This text is about recovery from a breakup, but it can also apply if you are trying to recover from a divorce.

For this text to truly make sense, I suggest reflecting on each point I’ll discuss. After all, this is an attempt to provide you with online psychotherapy.

1. Understanding Your Emotions if You Want to Recover After a Breakup

Try distinguishing between Love, Dependency, Habit, and a Hurt Ego.

I don’t expect this section to solve your problem since we’re dealing with emotions, but it can provide some direction and help ease your burden.

• Love develops over time (time is a fundamental component of love). It contains gratitude, respect, and the need to do good for the other person. You could say that love is built from noble emotions.

If you love the person who has decided to part ways with you, this needs to be reassessed.

Love usually develops between two people who nurture these noble qualities.

So, if you love someone who has left you, something is seriously off. Either you’re prone to loving not-so-exceptional partners, or your partner deeply deceived you (cheated for a long time), or you’re misinterpreting the things you received from your partner. True love and abandonment don’t go hand in hand, except in romantic movies.

• Dependency on that person comes from unhealthy places within us. If you feel dependent on them, you need to go to therapy to understand this tendency. This isn’t about the person but about an unhealthy type of attachment to them.

• Habit. When people spend a lot of time together, habits form, which can be hard to break. However, habits can be changed, and one needs to give this process time.

• Hurt Ego is also a common reason people feel bad after being left, and it is obviously part of all the other reasons. But it becomes a problem when it’s the primary reason you can’t detach from someone. The ego can be hurt if it’s viewed in the wrong way. Suppose we interpret someone’s rejection as a rejection of ourselves rather than as a change in that person’s preferences.

If your ego is hurt, reaching out to a psychotherapist is the best option. Understanding how an ego became so sensitive in the first place can help it heal.

In the context of this chapter, it is more about guiding you on what to face after a divorce or breakup. Should you reassess love, deal with habits, resolve dependency issues, or handle a wounded ego?

Breaking Up With Someone You Love

2. The Stages of Grief That Everyone Must Go Through

There are six stages of grief, and everyone must go through each.

According to psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s theory, there are five stages of grief, and we’ll add the sixth as a bonus.

What’s important to note about these stages is:

• The time spent in each stage will vary for different people and depend on the person’s character and individual traits.

• The stages are Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Sadness and Depression, Acceptance, and Finding Meaning.

• This means that we can move quickly through one stage in half an hour, while we may remain stuck in another stage for years. Since the duration of each stage depends on our characteristics, what can help us move through a stage faster is to seriously reflect on the process and aim for the last two stages of recovery.

• The first three stages are easier to bear, but the last two are essential for us to continue living.

If you want to read more about these stages, here’s a good article. But the essence is that everyone must go through these stages to reach their sense of meaning. When you pass through the first three stages… actually, when you feel sadness, that is the moment to congratulate yourself because you’ve entered the first phase of proper recovery.

Sudden Break Up With No Reason

3. Something in Your Character is Preventing You From Letting Go of Your Partner.

This could be an inability to accept loss, difficulty dealing with defeat, a tendency toward denial, stubbornness, or something else. However, if your grieving process takes too long, it may be due to a character trait.

• If you are proud that you don’t easily detach from people, that you are loyal, etc.—this is what’s at play.
• If you get very attached to people, that’s what this is about, and you need to work on it.

Here, recognizing the specific character trait involved would be helpful and necessary. This is usually challenging to do independently, so consulting a psychologist who can help you identify the issue is a good idea.

Whatever character trait is discovered, there’s a solution for each one. The solution is most often to accept that this trait harms you and decide to let it go. This is a long-term process that requires persistent effort, but it involves letting go of something deeply rooted and nurtured within you.

It’s worth reflecting on this. After all, don’t reject anything that could be helpful to you.

Break Up With No Explanation

4. Partner Analysis

is also an excellent path to recovery. Even though it’s hard for us to move on from the divorce or breakup, perhaps the partner contributed to the problem.

For example:

• Perhaps your partner blamed you for the breakup.
• Maybe the divorce or breakup ended overwhelmingly in their favor.
• Perhaps you feel foolish for having trusted that person.

Whatever the underlying reason related to your partner requires recognition and then an analysis of the partner through that lens.

This perspective can completely change the way you see your partner, so I’ll give you some ideas:

• If your partner blamed you for the breakup and you can’t recover because of that, are you sure they aren’t a manipulative person? Or someone selfish who doesn’t see their responsibility but blames others? Doesn’t that mean you were married to a narcissist?

• If the divorce ended overwhelmingly in your partner’s favor, doesn’t that mean they are greedy or unscrupulous and have no consideration for others?

• And if you feel foolish for trusting that person, wouldn’t that mean they were a deceiver?

As you can see, whichever way you look at it, you may have been dealing with the wrong person (I’m not saying you were, but it’s worth considering), which could help you recover faster because we wouldn’t mourn too much for a narcissist, an inconsiderate person, or a deceiver.

This realization of who you had by your side comes through analyzing both the partner and the breakup.

Again, a psychotherapist or a psychological counselor can help you with this.

📌 A small note: Considering that this may have been the final breakup, this is when it’s helpful for you to focus on the opposing sides of your partner. It’s not good to worship or admire them during this period. You can do that again one day, but for now, you need every form of self-manipulation and emotional regulation that can help you.

