Do you know how business professors heal their breakups? They take a course in How to Heal a Breakup… At least, I did… This happened to me a few years ago when I “lost” who I believed was “the love of my life.” In reality, that was one of the multiple stories I told myself.
Let’s call my ex-partner John… I’ve never dated a John… So, I am safe not to disclose any personal information.
At the time, the pain related to our breakup seemed unbearable. Later, I learned that people with my attachment style — anxious preoccupied — experience the strongest pain during the first 2–3 weeks after a breakup. Anxiously preoccupied people often crave high levels of closeness in relationships. We tend to put the relationship first, sometimes at the expense of self-care. As a result, we become rather sensitive to a rejection, and a breakup may strongly threaten our sense of self-worth.
In addition, during a breakup, the intensity of pain is related not only to the specific situation or partner we lose. It is reinforced by all the previous unresolved traumas that we didn’t heal in the past. This was exactly my case — an anxious person with an unprocessed abandonment wound, in combination with my basic needs for safety and emotional connection.
I didn’t know how to deal with that pain when my daughter told me, “Mom, why don’t you do something that you normally do when you don’t know what to do… look for an expert’s advice — read a book or take a course instead of looking for a solution in the dark.” Praising myself for raising such a smart individual, I googled healing a breakup training and, within a few minutes, signed up for a course offered by the online Personal Development School run by Thais Gibson https://www.instagram.com/thepersonaldevelopmentschool/. I went through the entire course within a couple of days pausing only for a few hours of sleep and a bit of food. It was such a relief to learn that there were actionable steps, backed up by science, to help me survive the pain.
I won’t go into every element of the course in this post. I’ll focus on a few key lessons that I learned and later shared with others who needed help. Some of the ideas that I’ll talk about don’t come directly from the course but are enhanced with further research and self-experimentation.
Lesson 1. Remember That Your Attachment Style Impacts the Way You Go Through a Breakup
Psychologists (Gibson T., 2020) talk about four attachment styles: secure, anxious preoccupied, avoidant dismissive, and fearful avoidant. While these styles are described as distinct, people normally show a blend of attachment patterns, with one style typically being more dominant than the others. When I took a test prior to delving into the course, my attachment blend was 45% anxious preoccupied, 33% secure, and 22% fearful avoidant.
There is a lot of literature that explains these styles in detail. I only want to give some context for the purpose of my story.
In general, people with secure attachment have healthy relationships with open and clear communication. The fact that these people are secure doesn’t mean that they don’t experience pain during a breakup. They do experience loss and sadness, but these feelings tend to be a bit more tolerable.
As mentioned earlier, anxious people have a subconscious fear of abandonment and rejection. They sacrifice themselves during a relationship to maintain it. During a breakup, their main fear becomes true — they get abandoned. Therefore, they experience pain immediately and with higher intensity.
People with avoidant attachment learned during their childhood that they must solely rely on themselves. Thus, they tend to withdraw and get easily overwhelmed in a relationship. Their pain is muted at the initial stages of a breakup, as they suppress it. However, pain hits them later with feelings of emptiness and depression.
Finally, fearful avoidant people — a mix of anxious and avoidant — experience an internal battle between being vulnerable and distant with their partners. As a result of a breakup, they experience similar extreme swings between pain and numbness.
The above description of emotional patterns experienced by people with different attachment styles is an oversimplification. These generalized tendencies vary depending on personal circumstances, the duration and stage of a relationship, unhealed wounds, and other factors. But understanding overall attachment patterns definitely helps. At least, it helped me. I realized that the amount of pain that I experienced was not something unusual; it was “expected” of someone with my attachment style. I was somewhat relieved to realize that my state was normal and that I was not weak. This realization helped me accept my pain instead of pushing it away.
Lesson 2: Use a Breakup to Heal Your Previous Traumas
Neuroscience (Barrette, 2017) tells us that our emotions are perception-based. What does this mean, and how does this work? Every life experience and emotions coloured by that experience get stored in our subconscious mind and body (i.e., pain, joy, anger). Over time, our subconscious mind/body doesn’t remember the actual event; it just remembers the feeling that we experienced. When we have a similar experience later in life, the subconscious mind/body remembers the association and responds with the same emotion. If our mind/body remembers that when we were abandoned in the past it felt lonely and threatening, this is how it will react now. If we didn’t process and heal the situation in the past, when we reexperience the situation again and respond with a similar negative emotion, it adds to the previous pain, creating a snowball effect.
If we become aware of what is really happening and we recognize that our current pain is shaped not only by the recent circumstances but by emotional memories, we can separate the present pain from the past pain. My reflections of past relationships brought me to a very remarkable realization. When I was young and rather inexperienced, I was abandoned by someone with no explanation. He literally disappeared on me. His betrayal left me deeply wounded. I never processed or healed that experience. Eventually, I forgot about it, but the pain stayed stored in my body. The fascinating and critical fact linking these two life experiences was that John was a full clone of my boyfriend from the past. My ability to isolate these two traumatic experiences was a true aha moment and a huge step toward my healing.
