
How to Recover from Romantic Heartbreak? - yarapavan
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-recover-from-romantic-heartbreak
======
motohagiography
Not persuaded that the author's advice to rationalize the faults of your ex is
sufficient or necessary for "recovery."

I would propose generally that the suffering of any breakup (or loss) is
proportional to how much you depended on the other persons reflected view of
you for your own idea of self. Getting past it is more of an exercise in self-
acceptance, self-forgiveness, and self-improvement than simply knocking down
the other to boost yourself up.

If you identified as a partner, husband, father, boyfriend, etc. then the loss
of that feels like a loss of self. But if the person in your life was just
that: _another person_ , in _your_ life, then you can still miss them, but
nothing intrinsic to who you are was lost. You are not broken, shattered, or
harmed. In this context, suffering is the effect of a residual belief about
the completeness of yourself, and has diminishingly little to do with the
other person at all.

Recovery is not "healing," from a "wound," rather, it is resetting your
perspective and accepting who you are as self-originating - and not as
reflected by another.

Too often, Pascal's maxim "to understand all is to forgive all," is advice
given without the necessary condition that you must apply it to yourself first
- otherwise it's just a recipe for obsessive thoughts. I would say to someone
suffering from a broken heart, whatever it might entail, start with the desire
to forgive yourself and whatever happens next, the journey alone is probably
going to be worth it.

~~~
s-shellfish
This is very good advice. However, healing will always take time and
experience.

~~~
pcmaffey
My rough estimate is half the time of the relationship. Of course healing is
its own journey of ups and downs...

~~~
delecti
In my experience, length of the relationship doesn't really correlate with
length of recovery.

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
Agreed. I’ve had two serious relationships before my current engagement. Both
lasted around two years.

After the first one ended, I bounced back fairly quickly because I was so
focused on losing weight and studying investing that I adapted to a new sense
of self and wasn’t bothered by the breakup anymore.

The second breakup resulted in a lot of unproductive wallowing in self-pity.
Would not recommend.

Anybody going through a breakup needs to find a self improvement project,
pronto. Go exercise, or learn to play a musical instrument, or sign up for
dancing classes, or head over to Adafruit/SparkFun and see what all that Maker
hubbub is all about.

As soon as you see yourself in a different light, you will have already moved
on.

------
wwweston
> We might accept, on an intellectual level, that by focusing on our ex’s
> faults we’re doing something important but it can still feel wrong
> (unpleasant), unbalanced, unfair, and even disloyal.

Of course it "can" feel unbalanced because it _is_.

The author's suggestion that recognizing in a heartbreak state we already have
an imbalanced focus kindof mitigates the problem... but I can't help suspect
there's more to it. People who are in a relationship and don't choose to end
it usually are there because they understand at some level the tradeoffs
between the imperfection of the relationship (or any relationship) and the
great parts of it, and it's a net positive. So, unless you were thinking of
ending it yourself, when it ends, it's a net loss, and trying to talk yourself
out of that is, fundamentally, a trick.

If you've practiced trying to be internally honest when it comes to
relationships, part of your brain is going to know you're playing sour grapes
and that seems likely to undermine the effort.

And if you haven't trained yourself to watch for when/how focusing on someone
else's faults is something you might not do honestly, good luck with conflict
in a relationship. :/

~~~
scotty79
> ... part of your brain is going to know you're playing sour grapes and that
> seems likely to undermine the effort.

It totally doesn't. I've been there. Even though you conciously know that
negativity toward your ex is somewhat fake it still helps you fix your brain.

Romantic love is nothing else than addction to a person. You don't expect as a
recovering addict to stay "on speaking terms" with cocaine nor remembering it
fondly will help you to recover better because that's the honest way and keeps
your integrity.

You should remember as much bad as possible and see bad in things you thought
were good. Also you should talk about your tragic falling out, with anonymous
strangers, eventually you'll get bored with your own story and move on.

------
mrxd
The long term implications of "expediting" recovery in this way are troubling
to me.

It's natural to feel grief when you lose something in your life that was
important, valuable and made you happy. You could shortcut that process by
convincing yourself it didn't really make you happy, but that is really
nothing more than a form of escapism. The pain of loss is one of the most
important signals that something impacted your happiness in an enduring way,
and that's necessary for making the right decisions in the future.

~~~
shawn
The sooner we get rid of the emotion, the better, probably. It’s a bit like
arguing that chronic back pain is healthy just because it’s natural.

It’s interesting to consider that technology might be able to solve this. How
long till an anti love pill hits the market with few side effects?

