May 15, 2026 • 30 mins
You know that moment after a breakup when you find yourself going back to their photos. Not all of them, just the best ones. The trips, the laughs, the versions of you that felt happiest together. And before you even realize it, it starts to feel like you lost something perfect. This is about that moment. The quiet spiral where you begin to question your decision, wondering if you made a mistake, where the relationship in your memory starts to feel better than it actually was. Jay breaks down what’s really happening there. Your mind is editing the past, holding onto the highlights while slowly letting go of the reasons it didn’t work. The arguments, the doubts, the patterns that hurt you all start to fade. So what you’re missing isn’t the full relationship. It’s a curated version of it.
Jay unpacks why heartbreak can feel so overwhelming. It’s not just emotional, it’s biological. Your brain responds to the loss like withdrawal, craving the connection it got used to, which is why checking their profile or replaying old conversations can feel almost impossible to resist. Even deeper than that, Jay explains how breakups often tap into something older, patterns of attachment, fears of being left, or the need to feel chosen. When you think you’re missing them, part of what you’re really feeling is the loss of security, identity, and the version of yourself that existed in that relationship.
In this episode you'll learn:
How to Stop Romanticizing Your Ex
How to Break the Late-Night Thought Spiral
How to Let Go Without Losing Yourself
How to Resist the Urge to Check Their Socials
How to Heal Without Reaching Out
How to Rebuild Your Identity After a Breakup
If you’re in that space right now, missing them, questioning everything, going back and forth in your mind, just know this: what you’re feeling is real, but it doesn’t mean the story you’re telling yourself is true. It means you cared, you attached, and now you’re learning how to let go.
With Love and Gratitude,
Jay Shetty
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What We Discuss:
00:00 Intro
02:20 The Version You Miss Isn’t the Whole Truth
07:29 Why Your Mind Rewrites the Past
10:46 The Hidden Patterns That Break Relationships
12:29 What You’re Really Grieving
17:22 The Real Work of Letting Go
19:32 #1: No Contact Rule
21:07 #2: The Full Picture Exercise
22:01 #3: Interrupt the Spiral
23:38 #4: Rebuild Your Identity
26:09 #5: Grief is Grief
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I know what you've been doing. You've been going back
through the photos, not all of them, just the good ones,
the one from that trip, the one where they're laughing
at something and the light is hitting them exactly right.
You've looked at it more times than you would ever
admit to anyone. You've been listening to songs that you
have no business listening to. Right now you know which ones,
(00:20):
the ones that you basically turned into a soundtrack for
a movie about the two of you, your relationship, a
movie that's much better than the relationship actually was. You've
been checking their Instagram. Maybe not their main feed, you're
smarter than that, but their stories for sure at one
am trying to figure out who that person in the
background of the photo is. You've been having conversations with
(00:42):
them in your head, long, articular, emotionally devastating conversations where
you finally say everything you should have said, and they
finally understand and something resolves, and then you come back
to reality and they haven't texted, and somehow that hurts
more the imaginary conversation. You've been doing, the math how
(01:04):
many days since you last spoke, whether they're thinking about you,
what they're doing, right now, whether the thing you said
in that argument three months before the end was the
thing that actually ended it. And in your most honest moments,
the three am ones or the Tuesday afternoon ones when
you're supposed to be working, you've been telling yourself a story.
(01:25):
Story goes something like this. It was so good. I've
never felt that way before. I don't know if I'll
ever feel that way ever again. Maybe we gave up
too soon. Maybe they were the one. I'm going to
need you to sit with me for thirty minutes today
because I need to tell you something about that story,
about your brain, about what's actually happening when you romanticize
(01:48):
your ex, when you romanticize someone you've lost, and about
what's waiting for you on the other side of this spiral,
if you're willing to walk through it rather than loop
it around forever. It's not a You'll be fine peptal.
This is not toxic positivity wearing a therapy speak costume.
This is the real thing, the neuroscience, the psychology, the
(02:09):
ancient wisdom, and the practical tools. Because you deserve the
actual truth more than you deserve to feel temporarily soothed. Ready,
let's go. This is the harsh truth your brain is
lying to you, and I want to share with you
the neuroscience of why they seem perfect now that they're gone.
(02:29):
Let's start with the most important thing. The person you
are missing does not exist, doesn't exist anymore, not exists,
but is different now, not exists, but is with someone else.
The specific person you're currently grieving, the one who appears
in the photos you keep returning to, the one who
(02:50):
stars in the mental highlight reel. You keep playing the
one who felt irreplaceable and perfect and like coming home.
That person is a construction, a story brain is telling you,
and your brain right now is a profoundly unreliable narrator.
Here's why. When we experience loss, the brain does something
that is genuinely astonishing from a neuroscience perspective and genuinely
(03:13):
cruel from a human one. It edits memory is not
a recording. We have known this in psychology for decades,
but it runs counter to how memory feels. We experience
our memories as faithful replications of what happened. They'renot. Every
time you retrieve a memory, you're not playing it back,
(03:33):
You're reconstructing it. And every reconstruction is influenced by your
current emotional state, your current needs, and your current narrative
about who you are and what your life means. This
was established definitively by the cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, one
of the most important and most underappreciated scientists of the
(03:53):
twentieth century. Her research on memory distortion showed that human
memory is extraordinarily malleable. We had details that weren't there,
We removed details that were there. We unconsciously rewrite what
happened to fit what we believe, what we feel, and
what we need to be true. Now apply that to
(04:14):
a relationship you've just lost. Your brain is in a
state of loss, and in a state of loss, the
brain is a very specific and predictable bias. It amplifies
the positive and suppresses the negative in memories of what
was lost. This is not a quirk, This is not weakness.
