When learning how to get over someone, most of us face an unexpected truth: relationships form the basis of meaning in our lives. Therefore, losing someone you love isn’t just about missing their presenceâit’s about losing a part of your identity.
That empty feeling after a break up is actually a lack of meaning and identity, not just loneliness. We often find ourselves clinging to the past, desperately trying to “fix” everything to get our old lives back. However, this approach only prolongs our suffering instead of helping us heal.
The reality is that part of us is now gone. To move forward, we need to accept this and start rebuilding our lives. In this science-backed guide, we’ll explore why breakups hurt so deeply and provide practical strategies to help you rediscover yourself, rebuild meaning, and ultimately move on.
Why Breakups Hurt More Than We Expect
“”Love is so short, forgetting is so long.”” â Pablo Neruda, Nobel Prize-winning poet, renowned for his profound insights on love and loss
Breakups strike at the core of our psychological makeup in ways most of us never anticipate. Research shows that successfully navigating intimate relationships during emerging adulthood is more closely tied to well-being than other developmental goals like financial independence, educational achievements, or maintaining friendships.
The role of identity in relationships
During a relationship, our sense of self becomes intertwined with our partner’s. This isn’t just poetic languageâit’s psychological reality. Psychotherapists recognize that our identity is framed within the context of others.
Studies show that married individuals actually take longer to distinguish between traits they share with their partners compared to traits they don’t share. As one researcher explains, “When two people’s lives intertwine, those boundaries get blurry”.
This blending of identities explains why people often say things like “he brought out the best in me” or “she brought out a side of me I’ve never seen”. Our partners literally help shape who we are through what researchers call the “Michelangelo Phenomenon”âwhere close partners help shape each other toward their ideal selves through their perceptions, encouragement, and daily interactions.
How emotional attachment creates meaning
Emotional attachment isn’t just a feelingâit’s a basic human need. This attachment forms the foundation of meaning in our relationships and lives.
Neuroscientists have discovered that attachment bonds create actual physical changes in our brains. These bonds lead to epigenetic changes, particularly in regions like the nucleus accumbensâthe brain’s reward center.
Additionally, the attachment system involves powerful neurochemicals like oxytocin and dopamine that motivate us to seek out our partners. These neurochemicals create such a powerful bond that people with complicated grief continue to show activation in reward centers of the brain when thinking about a lost loved one.
Dr. O’Connor explains that our brains essentially create a “we” instead of just a “you” and “me”. This neurological merging explains why emotional attachments feel so profound and why their disruption hurts so deeply.
Why loss feels like losing a part of yourself
After a breakup, many people report literally feeling like they’ve lost a part of themselves. This sensation has a neurobiological basisâat a “neural and coded level, our representation of the ‘we’ has a hole in it”.
Furthermore, breakups disrupt our sense of coherence (SOC)âthe feeling that things are comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful. This disruption explains the profound disorientation many experience after a relationship ends.
The pain is especially intense because our brains struggle to update the expectation of a partner’s presence. As neuroscientist David Eagleman notes, “Your brain refashions itself around the expectation of their presence. After the breakup with a lover… the sudden absence represents a major departure from homeostasis”.
For those wondering how to get over someone, understanding this neurobiological reality helps explain why breakups feel so devastating. The pain isn’t merely emotionalâit’s your brain physically adjusting to a new reality where someone who was literally integrated into your neural pathways is suddenly gone.
Moving forward requires more than just “getting over it.” Rather, it demands recognizing how the relationship shaped you, what those changes meant, and how you might carry valuable aspects of that growth forward as you begin to rebuild.
Rebuilding Meaning After a Breakup
Rebuilding meaning after heartbreak requires more than simply filling your calendar with activities. After losing someone important, you’re not just missing a personâyou’re experiencing a void in your life’s structure and purpose.
Why distraction isn’t enough
While keeping busy might provide temporary relief, merely distracting yourself won’t lead to genuine healing. When you attempt to escape the pain through distraction, you miss the opportunity to process your emotions fully. Unlike treating a headache, you can’t simply mask relationship grief with activities and expect it to disappear.
Rebounds represent another common yet counterproductive distraction. Despite offering momentary pleasure, they deny you the chance to reflect on and learn from your previous relationship. As one therapist notes, “What we don’t understand, we repeat”. Consequently, without proper reflection, you risk bringing the same patterns into future relationships.
Effective healing requires acknowledging all your feelingsâboth painful and positive. Focus on being present with your emotions first, then consciously redirect your attention toward growth-oriented activities. This differs fundamentally from distraction, which aims to escape discomfort altogether.
How to reconnect with people who matter
“It takes a village to heal from a breakup,” according to relationship experts. Accordingly, nurturing your support network becomes essential in rebuilding meaning after losing a partner.
