Relationships are a primary source of happiness and satisfaction for most people (Berscheid et al., 1998), so their breakup can become one of the biggest sources of discomfort (Tashiro, 2003). In any situation of love breakup, both an increase in psychological discomfort and a reduction in the person’s level of life satisfaction usually occur (Rhoades et al., 2011).
There are several ways in which a love breakup can occur. In the event that it does not occur by mutual agreement, recovery may be more difficult, especially for the person who does not agree to end it or does not share the reasons. For the person who finds himself in this situation, an intense and unexpected discomfort inevitably arises, with frequent doubts and episodes of sadness.
Issues to keep in mind:
- Manage your emotions in the phases of mourning. From a psychological point of view, a love break implies a personal grieving process of lesser or greater intensity that can lead, in the most complicated cases, recurring and painful thoughts about what happened.
Discomfort, hostility, nostalgia or sadness are emotional indicators of the breakup. These feelings will have a variable temporal extension depending on the case and may lead to personal maturation or a certain emotional regression. It is a natural adaptation phase that will vary in intensity and duration depending on the personality, personal history and general state of mind of each person.
Despite this, it is relevant to note that the love breakup is about a period. For this reason, we cannot allow it to extend in time beyond what is appropriate to get us started on recovering our well-being and adapting to our new personal situation.
- There are no culprits, stop looking for them.
A love relationship, like any interpersonal relationship, necessarily occurs between two or more people. Each part of the relationship plays the same role within it: responsibilities, blame and reproaches will always be shared among the members of the relationship.
Reflecting on one’s own behaviors as a way of learning from mistakes can be somewhat beneficial. However, this must be done with some moderation and as long as the purpose of our reflection is to achieve learning. Focusing all our attention and energy on finding the culprit will not help the recovery process, quite the opposite.
In my next article I will continue to provide tools to deal with these situations in a healthy way.
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References
Berscheid, E. (1998). A social psychological view of marital dysfunction and stability. In TN Bradbury (Ed.), The developmental course of marital dysfunction (pp. 441-459). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Rhoades, GK, Kamp Dush, CM, Atkins, DC, Stanley, SM, Markman, HJ (2011). Breaking up is hard to do: the impact of unmarried relationship dissolution on mental health and life satisfaction. Journal of Family Psychology, 25(3), 366-374
Tashiro, T., Frazier, P. (2003). “I’ll never be in a relationship like that again”: Personal growth following romantic relationship breakups. Personal Relationships, 10, 113-128.
by CEDOC