Breaking Up

"What is the opposite of two? A lonely me, a lonely you." - Richard Wilbur

"Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell." - Edna St.Vincent Millay

Letting go of someone you've loved can be exquisitely hard to do for many people. If you've been taken by surprise, if you've been misleading yourself about how they feel or if you've been lied to, full recovery can seem just out of reach.

It's so human to torture yourself wondering what happened, is there something wrong with you and what could you have done differently? The lingering mystery of "why me" can infiltrate and discourage the beginnings of new relationships. People can take years to untangle themselves from a lost love.

Life is about making loss bearable. Whether we lose our ability to be on the planet or our children grow up or we lose out on a relationship, we have to learn to cope with loss. While you may still feel the spark, you have to deal with the reality that the other person doesn't.

In my practice I see so many young women who expect too much, too soon. They are very focused on all the details that hint of a long term future. They glide over the mixed messages and ambivalence that is the undercurrent in many relationships.

It is worth the risk of loving someone else more than they love you. In the beginnings of things someone always gives more. If that's who you are, then accept the endgame may not work out the way you hope. Hoping for too much, too early can be a curse. Uncertainty is a huge part of romance.

Putting the pieces back together afterwards can be very difficult. Who wants to date when you just had your heart broken? Give yourself time to grieve. Ask yourself do you really miss him/her or do you miss being part of an intimate relationship.

Are you grieving the loss of the relationship or the loss of your illusions about what you believed was happening?

The relationship was not what you hoped. The best thing you can do is accept that dating is a painful process. That means you will get sucker punched by someone you love more than they love you.It's part of the deal.

Ask yourself are you so focused on finding a relationship, that you are avoiding defining a more meaningful life for yourself. There isn't anybody out there who wants to be used to plug the empty hole inside of you. Volunteer, learn to kayak or dance salsa. Develop a less superficial lifestyle. Make your life matter whether you have someone or not.

Closure

One technique that can be helpful for closure is to write a goodbye letter. Actually, two letters might be useful. The first can be an unedited dump that you then shred, burn or destroy. The second letter can be thoughtful and explore both the good and bad parts of the relationship. Write your favorite memories. Write what you miss. Write about how you grew and changed from being in love.

Acknowledge the differences. Then try to take responsibility for your part in the problems, because it always takes two to kill off a relationship. Include your hurt, sadness and sense of betrayal. Tell them what you wish for them in their next relationship. Try to cover anything that will help you to say goodbye and begin to move on.

Then read it aloud to a really good friend who will be a witness and listen. Then you need to remove pictures and anything that will trigger your obsessing. For example, if they changed the brand of toothpaste you use, change back to what you used to brush with.

Wait a week or so, then decide if you want to send them the letter or not. Ask the friend who listened what they think of the idea. Ask yourself will the letter help you to recognize this is the end of the relationship or are you using the letter towards building false hope?

Read about expectations on the Depression page of this website.

Books

Extreme Breakup Recovery by Jeanette Castelli

Getting Past Your Breakup: How to Turn a Devastating Loss into the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You by Susan Elliot

Obsessive Love: When It Hurts Too Much to Let Go by Dr. Susan Forward

Movies to Comfort

(500) Days of Summer - Follow this link to read review on my blog.

Watch this delightful movie to learn about easy it is to make it all up in your head that you are headed towards long term loving.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall - Raunchy.

Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (Widescreen Edition)

High Fidelity

Sliding Doors

Pain

"It feels just like walking on broken glass" -lyrics by Annie Lennox from the song Walking on Broken Glass

Profound pain can never be erased, and it always gets smaller over time. Learning to make pain bearable is an important part of life. A majority of Chinese movies attend to the telling of very painful stories (see the Chinese Section under Movies on web site).

It is paradoxical but true that if you honor and respect your pain it will take up less space in your heart.

It is important to share pain, to have it witnessed. Too often in life we are the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz with our jaws rusted shut. The secret to life is middle ground: sharing but not oozing your pain everywhere like those who are bitter or resentful. Choicefully sharing can make a difference. To be known truly is one of life's joys and risks.

