Getting over a Breakup

​Dear Lindsay,


I have a friend who is hung up on someone and is having a hard time getting over their feelings for that person. They talk about the whole situation a lot, every time we hangout, and it’s exhausting for me at times. I wish they could get over this person and move on and stop torturing themselves. How to help them see the light? Any advice?


From an exhausted friend.


Dear Exhausted Friend,


Oooh, this sounds hard.  For you, and for your friend.


I’m going to start by answering the part about your role in this situation first, and then talk about some of my philosophy around relationships and “getting over people” in general.  Maybe you’ll end of sharing some of these thoughts with your friend, maybe not.  Either way, hopefully I can give some deeper perspective on the whole situation that you will find helpful as you navigate it.


First off, it’s not your job to make your friend see the light.  I know you wish they would move on, but simply put that’s their department, not yours.  Maybe you can help, but ultimately, they are in their own process.  It’s up to you to choose what proximity and involvement you want to have to their process. If you are truly exhausted from listening to this never-ending loop, then you can say as much, kindly, and no longer participate in these conversations.  That might sound harsh, but you getting exhausted and resenting your friend is not good for anyone.  You might say something like “Hey, I’ve noticed that you’re still really hung up on this person.  I feel for you.  I’m hope one day you can find some peace and move on.  I’m noticing that I’m exhausted by these conversations.  It doesn’t feel like they are going anywhere, and I’m not up for continuing them.  I want to keep hanging out, but I’m not up for talking about this anymore.”


So you could take that route.  Or a version of it, where you only talk about this for awhile, and then interject with “ok, different topic”.  You don’t have to be at the mercy of talking about, or listening to, a big long thing that you don’t want to.  It’s your job to get out of the situations, and conversations you don’t want to be in.


Ok, now, deeper than that… what might be going on for your friend?  I’m of course not talking with them, so I’m just generalizing and guessing, but maybe some of this ring true.


It sounds like they were quite attached to the person they were with.  Attachment is a tricky thing.  We can get attached to a person, place, time in our lives, all sorts of things.  And attachment, healthy attachment, is really important to us feeling grounded and good in the world.  Thing is, life and relationships shift.  Lessening an attachment, changing an attachment is hard.  It takes time.  Sound like you think it should be happening faster for your friend.  And maybe it really is unhealthy how hung up on the past they are, I’m not sure.  But I will say that big shifts don’t happen quickly.  Deep changes in attachment can take a really long time.


Here’s another big thought:
In an intimate relationship, we are usually getting something from the other person that we aren’t getting from within ourselves.  In the healthier version of this, we match with someone who compliments us, but we are both whole people ourselves.  In the most extreme unhealthy version of this, the other person, at first, almost glows with a kind of golden light, because we see them as the personification of all these traits we lacking.  We don’t think of it this way, we just think they are amazing, but who we find attractive says a lot about us, and what parts of a complete psychology we are missing.  Before our psychology is really complete and balanced, we get into relationships where we count on the other person to complete us. It’s as if we were a puzzle, and the other person holds our missing piece.  This is toted in love songs as a good thing, but it’s actually quite disturbing and immature.  Mature love has an interdependence, but not gaping holes.  But, sadly, lots of relationships aren’t there. Lots of people are missing big puzzle pieces and look to other people to complete them.


So, it could be that your friend found in their ex a really important piece of their own psychological puzzle.  That, when they were with this person they quite literally, in their deep psychology, felt more complete.  And the beauty of that is that it singnaled something about who they are that they had never found so fully before.  This could be something obvious like their ex was taking them on adventures outside and they’d never don’t that before, or that their ex was a good cook and they’d never ate well, but chances are it was at a more subtle psychological level that you, from the outside might not be able to see. So they found that puzzle piece in their ex, and that was really important to them. The trouble is, they are locking that puzzle piece to their ex, conflating the two.  If I’m right that this phenomena is what’s been happening for your friend, then  it will quite literally feel inside them like they are missing a piece of themselves with their ex gone.  Because they are.
  They had outsourced that piece of themselves to their ex, and now their ex walked away with it.  So one way to see their inability to get over the relationship, is that something that the relationship held for them is REALLY IMPORTANT.


Hopefully, you friend can get curious about this, and go to therapy, and come to understand what it was they were getting from the relationship, and where else they could get that.
Because, as I see it, they won’t get over this person until they are getting this puzzle piece somewhere else.  That’s why some classic “how to get over someone” advice include going to sleep with someone else.  It’s the idea that having someone else in your bed will help erase the ghost of the last person. This, though sometimes a temporarily effective technique, in my opinion, is rather dangerous in that it by no means addresses the deeper issues, and risks using the next person merely for our own ends, as the rebound tonic, instead of being ready to start a new relationship from a healthy place.  So I’m not exactly suggesting you try and set your friend up on another date. They aren’t ready for that.


