12 ms·

How to Recover from Romantic Heartbreak?

• iamcasen 8y ago
  That article was quite literally just a bunch of common sense. Are those techniques for coping not widely known? I thought that's what everyone did after a breakup. ::Shrug::
  • abhchand 8y ago
    In my opinion it doesn't hurt to re-state common sense sometimes, particularly for 2 reasons: 1. We have so much going on in our head it reminds us that we can simplify it down to a more basic concept. In layman's terms, "get out of our own heads". 2. It provides external validation that our approach is correct. Seeing it stated in Scientific American and knowing that other people such as yourself also adhere to this "common sense" logic validates my line of thinking.
    • tsumnia 8y ago
      To add to this, "unspoken" rules, or common sense, are things you expect people to know and then get upset when they don't. If being explicit helps someone, why is that a bad thing?
    • iamcasen 8y ago
      I like how I was down-voted for simply stating that it is common sense. You're agreeing with me! I didn't say the article was bad... haha.
• Jeff_Brown 8y ago
  This seems likely to apply to extreme non-romantic disappointments too.
  • autoexec 8y ago
    We really need a word for non-romantic breakups because losing a very close friend can be just as hurtful, but it seems odd to say you "broke up" and nothing else ("falling out"?) really expresses the severity of the loss.
    • Jeff_Brown 8y ago
      You could say "heartbroken at the loss of a friend".
    • somebodythere 8y ago
      I hear people say they broke up with their friend all the time.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• pmichaud 8y ago
  I have issues with this model. I have no doubt that the strategy "works," but I think it lacks a coherent model of why it works. So the recommended strategies are unnecessarily rough or negative, in my view. One thing I agree with in the article is that a heartbroken person is experiencing grief. Grief is a state that about replanning, essentially. We all have a very nuanced and complicated set of subconscious plans to get all the things that are important to us. Everything from basic survival to social status, we have a model of how to consistently get in our lives. Friends, family, work, personal habits, all of these things interweave to create a complete system for our lives being okay according to us. Of course this can go wrong--we can get stuck believing that key things will never be better, and sink into depression--but I'm talking about psychologically healthy people. But then sometimes those key factors in your life go away. You lose your job or your mom dies. Well, woven throughout your psychology maybe you were relying on your mom being a bedrock source of safety and support, among uncountable other subtle effects you emotionally anticipated your mom would have on you life. And then she dies, and all that goes away. You don't have a ready replacement for practically any of it--the bedrock of support, the unconditional love you once emotionally leaned on, perhaps. And so you grieve. You reimagine, from a very deep emotional level, what your life will be like. And at first it's almost too painful to bear, because at that moment it just feels like you simply won't have the many gifts from your mom for the rest of your life, and that is terribly painful. So you go through a complex process of "figuring out," mostly subconsciously, how you're going to get that stuff. Social support gives you hope that maybe you can find support and love in a way that make things ultimately alright. Funny movies give you hope about feeling happy in the future. Remembering her, having a personal relationship with a strongly felt sense of her you still carry with you give you a sense that she may still be a source of wisdom. You lean more on your other family or friends for the same. In the happy case, as time goes on, most of everything gets solved, and you come to feel like you can live and have a good life without her. The rest stays with you in quiet moments of missing that never fully go away, in my experience. So this is the same during a bad breakup. You put a lot of your future hopes and dreams on the partner you no longer have. And now it feels like all that is gone forever, and it's devastating. The process is the same though -- you go about the business of reimagining your life from the ground up, being okay with living in a world where you and your now-ex aren't together.
• mrxd 8y ago
  The long term implications of "expediting" recovery in this way are troubling to me. It's natural to feel grief when you lose something in your life that was important, valuable and made you happy. You could shortcut that process by convincing yourself it didn't really make you happy, but that is really nothing more than a form of escapism. The pain of loss is one of the most important signals that something impacted your happiness in an enduring way, and that's necessary for making the right decisions in the future.
  • shawn 8y ago
    The sooner we get rid of the emotion, the better, probably. It’s a bit like arguing that chronic back pain is healthy just because it’s natural. It’s interesting to consider that technology might be able to solve this. How long till an anti love pill hits the market with few side effects?
    • RangerScience 8y ago
      Long time. "Love", in whatever form or meaning you want to take, (AFAIK/IMO) involves far to many systems for anything other than a systemic approach to have an effect (without sever side effects).
      • kazinator 8y ago
        I think we already have it, basically. I suspect you're not going to fall for that attractive stranger if your sympathetic nervous system is calmed down by beta-blockers.
        • RangerScience 8y ago
          Yeah, but, what are the side effects of that?
        • marssaxman 8y ago
          How does one go about getting one's hands on such things?
