5 Signs You are Winning the Breakup (& Why Breakup Hurts)

The phrase “winning the breakup” is gaining fast popularity. The title is conventionally given to the partner who seemingly moves on faster, living an enviable life with a hot new partner as seen on social media. By conventionally, I mean as illustrated in How I Met Your Mother. As the mainstream sitcom expresses humorously, there is a growing need for proving to our ex that we’re doing better than them by putting on a show, trying to postpone or bypass the mourning process by repressing our feelings. We try to justify our new reality after dejecting from a loved one by proving or asserting our “value” over theirs. This is a completely natural defense mechanism: this person was partially responsible for our self-esteem and now we’re dry on their reassurance. How dare they not give us our daily dose of validation? We’ll just go chase it elsewhere!

But although validation is important, we must eventually come to terms with the gravity of the situation and the emotional rollercoaster ride we’re about to take. We had a vulnerable, loving relationship, and now all of a sudden we’re supposed to act like they don’t matter to us at all. No wonder every artist in existence has a song about this complicated transition: it is a huge loss. After huge losses, we experience mourning. We lose many valued things in the form of activities, habits, and rituals at the end of a relationship, but more importantly, we lose:

• The object of love (our ex)

• Our perceived self-image when our ex was around

• The reciprocity of the love from our ex.

… says Freud, not me.

We try our darndest to minimize the magnitude of the damage at first, but what's done is done. The truth of the matter is, a secure emotional connection with a trusted partner is seen as vital to our survival, and as such, a breakup is perceived as “dangerous” in our primitive brain, and is very disruptive to our emotional stability.

Why Breakups Hurt

According to Sigmund Freud, mourning is the means by which we detach from these objects which we used to direct so much of our energy. By reminiscing on the memories and re-labeling them as “sad,” “embarrassing,” “stupid” rather than the feelings we actually experienced while they were happening, we actively disengage our loving energy from them, which then gets freed to be redirected elsewhere. Similarly, although Sigmund doesn’t use the exact terminology in his papers, we try to “win the breakup” to experience an egoistic gratification; by creating the circumstances to believe we’re doing far better than our ex, we partially counteract the damage our ego experiences when it is no longer subjected to their love.

So, let’s take a step away from the shallow depth of our conscious awareness, and break down the actual signs of moving on after a breakup.

1)You’re allowing yourself to feel the pain of their absence

It’s only understandable after a breakup to try to make the other party feel inferior, or to make ourselves feel superior —this is the work of our ego. The ego’s job is to protect our self-image and importance; to make sure we never feel the pain and hurt we've felt in the past. But the catch is, if we let the ego guide the majority of our behavior, we risk putting ourselves in a situation where our ego will simply overshadow the pain, stagnating the mourning process for the breakup, getting us stuck, wondering where it all went wrong. Because as stated before, mourning has a purpose: by attaching sadness and other emotions to the memories and lost lover we can reclaim our “libido” (love) to use it elsewhere. If we refuse to engage in this vital process indefinitely, we will never reclaim this precious loving energy: it’ll simply become invisibly stuck in the subconscious hell of repressed emotions.

This is a huge risk: Freud himself points out that if the mourning process is prolonged too far by chronically postponing dealing with painful emotions, the energy we use to suppress emotions dissipates, instead of the pain itself.

If you focus your energy on avoiding the painful mourning process rather than engaging in it, not only the mourning will remain unresolved, you will also eventually run out of all the energy that you use to suppress the pain, leaving you defenseless and clueless when they eventually resurface in a perhaps seemingly unrelated manner. This may lead to what father Freud calls “melancholia” aka. modern-day depression: “Catching up on your self-destructive ways, the ego as a last resort will shut off the in and outflow of love (to yourself and others) in a vital attempt to prevent its extinction.”

2)You are laying off the use of drugs and distractions that offer temporary relief

The foundational collective misunderstanding of our era, with the half-blind approaches of modern medicine and the “minimum effort, maximum convenience” mindset 21st century overall, presents itself once again. “If I fix the visible portion of the problem it’s resolved,” we seem to think. Beyond our approach to breakups, this may well be extended to any kind of mental illness since with all due respect, modern science focuses overwhelmingly on the symptoms of said illnesses rather than roots or causes, as those are simpler to resolve. But curing the symptoms of a disease is not enough: it’s only half the recovery. Just like the weeds in a field of grass, any problem will present itself until the root cause is addressed. The good news is, you will probably have other experiences in your life that give you other chances to learn to sit with your pain, although it gets more complicated each time. I guess, that actually is… the good news and the bad news.

