How to Survive a Breakup

By Bikash Paul

Going through a breakup is low-key the best time to rebrand yourself. You can be whoever you want to be, do whatever you want to do, and try anything you want to try without having to consider anyone but yourself.

 

But considering breakups = losing someone who was consistently in your life, it can be easy to dwell on the past instead of looking at what your future self can bring to the table. Completely understandable.

 

So to help you cope with all things breakup (since, hi, your future best self is waiting), we've sourced a bunch of tangible, practical ways you can actually get over someone according to experts who want to help. Because yes, sometimes buying yourself flowers at the grocery store is a lil start.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bikash Paul
• Release date: Sep 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215405895

Bikash Paul

Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and the only thing you have to offer. Bikash Paul from India is a content writer and digital marketer, also working with My Recharge Ayurveda for several years. I helped people solve their problems. My education qualification is MBA in marketing and an HR minor. Writing books is another profession.

Book preview

The Living Book

One day, journalists came to visit an old woman who was one hundred years old. It was in Ukraine. A tiny old woman who already has great-great-grandchildren, who survived the war, famine and all the consequences of the collapse of the USSR. Journalists asked what she remembered most of all in these hundred years, full of events. The old woman burst into tears and replied: Koli vid mene pishov cholovik. You know, that's the best! (When my husband left me. You know what a pain it is!) But her husband left her with the children 60 years ago!

Parting with a loved one is one of the most difficult situations in our lives. And suffering condemns us to loneliness. And we can suffer, as the example of this grandmother shows, indefinitely. Do not hope that the pain will pass by itself or time will cure it. Our healing is in our hands. Who will help us?

Unlike bodily illness, you can not put yourself in the hands of doctors who will make an accurate diagnosis and prescribe pills and injections. The bulk of the work here will have to be done by yourself. And it's about something invisible. And the pain is stronger than the physical...

A typical problem of a person experiencing a breakup is that he does not manage to look at the situation objectively, soberly. He is tormented not so much by the inability to be together with a loved one, as by various obsessions. For example:

- this is my only half, I will not be able to love anyone else SO much;

– no one will love me anymore, no one needs me (does not need me);

– I will not be able to live alone (alone);

– I am to blame for everything and will destroy any future relationship;

- It's all his (her's) fault, I'm an innocent victim and I can't do anything;

– my life will now be meaningless.

Recovery begins with overcoming these false ideas. When a person, as a result of working on himself, acquires or regains a sober view of things, the next task is to learn from the situation so that it does not happen again in the future. Having correctly survived this ordeal, we can get to know ourselves better, grow up, get rid of love addiction, in general, become a person, much more than before, ready for love and family life.

The place that hurts is useless to look for in the physical body. So there is a soul, there is love? Often it is in the situation of parting that a person first thinks about his soul.

To help you understand yourself and overcome the crisis of separation, we turn to knowledge from two areas – psychology and Orthodox Christianity.

In psychology, there are many different schools and movements. Although the name of this science includes the word psyche - soul, some of the currents of psychology do not understand the human soul and often do not even believe in its existence. Therefore, we cannot do without the science of the soul, which is contained in Orthodox Christianity. This science, we can call it Orthodox psychology, has knowledge about the laws in the life of the soul. She knows what makes love grow, what makes her fade away. It explains the causes of external events, which are lessons for the soul.

Therefore, in our book, the most important questions regarding the collapse of love relationships are answered by both psychologists and priests. Moreover, among the priests whom we invited to participate in the project, some have a psychological education or a certain erudition in the field of psychology.

This book is unusual. On the Internet, there is such a term - livejournal. And in front of you is a living book. The conversations of priests and psychologists offered to your attention were posted on the Internet, on the site Survive.ru (perejit.ru) specially created for this purpose. This is the largest and most successful project about parting with a loved one, about experiencing infidelity or divorce. Over the years of the project's existence, thousands of grateful responses have come from people to whom these conversations helped to survive the circumstances of the separation. And thousands of stories, the authors of which, in turn, received feedback on our site from those who have also experienced or are experiencing similar circumstances.

What happened to you is not a unique event. Parting with loved ones becomes the experience of almost every person, and for sure there are cases much harder than yours. You can read some stories in this book.

Based on the experience of working with hundreds of thousands of people experiencing a breakup on the site Survive. ru, I can say that this book will certainly help you. If you work on yourself as described in this book, you will be surprised how quickly and with what benefit you will be able to survive what happened.

* * *

I express my warm gratitude to all the authors of the conversations, priests and psychologists, as well as those who responded and respond to the stories of the sufferers on the site Survive. ru, for responsiveness, for sincerity, for your kind word, healing souls. I thank Olga Telnova, Olga Pokalyukhina, Maria Levina, Igor Galyagin and everyone else who helped in the work on the texts.

