sagesex

I’m coping with my second breakup in a few months, and my pain has eased off considerably since the last post. If you got dumped or have some other difficult emotions that you can’t let go of, I know where you’re coming from. This might become a somewhat longer article, but if you’re like me, letting some time pass might not seem like such a bad idea in your state.

I’m writing from my own viewpoint only to simplify things, but feel free to replace pronouns if you’re female/gay, or use some of these techniques on entirely different emotions or situations that trouble you. This may read a little like a shopping list, but I do advocate trying all of these techniques, and repeat the ones that work best. It’s not as if you had something better to do now, is it?

The Basics

Indeed, the first thing to realize – and it took me a while – is that this will take time. How much time? That depends. My mom once told me a month per relationship year. Personally, I have suffered longer and shorter, but that seems the right ballpark. Hopefully, if you follow the pointers in this post, it will be a lot shorter. Eventually it will be better, and you will come out of it stronger than you went in, but it will take time. And energy. Do not try to skip the hard part and blast out into your new life. Or try it, like I did, and come back to this paragraph when you have burnt out. Lovesickness and any other difficult emotion is physically painful and exhausting. You cannot expect to function normally while you deal with it. At least I could not. Some people swear by plunging headlong into work. To me, this sounds dangerously like repression. Repression might seem like a good idea at first, but it doesn’t work:

Repression means making or keeping some inner process or emotion unconscious. Emotions are energy in your body. This energy is there, and it is there for a reason. Both the energy and its cause won’t go away when you refuse to acknowledge them. Instead, the emotion will find an unconscious outlet (unconscious behavior that will not be adequate to the situation at hand but to the past emotion), and the cause will hurt you again when you face a similar situation. That is why a general pattern to all the methods I tried is making the emotion conscious while at the same time trying to not get overwhelmed by it. This consciousness will burn up the emotional energy while giving us the chance to learn. Just like physical pain is a warning sign that tells us to care for our body in some place, emotional pain is warning sign that tells us to adjust some behavior.

One thing that I found particularly amazing during the last weeks was to feel very concretely how inseparable my body, mind, and soul were. It is absolutely normal to suffer from loss of appetite, sleeplessness, and physical pain when you’re suffering loss or trauma, just as it is normal that your thoughts induce emotions and vice versa. That is why  you need to care for your body, soul, and mind at the same time. Neglecting one of them will hinder your progress with the other two.

It is critical that you do not resist your situation. This is at least a triple threat:

1. Don’t resist what happened. It is already there. If you cannot accept it, accept that you cannot accept it. Repeat recursively as needed. This is a central thought of Eckhart Tolle’s, but I’ll talk about him in another post.
2. Don’t resist your feelings. What you feel might upset you. You may be angry, vengeful, unjust, depressed, weak, whatever. It’s ok. Just see it. Just notice it. Don’t judge it.
3. Don’t resist the pain. This I found very hard. There will be physical pain, and it might be very hard to bear. Don’t label it as bad. This will make things worse. It’s just like a physical illness that will pass.

If you can stay fully conscious and accept all three challenges, you might just be able to watch your body and mind suffer, see the space around that, and blissfully rest in your eternal self. Welcome to enlightenment. I could not. That is why the following additional resources helped me tremendously.

Specific Techniques

Seek company! Now is the time to enlist the help of your family and friends. Simply being in company soothed me a lot. Try to establish some physical contact, hug people. Talk about everything. What happened. How you feel. What you think. This is a wonderful way to make things conscious, because you have someone with you who can mirror you and stop you from overanalyzing. Watch how you get better at speaking about it, watch how your perception changes.

What about the old adage of FTOW (Fuck Ten Other Women)? Well, if you can do that, fine. But don’t get stressed. It might be hard to do that for several reasons. Accept when you’re not ready. Accept the grace when lovers flock to you to still your pain. Accept the quiet when they do not. Then leave FTOW for the beautiful future, when your pain has healed. Women are a great replacement drug, but be aware that the effect will not last, and don’t burden yourself with obtaining it.

In fact, I believe (and it seems contemporary research is backing me up on this) that losing a lover is a lot like detox, physical craving and all. So replacing the drug with another will always be tempting. This should be done with great care. Sex I found relatively harmless, as long as there are no unwanted side effects. Alcohol, for example, is much more problematic, because it drains your Serotonin levels and weakens your body. This means that like a lot of drugs, it will first kill the pain, but leave you a wreck both physically (hangover) and emotionally (depression). This may seem obvious, but I had to experience it to the fullest to really believe it. You are much more helpless to your emotional pain once your body is weak.