To reconnect effectively:
- Identify your trusted support networkâpeople who genuinely care about your wellbeing
- Be vulnerable about your feelings with close friends and family
- Focus on quality relationships, not quantity
- Communicate your needs clearly to your support system
If you’ve lost touch with friends while in your relationship, many will welcome you back into their lives. Reach out and you might discover they’ve been waiting for you to be ready. For relationships that became strained, consider meeting in person, addressing issues directly, and finding new commonalities.
Remember to set boundaries about discussing your ex with mutual connections. Simply state, “We aren’t speaking. I need you to support that I have a good reason for this”. This prevents unwanted information from disrupting your healing process.
Creating new routines and goals
Establishing new routines provides structure during a time that often feels chaotic. Your post-breakup routine shouldn’t serve as a distraction but as a return to self. Focus primarily on self-care rather than productivity.
Begin by identifying activities that once brought you joy before the relationship. This might include hobbies, physical activities, or creative pursuits you set aside. Next, allocate time for self-reflectionâa quiet space where you can process your thoughts and feelings.
In addition, make one commitment each week to try something new. This could be visiting an unfamiliar coffee shop or restaurant with a friend. These novel experiences help disrupt old patterns while creating fresh neural pathways in your brain.
Finally, reconnect with your core values and set goals aligned with who you want to become. Ask yourself what makes you feel whole and empowered without a partner. Then visualize a meaningful future that belongs entirely to youâone built around your authentic needs rather than compromises made for someone else.
Through intentional reconnection with others and yourself, you’ll gradually rebuild meaning that’s truly yoursâa foundation for learning how to get over someone in a way that leaves you stronger than before.
Seeing the Relationship Clearly
“”The hottest love has the coldest end.”” â Socrates, Classical Greek philosopher, foundational figure in Western philosophy
After a painful breakup, our minds often create distorted perceptions of the relationship. Learning to see it clearly is crucial to your healing journey.
Letting go of the idealized version
Typically, we remember relationships through rose-colored glassesârecalling the good times while conveniently forgetting the struggles. This “rosy retrospection” is a cognitive bias where we paint past relationships more favorably than they actually were. When you catch yourself thinking about how “perfect” your ex was, you’re likely romanticizing the relationship rather than remembering it accurately.
This idealization creates an impossible standard that no future partner can meet. To break this cycle, try making a list of the reasons your relationship ended and the unhealthy aspects you experienced. As one expert notes, “If your past relationships have been toxic or unhealthy, it’s time to redefine what love actually looks like for you.”
Recognizing toxic patterns
Many relationships end because of recurring unhealthy dynamics. Dr. Gottman identified four communication patterns that predict relationship failure with 91% accuracy:
- Criticism: attacking character instead of addressing specific behaviors
- Contempt: expressing superiority through sarcasm, mockery, or disrespect
- Defensiveness: deflecting responsibility and playing victim
- Stonewalling: emotionally withdrawing from interaction
Moreover, other toxic patterns include codependency, constant fighting, blame-shifting, and communication breakdowns. Recognizing these patterns helps prevent carrying them into future relationships.
As one therapist explains, “Dysfunctional relationships involve a cycle of unhealthy behaviors that result in more hardship than good times.” Indeed, identifying these patterns often reveals that the relationship’s end was necessary for your well-being.
Understanding why it ended
Relationships rarely end without reason. Common causes include incompatible values, unrealistic expectations, lack of respect, and communication failures. When partners don’t want the same things from lifeâdifferences in religion, family planning, or lifestyleâseparation often becomes inevitable.
Given these points, gaining clarity about why your relationship ended isn’t about assigning blame but understanding incompatibilities. This understanding prevents you from repeating similar situations and helps you identify what you truly need in future relationships.
Seeing your past relationship clearly doesn’t mean vilifying your ex either. Instead, it’s about achieving balanced perceptionâacknowledging both the good experiences and the valid reasons it couldn’t continue. This clarity becomes the foundation for learning how to get over someone completely and moving toward healthier connections.
Rediscovering Yourself Without Them
Losing your sense of self is often the most profound yet overlooked aspect of a breakup. The line between “we” and “I” becomes blurred in relationships, as your identity merges with your partner’s at a neural level, creating a shared sense of being.
Exploring your identity outside the relationship
Following a breakup, you face an essential question: Who am I without them? Throughout your relationship, you likely adapted to your partner’s routines and embraced their interests, possibly setting aside parts of yourself. Now is the opportunity to rediscover those neglected aspects of your identity.
Start by reflecting on what defined you prior to the relationship. What activities brought you joy? What values guided your decisions? Which dreams did you postpone? This self-exploration isn’t about returning to your pre-relationship selfâit’s about recognizing how you’ve grown yet still maintaining your authentic core.
Consider asking yourself: “What makes me feel whole without a partner?” Then take deliberate steps toward activities that affirm your individual identity, whether resuming old passions or exploring entirely new interests.
Why solitude is necessary for healing
Although the instinct after a breakup might be to fill your calendar with distractions, solitude serves as a crucial healing space. Solitude differs fundamentally from lonelinessâit’s productive alone time that allows for self-reflection and emotional processing.
