How do you cope with break up when you have built your world around your ex and now that the relationship is over you feel completely lost and alone?
Chances are that you will have let friendships slide because you wanted to spend most if not all of your time with your ex.
When you are in love you seem to be magnetically drawn to the other person and although you don't deliberately neglect your friends it is not uncommon to suddenly find yourself isolated when you break up with a partner.
Your social life probably now revolves around things you and your ex enjoyed doing together and even if that involved socialising with friends, it will be awkward now that you are no longer part of a couple.
So no matter what the circumstances of your break up, you will probably feel pulled to try and still spend time with your ex, partly because you just want to be around them and partly because you feel like you don't have any other options.
It's natural to think that being around your ex and socialising around them has got to be less painful and miserable than stopping in with nothing but your thoughts.
But this is not the case. It may be less painful in the very short term, but it will not help you to move on and start to re-build your own social circle. How difficult will it be to be in the company of your ex and not be able to be with them, share private moments and shared glances.
There is nothing worse than putting yourself in this position and if your ex is a particularly nice person, they may well be giving you false hope of re-kindling the relationship just because they do not want to hurt your feelings anymore than they already have.
No, you need time and space to lick your wounds and you should not feel bad about indulging yourself in a short bout of misery - too long and it will be counter- productive and more difficult to climb out of.
You also need to give yourself time to really evaluate how you feel about your ex.
None of us take rejection very well and it is in our nature to want what we can't have. So our immediate reaction when a relationship breaks down is to try and get it back, not necessarily because that is what we really want, but because it is our instinct to do so.
So whilst you are keeping your distance from your ex, you are killing several birds with one stone.
You are giving yourself time to deal with the initial impact of the break up (in private). Time to think about how you are going to reconstruct your social life - because this is vital to you moving on. And time to think about how you really feel about your ex.
Chances are that you will have let friendships slide because you wanted to spend most if not all of your time with your ex.
When you are in love you seem to be magnetically drawn to the other person and although you don't deliberately neglect your friends it is not uncommon to suddenly find yourself isolated when you break up with a partner.
Your social life probably now revolves around things you and your ex enjoyed doing together and even if that involved socialising with friends, it will be awkward now that you are no longer part of a couple.
So no matter what the circumstances of your break up, you will probably feel pulled to try and still spend time with your ex, partly because you just want to be around them and partly because you feel like you don't have any other options.
It's natural to think that being around your ex and socialising around them has got to be less painful and miserable than stopping in with nothing but your thoughts.
But this is not the case. It may be less painful in the very short term, but it will not help you to move on and start to re-build your own social circle. How difficult will it be to be in the company of your ex and not be able to be with them, share private moments and shared glances.
There is nothing worse than putting yourself in this position and if your ex is a particularly nice person, they may well be giving you false hope of re-kindling the relationship just because they do not want to hurt your feelings anymore than they already have.
No, you need time and space to lick your wounds and you should not feel bad about indulging yourself in a short bout of misery - too long and it will be counter- productive and more difficult to climb out of.
You also need to give yourself time to really evaluate how you feel about your ex.
None of us take rejection very well and it is in our nature to want what we can't have. So our immediate reaction when a relationship breaks down is to try and get it back, not necessarily because that is what we really want, but because it is our instinct to do so.
So whilst you are keeping your distance from your ex, you are killing several birds with one stone.
You are giving yourself time to deal with the initial impact of the break up (in private). Time to think about how you are going to reconstruct your social life - because this is vital to you moving on. And time to think about how you really feel about your ex.