~~~
mrxd
> The sooner we get rid of the emotion, the better, probably.

Let's look at how this plays out in the real world. Someone gets dumped
because they were a terrible partner. We hope that the pain of loss motivates
them to do better in their next relationship. They briefly feel bad, but start
using the technique of "negative reappraisal" (the more common term is
"blaming the other person"). This rapidly decreases their distress in the
short term, but it also makes them avoid looking at their behavior and making
changes, so they make the same mistakes in their next relationship, and the
cycle repeats.

~~~
buxtehude
Perhaps both of you are right in your own way.

It is important and valuable to take time to reflect on how your behavior may
have led to the negative outcome and think about how you could better yourself
for the future - but take care not to be too self critical!

Many people spend too much time in self pity and sadness over this kind of
loss (I'm certainly guilty of this). Once you've done the necessary self-
reflection - please start to move on. Hanging on to idealized memories of "we"
takes you down a road of pain and not towards the future. Let it go. If
"negative reappraisal" helps you let go - when you are ready - so much the
better.

Life is short, and your best "dating years" are an even shorter span of time -
use them wisely - find someone worthy of you and enjoy your time together.

------
drblast
Maybe our entire model for romantic relationships is flawed if when they end
the most helpful thing to do demonize the ex in our head.

I get the sense that people are more attached to the fantasy of a perfect
relationship than they are to the imperfect person they're with who doesn't
fit that mold.

~~~
curiousgal
> _I get the sense that people are more attached to the fantasy of a perfect
> relationship than they are to the imperfect person they 're with who doesn't
> fit that mold._

Absolutely, but expecting your partner not to cheat on you is not asking for
perfection hence the legitimacy of demonizing them.

~~~
w9485ujoik
... so... I'm a professor of clinical psychology.

One of the most troubling things to me about modern therapy is an implicit
general paradigm of "whatever works to make a client feel better is good."

Introducing morality into therapy is also a very dangerous thing, so I don't
want to quite advocate that either, but sometimes I feel like therapy in the
US adopts this implicit competitive-individualist worldview that makes me
uncomfortable.

This article evoked similar feelings in me, that I almost never feel
comfortable with a client demonizing an ex, regardless of how bad the
relationship was. Even when a relationship is abusive and a client definitely
needs to get out, I try to frame it in terms of safety or self-love or
something like that.

There's many reasons for this. Often even in bad relationships a client bears
some responsibility, and I feel like encouraging demonizing kind of ends up
avoiding their own problematic patterns of behavior. Also, I think demonizing
implicitly assumes this flawed view of people as static and unchanging, which
can be problematic itself later. Finally, I think that dwelling on negative
feelings is probably unhelpful in the long run, and sometimes can cause people
to deny very real positive feelings, or genuine benefits they received.

This study--or at least the article is framed very much in terms of "how do I
get over this person." Framed that way, you get one answer. But really in the
long term, that's not the most important question with regard to a person's
mental wellness or health. It's relatively easy to just "get over someone."
It's much harder to come up with an understanding of a relationship that is
truly healthy, in a way that improves yourself and your future relationships.
I worry that modern therapy is too focused on pragmatic, short-term goals
without an awareness of the implicit paradigm that it's operating in.

In the longer term, I'm waiting for empirically-supported therapeutic
techniques coming from other cultural milieus that will challenge some of
these implicit value assumptions.

~~~
scotty79
> I'm a professor of clinical psychology. > ... > I almost never feel
> comfortable with a client demonizing an ex, regardless of how bad the
> relationship was.

That's very sad to hear because that's what actually works. You seem to
approach this as if you were responsible for some long term balance of humans
and their relationships in general and also carefully accounting who was at
fault and how much to use it as motivational tool.

I have personal expeirience of successfully "getting over someone". I got rid
of seven years of pretty much unconditional (but mostly unrequited) love in
roughly six months.

