How to Recover From a Breakup

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: This is Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby, and you’re listening to The Love, Happiness, and Success podcast. 

[Intro Song: Ten Years Gone by Led Zeppelin]

Led Zeppelin, everyone, with Ten Years Gone. One of the breakup anthems of all time, although not one that you’ll hear on the radio very often because it’s seven minutes long. Anyway, you can listen to the whole thing at the end and have a good cry because today, we’re talking about breakups and how to recover from a breakup if you are going through one. 

First, before we get started, let’s just stop right here. Let me introduce myself. If this is the first time for you to listen to the Love, Happiness, and Success podcast, welcome. I’m glad you found me, and I’m glad that you found this podcast if you’re going through a breakup because it is so hard. One of the things that is very common for people going through breakups is that it feels very, very lonely. So, I’m glad that you found me. I’m glad you found this. 

I’m Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby. I am a therapist. My background is as a marriage counselor. I’ve also been trained as a psychologist. And I’m a board-certified life coach. My business is helping people find love, happiness, and success in their lives. And then, a while back, I started doing this podcast just to put some free advice out into the world that could find people in their moment of need, and so I’m glad that you found this today. Welcome. 

Today, we are going to be talking about breakups and how to survive them. Over the years, I have become something of a self-proclaimed expert on breakups, which is kind of embarrassing because I’m a marriage counselor, right? And I’m always worried that if I talk about this, people are gonna say, “Are you the worst marriage counselor ever?” Because you know, all my couples break up. No, that’s actually not true. 

Most couples that show up for marriage counseling or relationship coaching who are motivated and committed to working on their relationships can always improve them. I’ve worked with a lot of couples in the process of healing their relationships, which is wonderful. I’m always so overjoyed for my couples when that’s possible for them and also for their families. Particularly divorce it’s so hard for everyone. In many cases, particularly, when it is a unilateral split, meaning that one person wants to break up and the other person doesn’t, in my opinion, particularly, when there are kids involved, it’s a tragedy and something that should be avoided at all costs if it’s possible. And the truth is that sometimes it’s not possible. 

There are times when one person in a relationship is just done, and not me or the best marriage counselor in the world can breathe that life back into a relationship if somebody really just doesn’t want to do it anymore. That door is closed. In those cases, what I can do to be helpful is to be of service to the person that is left on my couch alone who is really hurting, and continue to support, and guide that person. 

That is how I have learned as much as I have about breakups. When marriage counseling or relationship coaching doesn’t work, it’s walking people the rest of the way through that journey of recovery and really rebuilding their lives. And it is a harrowing experience for everybody that goes through it. So today, on The Love, Happiness, and Success podcast, we’re going to be talking more about this and how to recover from a breakup. 

If you are interested in learning just about everything there is to know about breakups, and why they’re so painful, and how to recover from a breakup, you may also want to check out a little book that I have coming out on the subject. It’s called Exaholics: Breaking Your Addiction to an Ex Love. It’s coming out at the beginning of November. Leading up to that, I’m going to be doing some more publishing and podcasting on the subject, sharing with you a little bit more about what is in the book in hopes that it can be helpful to you. So stay tuned for that. 

If you would like to get updates because, in addition to doing this podcast, I also write articles on my website, which is growingself.com. You can go there and sign up for my newsletter, and I’ll send you a roundup of what we have going on on the blog. I will not email you all the time. I usually send a round-up about once a month of the things that I have published. So if you would like to get on that train, go to growingself.com, and you’ll see sign-up boxes for the newsletter. 

Feeling Devastated After a Breakup

Okay, so let’s talk about breakups. There are a few things that I want to tell you about breakups. I’ll tell you some of them today, and again, we’re going to be doing more on this subject in upcoming episodes. But here’s the big thing that I want you to know that is so easy to forget when you’re going through a nasty breakup. That is that you are normal for feeling like you’re losing it, and going crazy, and being devastated. You are normal, and you are not alone. Everybody goes through this. 

