful for
that breakup because og listeners of the podcast will know
(03:18):
that is how the psychology of your twenties started. And
I think that it was like the thing that I
needed to expand my life and to take a risk
and to be creative and to know what I cared about.
So I kind of owe him a bit of a
thank you. I owe him my dream job, so thank
you very much, But that is a different story for
another time. I think after that breakup I'd love to
(03:42):
say that I like healed and I moved on and
I started dating an appropriate amount of time later, but
that is not the case. I was really, really lonely,
and I went back on the dating apps well before
I should have and ended up in a six month
situationship with someone I shouldn't have been in a relationship with.
(04:02):
But we ended up going on holidays together and we met,
I met his parents, and I really thought we had
this future, which we never did. And from the beginning,
he was very clear he didn't want a relationship. He
was never going to commit to me, and you know,
I think that I just didn't want to hear that
and I didn't want to see it, and so I
(04:23):
put a lot of hope and energy and love into
this person. And then you know, six months later, that
was the end, and I realized again, like, this person
doesn't really respect me very much, this person really doesn't
want to be with me. I can't force him to,
and I had my heart broken again. These moments now
(04:43):
are so formative for the person that I am, to
the point where I'm I genuinely think they are some
of the things that I'm most grateful for in my
life like. Those heartbreaks shaped me, and they also pushed
me to an emotional limit that I think gave me
some good wisdom to share on how to survive these situations.
(05:04):
In the time since I've dated a few people, I
went through one other breakup where I got to apply
so many of the learnings from those two big breakups.
And now I'm in a three year relationship with somebody
that I love so much. I adore him. He is incredible,
and you know, almost five years old. I want to
(05:25):
look back today and just kind of give you a
psychological guide to how I got through it and how
hopefully you can as well. I know this moment is
so painful. I know that actually nobody experiences this in
the same way, and that I'm sure you think you're
never going to find love again. You're never going to
be able to survive without them. You can't imagine a
future where like their name isn't in your phone and
(05:47):
they don't know everything about you. But I promise you
will get there. The feeling of emptiness you have won't
be forever, and I want to give you a little
bit of a guide through. So without further ado, let's
get into the psychology behind how to survive your breakup,
How to survive heartbreak? Stay with us. Let's start very,
(06:13):
very simply, why do breakups hurt so much? And it
might seem simple, anybody who has lived through it knows
it's deeply complex. There are basically a few reasons why
you're in so much pain right now, and there's a
reason why they call it heartbreak, because that deep feeling
(06:34):
in your chest, in your lungs, in your limbs is real,
literal physical pain. We're going to get to how I
know that to be true in a second. But the
most simple, rudimentary psychological explanation for why a breakup hurts
so much is this love, like few other things, makes
(06:54):
us feel amazing to a degree that really has no rivals.
It makes us feel incredible to be seen, to feel important,
to connect with somebody else. Obviously, it brings a lot
of pleasure to be loved, to be like in this
deep bonding moment with somebody. And what's really behind those feelings,
(07:16):
what really drives those feelings is dopamine and oxytocin. Oxytocin
especially is literally known as the love hormone. And if
you ever, if anybody ever managed to purify it and
give it to somebody in a vial. It would be
one of the most potent and strong drugs out there.
It would also be one of the most addictive. That
(07:36):
is how intense of a drug and of a feeling
it is. Now, Oxytocin isn't just about love. It's also
what allows us to bond and trust other people, and
it is essential for building neural pathways that basically weave
the memories and our emotions about somebody into our brain.
(08:00):
They leave an imprint. The memory of them will leave
an imprint on your neural structures. And the flexibility of
the brain means that in response to all this really
deep emotional, intense stuff, it adapts to expect it, It
adapts to deepen that imprint, to become reliant on the
(08:21):
dopamine and the oxytocin provided by this person, to rely
on them more and more. And so when it ends
and all those positive sensations go away and that imprint
is no longer filled, suddenly there is a deep emotional, psychological,
biological emptiness that our brain just can't comprehend. It can't
(08:47):
comprehend that this person was here, they were with us.
We love them, and then it was over. The whole
was no longer filled. Scientists and psychologists, you will hear
them make comparisons between a breakup and literal drug withdrawal.
It is like your brain is detoxing from a substance,
(09:09):
and that substance is this other person. You don't have
access to them anymore, and your brain still very much
wants to, your brain still very much expects to and
so you are undeniably left very hurt and left very
lacking or longing or yearning because of this situation. That
(09:31):
pain you're feeling is not in your head. It is
very much real. Studies, including a very famous one from
twenty twelve, have shown that relationship breakdown activates the same
brain regions that process physical pain. You've probably heard that before,
but the kind of pain they're describing is obviously not
(09:51):
the same as stubbing your toe or breaking a limb.
It's really known as social pain, the pain of losing
a social connection, the pain of rejection, the pain of
feeling deep, longing and missing for somebody. That really connects
to a pain in how we saw ourselves that we
(10:11):
no longer have. You know, we saw ourselves as this
person who was attached to this other individual. We saw
ourselves in a partnership, we saw ourselves in a pair,
and we no longer do. And so there is also
a real identity shakeup that is going on behind the scenes.
Back to that pain thing as well, It's not like
(10:32):
there is a hierarchy where physical pain hurts more than
this social pain hurts more than this social loss. They
hurt equally, which might seem bizarre to say, but they
hurt equally because pain is not actually experienced by the body.
It is experienced by the mind and by the brain,
specifically pain related neural regions in your brain. I could
(10:56):
cut off your leg, I could you know, kick you
in the shine. You would not feel any of that
as actual pain if the pain related neuroregions in your
brain were not working, because you would have no way
of reading the sensation. What that means is that the
pain of a heartbreak is processed in the same way
(11:17):
and at the same capacity and level as physical pain
would be. They use identical systems. So I don't want
you to discount what you're feeling and think, ah, this
is not real. This can't be as painful as I
think it is. This is all in my head. Absolutely not.
There is real science behind why you feel the way
(11:38):
that you do. Breakups also leave us with an emotional
void where there's a lot of love that has nowhere
to go, and they also leave us with a near
future void. What I mean by a near future void
is that it makes us have to rapidly adapt to
(11:59):
a new way of life life whilst also accepting the
grief of a future that is never going to happen.
You're not going to see each other every weekend. The
future trip that you so wanted to take isn't going
to happen. They're not going to be at your birthday
next year. It's like they've been erased out of all
those future memories that you want to have, all the
things that you've built, the routine, the inside jokes, the connection,
(12:22):
the relationships with their family, the memories. It feels like
you have to erase them, not just from the past
and the present, but from the future, and you have
to say goodbye and that those memories were maybe for nothing.
This has a name. It's called ambiguous loss. Grieving something
that hasn't happened yet but that you still miss in
a way, grieving the future that you really wanted to
(12:46):
build with this person, building a life that you would
deeply invested in. I personally think some of the hardest
breakups are the ones when it could have almost worked.
You think it's working, you tried really hard, or you
(13:06):
were just blindsided, and the plans, the potential they were
just like suddenly killed off in the moment. You know,
it's a random Monday night and your whole life is
suddenly different. Half the pain is just having to adapt
to this new reality that you probably didn't want to
(13:26):
find yourself in in the first place. I think it's
the same for relationships that maybe didn't have a serious
label just because you weren't boyfriend and girlfriends just because
you weren't formally together, even if it was a situationship.
There is a part of you that always deeply hopes
that it could work out, and there is a part
of you that really holds on to the wattifs. And
(13:47):
a lot of psychologists will tell you that it's the
wattifs that make the pain last as long as it does,
and why it's so hard to find closure because the
opposite of closure is possibility, and that's what the what
ifs are thriving in What if they'd just given me
a chance? What if things had been different? What if
(14:08):
we hadn't had that fight. What if I hadn't broken
up with them over that thing? What if I just
loved them a little bit more? What if they've just
loved me a little bit more. There was this Psychology
Today article that I read about this that said, the
reason these what ifs haunt us is because they actually
offer us a full sense of control. If we can
(14:31):
pinpoint what went wrong, we can maybe fix it and
get back together with them, or we can prevent it
from happening again. We search for things that will fill
in the gaps of why this didn't work. The hard
truth is, even if you could identify the exact moment
or reason that things fell apart, it's probably not going
to change the outcome. The relationship ended for a reason,
(14:54):
and clinging to what if really only prolongs you're suffering.