For me love felt just like an addiction but not to a specific substance but to
a specific person. Person you are addicted to is burnt into your neurons. All
roads (thoughts) lead to Rome (her). You need to cut those and the best way to
do that, I found, was to whenever I noticed I'm thinkig of her, curse her with
as much negativity as I could muster, conciously knowing that it was nearly
completely undeserved and dishonest. Still it helped me to teach my brain that
drifting towards her is a path of thought that ends quickly and unpleasantly.
This negativity was completely safe because of the first rule I imposed on
myself. Strictly no contact. I kept it for many years till a brief random
encounter on the street in company of our respective partners that ended with
polite exchange of typical platitudes. I don't hate her and I'd even help her
if the problem was serious enough, so negativity didn't leave lasting impact.

I get that you are interested in improving you patient's long term outlook
same way as addiction therapist wants to improve life of their patients. But
you need to get them roughly clean first.

I hope you try the negativity with some of your patients. It won't make your
clients feel good but it will help speed up recovery to a point where they
might be receptive to introspection of their approach to relationships.

Another thing that helped me was talking to anonymous people on internet chat
and telling them negative parts of my story over and over till I got bored
with my story.

I also blindly dated few people until I got bored with that too.

Then I, alone with myself, felt finally happy, first time in many years.

Then I felt ready and met another girl and I built with her much healthier
relationship. I learned with her a lot.

... and now she's in prolonged process of dying because of brain cancer ... so
I guess don't stress so much about you clients long term well being because
life will give them whatever despite your best efforts. And when in doubt,
always go with science.

------
tunesmith
This article felt all kinds of icky to me. If they truly only focused on those
three conditions, only the first condition was in the category of putting
distance between yourself and your ex. The other two were just "coming to
terms with it" and "distracting onself", respectively.

But using negative reappraisals is just one way to put conceptual distance
between yourself and your ex. They might have just been testing the efficacy
of creating conceptual distance, not the efficacy of "negative reappraisals"
itself. Another way to create conceptual distance is to evolve and change your
self, until you realize that the relationship might have been fine for your
past self but isn't right for who you have become. And that again is hard and
uncomfortable and takes work and time, but at least it isn't demonizing
someone else.

------
InclinedPlane
All of this seems wrong to me. It's ok to feel feelings, not just ups but also
downs. How we bear and cope with losses and "negative" emotions is an
important and defining part of the human experience. Imagine a world where the
only movies, tv shows, and books allowed were comedies, it would be a much
less interesting and much less substantive world. Adopting a "sour grapes"
attitude toward the loss of a romantic relationship is not mature, and it is
certainly not a healthy coping strategy.

I have to wonder about any advice for dealing with a relationship loss that
would be drastically different depending on who initiated a breakup or
depending on whether or not the loss occurred due to a death. Nobody would
advise dealing with the death of a loved one by regularly thinking about all
of the ways that the deceased was shitty and thus one's life was actually
better without them around, would they?

As I said, it's ok to feel feelings. What is important here is having feelings
that are grounded in reality, having feelings that are part of your life
rather than subsuming and taking over your life, and avoiding "negative"
feelings pushing you into a spiral of negative self-talk or excessive
rumination on the past or on fictional time lines.

People break up, it's a thing that happens. It's important to first recognize
that other people can and should have agency over their own lives which is
independent from you. It's also important to recognize your own self-worth,
your ability to continue living, to have other relationships and to live a
rewarding life even when single. It's fine to experience and be brought low by
loss, even if it's "just" the ending of a relationship, you don't have to
vilify your ex to be able to get beyond that loss. With healthy coping
strategies you can integrate that loss into your life, having it be a part of
who you are without defining and controlling you.

------
vonnik
My best LPT: remove every object (and block every site) that reminds you of
the relationship.

The author is trying to achieve an outcome in a patient, not enforce the
adherence to some objective truth like "my ex is all right" or "I really did
love them and now I don't".

He's trying to find ways to get someone to end a pathological obsession. If a
little demonization helps a person get their mind back on track, so much the
better.

~~~
scarecrowbob
Well, that kind of removal was a pretty good way to get off Facebook and quit
drinking, but the problem is that after 8 years I ended up with a lot of crap
that I don't want to just toss simply because it resonates with them.

I may have to leave the country, but that move seems less functional to do
that then to just put up with being sad for a couple of years.

------
simion314
After thinking more on this I think that something is missing, the article
suggest to make a list with bad things about your partner but this will not
help if you are analyzing yourself, trying to find your own mistakes and
improving yourself. Putting all the blame on the other may not be the correct
thing in some cases.