The people that haven’t gone through it, they just haven’t gone through it yet. And that’s true for everyone. I have gone through it. I went through a terrible, terrible breakup when I was in high school. It was crushing. It was devastating. I thought I would never recover. I can’t even tell you how awful it was. And everybody that you know has had their hearts broken: rock stars, captains of industry, world leaders, movie stars, everyone. They have had their hearts broken. It’s the human experience. The only people that don’t get their hearts broken are sociopaths because they’re not really capable of loving somebody. 

You know what though? Let me tell you: sociopaths, they had their hearts broken too when they were very, very young, and that’s why they are sociopaths. So let’s just have compassion for everyone. It’s the human experience: heartbreak and to be in terrible pain when love is lost. It’s the flip side of love. It’s the other side of that coin. You can’t love without being at risk of loss. This is just the price that we all have to pay for opening up our hearts. For the people that haven’t, it means one of just a few things. It means they have never loved someone deeply in the context of an unsustainable relationship because again, not all relationships are sustainable. They’re just not all possible. To love somebody deeply in that context will lead to heartbreak. 

Or if you haven’t gone through this, sometimes, people do detach emotionally from a relationship before it ends. And their experience of the breakup is also different because they’ve been moving through the steps of grief, and psychological distancing, and making sense of what’s happening, and accepting things. They’ve actually done it before the relationship has officially ended. So by the time it finally does, they can feel okay about it. They’ve just been doing that work internally. The other people that haven’t experienced this, the lucky, lucky few, they have just fallen in love the first time with somebody who was able to love them back, and have a healthy relationship with them, and the relationship has endured, and they’re still together. 

I want you to know that because one of the things that happens that I see a lot of, I experienced it and to a person, all the people that I’ve worked with on this issue, they think that there’s something wrong with them for being devastated. They can’t sleep. They can’t eat. They feel like it’s all they can think about, or they feel like they’re obsessed with thoughts about their ex. They have all kinds of intrusive thoughts. They’re so sad, crying all the time, pumping other people for information, stalking them online, trying to gather the information that can feel quite compulsive. And they feel like they’re going nuts because they’re having this experience. 

Some of the things that I want to talk with you about today is why that happens because I don’t know about you, but for me, when I have just a basic understanding of why I feel the way I do or what’s going on, it is so comforting to me, even though it doesn’t necessarily change the experience, necessarily. If I can understand something, and then, “Okay, it’s normal. It’s gonna pass. This is normal and expected, okay.” It just helps me accept it, settle into the experience, and feel more calm about it, and that’s worth a lot. 

Let me offer you just a little bit more information that hopefully can help you understand what’s going on and why this is so hard. Then, I’m also going to be sharing with you a few tips for how to help yourself through this process. But first of all, what people don’t often realize, and the reason for that is because this is fairly new information academically that is still filtering down to the general public, but relationships are addictive, physiologically addictive. It makes sense when you consider the fact that human beings need to bond and fiercely to other people in order to survive. In order for human infants to grow and develop normally, there needs to be an intense bond of love, a reciprocal bond of love between mother and baby. 

Evolutionarily speaking, in order for our species to survive, people need to develop very, very, very strong bonds to each other to form pair bonds and mate, and also to sustain tribes because people, human beings, in the natural world, we cannot exist unless it’s collectively. So from a survival standpoint, there are very, very, very good survival reasons why we need to really bond, lock on to other people emotionally and psychologically. With other survival systems that your body has developed over the eons, your drive to attach and fall in love with someone else, it’s physiologically based. And there are neurological and hormonal systems that become activated when we fall in love. 

How to Recover from a Breakup: Three Stages of the Love Process

There are essentially three stages of the love process. The first is just lust. Lust is what happens when we see somebody hot like, “Oh, wow.” Lust is indiscriminate. You can feel lust for all kinds of different people. It doesn’t signify anything except that you would like to have sex with them. That’s what lust means. However, lust is the very first attractor that can pull people together. 