Special thanks to the programmer of the site Ivan Belykh.

Compiler.

Why does love go away?

It is said that true love is not just a feeling. It's a state that never stops. It is said that a person dies, passes into another world, and even then his love does not die, but remains with him.

Why is it that in reality we see feelings cool down, and the person who thought he loved begins to doubt his feelings or even becomes sure that the love is gone?

Was there love? psychologist Irina Karpenko

Probably, many people in life were touched by such a disaster. Someone experienced it in his youth, someone in adulthood, but everyone who was touched by it still feels, remembering it, pain, a pinching feeling of loneliness, maybe longing for lost love and once a loved one. Someone experiences resentment, not understanding why it happened to him, for which he was hurt so much by another person.

When we remember our love, then every happy and unhappy person in it likes most of all, probably, the beginning of love. The purest moments when we first looked into each other's eyes, the first dates, the amazing moments of revealing one person to another. Minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and some years of trust, this amazing intimacy, when we consider a person the most extraordinary, the most irresistible.

And suddenly this amazing feeling disappears. On the one hand, or both, in place of trust, almost deification of the other, comes, to put it mildly, a very sober look at the one whom we considered our soul mate. First comes the understanding of the characteristics, shortcomings, dependencies, weaknesses, expected reactions of a person. And then suddenly , once, and there is a very distinct consciousness that this person is not just the same as everyone else - ordinary, and maybe in some ways he has great flaws.

And now, imperceptibly for us, our blinding or deification of the other passes, and a rational negative perception of the other remains. We stop seeing another person, he is for us either something incomprehensible, unpredictable, or something with a minus sign. We lock ourselves in our resentment lockers, and the seeming love goes nowhere. At this point, the other person suddenly discovers that he is no longer so comfortable in the field of our relationship.

I often encounter complaints from women that are very similar to each other. In these complaints, the motive is usually heard that the beloved man is not at all what he seemed, he completely did not live up to expectations. The wife waits for him to bring her roses or bread from the store, and he comes sick and drunk.

If initially there was an acceptance of the other, simply because he is, he is with you, then suddenly a different phase of the relationship suddenly begins. We begin to perceive the other person based on what he does for us, how he meets our expectations and requirements. This is the threshold beyond which love is no longer there.

As someone who has also experienced a similar thing, now, at the age of 48, I want to ask myself the question – what do we mean by the word love? What exactly is leaving? I am reminded of the beautiful words of Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh and Paisius Svyatogorets about genuine love. And when we compare their definitions to our love, we are often surprised to find that what we call love is more like blindness. There is usually no genuine love in us, as a willingness to accept the other as a whole, to work to understand and forgive him, to work to change him and ourselves.

We would like love to be only joy, emotions, only a gift. But I look around, and I see very few happy families among my friends. And all happy couples who have been living together for more than one year, who appreciate, love, understand and accept the other half, almost all have experienced crises, but these people work every day. That is why their love is real.

So when I go back to the question of why love goes away, I say, I don't believe that love can go away if it's love.

It's something else going away, and you have to think about what's going on with you? How to love yourself? And how do you learn to love another?

Was there love? Archpriest Igor Gagarin

Was she even the kind of love that was gone? That is, was love the feeling that we took for love? Remember where our first encounter with Shakespeare's Romeo begins? We see an unhappy young man who grieves for unrequited love for a girl. But the girl Romeo is so murdered about is not Juliet. With Juliet, the meeting is ahead.

Not having met in his life with genuine love, a person is sometimes inclined to take for it any sympathy, any attraction. After all, we really want to love and be loved, sometimes we want it so badly that we are ready to convince ourselves that this has already happened. There would be no hurry, but give yourself time to figure it out, but youth is almost always inclined to hurry.

I have repeatedly had to listen to the complaints of one of the young spouses that it is unbearably difficult for him (her) to live with his spouse, because I do not love him at all. But they loved it before! – No, I never did! – But you said it very differently before the wedding, I remember! – I thought I loved, and now I understand that I did not love even then... It would be better, of course, to understand this earlier than to make marital vows.

When two young people meet, each seeks to create the best impression of himself, to open up to the other with his most beautiful side. When I meet a person I like, I don't see all of him, but only a part, and the one that he himself wants to show me. The missing finishes my imagination. It is clear that this drawing may not even coincide with the actual portrait. And then people take that step, more responsible and more important than anything in the world – they become husband and wife. Husband and wife will no longer be able to pretend. Quite quickly, they will see the real face of their chosen one. That's when the serious test of love comes. I fell in love with one, married one, and the person turned out to be completely different...

The closer we communicate with a person, the deeper we penetrate into him, and here discovery follows discovery. Sometimes something can open up that can completely alienate from me someone for whom I have recently been more precious than anyone else.