I remember this is what happened to with that situationship
I was in where I just was like trying to
convince him constantly that if he committed, we would be
really good together. That what if of like what if
you just believed me for a second. What if you
(15:15):
just saw what I saw, you know, then we could
have this amazing life together. That whole situation was a fantasy,
and I was trying to force somebody to believe in
something that they didn't want proof of and that they
didn't necessarily want. And what it was really about was
control me, trying to control a situation that made me
(15:37):
feel really vulnerable, so that the outcome did make me
feel worse about myself. Okay, so now that we understand
the pain, hopefully a little bit better, I want to
go through the life cycle of a breakup and what
to expect. What are the signs that you're healing, What
are the signs that you're getting better, what kind of
awaits you in the next chapter of this heartbreak. Heartbreak
(15:59):
is obvious different for everyone, but the way the heart
mends itself like actually seems to follow a very similar pattern.
Instead of timelines, now I can't give you an absolute number.
I can't give you an exact date or the number
of months, and it's going to take before you feel better,
(16:20):
but we can talk about the stages. There have been
a couple of attempts to kind of do this to
kind of categorize the life cycle of a breakup. The
most famous one is obviously the stage of grief theory
by Elizabeth Koubler Ross. This theory you've probably heard of it.
It basically was developed to describe how people move through
(16:44):
the grief that occurs when somebody dies. People then realize
it also applies to the grief of when a relationship dies,
but the stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
The theory is you have to go through each stage in
your own time to get to a point when you're
really ready to move on. I find that that theory
(17:04):
is quite accurate, but I also have my own model
that I think describes it a little bit better, and
I describe it as the three waves of the breakup.
So before you even get into the breakup, I think,
before you even actually start to be able to move on,
you are going to go through that stage of shock
(17:28):
and of denial. Every single one of us is going
to have this. It could last a minute, a day,
a month, three months. Essentially, it's going to maybe take
a while for you to really realize the emotional situation
you're in. And that's why it can take some time
for your emotions to catch up to your reality. Like
(17:48):
I said, it took me four months to really grieve
that first breakup, four months before I even cried, because
I was still in this shock feeling. You know, you
may wake up for a few days, you know, afterwards,
just kind of forgetting that it even happened. You may
really genuinely feel that you're fine, You're already over it.
(18:09):
I'm sorry to say that feeling is a trick, that
feeling is a lie. At some stage, the gates are
actually going to open, and that's when the healing and
the heartbreak really begins, and that's when the first wave
actually occurs. The first wave of a breakup, of any breakup,
is what I call the emotional mess stage. After that
(18:29):
shock falls away, this is when you first encounter like
the true reality, the raw truth of the emotional wreckage
of what's happened. In this first wave, you will do,
and you have permission to do stupid things to give it.
You're going to get bangs, You're going to try desperately
to be friends with your ex. You're going to keep
(18:51):
going back looking for closure. You're going to get too drunk,
You're going to cry, in embarrassing places. It is a requirement.
If you have not gone through this, you are probably
still in the shock fase. What's really happening is that
all the love that you have has nowhere to go,
so you respond impulsively, You respond with great intensity. I
tend to think of it as like the first stage
(19:12):
of having an open wound, like blood is just gushing everywhere,
and that's totally normal. This is what I really recommend,
and I'm gonna I know it's going to sound basic,
but I really do recommend you go no contact for
thirty days. Whatever terms you ended the relationship on, good
or bad. Neurologically, it's going to be easier for you
(19:34):
to move on from this situation if you are not
constantly triggered and reminded of their existence, or if their
role and presence in your life is not continuingly like
continuing to be reinforced. You need to stop those neurons
and stop those synaptic connections that associate you with them
(19:57):
from firing. The way I really like to describe it
is when you go to contact, you're able to hear
your own voice and feel your own emotions more clearly.
It's like being able to just have a conversation with
yourself without hearing somebody else's voice like talking over you.
(20:18):
You're each going to handle this breakup very differently, and
at some stage, like each of you is going to
try and convince the other person to see it the
way that you see it. You don't need that other
voice talking over how you feel and interrupting your emotional processing.
Going no contact just gives you the time to concentrate
(20:40):
on what you think about the situation and to also
just kind of work through the pain. I always say
that like going cold turkey on a relationship, might feel
a lot more painful, but it speeds the process up
a lot compared to slowly trying to move away or
slowly trying to withdraw from somebody, which is just going
(21:01):
to make the pain and make the wound heal so
much slower. During the first wave, typically an event will
trigger you to move into the second wave, and typically
this is something that's a little bit unfortunate. You find
out that they're seeing somebody new, You have a big
confrontational chat after the no contact, you see their true colors.
(21:22):
You realize finally the big reason you can't be together.
This pushes you into the second wave where the real
deep healing begins. Second wave deep healing stage, the temporary
fixes no longer work. Going out doesn't keep the pain away.
You can't outrun the serious grief that this relationship isn't
going to work, it's not going to come back. And
(21:42):
this is when you feel very hopeless. You cry a lot,
it feels very dark. It's also when you really have
to look the pain in the eye. Surviving this wave
is mainly about time, but there are some things that
will definitely help as well. So not dating is a
big one. Being around your friends, really sinking deeper into
(22:04):
your hobbies, dating yourself in a really active way, taking
yourself out for dinner, filling up your social calendar with
things that you're excited to do, are all really going
to help. When you start to kind of get into
the flow of this, you're going to be thinking about
them a lot less. You're gonna be thinking like, hey,
(22:25):
I think I'm going to survive this. That's when you
experience the third wave, which is acceptance. But before you
can get there, you are going to experience one more
wave of grief. And I'm going to talk about why
that is. What it feels like, and how to get
through that infamous third wave after this short break. I
(22:53):
truly think the second hardest part of a breakup after
of course, like the initial devastation, is actually always going
to be right before things get easier very quickly. And
I know this from experience, not just my own, but
from other people's. You know, the moment you think, I
just don't think I can survive this any longer. I'm
(23:14):
doing everything I can, I can't stop thinking about them.
That is truly when you come to a state of acceptance,
when you come to realize, like, the only way I
can survive this is by understanding myself better and is
by actually going further into the belly of the beast.
You begin to really find a lot more clarity. And
this is where in this third wave, like I really
(23:36):
recommend you start journaling about what you've learned. You begin
to see patterns more clearly, you begin to be able
to really soak in the lessons. It may also be
in this third wave when you contact them one last time,
you do that final farewell, and it's when you really
start to trust your intuition again about maybe seeing other
(23:56):
people making big life decisions that's the next chapter for
you going to hold you feel more optimistic for the
first time in months, then you feel pessimistic. I want
to make something clear. It is totally normal to be
in wave three or beyond, to be in like the
total acceptance stage and still get flashbacks of them, to
(24:19):
still find yourself thinking about them, even missing them. This
is not a sign to get back together. These involuntary
memory flare ups. They are no more than what we
call mind pops. And I talked about this in my
book actually where I did my whole chapter on heartbreak.
(24:42):
These mind pops are something that psychologists and scientists have
labeled recently. It's basically where our brain just suddenly brings
about memories and information to the surface so that we
can determine whether it's still relevant or not. It is
this involuntary memory recall that is rigged by the environment,
triggered by something happening, by a smell, a song, lyric,
(25:06):
a place, a food, we don't even know it, and
suddenly you're right back in that place in time, reminiscing
on them all those years later. If a memory is
particularly emotionally loaded, like it's gonna come up a few times,
maybe just because you're bored, maybe just because your inhibitions
are down. Don't try and be afraid. Don't try and
(25:28):
suppress these thoughts. They are super normal. They are nothing
more than your brain just deciding to fire in strange ways.
