At the end of a relationship, we all just want to climb into bed, pull the blankets over our heads, and lie there forever. After all, whether you’ve dumped someone or been dumped, breakups are never that easy.
If you can’t cope with breakups in a healthy way, you might instead turn to food or alcohol to drown your sorrows, or blame yourself for whatever has gone wrong. It’s ok; we’ve all been there.
Luckily, there are some things you can do right now to feel stronger, mend your broken heart, and put the past behind you.
Recognize Your Emotional State
Although it’s normal to want to feel better, you should refrain from stuffing or suppressing your emotions. Recognizing your feelings and enabling yourself to grieve are crucial steps in the healing process. If you’ve been in a long-term relationship, this healing phase is particularly important. And if the relationship was riddled with complications, you may still feel as though a piece of you is incomplete. It’s also critical to give yourself the space and time to weep; crying will bring comfort and make you feel better in the long run. Overall, the key is to break free from this situation, so give yourself a week to process what happened before collecting your thoughts and focusing on moving forward.
Get Rid of Traces of Your Ex
One of the first things you can do following a breakup is clean your space of any signs of your past partners; keeping your ex’s photo on your nightstand or wearing their old sweatshirt makes it difficult to move on and recover from a breakup. That’s why you should spend time cleaning up every trace of them in your house. After all: what’s out of sight is out of mind.
Find Closure
You won’t be able to move on if you break all ties. Every now and then, what is generally known as closure–finding a way to conclude the relationship in a healthy manner–is expected. Meeting for coffee to chat or hanging out as friends, often under the illusion of obtaining closure, is risky. Indeed, it obviously keeps you attached to your ex, but in an unhealthy way.
Instead, you should try your best to come up with alternative solutions to get the closure you need. One option is to write a letter to your ex in which you express anything you couldn’t say in person. Don’t give it to them, but know that the act of writing down your feelings will help you to move on from the relationship.
To sum up, if you caused the break or were completely thrown off balance, you need to put the past behind you and live on. It’s entirely up to you how you go about it. The main thing is that you make a deliberate attempt to grow out of this situation.