What to do to overcome heartbreak?

Some tips on how to cope with the feeling of falling out of love and turn the page.

Disaffection is a type of discomfort that affects or has affected many people, given that the world of falling in love, by frequently leading to very intense feelings about what you feel for someone, can lead to disappointment on numerous occasions.

Here we will see what heartbreak consists of and how to overcome it from the point of view of psychology and emotional well-beingthrough various tips.

What is the disaffection and how does it appear?

The disaffection is the psychological phenomenon characterized by the emotional Pain that appears when you experience the end of a love story in which you were involved.. It is an experience that often goes hand in hand with the breakup and separation, but it is not always the case.

On the one hand, there are not rare cases of people who remain in a relationship for years despite having suffered a heartbreak and not continuing with the other person because of the love they feel for him or her, but for other reasons. In cases like this, although these people know that they are no longer in a loving relationship (at least, not one in which their feelings are reciprocated), they continue to move forward making their lack of love coexist with the presence of the other person in their daily life.

On the other hand, it must be taken into account that it is technically possible to suffer from heartbreak despite not having initiated a love relationship. This is what happens, for example, when someone is rejected by the person he or she has fallen in love with.

And the fact is that the important thing about falling out of love is not so much that the love story that we see drifting away from us has become real beyond our imagination.We have become accustomed to taking it for granted, to integrating it into our daily lives, even without the active participation of the person we love. In fact, it is common that after a "crush" people spend a lot of time fantasizing about what their life together with the person who has captivated them will be like, which leads to illusion and to not conceive other plans for the future without that special someone.

Thus, in many cases, falling out of love is an experience similar to the psychological grief that occurs when a loved one dies. However, unlike the case of those who miss someone who has already died, in the case of heartbreak many contradictory feelings often arise, since the fact of seeing how the person we have fallen in love with moves away from us can arouse resentment.

Thus, at least two mechanisms of discomfort usually appear in the lack of love: missing the person, on the one hand, and experiencing doubts about what we should feel for him or her, on the other, as we shall see.as we shall see.

The differential fact: affective ambivalence.

As we have seen, part of what makes falling out of love a painful experience is the feeling of loss, the idea that everyday life has lost one of its most important aspects, which is the company of the person we have come to love. But something that also causes discomfort is the indecision about how to relate to what we have left: the memories of that person..

The fact is that falling out of love forces us to make a decision about whether to continue perceiving that person and our relationship in the same way we did before the heartbreak, or whether to rethink our position on what we have been doing up to that moment: what relationship did we aspire to? Have we been reasonable in setting our expectations? Has the relationship been genuine, or a mirage that only took place in our head? Is the other person as valuable and special as we thought?

These and many other questions give cause to reconsider both the reconsider both the person we fell in love with and the way in which he or she has come into our lives.In many occasions this uncomfortable process leads to a very critical attitude about what happened, from which reproaches arise towards one or both parties.

What to do?

Here are some tips on how to overcome heartbreak and turn the page in the best possible way.

1. Don't base everything on demonizing the other person.

If you concentrate all your frustrations and all your sadness projecting those feelings on the one who awakened love in you, making him/her responsible for everything that happened, you will only be hiding your pain, you will only be sweeping your pain under the rug.You will learn to attach a lot of importance to that person: you will learn to fear that she will appear again in your life and, in a matter of minutes or seconds, make you feel bad again by doing something that does not fit with the artificial and Manichean vision you have created of her.

In addition, it will also awaken in you an unhealthy competitiveness, which will lead you to try to "be better than her" to prove that you have matured more, which is contradictory.

2. Learn to tolerate your shortcomings by looking back.

When looking back on past situations it is very easy to detect faults and blunders in one's own behavior, among which we would perhaps include not having detected signs that we were generating overly optimistic expectations about the relationship we were going to have with the other person.

It is important to to stop and analyze to what extent it is constructive and useful to wallow in self-criticism for the sake of self-criticism.instead of assuming that no one can know everything at all times and focusing on drawing a lesson. Which brings us to the next tip.

3. Focus on learning

Okay, so you've had a heartbreak experience, but what did you learn from it? Emotions are a very powerful way to fix memories, and that's why, in the first place, emotions are a very powerful way to fix memories.And that's why, if you manage to come to an accurate conclusion about what happened, the experience will allow you to mature more emotionally quite quickly, since you will always have that lesson at hand.

However, avoid a very pessimistic bias or it will close more doors than it will open. Consider how this experience can help you to be happier.

4. Focus on your well-being, not on feeding narratives.

If the falling out of love has arisen in part because we have been subjected to an overly idealized narrative about what that relationship was or was going to be, it is important not to fall into such a trap again but of the opposite sign: a totally pessimistic and disenchanted perspective, practically marked by cynicism, about human relationships.

In the end, these perspectives that tend to simplify reality (either towards optimism or pessimism) only work for themselves, leading us to interpret everything that happens to us in a way that validates that way of seeing things.

We do not want to be slaves of such a flat and totalizing philosophy of life, but to obtain a way of perceiving things in a different way.Rather, we want to obtain a way of perceiving things that has the necessary nuances to give us room for maneuver and autonomy, assuming that we cannot always be right or know everything that is going on in us and in our relationships.

5. If you do not make progress, go to psychological therapy.

Psychotherapy is the most effective way to overcome emotional problems of this type, and offers personalized professional help adapted to each case.

Are you looking for professional help?

If you are interested in psychotherapy to overcome emotional or behavioral problems that are affecting you negatively, please contact us. At Avance Psychologists we have a complete team of psychologists and 20 years of experience attending patients. You can find us in our center located in Madrid, as well as in our online therapy sessions by video call. On this page are our contact details.

Bibliographic references:

• Lopez-Cantero, E. (2018). The Break-Up Check: Exploring Romantic Love through Relationship Terminations. Philosophia (Ramat Gan), 46(3): pp. 689 - 703.
• Sharpsteen, D.J.; Kirkpatrick, L.A. (1997). Romantic jealousy and adult romantic attachment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 72(3): pp. 627 - 640.
• Verhallen, A.M. et. al. (2019). Romantic relationship breakup: An experimental model to study effects of stress on depression (-like) symptoms. PLoS One, 14(5): e0217320.
• Weiss, R.S. (1998). Separation and other problems that threaten relationships. The BMJ, 316(7136): pp. 1011 - 1013.