Do not let it make you think that you need
to go back to this person. Want you to approach
these mindpubs cautiously and with neutrality. It is totally normal
(25:51):
that you're going to miss them. You felt connected, they
were a part of your life. Maybe things ended in
an unsatisfactory way. That doesn't mean that you still have
to be emotionally invested in them. It's also essentral to
question how you may be romanticizing parts of your relationship
(26:11):
that never actually happened. There's a reason why we only
remember the good times. It's known as the Pollyanna principle.
A positive cognitive bias is what is occurring, whereby we
remember the good times more clearly than the bad, and
therefore we fixate on them more and they give us
an unrealistic view of the relationship. Often we romanticize the
(26:34):
past to protect ourselves from negative memories, and in the
process we engage in something called selective recall, when we
think about our ex or some unrequited love, all we
remember is what made them special and all the other things,
the unanswered messages, the lack of effort, the unhappiness that
is left out. And it's no wonder you can't move
(26:56):
on when you are remembering your entire relationship incorrectly, despite
your best intentions. I'm going to say something you may
not want to hear right now, but that's going to happen.
There is no fast forwarding through a breakup. I think grief,
whether it last a week to five years, is the
(27:19):
price you pay for love, and I think it's a
pretty fair price. The second thing I'm going to say
that you may not like is that you do have
to find the beauty in this a little bit, or
at least the romance. And when I mean romance, what
I really mean is meaning, why did this happen? How
is this part of your story? What are you going
(27:40):
to create from this? Because, by gosh, you are going
to build and make something beautiful of yourself and your
life because of this pain, not in spite of it.
Like I genuinely I said, that's at the beginning. Breakups
are just like such fertile soil to plant the seeds
of your new life. There is so much you can
(28:00):
do out of like out of the rubble of a breakup.
Like I cannot express to you how my whole life
is different because somebody broke up with me, And my
whole life is different in a way that is, and
I can tell, is profoundly better than what it would
have been if I'd stayed, or if we'd broken up,
you know, five months, six months later, or if we'd
(28:21):
actually never been together. It all makes sense, it's all
part of the story. So I think it's time to
give you some of my tips, the best tips that
I use that I think are important for getting through this,
that are based in psychology. The first big tip that
I have for you is to survive this breakup, you
(28:43):
need to restructure your environment. This involves getting rid of
any reminders of this person, and then on top of that,
introducing new objects, new colors, new things, new images that
reflect the new life and new mindset that you were
stepping into. After my first terrible breakup, I did a
(29:05):
clean sweep everything that reminded me of him. They went
into a box and it went into storage, and I
couldn't tell you where that box is now. I just
needed it to be gone. I also ordered a bunch
of posters of my favorite art to hang up on
my walls. I also painted a bunch of stuff in
my room. I moved all of my furniture around, I
(29:25):
bought new bed sheets. I just wanted stuff that was
going to represent me and represent you know, this life
that I wanted to have as a single person. Research
in environmental psychology shows that our surroundings profoundly affect our
emotions and behaviors, especially in times like this. There was
this very famous equation that was described by this individual
(29:48):
called Kurt Lewin, and his equation is basically the behavior.
Your behavior is a function both of the person you
are and of your environment. So when your living space
is filled with reminders of a past relationship, how do
you expect yourself to behave any differently? When you are
continuously triggering memories and the emotional pain of this person
(30:11):
and the fact they're not in your life anymore, you
need to be so deliberate about changing your environment, rearranging furniture, redecorating, replacing,
so that the new physical cues in your environment symbolize
the things that you care about, symbolize the things that
are independently important to you, and symbolize your new life. Okay,
(30:32):
tip number two, get a project and make it a
project or a hobby or something that you have never
showed interest in before and that they would know nothing about.
For me, that was this podcast. I cannot tell you
how important this podcast was for me to get through
those emotions. But what was so important about it was
(30:54):
it was like I was learning all these new skills.
I was creating this whole new life of myself that
you didn't know anything about, that had no connection to
this individual. I also think that we are rarely as
motivated to prove something to ourselves as we are when
we are in deep emotional pain. You know, you really
(31:18):
have like one of the purest forms of motivation for
yourself right now. Heartbreak is like heroine for getting stuff
done and for reinventing yourself. You know, whether that is
throwing yourself into the gym, you know, writing a book,
writing poetry, starting a garden, solo, traveling, like there is
a reason half of the music out there is breakup songs.
(31:41):
Every feeling that you have is going to be right
on the surface. It's so easy to access, and it's
so easy to take those feelings and to convert them
into something that you are really, really proud of. Number three,
My third tip is to get a breakup buddy. I
was talking to my friend Grace about this the other day.
(32:03):
But having a friend or a person that is going
through it with you makes this whole process like totally
more bearable, and I think it allows you to be
more honest and reflective compared to your friends who are
maybe still in relationships or people who haven't been through
a breakup in a while. When you talk through your
(32:24):
breakup with your breakup buddy, you engage in a process
that psychologists call coregulation. And this is where two people
actually help regulate each other's emotions because they're going through
something similar and they are sharing very vulnerably their story,
their reflections, and their truth. And it actually allows us
(32:46):
to feed off other people's calm, to feed off the
other person's emotions, to feed off their learnings. There was
a twenty eleven study on emotional disclosure that found expressing
painful emotions to someone who was in similar circumstances to
you actually reduces depressive symptoms, and it improves recovery time
(33:08):
for all number of illnesses, including heartbreak. It also just
makes you a lot less lonely. I think the loneliness
is the hardest part of this right. Maybe since this
relationship occurred, a lot of your friends have found themselves
in relationships, and maybe you're the last single person. People
are busy, maybe you live in a new city. That
(33:28):
loneliness can have you running back to a less than
good relationship faster than you can say boo, because it
is the only thing that's going to make you feel good.
So find your person. Trust me, when you start looking,
they're everywhere. They are in book clubs, run clubs, braves,
gallery opening, friends' birthday parties. You're going to find somebody
(33:51):
who is also going through their biggest heartbreak just like you,
and it's going to be your biggest comfort. And I
think it's going to be some of you guys can
always look back on, like you went through the trenches together.
You went through this really hard time together. This kind
of links to a bigger tip. In general, you really
need to get out of your head and into the
(34:11):
world and commit to meeting new people. You may have
lost your main connection. You know, you may have lost
this person that you love, but researchers estimate that that
relationship is worth about five smaller friendships or connections. So
what that means is that you know that's not a loss.
Now you have all this space. It's like finding a
whole new closet that you get to fill. Like, you
(34:32):
have all this space in your life for new connections,
new relationships. Fill the closet. Fill the closet with these
new people. That sounds really creepy. Just fill your time
and your space with connections that platonically might outlast your
next relationship or the one after that. My fourth tip
is to use the power of visualization to allow yourself
(34:54):
to see the relationship more clearly and also see your
future more clearly. I want you to visualize the next
five years of your life in two ways. The first
way is what would your life look like five years
from now if you'd stayed. You can write about this,
you can journal this if you need, But what would
(35:15):
it have looked like honestly if you had stayed? And secondly,
what do you actually want it to look like in
five years? And what do you now have the opportunity
to do because you are not in this relationship, this
exercise just asks you to be really, really honest with yourself.
(35:36):
There was a reason this relationship didn't work out, even
if the reason was simply because the other person wasn't
in love anymore. There are things that can't be forced,
and there are things that would have eventually eroded the
relationship would have meant that you would have broken up
further down the line, what was this relationship asking you
to be and what was it asking you to become
(35:58):
that maybe wasn't going to be your best? And now
that you're not in it, you now have this opportunity
to shape the next five years, the next ten years,
twenty years of your life in a whole different environment,
a whole different space, maybe in all these different relationships
and places. How are you going to go about it?
I think what this question is really asking you to
(36:18):
do is to just get clear on the vision for yourself.