Another aha moment came when I found out that the most important healing and transformation may happen exactly when our current pain resurfaces our past unhealed traumas, if we are willing to face the pain and work with it instead of trying to numb it or run away from it. My pain told me, “THIS IS THE MOMENT.” Many old wounds got resurfaced and I said to myself, “It’s now or never. This is the time to stop running away from the pain. I want to welcome it, experience it, and use it to heal my past.”
I immediately contacted my therapist to get back to our regular sessions that were on pause at the time. I know that some people find that they are not ready to work with a therapist. Therefore, I want to talk about another tool that anyone can use on their own and that I found incredibly valuable. I am talking about expressive writing.
Pennebaker and Smyth (2016) describe expressive writing as a simple practice where people write about an upsetting experience for about 15–20 minutes a day over three or four days. When you engage in expressive writing, you don’t just describe the details of the event or experience. You focus on writing about deepest thoughts and feelings related to this stressful event.
What is the mechanism behind this process? According to Lieberman and his colleagues (2007), simply putting a negative emotion into words can lower its intensity. They call this process affect labeling. When you’re caught in a strong emotion, the amygdala — the emotional alarm center of the brain — takes over, making it hard to think clearly. But when you name the emotion, like saying, “I’m feeling angry right now,” the thinking part of your brain (the prefrontal cortex) kicks in. This shift helps calm the emotional response and makes the feeling more manageable.
Pennebaker and Smyth (2016) also explain that writing about meaningful events helps us understand them better. When we put our thoughts and feelings about unexpected or difficult experiences into words, we’re forced to pull together all the different pieces of the experience. Once we can organize a messy, emotional situation into something that makes sense, it becomes easier to move forward instead of staying stuck in it.
Expressive writing acts as an eraser that literally erases your stored emotional reactions from your subconscious mind. I spent a lot of time thinking about different experiences that were contributing to my pain and spent a lot of time using expressive writing to erase them from my subconscious mind.
Lesson 3: Balance Your Emotional Memory
From the course, I also learned that our emotional memory is not balanced or neutral. Under loss — in this case the loss of a romantic relationship — the brain retrieves only positive memories associated with the lost relationship and suppresses any negative memories. In my case, I only remembered how great it felt to have deep conversations with John — the experiences that made me feel heard. I also kept going back to the memories of how romantic he was. I entirely forgot what an emotional rollercoaster I had to go through week after week due to John’s fearful avoidant attachment.
Let me give you a better idea of a rollercoaster and how traumatic it was for me. One day, John writes a long and emotional email to his entire family introducing me as the love of his life, and I am at my highest point of feeling loved. The next day, John calls me halfway through his drive to my place, saying that we may be going too fast and he needs to think. Then, he disappears. You can imagine that I am totally devasted. A few days after complete silence, John sends tons of flowers and shows up at my place with three bags of gifts….and the rollercoaster goes on. My poor anxious soul becomes even more anxious… However, at the moment of our breakup, my mind was only retrieving amazing memories of us, totally ignoring any painful memories.
The course suggested that I balance my emotional memories by purposefully focusing on negative memories of the relationship and on any positive aspect of the breakup by answering the following questions:
(i) What are the positive aspects of the breakup for my future?
(ii) What lessons am I going to take from the relationship that I can capitalize on?
(iii) What would be the cost if the relationship continued?
I came up with an extensive list of answers and points for the questions above and diligently read them to myself every day to help my brain overcome its strong inclination to focus only on positive memories. Little by little I could feel how this tool started working and my emotional memory got more balanced. Later, whenever the pain related to losing John would hit me out of nowhere, I would pull out those lists and read through them to remind my brain about the positive aspects of our breakup.
Lesson 4: Rewrite Negative Stories Related to the Breakup That You Tell Yourself
Who do we talk to the most? Yup, it’s us. And what do we say to ourselves the most? Yup, lots of negative stories. There are multiple reasons for why we do so. One is the negativity bias (Baumeister R. F. et al, 2001), which means that we tend to give greater emphasis to negative information than to positive information. Another explanation is that our brain works as a prediction machine (Barrett, 2007). It constantly predicts outcomes to reduce uncertainty. Negative stories create an illusion of control by preparing us for disappointment.
Remarkably, when I reviewed the notes I took during my healing breakup course, the section devoted to the topic of negative stories was the lengthiest. My brain came up with so many negative stories related to the breakup that I needed to address: John didn’t love me (I am not lovable); I was too needy in our relationship; I will never meet someone like John; John was the love of my life; something is wrong with me; all my relationships suck; I will never be in a sustainable relationship; I was not enough; I will never be able to move forward…
What Thais Gibbson suggested in the course was rewriting these stories in a very systematic way. She suggested a very simple but feasible approach — write down a negative story, put a counter story next to it and then support the counter story with evidence. For example, my negative story was my life is over. My counter story was this is actually a new beginning of my life. My evidence was that this was a critical moment in my life when I had a great opportunity to heal my old wounds and move toward a healthier and more sustainable relationship.
