365 - Heartbreak and Recovery
We’ve talked about breakups before on the show, but this week we’re having a discussion about ways we cope after breakups and coming up with some healthy tools based on research.
What the research says
Most of us have suffered heartbreak before, and it’s never fun. But there is some research on it that might allow us to be better equipped to handle it next time:
The pain of heartbreak is real pain (and can be treated as such).
It takes around 11 weeks to feel better after the loss of a romantic partner.
There are strategies that can help, but some have drawbacks and should be used sparingly.
While wallowing too much post-breakup can be harmful, taking some time to reflect on the relationship can speed the healing process.
Tools for your breakup toolbox
Go slowly, take one thing at a time, and allow yourself to feel your emotions.
Be active in creating your support network, especially if you’re non-monogamous.
Talk with a therapist.
Journal.
Engage in rituals. While closure is a myth, the sense of completing something is helpful.
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we're talking about heartbreak, breakups and recovery. There's a real mix of helpful and very unhelpful advice out there in the world for dealing with breakups or loss or heartbreaks, things like that. Today, we're going to be looking at some research about breakups and heartbreak, sharing some of our personal experiences with it and looking at some suggestions for healthy recovery strategies.
Emily: Wow. Well, this is probably an episode that is near and dear to a lot of people's hearts, but I do have to ask why now? Why are we doing it right at this particular moment in time? Perhaps, Dedeker, you can answer that question.
Dedeker: Well, Emily, I'm so glad you asked because the fact of the matter is that I was broken up with the first week of January of this year.
Emily: Gosh, it was that long ago though?
Dedeker: Yes.
Emily: That's amazing. I feel like it happened like yesterday.
Dedeker: Now I know what you may be thinking and all our listeners out there may be thinking, "What? Dedeker Winston, the charming, talented, beautiful, intelligent author, and cohost of this podcast? Somebody broke up with her?" Again, thank you so much for making that observation. Yes, indeed. That's not actually how I feel about myself, but I figure it's maybe easier to lean in that direction rather than the opposite direction where it's easy to go after a breakup, which is, oh, I'm terrible. I'm unlovable and no one will ever love me again. This is all my fault and oh gosh, why didn't I do anything differently? I figured maybe easier to lean into how could this have happened to me? I'm just so perfect.
Emily: There you go.
Jase: These are both relatable extremes to many people. concluded after breakups.
Dedeker: Yes. I'm right in the thick of breakup recovery. I know that I found a lot of really amazing resources. I've had a lot of breakups in my life, but I do think that where I'm at now, this has probably been the one I've been the most equipped for as much as it has sucked, but I feel like I've just had a lot of tools under my belt, have had access to a great support network, access to a lot of great resources. I want to pay it forward to all of you out there who may be also in the thick of this or may experience this.
Some disclaimers as we get into this, we have a whole thing on the show, I think, about trying our best to protect people's privacy. I'm not going to use this show or this episode as an opportunity to gossip about my ex or gossip about what happened in the relationship.
Emily: Ah, no, I'm kidding.
Dedeker: It's okay. If you really, really want access to that gossip, your choice is become one of the hosts of the show, because then we'll talk about it off the air. That's pretty much the only way. I really don't ever want to set up an expectation that if someone is dating me or connected to me in any way, that automatically means the good, the bad, the ugly is going to end up recorded and on the show.
I may end up talking about stuff from this relationship in the future. I'll probably do the same treatment that I've done with other exes when I talk about them on the show, which is to use a pseudonym, to talk about things in a very anonymous way so that I'm not necessarily airing somebody's dirty laundry directly. If you love dirty laundry, I'm sorry, this is not the episode for that. But if you love recovering from a heartbreak, this is the episode for you.
Emily: Yeay. Okay. All right. Sounds good. Let's do it.
Dedeker: Let's just start off with a little bit of riffing. I'm curious to hear from the two of you have y'all gotten over breakups in the past?
Emily: God, by talking to everyone about it ever for a long period of time until my mother inevitably is like, "You need to stop talking about it" and she's right, generally.
Dedeker: It's funny because ever since you shared that story with me through this whole process, your mom's voice has been in my head.
Emily: I'm not surprised.
Dedeker: Sometimes whispering to me.
Emily: It's always there.
In all of our heads.
Dedeker: Sherry sometimes whispers to me, "You got to stop talking about this. You got to move on. You got to get it together."