What I’m saying is that your friend won’t move on until they have recouped their puzzle piece from their ex.  Hopefully, they can gain some understaffing about what this puzzle piece is, and begin to fulfill it for themselves.  To strengthen the aspects of their personality that the other person was fulfilling.  The best book I’ve read about this so far is called “Wild Mind” by Bill Plotkin.  In it he maps out the different aspects of a healthy mature psychology, and gives practical ways to nurture the parts we’re deficient in. Again, that’s a book called “Wild Mind” by Bill Plotkin


I want to try another angle on understanding what’s going on in a breakup.  The story is usually that a break up is bad.  That something went wrong.  Though I hope this assumption is shifting, and do see evidence as such, it is still quite pervasive.  And sometimes, don’t get me wrong, a breakup definitely is sad, and something went wrong.  A failure of trust, communication, respect.  That’s awful.
But here’s the thing; the idea that for a relationship to be successful it’s got to last forever and stay the same is ridiculous, untenable, and just plain not possible.  Life is way too much of moving river for this to be realistic.  If two people are alive and evolving, then their relationship MUST shift and change over time.  If it can’t do this, then it will end.
And sometimes, even with everything going well, people who have been close will drift apart.  Sometimes, strangely, that is actually the measure of health, that people are being true to themselves, and the flow of life.  Sometime the most loving thing to do is to give someone else space away from us.
But it sounds like your friend isn’t at the place of knowing or feeling this.  And chances are some pithy platitude from you isn’t going to change their mind.


Maybe there is someone you know who has gone through a hard breakup and moved on.  Someone who did the grief work, and is now on the other side.  They might be a good person to set your friend up with, not romantically, but must in a walk in the woods have a talk sort of way.  Maybe they can speak from their experience what helped them move on.


But let’s go back to an earlier point here…there is grief work to be done.  Something is stuck for your friend, and not moving along. Chances are, it’s that they haven’t gone deep enough into their own grief around the lost or change in this relationship.  They likely will need some support, I’m talking therapy and time in trees and good food, to help them dive safely into the grief.


There also might be something incomplete for them about the relationship.  They might have some burning questions to ask their ex, they might have a trip they wished they’d gone on.  You could ask them about this, and see if there is something practical you could help them fulfill.  Maybe there is a note they need to write, or pretend to write, to their ex, to get some things off their chest.  But again it’s not your job to facilitate this.






It also could be that they are getting something important out of this looping on their ex.  Maybe they are using conversations with you to process their feelings (again, they need to get a therapist, cause this isn’t your job to do so indefinitely and to the point of exhaustion).  Maybe in some twisted way they are enjoying replaying the drama of it because it makes them feel superior, or inferior, or wounded or angry.  Some important feeling that their incomplete psychology is getting off on.  But it’s not your job to figure that out.


I’ve said it a few different ways, but let me say it simply.  This inability to get over this relationship is part of a deeper thing for your friend.  It feels to them, and might seems like in their conversations, like what they are going through is about the details of this particular relationship and breakup.  But that is the mushroom bloom of the situation. There’s a whole underground network of incomplete psychology and history and attachment wounds and needs going on for your friend that is causing this to bloom out into your conversations over and over again.  They need more support in working with that subterranean stuff, and that’s not your job.


When I think back to the first time I wasn’t getting over a relationship quickly, there was a lot still for me to learn. About myself, about love.  And, actually, that person, one of the ones I had a hard time getting over, is still in my life, just in a different way. I called him up just a few days ago to ask about his father who was in hospital, and we ended up talking about mushroom picking.  There’s still a lot of tenderness between us.  We’re family.   I didn’t get over him, so to speak. I held him in my heart dearly for years.  We got back together at one point for a few more years.  Then we split up again because we couldn’t make each other as deeply happy and fulfilled as we knew was possible.  It was the most loving thing we could do for each other.
I did mourn, cry, do a bunch of art, therapy, and time.  And then I caught up with the river or life that had drawn us together, and then apart, and then together, and then apart again.  In my experience, there’s a  deep mystery to love.  There’s a destiny sort of element to it that feels synchronous, and mythical and important.  If your friend’s relationship was one of these deep destiny ones, then who knows what part of their journey they are one now, and what may or may not circle back around.  That’s for them to discover, and for you to adjust your connection to them to take care of yourself as you love your friend.


As their friend, and not their therapist, I think the best you can offer, if you’re up for it, is some loving attention.  Usually most twisted psychology things stem from not enough healthy attention.  Listening, caring, having healthy boundaries.


But, it sounds like first off, before you could offer some healthy attention back to your friend, you need to take care of yourself and make sure that you’re not overextending in the time you spend with them. Kindly state when you’re done with a conversation. Say that you care about them but what you are and are not up for.  Knowing our own boundaries and holding them calmly is a way of relating with care and makes longevity of relationships more possible.
It might even be that you voicing your exhaustion about these looping conversations is a wake up call of sorts to your friend and they realize that they too are exhausted by the loop.  Maybe they just don’t know what else to talk about.  In which case, they need to go on some more adventures, of mind, or body or spirit.


I’m wishing for your friend a good therapist and some sweet long walks.  For you, I’m wishing you kindness and clarity.


I hope this helps.


Lindsay