This is a documented neurological phenomenon. The moments of warmth, connection, laughter,
(04:36):
and intimacy get vivid. The chronic pattern of dismissal, the
way they made you feel small in front of their friends,
the way they went cold when you needed the most,
The Sunday arguments that always circled the same drain, those
get fuzzy, dimmed, explain away. You end up remembering a
relationship that was approximately forty percent better than the one
(04:58):
you actually had. And here's the other thing happening in
your brain. Simultaneously. When you were in the relationship, your
brain's reward system, the dopamine circuits, adapted to the presence
of your partner. They became a predicted reward, something your
brain had learned to anticipate and plan around. When the
relationship ends, that reward prediction is suddenly violently disrupted. And
(05:20):
the disruption of a predicted reward is neurologically identical to withdrawal.
This is not metaphor. Researchers at Rutgers University Helen Fisher
and her colleagues put people who had recently been rejected
in romantic relationships into an fMRI scanner and showed them
photos of their ex This will shock you. The brain
(05:42):
regions that activated were the same ones that activate in
cocaine addiction. The ventral tegmental area, the obsessive thinking, the
physical ache, the craving, the compulsive checking behavior. These are
not signs of how deep your love was. They are
signs of withdrawal. You're not pining for a person, you're
(06:03):
detoxing from a neurochemical And here's where it gets even
more interesting and more uncomfortable. The brain doesn't just romanticize
by boosting the positive memories. It also uses a mechanism
called deprivation amplification. Things we cannot have become more desirable,
not despite their unavailability, but because of it. The psychological
(06:27):
literature calls this reactance. When something is taken away, we
instinctively want it more, independent of how much we actually
wanted it before. Think about that for a second. You
might be partially in love with the unavailability itself. You
might be confusing the ache of deprivation, the biological screaming
(06:48):
of a reward system that's been cut off, with evidence
of exceptional, irreplaceable love. Not because you're foolish, but because
you're human. There's a line I think about all the
time from Victor Frankel between stimulus and response. There is space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
(07:12):
Understanding what's happening in your brain right now is that space.
It is the difference between being controlled by that neurological
process and being able to look at it, name it,
and make a different choice. So let's look at the
other thing your brain is doing. Let's look at the story.
The story you're telling is fiction. There's a difference between
(07:34):
your highlight reel and the full picture. There's a concept
in cognitive behavioral therapy called selective abstraction, the tendency to
focus on one element of a situation while ignoring the
broader context. To take a fragment and let it represent
the whole. We do this all the time, right you
judge someone based on your first interaction in plain language,
(07:55):
you're watching the trailer for your relationship, not the film.
The trailer trailers, as you know, are masterpieces of selective editing.
Have you ever been to the theaters and you watch
a trailer before the movie that you're going for, and
then you think, well, I can't wait to watch that movie.
Then you watch that movie and every joke was in
the trailer, every action moment was in the trailer, every
(08:16):
beautiful romantic moment was in the trailer, and the movie
was average. Every great line, every beautiful image, every moment
of connection and tenderness and electricity cut together to make
you want to see the movie. The trailer for a
mediocre film can make it look like the most important
cinematic experience of your lifetime. If you've just gone through
a breakup, this is what your brain is doing. It
(08:39):
has cut a three minute trailer for a two year relationship,
and you have watched that trailer so many times that
you've started to believe the trailer is the relationship. So
I want to do something with you that's going to
be uncomfortable, and I want you to do it honestly.
I want you to watch the full film, not to
be cruel, not to demonize them or to erase what
(09:02):
was really good, but because you cannot make clear eye
decisions about your own recovery, about whether you should reach out,
about whether this deserves to be mourned or released, about
what you actually want. If you're working from a distorted source,
think about the thing that ended it, Not the surface event,
the argument, the moment, the conversation, the actual underlying pattern,
(09:27):
the pattern that kept reasserting itself, that you kept hoping
would change that never quite did. What was it was
it that they made you feel like an afterthought, that
your needs were inconvenient that they were emotionally unavailable in
a way that made you work constantly for reassurance. You
should have just been given that there was always something
(09:48):
more important than you, the job, the friends, the general
principle of their independence, or was it something in you,
a pattern of your own that this relationship was surfacing
and anxious attachment style that turned you into someone you
didn't like, a habit of losing yourself in someone else
until you couldn't find the edges of where you ended
and they began. Whatever the pat was, it was real,
(10:11):
It was consistent, and it did not go away, and
if you got back together tomorrow, it would still be there,
still consistent, still real, with the added weight of everything
that's happened since. One of my favorite Buddhist teachings is this,
you cannot step in the same river twice. The river
(10:31):
changes and you change as well. What you're trying to
return to doesn't exist anymore. The relationship of the highlight
reel is not a place you can go back to.
It was barely even a place you were actually at.
Psychologist John Gottman, who has spent forty years studying couples,
identified what he calls the full horsemen of relationship failure, contempt, criticism, defensiveness,
(10:59):
and Stonewall and his research found that by the time
relationships end, these patterns have usually been present and consistent
for an average of six years before the breakup. Six years,
which means you probably have evidence, memories, feelings, moments that
the relationships had these patterns for a long time, but
(11:19):
those memories are now fuzzy, explained away, rewritten as misunderstandings
or your fault, or understandable given their circumstances, because your
editing brain has decided the relationship was better than it was.
I'm not saying it wasn't real. I'm not saying it
didn't matter. I'm not saying there wasn't love or beauty
or genuine connection. There probably was. And that's what makes
(11:41):
it harder, not easier, because you're not mourning a lie.
You're mourning something that had real value and real limitations simultaneously,
and the human brain finds that complexity almost impossible to hold.
Here's the questions I want you to ask yourself after
a breakup. Who were you when you were in that relationship?
Were you more yourself or less yourself? Were you growing
(12:05):
toward who you want to be or were you just tolerating, accommodating,
shrinking or performing. Were you genuinely seen or were you
constantly trying to be seen and often failing. Because your
answer to that question tells you something far more important
than whether they were wonderful. It tells you whether the
relationship was actually good for you. Now here's what you're
(12:27):
actually grieving, and surprisingly, it's not them, it's something much older.