Of course, these examples do not exhaust the question. It's probably impossible to exhaust it, there are so many reasons why I was loved and became unloved...

Once we've fallen in love with someone, we can't fall out of love. Priest Andrew Lorgus

If a person has left you, it is not a fact that he fell out of love with you. There is a change in relationships, not a change in a person's heart. It is possible that love remained in the heart.

Moreover, I am deeply convinced that a person can never fall out of love, it is not given to the human heart.

The feeling of this love is changing. Relationships between people are changing. But thank God they are changing. Because the development of the human personality, its spiritual path implies a change in relationships. From children we become adults, from adults – old people. That is, everything goes its own way, this is normal.

But the fact that love disappears from the heart, I do not really believe in this. I think that once we fall in love with someone, we can no longer fall out of love.

They say that you can love only once in a lifetime. It's not that. The heart holds many loves. But in the highest sense, love is one. This is the divine quality of the human personality that can manifest itself to several people. It can be a mother, father, spouse, spouse, children. Love has no limit.

When you say, A loved one is gone, he didn't leave his love, he left you. So, something in your relationship was more painful for him than the experience of a breakup. It's a matter of relationships, not love. It's possible that there was something in your relationship that scared him, or repelled him. Something he couldn't accept.

For example, it could be a feeling that you deprive him of freedom, subdue him, you, if not humiliate him, then at least somehow conquer him, make him live in your way. Often women, girls have a fear that the chosen one will subordinate her to himself and thereby damage her individuality. She has a fear that her personality will be trampled on, pushed to the background. Not every woman is ready to dissolve in the personality of a man, to become his reflection. There's no need for that.

The second option is that the girl may be afraid of something in herself. The fact that suddenly something unusual, terrible for herself will wake up in her. Often a woman has a fear of becoming happy if her mother was unhappy in marriage. Such a woman sometimes forbids herself to be happy and leaves the one who can help her find this happiness.

The third option is that the woman could leave because she was afraid that she would have to be an older sister, a nanny, a mother for her husband. Perhaps she wanted to find in you a patron, a strong man, but she saw a boy who needs to be watched, who needs to be helped. It may be the other way around: a woman saw in you not a father whom she was looking for intuitively, as often women look for in a man, but a mature man who requires her to be a woman. And she may not have realized that being a woman is so much more joyful than being a teenager.

All possible options are difficult to list, because each person is unique. Be that as it may, there is a creative beginning in what happened. Maybe for you this is the way to yourself, to discover the authentic self. Maybe this suffering will lead a man to discover some of his amazing talent. Maybe they will lead him to God. Or maybe for the woman who left you, it was false love (i.e., pity, romantic infatuation, compassion). Or for you, it was romantic reverie rather than genuine love. Or maybe it was all true. You yourself have to discover the meaning of what happened...

The ability to cherish love is laid in childhood. Psychologist Irina Moshkova

Most likely, love goes away because we are completely unprepared for its arrival. We grow up in families in which parents do not tell their children anything about the essence of love, they do not know how to express their parental love for children in such a way that children feel happy from the fact that they are loved. Often children observe in their families anti-love - enmity, hatred and the desire to insist at all costs on their own and take revenge on their offender. At the same time, the spiritual basis of true love is undermined, because, according to the Gospel, Love is always sacrificial, it is not exalted, not proud, does not rage, does not seek its own, does not get irritated, does not think evil (1 Cor. 13:4-5).

All parents who seek help from a child psychologist say that they, of course, love their children and do everything necessary for them, but the question is what is meant. Upon closer inspection, it turns out that they love not as Christ commanded, but as they can, realizing the position of parental egoism, and they care primarily not about the soul of the child, but about how to feed, drink, sleep and put to bed and check lessons. Is it any wonder that infantile children-consumers grow up in families, having infringed self-love, an inferiority complex and a suppressed spiritual dignity of a person. Going into an independent life, young men and women who have such a flawed self-consciousness seek to build their personal lives on the basis of a thirst for self-affirmation, pride and vanity.

The lack of positive experience of genuine love deprives them of the opportunity to enter a new life and achieve positive results. Unloved in childhood by their own parents, young people dream of finding such love in which they will receive affection, care, attention and material well-being from their beloved. While true love is always looking for opportunities to give, to devote to a loved one both yourself and your life. The error in attitudes and expectations regarding their future family life among young people is so great that in fact already at the wedding it is possible to predict the upcoming divorce.

