A Three Step Fighters Approach to a Relationship Break Up
Learning how to deal with a break up is going to be one of the most difficult challenges you will face. Can you keep the breakup from infecting future relationships, social life, and your work? Will the feelings of shortfall, illness, and confusion bury you? My soon to be ex wife and I were together for eighteen yrs. At thirty six years old that’s half my life. To say I felt poor is a severe understatement, I felt as if someone had passed on and some days I wanted to. Be courageous, be a combatant with your emotions not against them, you will get through this. Embrace the gift this challenge brings it will make you a superior person in the end. Use the difficult times to build depth and character. You will acquire the ability to show compassion when needed and relate better with others in there time of need. This life experience will one day be gazed back on as something to be fortunate for.
Step 1. Cognizance – Sadness, aggravation, aches, agony, nausea, these are all feelings you may experience from a break up. The body will give you queues and inform you what you are feeling. Determining what feelings are alive inside your body. Ask yourself, what am I feeling? The best place to find this information is merely to be conscious of your feelings.
Step 2. Consider this one question, “is what I am feeling in this moment going to Kill me?” Now it may feel like you are dying but that is not the question. Can what you are feeling in fact Kill you? Of course it is in no way killing you, so why refrain from it? Most of us commonly tend to run from emotions that are okay to feel. From one instant to the next you are still surviving. Your emotions are not actually ripping you apart and killing you, there is a difference.
Step 3. Step 3 in dealing with a breakup is allowance. You need to give yourself permission to experience your feelings as miserable as you are right now. You will be defensive and of course susceptible to your feelings but this is all right. Stop resisting reality if what you feel is not killing you. When we are not willing to feel what we are experiencing, we are resisting these emotions. These feelings will have to go somewhere and without conscious thought will be forced from our mind into our body. Stuffing our emotions leads to worry, sleeplessness, headaches, and sickness just to name a few. Anything sound familiar here? Let yourself feel what your feeling, if your experience feels as though it is consuming you go back to step 2. and just be aware of your reality.
As you go through your early stages of the break up take time to understand these steps, and take care of yourself. Be mindful of your body, stress will have its way with you swift and hard. Eat right, exercise, sleep well, always being conscious and attentive of your body’s needs. Sever all communication with your ex for now, this may allow for a real friendship later. Keep your focus on you, complete distance from your ex will permit you to heal. Who knows maybe one day you and your ex will decide to get back together, but for now it needs to be about you.