This is the part of the episode where I need
you to stay with me, because this is the hardest
part and also the most important. When someone comes to
me or a trusted friend and says, I can't stop
thinking about my ex. I think I made a mistake.
I think they were the one. There is almost always
(12:48):
something underneath the grief about the specific person that doesn't
get examined, because grief is not simple, and romantic grief
is almost never just about the person in front of you.
The psychologist and attachment researcher Sue Johnson has spent her
career studying what happens in the nervous system when intimate
connection is threatened or lost, and what she found is
(13:11):
that adult romantic attachment doesn't operate in isolation. It operates
on the top of the entire architecture of attachment you've
been building since you were an infant. When your earliest
caregivers were consistent and responsive, you developed what's called a
secure attachment style. You learned at the level of the
(13:32):
nervous system, programming before language even existed, that people are safe,
that you're worthy of love, and that separation is temporary.
That you can let people go and they will come back,
or if they don't, you will survive and find connection again.
When your earliest caregivers were inconsistent or absent, or overwhelming
or emotionally unavailable, you developed a different program. You might
(13:55):
have anxious attachment, the constant background hum that love is precarious,
that you have to work to maintain it, that the
other person's withdrawal is evidence that you've done something wrong.
Or avoidant attachment, the learned belief that needing people is dangerous,
that you're better off not needing, that closeness is a trap.
Most people reading this, most people doing the three A
(14:18):
M spiral, are not just grieving a relationship. They are
re experiencing a very old wound. The grief about this
person is a portal into a grief that has been
sitting in the body for much longer. The anxious attached
person isn't just missing their ex. They are re experiencing
every moment in childhood when love felt conditional, when approval
(14:42):
could be earned, and then suddenly withdrawn, when they tried
their very hardest and it still wasn't enough. The avoidant
person who is pretending to be fine and yet finds
themselves inexplicably devastated isn't just managing a breakup. They are
brushing against the thing They have spent their whole life,
running from, the terrifying evidence that they needed someone and
(15:06):
then lost them. I'm not saying this to psycho analyze you,
but to offer something critical compassion for the scale of
what you're actually carrying. Stop hating yourself for not getting
over your ex. You're not weak because this is so hard.
You're not pathetic because you can't stop thinking about them.
You're a person who formed a deep attachment that is
(15:29):
connected to something much larger and older and more foundational
than this one relationship, and when that attachment is disrupted,
the pain reaches all the way down into that original wound.
A shocking is this sounds this is actually good news
because it means the healing you do right now, if
you can do it properly, if you do it honestly,
(15:50):
is not just about getting over this person. It is
about attending to something that is needed attention for a
very long time. This breakup, as terrible as it feels,
is also an invitation. The zen teacher Pay My Children
writes about something she calls groundlessness, the terrifying experience of
(16:10):
having the floor fall away from under you, of being
in free fall with nothing solid to grab, and she
argues counterintuitively provocatively that groundlessness is not a problem to
be solved. It is the most spiritual condition available to
a human being, because when the ground falls away, you
(16:32):
discover whether you are standing on solid ground at all,
or whether you are standing on the illusion of someone
else holding you up. The spiral of romanticizing your ex
is at its core, the desperate attempt to find the
floor again, to go back to the thing that felt
like solid ground. But the floor was never solid. It
(16:53):
was a person, which means it was always going to move.
Stop romanticizing your ex. Missing them, You're missing the version
they showed you before you saw the full picture. You're
not missing them, You're missing the future you're already planned
in your head. You're not missing them, you're missing feeling chosen.
(17:15):
You're not missing them. You're just not ready to let
go of the story yet. But you will be. If
you've gone through a breakup. The work, the real work,
is not to find new ground to stand on. It's
to find yourself standing without anything to lean on in
(17:36):
the groundlessness for long enough to realize you were always
capable of standing alone. There's a Japanese concept called mono
no aware, often translated as the pathos of things, the
bitter sweetness of impermanence, the particular beauty and sadness that
comes from knowing that nothing lasts. The Japanese don't treat
(17:58):
impermanence as a problem. They treat it as the very
thing that gives experience its beauty. Cherry blossoms are the
most revered symbol in Japanese culture, not despite the fact
that they fall in a week, because of it. What
you had was real, what you had could have been
beautiful in parts, and it is gone. And all three
(18:19):
of those things are true simultaneously, and sitting with that truth,
all of it without rewriting the ending, without fantasy editing
it into something it wasn't, without bargaining with the past
or that person. Is not resignation, is not giving up.
It is the most courageous thing you can do, the
willingness to feel the full beauty of something that is over. Now,
(18:41):
let me tell you how to actually do that, How
to interrupt the spiral, how to work with your brain
instead of being controlled by it. Because knowing the science
doesn't make it stop hurting, but it does change what
you do with the hurt. Let me be really honest
with you about breakups. There is no version of getting
over someone that doesn't involve feeling it. There's no cognitive
(19:04):
hack that bypasses grief. There is no framework that makes
this painless. There are two types of pain. The first
is the pain that moves you, that transforms you, that
carries you somewhere new. And then there's the pain that loops,
the pain that keeps you exactly where you are, circling
(19:25):
the same drain for months or years, pretending to be
the depth of feeling when it's actually just a broken record.
(19:53):
Here's how you get to the pain that moves you.
Tool number one, the no contact rule, and I want
to talk to you about why it's actually biology. You've
heard about no contact, but you may not know the
real reason it works. And the real reason is not
about playing games or winning the breakup or making them
miss you. The real reason is neurological. Every time you
(20:16):
check their social media, you are feeding the addiction. You
are reactivating the dopamine circuit. You're telling your neural pathways
this is still relevant. Keep tracking it. Your brain cannot
begin to withdraw, cannot begin to heal while you keep
administering microdoses of the drug. No contact is not punishment.
No contact is detox. And it includes the things you're
(20:37):
pretending don't count. The casual social media check that you
tell yourself is harmless, the friendly text you're composing in
your head, the driving past where they live. Every one
of these is a hit. Every one of these restarts
the clock on withdrawal. You're not cutting them off because
you're cold. You're cutting off the supply because you're trying
(20:58):
to heal. Those are complete different things. Stop checking their feed.