~~~
doughj3
I think it's less about blame and more about objective recognition that the
relationship and/or person was not as perfect as we'd like to think when we're
going through heartbreak. There's a quote from Bojack Horseman, "When you look
at someone through rose colored glasses, all the red flags just look like
flags." I think this suggestion is more about being honest about the negatives
that one looked past, even if one was content with the tradeoff.

~~~
simion314
Yes, I understand that but it seems incomplete, is correct thing to do but it
may not be the only thing to do IMO.

But I agree that the point discussed is an important/significant one.

------
Jeff_Brown
This seems likely to apply to extreme non-romantic disappointments too.

~~~
autoexec
We really need a word for non-romantic breakups because losing a very close
friend can be just as hurtful, but it seems odd to say you "broke up" and
nothing else ("falling out"?) really expresses the severity of the loss.

~~~
Jeff_Brown
You could say "heartbroken at the loss of a friend".

------
circlefavshape
Wow. I've only ever had one significant romantic relationship - still together
after nearly 30 years. Just as we were coming to the end of our 30s we had an
unexpected blooming of the emotional and sexual intensity of our relationship
that went on for years. When it eventually fizzled out (the intensity, not the
relationship itself) I was heartbroken, and 3 years later I still kinda am,
and still find it really hard to accept

I do best when I manage not to think about it at all, but perhaps rewriting
the story of that golden age in my head (obvs without demonising my wife) is
what will actually work for me

------
zamalek
I've got a somewhat different method, which can very loosely be described as
acceptance, taking responsibility and growth. There are a few parts to a
breakup:

Withdrawal Symptoms

When you first start to have romantic feelings for someone and have those
butterflies in your stomach, you are high as fuck on some pretty great
chemicals. Just like any addiction, your body builds a resistance to the
dosage and forms a dependency. There is nothing you can do about this, except
to wait for it to pass (which it will).

Loss of Control

You are thrust into a position where you have no control over the situation
and, seemingly, your emotions. You have no control over the situation, accept
that. Accept that the other person has decided on a different direction. Don't
accept that you are not in control of your emotions. Dealing with heartbreak
is categorically a personal enterprise - your opinions on what the other
person did or didn't do will do nothing for your own emotional state.
Heartbreak is just like hatred: it affects nobody except for the person
experiencing that emotion. Gaining control over your emotional state first
requires accepting it and the futility of thinking that you can control any
external factor that is causing it.

Unacknowledged Guilt

Also known as "closure." This is, one again, a completely internal process and
no amount of discussions with your ex will help push it forward. For any
normally functioning relationship (read: non-abusive), it takes two to tango.
I can't speak to Melissa's (from the article) experience, as I don't have all
the details, so I'll share one of my experiences:

It started with an ultimatum, "me or smoking." I honestly tried to quit, but
couldn't manage without her support - she wanted nothing to do with it. I had
to lie while I failed to deliver on that promise. After two and a half years,
of lies, I finally managed to quit and - still partially in withdrawals - I
told her that I had made good on the promise. It turned into a pretty horrible
fight and she ended it. I [correctly] concluded that ultimatums have no place
in relationships, but [incorrectly] concluded that was the end of it. My
family and friends were all to happy to feed this delusion, assuming it was
helping. It was only when I started correcting them, explaining that I had
lied to her for two years that the heartbreak started dissolving. I had to
acknowledge my guilt, which curiously gave me back control over the situation:
it was no longer something someone else did putting me through those emotions
- it was me. Those "what if" scenarios that ran through my head all collapsed
into one: "what if I hadn't lied." I might have lost her at the onset, but
then I wouldn't have had heartbreak. She might have decided to support me if I
asked for help, and I might have quit far sooner. I now have a plan to make
sure that I won't face that scenario ever again.

Commit to Grow

Act on what you have discovered about yourself and others. My first lesson was
to reject ultimatums, but also to be honest - no matter what the consequences
might be for me. There's a millions of tiny things that happen in failed
relationships and each of them are an opportunity to grow. You never walk away
empty-handed.