Being alone after a breakup provides the space to:
- Face emotions directly rather than suppressing them
- Process what happened without external influences
- Reconnect with your intuition and inner voice
- Develop emotional resilience through self-reliance
Many people rush into new relationships or busy activities to escape the discomfort of being alone. Nonetheless, this avoidance prevents true healing and self-discovery. As counterintuitive as it seems, learning to be comfortable with your own company establishes the foundation for genuine recovery.
How to rebuild confidence and self-worth
Your self-worth isn’t determined by someone else’s decision to leave. Although heartbreak can feel like confirmation of your deepest insecurities, rebuilding begins with challenging these beliefs.
First, examine your inner dialog. Notice when your thoughts turn self-critical, then practice replacing them with self-compassionate alternatives. Instead of “I’m not good enough,” shift to “I am enough as I am, and I’m always growing.”
Subsequently, rebuild trust with yourself through consistent small promisesâtaking that walk you planned or setting a boundary when needed. Each fulfilled commitment reinforces your self-reliance.
Finally, prioritize self-care as an affirmation of your inherent worth. This isn’t selfish; it’s a necessary practice in recognizing that you deserve care simply because you exist, not because you earned it through someone else’s approval.
Understanding Your Emotional Needs
Emotional needs form the foundation of relationship satisfaction and understanding them is crucial when learning how to get over someone. After a breakup, examining these needs offers valuable insights into both why the relationship ended and what you truly require in future connections.
The 3 core emotional needs in relationships
At their most fundamental level, relationships fulfill three essential emotional needs. First, we all need safety and securityâthe feeling that we can trust our partner and feel protected both physically and emotionally. Second, we require autonomyâthe ability to maintain our individual identity while being in a relationship. Third, we need love and belongingâthe feeling of being genuinely cared for, accepted, and valued for who we are.
These core needs develop early in life through our interactions with caregivers. When these needs are consistently met in childhood, we typically form secure attachment patterns. Yet many of us experienced childhoods where one or more of these fundamental needs went unfulfilled.
How unmet needs lead to recurring patterns
Unmet emotional needs create powerful unconscious patterns that repeat themselves in adult relationships. For instance, if your need for safety went unmet in childhood, you might find yourself either constantly seeking reassurance from partners or pushing them away before they can abandon you.
These patterns manifest in what psychologists call attachment styles. People with anxious attachment tend to fear abandonment and seek constant validation, whereas those with avoidant styles appear emotionally unavailable despite craving connection.
Likewise, unmet childhood needs for autonomy can lead to either clingy behavior or difficulty with intimacy in adult relationships. As one expert notes, “When a schema is formed based on a healthy upbringing, these typically generalize to healthy and adaptive adult schemas”. Conversely, unhealthy schemas distort how we respond emotionally and behaviorally.
Identifying your needs for future relationships
To break recurring patterns after a breakup, first acknowledge that having needs doesn’t make you “needy”âit makes you human. Begin by asking yourself: “What makes me feel emotionally and physically safe?” and “Where do I feel autonomous and capable?”
Next, examine your past relationship. Which needs were met, and which went unfulfilled? Were you seeking external validation when you needed to develop self-trust? Did you compromise core values to maintain the relationship?
Recognizing these patterns creates the opportunity for change. Remember, identifying your emotional needs empowers you to ask for them to be met and set clear boundaries in future relationships.
Conclusion
Heartbreak represents one of life’s most challenging experiences, yet science shows us that healing is both possible and inevitable. Throughout this guide, we’ve explored why losing someone hurts so deeplyâbecause relationships literally become part of our neural pathways and identity. Your pain makes perfect sense when we understand that your brain physically restructures itself around a partner’s presence.
Nevertheless, this pain eventually subsides as you take deliberate steps toward recovery. Rebuilding meaning comes not through distraction but through reconnecting with people who truly matter and creating new routines that honor your authentic self. Additionally, seeing your past relationship clearlyâwithout idealization or demonizationâhelps break unhealthy patterns and prevents carrying old wounds into new connections.
The journey back to yourself after a breakup certainly requires patience and self-compassion. Solitude becomes your ally in this process, offering space for genuine emotional processing rather than avoidance. Remember that understanding your core emotional needs provides valuable insight into what you truly require from future relationships.
Most importantly, getting over someone doesn’t mean forgetting them or erasing their impact on your life. Instead, it means integrating that experience into your story while continuing to write new chapters. You carry forward the growth while leaving behind the pain. The parts of yourself discovered through loving another person remain yours to keepâthey belong to you, not the relationship.
Healing happens gradually, then suddenly. Therefore, trust this process even when progress feels slow. One day, you’ll realize the sharp pain has transformed into something gentlerâperhaps even gratitude for what was learned. Until then, be kind to yourself as you rebuild, rediscover, and ultimately reclaim your whole and complete identity.
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