Emily: Get your shit together. Exactly. No, no. It's fine, but I guess there is maybe something to be said that often, any trauma that you go through, it's good to talk about, but sometimes it's best to talk about with a licensed professional or somebody, a counselor or someone along those lines, if you can, because they are being paid to hear your grievances and your friends and family most likely are not. Not that I am saying that about you, Dedeker, because I heard a lot, but not like probably as much as the person who lives with you.
Dedeker: Oh, Jase heard much. We'll talk about that a little bit later in the episode.
Jase: It's funny, I'm thinking back to my last breakup, which was, I guess, the September or so before the pandemic, September of 2019. I actually think one of my healthier times of coping with a breakup and being sad about that and what I mean by that is that I didn't try to just do something to not feel it. There's that temptation to numb out somehow, whether that's immediately going on a bunch of new dates, whether it's just getting into some new hobby or doing something or just drinking a lot or doing drugs or whatever.
I felt like in this case, it partly just worked out that way where I happened to be in Japan by myself for a month. I had a lot of time to just sit and cope and deal with that. I actually think that ultimately, that was good and probably a healthier way to deal with it than I have with some breakups in the past, which is where I've more like trying to seek that approval or validation to prove to myself that I'm desirable or something like that.
Dedeker: Both of you have touched on things that is reflected in the research on heartbreak and breakup recovery, but we'll dive into that a little bit later. The way I've ordered this episode is almost like the arc of my own recovery journey and what I went through and the tools that I discovered as I discovered them in the different phases that I went through. Where I'm starting out is talking about, I guess, the immediate trauma of a breakup happening, however it is that happens for you. In my case, it was very, very unexpected. We'll talk a little bit about that situation later on as well.
I use the word trauma with a lowercase 't'. Sometimes people feel a little bit self-conscious about using the word trauma if they don't feel ''traumatized enough necessarily''. In my background and the training that I'm doing for getting my certification as a somatic experiencing practitioner, they talk about the fact that like there's a difference between an event that happens that's very, very stressful, an event that's traumatic and there can be a lot of different factors that go into that, but basically, what distinguishes stress from trauma is the nervous system overwhelm.
A stressful event is like, wow, this really attacked my nervous system. This caused a lot of distress and upset and anxiety, but ultimately, I was able to handle it and come back down maybe by the end of the event or the end of the day or stuff like that. Versus something that's traumatic, which is where we go into overwhelm where something is just like either a piece of knowledge or a piece of news or an experience is so intense that it just overwhelms your nervous system and your nervous system then usually has to kick into fight or flight response of some kind.
In my case, it was very, very unexpected. It was very, very shocking. I was very fortunate in the sense that like-- It happened over a Zoom call, which also sucks because this freaking pandemic, if there's any reason for me to hate Zoom, more.
Emily: You have to use it a lot. Even go on dates and have big emotional talks.
Dedeker: I know. I was fortunate in the sense that after that call, I was able to just like go collapse on the couch and have Jase hold me. I didn't have to go into a situation where I was having to hold back my physical and emotional responses. Because for me, in the face of nervous system overwhelm, for me, it often manifests shaking and that's actually really common for people to get the shakes or get trembles or stuff like that. There are a lot of social forces or situations that encourage us, no don't shake because that looks scary, that looks disturbing or things like that.
I think there's a case to be made that sometimes holding back these responses can sometimes be damaging, maybe not necessarily in a permanent way, but your body and your nervous system wants to feel those things. I also say that to folks because I don't want anyone to take that as permission to just go ape shit on the person who just broke up with them or things like that.
Jase: Right, it's more like letting the physical experience go through you than outwardly putting it onto other people. Does that make sense? The difference of allowing an experience to happen in your body versus putting that experience onto someone else. Those are two different things.
Dedeker: I feel like that would be my first piece of advice for folks if-- and you can have this response, whether you were the one who was doing the breaking up or you were broken up with. That applies to a lot of the stuff that we're going to talk about in this episode is just, I really realize that sometimes in life, you get a bad piece of news, then it's like, I still got to go pick up the kids or I still got to go into work or I got to pull it together to make dinner or whatever it is. I totally get that.
Any way that you can carve out the time and space for yourself to actually feel the emotions and actually let them move through your body, chances are, it's not going to be as scary as we think that it's going to be because that is, I think, a really important part of the process to not just to tamp down the emotions. I know I've definitely been in situations where I've had to, and it really sucks.
Emily: Do you feel as though that initial physical reaction happened again and again after that initial time that you felt it or was it diminished each time or was it never exactly like that initial physical response that you had?