You know, it's just you. What do you want? What
do you want to strive for? What do you want
to turn this loss into? Because there are like so
many big wins that come out of just investigating and
really questioning what do I actually want from my life,
and now you don't have somebody else in it that
(36:39):
you have to think about. There's just so much more
room for freedom. This really lends to my final tip
after this shot break. I think we often look for
closure in the other person, and we look for closure
(37:01):
in that final conversation, that final thing they're going to
say to us. It's going to make us realize why
it ended, why it was the way it was. My
final tip, I need you to write the story of
your relationship, and write the finish or the closing chapter
of your relationship for yourself as if you are telling
(37:21):
the story of your relationship as a folk story or
as a lesson to a younger, a younger version of
your to your future children, or almost like a fairy tale,
right at the beginning, right the middle of the relationship,
and right the end. But also write why you think
(37:42):
it had to happen, and maybe even if you want
to project into the future, write about why this relationship
was actually a stepping stone and what it may be
guiding you to that is bigger than you. This really
leverages the power of something we call narrative psychology. Narrative
psychology is basically the study of how We make sense
(38:04):
of our lives through stories, and it plays a really
powerful role in healing after a breakup. According to the
narrative psychologist Dan P. McAdams, we construct our identity through
personal narratives that link our past, present, and imagine future
into a coherent whole. And when something disrupts that story
(38:24):
and doesn't make sense with what we thought was going
to happen, like a breakup, that's when we experience a
lot of pain. The story is disrupted, like the plot
line that we once shared is suddenly incomplete. So writing
the story of your relationship as a lesson or from
your perspective allows you to engage in that reconstruction process,
(38:45):
and it allows you to really make meaning from this
grief and from this loss in a manner that is very,
very powerful. I want to give you a bonus tip
speaking of closure and healing, and I know I've talked
about this in another episode on Heartbreak, but I'm gonna
say it again. I need you to make a breakup playlist.
(39:07):
Maybe you already have one, but music and heartbreak are
like the perfect pairing. Twenty fourteen study actually found that
breakup songs help you heal because they promote emotional expression
and therefore give you an outlet compared to emotional suppression.
There's also this additional funny part to this tip as well,
(39:29):
which is that I think having a very specific breakup
playlist actually allows you to track how your response or
how your healing is going based on how you respond
to the music. So what I mean by that is
that it's often very hard to see how far you've come,
(39:49):
how much your grief is actually moving or healing, because
we don't always have that linear state of mind when
we're going through something really really difficult. Recently, I listened
back to my breakup playlist from that year of breakups,
and I remember listening to these songs and sobbing, and
(40:13):
I remember having such an emotional reaction. And I listened
to those songs the other day and I felt nothing.
I just felt I just felt neutral. I didn't feel sad,
I didn't feel nostalgic, I didn't feel excited. I just
felt nothing. And it was this really profound way of
(40:34):
seeing how I have changed and how I've obviously I've
very obviously healed, but how like something that I once
thought was going to define my life, and then I
was never going to recover from I did something I
thought I was never going to get over. I got over,
(40:56):
and my life is now so so much better. And
I think that's really where I want to kind of
finish this episode, Like it's very easy to feel pessimistic
about love, and it's very easy to feel like, because
(41:18):
this relationship didn't work out, I'm never going to find
anyone better. Because I'm feeling so intense and deeply pained
by the ending of this relationship, that's a sign that
this person was the one. That's just not the case.
I never thought I would feel pain, any deeper pain
(41:40):
than the way I did with my first boyfriend, and
then I did. I felt even more pain for somebody
who was a lot less deserving of my love, and
even then, like that actually said nothing more than that
I was just attached and it was always going to
be hard to get over. And now I'm in this
amazing relationship, and I wish that I could just sit
(42:03):
down with my younger self and just say, you've just
got to get through this. This is an important emotional experience,
and you're gonna find love, if not in your twenties,
if not in your thirties, eventually you will. I always
love hearing stories of people who find love a little
bit later on. I think about, you know, my aunt
(42:25):
who dated a terrible man for years and then at
fifty seven met like the love of her life who
she has never been more in love with and who
she just adores. Or my grandma, who you know, divorced
my grandfather in her forties and then met who I
really do consider to be my grandfather and he like
(42:46):
moved her to Australia and took her to Africa and
made her an important part of his business and just
thinks she's incredible at ninety years old. True love really
does exist, And sometimes I do think it's waiting behind heartbreak.
It's begging you to let go, to leave this person,
to learn as much as you can from this situation,
(43:06):
because it knows what else is coming. And I know
you're in so much pain right now. I know you
think you're never going to get over them. But whenever
you feel pessimistic about the future without them in it,
look for the big love stories because you will find
them and remember like your biggest love story, like you
are the love of your own life, the relationship you
(43:28):
have with yourself matters more than anything, and it's from
that that all other relationships form. So focus on you
for a while, focus on being so magnetic and amazing
and in love with yourself that whoever comes to the
door next, whoever you meet next, whether it's in two months,
two years, or ten years, is just going to undeniably
know that you know yourself, know that you deserve respect,
(43:50):
and know their feelings for you are true, and that
you're the one, and that they love you. And I'm sure,
absolutely positively, like you can take me to the bank,
that you will find somebody like that, even if you
are in the pits of sadness and despair right now.
So thank you so much for listening to this episode.
I hope that this guide has been helpful. There was
(44:12):
so much more I wanted to say. I had to
deliberately like just not talk about so much other stuff
I really wanted to talk about, like when you know you,
when you know it's time to date again, what to
do if somebody moves on first. But feel like we
might just have to do a part two of this
episode because I spoke for way too long. But yeah,
I'm sending you a lot of love with your little
(44:34):
heart broken at the moment. I'm sure you're taking very
good care of it, but I hope that you're healing,
and I hope that you're mending, and I hope that
this episode you can take something from it and put
it into practice. If you have made it this far,
leave a few emojis down below, then explain such capture
where you are in the breakup right now, and whether
(44:57):
you're in Wave one, Wave two, or Wave three. I
want to know I'm setting love to my Wave one,
my Wave one people. I'm sure it's very very brutal,
but yeah, leave a little comment down below the emojis
that describe your current state of mind with your breakup,
but also what wave you're in. Make sure to maybe
share this with somebody else who you think might really
need to hear it. Your breakup buddy, and follow us
(45:19):
as well on Instagram at that Psychology podcast if you
want to share how you're going, share how this episode
helped you, any suggestions, or if you want a part
two to this episode as well. I always love to
hear from you guys, and make sure that you are
following wherever you are listening, whether that is on Apple,
on the iHeartRadio app on Spotify so that you know
when we post new episodes. But with all that in mind,
(45:42):
thank you again for listening, and until next time, be safe,
be kind, be gentle to yourself, and we will talk
very very soon,
Hello everybody. I'm Jemma Spake and welcome back to the
Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through
the biggest changes, moments, and transitions of our twenties and
what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back
(00:24):
to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. New listeners,
old listeners. Wherever you are in the world, it is
so great to have you here. Back for another episode
as we, of course break down the Psychology of your twenties. Today,
I want to talk about heartbreak. I want to talk
about why it is so hard, but also give you
(00:46):
kind of a guide based on psychology and my experience
on how to get over it. Maybe that's not even
the best way to say it. How to get through it,
how to process the loss, to still feel strong enough
to believe in love, how to find love again. I
want to begin by telling you all the story of
(01:10):
my worst breakup. And when I say breakup, I should
actually say breakups as in plural. In twenty twenty one,
I went through two breakups in one year, one with
a person that I was in a long term relationship
with a serious relationship with, and another with someone you know.
