What to do to overcome heartbreak?

Heartbreak is a type of discomfort that affects or has affected many people, given that the world of falling in love, when carrying often very intense feelings about how you feel about someone can lead to disappointments in many ways. occasions.

Here we will see what heartbreak consists of and how to overcome it from the point of view of psychology and emotional well-being, through various tips.

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What is heartbreak and how does it appear?

Heartbreak is the psychological phenomenon characterized by the emotional pain that occurs when experiencing the end of a love story in which you were involved. It is an experience that often goes hand in hand with the breakup of a couple and separation, but this is not always the case.

On the one hand, the cases of people who continue in a relationship for years despite having suffered a love disappointment and not to continue with the other person because of the love they feel towards her, but for others motivations. In cases like this, although being people know that they are no longer in a love relationship (at least, not one in which feelings are reciprocated), they move forward making their heartbreak coexist with the presence of the other person in their day to day.

On the other hand, it must be taken into account that technically it is possible to suffer heartbreak despite not having started a love relationship. This is what happens, for example, when someone is rejected by someone who had fallen in love.

And is that the important thing about heartbreak is not so much that the love story that we see moving away from us has become real beyond our imagination, but rather that we have become accustomed to taking it for granted, to integrating it into our daily lives, even without the active participation of the one we love. In fact, it is common for people to spend a lot of time fantasizing about what their life will be like after a "crush" common with those who have captivated them, which leads to hope and not to conceive other plans for the future without that someone special.

Thus, in many cases, heartbreak is an experience similar to the psychological grief that occurs when a loved one dies. However, unlike the case of those who miss someone who has already passed away, in heartbreak it is common for many mixed feelings, since seeing the person we have fallen in love with move away from us can awaken resentment.

Thus, in heartbreak, at least two mechanisms of discomfort usually appear: missing the person, on the one hand, and experiencing doubts about how we should feel about them, as we will see.

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The differential fact: affective ambivalence

As we have seen, part of what makes heartbreak a painful experience is the feeling of loss, the idea of that the day to day has lost one of its most important aspects, which is the company of the person we have come to to love. But something that also produces discomfort is indecision about how to relate to what we have left: memories of that person.

And it is that heartbreak forces us to make the decision about whether to continue perceiving that person and our relationship in the same way in which it we were doing before the disappointment, or if we rethink our position on what we have been doing up to that moment: to what relationship did we aspire? Have we been reasonable in setting our expectations? Was that relationship something authentic, or a mirage that only took place in our heads? Is the other person as valuable and special as we thought?

These and many other questions give rise to reconsider both the person we fell in love with and the way they came into our lives, and on many occasions this uncomfortable process leads to a very critical attitude about what happened, from which reproaches arise towards one or both parties.

To do?

These are some tips on how to overcome heartbreak and turn the page in the best possible way.

1. Don't base everything on demonizing the other person

If you concentrate all your frustrations and all your sadness projecting those feelings on who aroused love in you, making him responsible for everything that happened, you'll just be hiding your pain under the rug, since you will learn to give great importance to that person: you will learn to fear that he will appear again in your life and, in a matter of minutes or seconds, it makes you feel bad again by doing something that does not fit with that artificial and Manichaean vision that you have created for yourself. her.

In addition, it will also awaken in you an insane competitiveness, which will lead you to try to “be better than her” to show that you have matured more, which is contradictory.

2. Learn to tolerate your flaws by looking back

When recalling past situations it is very easy to detect failures and blunders in one's own behavior, among which perhaps we would include not having detected signs that we were generating overly optimistic expectations about the relationship we were going to have with the other person.

It is important pausing to analyze the extent to which it is constructive and useful to bask in self-criticism for self-criticism, instead of assuming that no one can know everything at all times and focus on drawing a lesson. Which brings us to the next tip.

3. Orient yourself towards learning

Very well, you have suffered a heartbreak experience, but... what have you learned from that? Emotions are a very powerful way to fix memories, and that is why, if you can come to a correct conclusion about what has happened, the experience will allow you to mature more emotionally quite quickly, given that you will have that lesson always at hand.

Of course, it prevents it from producing a very pessimistic bias or it will close more doors than it will open. Consider how that experience can help you to be happier.

4. Focus on your well-being, not on feeding narratives

If the heartbreak has arisen in part because of having been subjected to an overly idealized narrative about what that relationship was or was going to be, it is important not to fall into another Once in a trap of this type but of the opposite sign: a totally pessimistic and disenchanted perspective, practically marked by cynicism, on relationships human.

Ultimately, these perspectives that tend to simplify reality (either towards optimism or towards pessimism) they only work for themselves, leading us to interpret everything that happens to us in a way that validates that way of seeing things.

We do not want to be slaves of such a flat and totalizing philosophy of life, but to obtain a way of perceiving things that has the necessary nuances to give us room for maneuver and have autonomy, assuming that we cannot always be right or know everything that is happening in us and in our relations.

5. If you do not progress, go to psychological therapy

Psychotherapy is the most effective way to overcome emotional problems of this type, and offers personalized professional help adapted to each case.

Looking for professional help?

If you are interested in going to psychotherapy to overcome emotional or behavioral problems that are being negatively affected, get in touch with us. On Advance Psychologists We have a full team of psychologists and 20 years of experience caring for patients. You can find us in our center located in Madrid, as well as in online therapy sessions by video call. On this page are our contact details.

Bibliographic references:

• Lopez-Cantero, E. (2018). The Break-Up Check: Exploring Romantic Love through Relationship Terminations. Philosophia (Ramat Gan), 46 (3): pp. 689 - 703.
• Sharpsteen, D.J.; Kirkpatrick, L.A. (1997). Romantic jealousy and adult romantic attachment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 72 (3): pp. 627 - 640.
• Verhallen, A.M. et. to the. (2019). Romantic relationship breakup: An experimental model to study effects of stress on depression (-like) symptoms. PLoS One, 14 (5): e0217320.
• Weiss, R.S. (1998). Separation and other problems that threaten relationships. The BMJ, 316 (7136): pp. 1011 - 1013.