• asimjalis 8y ago
  This strategy replaces heartbreak with bitterness. Not such a great deal.
• simion314 8y ago
  After thinking more on this I think that something is missing, the article suggest to make a list with bad things about your partner but this will not help if you are analyzing yourself, trying to find your own mistakes and improving yourself. Putting all the blame on the other may not be the correct thing in some cases.
  • doughj3 8y ago
    I think it's less about blame and more about objective recognition that the relationship and/or person was not as perfect as we'd like to think when we're going through heartbreak. There's a quote from Bojack Horseman, "When you look at someone through rose colored glasses, all the red flags just look like flags." I think this suggestion is more about being honest about the negatives that one looked past, even if one was content with the tradeoff.
    • simion314 8y ago
      Yes, I understand that but it seems incomplete, is correct thing to do but it may not be the only thing to do IMO. But I agree that the point discussed is an important/significant one.
  • scotty79 8y ago
    It's a method to stop loving someone not a metod to holistically advance yourself to next level of conciousness. You can do that after you stop being in love with a person you shouldn't be in love with anymore.
• uncannyvalley3 8y ago
  Is this anything new???
• johnchristopher 8y ago
  I have seen some breakups. At some point or another one of the participants dehumanizes the previous partner. It's scary, it's like the propaganda bullet point that is part of the list used to qualify a genocide. I never did that ; heartbreaks are really damaging to me. Anecdata, of course.
  • r00fus 8y ago
    If dehumanization helps to distance and align with reality, then that's what'll happen. It could be the catalyst that helps push some folks past the threshold function that would otherwise keep them in the past.
• drblast 8y ago
  Maybe our entire model for romantic relationships is flawed if when they end the most helpful thing to do demonize the ex in our head. I get the sense that people are more attached to the fantasy of a perfect relationship than they are to the imperfect person they're with who doesn't fit that mold.
  • RangerScience 8y ago
    Ayup. People should come before relationships.
  • kqr 8y ago
    > I get the sense that people are more attached to the fantasy of a perfect relationship than they are to the imperfect person they're with who doesn't fit that mold. This is really common and also a tough nut to crack. Introducing the idea of love as "seeing each other's shit and choosing to put up with it" is somehow significantly less romantic than "everything magically works out beautifully."
  • osrec 8y ago
    I feel a lot of people are also attached to the fantasy of themselves being rather perfect, which makes heartbreak somewhat harder to digest.
  • curiousgal 8y ago
    > I get the sense that people are more attached to the fantasy of a perfect relationship than they are to the imperfect person they're with who doesn't fit that mold. Absolutely, but expecting your partner not to cheat on you is not asking for perfection hence the legitimacy of demonizing them.
    • scarface74 8y ago
      Exactly. There is a big difference between “we tried, things didn’t work out, we grew apart, c’est la vie” and being cheated on.
    • JustSomeNobody 8y ago
• User23 8y ago
  Love. Love never changes. https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/CuresforLove.php https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/CuresforLove...
• vonnik 8y ago
  My best LPT: remove every object (and block every site) that reminds you of the relationship. The author is trying to achieve an outcome in a patient, not enforce the adherence to some objective truth like "my ex is all right" or "I really did love them and now I don't". He's trying to find ways to get someone to end a pathological obsession. If a little demonization helps a person get their mind back on track, so much the better.
  • scarecrowbob 8y ago
    Well, that kind of removal was a pretty good way to get off Facebook and quit drinking, but the problem is that after 8 years I ended up with a lot of crap that I don't want to just toss simply because it resonates with them. I may have to leave the country, but that move seems less functional to do that then to just put up with being sad for a couple of years.
• wwweston 8y ago
  > We might accept, on an intellectual level, that by focusing on our ex’s faults we’re doing something important but it can still feel wrong (unpleasant), unbalanced, unfair, and even disloyal. Of course it "can" feel unbalanced because it is. The author's suggestion that recognizing in a heartbreak state we already have an imbalanced focus kindof mitigates the problem... but I can't help suspect there's more to it. People who are in a relationship and don't choose to end it usually are there because they understand at some level the tradeoffs between the imperfection of the relationship (or any relationship) and the great parts of it, and it's a net positive. So, unless you were thinking of ending it yourself, when it ends, it's a net loss, and trying to talk yourself out of that is, fundamentally, a trick. If you've practiced trying to be internally honest when it comes to relationships, part of your brain is going to know you're playing sour grapes and that seems likely to undermine the effort. And if you haven't trained yourself to watch for when/how focusing on someone else's faults is something you might not do honestly, good luck with conflict in a relationship. :/
  • scotty79 8y ago
    > ... part of your brain is going to know you're playing sour grapes and that seems likely to undermine the effort. It totally doesn't. I've been there. Even though you conciously know that negativity toward your ex is somewhat fake it still helps you fix your brain. Romantic love is nothing else than addction to a person. You don't expect as a recovering addict to stay "on speaking terms" with cocaine nor remembering it fondly will help you to recover better because that's the honest way and keeps your integrity. You should remember as much bad as possible and see bad in things you thought were good. Also you should talk about your tragic falling out, with anonymous strangers, eventually you'll get bored with your own story and move on.