And the relationship was a lot less serious, but someone
(01:31):
who I deeply cared for and I can admit to
myself now like definitely loved very very much. Let me
describe kind of like the circumstances of the two in
one year breakup situation of the very tragic year that
happened to me. I had been dating my first very
(01:52):
serious boyfriend for about two years when I think I
just realized, you know, I think we both realized we
just weren't right for each other. I actually remember him,
I distinctly remember him trying to break up with me
a few months before we actually did, because he was like,
I'm writing my thesis and I'm just going to be
too busy for you, and like I need to focus
(02:13):
all my attention on my writing and I won't have
time to be with you. And I don't know why,
but I like stayed with him, even though that was
like the beginning of the end, and eventually I was
the person to break up with him two days before
Valentine's Day, I should say, because of course that was
my luck. But it wasn't gonna work, and I think
it was for the best. And after we broke up,
(02:34):
we did this like on and off again thing for
a few months before I realized he actually had a
new girlfriend he wasn't telling me about, and it was
very embarrassing. And I was in this small college town
and everybody knew and I kept telling people like, we're
going to try and make it work. Meanwhile he was
completely like he was seeing somebody else. It was terribly painful,
(02:55):
and it kind of took four months for me to
like officially begin to caree our relationship because of all
that happened, and because there was this delayed emotional reaction,
it took me a while to realize, like, oh, this
is it. We actually aren't getting back together, and that's
when the grief really began. I'm also very grateful for
that breakup because og listeners of the podcast will know
(03:18):
that is how the psychology of your twenties started. And
I think that it was like the thing that I
needed to expand my life and to take a risk
and to be creative and to know what I cared about.
So I kind of owe him a bit of a
thank you. I owe him my dream job, so thank
you very much, But that is a different story for
another time. I think after that breakup I'd love to
(03:42):
say that I like healed and I moved on and
I started dating an appropriate amount of time later, but
that is not the case. I was really, really lonely,
and I went back on the dating apps well before
I should have and ended up in a six month
situationship with someone I shouldn't have been in a relationship with.
(04:02):
But we ended up going on holidays together and we met,
I met his parents, and I really thought we had
this future, which we never did. And from the beginning,
he was very clear he didn't want a relationship. He
was never going to commit to me, and you know,
I think that I just didn't want to hear that
and I didn't want to see it, and so I
(04:23):
put a lot of hope and energy and love into
this person. And then you know, six months later, that
was the end, and I realized again, like, this person
doesn't really respect me very much, this person really doesn't
want to be with me. I can't force him to,
and I had my heart broken again. These moments now
(04:43):
are so formative for the person that I am, to
the point where I'm I genuinely think they are some
of the things that I'm most grateful for in my
life like. Those heartbreaks shaped me, and they also pushed
me to an emotional limit that I think gave me
some good wisdom to share on how to survive these situations.
(05:04):
In the time since I've dated a few people, I
went through one other breakup where I got to apply
so many of the learnings from those two big breakups.
And now I'm in a three year relationship with somebody
that I love so much. I adore him. He is incredible,
and you know, almost five years old. I want to
(05:25):
look back today and just kind of give you a
psychological guide to how I got through it and how
hopefully you can as well. I know this moment is
so painful. I know that actually nobody experiences this in
the same way, and that I'm sure you think you're
never going to find love again. You're never going to
be able to survive without them. You can't imagine a
future where like their name isn't in your phone and
(05:47):
they don't know everything about you. But I promise you
will get there. The feeling of emptiness you have won't
be forever, and I want to give you a little
bit of a guide through. So without further ado, let's
get into the psychology behind how to survive your breakup,
How to survive heartbreak? Stay with us. Let's start very,
(06:13):
very simply, why do breakups hurt so much? And it
might seem simple, anybody who has lived through it knows
it's deeply complex. There are basically a few reasons why
you're in so much pain right now, and there's a
reason why they call it heartbreak, because that deep feeling
(06:34):
in your chest, in your lungs, in your limbs is real,
literal physical pain. We're going to get to how I
know that to be true in a second. But the
most simple, rudimentary psychological explanation for why a breakup hurts
so much is this love, like few other things, makes
(06:54):
us feel amazing to a degree that really has no rivals.
It makes us feel incredible to be seen, to feel important,
to connect with somebody else. Obviously, it brings a lot
of pleasure to be loved, to be like in this
deep bonding moment with somebody. And what's really behind those feelings,
(07:16):
what really drives those feelings is dopamine and oxytocin. Oxytocin
especially is literally known as the love hormone. And if
you ever, if anybody ever managed to purify it and
give it to somebody in a vial. It would be
one of the most potent and strong drugs out there.
It would also be one of the most addictive. That
(07:36):
is how intense of a drug and of a feeling
it is. Now, Oxytocin isn't just about love. It's also
what allows us to bond and trust other people, and
it is essential for building neural pathways that basically weave
the memories and our emotions about somebody into our brain.
(08:00):
They leave an imprint. The memory of them will leave
an imprint on your neural structures. And the flexibility of
the brain means that in response to all this really
deep emotional, intense stuff, it adapts to expect it, It
adapts to deepen that imprint, to become reliant on the
(08:21):
dopamine and the oxytocin provided by this person, to rely
on them more and more. And so when it ends
and all those positive sensations go away and that imprint
is no longer filled, suddenly there is a deep emotional, psychological,
biological emptiness that our brain just can't comprehend. It can't
(08:47):
comprehend that this person was here, they were with us.
We love them, and then it was over. The whole
was no longer filled. Scientists and psychologists, you will hear
them make comparisons between a breakup and literal drug withdrawal.
It is like your brain is detoxing from a substance,
(09:09):
and that substance is this other person. You don't have
access to them anymore, and your brain still very much
wants to, your brain still very much expects to and
so you are undeniably left very hurt and left very
lacking or longing or yearning because of this situation. That
(09:31):
pain you're feeling is not in your head. It is
very much real. Studies, including a very famous one from
twenty twelve, have shown that relationship breakdown activates the same
brain regions that process physical pain. You've probably heard that before,
but the kind of pain they're describing is obviously not
(09:51):
the same as stubbing your toe or breaking a limb.
It's really known as social pain, the pain of losing
a social connection, the pain of rejection, the pain of
feeling deep, longing and missing for somebody. That really connects
to a pain in how we saw ourselves that we
(10:11):
no longer have. You know, we saw ourselves as this
person who was attached to this other individual. We saw
ourselves in a partnership, we saw ourselves in a pair,
and we no longer do. And so there is also
a real identity shakeup that is going on behind the scenes.
Back to that pain thing as well, It's not like
(10:32):
there is a hierarchy where physical pain hurts more than
this social pain hurts more than this social loss. They
hurt equally, which might seem bizarre to say, but they
hurt equally because pain is not actually experienced by the body.
It is experienced by the mind and by the brain,
specifically pain related neural regions in your brain. I could
(10:56):
cut off your leg, I could you know, kick you
in the shine. You would not feel any of that
as actual pain if the pain related neuroregions in your
brain were not working, because you would have no way
of reading the sensation. What that means is that the
pain of a heartbreak is processed in the same way
(11:17):
and at the same capacity and level as physical pain
would be. They use identical systems. So I don't want
you to discount what you're feeling and think, ah, this
is not real. This can't be as painful as I
think it is. This is all in my head. Absolutely not.
There is real science behind why you feel the way
(11:38):
that you do. Breakups also leave us with an emotional
void where there's a lot of love that has nowhere
to go, and they also leave us with a near
future void. What I mean by a near future void
is that it makes us have to rapidly adapt to
(11:59):
a new way of life life whilst also accepting the
grief of a future that is never going to happen.
You're not going to see each other every weekend. The
future trip that you so wanted to take isn't going
to happen. They're not going to be at your birthday
next year. It's like they've been erased out of all
those future memories that you want to have, all the
things that you've built, the routine, the inside jokes, the connection,
(12:22):
the relationships with their family, the memories. It feels like
you have to erase them, not just from the past
and the present, but from the future, and you have
to say goodbye and that those memories were maybe for nothing.
This has a name. It's called ambiguous loss. Grieving something
that hasn't happened yet but that you still miss in
a way, grieving the future that you really wanted to
(12:46):
build with this person, building a life that you would
deeply invested in. I personally think some of the hardest
breakups are the ones when it could have almost worked.
