Happy endings are the only kind I’ve ever truly liked. Life doesn’t give us a whole lot of those. Instead, we often encounter uncertainty or loss. Sometimes, we get both in a chaotic little package. Happy endings probably happen, but it’s not as common as we’d like. Instead, we’re challenged to heal from the cycle of loving, learning, and losing.
I’m so tired of losing.
One would think that healing would get easier with so much practice, but it just makes the whole process more complicated. Past pain is often brought to the surface by present pain. We’re never really healing from just one thing, are we? There are layers to loss and healing from it.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the weird things I’ve done while healing — behaviors that, it turns out, are normal but rarely seem like it at the time. We’ve all heard that healing isn’t linear, but most of us still want it to be. We want to go from a clear start to a clear finish and get on with our lives. Instead, we’re thrown back and forth until we somehow emerge on the other side.
Sometimes, we emerge stronger. Other times, we emerge harder, with sharp edges. I feel like I keep emerging weirder, but maybe that’s just me.
Here are 4 strange behaviors that mean you’re actually healing:
1. Rumination
There are all kinds of things we can heal from, but one of the most common is the loss of a romantic relationship. When we find ourselves ruminating on a past relationship, we might experience frustration in addition to all the other feelings that come up. Why are we like this? Why can’t we just let go and move on?
It turns out that rumination is entirely normal for people who have an anxious attachment style. Chronic mourning and intrusive thoughts that dwell on the past relationship are normal for someone with this style of attachment according to researchers. I can honestly say that I’ve beaten myself up quite a bit for having this reaction to loss but it makes sense given my attachment style.
Moreover, it makes just as much sense that some of the people I attached to were able to move on more easily. Those with an avoidant attachment style tend to move forward quickly, often bypassing many of the emotions in the grieving process. When an anxiously attached person and an avoidantly attached person break up, it makes sense that the anxious person would hold on and ruminate for longer than the person who is accustomed to avoiding the deeper emotions. One gets stuck, and the other moves forward without truly healing.
Rumination might feel weird, but for some attachment styles, it’s to be expected. There are also gender differences in terms of healing. It’s normal for women to ruminate more on failed relationships while men tend to avoid their feelings in favor of new distractions, which could explain why men often rebound faster.
However, women tend to recover more fully than men do from breakups. Even though this is normal behavior in terms of managing loss, it’s also important to teach ourselves how to stop ruminating. This will help us heal more quickly than we might otherwise.
2. Pain and Withdrawal
If the healing process feels physically painful, that’s because it is. It’s not all in our heads. Neuroscientists who have studied unwelcome breakups found that pain from loss is processed in the same part of the brain where we experience physical pain. Researchers have also discovered that the experience of having love for a former partner can work the same as an addiction where cravings and withdrawal symptoms can occur.
Even though this experience of pain and withdrawal might feel weird, it is normal. We’re left trying to work through both physical and emotional pain while still dealing with cravings for that person. Often, those cravings are triggered, and it’s recommended that we observe our triggers and create new patterns of behavior around them. This will help keep us from dwelling on that loss and further complicating the healing timeline. While pain relievers like Tylenol have been shown to decrease emotional pain, overusing pain medication can have a detrimental impact on the body. This is why we need to learn new ways of managing our very real pain.
3. Fear of Falling in Love
It’s possible to develop a phobia around falling in love again. It’s called philophobia. It’s an anxiety disorder that can be caused by past trauma, fear of abandonment, attachment issues, or cultural pressures. Someone with an actual phobia of falling in love might have difficulty forming truly intimate relationships, experience heightened anxiety about relationships ending while in them, and be guarded when it comes to love. They might also experience dry mouth, shaking, shortness of breath, nausea, and real feelings of terror. If this is experienced for six months or more and inhibits the ability to form meaningful relationships, a person may be philophobia.
Even if we don’t develop a phobia, research has shown that having an intense fear that a partner will leave decreases that person’s love, attraction, and commitment. In other words, being chronically afraid of being dumped can harm future relationships. While it’s normal to experience heightened fears after being hurt, it can delay the healing process when we allow it to sabotage our future relationships. Just because one person hurt us doesn’t mean everyone else will. Part of our healing demands that we adjust this perspective — or else risk losing future loving relationships because of a fear response.
4. Weight Gain
While we might attribute weight gain after a breakup to comfort eating and depressive sleeping, there’s more to it than that. Research has found that stress from a breakup can create a cortisol response that can redistribute fat to the abdominal region of the body and interfere with the body’s digestive responses. It might seem like a weird side effect to loss to suddenly have weight gain in the stomach area, but it’s normal.
This is why it’s so important to manage the stress surrounding a loss. Using healthy coping skills like physical movement can help keep stress under control. We also need to manage impulses to comfort eat to an unhealthy degree. Some people might eat, pray, and love, but it’s normal to want to eat, sleep, and grieve during this process. It’s important to understand that weight distribution to the stomach might seem weird, but it’s a normal side effect — if a highly undesirable one.
While You Were Healing
Healing looks a lot more like a rollercoaster than a straight route from Point A to Point B. It’s not easy, and we’re probably all way too hard on ourselves. Is it just me, or does everyone want their breakup to look more like a 1980s montage? I want the glow-up to happen in the time it takes Holding Out for a Hero to finish playing. I don’t want to spend months or years feeling like I’m finally better and then having an enormous setback that feels like starting all over again.
When we acknowledge, accept, and experience our feelings, we truly begin to heal. It’s not quick or easy. It’s certainly not something we can ever fully anticipate. It happens in its own time — to my eternal annoyance.
But for all those who have experienced rumination, pain and withdrawal, fear of ever falling in love again, or weight gain — it’s all perfectly normal. It doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with us beyond the human experience of a broken heart. It hurts, but it heals if we let it. The truth is that it doesn’t just heal on its own. We have to do a little work to get there, and unfortunately, it’s a little more involved than just sticking a bandage on our feelings and saying we’re fine.
The best advice I can offer is to keep going. It’s what I tell myself, too. We take one small step at a time through the pain. In some ways, we fake it until we make it. That doesn’t mean we pretend we’re okay when we’re not, but we do make the conscious choice to do good things to help ourselves — even when it feels like nothing will help. Creating a pattern of healthy habits will work eventually. We have to trust the process, even if we’re taking the steps with little enthusiasm.
So, we drink some water. We go for a walk or do a little gentle stretching. We give ourselves a time limit to ruminate on the past before redirecting our attention. We baby-step ourselves to the other side of heartache. One day, we’ll arrive. We’ll let go of what was and embrace what’s next. But if the whole process feels a bit weird, that’s because it is. It’s normal. Now, keep going.
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