Today’s post is going to start off where part one ended: what happens when love is lost.
Broken Attachment
Even before a breakup happens, most people can sense their relationship is failing long before it is officially over. The limbic brain senses that you are in one of the most terrible dangers a human can experience: disconnection. Anxiety flares. The neocortex tries to find evidence to make sense of your inarticulate emotional experiences, getting stuck on rational details like what exactly was said or done that indicates the attachment is being threatened.
When a romantic attachment starts to feel less secure, most relationships begin to polarize into a pursue/withdraw pattern. In other words, one partner chases and the other pulls away. The pursuer experiences the other as unavailable or unresponsive and attempts to seek contact and reconnect with increasing intensity. The withdrawer experiences the pursuer as emotionally unsafe and withdraws both physically and emotionally (which only heightens the pursuer’s anxiety). This cycle usually intensifies over time. Each spin around the cycle stretches the attachment ever further, until eventually, it breaks.
The Aftermath of a Breakup
Almost everyone in the aftermath of a lost cherished relationship describes the same experience: feeling devastated about the loss, being obsessed with thoughts of their Ex, feeling an overwhelming desire to reconnect, doing compulsive things in efforts to maintain proximity with their Ex, and feeling absolutely helpless to stop those feelings- even when they really want to and know they should. It’s even more terrible and confusing when their relationship seemed satisfying and meaningful.
All humans are terribly impacted by the horrible feelings that rejection creates. Many people describe the moment they realized their relationship was ending as having an unreal quality to it- like a nightmare. In these first moments when you are confronted with rejection or abandonment, everything in your body goes into survival mode. For humans, like most mammals, abandonment is a primary trauma. When you lose your partner, your body, mind, and emotions experience it as a direct threat to your survival and fundamental well-being. When loss is happening neurotransmitters like dopamine and norepinephrine soar, creating intense agitation and emotionality. When enduring the trauma of abandonment, you may be flooded with anxiety that can border on panic or terror.
The 9 Phases of Post-Breakup Trauma
Protest and Despair
Even if you are the one initiating the breakup, in the moment that you separate from the person to whom you have been so strongly attached you are still likely to have an intense emotional reaction. The emotions associated with a threatened primary attachment feel less like sadness and more like a threat to your very existence. This primal experience can be very confusing for people, and the fear and anxiety they feel at the moment of separation can make them think that maybe they should stay in the relationship after all (even if the relationship is very unhealthy for them). The drive to reestablish contact is so strong that it can feel absolutely overwhelming and impossible to resist. This is why people call and text even when they know they shouldn’t, stalk Facebook and Instagram pages, and arrange for unexpected encounters, even when the object of their affection no longer wants anything to do with them.,
Like protest, despair has very distinct characteristics and is a coherent physiological and psychological state. Despair begins as frantic efforts to reconnect collapse, single-minded hope is replaced with hopelessness and a new certainty that the beloved is not coming back.
Withdrawal
As I discussed in part one, romantic love is experienced through the same reward and motivation systems that illicit drugs hijack when you get high and falling in love is similar to having a fierce substance addiction. Therefore, when love is taken away, everything inside of you blazes into a fury of craving and need. The experience of jilted lovers is highly consistent with symptoms of withdrawal to addictive substances.
Obsession
Obsession fuels love. Early stage love is characterized by obsessions that percolate excited feelings and daydreams about your lover. Similarly, a bad breakup is defined by dark obsessions that spin out into nightmarish anxieties. One important thing to understand about obsessions after a breakup is that because losing an attachment triggers the biological, physiological experience of love, your thoughts about your Ex are much more likely to be focused on their positive qualities. This means you will once again begin to idealize your lover, downplay their flaws, and focus on the wonderful parts of your relationship.
Information Gathering
If you can’t communicate with your lover or have actual contact with them, gathering information about them is another way to keep your beloved close to you. You may watch their social media pages to gain insight into their state of mind, make sense of what happened, look for evidence of where they’ve been, who they’re with, and how they’re feeling. You try to interpret small clues and nuances from things they post about how they feel. Are they sad? Do they care? Do they still love you? You may personalize their online activity, interpreting posts and pictures as efforts to communicate with you.
Love and Hate
Interestingly, even when people are very angry with their rejecting partner, their brain scans still give evidence of much of the same activity as romantically attracted people. This implies that as intense as your hatred toward your Ex might be, it doesn’t necessarily extinguish feelings of love. The truth is, love and hate are close neighbors, neurologically speaking, occupying nearly the same small patch of real estate in your brain. They fuel each other and tend to go hand in hand- which may be why your partner can incite rage and irrationality in you in the way that no one else can. The true opposite of love isn’t hate at all, but indifference; heartbroken lovers are anything but indifferent.
Physical Symptoms
Studies have found that people in long-term relationships tend to impact each other physiologically. Stable relationships create a sense of security and co-regulation that has physical implications. When that security is disrupted, it takes a physical toll. Abrupt disconnection from a long-term lover creates changes in sleeping and eating patterns, affects your immune system, and triggers a stress response.
Loss of Self-Esteem
Breakups are so fundamentally traumatizing and damaging to your self-esteem because of the rejection at the core of the experience. If you are heartbroken, it means that you really loved your Ex. You believed they loved you. You gave yourself to them and trusted them to love you back. When they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, it feels like a statement about your worth. If you had been better, sexier, more fun, more accomplished, less difficult, or more lovable, you would have been enough for them. They would have loved you better. Instead, they hurt you, mistreated you, or simply rejected you. When the one person you totally opened up to changes their mind about you, it changes the way you feel about yourself. Self-confidence can feel shattered; when you lose value in the eyes of your Ex, you lose value in your own eyes as well.
Social and Other Losses
In the midst of your inner torment, the outside reality of your life may be in shambles as well. You lose so much when a relationship ends. Your other friendships may be strained, attempts to spend time with friends you knew as a couple may be awkward. You are decimated by pain and may be in the grips of a feverish compulsion to know everything about your Ex, making interactions uncomfortable for everyone. The loyalties of your friends may be divided. Losing your relationship may make you feel like you have lost your entire life.
Relapse
Months, even years after a breakup, a chance run-in with an Ex can trigger all the old desires and longings. Often, Exaholics in recovery are also triggered by seeing certain people, being in particular places, or hearing songs that remind them of their Ex. Such exposures can bring about a new round of craving and obsessive thinking, and even trigger a new flurry of texting, calling, and lurking around in efforts to reconnect with their lost love.
If you are reading this wondering, “Is this ever going to get better?”- the answer is yes. The next blog post will be focused on the path to recovery: the stages of healing, how to cope while you’re recovering, and healing through the twelve steps of Exaholics.
DM me on Instagram @onceuponatimeonhinge with questions, comments, or just to discuss this post further!
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