They're not coming back because you watch their story. They're
not coming back because you like something from forty seven
weeks ago at two am. They're not coming back because
you figured out who that person in their photo is.
They're not coming back because you've refreshed their profile eleven
(21:21):
times today. They're not coming back, but your pieces the
second you stop looking. Tune number two, the full picture exercise.
I want you to do something tonight, if you're brave enough.
Take a piece of paper, Draw a line down the middle.
On the left side, write down the things you genuinely miss,
the real things, not the imagined, perfect version, the actual
(21:43):
things that were good and real and valuable. On the
right side, write down the things you've been selectively forgetting,
The pattern that kept repeating, the way you felt bad
on days which were more frequent than your highlight reel
admits the specific moments where you felt unseen or dismissed,
or too much not enough, the days you cried. Write
down who you were on your worst days in that relationship,
(22:06):
right down the cost personally, professionally, to your family. This
isn't bitterness, it's not revenge. It's accuracy. You're correcting your memories, editing.
You're forcing your brain to hold the full picture rather
than just the trailer. Two Number three interrupt the spiral, literally,
the romanticizing spiral, is a thought pattern, and thought patterns
(22:28):
are neurological pathways, neural circuits that have been strengthened through repetition.
Every time you indulge the spiral, you strengthen the pathway.
Every time you interrupt it, you begin to weaken it.
It's not suppression forcing yourself to not think about something. Actually,
this increases the frequency of the thought. It's that don't
think about a pink elephant problem. The harder you try
(22:51):
not to think about the pink elephant, you think about
the pink elephant. What works instead is what neuroscientists call
pattern interruption, a brief but genuine redirect of neural attention
to something that requires full cognitive engagement. When the spiral starts,
when you catch your hand moving toward their instagram, when
the imaginary conversation begins, when the maybe we gave up
(23:13):
too soon story starts playing, you do something that requires
your genuine attention immediately. Something physical works best, a short,
vigorous walk, cold water on your face, five pushups, something
that activates your body and breaks the cognitive loop. Then,
and this is key, you do not fight the feeling
you name it. I am experiencing a craving for this person.
(23:36):
Just that The simple act of naming an emotion, when
neuroscientists call affect labeling, activates the prefront or cortex and
measurably reduces activity in the amygdala. You move the feeling
from the reactive part of your brain to the observing part.
You become the person watching the spiral rather than the
(23:56):
person inside it. Pol Number four red build identity, not
find yourself. I know find yourself is tired. Advice. Bear
with me because this is different, I promise. One of
the most underappreciated effects of a significant relationship ending is
what psychologists call self concept contraction. In a long or
(24:18):
deep relationship, your identity expands. You become someone who is
part of a wei. You have shared friends, shared routine,
shared references, shared futures. When the relationship ends, that whole
dimension of identity collapses. You don't just lose the person,
you lose the version of yourself that existed in relation
to them. The antidote is not to immediately seek a
(24:40):
new relationship to fill the gap, but to actively rebuild
your own independent self concept to recover your own narrative.
This means what did you stop doing when you were
in that relationship? What did you let atrophy? What parts
of yourself did you set aside to make room for
the wei friend? You let drift interest, You abandoned ambitions.
(25:02):
You quietly shelved the parts of you that existed before
them and are still there waiting go find them. Not
as therapy, not as distraction, as recovery of self. Every
time you do something that is purely authentically yours, something
that reflects who you are, independent of any relationship, you
are rebuilding the self concept that the relationship and the
(25:25):
breakup have eroded. You are answering the question who am
I without them, and discovering that the answer is more
than you remembered. Please stop making excuses for them in
your mind. Don't forget how small they made you feel.
Don't forget they had every chance to choose you. Don't
(25:48):
forget the excuses you made for them. Don't forget you
cried because of this person more than once. Don't forget
how many times they disappointed you and you stayed anyway.
Please don't forget your worth. Please don't forget you deserved
more than what they gave you. Please don't forget you
(26:09):
always gave them the benefit of the doubt. Please don't
forget you always saw the good in them and receive
the bad. Please don't forget you bent over backwards when
they barely moved. Please don't forget. Someone who deserves you
won't make you question if you're enough. Turne number five.
(26:31):
Let the grief be grief. Don't dress it up as love.
This is the hardest one and the most important. Grief
is grief. It needs to be felt, not managed, not optimized,
not rushed through or bypassed or processed into insight before
it's ready. Grief is a biological process, the nervous system
integrating a loss, and it takes the time it takes.
(26:54):
But there is a crucial difference between grief and romanticization.
Grief moves comes in waves, intense and quiet, then intense again,
gradually spacing out. It doesn't ask you to do anything
except feel it. It doesn't require you to figure out
whether they were the one, or whether you made a mistake,
or whether you should text them. It just hurts, and
(27:15):
then hurts less, and then hurts again, and eventually, if
you don't keep feeding it, it hurts differently, not as
a wound, but as a scar, as evidence of something
real that changed you that you remember. Romanticizing a relationship
doesn't help you move forward. It loops. It keeps you
in a story. It asks you to stay in the
(27:36):
question what if, maybe perhaps if, only because the story
needs you to stay in it, to stay alive. The
story is not serving your grief, it's serving itself. So
let yourself grief actually grief. Feel the loss, feel the sadness,
feel the particular ache of missing someone who is genuinely
(27:57):
important to you. That grief is true, grit, if is healthy,
That grief is the right response to loss. Just don't
let the grief become a story that keeps you from
moving through it. Feel it, and then let it move.
You've been telling yourself that you're holding onto them because
of how much you love them. I want to offer
you a different possibility. You've been holding onto the story
(28:20):
of them because it's safer than the thing on the
other side of letting go. On the other side of
letting go is the open question of what comes next,
the terrifying freedom of not being defined by this grief,
the vulnerability of being available to yourself, to life, to
whoever might come next without the protection of still being
(28:41):
someone's ex. On the other side of letting go is
the work of figuring out who you actually are, not
in relation to them, not in comparison to what you had.
