How to combat separation anxiety: 3 keys to help you deal with it
With the breakup of a couple come problems for which it is difficult to be prepared.
It is a reality that divorces and breakups are becoming more and more common. While a few decades ago both social pressure and the pretension that romantic relationships would last indefinitely made the idea of separating unattractive, today the costs associated with going their separate ways are much lower, and the advantages are increasingly more.
With the liberalization of emotional ties come new options for facing the future individually and unilaterally, but this is not without its problems. The anxiety produced by the separation is one of them.. At the end of the day, even though ending a relationship is becoming less and less rare, in most cases it is still an anxious and unpleasant experience, sometimes even traumatic.
Now then... how to deal with all those negative feelings when a history built in common fades away? Let's take a look at some keys that help to properly manage emotions in these cases..
How to deal with separation anxiety: the other side of the breakup
Where there has been an honest and heartfelt relationship that comes to an end, there is an emotional blow. With the breakup comes a real paradigm shift both physically and psychologically. For example, when we go through such an experience it changes the way we perceive ourselves, but it also changes our routines, including the physical places we are used to moving around.
However, the fact that the separation will almost certainly affect us emotionally separation will almost certainly affect us emotionally does not mean that we have to resign ourselves to suffer in any way, giving up the possibility of regulating those emotions in the most appropriate way possible. Below you will find several tips and reflections that may be useful to combat anxiety due to a breakup.
1. Mentalize yourself: there is no such thing as a better half
Much of the suffering caused by separation is simply due to the fact that, for cultural reasons, we still have very high expectations about what relationships based on romantic love should be.
The idea that the members of a couple are predestined to find each other and that when they come together they form a kind of inseparable unit comes from magical thinking traditionally linked to religion. and that by coming together they form a kind of inseparable unit comes from magical thinking traditionally linked to religion and, although in certain contexts it could be useful (times and places where not having a strongly united family to provide stability could mean death), today it has lost all meaning in much of the world.
Therefore, it is good to think that as long as it was very important to us, the universe does not revolve around a relationship that has ended. Therefore, the world continues to make sense even though that person is no longer by our side.
2. No one is indispensable to be happy
Do you know the fallacy of request of principle? It is an error of reasoning an error of reasoning according to which a conclusion is reached from premises in which the conclusion is already implicit. For example: the mind and the body are part of the human being, so the mind and the body are two different things.
When couple breakups occur, people who are going through the mourning process originated by the absence of the other usually fall into a fallacy of request of principle, although this time directed towards emotions.
This reasoning usually goes as follows: that person who gave me happiness has disappearedso I can no longer be happy. Seen superficially, this reasoning seems to make sense, but if we examine it in more depth, we realize that the premise assumes something very debatable: that happiness was given by that person, as if he or she were a source of vitality.
The mistake lies in believing such categorical statements based on emotions and sensations typical of a stage of emotional instability such as a breakup. In those moments, our perception of things is so altered that we are capable of believing that the truth about our life has been revealed after years of being hidden in the shadows. The belief in this kind of catastrophic thinking causes a lot of anxiety, but we should not let it causes a lot of anxiety, but we must not let these ideas overcome us.
3. Move in a different way
With the breakup comes change, that is undeniable. You cannot separate from your partner and act as if everything remained the same. More than anything, because under these circumstances, as we will not have the possibility to continue doing our lives as we did, in practice what we will do is not to act at all. Adopting a totally passive attitude, doing nothing, and let sadness, anxiety and intrusive thoughts eat away at us..
Therefore, we must be consistent with the situation and change our habits. Embracing change means taking up new hobbies, meeting new people and moving to new places. The change of routine will make it more difficult to fall back into the vicious circle of obsessive thoughts that are typical of rumination.
(Updated at Apr 12 / 2024)