~~~
scotty79
You can speed up withdrawal with negativity. Then you don't need all other
stuff. You just forget the person, except perhaps as unpleasent expeirience
from the past, and can go on to growing unburdened.

Don't worry. You'll not forget lessons learned or the facts just rid yourself
of inappropriate feelings.

------
alimw
The article completely ignores the hugely damaging effect this aggressive
approach can have (and, I can attest, does have) on the other party.

------
theaeolist
The fox who longed for grapes, beholds with pain

The tempting clusters were too high to gain;

Grieved in his heart he forced a careless smile,

And cried, ‘They’re sharp and hardly worth my while.’

------
User23
Love. Love never changes.
[https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/CuresforLove...](https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/CuresforLove.php)

------
dwnwudp
>If you are trying to get over heartbreak, make a list of the person’s faults
as well as of the shortcomings of the actual relationship and to keep that
list on their phone.

Sounds like the author is advocating for some illicit activity here.

~~~
learc83
Their is a typo. It should be your.

The next sentence is "Whenever you find yourself having idealized thoughts and
memoires, whip out your phone and read a few reminders in order to balance
your perceptions and remind yourself that your ex was not perfect and neither
was the relationship."

------
johnchristopher
I have seen some breakups. At some point or another one of the participants
dehumanizes the previous partner. It's scary, it's like the propaganda bullet
point that is part of the list used to qualify a genocide.

I never did that ; heartbreaks are really damaging to me.

Anecdata, of course.

~~~
r00fus
If dehumanization helps to distance and align with reality, then that's
what'll happen.

It could be the catalyst that helps push some folks past the threshold
function that would otherwise keep them in the past.

------
pmichaud
I have issues with this model. I have no doubt that the strategy "works," but
I think it lacks a coherent model of why it works. So the recommended
strategies are unnecessarily rough or negative, in my view. One thing I agree
with in the article is that a heartbroken person is experiencing grief.

Grief is a state that about replanning, essentially. We all have a very
nuanced and complicated set of subconscious plans to get all the things that
are important to us. Everything from basic survival to social status, we have
a model of how to consistently get in our lives. Friends, family, work,
personal habits, all of these things interweave to create a complete system
for our lives being okay according to us. Of course this can go wrong--we can
get stuck believing that key things will never be better, and sink into
depression--but I'm talking about psychologically healthy people.

But then sometimes those key factors in your life go away. You lose your job
or your mom dies. Well, woven throughout your psychology maybe you were
relying on your mom being a bedrock source of safety and support, among
uncountable other subtle effects you emotionally anticipated your mom would
have on you life. And then she dies, and all that goes away. You don't have a
ready replacement for practically any of it--the bedrock of support, the
unconditional love you once emotionally leaned on, perhaps. And so you grieve.
You reimagine, from a very deep emotional level, what your life will be like.
And at first it's almost too painful to bear, because at that moment it just
feels like you simply won't have the many gifts from your mom for the rest of
your life, and that is terribly painful.

So you go through a complex process of "figuring out," mostly subconsciously,
how you're going to get that stuff. Social support gives you hope that maybe
you can find support and love in a way that make things ultimately alright.
Funny movies give you hope about feeling happy in the future. Remembering her,
having a personal relationship with a strongly felt sense of her you still
carry with you give you a sense that she may still be a source of wisdom. You
lean more on your other family or friends for the same.

In the happy case, as time goes on, most of everything gets solved, and you
come to feel like you can live and have a good life without her. The rest
stays with you in quiet moments of missing that never fully go away, in my
experience.