When that happens, sometimes, if the circumstances are right, romantic love can start to bloom. And romantic love is a very distinct human experience. It is shared by mammals, some species of birds. Any animal that does pair bonding will experience romantic love. This is a very, very, very intense fixation with one special person. An irreplaceable, cherished person, that is just the world, the moon, the stars. 

When this happens, when people start to fall in love, it activates the same part of our brains that is associated with things like cocaine addiction. There are structures in your brain that produce a substance called dopamine. Sorry for all you non-nerds out there but for my nerd brethren, thank you. Allow me to explain here. Dopamine, it’s a substance in your brain that creates intense feelings of activation. When you have dopamine getting triggered, you feel euphoric. You feel energized. You tend to feel obsessive about whatever is happening. You tend to feel restless, full of energy, and also having intrusive thoughts, and craving it. 

It’s very parallel to the process that people experience when they become addicted to stimulants like cocaine. When people fall in love, there’s euphoria. There’s energy. Their lover is all they can think about. They crave connection with this person. They’re thinking about them all the time and, again, consider that there is a biological basis for why this is happening, because nature wants us to do this. 

But here’s the deal, and I think I mentioned in a previous podcast, we can get “addicted” to the wrong person. Just because you have this super intense love experience doesn’t necessarily mean that this is a good person for you to have a relationship with. People can feel these feelings in the context of an affair: the bad boy that so many women fall in love with, the crazy hot chick that so many men fall in love with. You feel all these feelings even for the wrong person sometimes. But anyway, that is the experience of romantic love. 

Now, if people stay together, romantic love drives them together, over time, the third stage of love develops, and that is the attachment stage. This is analogous to opiate addiction, and I’m not making this stuff up. Brain image scans, if you want to review the work of Dr. Helen Fisher, she’s so amazing. She’s done brain image scanning on people in love and was able to show with functional MRIs that there is an activity in the same parts of the brain that are activated during opiate addiction as people who are deeply attached, or cocaine addiction as people who are in intense, early-stage romantic love. 

That’s what I want you to know about just how love works because it explains what happens to us when love is lost. So if falling in love is similar to becoming addicted to something, going through a breakup, having that relationship end unexpectedly or unwantedly, it’s like going through withdrawal. And this is true emotionally but also physiologically. When people go through withdrawal, relationship withdrawal, the “symptoms” of this are obsessing. 

They think about their ex night and day from the moment they wake up in the morning to the second they close their eyes and try, unsuccessfully, to go to sleep all night. They are on their mind. Driving along, they see a car that looks like theirs. They’re waiting for a text or a phone call. They often try to compulsively information gather: stalking Facebook online, watching for any kind of signals from their partner, all these kinds of things. 

It’s very analogous to the kind of craving and almost frantic attempts to use again that you see in somebody’s going cold turkey off of cocaine or heroin. And there is a biological basis for that. I just wanted to tell you that. So that if you’re thinking like, “What the heck is wrong with me? I’m going crazy,” I just want you to know that this is actually what people are built to do. 

We are built to bond deeply with other people. Nature intended us to work this way. It’s supposed to hurt when relationships are lost. We have a biological drive to reconnect because not too long ago, our very survival depended on our connections with other people. We’re more independent now in this modern world than we were even just a few 100 years ago, but our bodies haven’t changed just because our culture has, so know that. 

The Protest and Despair Phases after Breakups

There is a protest response whenever somebody loses a relationship, and you see this in all baby animals. A human baby, especially during that really critical stage from, probably, 6 months to 18 months when a human baby is super aware of where their mommy is all the time and has to be with their mommy, and the mommy walks out of the room, and they flip out. That’s the protest response. You’ll see it in a little puppy. If you take it away from its mommy, it will go crazy and try to get back to its mommy. 

