HEALTH TIPS, GUIDES AND RELATIONSHIP ADVICE

How To Manage After A Break Up

The more intimate your relationship and the longer it lasted, naturally, the more difficult your break-up will be.  Especially if bitterness, anger, betrayal, and fighting have dominated the final stage of the relationship, you may struggle to find closure and move on.  Psychologists list the end of a cherished relationship among life’s most traumatic events, and break-ups also number among the top five triggers for clinical depression.  Your friends, eager to see you happy and worried about your health, will encourage you to get over it, offering sage insights: “Boys are like busses.  There will be another one in fifteen minutes.”  The experts advise, however, you take time to grieve and heal even as you take aggressive measures to end the relationship and keep it from interfering with your everyday life and work.

 Relationship experts agree on one fundamental rule: Get it over and done as quickly as possible.  The most popular adage says, “Tear-off the bandage quickly,” and the analogy is especially apt.  Do not protract the pain and suffering  Although you must allow time for private grieving, once you have made-up your mind about ending the relationship, convince your heart to follow, and begin moving on.  Do not fear appearing cold-hearted to your former partner.  The more you can steel your heart against fresh assaults and disconnect “the buttons” that trigger your strong emotions, the sooner you will restore your emotional health.

 You cannot “still be friends.”

You may not be enemies, but you certainly are no longer friends.  Therefore, cut off all communication.  All of it.  “Unfriend” your “ex-“ and erase every memory from all of your social networks, your cell phone, your speed dial, and all your other advanced communications tools.  Press “delete” and “ignore” everywhere you must, instructing your secretary to refuse your ex’s calls, and advising your friends not to pass along the old partner’s messages.

 Protect yourself.

The more intense the relationship, the greater the chances the break-up may turn ugly.  Be realistic about the possibility of malicious mischief and violence.  Do not hesitate to protect yourself.  If your intuition says that you are unsafe, trust it.  Do not allow the benefit of the doubt.  Instead, take immediate and decisive action.  If you think you ex- is stalking you, take-out a restraining order.  If your ex- even vaguely threatens you, call the police.  Change your regular patterns, making it more difficult for your ex- to “bump into you by coincidence.”  Ask your friends and family to accompany you when you go out. Use everything you know about protecting your person, your property, and your vital personal information.  If your ex- had access to your home, immediately change all the locks.  Park your car in a new, safer and better-lit place.  Definitely change all of the passwords on all of your computer accounts, and even more importantly, change all of your bank accounts.  Act aggressively to make your life as ex-free as you can.

 Protect the children.

Even if you and your new “ex-“ have children together, you cannot remain friends.  In fact, the more you can restructure the relationship to make it as businesslike as possible, the better it will be for you and the children.  Lay down some inviolable rules of communication—first and most importantly, keep conversations about the children focused on the children.  Then, build-in restrictions on blame, fault-finding, recrimination, and name-calling.  Most of all, do not hold the children hostage to unfinished emotional business.  The kids need both parents in their lives, and they expect you to behave as the grown-ups in the picture.

 Grieve.

Relationship experts advise, when a relationship dies, people go through the same stages of grief as when a person dies.  You must expect to go through the grieving process, and you should plan to manage each stage of the process as effectively as you can.  Do not hesitate to get counseling, and capitalize on your friends and family for support.  By the time you change the locks on your door, you will be past “denial,” but you will have worked your way well into “rage.”  Especially if your ex- cheated on you or betrayed your trust in another equally meaningful way, you will experience greater anger than you ever have known before.  Do not try to repress it, but find a healthy way to redirect it.  Psychologists and police have a million stories about ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends acting-out their anger by seeking revenge.  A few of their stories are funny; most are tragic.

Beware of “rebounds.”

As you progress through your grief to understanding and acceptance of your situation, exercise great caution about starting another relationship.  Psychologists specifically warn, first, people tend to persist in their patterns of partner selection unless they consciously and deliberately examine those patterns and take bold steps to break them.  Sadly but truly, women tend to date men like their fathers and brothers; men tend to date women like their mothers and sisters. You must replace those unconscious habits with new principles of selection.  In other words, you must learn to hold-out for the person you genuinely want.  The experts warn, second, you remain vulnerable for a long time after a break-up.  When you start a new relationship, go very, very slowly, and do not fear taking time and making sure you feel ready for each step in the relationship’s evolution.