Life After Breakup: Correcting Mistakes

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

LIFE AFTER SEPARATION: WORKING ON MISTAKES

Parting is

death of relationship, not the death of people

The man who cannot part

cannot and meet.

SEPARATION AS INJURY

Parting with a partner is a fairly common theme in my therapy work. Moreover, on both sides: both male and female. Listening to the difficult stories of our clients' relationships, each time delving into their specific situation anew, I understand that despite the uniqueness of each couple, you can still talk about typical mistakes and difficulties that partners face when parting. Accordingly, we can offer some algorithm for working with this kind of clients.

Parting is always stressful for partners in any relationship. And in many cases it is also an injury. … Psychotrauma - this is a significant life event, a strong change in life circumstances, in which it is difficult for a person's consciousness to accept and experience it. In a situation where partners have strong emotional dependence, this is not only an inevitable serious injury, but also the crisis.

The situation of psychotrauma knocks out even a psychologically healthy person to the borderline level of functioning. A person in such a situation has a complex cocktail of emotions-feelings, which, as a rule, in different proportions contain resentment, anger, rage, fear, shame, and guilt.

In addition to the above feelings, the typical state of a person in a situation of separation is the experience of disappointment, abandonment, a feeling of inner emptiness, loss of meaning in life, depression.

And this is not surprising. Parting is the death of a relationship. And often the “death of a relationship” is even subjectively more difficult to accept than the real death of a partner. In a situation of real death of the second half, there are no hopes and illusions. In a relationship dying, it’s harder to let go of hope. “To bury” a living person is harder, because somewhere there he lives, makes plans for his life, rejoices, sad, falls in love, builds new relationships, but not with you.

The main difficulty in breaking up is to break up psychologically. You can leave a person physically, but at the same time not part with him emotionally. The main task of therapy in the event of separation from a partner is the task of living the separation process and building new life meanings.

And here you can meet a number of typical mistakes that partners often make when parting. I will describe them.

SEPARATION ERRORS:

These are the most common mistakes that can be observed when parting. They can, to varying degrees and in different proportions, be present in individual life stories. Perhaps at the moment of separation, this is the only possible strategy for survival and relief of mental pain. But the sad thing is that fixing on these defensive strategies can make a person closed off to his own life. Each of these mistakes can become a mental trap for a person, often making the process of parting, and, consequently, new meetings impossible.

A person who cannot leave cannot meet. To meet with another person, with another self, with another world … He gets bogged down in the past and is closed to the future. He chooses all the time. Selects the past.

SEPARATION PROBLEMS:

To part means to separate psychologically. To break up, you need to acknowledge and accept the reality of past relationships. And for this it is necessary to conduct a thorough objective revision of them.

Important:

To part means to discover new facets of self-identity in oneself. This is especially important in the case when the relationship with the partner was built on the type of merger. And the marital we-identity was "polished" as the only facet of self-identity. In this case, you will have to "pick yourself up". And for this, sometimes it is necessary to meet with yourself, to remember yourself. It is important to discover, remember and reanimate other facets of your identity - professional, friendly, creative …

To part means to find new meanings and values. Parting, besides being a trauma, is also a crisis for many couples. Although this crisis belongs to non-normative crises, it nevertheless deeply affects the personality, forcing it to radically change - to radically rebuild the basic components of consciousness - the picture of the World and the image of oneself. And this inevitably leads to the need to revise their values and give birth to new life meanings on their basis.

It's important to remember that breaking up is the death of a relationship, not the death of people. And in the case of “relationship death,” relationships die, not people. And people, in spite of everything, have to live on - make plans, create, love.

To do this, the trauma of parting must be lived and experienced so that it does not freeze the soul of a person, does not make him "a frozen block in the stream of life."

The crisis can also proceed in different ways. It is important that it becomes a point of growth for a person, in which sprouts of new life meanings and goals will sprout.

The breakup situation requires a lot of support and the presence of a sensitive, accepting person nearby.

Independently, without competent organized support, a person often finds it difficult to cope with the task of parting. It is better to do this accompanied by a specialist, if possible.

Love yourself! And the rest will catch up)