You think it's working, you tried really hard, or you
(13:06):
were just blindsided, and the plans, the potential they were
just like suddenly killed off in the moment. You know,
it's a random Monday night and your whole life is
suddenly different. Half the pain is just having to adapt
to this new reality that you probably didn't want to
(13:26):
find yourself in in the first place. I think it's
the same for relationships that maybe didn't have a serious
label just because you weren't boyfriend and girlfriends just because
you weren't formally together, even if it was a situationship.
There is a part of you that always deeply hopes
that it could work out, and there is a part
of you that really holds on to the wattifs. And
(13:47):
a lot of psychologists will tell you that it's the
wattifs that make the pain last as long as it does,
and why it's so hard to find closure because the
opposite of closure is possibility, and that's what the what
ifs are thriving in What if they'd just given me
a chance? What if things had been different? What if
(14:08):
we hadn't had that fight. What if I hadn't broken
up with them over that thing? What if I just
loved them a little bit more? What if they've just
loved me a little bit more. There was this Psychology
Today article that I read about this that said, the
reason these what ifs haunt us is because they actually
offer us a full sense of control. If we can
(14:31):
pinpoint what went wrong, we can maybe fix it and
get back together with them, or we can prevent it
from happening again. We search for things that will fill
in the gaps of why this didn't work. The hard
truth is, even if you could identify the exact moment
or reason that things fell apart, it's probably not going
to change the outcome. The relationship ended for a reason,
(14:54):
and clinging to what if really only prolongs you're suffering.
I remember this is what happened to with that situationship
I was in where I just was like trying to
convince him constantly that if he committed, we would be
really good together. That what if of like what if
you just believed me for a second. What if you
(15:15):
just saw what I saw, you know, then we could
have this amazing life together. That whole situation was a fantasy,
and I was trying to force somebody to believe in
something that they didn't want proof of and that they
didn't necessarily want. And what it was really about was
control me, trying to control a situation that made me
(15:37):
feel really vulnerable, so that the outcome did make me
feel worse about myself. Okay, so now that we understand
the pain, hopefully a little bit better, I want to
go through the life cycle of a breakup and what
to expect. What are the signs that you're healing, What
are the signs that you're getting better, what kind of
awaits you in the next chapter of this heartbreak. Heartbreak
(15:59):
is obvious different for everyone, but the way the heart
mends itself like actually seems to follow a very similar pattern.
Instead of timelines, now I can't give you an absolute number.
I can't give you an exact date or the number
of months, and it's going to take before you feel better,
(16:20):
but we can talk about the stages. There have been
a couple of attempts to kind of do this to
kind of categorize the life cycle of a breakup. The
most famous one is obviously the stage of grief theory
by Elizabeth Koubler Ross. This theory you've probably heard of it.
It basically was developed to describe how people move through
(16:44):
the grief that occurs when somebody dies. People then realize
it also applies to the grief of when a relationship dies,
but the stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
The theory is you have to go through each stage in
your own time to get to a point when you're
really ready to move on. I find that that theory
(17:04):
is quite accurate, but I also have my own model
that I think describes it a little bit better, and
I describe it as the three waves of the breakup.
So before you even get into the breakup, I think,
before you even actually start to be able to move on,
you are going to go through that stage of shock
(17:28):
and of denial. Every single one of us is going
to have this. It could last a minute, a day,
a month, three months. Essentially, it's going to maybe take
a while for you to really realize the emotional situation
you're in. And that's why it can take some time
for your emotions to catch up to your reality. Like
(17:48):
I said, it took me four months to really grieve
that first breakup, four months before I even cried, because
I was still in this shock feeling. You know, you
may wake up for a few days, you know, afterwards,
just kind of forgetting that it even happened. You may
really genuinely feel that you're fine, You're already over it.
(18:09):
I'm sorry to say that feeling is a trick, that
feeling is a lie. At some stage, the gates are
actually going to open, and that's when the healing and
the heartbreak really begins, and that's when the first wave
actually occurs. The first wave of a breakup, of any breakup,
is what I call the emotional mess stage. After that
(18:29):
shock falls away, this is when you first encounter like
the true reality, the raw truth of the emotional wreckage
of what's happened. In this first wave, you will do,
and you have permission to do stupid things to give it.
You're going to get bangs, You're going to try desperately
to be friends with your ex. You're going to keep
(18:51):
going back looking for closure. You're going to get too drunk,
You're going to cry, in embarrassing places. It is a requirement.
If you have not gone through this, you are probably
still in the shock fase. What's really happening is that
all the love that you have has nowhere to go,
so you respond impulsively, You respond with great intensity. I
tend to think of it as like the first stage
(19:12):
of having an open wound, like blood is just gushing everywhere,
and that's totally normal. This is what I really recommend,
and I'm gonna I know it's going to sound basic,
but I really do recommend you go no contact for
thirty days. Whatever terms you ended the relationship on, good
or bad. Neurologically, it's going to be easier for you
(19:34):
to move on from this situation if you are not
constantly triggered and reminded of their existence, or if their
role and presence in your life is not continuingly like
continuing to be reinforced. You need to stop those neurons
and stop those synaptic connections that associate you with them
(19:57):
from firing. The way I really like to describe it
is when you go to contact, you're able to hear
your own voice and feel your own emotions more clearly.
It's like being able to just have a conversation with
yourself without hearing somebody else's voice like talking over you.
(20:18):
You're each going to handle this breakup very differently, and
at some stage, like each of you is going to
try and convince the other person to see it the
way that you see it. You don't need that other
voice talking over how you feel and interrupting your emotional processing.
Going no contact just gives you the time to concentrate
(20:40):
on what you think about the situation and to also
just kind of work through the pain. I always say
that like going cold turkey on a relationship, might feel
a lot more painful, but it speeds the process up
a lot compared to slowly trying to move away or
slowly trying to withdraw from somebody, which is just going
(21:01):
to make the pain and make the wound heal so
much slower. During the first wave, typically an event will
trigger you to move into the second wave, and typically
this is something that's a little bit unfortunate. You find
out that they're seeing somebody new, You have a big
confrontational chat after the no contact, you see their true colors.
(21:22):
You realize finally the big reason you can't be together.
This pushes you into the second wave where the real
deep healing begins. Second wave deep healing stage, the temporary
fixes no longer work. Going out doesn't keep the pain away.
You can't outrun the serious grief that this relationship isn't
going to work, it's not going to come back. And
(21:42):
this is when you feel very hopeless. You cry a lot,
it feels very dark. It's also when you really have
to look the pain in the eye. Surviving this wave
is mainly about time, but there are some things that
will definitely help as well. So not dating is a
big one. Being around your friends, really sinking deeper into
(22:04):
your hobbies, dating yourself in a really active way, taking
yourself out for dinner, filling up your social calendar with
things that you're excited to do, are all really going
to help. When you start to kind of get into
the flow of this, you're going to be thinking about
them a lot less. You're gonna be thinking like, hey,
(22:25):
I think I'm going to survive this. That's when you
experience the third wave, which is acceptance. But before you
can get there, you are going to experience one more
wave of grief. And I'm going to talk about why
that is. What it feels like, and how to get
through that infamous third wave after this short break. I
(22:53):
truly think the second hardest part of a breakup after
of course, like the initial devastation, is actually always going
to be right before things get easier very quickly. And
I know this from experience, not just my own, but
from other people's. You know, the moment you think, I
just don't think I can survive this any longer. I'm
(23:14):
doing everything I can, I can't stop thinking about them.
That is truly when you come to a state of acceptance,
when you come to realize, like, the only way I
can survive this is by understanding myself better and is
by actually going further into the belly of the beast.