Just you standing in your own life, making choices from
your own center, building something from where you actually are
rather than from where you wish you still were. But
here's what I know. The love that is coming for you,
(29:05):
the life that is waiting for you, is not located
in the past. It is not in the photos you
keep looking back to, or the songs you keep listening to,
or the imaginary conversations where they finally understand. It is
in front of you, in the version of yourself that
has been through something real and survived it and learned
things you couldn't have learned any other way. I really
(29:28):
hope that this episode helps you. I hope you'll pass
it on to a friend who may be going through
this right now. Thank you for trusting me. Remember I'm
always in your corner and I'm forever rooting for you.
If you love this episode, you're going to love my
conversation with Matthew Hussey on how to get over your
ex and find true love in your relationships. Make a
(29:50):
list of the things that are truly important for you
to find in a partner, and then be that list
I know what you've been doing. You've been going back
through the photos, not all of them, just the good ones,
the one from that trip, the one where they're laughing
at something and the light is hitting them exactly right.
You've looked at it more times than you would ever
admit to anyone. You've been listening to songs that you
have no business listening to. Right now you know which ones,
(00:20):
the ones that you basically turned into a soundtrack for
a movie about the two of you, your relationship, a
movie that's much better than the relationship actually was. You've
been checking their Instagram. Maybe not their main feed, you're
smarter than that, but their stories for sure at one
am trying to figure out who that person in the
background of the photo is. You've been having conversations with
(00:42):
them in your head, long, articular, emotionally devastating conversations where
you finally say everything you should have said, and they
finally understand and something resolves, and then you come back
to reality and they haven't texted, and somehow that hurts
more the imaginary conversation. You've been doing, the math how
(01:04):
many days since you last spoke, whether they're thinking about you,
what they're doing, right now, whether the thing you said
in that argument three months before the end was the
thing that actually ended it. And in your most honest moments,
the three am ones or the Tuesday afternoon ones when
you're supposed to be working, you've been telling yourself a story.
(01:25):
Story goes something like this. It was so good. I've
never felt that way before. I don't know if I'll
ever feel that way ever again. Maybe we gave up
too soon. Maybe they were the one. I'm going to
need you to sit with me for thirty minutes today
because I need to tell you something about that story,
about your brain, about what's actually happening when you romanticize
(01:48):
your ex, when you romanticize someone you've lost, and about
what's waiting for you on the other side of this spiral,
if you're willing to walk through it rather than loop
it around forever. It's not a You'll be fine peptal.
This is not toxic positivity wearing a therapy speak costume.
This is the real thing, the neuroscience, the psychology, the
(02:09):
ancient wisdom, and the practical tools. Because you deserve the
actual truth more than you deserve to feel temporarily soothed. Ready,
let's go. This is the harsh truth your brain is
lying to you, and I want to share with you
the neuroscience of why they seem perfect now that they're gone.
(02:29):
Let's start with the most important thing. The person you
are missing does not exist, doesn't exist anymore, not exists,
but is different now, not exists, but is with someone else.
The specific person you're currently grieving, the one who appears
in the photos you keep returning to, the one who
(02:50):
stars in the mental highlight reel. You keep playing the
one who felt irreplaceable and perfect and like coming home.
That person is a construction, a story brain is telling you,
and your brain right now is a profoundly unreliable narrator.
Here's why. When we experience loss, the brain does something
that is genuinely astonishing from a neuroscience perspective and genuinely
(03:13):
cruel from a human one. It edits memory is not
a recording. We have known this in psychology for decades,
but it runs counter to how memory feels. We experience
our memories as faithful replications of what happened. They'renot. Every
time you retrieve a memory, you're not playing it back,
(03:33):
You're reconstructing it. And every reconstruction is influenced by your
current emotional state, your current needs, and your current narrative
about who you are and what your life means. This
was established definitively by the cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, one
of the most important and most underappreciated scientists of the
(03:53):
twentieth century. Her research on memory distortion showed that human
memory is extraordinarily malleable. We had details that weren't there,
We removed details that were there. We unconsciously rewrite what
happened to fit what we believe, what we feel, and
what we need to be true. Now apply that to
(04:14):
a relationship you've just lost. Your brain is in a
state of loss, and in a state of loss, the
brain is a very specific and predictable bias. It amplifies
the positive and suppresses the negative in memories of what
was lost. This is not a quirk, This is not weakness.
This is a documented neurological phenomenon. The moments of warmth, connection, laughter,
(04:36):
and intimacy get vivid. The chronic pattern of dismissal, the
way they made you feel small in front of their friends,
the way they went cold when you needed the most,
The Sunday arguments that always circled the same drain, those
get fuzzy, dimmed, explain away. You end up remembering a
relationship that was approximately forty percent better than the one
(04:58):
you actually had. And here's the other thing happening in
your brain. Simultaneously. When you were in the relationship, your
brain's reward system, the dopamine circuits, adapted to the presence
of your partner. They became a predicted reward, something your
brain had learned to anticipate and plan around. When the
relationship ends, that reward prediction is suddenly violently disrupted. And
(05:20):
the disruption of a predicted reward is neurologically identical to withdrawal.