Without a doubt, unspoken pain creates cracks and crevices in the soul. Consider writing a letter to God, to yourself, or to someone who has hurt you, not to send but to allow the pain to take up less space in your soul.

There is another kind of pain that Iris Murdoch writes about in The Good Apprentice (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin). Therapy is often about coping with our broken self-delusions. Murdoch writes:

"Your picture of yourself, your self-illusion is in process of being broken. This places you in an unusual position, very close to the truth, and that proximity is part of your pain...you hate your damaged self and feel you cannot live with it, yet you desperately cherish it at the same time. You describe your grief as a system. Indeed it is, a defensive system of mutually supporting falsehoods instinctively produced to defend your old egoistic self-image which you cannot bear to lose, you cannot bear its death which seems so like your own. Your endless talk of dying is a substitute for the real needful death, the death of your illusions...you say you live in pain. Let it be the death of the old false self, and the life-movement of the new real truthful self."

This is said by a character who is a psychiatrist to young Edward, who has had a part in the death of his roommate. Great tragedy does open up possibilities. As an aside: The Chinese symbol for crisis also has the dual meaning of opportunity.

Guilt

"Guilt was not merely a weakness, it was misleading, casting one's entire life into doubt."
- From Making Things Better by Anita Brookner.

So many people suffer from excessive guilt which makes life so much more difficult. Guilt triggers depression, anxiety & low self esteem. The religious culture of both Catholics & Jews makes guilt more difficult to bear.

Guilt that pinches us to do better next time is totally reasonable. Guilt that simply makes you feel bad about yourself for decades is totally unreasonable. Think through your guilt and make the distinction: what's unreasonable & what's reasonable?

Many times unreasonable guilt is really all about resentments that you are pretending don't exist. So ask yourself, are there any resentments underneath your guilty feelings.

Many times unreasonable guilt means you haven't accepted your own humanity. We all make mistakes and only stop on the day that we die. Our dark side is part of our nature # we make it smaller every decade, though it will never go away. Forgiving ourselves matters. Ruining our lives with excessive guilt that is a breeding ground for insidious doubt that can ruin a lifetime. What good is that?

Speaking up and being more authentic is helpful to diffusing guilt. The more you swallow from others and suffer in silence, the more you add to your depression. It is cultural to define speaking up as being mean or hurting someone’s feelings. Think of speaking up as an opportunity to teach someone else what is reasonable or unreasonable from your point of view.

The relationship only has a chance at being an authentic dyad if both people risk more honesty. When energy goes back and forth to accommodate both of their differences, it is a more complex relationship and more often satisfying for longer to both because there is greater opportunity for dialogue.

A majority of couples more often have a power dynamic that Fritz Perls referred to as:

Depressed energy and silence feed the Underdog position. Many partnerships mirror this second arrangement, in which the Underdog enables by hiding in the "presumed safety" of being silent and unknown. This proven dynamic is much less interesting, though it is less work and more simplistic. The Top Dog tends toward monologue and being self-serving, making convenient assumptions about the other. Ask yourself, "Have I swallowed too much and cooperated in keeping myself invisible?"

Movies

21 Grams

P.O.V.: What I Want My Words to Do to You - Follow this link to read review on my blog.

The Shawshank Redemption (Single-Disc Edition) - Rated 1st of the top 250 movies at imdb.

Homework

• Guilt Exercise (downloadable PDF form)
  Write in one column what you feel guilty about, as many examples as you can think of all at once. Then look through them and see if there is a legitimate reasonable obligation to address or is there an unspoken resentment being hoarded about what is unreasonable?
• When I Say No, I Feel Guilty

What it Means to be Human

One of my favorite passages on how impossible it is to understand someone else and yet we are compelled to keep on trying anyway;

“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is so ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another’s interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that - well, lucky you.”

- from the book American Pastoral by Phillip Roth