Managing the symptoms with substances, distractions, medications etc. are only helpful if we can stay aware that they’re not real solutions and use the opportunity under their influence as a way to gradually progress towards a real solution. But these are dangerous waters. Raw emotions are more insightful. But do what you’ve got to do, and please remember to wake up to forgive yourself every day.

For some people, using substances may make it easier to give them the courage to face the dark side of the moon. So proceed at your own risk with them and be wary of the risks.

By making it a habit to leave the roots buried down, when more weeds grow eventually you will

• have less practice with how to deal with them, and

• have to trim the weeds so often you can’t focus on growing the grass.

Waiting too long will both cost us this valuable practice and allow the roots of the problem to run deeper, both of which make it nasty if not impossible to rip out the roots. Trimming down or pushing away uncomfortable things doesn’t make them go away!

If this sounds too obvious to be pointed out, look around. It’s shocking to see so many people, from every layer of intelligence, social status, intellectual profundity and wealth, trying to bury their feelings down, assuming they’ll get away with it. In fact, this is what the pursuit of “winning the breakup” is all about: focusing more on proving to others of having moved on than doing the work that will actually help with moving on, of which the first step is accepting the pain. It’s frustrating to have to restate this: repressing your emotions doesn’t mean you’ve gotten rid of them, and the further you push them down and for longer, the more control they have over your everyday decision.

The deeper you bury an emotion down, the more power it has over you. That’s right: Feelings you decide to never confront have the ultimate control of your behavior. They cause a number of malicious cycles that justify and strengthen your reasoning as to why you shouldn’t confront them, and lead you to engage in ridiculous self-sabotages just so you can chase safety, on a constant run from the truth. If you'd like to read more about this phenomenon, check out my book Self Realization Journal.

3)You are being honest to yourself (and others, if you choose to share) about your mental state

Some people argue with me on this, debating that we can live just fine never letting out the pain of detaching from a loved one. In a way, they’re right. We can. We can push our emotions down from our conscious awareness and deep into our subconscious for an entire lifetime. It’s possible.

But as much as we can avoid facing feelings, we can never avoid facing the consequences of having done so.

One study examining the predictors for a long and healthy life found that expressing emotions freely was more important than diet, nutrition, and level of physical activity. Cancer patients who report “positive mood” (those who suppress their negative emotions) die sooner than those who report higher levels of anxiety and depression.

Darwin argues that emotional expression is crucial to the success of our species evolutionarily and that when emotional responses are repressed, so will all other physiological responses crucial to survival. Carl Jung attributed the reasons for insincerity, emotional underdevelopment and “progressive alienation from man’s foundations” to denying certain parts of oneself.

4)You are neither villainizing nor victimizing yourself or your ex

Your brain knows truths you might never consciously be aware of. The temptation to rewrite the story and to over-analyze the past does not help you constructively analyze patterns —only your therapist can do that. No matter how intellectually well-appointed you may be, when emotions are at work, your brain (and the ones of those close to you) are so biased that they are barely capable of any valuable input.

-Paul Ekman, Ph. D.

After an emotionally charged situation like a breakup, our feelings can create a great deal of confusion, and they affect how we think as well as how we recount the story to others. Trying to think through will not only be counterproductive, but it might also push you into feelings of paranoia and panic. Worse yet if you are the type to suppress these feelings, in which case, they are able to affect your thinking without you even being aware of it.

Only after you’ve felt through all the pain, and the joy, and relived the bittersweet memories until you are empty are you able to think logically and see things neutrally.

5) You are using this experience to build up courage instead of fear.

Perhaps the most dangerous risk of neglecting our feelings is cultivating ourselves into a coward. Simply because, you reap what you sow. If you use your energy to resist your inner truth, rather than learning to let it flow through yourself, then that’s the skill you will improve, running low on practice on the other. Emre Soyer and Robin M Hogarth, in their article on Harvard Business Review, inform that we rely on the weight of experience to make judgments and decisions.