This is not metaphor. Researchers at Rutgers University Helen Fisher
and her colleagues put people who had recently been rejected
in romantic relationships into an fMRI scanner and showed them
photos of their ex This will shock you. The brain
(05:42):
regions that activated were the same ones that activate in
cocaine addiction. The ventral tegmental area, the obsessive thinking, the
physical ache, the craving, the compulsive checking behavior. These are
not signs of how deep your love was. They are
signs of withdrawal. You're not pining for a person, you're
(06:03):
detoxing from a neurochemical And here's where it gets even
more interesting and more uncomfortable. The brain doesn't just romanticize
by boosting the positive memories. It also uses a mechanism
called deprivation amplification. Things we cannot have become more desirable,
not despite their unavailability, but because of it. The psychological
(06:27):
literature calls this reactance. When something is taken away, we
instinctively want it more, independent of how much we actually
wanted it before. Think about that for a second. You
might be partially in love with the unavailability itself. You
might be confusing the ache of deprivation, the biological screaming
(06:48):
of a reward system that's been cut off, with evidence
of exceptional, irreplaceable love. Not because you're foolish, but because
you're human. There's a line I think about all the
time from Victor Frankel between stimulus and response. There is space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
(07:12):
Understanding what's happening in your brain right now is that space.
It is the difference between being controlled by that neurological
process and being able to look at it, name it,
and make a different choice. So let's look at the
other thing your brain is doing. Let's look at the story.
The story you're telling is fiction. There's a difference between
(07:34):
your highlight reel and the full picture. There's a concept
in cognitive behavioral therapy called selective abstraction, the tendency to
focus on one element of a situation while ignoring the
broader context. To take a fragment and let it represent
the whole. We do this all the time, right you
judge someone based on your first interaction in plain language,
(07:55):
you're watching the trailer for your relationship, not the film.
The trailer trailers, as you know, are masterpieces of selective editing.
Have you ever been to the theaters and you watch
a trailer before the movie that you're going for, and
then you think, well, I can't wait to watch that movie.
Then you watch that movie and every joke was in
the trailer, every action moment was in the trailer, every
(08:16):
beautiful romantic moment was in the trailer, and the movie
was average. Every great line, every beautiful image, every moment
of connection and tenderness and electricity cut together to make
you want to see the movie. The trailer for a
mediocre film can make it look like the most important
cinematic experience of your lifetime. If you've just gone through
a breakup, this is what your brain is doing. It
(08:39):
has cut a three minute trailer for a two year relationship,
and you have watched that trailer so many times that
you've started to believe the trailer is the relationship. So
I want to do something with you that's going to
be uncomfortable, and I want you to do it honestly.
I want you to watch the full film, not to
be cruel, not to demonize them or to erase what
(09:02):
was really good, but because you cannot make clear eye
decisions about your own recovery, about whether you should reach out,
about whether this deserves to be mourned or released, about
what you actually want. If you're working from a distorted source,
think about the thing that ended it, Not the surface event,
the argument, the moment, the conversation, the actual underlying pattern,
(09:27):
the pattern that kept reasserting itself, that you kept hoping
would change that never quite did. What was it was
it that they made you feel like an afterthought, that
your needs were inconvenient that they were emotionally unavailable in
a way that made you work constantly for reassurance. You
should have just been given that there was always something
(09:48):
more important than you, the job, the friends, the general
principle of their independence, or was it something in you,
a pattern of your own that this relationship was surfacing
and anxious attachment style that turned you into someone you
didn't like, a habit of losing yourself in someone else
until you couldn't find the edges of where you ended
and they began. Whatever the pat was, it was real,
(10:11):
It was consistent, and it did not go away, and
if you got back together tomorrow, it would still be there,
still consistent, still real, with the added weight of everything
that's happened since. One of my favorite Buddhist teachings is this,
you cannot step in the same river twice. The river
(10:31):
changes and you change as well. What you're trying to
return to doesn't exist anymore. The relationship of the highlight
reel is not a place you can go back to.
It was barely even a place you were actually at.
Psychologist John Gottman, who has spent forty years studying couples,
identified what he calls the full horsemen of relationship failure, contempt, criticism, defensiveness,
(10:59):
and Stonewall and his research found that by the time
relationships end, these patterns have usually been present and consistent
for an average of six years before the breakup. Six years,
which means you probably have evidence, memories, feelings, moments that
the relationships had these patterns for a long time, but
(11:19):
those memories are now fuzzy, explained away, rewritten as misunderstandings
or your fault, or understandable given their circumstances, because your
editing brain has decided the relationship was better than it was.
I'm not saying it wasn't real. I'm not saying it
didn't matter. I'm not saying there wasn't love or beauty
or genuine connection. There probably was. And that's what makes
(11:41):
it harder, not easier, because you're not mourning a lie.
You're mourning something that had real value and real limitations simultaneously,
and the human brain finds that complexity almost impossible to hold.
Here's the questions I want you to ask yourself after
a breakup. Who were you when you were in that relationship?
Were you more yourself or less yourself? Were you growing
(12:05):
toward who you want to be or were you just tolerating, accommodating,
shrinking or performing. Were you genuinely seen or were you
constantly trying to be seen and often failing. Because your
answer to that question tells you something far more important
than whether they were wonderful. It tells you whether the
relationship was actually good for you. Now here's what you're
(12:27):
actually grieving, and surprisingly, it's not them, it's something much older.
This is the part of the episode where I need
you to stay with me, because this is the hardest
part and also the most important. When someone comes to
me or a trusted friend and says, I can't stop
thinking about my ex. I think I made a mistake.
I think they were the one. There is almost always
(12:48):
something underneath the grief about the specific person that doesn't
get examined, because grief is not simple, and romantic grief
is almost never just about the person in front of you.
The psychologist and attachment researcher Sue Johnson has spent her
career studying what happens in the nervous system when intimate
connection is threatened or lost, and what she found is
(13:11):
that adult romantic attachment doesn't operate in isolation. It operates
on the top of the entire architecture of attachment you've
been building since you were an infant. When your earliest
caregivers were consistent and responsive, you developed what's called a
secure attachment style. You learned at the level of the
(13:32):
nervous system, programming before language even existed, that people are safe,
that you're worthy of love, and that separation is temporary.
That you can let people go and they will come back,
or if they don't, you will survive and find connection again.
When your earliest caregivers were inconsistent or absent, or overwhelming
or emotionally unavailable, you developed a different program. You might
(13:55):
have anxious attachment, the constant background hum that love is precarious,
that you have to work to maintain it, that the
other person's withdrawal is evidence that you've done something wrong.
