• Break-ups: pain, emptiness and grief

Carlton Alfred Smith, “Recalling the Past,” 1888. Wikimedia Commons

“When you experience loss, people say you’ll move through the 5 stages of grief….
Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance
….. What they don’t tell you is that you’ll cycle through them all every day.”

Ranata Suzuki

The sense of loss, the pain and grief after the break-up of a relationship can feel monumental. We may feel totally unprepared for such a massive onslaught of feelings, and as the quotation says, we may experience a plethora of different and overwhelming emotions each day. The feelings linger as time passes, and we may spend our days quietly grieving for what we have lost.

We may feel that we have not only lost what we had in the past with that person, but we have also lost our hopes and dreams connected to the future. What has disappeared from view is an imagined future that may once have been part of a shared dream.

Carlton Alfred Smith, “Recalling the Past,” 1888. Wikimedia Commons

“They say you don’t get over someone until you find someone or something better. As humans, we don’t deal well with emptiness. Any empty space must be filled. Immediately. The pain of emptiness is too strong. It compels the victim to fill that place. A single moment with that empty spot causes excruciating pain. That’s why we run from distraction to distraction—and from attachment to attachment.”

Yasmin Mogahed

After a break-up, there can be a massive sense of emptiness, an emotional void, both internally and externally.

Separation and divorce may mean that, at times, we miss the person who has, perhaps, been in our lives for several years.

Even if the situation over the separation was bad, as well as having angry and rejecting thoughts and feelings, we may find that we miss the good times and the good aspects of that other person. We may also feel lonely, and may miss, not the person themselves, but the company or the feeling of security and intimacy that we may have had in the past. There may be a sense of loss about no longer being part of a couple.

However, in time, there can develop a readiness to move away from longing for the past, into preparations for a new future and more satisfying relationships. The process may be long and painful, and we will need the support of friends, family, and, perhaps, a therapist.

When we feel lonely, there is an almost unbearable sense of being uncared for, bereft, unloved, totally isolated, an outcast.

Such emptiness, such hollowness inside, may feel massive, as if it is totally overtaking the whole of oneself, submerging mind and body.

There may be a resulting sense of powerlessness and helplessness against such a dark torrent of feeling.

“All the space without you in it, is empty.”

Iain Thomas

Painting of an empty chair, by Kefah Ali Deeb. 2024. Wikimedia Commons

“The feeling of emptiness is the most fundamental experience of human existence, and yet it is the one we most desperately seek to avoid.”

Lacan

Melancholy. Edvard Munch. 1892. Wikimedia Commons

“The loss of a loved person is one of the most intensely painful experiences any human being can suffer.”

John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss (1980)

• Understanding unconscious interactions: the development of  learning and hope after a break-up.

Charles Dana Gibson: The Party Wall , 1903. (Image: CAD Library via Flickr CC BY 2.0)

“We are both wounded in our own way and, like a pair of tectonic plates shifting over time, our wounds will gradually grate against one another’s, causing damage at a glacial pace. Neither of us will notice until it’s too late.”

Hazel Hayes, Out of Love

The powerful role of our unconscious in relationships should not be underestimated; without awareness of this, we may repeat unhelpful old patterns of relating to another, whilst being totally oblivious of what we are doing.

Subterranean Forces – Diego Rivera. 1927. Wikioo.

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

 C.G. Jung

Living unconsciously in this way will mean that we go through life lacking any awareness that there is anything other than the conscious mind. There is no sense of the deeper level of consciousness that actually drives much of our behaviour.

“The world is full of lots of people play acting and hurling stuff about, unconscious of the effects.”

Jay Woodman

Even after a break-up, it is still crucially important that we understand the part our own unconscious has played in the demise of that relationship; this knowledge will enable us to develop new ways of being in any future relationship.

“What I cannot accept in myself, what I cannot handle in the complexity of the world, what I fear in you, often leads me to repress you if I can.”

James Hollis

‘Unhooking’ ourselves from the repetitive spiral of old, unconscious ways of thinking and relating can mean that we can, genuinely, form healthier, freer, new beginnings with someone else.

“The end of a relationship is not a failure; it is information.”

Esther Perel

• Personal growth after a break-up

Vilhelm Hammershøi – Interior from the Home of the Artist.1901. Wikimedia Commons

“I felt that same void. But I learned to see it not as an absence, but as a space. An empty room. And I understood that my life’s primary task was not to find someone to move into that room with me, but to furnish it myself.”

 Charlotte Eriksson

Edvard Munch – Separation (3) 1896. Wikimedia Commons

“What hurts us teaches us.”

Carl Jung

After a painful break-up, and in the fullness of time, we can look back and gain some understanding of what went wrong and how we might move forward in terms of our personal growth. Again, perhaps we might decide to have some therapy or counselling, or maybe we will engage in deep personal reflection and thought.

We need to learn to recognise the old patterns of relating to another have been repeated, and perhaps to identify the unmet needs and unresolved difficulties that influenced our partner choice in the first place. The period after a break-up can be a time of transition, a time to alter waysofthinking that may have been unhelpful and restrictive.

• A systemic view

Edvard Munch – Separation. 1894. Wikimedia Commons

A relationship doesn’t end because one person failed. It ends because the system no longer works.”

Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity

This quotation refers to systems theory, which is of utmost relevance to understanding relationships and grasping what has gone wrong systemically.  It is easy to miss the systems at play in a relationship if one is not familiar with such ways of thinking. However, without  awareness, a narrow, one-sided attitude can mean that blame and finger-pointing may occur.

Keeping two opposite, contradictory views in mind at the same time is a difficult task; however, if we are able to do this, the rewards are manifold. Such thinking is surely situated at the heart of creativity. Yet, so often, people opt for one side or another, choosing to ignore the fact that the world, and life, are just not that simple.

The couple represent two parts of a whole; they created the entity of the marriage and they both have a part in its demise. Apportioning blame to one partner or another represents a way of thinking that is limited and incomplete. It is the product of a one-sided mindset, a way of thinking that cannot recognise the validity of two different viewpoints. The result is half-truths and biased versions of reality.

Henri Mattise. The Conversation. 1908-12. Wikimedia Commons

Systems thinking helps us understand that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, that everything is connected, that we make an error if we focus on the words or actions of just one individual. We need instead to look at the whole system and the environment of which that individual is a part.

“Yet we act as if simple cause and effect is at work. We push to find the one simple reason things have gone wrong. We look for the one action, or the one person, that created this mess. As soon as we find someone to blame, we act as if we’ve solved the problem.”

Margaret J. Wheatley

As we look back on a broken relationship, it can be helpful…and maybe painful… to know that ‘responsibility’ for the break-up does not reside in one person, no matter how much it appears to be so.

Both psychoanalytical and systemic thinking, as well as other psychological approaches, would regard relationships as dynamic and interactional. Through intricate relational networks, we create patterns in the spaces between us, some of which are functional, whilst others can lead to breakdown and break-up.

“Meaning is not in things but in between them.”

Norman O. Brown

The ways in which we repeat old patterns and create new ones with other people reveal how much we are part of the human condition…

Separation (1).Edvard Munch. 1906-7. Wikimedia Commons

“What we don’t need in the midst of struggle is shame for being human.”

Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

© Linda Berman