Duels and love losses

There are many forms of psychological grief caused by significant losses. For example, due to the loss of a job, a partner, a change of school, the loss of a loved one, the loss of health, and perhaps even the loss of a pet.

In this case I want to delve into the loss of a relationship, which has its own characteristics.

• Related article: "The 7 myths of romantic love"

The keys to grief over a breakup

It is very common that, when they end a love relationship, in a very short time people believe and feel that they are answered or as if nothing bad had happened to them; they even start the search for a new partner all over again, like "throwing dirt under the rug." That is, taking your own emotional problems to the next relationship.

Those emotional problems or personality factors that influenced 50% in that break probably continue to be in people, unresolved, some time later. And they can even lead to codependency or an unwanted quality of life.

Too It is common for friends or family of people involved in this break to invite the person in question to distract themselves, have fun, go out

even with other prospective partners, with the desire not to see them cry or suffer; obviously they do this out of love, however, most of the time those who love us the most are the ones who are most likely to end up harming us.

It is harmful to pretend that nothing happened and ask the person who suffered a loss to become strong, be distracted or simply find another person to fill that void. It is harmful because they are not allowing you to grieve in a correct way, since the only thing that generates the act of being strong is a lag of negative and unprocessed emotions.

• You may be interested in: "This is how a couple breakup is overcome by improving self-esteem"

To do?

The normal thing in people who lose a partner should be to wait a considerable time (more or less 6 or 9 months as minimum) alone, learning to deal with their own loneliness, understanding it, processing it, and thus diminishing the great feeling of emptiness. Allowing yourself this time alone implies going to the movies, theater, shopping, doing hobbies that you usually enjoy, but with yourself. And of course, when you feel the need, cry and feel sad, angry, wanting to regain that relationship and finally accepting the break.

Precisely those last emotions represent, according to some authors, the stages of mourning. There are researchers who propose more stages, but in summary, the stages of grief are: Denial, sadness, anger, haggling or wanting to recover what was lost and finally acceptance. These stages do not have a chronological or precise order, but it is essential to go through all of them in a constant swing and let the respective emotions flow to each one of them.

The loss of a partner is a huge opportunity to rework emotions, triggered in the present but that have their roots in the early stages of the person's life. So far from what is believed, the best thing to be in a love duel would be to face those intense emotions, learning to enjoy one's own company.

The ideal when something like this happens will always be to get rid of any vestige that the person remembers (negatively and even positively), so that the only thing that remains at the end is a more emotionally neutral memory. It is worth mentioning that the keywords to go through this process and end in an ideal way are: I love you, I forgive you, thank you and I'm sorry.

Once these words can be said sincerely (and imaginatively), the person will very likely have overcome that loss.

• Related article: "Grief: coping with the loss of a loved one"

What can happen to a poorly managed duel over a broken couple?

On the other hand, when a duel is not worked out properly, the consequences of it can be quite serious, since this can become pathological and become incorporated into the life of the person without notice. What's more, you will be repeating the same behavioral patterns as long as you continue to avoid that break.

Even, sometimes, some people who do not correctly elaborate a loss, cannot be relieved only with the support of psychotherapy, but require psychiatric and pharmacological support.

Clinically speaking, in cases like this, problems such as anxiety crisis wave depression. This last psychopathology implies spending several months experiencing irritability, sadness, eating problems, lack of interest in things that previously interested him, lack of hygiene... With which the person may not be living a dignified life and with everything that he would like, that you really deserve just because you are human.

It could be the case in which all the deficiencies or improvement issues in a person's life even revolve around one or more previously unresolved duels. It occurs in people very anchored in what could be called melancholy or discouragement most of the time.

For all the above, we must consider it very important to allow ourselves to be vulnerable and ask for professional psychotherapeutic help without no kind of prejudice, since it is a process focused on one's own well-being and to achieve the best possible life, without repeating harmful behavioral and perhaps even family patterns, learned from unresolved or processed emotional deficiencies from the earliest years of life.

Of course, no person is born with all the skills to enter life in an ideal way, but it is braver and stronger who accepts help in an intelligent way ...