So of course if you get stuck romanticizing them forever, you never quite get over the feeling that something irrevocably lost. One workable strategy is to thin

So of course if you get stuck romanticizing them forever, you never quite get over the feeling that something irrevocably lost. One workable strategy is to think of them in a bad light, to consciously say to yourself: they weren't that great, here are all the reasons. And this works. It works because it prompts your mind to consider other options for how your life might go. But one pitfall of the strategy is that it doesn't actually require you to think of better options, it just hints at it. So some people doing the strategy will successfully convince themselves that their ex sucked, but also have absolutely no other emotional options for feeling hope about the future. That's a rough place. But a different strategy is more like "they WERE great, but also other people can be great, and they can be great in ways I don't currently know, but I can be excited to find out." Most social support after a breakup involves friends telling you everything will be fine, and you'll find someone better, and anyway the ex was a jerk, so no big deal. Stuff like that totally plays into a healthy process of grieving for the life you thought you were going to have, ie. reimagining that life as a different but equally good or maybe better life. So yeah, one place to get stuck is failing to let go of the one conception you have of how your life can be good, that was totally predicated of your relationship with your ex continuing. Another way it can go wrong is if you just refuse to process it at all. You drink yourself into a stupor when it comes up, for example. Sure it blocks the pain, but it also blocks the process of reimagining. And if that's your main coping mechanism you're just drawing out the pain longer, maybe permanently (not to mention the damage many substances do to your body). So the "real" answer, according to me is that you have to encounter your own pain in a mindful way, acknowledging what is lost and how much it hurts, while staying just ahead of it and questioning the strong feelings that say "nothing can replace this, everything is bad forever." Is it really true? Can you imagine a way that it might not be true? And yes, staying connected to your social support system and the other things in your life that actually are working, instead of just crawling into a hole of despair and laying down to die. Grieving is hard, but it's important, and you can't avoid it. Either you face the pain with courage and intelligence, or you let it eat whatever potential for goodness was once there. Either way you have to wrestle it.