The fact is that, after acquaintance, at the first stage of the relationship, young people experience a natural pull towards each other. There is a love that fascinates, literally bewitches a young man and a girl. Literally everything: appearance, thoughts, words and deeds , seems interesting and beautiful. All the best spiritual qualities are indicated and manifested in communication of mutual value. At this time, it is easy and free to breathe, I want to believe everything and it is so easy to make mutual promises. It seems that this fairy tale will last a lifetime... But no! After a short period of 2-3 months, as soon as the real life together begins with its inevitable troubles and worries in specific circumstances, the idyll stops. To the surface comes all the worst, the basest, the most secret, stored in the cellars of the unconscious, which were filled in early childhood. Quarrels and conflicts begin. Quarreling, each of the young spouses expects that the other will spare him, pity and meet him halfway, yield and understand, but this does not happen, since two self-loving people will never agree.

The more often these clashes occur, the faster our love goes away. Unfortunately, we are completely unprepared to accept this wonderful Gift of God. We do not understand or appreciate the generous divine gifts that are given to us in advance, in the expectation that we will someday grow up to understand their essence.

It must be remembered that true love must still be lived, All our lives we need to learn such love, overcoming our egoism and performing selfless service to each other.

Everything god allows to happen to us has a purpose. Abbot Eumenius (Pinnate)

We all have such a different understanding of what love is. For me, love, as far as it can be defined in simple words, is a state when you shine a light on a person and are simply grateful to him for accepting your light, your care for it.

Very often, many of us can't tell the difference between love and addiction – a painful, passionate dependence on another person. In a sense, addiction is Koshcheeva's disease. Koschei the Immortal is a character of Russian folk tales – such a creature, whose life force is not inside him, but elsewhere. Because of this, Koschei's life is constantly under threat. The state of dependence is characterized by this: the meaning of our life is in another person. Falling into a relationship of dependence, we, taking a step towards another person, lose the point of support in ourselves.

Addiction is a trap, it's an ecstatic, painful condition. If a marriage is performed out of addiction, it is usually short-lived. Spouses tyrannize and torture each other, making impossible demands on each other. Sooner or later, one of them runs out of patience, and he says that's it, enough!.

Love is quiet, peaceful, sacrificial. First of all, he means a loved one, and not his feelings about him. Love is responsible, and its logical conclusion is the construction of a family (of course, here I mean love between a man and a woman).

The cult of passions, the inability to distinguish between dependence and true love, has led to the fact that the bar of the moral law has fallen in the minds of society, people begin sexual experiments, cling to each other, before they make the final choice to be together. To substantiate this point of view, a quite decent name was even invented - civil marriage.

This look brings a lot of pain to people. Is it natural to try on a person as, for example, shoes in a store: are we suitable for each other? At the level of human physiology and psychology, the seed of a man is precisely the very glue of which the Holy Scriptures speak, that a man will leave his father and his mother and cling to his wife; and there shall be one flesh. After people stick, it is very painful to peel off.

What we call love, love, passion has not only a spiritual (psychological) component, but also a somatic (bodily) component. In each of us, certain biochemical processes work. And the intensity, acceleration of these biochemical processes, people often perceive as a state of love. American scientists have calculated that the gene for falling in love lives one and a half to two years. That is, the intensity of the feeling, when we seem to be sick by another person, is most strongly manifested on average 1.5-2 years. This time is given to man to learn to love.

True love begins to manifest itself at the moment when people connected by marital relations are faced with the question: Who takes out the trash can today?

I have noticed that many people who have experienced the pain of rejection in childhood cannot ask for love, for care, for tenderness. I know one girl who was raised by her mother until the age of six, and at six she sent her to kindergarten. The girl was very uncomfortable in kindergarten. She would come from the kindergarten, throw herself on her mother's neck and say: Mom, love me! But a child can ask: Mom, love me, and we, adults, are either sometimes proud, or we have a rejection complex: Well, how will I ask about this?.

It is very important that we are not afraid, not ashamed to open our hearts to another person – a friend, girlfriend, husband, wife. So that we can say, I miss love right now. It is very important to me that you be with me now. Come on, you know how we're going to spend the evening? I'll just sit next to you and rest on your shoulder. And I will cry. Can? Want. And you're going to calm me down. I'm really. I openly admit it. I just want to be with you. I want to be weak today.

A lot of people want to have a love relationship, but they are afraid of appearing weak, vulnerable. They want to appear strong. That is why many people lose love.

When we are not ashamed in front of a loved one to be weak, this is the beginning of a deep relationship. Love is the rapprochement of people with maximum openness to each other. The loving (and on a bodily level) are completely naked. Each of them is as vulnerable as possible to the other. This is the harmony and beauty of God-created intimate marital relationships.

These days, so many people are naked in front of each other, and their hearts remain closed to each other. It seems to people that bodily, sexual relations will help to become closer. Nothing like that! They will further expose our loneliness.

I had to marry one couple. My friend and his girlfriend, now a wife. I heard an amazing thing before their wedding. She says, "I love him as my future husband. But I don't trust him and I can't be completely open