Many people have good intentions when a loved one is experiencing a breakup, offering advice on how to navigate through the pain, things to do to keep busy, and help in moving forward with activities and socializing. The primary thing is to remember self-love.
Sometimes that gets lost during the course of a partnership, especially one that’s faltering. Before the grieving or healing process from the breakup can begin, finding love for oneself again is crucial.
That will disallow blame when it comes to discerning reasons things didn’t work out. It’s important to remember that relationships don’t always work because simply two people are incompatible for any number of reasons.
No one person is at fault. Check out some helpful hints on how to work toward self-love when you’re experiencing a breakup.
Loving yourself again after a breakup
The loss of a partner is tough, but it’s even more challenging when you’ve also lost sight of your self-love. That can begin to happen as the partnership starts to spiral. A lot of that has to do with individuals finding personal blame for things that are not working in the relationship.
In most cases, people don’t recognize when a breakdown starts to happen; it’s no one person’s fault. Generally, if needs are not being met, there’s miscommunication or an overall lack of communication, and that’s often because two people don’t know how to talk to each other.
Sometimes that’s simply because they don’t try to learn the other person’s style or they’re incompatible. How people react to the incompatibility or the lack of effort is where the fault comes into play, especially if someone decides to cheat.
In order to begin the process of grieving, you need to find your path back to loving yourself to avoid pointing fingers or self-blame. What steps can you take to get back to that point so you can move forward? Let’s dive in.
1. Accepting it takes two to make it work and two for a partnership to fall
When a partnership is thriving, both people are putting forth an effort to ensure that it does. Relationships aren’t all roses and sunshine all the time. There are highs and lows, a lot of hectic days, and the need to attempt to avoid complacency.
Sometimes one person has to be strong when the other is weak, and then the other picks up when their partner falls. Rough patches must be navigated with communication effectively instead of anyone shutting down or attempting to resist conflict.
When couples work together as a team, the connection deepens, and the bond grows stronger. When these things break down or don’t exist, it’s because these individuals are not compatible as a couple, or there’s no effort between them being exerted to make the partnership effective. That’s not a “fault” issue; it’s just not meant.
An essential step to loving yourself again after the loss is to find what might have been some positive experiences from the partnership instead of focusing on what was negative.
2. Don’t judge yourself
The challenge when a breakup happens is avoiding the urge to beat yourself up for lousy judgment when choosing partners.
Attraction is something not even scientists can explain, and it’s certainly not anything you have control over. It doesn’t always correlate with compatibility necessarily.
After that initial infatuation stage or honeymoon phase, when the reality of the relationship sets in, that’s when compatibility begins to register. When you recognize that the individual is far from someone you would typically be with, don’t kick yourself for a bad decision.
It’s as important to love yourself enough to appreciate that you caught the problems sooner instead of when things went too far.
That self-love will provide you the courage to navigate the breakup and learn from the experience to try to be more selective instead of reacting based solely on attraction when meeting new people.
These are the sorts of lessons that make you a much stronger person and help you to find the healthy, lasting partnership you’re meant to have.
3. Be gentle with yourself and allow the healing to begin
Experiencing the loss of a partner can be devastating, creating an overwhelm of emotions that are difficult to manage. The priority is to be gentle and loving to yourself during this time, allowing the feelings and emotions to flow when they happen.
That doesn’t mean only when you’re alone privately in your room late at night. You could have a trigger when you’re in the middle of a public setting with friends when seeing something that reminds you of your ex, causing you to cry your eyes out. Let that happen.
There are no rules you need to abide by or restrictions on where you’re allowed to be triggered.
You shouldn’t feel like you need to avoid seeing friends or family in case this were to happen or feel bad when you react to memories. Loved ones understand what you’re going through, hoping you’ll come around despite believing you’ll bring the mood down. Allow yourself to be human.
4. There’s no timeline
Regardless of how long you might have dated or been together, it won’t dictate the amount of time it takes for you to work through the healing phase. If it was a tough relationship that was especially hard on your self-esteem and diminished your self-love, it could take longer to work through the process.
Or if it was someone with whom you experienced a great relationship, developing love and a deep connection, it could be tough to comprehend it coming to an end, let alone finding a way to heal.
It is important not to let anyone tell you how long it should take to “get better” from the breakup. Loved ones will try to get you to move forward sooner rather than later.
Finding self-love and healing will happen in your own time. Whether that is a matter of weeks or months will be up to you, not loved ones or experts on the internet. While society is overall deadline-based, loving yourself through a breakup doesn’t fall under a deadline.
5. Mistakes will happen
Allow self-compassion and self-love when making mistakes; there will be quite a few when devastated by a breakup with a partner.
Sometimes you might find the ideal way to handle the turmoil you’re enduring is by typing up a “scathing” text letting the ex know all the things you believe they did wrong and releasing all the bad thoughts you now have for them.
Then you do it again maybe 36 times in the 2’oclock early morning hour when the emotions are festering. But then, when calm, you reach out later in the week by calling to see how you can patch things up to try to get back together.
You won’t do all the right things in an emotional state, nor given the fact that you’re human going through a great deal of confusion. In hindsight, you might be embarrassed by what happened at the height of emotion, but you’ll have self-love to soothe the feelings of humiliation.
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6. Forgive your ex and yourself
In order to love, there has to be forgiveness. The biggest reason to forgive is to allow yourself to heal and move forward. It will enable you the compassion to find the self-love you might have lost while enduring the breaking down of a relationship.
Forgiveness is often misunderstood to be about forgetting what might have happened or any wrongdoing on the other person’s part. Forgiveness is not for the other person.
It’s about releasing yourself from the hold that person has on you and allowing yourself to move forward. It’s letting go and acceptance of the ending.
This is when you can look back over the partnership to see what was really wrong with the relationship, where things weren’t quite right between you. You can pick up the lessons that you’re meant to take with you moving forward. Everyone should bring life lessons from each couplehood.
These create your communication style, how you handle conflict, and how you compromise. So when a lasting relationship comes along, it can grow healthy and strong based on these previous partnerships.
You’ll learn to appreciate that you had each of them and how they made you love yourself.
Conclusion
When going through a breakup, it can be challenging to love yourself when you, instead, want to self-blame for your part in the ending or wonder why you might not be good enough for a partner to stick around.
Finding self-love is essential for healing, recognizing your worth, and understanding that looking for faults won’t be helpful or healthy.
The most beneficial approach to moving toward acceptance is to search for lessons, what you can take with you, and what you might be able to do the next time more effectively.
When these become apparent, you will have developed compassion, love, and forgiveness for yourself and the relationship and can move forward healthfully.