That is why in general, it is very helpful to care for yourself as lovingly as you can manage during this time (of course, this is true all the time). Try to sleep regularly. Try to eat well. Think about things that you know are good for you: walk in nature, play an instrument, do sports … but again, don’t overtax yourself.  If you cannot do it on your own, get help. If you do slip (like I did), don’t be hard on yourself. In my case, I needed to party to a physical standstill to realize I need some rest.

Your mind will race. Accept that but don’t listen too closely to the chatter. Try to postpone or structure thoughts, through talking to friends, writing them down, and the 5D-compassion technique by ideagasms’ Stephane Hemon. The guy and his writings are a little controversial, but I found his method extremely helpful to let go of egotistical viewpoints and blame, and really understand the behavior of others in difficult situations. Just do it, again and again, for all the situations that trouble you. It will help you learn from the experience, so the karmic wheel stops spinning and you don’t have to repeat the same mistakes.

If you like NLP, there are probably hundreds of techniques in there to help you. I tried one called submodalities, and this is actually fun: Picture your ex or the painful situation. If that hurts too much, disassociate: Picture yourself sitting in a cinema watching your ex on the screen. Or picture yourself watching yourself in a cinema … you get the drift. Now observe the specifics (submodalities in NLP speak) of this mental picture: Where is it? Is it moving? Is it colorful? What colors? What size? Sounds? Then try changing submodalities: Make a colorful picture black and white, play a movie backwards, make the picture smaller, move it somewhere else. If you want to be really bad, imagine someone that you don’t care about at all, and then copy his submodalities to the picture of your ex. Observe how the feeling changes.

Decisions

One thing that I found critical is creating a great future. You have to find the right moments for this, though, since it will not work when your pain is too strong. But once the pain is bearable, and you can muster some energy, make plans. It is best to include others in it who can help you follow through. Find activities that are only possible or much easier now that the relationship is gone. Go on a holiday. Find new friends. Learn new skills. But again, don’t strain yourself. Picture a beautiful future without your ex. Once you have identified a positive viewpoint, replace the negative thoughts with this frame everytime they crop up.

A basic dilemma that came up again and again for me is this: How do you deal with your ex? You will feel pulled back and forth between trying to salvage things and hating her, between letting her go and keeping her in your heart. There are two dimensions to this question:

1. For practical matters, I recommend keeping her out of sight for a while. That is until you can emotionally handle being reminded of her. See above for time frames and be your own guru. If you feel the need to tell her something, do so. Maybe it won’t change anything, but at least you escape the uncertainty. She dumped you anyway, so she will have to deal with your emotional reactions. A letter or text message is fine. I wouldn’t recommend talking person to person or on the phone, arguments will not make things better.

2. In my head and heart, I got to the following viewpoint (But that’s just my personal view, it heavily depends upon the situation): We’ll always be lovers. Nothing can change that. If my lover chooses another guy, that’s fine. It just means that at the moment, we’re not meant to be together. If she’s happy, I’m letting her go and rejoice in her happiness. Even though I might be sad, I’ll be happy with or without her. If we meet again, we’ll see if we have learnt enough to be together, and still enjoy each other.

A miracle cure

Finally, Emotional Freedom Technique (tapping) is a very powerful and simple method for letting go of any trauma or suffering. It is a really miraculous tool, and the EFT manual and more can be obtained for free from their website. Though the manual and website can be a little verbose at times, the actual technique is quite simple and extremely general. And, in conjunction with all the other aspects covered here, it helped me get better very quickly, after my friend held from coldseduction.com reminded me of it. Thank you for that.

I am deeply grateful to all the people who helped me through this affliction, including those who discovered and taught me the principles in this article. By the way, writing down what you are grateful for once a day is another great method to focus on the positive. I wish you strength and I know you will be free very soon. Thank you for reading this until the end.

P.S.: I know there are many more ways of coping with difficult emotions, and different methods work for different people. If you have found anything particularly helpful, please feel free to share it in a comment.

P.P.S.: It’s normal to have relapses, but if you don’t get better after some time, or if you have ongoing suicide phantasies, you might have triggered a depression. This is serious stuff, and it can be treated, so consult a professional when in doubt.

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I’m coping with my second breakup in a few months, and my pain has eased off considerably since the last post. If you got dumped or have some other difficult...