You begin to really find a lot more clarity. And
this is where in this third wave, like I really
(23:36):
recommend you start journaling about what you've learned. You begin
to see patterns more clearly, you begin to be able
to really soak in the lessons. It may also be
in this third wave when you contact them one last time,
you do that final farewell, and it's when you really
start to trust your intuition again about maybe seeing other
(23:56):
people making big life decisions that's the next chapter for
you going to hold you feel more optimistic for the
first time in months, then you feel pessimistic. I want
to make something clear. It is totally normal to be
in wave three or beyond, to be in like the
total acceptance stage and still get flashbacks of them, to
(24:19):
still find yourself thinking about them, even missing them. This
is not a sign to get back together. These involuntary
memory flare ups. They are no more than what we
call mind pops. And I talked about this in my
book actually where I did my whole chapter on heartbreak.
(24:42):
These mind pops are something that psychologists and scientists have
labeled recently. It's basically where our brain just suddenly brings
about memories and information to the surface so that we
can determine whether it's still relevant or not. It is
this involuntary memory recall that is rigged by the environment,
triggered by something happening, by a smell, a song, lyric,
(25:06):
a place, a food, we don't even know it, and
suddenly you're right back in that place in time, reminiscing
on them all those years later. If a memory is
particularly emotionally loaded, like it's gonna come up a few times,
maybe just because you're bored, maybe just because your inhibitions
are down. Don't try and be afraid. Don't try and
(25:28):
suppress these thoughts. They are super normal. They are nothing
more than your brain just deciding to fire in strange ways.
Do not let it make you think that you need
to go back to this person. Want you to approach
these mindpubs cautiously and with neutrality. It is totally normal
(25:51):
that you're going to miss them. You felt connected, they
were a part of your life. Maybe things ended in
an unsatisfactory way. That doesn't mean that you still have
to be emotionally invested in them. It's also essentral to
question how you may be romanticizing parts of your relationship
(26:11):
that never actually happened. There's a reason why we only
remember the good times. It's known as the Pollyanna principle.
A positive cognitive bias is what is occurring, whereby we
remember the good times more clearly than the bad, and
therefore we fixate on them more and they give us
an unrealistic view of the relationship. Often we romanticize the
(26:34):
past to protect ourselves from negative memories, and in the
process we engage in something called selective recall, when we
think about our ex or some unrequited love, all we
remember is what made them special and all the other things,
the unanswered messages, the lack of effort, the unhappiness that
is left out. And it's no wonder you can't move
(26:56):
on when you are remembering your entire relationship incorrectly, despite
your best intentions. I'm going to say something you may
not want to hear right now, but that's going to happen.
There is no fast forwarding through a breakup. I think grief,
whether it last a week to five years, is the
(27:19):
price you pay for love, and I think it's a
pretty fair price. The second thing I'm going to say
that you may not like is that you do have
to find the beauty in this a little bit, or
at least the romance. And when I mean romance, what
I really mean is meaning, why did this happen? How
is this part of your story? What are you going
(27:40):
to create from this? Because, by gosh, you are going
to build and make something beautiful of yourself and your
life because of this pain, not in spite of it.
Like I genuinely I said, that's at the beginning. Breakups
are just like such fertile soil to plant the seeds
of your new life. There is so much you can
(28:00):
do out of like out of the rubble of a breakup.
Like I cannot express to you how my whole life
is different because somebody broke up with me, And my
whole life is different in a way that is, and
I can tell, is profoundly better than what it would
have been if I'd stayed, or if we'd broken up,
you know, five months, six months later, or if we'd
(28:21):
actually never been together. It all makes sense, it's all
part of the story. So I think it's time to
give you some of my tips, the best tips that
I use that I think are important for getting through this,
that are based in psychology. The first big tip that
I have for you is to survive this breakup, you
(28:43):
need to restructure your environment. This involves getting rid of
any reminders of this person, and then on top of that,
introducing new objects, new colors, new things, new images that
reflect the new life and new mindset that you were
stepping into. After my first terrible breakup, I did a
(29:05):
clean sweep everything that reminded me of him. They went
into a box and it went into storage, and I
couldn't tell you where that box is now. I just
needed it to be gone. I also ordered a bunch
of posters of my favorite art to hang up on
my walls. I also painted a bunch of stuff in
my room. I moved all of my furniture around, I
(29:25):
bought new bed sheets. I just wanted stuff that was
going to represent me and represent you know, this life
that I wanted to have as a single person. Research
in environmental psychology shows that our surroundings profoundly affect our
emotions and behaviors, especially in times like this. There was
this very famous equation that was described by this individual
(29:48):
called Kurt Lewin, and his equation is basically the behavior.
Your behavior is a function both of the person you
are and of your environment. So when your living space
is filled with reminders of a past relationship, how do
you expect yourself to behave any differently? When you are
continuously triggering memories and the emotional pain of this person
(30:11):
and the fact they're not in your life anymore, you
need to be so deliberate about changing your environment, rearranging furniture, redecorating, replacing,
so that the new physical cues in your environment symbolize
the things that you care about, symbolize the things that
are independently important to you, and symbolize your new life. Okay,
(30:32):
tip number two, get a project and make it a
project or a hobby or something that you have never
showed interest in before and that they would know nothing about.
For me, that was this podcast. I cannot tell you
how important this podcast was for me to get through
those emotions. But what was so important about it was
(30:54):
it was like I was learning all these new skills.
I was creating this whole new life of myself that
you didn't know anything about, that had no connection to
this individual. I also think that we are rarely as
motivated to prove something to ourselves as we are when
we are in deep emotional pain. You know, you really
(31:18):
have like one of the purest forms of motivation for
yourself right now. Heartbreak is like heroine for getting stuff
done and for reinventing yourself. You know, whether that is
throwing yourself into the gym, you know, writing a book,
writing poetry, starting a garden, solo, traveling, like there is
a reason half of the music out there is breakup songs.
(31:41):
Every feeling that you have is going to be right
on the surface. It's so easy to access, and it's
so easy to take those feelings and to convert them
into something that you are really, really proud of. Number three,
My third tip is to get a breakup buddy. I
was talking to my friend Grace about this the other day.
(32:03):
But having a friend or a person that is going
through it with you makes this whole process like totally
more bearable, and I think it allows you to be
more honest and reflective compared to your friends who are
maybe still in relationships or people who haven't been through
a breakup in a while. When you talk through your
(32:24):
breakup with your breakup buddy, you engage in a process
that psychologists call coregulation. And this is where two people
actually help regulate each other's emotions because they're going through
something similar and they are sharing very vulnerably their story,
their reflections, and their truth. And it actually allows us
(32:46):
to feed off other people's calm, to feed off the
other person's emotions, to feed off their learnings. There was
a twenty eleven study on emotional disclosure that found expressing
painful emotions to someone who was in similar circumstances to
you actually reduces depressive symptoms, and it improves recovery time
(33:08):
for all number of illnesses, including heartbreak. It also just
makes you a lot less lonely. I think the loneliness
is the hardest part of this right. Maybe since this
relationship occurred, a lot of your friends have found themselves
in relationships, and maybe you're the last single person. People
are busy, maybe you live in a new city. That
(33:28):
loneliness can have you running back to a less than
good relationship faster than you can say boo, because it
is the only thing that's going to make you feel good.
So find your person. Trust me, when you start looking,
they're everywhere. They are in book clubs, run clubs, braves,
gallery opening, friends' birthday parties. You're going to find somebody
(33:51):
who is also going through their biggest heartbreak just like you,
and it's going to be your biggest comfort. And I
think it's going to be some of you guys can
always look back on, like you went through the trenches together.
You went through this really hard time together. This kind
of links to a bigger tip. In general, you really
need to get out of your head and into the
(34:11):
world and commit to meeting new people. You may have
lost your main connection. You know, you may have lost
this person that you love, but researchers estimate that that
relationship is worth about five smaller friendships or connections. So
what that means is that you know that's not a loss.
