Gone Yet Everlasting
Why It’s So Hard to Move On After a Breakup
When someone dies most people understand the well-known process one goes through. It has to do with the 5 stages of grief and the rewiring of the neural mapping in your brain. When a relationship ends, whether it be in 1 year, 6+ years, or 15 years, the process is very similar.
When my last long-term relationship ended I realized something crucial. In my mind, my partner was gone and yet still very much alive. I struggled to make sense of this dichotomy. Though I chose to end the relationship for good reasons I was still left with the devastation of trying to pick up the pieces of my life and create something new from scratch — all while processing the loss of love.
I waded through seemingly endless amounts of reading in my search for an answer to what I was feeling. I wanted it to go away — FAST. No such luck. What I found, however, was some science, coupled with psychology, that allowed me to at least understand and accept the process I was entangled in. I had an enormous rewiring job ahead of me which explained the seemingly unending grief. I was going to have to gain new lived experience and repetition of that experience to rewire my brain to make sense of his absence and move forward into a new reality.
When a long-term relationship ends, the person gone is still very much alive in…