Or avoidant attachment, the learned belief that needing people is dangerous,
that you're better off not needing, that closeness is a trap.
Most people reading this, most people doing the three A
(14:18):
M spiral, are not just grieving a relationship. They are
re experiencing a very old wound. The grief about this
person is a portal into a grief that has been
sitting in the body for much longer. The anxious attached
person isn't just missing their ex. They are re experiencing
every moment in childhood when love felt conditional, when approval
(14:42):
could be earned, and then suddenly withdrawn, when they tried
their very hardest and it still wasn't enough. The avoidant
person who is pretending to be fine and yet finds
themselves inexplicably devastated isn't just managing a breakup. They are
brushing against the thing They have spent their whole life,
running from, the terrifying evidence that they needed someone and
(15:06):
then lost them. I'm not saying this to psycho analyze you,
but to offer something critical compassion for the scale of
what you're actually carrying. Stop hating yourself for not getting
over your ex. You're not weak because this is so hard.
You're not pathetic because you can't stop thinking about them.
You're a person who formed a deep attachment that is
(15:29):
connected to something much larger and older and more foundational
than this one relationship, and when that attachment is disrupted,
the pain reaches all the way down into that original wound.
A shocking is this sounds this is actually good news
because it means the healing you do right now, if
you can do it properly, if you do it honestly,
(15:50):
is not just about getting over this person. It is
about attending to something that is needed attention for a
very long time. This breakup, as terrible as it feels,
is also an invitation. The zen teacher Pay My Children
writes about something she calls groundlessness, the terrifying experience of
(16:10):
having the floor fall away from under you, of being
in free fall with nothing solid to grab, and she
argues counterintuitively provocatively that groundlessness is not a problem to
be solved. It is the most spiritual condition available to
a human being, because when the ground falls away, you
(16:32):
discover whether you are standing on solid ground at all,
or whether you are standing on the illusion of someone
else holding you up. The spiral of romanticizing your ex
is at its core, the desperate attempt to find the
floor again, to go back to the thing that felt
like solid ground. But the floor was never solid. It
(16:53):
was a person, which means it was always going to move.
Stop romanticizing your ex. Missing them, You're missing the version
they showed you before you saw the full picture. You're
not missing them, You're missing the future you're already planned
in your head. You're not missing them, you're missing feeling chosen.
(17:15):
You're not missing them. You're just not ready to let
go of the story yet. But you will be. If
you've gone through a breakup. The work, the real work,
is not to find new ground to stand on. It's
to find yourself standing without anything to lean on in
(17:36):
the groundlessness for long enough to realize you were always
capable of standing alone. There's a Japanese concept called mono
no aware, often translated as the pathos of things, the
bitter sweetness of impermanence, the particular beauty and sadness that
comes from knowing that nothing lasts. The Japanese don't treat
(17:58):
impermanence as a problem. They treat it as the very
thing that gives experience its beauty. Cherry blossoms are the
most revered symbol in Japanese culture, not despite the fact
that they fall in a week, because of it. What
you had was real, what you had could have been
beautiful in parts, and it is gone. And all three
(18:19):
of those things are true simultaneously, and sitting with that truth,
all of it without rewriting the ending, without fantasy editing
it into something it wasn't, without bargaining with the past
or that person. Is not resignation, is not giving up.
It is the most courageous thing you can do, the
willingness to feel the full beauty of something that is over. Now,
(18:41):
let me tell you how to actually do that, How
to interrupt the spiral, how to work with your brain
instead of being controlled by it. Because knowing the science
doesn't make it stop hurting, but it does change what
you do with the hurt. Let me be really honest
with you about breakups. There is no version of getting
over someone that doesn't involve feeling it. There's no cognitive
(19:04):
hack that bypasses grief. There is no framework that makes
this painless. There are two types of pain. The first
is the pain that moves you, that transforms you, that
carries you somewhere new. And then there's the pain that loops,
the pain that keeps you exactly where you are, circling
(19:25):
the same drain for months or years, pretending to be
the depth of feeling when it's actually just a broken record.
(19:53):
Here's how you get to the pain that moves you.
Tool number one, the no contact rule, and I want
to talk to you about why it's actually biology. You've
heard about no contact, but you may not know the
real reason it works. And the real reason is not
about playing games or winning the breakup or making them
miss you. The real reason is neurological. Every time you
(20:16):
check their social media, you are feeding the addiction. You
are reactivating the dopamine circuit. You're telling your neural pathways
this is still relevant. Keep tracking it. Your brain cannot
begin to withdraw, cannot begin to heal while you keep
administering microdoses of the drug. No contact is not punishment.
No contact is detox. And it includes the things you're
(20:37):
pretending don't count. The casual social media check that you
tell yourself is harmless, the friendly text you're composing in
your head, the driving past where they live. Every one
of these is a hit. Every one of these restarts
the clock on withdrawal. You're not cutting them off because
you're cold. You're cutting off the supply because you're trying
(20:58):
to heal. Those are complete different things. Stop checking their feed.
They're not coming back because you watch their story. They're
not coming back because you like something from forty seven
weeks ago at two am. They're not coming back because
you figured out who that person in their photo is.
They're not coming back because you've refreshed their profile eleven
(21:21):
times today. They're not coming back, but your pieces the
second you stop looking. Tune number two, the full picture exercise.
I want you to do something tonight, if you're brave enough.
Take a piece of paper, Draw a line down the middle.
On the left side, write down the things you genuinely miss,
the real things, not the imagined, perfect version, the actual
(21:43):
things that were good and real and valuable. On the
right side, write down the things you've been selectively forgetting,
The pattern that kept repeating, the way you felt bad
on days which were more frequent than your highlight reel
admits the specific moments where you felt unseen or dismissed,
or too much not enough, the days you cried. Write
down who you were on your worst days in that relationship,
(22:06):
right down the cost personally, professionally, to your family. This
isn't bitterness, it's not revenge. It's accuracy. You're correcting your memories, editing.