• dwnwudp 8y ago
  >If you are trying to get over heartbreak, make a list of the person’s faults as well as of the shortcomings of the actual relationship and to keep that list on their phone. Sounds like the author is advocating for some illicit activity here.
  • learc83 8y ago
    Their is a typo. It should be your. The next sentence is "Whenever you find yourself having idealized thoughts and memoires, whip out your phone and read a few reminders in order to balance your perceptions and remind yourself that your ex was not perfect and neither was the relationship."
• zamalek 8y ago
  I've got a somewhat different method, which can very loosely be described as acceptance, taking responsibility and growth. There are a few parts to a breakup: Withdrawal Symptoms When you first start to have romantic feelings for someone and have those butterflies in your stomach, you are high as fuck on some pretty great chemicals. Just like any addiction, your body builds a resistance to the dosage and forms a dependency. There is nothing you can do about this, except to wait for it to pass (which it will). Loss of Control You are thrust into a position where you have no control over the situation and, seemingly, your emotions. You have no control over the situation, accept that. Accept that the other person has decided on a different direction. Don't accept that you are not in control of your emotions. Dealing with heartbreak is categorically a personal enterprise - your opinions on what the other person did or didn't do will do nothing for your own emotional state. Heartbreak is just like hatred: it affects nobody except for the person experiencing that emotion. Gaining control over your emotional state first requires accepting it and the futility of thinking that you can control any external factor that is causing it. Unacknowledged Guilt Also known as "closure." This is, one again, a completely internal process and no amount of discussions with your ex will help push it forward. For any normally functioning relationship (read: non-abusive), it takes two to tango. I can't speak to Melissa's (from the article) experience, as I don't have all the details, so I'll share one of my experiences: It started with an ultimatum, "me or smoking." I honestly tried to quit, but couldn't manage without her support - she wanted nothing to do with it. I had to lie while I failed to deliver on that promise. After two and a half years, of lies, I finally managed to quit and - still partially in withdrawals - I told her that I had made good on the promise. It turned into a pretty horrible fight and she ended it. I [correctly] concluded that ultimatums have no place in relationships, but [incorrectly] concluded that was the end of it. My family and friends were all to happy to feed this delusion, assuming it was helping. It was only when I started correcting them, explaining that I had lied to her for two years that the heartbreak started dissolving. I had to acknowledge my guilt, which curiously gave me back control over the situation: it was no longer something someone else did putting me through those emotions - it was me. Those "what if" scenarios that ran through my head all collapsed into one: "what if I hadn't lied." I might have lost her at the onset, but then I wouldn't have had heartbreak. She might have decided to support me if I asked for help, and I might have quit far sooner. I now have a plan to make sure that I won't face that scenario ever again. Commit to Grow Act on what you have discovered about yourself and others. My first lesson was to reject ultimatums, but also to be honest - no matter what the consequences might be for me. There's a millions of tiny things that happen in failed relationships and each of them are an opportunity to grow. You never walk away empty-handed.
• schwinn 8y ago
  So the TL;DR is: move on.
• theaeolist 8y ago
  The fox who longed for grapes, beholds with pain The tempting clusters were too high to gain; Grieved in his heart he forced a careless smile, And cried, ‘They’re sharp and hardly worth my while.’
• tunesmith 8y ago
  This article felt all kinds of icky to me. If they truly only focused on those three conditions, only the first condition was in the category of putting distance between yourself and your ex. The other two were just "coming to terms with it" and "distracting onself", respectively. But using negative reappraisals is just one way to put conceptual distance between yourself and your ex. They might have just been testing the efficacy of creating conceptual distance, not the efficacy of "negative reappraisals" itself. Another way to create conceptual distance is to evolve and change your self, until you realize that the relationship might have been fine for your past self but isn't right for who you have become. And that again is hard and uncomfortable and takes work and time, but at least it isn't demonizing someone else.