Now you have all this space. It's like finding a
whole new closet that you get to fill. Like, you
(34:32):
have all this space in your life for new connections,
new relationships. Fill the closet. Fill the closet with these
new people. That sounds really creepy. Just fill your time
and your space with connections that platonically might outlast your
next relationship or the one after that. My fourth tip
is to use the power of visualization to allow yourself
(34:54):
to see the relationship more clearly and also see your
future more clearly. I want you to visualize the next
five years of your life in two ways. The first
way is what would your life look like five years
from now if you'd stayed. You can write about this,
you can journal this if you need, But what would
(35:15):
it have looked like honestly if you had stayed? And secondly,
what do you actually want it to look like in
five years? And what do you now have the opportunity
to do because you are not in this relationship, this
exercise just asks you to be really, really honest with yourself.
(35:36):
There was a reason this relationship didn't work out, even
if the reason was simply because the other person wasn't
in love anymore. There are things that can't be forced,
and there are things that would have eventually eroded the
relationship would have meant that you would have broken up
further down the line, what was this relationship asking you
to be and what was it asking you to become
(35:58):
that maybe wasn't going to be your best? And now
that you're not in it, you now have this opportunity
to shape the next five years, the next ten years,
twenty years of your life in a whole different environment,
a whole different space, maybe in all these different relationships
and places. How are you going to go about it?
I think what this question is really asking you to
(36:18):
do is to just get clear on the vision for yourself.
You know, it's just you. What do you want? What
do you want to strive for? What do you want
to turn this loss into? Because there are like so
many big wins that come out of just investigating and
really questioning what do I actually want from my life,
and now you don't have somebody else in it that
(36:39):
you have to think about. There's just so much more
room for freedom. This really lends to my final tip
after this shot break. I think we often look for
closure in the other person, and we look for closure
(37:01):
in that final conversation, that final thing they're going to
say to us. It's going to make us realize why
it ended, why it was the way it was. My
final tip, I need you to write the story of
your relationship, and write the finish or the closing chapter
of your relationship for yourself as if you are telling
(37:21):
the story of your relationship as a folk story or
as a lesson to a younger, a younger version of
your to your future children, or almost like a fairy tale,
right at the beginning, right the middle of the relationship,
and right the end. But also write why you think
(37:42):
it had to happen, and maybe even if you want
to project into the future, write about why this relationship
was actually a stepping stone and what it may be
guiding you to that is bigger than you. This really
leverages the power of something we call narrative psychology. Narrative
psychology is basically the study of how We make sense
(38:04):
of our lives through stories, and it plays a really
powerful role in healing after a breakup. According to the
narrative psychologist Dan P. McAdams, we construct our identity through
personal narratives that link our past, present, and imagine future
into a coherent whole. And when something disrupts that story
(38:24):
and doesn't make sense with what we thought was going
to happen, like a breakup, that's when we experience a
lot of pain. The story is disrupted, like the plot
line that we once shared is suddenly incomplete. So writing
the story of your relationship as a lesson or from
your perspective allows you to engage in that reconstruction process,
(38:45):
and it allows you to really make meaning from this
grief and from this loss in a manner that is very,
very powerful. I want to give you a bonus tip
speaking of closure and healing, and I know I've talked
about this in another episode on Heartbreak, but I'm gonna
say it again. I need you to make a breakup playlist.
(39:07):
Maybe you already have one, but music and heartbreak are
like the perfect pairing. Twenty fourteen study actually found that
breakup songs help you heal because they promote emotional expression
and therefore give you an outlet compared to emotional suppression.
There's also this additional funny part to this tip as well,
(39:29):
which is that I think having a very specific breakup
playlist actually allows you to track how your response or
how your healing is going based on how you respond
to the music. So what I mean by that is
that it's often very hard to see how far you've come,
(39:49):
how much your grief is actually moving or healing, because
we don't always have that linear state of mind when
we're going through something really really difficult. Recently, I listened
back to my breakup playlist from that year of breakups,
and I remember listening to these songs and sobbing, and
(40:13):
I remember having such an emotional reaction. And I listened
to those songs the other day and I felt nothing.
I just felt I just felt neutral. I didn't feel sad,
I didn't feel nostalgic, I didn't feel excited. I just
felt nothing. And it was this really profound way of
(40:34):
seeing how I have changed and how I've obviously I've
very obviously healed, but how like something that I once
thought was going to define my life, and then I
was never going to recover from I did something I
thought I was never going to get over. I got over,
(40:56):
and my life is now so so much better. And
I think that's really where I want to kind of
finish this episode, Like it's very easy to feel pessimistic
about love, and it's very easy to feel like, because
(41:18):
this relationship didn't work out, I'm never going to find
anyone better. Because I'm feeling so intense and deeply pained
by the ending of this relationship, that's a sign that
this person was the one. That's just not the case.
I never thought I would feel pain, any deeper pain
(41:40):
than the way I did with my first boyfriend, and
then I did. I felt even more pain for somebody
who was a lot less deserving of my love, and
even then, like that actually said nothing more than that
I was just attached and it was always going to
be hard to get over. And now I'm in this
amazing relationship, and I wish that I could just sit
(42:03):
down with my younger self and just say, you've just
got to get through this. This is an important emotional experience,
and you're gonna find love, if not in your twenties,
if not in your thirties, eventually you will. I always
love hearing stories of people who find love a little
bit later on. I think about, you know, my aunt
(42:25):
who dated a terrible man for years and then at
fifty seven met like the love of her life who
she has never been more in love with and who
she just adores. Or my grandma, who you know, divorced
my grandfather in her forties and then met who I
really do consider to be my grandfather and he like
(42:46):
moved her to Australia and took her to Africa and
made her an important part of his business and just
thinks she's incredible at ninety years old. True love really
does exist, And sometimes I do think it's waiting behind heartbreak.
It's begging you to let go, to leave this person,
to learn as much as you can from this situation,
(43:06):
because it knows what else is coming. And I know
you're in so much pain right now. I know you
think you're never going to get over them. But whenever
you feel pessimistic about the future without them in it,
look for the big love stories because you will find
them and remember like your biggest love story, like you
are the love of your own life, the relationship you
(43:28):
have with yourself matters more than anything, and it's from
that that all other relationships form. So focus on you
for a while, focus on being so magnetic and amazing
and in love with yourself that whoever comes to the
door next, whoever you meet next, whether it's in two months,
two years, or ten years, is just going to undeniably
know that you know yourself, know that you deserve respect,
(43:50):
and know their feelings for you are true, and that
you're the one, and that they love you. And I'm sure,
absolutely positively, like you can take me to the bank,
that you will find somebody like that, even if you
are in the pits of sadness and despair right now.
So thank you so much for listening to this episode.
I hope that this guide has been helpful. There was
(44:12):
so much more I wanted to say. I had to
deliberately like just not talk about so much other stuff
I really wanted to talk about, like when you know you,
when you know it's time to date again, what to
do if somebody moves on first. But feel like we
might just have to do a part two of this
episode because I spoke for way too long. But yeah,
I'm sending you a lot of love with your little
(44:34):
heart broken at the moment. I'm sure you're taking very
good care of it, but I hope that you're healing,
and I hope that you're mending, and I hope that
this episode you can take something from it and put
it into practice. If you have made it this far,
leave a few emojis down below, then explain such capture
where you are in the breakup right now, and whether
(44:57):
you're in Wave one, Wave two, or Wave three. I
want to know I'm setting love to my Wave one,
my Wave one people. I'm sure it's very very brutal,
but yeah, leave a little comment down below the emojis
that describe your current state of mind with your breakup,
but also what wave you're in. Make sure to maybe
share this with somebody else who you think might really
need to hear it. Your breakup buddy, and follow us
(45:19):
as well on Instagram at that Psychology podcast if you
want to share how you're going, share how this episode
helped you, any suggestions, or if you want a part
two to this episode as well. I always love to
hear from you guys, and make sure that you are
following wherever you are listening, whether that is on Apple,
on the iHeartRadio app on Spotify so that you know
when we post new episodes. But with all that in mind,
(45:42):
thank you again for listening, and until next time, be safe,
be kind, be gentle to yourself, and we will talk
very very soon,
Host
Jemma Sbeghen
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