Lesson 5: Find Other Ways to Meet Your Unmet Needs
Another reason breakups hurt so much is that our romantic partners often help meet our basic human needs. When we lose our romantic partners, we need to find ways to have our needs met in different ways. Tony Robbins (1992) talks about six basic human needs, such as Love/Connection, Growth, Significance, Contribution, Certainty/Safety, Uncertainty/Novelty. The process I went through to uncover my basic needs deserves a separate story. Here, I’ll just say that my key basic needs are Connection and Safety.
When I “lost” John who to a certain extent made me feel heard and helped me make sense of my inner world, I felt a void. Following the course suggestions, I spent a lot of time speaking with my daughter, close friends, and my therapist to compensate for the lack of emotional connection. I also introduced a set of self-love rituals described in the book Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It by Kamal Ravikant. This book has become my self-love guide, which I’ve been referring to ever since.
I also asked myself which activities helped me feel safe. I introduced more structure into my life — a more organized house, a budget, clear morning and evening routines, and fewer last-minute decisions — to bring more safety into my everyday life.
More importantly, I uncovered the full power of a tool that helped me meet both basic needs simultaneously: writing. I literally started writing nonstop. While writing, I felt that I was talking to someone who gave me space to share my experiences and feelings, who listened without judgement, and who could relate to my pain. I felt heard. I felt seen. I felt understood. In addition, whenever I turned to expressive while caught in a strong emotion, I would felt less stressed, calmer, and safer (remember the affect labelling process described above?).
It’s Time to Payback
Do you remember that my fascinating Healing a Breakup journey started with a genius advice from my daughter? A year later, she and her boyfriend decided to break up. Imagine your child being full of pain. You would do anything to take that pain away.
Her predominant attachment style is secure… Irrespective of that, the pain related to their breakup was very strong. They had both invested a lot in the relationship. Hence, it was devastating. As a recovering helicopter parent (still working on stopping being one), I jumped at helping my daughter. For a week, we ran a healing a breakup bootcamp to help my “little one” (told you… still a helicopter) go through the pain without turning it into prolonged suffering. Two weeks later, she said, ‘Phew… I feel much better. I cannot imagine how I would have dealt with this pain if we hadn’t done this in such an intentional way!’
Interestingly, a few months later her ex-boyfriend contacted her, suggesting they get back together. His predominant style is avoidant. As we learned, people with avoidant attachment style feel completely numb at the initial stages of a breakup but get hit by immense pain a few weeks or months after… Guess what… As a person who cared deeply about her ex-boyfriend, my daughter took him through the process of healing his breakup with her.
I could finish my story here… However, this is not the end… The last section of this post is THE reason for the title of this post.
Business Professors Can Teach More Than Just Business Concepts
A couple of years ago, while teaching a business-related course, I noticed that one of my students (let’s call her Shilpa) was completely checked out — poor participation in class and no contribution to teamwork. I suggested that Shilpa and I talk. When we met in a campus lobby, she broke down into tears. Between her bursts of tears, I was able to piece together that Shilpa was going through a breakup. She had chosen to come to Canada. Her boyfriend had gone to do studies in Australia. They had committed to long-distance, but within a few weeks, he decided that it was too much and broke up with her. Imagine the devastation and pain Shilpa had to face on top of the stress related to moving to a new country and adjusting to a new environment. She openly told me that she could not sleep or eat properly, could not concentrate in class, and didn’t know how to survive…
Imagine a student and her business professor sitting in a lobby while the student is crying. What do you think other people were thinking at that time? I bet many assumed, “Oh… that terrible professor… she’s probably criticizing her poor student for doing badly in class.”
Of course, I couldn’t run a week-long bootcamp with her or deliver the entire Healing a Breakup course. But within the next hour, I briefly shared my own breakup experience with Shilpa and suggested a few simple steps. I asked her to focus on balancing her emotional memory by reflecting on the questions from Lesson 3 and reminding herself of the answers.
Two weeks later, Shilpa came up to me before the class and said, “Professor, could I please give you a hug? I cannot tell you how much better I feel after using the strategies you recommended. I can breathe again. I can focus better. I now feel that I can survive.” We hugged.
Final Thoughts
Understanding the psychological mechanisms behind so many aspects of ourselves and our lives allows us to help ourselves and others reduce suffering and find joy even at most challenging situations in life.
List of References
Barrett, L. F. (2017). How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C., & Vohs, K. D. (2001). Bad is stronger than good. Review of General Psychology, 5(4), 323–370.
Gibson, T. (2020). Attachment theory: A guide to strengthening the relationships in your life. Callisto Media, Inc..
Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428.
Pennebaker, J. M., & Smyth, J. M. (2016). Opening up by writing it down: How expressive writing improves health and eases emotional pain. Guilford.
Ravikant, K. (2020). Love yourself like your life depends on it. HarperOne.
Robbins, A. (1992). Awaken the giant within: How to take immediate control of your mental, emotional, physical & financial destiny! Simon & Schuster.
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