Again, the same thing happens in humans. And some people are surprised to hear this because we think of attachment as just being something that’s really for babies and mommies. But the truth is, again, because our species is the one that’s so wired for connection, that humans need attachment: strong, secure attachment throughout their lives. Attachment means having a cherished, beloved person in your corner that loves you and that you love, your soft place to fall. It’s your person. Even outside of romantic love, it’s just that security, that sense of home that we have in a relationship with somebody: our number one. And again, when that is broken, or even threatened, people flip out. 

That’s a lot of what we see in marriage counseling. It’s when people are in distressed relationships, so they’re feeling unsafe in their relationship. They’re feeling hurt. They’re feeling rejected. They’re feeling afraid. They will respond to their partner in ways that illuminate these really old attachment styles, either seeking to reconnect frantically or trying to protect themselves from a relationship that feels threatening. I should probably talk more about that in another podcast. Let’s stick to this subject which is how to recover from a breakup. 

So again, that protest response is trying frantically to reconnect. So a lot of times during breakups, you’ll see people calling their exes, sending letters, sending emails, texting, sometimes over and over again, leaving presents, or kind of cruising around places where they might see their ex, and all of these are in efforts to reconnect with their partner, their super important person. And again, sometimes people think “What is wrong with me? He told me he didn’t want to be with me. I know this, and I’m still calling him, trying to reconnect. If I yell at him loud enough, he’ll understand how devastated I am, then he’ll want to be back together with me.” People don’t say that, but that’s the logic around that frantic, frantic feeling, that panic almost, that is often associated with that desire to reconnect. 

And then, if people aren’t able to reconnect, that protest phase starts to fade into what’s called despair, the despair phase, which you also see in all animals, but it’s really akin to depression. People begin to isolate. They don’t want to go anywhere. They’re kind of sluggish and slow, and kind of hibernating. And it has a lot in common with depression. People oftentimes feel very hopeless about their lives. They will often feel very down on themselves, like, “What is wrong with me? Why wasn’t I good enough to love? If I was better, they would have loved me more.” All that kind of stuff. 

And also, oftentimes, rejecting other people that want to either have relationships with them or even be friends with them. It’s just really shutting down and withdrawing, and going into this depressive phase. But it’s not the same thing as major depressive disorder, although it can trigger it. But because it is directly related to this experience, it’s almost more like a grief state. And it’s fairly transient, but sometimes people get stuck in that phase, too, where they really feel like they’re just pining away for their lost love, and they can’t move on. So that’s something to pay attention to, as well. 

How to Help Yourself During a Protest or Despair Phase

Sometimes, doing a little personal growth work, and I’ll be giving you tons of tips, or reading a “how to recover from a breakup” book, or getting involved in some online support groups can be enough to break that cycle and help people lift out of that despair phase. But if it’s been going on for longer than, I would say, a month or two, it might be a good idea to talk to somebody, just to check it out. Because sometimes, having the support of somebody who can help you shift your thoughts, and shift your feelings, and shift your behaviors more intentionally can help you get out of that place and move on. Just FYI. But here, let me give you some tips now, on things that you can do to help yourself whether or not you’re in that first panicky, protests phase or if you’re in that despair kind of phase. 

If you know in your heart of hearts that you need to be done, you know that the relationship isn’t going to work, you know that it’s not good for you, and you really want to be done with this person but you can’t just get over it or stop thinking about them, the very first thing that you can do to help yourself with it, which is effective, is to stop or reduce any contact that you have with them as much as you possibly can. Because every time you have contact with your ex, it sends another zing of dopamine into your brain. 

It essentially reinforces the addiction, even if it’s a negative experience, which sounds so odd. Even if it’s negative, you’re still reinforcing that connection and that addiction. As hard as it may be, unfriend them on Facebook. Stop following them on Instagram and Twitter. Stop cyberstalking them. Stop going to places where you might run into them. Certainly, stop talking to them or corresponding with them. If you guys are just trying to be friends, just stop that. Because again, the more that you reinforce that contact, the worse it’ll be for you, and the longer this is going to drag on. 