Our choices are driven from the past results of our endeavors, what we’ve seen with our own eyes and heard with our own ears: not by our interpretations of the events and what we tell ourselves we should do. (For psych nerds: The former is referred to as predictive utility.) The moral of the story is:

We can avoid facing feelings. We can never avoid the consequences of having done so.

After all, the results of our past experiences provide the most accurate barometer to our authentic future success, overpoweringly so than any of the stories the thinking mind creates. We make decisions about whether we’re going to accomplish something or steer clear of it, leave the country and start a band or stay in school and work a job you hate all based on our previous experiences, and then we create explanations for our actions, not the other way around!

To put it all together; you can fool others, but never yourself; and it’s not what you tell yourself or others which determines if you’re a doer or a talker, it’s the things your brain knows you did or didn’t do, in the past. That’s why when someone is brave at heart, absolutely nothing will faze them; because in order to get where they are mentally, they’ve had to indefinitely experience and hone the relentlessness to go up and beyond against the foolish expectations, pressure of relatives, fear of failure, expectation of the worst, unsupportive friends, hellfire preachers. They’ve cultivated tried and true methods for overcoming adversities, including their own negative mindset and now that’s what their mind will serve them to do more of.

If someone’s a coward, on the other hand, then they are a coward; end of story. That’s where their story begins, and that’s where it ends. They may have lived through an entirely different scenario in their minds. But essentially, what someone has experienced in their minds really doesn’t change what has happened here on concrete earth. They will still base their future actions on their past strategies. To raise the stakes even higher, just like bravery and hope, cowardice will present itself in every endeavor the individual’s involved in, no matter how small. Because regardless of what stories they tell themselves and regardless of how many times they validate them via others, their subconscious will always be aware of their actual statistical likelihood of them climbing through obstacles, and their actions will be adjusted accordingly. The thinking mind will then create further stories and justifications for their actions so the ego can survive.

That’s why you see people around who either constantly hype themselves up or trash themselves down, complaining about every single aspect of life while couch-analyzing and using their mental fortitude to cloud their minds instead of facing challenges. Psychologically speaking, wallowing in pity is essentially the same thing as reeling in egoistic grandiosity. Both are powerful defense mechanisms of the ego, also referred to as “ego stories” about why the individual never follows through on anything they seek. These people fail to see or acknowledge all the wild opportunities passing them by all the time, because when you establish yourself to be a coward through your actions, you’ve exhausted all your options already. At a deep level on the iceberg of your consciousness, you're painfully aware that you’re not going to follow through on any of them, so why even bother acknowledging them? Your brain knows exactly who you are: whether you’re able to see it at a conscious level or not.

I know this is harsh to hear, but I’m telling you all of these because I already know you’re brave enough to accept that you’ve lost someone you cared about, as you’ve proved to yourself by reading this far into this article. In respect to your act of courage, I see it as my duty to lay out the real facts for you. Because the toxic positivity culture keeps preaching the horrendous idea that we can somehow move through life without having to confront the difficult periods. That’s why I’m brutally open about the real consequences of building up a character of cowardice. Winning the breakup isn’t that important because this process you’re undertaking holds the potential to craft way more than simply “winning the breakup.”

If you choose not to confront this empowering, challenging journey ahead of you for what it exactly is, then you’re also less likely to overcome the challenges that you must for any endeavor you take on moving forward, hence losing the breakup. The weakening or strengthening of your character amidst this grieving process is the ultimate cost. So stop worrying about proving to a person how little you care about them, and focus on fulfilling your duty to your own self: much more is at stake here!

When we make it a habit of running away from pain and strong emotions, before we know it, we’re living a life full of regret. In fact, the number one regret of dying people is “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” The decisions you make right now will affect the next ones consequentially and your decisions collectively make up your character. You’re writing history right now. The challenging journey ahead of you is the perfect opportunity for proving to yourself and to your subconscious being that you can take on absolutely any challenge that life may throw at you; and that starts right here, right now. How you handle this journey will be part of a blueprint for how you handle other challenging journeys, which are unavoidable as part of life. We can’t choose whether to experience pain or joy. We can only choose whether to live or merely stand by while we experience the joy and the sorrow and all that’s in between.

I believe in you if nobody else.

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Selin TanriVerdi

@SelinTV