• motohagiography 8y ago
  Not persuaded that the author's advice to rationalize the faults of your ex is sufficient or necessary for "recovery." I would propose generally that the suffering of any breakup (or loss) is proportional to how much you depended on the other persons reflected view of you for your own idea of self. Getting past it is more of an exercise in self-acceptance, self-forgiveness, and self-improvement than simply knocking down the other to boost yourself up. If you identified as a partner, husband, father, boyfriend, etc. then the loss of that feels like a loss of self. But if the person in your life was just that: another person, in your life, then you can still miss them, but nothing intrinsic to who you are was lost. You are not broken, shattered, or harmed. In this context, suffering is the effect of a residual belief about the completeness of yourself, and has diminishingly little to do with the other person at all. Recovery is not "healing," from a "wound," rather, it is resetting your perspective and accepting who you are as self-originating - and not as reflected by another. Too often, Pascal's maxim "to understand all is to forgive all," is advice given without the necessary condition that you must apply it to yourself first - otherwise it's just a recipe for obsessive thoughts. I would say to someone suffering from a broken heart, whatever it might entail, start with the desire to forgive yourself and whatever happens next, the journey alone is probably going to be worth it.
  • s-shellfish 8y ago
    This is very good advice. However, healing will always take time and experience.
    • pcmaffey 8y ago
      My rough estimate is half the time of the relationship. Of course healing is its own journey of ups and downs...
      • delecti 8y ago
        In my experience, length of the relationship doesn't really correlate with length of recovery.
• InclinedPlane 8y ago
  All of this seems wrong to me. It's ok to feel feelings, not just ups but also downs. How we bear and cope with losses and "negative" emotions is an important and defining part of the human experience. Imagine a world where the only movies, tv shows, and books allowed were comedies, it would be a much less interesting and much less substantive world. Adopting a "sour grapes" attitude toward the loss of a romantic relationship is not mature, and it is certainly not a healthy coping strategy. I have to wonder about any advice for dealing with a relationship loss that would be drastically different depending on who initiated a breakup or depending on whether or not the loss occurred due to a death. Nobody would advise dealing with the death of a loved one by regularly thinking about all of the ways that the deceased was shitty and thus one's life was actually better without them around, would they? As I said, it's ok to feel feelings. What is important here is having feelings that are grounded in reality, having feelings that are part of your life rather than subsuming and taking over your life, and avoiding "negative" feelings pushing you into a spiral of negative self-talk or excessive rumination on the past or on fictional time lines. People break up, it's a thing that happens. It's important to first recognize that other people can and should have agency over their own lives which is independent from you. It's also important to recognize your own self-worth, your ability to continue living, to have other relationships and to live a rewarding life even when single. It's fine to experience and be brought low by loss, even if it's "just" the ending of a relationship, you don't have to vilify your ex to be able to get beyond that loss. With healthy coping strategies you can integrate that loss into your life, having it be a part of who you are without defining and controlling you.
• dominotw 8y ago
  its really easy for men. Refocus on a something else, new parter/dates( sex with new person works the best), new project, new class ect.
• stealthmodeclan 8y ago
  This is after many broken hearts. I've read somewhere that some part of the North Europeans have a gene which prevents bonding, so it's easier for them to walk out of relationship. I am not able to find it anymore, maybe it's something to do with the Oxytocin receptors. So why not create a drug with similar effect for others? What i am writing below might be sexist but it's from experience. Since, i am a man i don't know woman's perspective. I am not bothered much by the loss of a person in relationship, what bothers me the herculean efforts I put including compromises, blood, sweat and sacrifices which is now lost. That Ferrari I bought for you, the sea side bungalow i gifted you. All the evenings i arranged for you and the vacations which we spent together, all lost. A man almost never only brings his body/mind/heart to the relationship, he brings with him the obsession to labor tirelessly for her comfort - destroying yourself to get that bonus which will statisfy her seems perfectly rational then. The value of those experiences drastically declines for me when I realize the person has separated from me. It's not very different than a teenager wanting his favourite couples in the movie to be in relationship or marriage in a real life. Once the relationship ends, i realize that person isn't even as beautiful as i always perceived them. The 7/10 girl looks 10/10 when you love her she gets back to 7/10 when the realationship ends. I wonder if the love is self dilllusion.
  • faleidel 8y ago
    For me a relationship is a way to have support in your life. After a break up, all the support a person has given you is still there. The effect of that person helping you in your life should have lasting inpact on you. It's a strange way to put it but see it as a tool. When you lose a tool nothing that was build with it will crumble. The house will stay up even if the hammer break.
• circlefavshape 8y ago
  Wow. I've only ever had one significant romantic relationship - still together after nearly 30 years. Just as we were coming to the end of our 30s we had an unexpected blooming of the emotional and sexual intensity of our relationship that went on for years. When it eventually fizzled out (the intensity, not the relationship itself) I was heartbroken, and 3 years later I still kinda am, and still find it really hard to accept I do best when I manage not to think about it at all, but perhaps rewriting the story of that golden age in my head (obvs without demonising my wife) is what will actually work for me
• alimw 8y ago
  The article completely ignores the hugely damaging effect this aggressive approach can have (and, I can attest, does have) on the other party.