Yes, a breakup is like death! Accept it, embrace it and move on!

The comparison might sounds rough but if you have ever loved anyone so much in a relationship that ended up in a breakup you can relate to the topic. Comparing a breakup with death might sound wrong and insensible but if you think about it, it’s all about grief and the pain of losing someone you once loved.

Grief symptoms such as anxiety, depression, anger and guilt are also seen in people that go through breakups and even if the amount of pain varies from each type of relationship, the feeling is basically the same: deep ache and desperation over something that was lost.

One of the most important things to do when you are going through a breakup is to accept that what you are feeling is real and to realize that is also normal. Trying to run away from the feeling or rushing the grief process might only imply that you will either stay in it longer or that you will use denial as a wrong coping mechanism which will take you away from a healthy healing process and isolate you from the possibility to find someone to love again.

One big difference between death and breakups is that even if you don’t think so at the moment, when you breakup with someone you are able and capable to find someone to love again while with death, you have to come to term with the reality of the lost of a loved one and learn how to live without that person for the rest of your life, with a breakup there is always hope.

So embrace your breakup! Feel the pain, talk about it, cry, take your time to be negative and to be sad, feel the anger, talk about that too, stay in bed for a day if you need to, think everyone would break your heart again, wake up in the middle of the night and call a friend saying how awful love can be and how you are sure you will never trust anyone again, skip love songs, make ugly faces when you see other couples being romantic, do anything you need to do so you can FEEL and then… move on!

The process of moving on doesn’t mean to jump into another relationship, after a breakup, you will have to learn how to live without the person you broke up with and readjust your life to be happy with yourself and by yourself before even thinking about finding love again, skipping the step where you embrace your loss and find happiness within yourself would just delay the process of grieving and enroll you in a pattern of dysfunctional relationships that would just lead you into another breakup.

Moving on means to stand up from that painful feeling by yourself, this might take a while so take your time, not the time others might think necessary but the one you personally need to be free from the pain and be hopeful again. If you feel it’s taking too long seek help within your friends or psychotherapy, counseling is always a good place to start after accepting you cannot deal with your emotions by yourself.

Trust me, there is hope! I didn’t write this article based only on reading about psychology, grief and self-help books, I lived it! I went through it and I survived it! I felt exactly the same way you might feel right now and I even believed I was never going to be able to see relationships in a positive way again. I went through such deep breakup grief I was not even able to write for this page for a while, I lost my inspiration and my desire to believe in positivism but deep down inside I knew I needed to give myself the time to feel that way, to accept the death of my previous relationship, to embrace that the pain was going to last for a while and to move on to find a relationship with myself and hope for the future.

#relationsh #breakup #love #acceptance