Strategies for Overcoming Previous Romantic attachment

Strategies for Moving On from Previous Romantic Relationships

In the aftermath of a breakup, navigating the path to healing can be a challenging journey. Here are some insights from renowned thinkers and authors that may help in this process.

Distinguishing love from infatuation can be a crucial step in moving forward, according to Susan Shapiro. In an article for Redbook Magazine, she explains that love is appreciating a person's qualities even if they are not perfect, while infatuation involves idealizing a person with unrealistic expectations.

Henri Nouwen, a renowned theologian, suggests that the emptiness within you after a breakup should be willingly experienced, not the one who could temporarily take it away. This perspective allows us to build a new foundation and begin to define who we are and what we aspire to be.

According to Nouwen, the fastest way to heal from a breakup is to continue to love deeply and to open your heart to the possibility of future love. The pain that comes from deep love makes your love ever more fruitful.

Remembering the impermanence of any relationship can be especially freeing when healing from a breakup. As the Buddhist tradition teaches us, much of our suffering is born in clinging to relationships and material items, attaching ourselves to their permanent status. To avoid this suffering, we should get comfortable with the idea that everything in life is transient.

Psychiatrist Mark Epstein suggests that intimacy puts us in touch with fragility and the acceptance of fragility opens us to intimacy. To love means to appreciate the fleetingness of a relationship, to be able to embrace impermanence.

Retraining the mind from rehashing old memories to envisioning an optimistic future is part of making the decision to let go, a sentiment echoed by John Grohol. Making this decision is the first step to healing after a breakup.

A heartbreak can inspire self-growth and gift a sense of independence and vitality, as noted by various authors. Jean-Yves Leloup explains that we must undergo hardships, breakups, and narcissistic wounds, which shatter the flattering images that we had of ourselves, in order to discover two truths: that we are not who we thought we were; and that the loss of a cherished pleasure is not necessarily the loss of true happiness and well-being.

Nicholas Sparks encapsulates this idea succinctly: "The emotion that can break your heart is sometimes the very one that heals it." Mark Epstein, in his book Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart, writes that when we take loved objects into our egos with the hope or expectation of having them forever, we are deluding ourselves and postponing an inevitable grief. The solution is not to deny attachment but to become less controlling in how we love.

In the words of Oscar Wilde, "the heart was made to be broken." Yet, as we navigate the journey of healing, these insights can provide a compass, guiding us towards a path of self-discovery, growth, and ultimately, healing.