How to (Healthily) Get Through a Painful Breakup

“Tell me what you fear, and I will tell you what has happened to you.” – Donald J. Winnicott, British psychoanalyst

Erik Erikson, a developmental psychoanalyst, labeled the adulthood years the “Intimacy versus Isolation” stage, which is immediately preceded by the adolescent “Identity versus Role Confusion stage” and followed by the middle adulthood “Generativity versus Stagnation” phase.

In other words, according to Erikson, emotional intimacy (including romantic attachment) is an important phase of development that we are all tasked with navigating. If in adolescence our task is to figure out our identities, adulthood involves figuring out how to connect to others in secure, supportive ways. This is true even if we make the valid personal choice to remain single and find connection through chosen family and/or our families of origin.

This is why breakups can be so impactful, and even traumatic, for many people. As an attachment-based psychodynamic therapist, I see attachment as a core need that people have from infancy to the grave.

Evolutionary psychologists would say that attachment is a core need embedded into our biology because without belonging to a group, our ancestors would not have been able to survive in the wild. This is why many people going through breakups describe the experience as a hijacking of their nervous systems, bodies, and psyches. It can be hard to function when one’s psyche and body are thrown into grief, which is the central symptom of a breakup.

So, how do you healthily get through a breakup? It’s never a linear process, but after supporting clients navigating through breakups (and drawing from my own experiences of loss), I’ve learned a lot about accompanying people through loss and grief.

1. If you can’t take care of anything else, take care of the basics. Depending on how traumatic the breakup was (e.g., cheating, abuse, or just something that came out of the blue, like the person losing romantic feelings), it can be very tempting to neglect self-care of your body and completely self-isolate. If you’re able to take sick days, there’s no more of a valid reason to do so than during a major loss. This is true especially because we live in a country that under-utilizes its sick days.

   “Go easy on yourself, whatever you do today, let it be enough.”
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2. Tell your story, as much as you need to, to caring ears. Favor processing over rumination. One of the most healing things you can do is to tell your story to empathic ears. It’s very seductive to isolate yourself and get stuck in a cycle of rumination and playing scenarios over and over in your head (which is often an attempt to regain our power and heal feelings of helplessness), but rumination can keep you in a painful loop. Processing, however, involves telling your story with the validation, feedback, and new perspectives the people who love and care about you can provide. Empathic friends can help you defeat self-blaming stories about yourself and the relationship. Read more about stopping rumination cycles here (thanks to a client for sharing).

   If you feel like you don’t have an immediate support system, joining and reading stories on different relationship or breakup-related subreddits can be a start to being validated by people who have gone through similar experiences.
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3. Go to therapy. While friendships and support systems are important, therapy can provide consistent, weekly support to help you navigate all of your feelings about your breakup. Not just because friends may not always be available every week, but because therapy can help you dissolve the grief into all of its component pieces: such as what contributed to the breakdown of the relationship, how your attachment style can impact how you process the loss, what internal/unconscious scripts you may carry about love and relationships, and how to develop more self-compassion so that the grief does not devolve into self-attack and depression.
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4. Consider the possibility of medication with an appropriate psychiatric provider. If you feel like there’s nothing that’s making you feel better, medication can be an option to explore with your mental health provider. A therapist can make a referral to a psychiatrist or psychiatric nurse practitioner to assess whether medication is appropriate for you. There is no such thing as a magic pill to cure loss, but medication can often give you a better baseline so that things like daily tasks feel more manageable. I often use the metaphor that when drowning in an ocean, medication can be the flotation device while therapy serves as the swimming lessons. Both therapy and medication can work together powerfully.
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5. Redirect love to yourself. This is the one many people get understandably defensive about (“But I already love myself!”), but it’s not a judgment or statement on your self-esteem. A few of my clients have quoted the famous Wandavision description of grief as “love with nowhere to go.” While you’re allowed to have love for the person you lost for as long as you need to (there is no timeline to grief; ignore anyone who tells you “you should be over it by now”), how can you direct that love toward yourself? How can you hold space for both mourning your dreams of a future with this person while unapologetically highlighting your inherent worthiness to be loved regardless of someone else’s behavior? This isn’t just simply about picking up a hobby or two (though this can certainly be empowering), but about being in touch with what you have to offer a partner and being able to identify where your values and the other person’s values might have differed.

I know that a listicle won’t take away the pain you might be experiencing, but I hope that you know that there are many resources out there to walk with you while you process this loss. It’s painful to mourn a person we lose through death, but it can also be painful to mourn someone who is still alive. A good partner is supposed to be a secure base where we can “land” after facing the challenges of the outside world (source: Dr. Sue Johnson, EFT couples therapy founder), and to lose that can be destabilizing and can feel like restarting our hopes for the future from scratch.

I hope that this sends you in the right direction, and if you’d like to explore working with me, I am open to chatting.

Other resources if you feel like you’re struggling right now:

• The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255
• NYC Crisis Text Line
• The Open Path Collective (for uninsured, sliding scale therapy)

Disclaimer: This blog post is published for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or crisis intervention.