Of course, I don’t recommend attributing qualities to your partner that they don’t have, but rather holding on to the negative ones they do. It’s much harder to detach from someone with only great qualities than someone who is not so perfect.

Why Do I Want Someone Who Doesn’t Want Me?

5. Why Did You Break Up? Was it Your Partner’s Fault or Yours?

The feelings that arise from this are very different.

• When the partner is to blame for the breakup, it leads to a wounded ego, disbelief, and a sense of betrayal.

• When the fault lies with us, it brings guilt and remorse.

Since these are different issues, they must be resolved in different ways.

I emphasize here that it’s necessary to analyze the entire situation because that’s where you will benefit the most.

• For example, if your partner is to blame, what hurts you is feeling like you were foolish or you’ve lost trust in people and love. It may be financially affecting you, which you must deal with. Through analysis, you’ll see what’s most important to work on initially.

• If it’s your fault, you need to analyze whether you were manipulated into thinking that or if there are behaviors in yourself that you need to work on seriously. Are you prone to feelings of guilt?

Feeling Guilt After Breakup

6. What is Your Relationship With Your Partner Like?

Sometimes, people can’t detach from their ex-partner because the ex can’t let go of them. Sometimes it’s because they don’t want to, and sometimes it’s because we don’t want to.

In my career, I’ve worked with couples who remained tied to each other for years after separating or divorcing, sabotaging each other’s potential for something new.

If you’re in contact with your ex or rely on them, or if they depend on you… It would be a good idea to reflect on who initiated that connection. Is it you, them, or both? Whoever it is (or both of you), that person should be “forbidden” from maintaining that connection and closeness, even if it means you have to forbid yourself.

The problem with this is that, although you are separated, you will experience all of your partner’s life experiences, whether good or bad. Each of those challenges will bind you a little more or prolong the separation.

If your relationship no longer has a future and you have already parted ways, it means you couldn’t survive together, which means there’s no point in staying closely connected.

Therefore, you must insist, with yourself or your partner, that this type of relationship should be cut off and that each person must find a way to function on their own.

Otherwise, this setup could be painful for both of you.

Why Break Up Is So Hard To Bear: Real Reasons

7. Is the Breakup Final?

If you are divorced, it sounds final. With the divergence, something is different, but I mention this point because some people cannot accept final endings.

This trait can keep a person in limbo forever. Not coming to terms with a definitive end.

The person remains in the hope that things will change or even slip into psychosis, where they live a parallel life with that person in their head. I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie He Loves Me… He Loves Me Not, where a girl believes that a doctor is in love with her. In it, you can see psychosis at work.

The movie portrays it extremely, but such delusions and fantasies are much more common in everyday life than you might think.

In my career, I’ve met many people who have fantasized for years that their partner will return to them.

In any case, life is put on hold while living in a world of hope and fantasy. Meanwhile, the ex-partner can live a very fulfilled and functional life.

In this case, the best solution is to accept the definitive end and face that truth. This is a painful truth that no one wants, but everyone must go through (you’ve seen this in stages four and five of recovery). People avoid this stage because it’s excruciating, but it is the first stage of proper recovery. We all have to go through it if we want to move forward.

Does True Love Come Back?

8. Some Small Techniques for Quicker Healing from Breakup:

• Focus on yourself and your needs and pleasures.
• Explore new interests.
• Nurture your emotional connections and close relationships.
• Find new hobbies. As many as possible.
• Use self-help techniques: meditation and mindfulness, journaling thoughts and emotions, breathing techniques, visualization, positive affirmations, and relaxation techniques (progressive muscle relaxation).
• Learn skills for managing stress and anxiety.

And finally, if you go through all of this, although it can also be helpful during the healing process:

9. Building a New Identity

• Discovering your values. Since divorce and separation can seriously damage self-confidence and change your self-image, it is crucial to restore it. These articles might help you: How To Build Self-Confidence: Tips From a Professional, How to Respect Yourself: Practical Steps, How Can I Learn To Love Myself: Exact Steps
• Who am I? Discovering or establishing who you are from scratch.
• Defining a new life path. It’s essential to sit down and plan your life, starting with the next day, then the next week, the next month, the quarterly year, and the whole year.

During this period of separation, one of the hardest things for people is the feeling of lost direction and identity (we no longer know who we are, we stop doing the things we’ve always done, and the plans we had are gone).

That’s why making life plans is a good idea, starting with who and what we want to be, as this will provide anchoring, direction, and stability.

What Is the Most Painful Stage of a Breakup?

10. Professional Support and Therapy

Is what I would recommend first, but I’ve placed it last so you don’t feel like you have no choice without it. However, professional help and therapy are excellent directions in times like these, especially if the therapist is good at them. A good therapist can guide you, correct false beliefs, help you make plans, support you, assist in reinventing yourself, and strengthen you.

But they can also just listen, which people often need during this period when they simply want to talk things out.

Partner Broke Up With You—What Are Your Solutions?

11. Action

This encompasses everything above.

One way or another, action is very healing because it signals to your brain that you’ve decided to face the situation, thus sending the message that things are under control. Our brain likes it when we take matters into our own hands because it makes us feel more secure.

I recommend going through these suggestions daily, sending you signals of proactivity, courage, and problem-solving, which will help calm you down significantly.

If you want to move forward, the worst possible solution is to look backward.

I hope this text is helpful to you. Dee

Signs You Are Wasting Your Time Trying To Get Your Ex Back