Now, it’s also true that many people that I work with, like all addictions, relationship addiction is characterized by denial. The person who is addicted to alcohol says, “Well, it’s Thursday. Everybody drinks on Thursday. I’m totally in control of this. I’ll have a drink.” And the person who’s addicted to cigarettes will say, “Oh, it’s Saturday night, and I’ll just smoke one, and then I’ll throw it back away.” All addictions, we play games with ourselves when we’re addicted to things, right? 

Our emotional brain does whatever it wants. It twists our thinking brain into a pretzel so that it gives it what it wants, which is whatever substance it’s jonesing after. Relationship addiction is no different. But in this case, because that deep emotional brain is wanting connection with your ex, the denial is that “We can get back together. We should be together. This was just a bad fight. We can work it out. We really love each other. We’re meant to be together, blah blah.” 

And so, if this is really what you believe, there are other ways of helping yourself get through that, but that is more of a process because basically, you have to resolve that ambivalence. And that can often be hard to do on your own. That might be another time when it could be helpful to enlist the support of a good therapist or a coach just to help you work through that ambivalence so that then you can practice abstinence, which is no contact with the person. 

Another thing that I’d like you to consider is getting some social support. Because another thing that happens, that feels so invalidating for people when they’re going through breakups, is that they talk to their mom or their sister or their best friend, and they’re like, “I’m dying. My heart is broken. I’m so sad. I’m never gonna get over this person. I’m so devastated. He’s all I can think about. He’s so great. I can’t believe we’re not together anymore. We need to be together.” And what often comes back to us when we’re in this state is “You just have to let it go. You have to move on. You have to get over it. There are lots of fish in the sea. Have you tried match.com? There’s a lot of people out there. You’re a great girl. You can do so much better than that.” 

Those kinds of invalidating comments… The people love you. They mean well. And I bet everything that they’re telling you is absolutely true, and also, you’re not there. You’re not ready to think about match.com. You are not ready. What they’re telling you isn’t congruent with how you feel. You feel terrible. You feel sad. You feel heartbroken. You feel anxious. You feel rejected. You feel all of these things. And somebody is wanting to sort of shake you and say, “Okay, snap out of it. Time to move on.” 

Not only is it not helpful, but it also contributes to the loneliness that people feel while they’re going through it because their closest friends, their loved ones seem to not understand how they feel. And it can feel extremely isolating. So I would like to encourage you to find some kind of social support. It could be a friend that has gone through a really yucky breakup, and that can still put themselves in that place emotionally, and not judge you, or want you to be different for feeling the way that you do.

Oftentimes, support groups can be enormously helpful. So if you’re in a city or town of any size at all, you can do a breakup support group. Google, oftentimes, there are meetups. If you just type in “breakup meetup,” sometimes, things will pop up. Divorce support groups are oftentimes available. There are also a number of online support groups. There are a few different forums. I know one very well, which is hosted through Exaholics. It’s exaholics.com. It’s free. You can create an account and basically, just be in the company of other people who are going through the same thing. 

It’s just enormously healing for a lot of people to realize that they’re not alone, other people who are going through it, can understand them. They can talk about their feelings in an environment where they’re not going to be judged. Also, for many people, seeing other people go through that process of healing gives them a lot of hope. That “Oh, you know what, they went through it, I can go through it too.” So that can be extremely, extremely helpful. 

Finally, most of all, I’d like for you to be very, very, very gentle with yourself right now because what many people don’t understand, but what I think is becoming more and more public knowledge is that going through a breakup and losing an important relationship, it is a trauma. It is on the order of a death. Sometimes, it’s even more traumatizing than a death because if somebody dies, that is tragic and terrible, but it’s usually not personal. 