You're forcing your brain to hold the full picture rather
than just the trailer. Two Number three interrupt the spiral, literally,
the romanticizing spiral, is a thought pattern, and thought patterns
(22:28):
are neurological pathways, neural circuits that have been strengthened through repetition.
Every time you indulge the spiral, you strengthen the pathway.
Every time you interrupt it, you begin to weaken it.
It's not suppression forcing yourself to not think about something. Actually,
this increases the frequency of the thought. It's that don't
think about a pink elephant problem. The harder you try
(22:51):
not to think about the pink elephant, you think about
the pink elephant. What works instead is what neuroscientists call
pattern interruption, a brief but genuine redirect of neural attention
to something that requires full cognitive engagement. When the spiral starts,
when you catch your hand moving toward their instagram, when
the imaginary conversation begins, when the maybe we gave up
(23:13):
too soon story starts playing, you do something that requires
your genuine attention immediately. Something physical works best, a short,
vigorous walk, cold water on your face, five pushups, something
that activates your body and breaks the cognitive loop. Then,
and this is key, you do not fight the feeling
you name it. I am experiencing a craving for this person.
(23:36):
Just that The simple act of naming an emotion, when
neuroscientists call affect labeling, activates the prefront or cortex and
measurably reduces activity in the amygdala. You move the feeling
from the reactive part of your brain to the observing part.
You become the person watching the spiral rather than the
(23:56):
person inside it. Pol Number four red build identity, not
find yourself. I know find yourself is tired. Advice. Bear
with me because this is different, I promise. One of
the most underappreciated effects of a significant relationship ending is
what psychologists call self concept contraction. In a long or
(24:18):
deep relationship, your identity expands. You become someone who is
part of a wei. You have shared friends, shared routine,
shared references, shared futures. When the relationship ends, that whole
dimension of identity collapses. You don't just lose the person,
you lose the version of yourself that existed in relation
to them. The antidote is not to immediately seek a
(24:40):
new relationship to fill the gap, but to actively rebuild
your own independent self concept to recover your own narrative.
This means what did you stop doing when you were
in that relationship? What did you let atrophy? What parts
of yourself did you set aside to make room for
the wei friend? You let drift interest, You abandoned ambitions.
(25:02):
You quietly shelved the parts of you that existed before
them and are still there waiting go find them. Not
as therapy, not as distraction, as recovery of self. Every
time you do something that is purely authentically yours, something
that reflects who you are, independent of any relationship, you
are rebuilding the self concept that the relationship and the
(25:25):
breakup have eroded. You are answering the question who am
I without them, and discovering that the answer is more
than you remembered. Please stop making excuses for them in
your mind. Don't forget how small they made you feel.
Don't forget they had every chance to choose you. Don't
(25:48):
forget the excuses you made for them. Don't forget you
cried because of this person more than once. Don't forget
how many times they disappointed you and you stayed anyway.
Please don't forget your worth. Please don't forget you deserved
more than what they gave you. Please don't forget you
(26:09):
always gave them the benefit of the doubt. Please don't
forget you always saw the good in them and receive
the bad. Please don't forget you bent over backwards when
they barely moved. Please don't forget. Someone who deserves you
won't make you question if you're enough. Turne number five.
(26:31):
Let the grief be grief. Don't dress it up as love.
This is the hardest one and the most important. Grief
is grief. It needs to be felt, not managed, not optimized,
not rushed through or bypassed or processed into insight before
it's ready. Grief is a biological process, the nervous system
integrating a loss, and it takes the time it takes.
(26:54):
But there is a crucial difference between grief and romanticization.
Grief moves comes in waves, intense and quiet, then intense again,
gradually spacing out. It doesn't ask you to do anything
except feel it. It doesn't require you to figure out
whether they were the one, or whether you made a mistake,
or whether you should text them. It just hurts, and
(27:15):
then hurts less, and then hurts again, and eventually, if
you don't keep feeding it, it hurts differently, not as
a wound, but as a scar, as evidence of something
real that changed you that you remember. Romanticizing a relationship
doesn't help you move forward. It loops. It keeps you
in a story. It asks you to stay in the
(27:36):
question what if, maybe perhaps if, only because the story
needs you to stay in it, to stay alive. The
story is not serving your grief, it's serving itself. So
let yourself grief actually grief. Feel the loss, feel the sadness,
feel the particular ache of missing someone who is genuinely
(27:57):
important to you. That grief is true, grit, if is healthy,
That grief is the right response to loss. Just don't
let the grief become a story that keeps you from
moving through it. Feel it, and then let it move.
You've been telling yourself that you're holding onto them because
of how much you love them. I want to offer
you a different possibility. You've been holding onto the story
(28:20):
of them because it's safer than the thing on the
other side of letting go. On the other side of
letting go is the open question of what comes next,
the terrifying freedom of not being defined by this grief,
the vulnerability of being available to yourself, to life, to
whoever might come next without the protection of still being
(28:41):
someone's ex. On the other side of letting go is
the work of figuring out who you actually are, not
in relation to them, not in comparison to what you had.
Just you standing in your own life, making choices from
your own center, building something from where you actually are
rather than from where you wish you still were. But
here's what I know. The love that is coming for you,
(29:05):
the life that is waiting for you, is not located
in the past. It is not in the photos you
keep looking back to, or the songs you keep listening to,
or the imaginary conversations where they finally understand. It is
in front of you, in the version of yourself that
has been through something real and survived it and learned
things you couldn't have learned any other way. I really
(29:28):
hope that this episode helps you. I hope you'll pass
it on to a friend who may be going through
this right now. Thank you for trusting me. Remember I'm
always in your corner and I'm forever rooting for you.
If you love this episode, you're going to love my
conversation with Matthew Hussey on how to get over your
ex and find true love in your relationships. Make a
(29:50):
list of the things that are truly important for you
to find in a partner, and then be that list
Host
Jay Shetty
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