How can you make breaking up easier? How can you support yourself through the process?
Join Reid Mihalko from ReidAboutSex.com and Cathy Vartuli from TheIntimacyDojo.com as they discuss making breaking up easier!
Cathy: Hi, everyone. Breakups are pretty hard. What are five ways you can make breakups easier on yourself?
Reid: Tune in now. We will tell you as we pull the answers out of our butts. I’m Reid Mihalko from ReidAboutSex.com.
Cathy: I’m Cathy Vartuli from TheIntimacyDojo.com.
Reid: What’s yours?
Cathy: The first thing is to ask for help. A lot of times we breakup and we’re very focused on our ex. A lot of us have built our world around our ex. It’s real. This is a great time that we talk to friends you have now or that you might’ve left in the wake of the relationship and say, “Hey, you know sorry I was lost in new relationship energy or whatever.”
Reid: Your friend’s going to be like, “Uh-huh (affirmative), yeah fall in love, disappear. Now breakup. Now you come back crawling to your friends.”
Cathy: Most of them will … most of the time they’ll be like, “Okay.” They’ve been there.
Reid: Yeah, just totally own it. Be like, “Yes, I fell in love. I fell off the face of the earth. Now I need your help because breakups suck.”
Nothing’s wrong. We have … there’s lots of interesting studies going on now that talk about what’s going on in your brain when you’re in love and what’s going on in your brain when you’re falling out of love.
Cathy: Like withdrawal from the dopamine and all the stuff in your head.
Reid: You are completely normal when you’re obsessing and can’t get your ex out of your mind. You’re like late at night after two or three drinks, you’re like …
Cathy: “I should call.”
Reid: “I should call them. I should call them.” You’re obsessive compulsiveness is normal because your blood chemistry’s changing.
This is the stuff you need to … you can reach out to your friends and be like, “Listen, can you just make sure I don’t call them?”
If you’re like me, because of smart phones, I don’t know my closest friend’s or my … even my partner; I don’t have their phone number memorized. I would recommend deleting your ex’s number from your phone. It will make it harder for you to call them.
Put your good friends on speed dial. Call them when you need … when you’re feeling the need to call your partner. We’ve all been through this. Re-establishing those connections in the midst of a breakup with your ex, that’s going to prolong the chemistry. You want to quit cold turkey as much as you can. Go through your little withdrawals. That’s normal. We all do this for the most part.
Cathy: Another cool thing is by reconnecting with your friends, you help…the primitive part of our brain really likes to have connection. It feels scared if it’s alone. That makes sense when we evolved, that part of our brain evolved, if we weren’t with our tribe, we pretty much were bear meat.
We get scared when we lose that connection with someone. Invite your friends to fill up your schedule a little bit so that you have activities to do. That part of your brain goes, “Okay, maybe I don’t have that particular person who I really like or really had good connections with in the past, but I’m still getting some connections, some social interaction. So, I’m not feeling so alone and abandoned.”
Reid: Other current tips from modern day society, go into your Facebook preferences and take them … either unfriend them. You can say, “Listen, we’re going through a breakup. I’m gonna unfriend you for three or four months just so that I don’t have your social schedule all up in my Facebook.” Set the … whatever the preference is because Facebook changes every week, whatever the …. Thank you, Facebook.
Change the preference so that they don’t come up in your feed as often. Just understand that when you want to go check out their page, it’s because you’re obsessing. That’s okay. Really, that for me in working with people …
Cathy: Yeah, stop beating yourself up.
Reid: That’s the biggest piece. You end up trying to draw out your withdrawal symptoms. You guys can be friends, but be friends three or four months from now. Honestly, this is my best advice to make the transition the smoothest as possible.
Do not call each other or see each other for three months. I always say six. Non one ever … I’ve never coached that’s been able to do six. Trust me on this. It helps. It helps you guys disengage and unweave the lives you guys have been doing.
Some people break up with really good people. You actually want to be friends. It just wasn’t good for you guys to be romantic. Even that, I would say, don’t see each other for three months. If you’re really destined to be friends, you’ll be friends later. It’ll be easy to re-establish it.
Cathy: One thing that’s helped me is to actually schedule in my calendar with the person. During the breakup, we agree … I don’t want … that’s best for both of us if we don’t talk for three months. If we actually put something in the calendar that gives my brain something to … “Okay, this much ….” There’s a … there’s not an indefinite we’ll never see each other again. It gives my brain some place to relax.
Reid: Three months from now let’s have a check-in.
Cathy: You’ll have a coffee or ….
Reid: If you really need to get information to each other, do it through your friend network. This is all stuff as you guys are breaking up, you can set this up.
Cathy: You can actually set it up before. Reid has a great article on exit strategies on his Web site. I thought that was brilliant, having agreement on how … what would happen if you break up is just really powerful.
Reid: Yeah, that you can do while you’re starting to fall in love. Not because it’s some weird, “Oh, my God, we’re declaring or predicting the end of our relationship.” You guys are having conversations about what you would need to do. Sometimes in those conversations around breaking up, you figure out better ways of communicating while you’re together.
Cathy: Yeah, and can actually add security to the relationship. You know every fight isn’t the end. “We’ve agreed to wait for the weekend to talk it through,” or whatever; okay, it’s not the end of the world.”
Reid: Breaking up is hard to do. It’s okay. You’re not supposed to be black belt ninja at breakups. Have your friends … I’m doing a recap right now…have your friends … in case you feel it was not obvious to you or to you. Have your friends … source your friends to fill up your social calendar to be the people that you drunk dial instead of your ex. Lower the status of the profile updates from your ex; even unfriend them for a couple of months so that you guys can go through withdrawals together.
That’s going to be really useful and leverage your friends. My biggest bit of advice is don’t see each other for three months, which is going to be really hard. It’s going to be way wonkier and more hard trying to kind of see each and be friends while you’re still obsessed with each other.
It’s just going to piss you off when they go out on a date with somebody else or they find out you went out on a date. It’s just going to be weird. I’m an advocate for very conscious cold turkeyness.
Cathy: Yes, have an exit strategy if you can. The last one I want to add is take care of yourself. Be gentle. Do what things nurture you. Take a bath. Schedule a nice restaurant with a friend, whatever. Do things so that you feel taken care of and pampered a little bit. That can make a huge difference.
Reid: Yup, I hope this was useful.
Cathy: Thank you. Please leave comments below.
Reid: Bye.
Cathy: Bye.