Nobody’s gonna say, “I just can’t live with you anymore, so I’m going to go get cancer.” I probably shouldn’t even say that. But when those kinds of things happen, it’s just a tragic accident, or disease, or misfortune. But when you lose a relationship because of a breakup, there’s always a statement of “What was wrong with me? What was wrong with us? Did I choose the wrong person? Did I do something to make this happen?” 

A lot of people, unfortunately, turn breakups, especially while they’re going through that despair phase, into a statement of their worth. “This happened because I wasn’t good enough.” I just want you to know that relationships end for all kinds of reasons. There are factors on both sides of the coin that contribute to things not working out. Many times, it’s simply because it just wasn’t a good match in terms of personality, or values, or just the way that people relate with each other. But if you have become really addicted and attached to somebody, it doesn’t matter. You can’t see that while you’re in it. You’re just feeling the pain. 

I would like to encourage you to be very, very gentle with yourself for a while. By gentle, I mean expecting yourself to not be okay for a while. So resting, doing things that feel nourishing and nurturing, taking some time, journaling, yoga, walking, drawing, spiritual activities, anything that feels like it’s really replenishing you is really important. Also, to try to fight back against those feelings of shame. 

If you have thoughts in your head about “I’m not good enough” or “This happened because I x, y, z,” and “I wasn’t pretty enough or smart enough or made enough money,” or whatever it could be, really challenge yourself to talk back against some of those. If you would like support in doing that, you might want to check out my Happiness Class. You can even take the first class for free, which will teach you kind of the basics of what I’m talking about, and teach you how to start shifting those thoughts around, and taking some of your power back against those really negative automatic thoughts that’ll drag you down. You can go to The-Happiness-Class.com if you want to check that out. Again, the first class is free. Just look at it. 

But making an effort to protect yourself from that bully that feels like it lives inside of you, and you’re going through something like that because in addition to protecting yourself from your ex and these harmful circumstances, a lot of people, as odd as it sounds, need to protect themselves from this reality, almost bully kind of critical voice that begins to emerge inside of them that has all the self-incrimination, all the self-doubt. So, do that. 

But also, understand that when you go through a breakup, it’s a loss and that grief is always part of loss. Back in the day, people used to go through a period of mourning when they experienced a loss. In some cultures, it was up to a year. People would dress in black, or they’d wear black armbands. And it kind of gave other people a heads up, to say, “I’m not okay right now. I’m going through something, so be gentle with me.” So, people would not get invited to parties. Or people would make exceptions for them, just understanding that they are going through a hard space.

Unfortunately, in our modern culture, such grace is not typically extended to us, certainly not in America. That’s not the American way. You need to pull yourself together and keep on truckin’. So even though you may be required to maintain some kind of façade with your job or for certain things, I want you to know that on the inside, you’re giving yourself a pass, and that it is okay for you to be sad right now, and allow yourself to have this experience because grief is one of these things… It’s a paradox. The more you accept it, and the more you embrace it, and just allow sadness to have its way with you, and cry and do journaling, and go to some seminars, and whatever, when you allow yourself to really fully immerse in that experience, you’ll work through it more quickly. 

People that tend to have these kinds of things linger are either trapped in unhelpful thinking styles. Again, if you want help with that, check out the Happiness Class. Or they are not allowing themselves to really fully feel their pain, so they’re avoiding it. They’re minimizing it, or they are postponing it by using emotional alchemy: doing things like drinking, or drugs, or getting super busy at work, or distracting themselves. They just push that grief out ahead of them.

The only way out of this is through it, unfortunately. Allow yourself to be sad. Have a good cry. Know that this is a time of grieving and mourning. Get support if you feel like you need it. And stay tuned to The Love, Happiness, and Success podcast. 

Again, over the coming month or two, I’m going to be talking more about this subject. And I’ll have even more tips and ideas for you to negotiate this fragile time. But for the moment, here is Led Zeppelin with seven minutes of sadness to help you get in touch with your grief. Okay, go cry, and I’ll talk to you next time.

[Outro Song]