So this is the same during a bad breakup. You put a lot of your future hopes
and dreams on the partner you no longer have. And now it feels like all that
is gone forever, and it's devastating. The process is the same though -- you
go about the business of reimagining your life from the ground up, being okay
with living in a world where you and your now-ex aren't together.

~~~
pmichaud
So of course if you get stuck romanticizing them forever, you never quite get
over the feeling that something irrevocably lost. One workable strategy is to
think of them in a bad light, to consciously say to yourself: they weren't
that great, here are all the reasons. And this works. It works because it
prompts your mind to consider other options for how your life might go. But
one pitfall of the strategy is that it doesn't actually require you to think
of better options, it just hints at it. So some people doing the strategy will
successfully convince themselves that their ex sucked, but also have
absolutely no other emotional options for feeling hope about the future.
That's a rough place.

But a different strategy is more like "they WERE great, but also other people
can be great, and they can be great in ways I don't currently know, but I can
be excited to find out."

Most social support after a breakup involves friends telling you everything
will be fine, and you'll find someone better, and anyway the ex was a jerk, so
no big deal. Stuff like that totally plays into a healthy process of grieving
for the life you thought you were going to have, ie. reimagining that life as
a different but equally good or maybe better life.

So yeah, one place to get stuck is failing to let go of the one conception you
have of how your life can be good, that was totally predicated of your
relationship with your ex continuing.

Another way it can go wrong is if you just refuse to process it at all. You
drink yourself into a stupor when it comes up, for example. Sure it blocks the
pain, but it also blocks the process of reimagining. And if that's your main
coping mechanism you're just drawing out the pain longer, maybe permanently
(not to mention the damage many substances do to your body).

So the "real" answer, according to me is that you have to encounter your own
pain in a mindful way, acknowledging what is lost and how much it hurts, while
staying just ahead of it and questioning the strong feelings that say "nothing
can replace this, everything is bad forever." Is it really true? Can you
imagine a way that it might not be true?

And yes, staying connected to your social support system and the other things
in your life that actually are working, instead of just crawling into a hole
of despair and laying down to die.

Grieving is hard, but it's important, and you can't avoid it. Either you face
the pain with courage and intelligence, or you let it eat whatever potential
for goodness was once there. Either way you have to wrestle it.

~~~
throwaway278394
I'm currently experiencing a heartbreak and I want to thank you for your
comment. Very insightful.

~~~
magic_beans
I hope you're ok. It's rough out there with a broken heart :(

------
stealthmodeclan
This is after many broken hearts.

I've read somewhere that some part of the North Europeans have a gene which
prevents bonding, so it's easier for them to walk out of relationship. I am
not able to find it anymore, maybe it's something to do with the Oxytocin
receptors.

So why not create a drug with similar effect for others?

What i am writing below might be sexist but it's from experience. Since, i am
a man i don't know woman's perspective.

I am not bothered much by the loss of a person in relationship, what bothers
me the herculean efforts I put including compromises, blood, sweat and
sacrifices which is now lost.

That Ferrari I bought for you, the sea side bungalow i gifted you. All the
evenings i arranged for you and the vacations which we spent together, all
lost.

A man almost never only brings his body/mind/heart to the relationship, he
brings with him the obsession to labor tirelessly for her comfort - destroying
yourself to get that bonus which will statisfy her seems perfectly rational
then.

The value of those experiences drastically declines for me when I realize the
person has separated from me.

It's not very different than a teenager wanting his favourite couples in the
movie to be in relationship or marriage in a real life.

Once the relationship ends, i realize that person isn't even as beautiful as i
always perceived them. The 7/10 girl looks 10/10 when you love her she gets
back to 7/10 when the realationship ends. I wonder if the love is self
dilllusion.

~~~
faleidel
For me a relationship is a way to have support in your life.

After a break up, all the support a person has given you is still there. The
effect of that person helping you in your life should have lasting inpact on
you. It's a strange way to put it but see it as a tool. When you lose a tool
nothing that was build with it will crumble. The house will stay up even if
the hammer break.

------
schwinn
So the TL;DR is: move on.

------
asimjalis
This strategy replaces heartbreak with bitterness. Not such a great deal.

------
dominotw
its really easy for men. Refocus on a something else, new parter/dates( sex
with new person works the best), new project, new class ect.

------
iamcasen
That article was quite literally just a bunch of common sense. Are those
techniques for coping not widely known? I thought that's what everyone did
after a breakup. ::Shrug::

~~~
abhchand
In my opinion it doesn't hurt to re-state common sense sometimes, particularly
for 2 reasons:

1\. We have so much going on in our head it reminds us that we can simplify it
down to a more basic concept. In layman's terms, "get out of our own heads".

2\. It provides external validation that our approach is correct. Seeing it
stated in Scientific American and knowing that other people such as yourself
also adhere to this "common sense" logic validates my line of thinking.

~~~
tsumnia
To add to this, "unspoken" rules, or common sense, are things you expect
people to know and then get upset when they don't. If being explicit helps
someone, why is that a bad thing?

