Reactions to Breakups and How One Can Cope

Written by Chelsea Ellithorpe

​Breaking up with a close partner can be quite a difficult time in one’s life and a painful experience. No matter how the relationship ended, there are certain feelings of sadness, loneliness, and pain associated with such a loss. However, certain breakups seem to be worse than others. While certain breakups may occur under the best circumstances, others may end up tearing a person apart. Important aspects to examine when researching breakups include what factors lead to a higher dose of pain and that stinging sensation of rejection and loss.

Why Do Certain Breakups Hurt More?

​Sprecher and colleagues (1998) found that after a recent breakup, people cited a wide variety of reasons for their feelings of hurt or loss, including the circumstances around the start and end of the relationship, what they or their partner thought of relationships, and descriptives associated with the relationship and how it was. The authors note that people are more distressed during a breakup when the relationship was long-lasting, when they sought after the relationship in the beginning, when they thought their partner left them for someone else, when they did not initiate the breakup, and when they were satisfied and committed within the relationship (Sprecher, Felmlee, Metts, Fehr, & Vanni, 1998). 

​Attachment style also affects how people respond to breakups. Those with a secure attachment style often ask family and friends for support as they cope with a breakup (Davis, Shaver, & Vernon, 2003). They believe that their social network of family and friends is able to help them during such a time of need and were better able to cope with and adjust after a breakup when they believed their social network, apart from that romantic relationship, was strong (Moller, Fouladi, McCarthy, & Hatch, 2003). Those who are more anxiously-attached and clingy tend to feel more pain after a breakup than others (Sprecher et al., 1998). Anxiously-attached individuals often feel a wide variety of negative emotions after a breakup, including depression, anger, and pain, and often blame themselves for the breakup and may try to rekindle the relationship or obsessively think about the breakup and their ex (Davis, Shaver, & Vernon, 2003). However, those with avoidant attachment often react by isolating themselves and avoiding social connections. 

How Can One Move Past a Breakup?

​Having a strong social network, as previously mentioned, can help one cope with a breakup. Forming novel or unique associations with activities and events previously associated with an ex or the relationship can also help one move on. These new memories of and associations with events that used to be connected to an ex can weaken thought associations with the ex and the pain associated with these events (Poirier, Nairne, Morin, Zimmermann, Koutmeridou, & Fowler, 2012).

​People often make a conscious attempt to forget their ex in order to move on; however, this may actually cause a person to excessively focus on their ex due to trying to ignore the thoughts about the breakup. Trying to avoid thinking about the breakup may cause this event to plague one’s thoughts, due to the “white bear effect,” where thought suppression can lead to overthinking about that thought (Wegner, 2011). 

​Wegner (2011) suggests a variety of techniques that may help one to forget about a bad breakup and an ex. Distractions of more positive activities and thoughts may help one to shift their thoughts from the painful experience to things that help one cope with the event. Avoiding stressful situations and an ex may allow a person to better suppress unwanted thoughts about the breakup. Temporarily avoiding thinking about an ex and the breakup is much more manageable and likely to succeed than permanently pushing an ex out of one’s mind. Therefore, avoiding seeing an ex or their social media posts for a few days rather than blocking them in general is more likely to help with coping. Finally, learning how to handle these painful thoughts, accepting their presence, and training yourself to eliminate the negative association and affective response are much more effective solutions.

References

Davis, D., Shaver, P. R., & Vernon, M. L. (2003). Physical, emotional, and behavioral reactions to breaking up: The roles of gender, age, emotional involvement, and attachment style. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 29(7), 871-884.

Moller, N. P., Fouladi, R. T., McCarthy, C. J., & Hatch, K. D. (2003). Relationship of attachment and social support to college students’ adjustment following a relationship breakup. Journal of Counseling & Development, 81(3), 354-369.

Poirier, M., Nairne, J. S., Morin, C., Zimmermann, F. G. S., Koutmeridou, K., & Fowler, J.(2012). Memory as discrimination: A challenge to the encoding–retrieval match principle. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 38(1), 16-29.

Sprecher, S., Felmlee, D., Metts, S., Fehr, B., & Vanni, D. (1998). Factors associated with distress following the breakup of a close relationship. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 15(6), 791-809.

Wegner, D.M. (2011). Setting free the bears: Escape from thought suppression. American Psychologist, 66(8), 671-680.