Dedeker: It was never quite like that, like right after the first shock of the news. I think, I don't know, I can't get confirmation on this. I think that that would be the result of letting myself actually feel it and letting it actually move through. It doesn't mean that I was just cured instantly and never felt any pain after that. I certainly felt a lot of pain and a lot of upset and a lot of sadness and anger and all the feelings.
I just want to encourage folks to be able to find a time and place, especially if you're very early on in this to go ahead and let yourself be a little bit of a conduit to the pain. It's going to be worse if you're trying to bottle it up or dam it up or numb it out. I just want to encourage people to consider doing that as part of their recovery.
Jase: Let's get into a little bit of research about how this actually works in the body and in the brain.
Dedeker: Yes, because what I learned about myself is literally the next morning I woke up and the first thing I did was treat it like a multiamory episode, and I was like, "What does the research say about this? What can science teach me? Science needs to tell me something to do to deal with all these feelings".
Jase: Meanwhile, I was on my phone when she would go into the other room, like, how to support someone in a breakup
Dedeker: Oh, were you actually researching that too? I didn't know.
Jase: Yes. It's that whole thing of trying to remember, wait a minute, what are the things that are instincts of how to help someone that are not helpful versus what are the things that actually are helpful? If someone's dealing with capital 'T' trauma or lowercase 't' trauma of breakup or losing a job or something like that of what's trying to solve a problem versus what's being there and being supportive versus what's like I should be offering some support.
I didn't do as much research. Dedeker was pretty obsessively researching this stuff for a little while at first figuring out what should I be doing? Also on my side, trying to do some of that, how do I offer the best amount of support without overwhelming that or without getting in the way of her processing or without putting my own opinions on it or whatever, and figure out the best way to deal with it.
Dedeker: First thing I came across is the fact that heartache or heartbreak, it is real pain. There's a 2011 study where basically they had the participants looking at pictures of their ex while they also monitored their brain activity. They found that the parts of the brain that are usually associated with physical pain lit up when they were looking at pictures of their ex. There is another study out there that found that actually taking a painkiller or taking a Tylenol could help buffer against that emotional pain.
Emily: That's fascinating.
Jase: Wow. That's surprising.
Dedeker: Could be the placebo effect for all. I know I didn't read the text of this study, but I did that next morning, immediately take Ibuprofen and took it a few times over the next following days. I was just like, I'll just throw anything at it. May as well even if it's placebo effect. If it helps things feel a little bit better, then fine.
Emily: Also one small 2010 study found that under an MRI scanner, the brains of heartsick people, people who have gone through something that is causing their hearts to feel awful, it can resemble the brains of those experiencing cocaine withdrawal and the researchers theorize that this may explain why some of us feel and act a bit wild after a bad breakup. Wild's an interesting words to use.
I think whenever we go through traumatic experiences, sometimes we surprise ourselves in how we act and what we feel and what we maybe even say or do. Again, that's not a permission to just go buck wild. I think that if you have moments of introspection, sometimes you can realize, wow, that's a place that I haven't really gone to and I'm assuming it's because I'm going through this really traumatic event.
Dedeker: Also, generally we're really bad at predicting how we're going to feel about something in the future. We're just super bad at that, at knowing what we're going to do, how we're going to act, combined with-- I did find it helpful to have this laid out in almost like a brain chemistry perspective. Almost the way we talk about NRE, where it's not like NRE's total BS and you shouldn't feel these things, but also you should be taking it with a grain of salt, you should be recognizing the fact that like there's a chemical cocktail in your brain that's changing the way that you feel about things and think about things.
The same thing when you've lost a relationship or lost a person. That your brain is used to these particular routines, these particular patterns, this particular pattern of dopamine release related to this particular person, and then suddenly that's gone and it totally makes sense why suddenly you're in withdrawal brain, which can include obsessive thoughts or depression or not being able to sleep or not being able to eat or feeling this really intense pursuit or pull towards that other person. That's all normal. It's not necessarily encouraged that you feed those behaviors, but it is all normal. For me, I know just knowing that literally from that brain chemistry perspective was helpful.
Jase: Then another thing is when it comes to the amount of time that it takes to get over a breakup, there are various conventional wisdom out there about like, oh, it's the length of the relationship divided in half or one week for every year or one month for every year, whatever. There's all sorts of stuff out there, but what does the research actually say?
For example, a 2011 study that was published in the Journal of Positive Psychology, they found that it takes an average of 11 weeks to feel better after the loss of a romantic partner. This interestingly was regardless of whether you were the one who was dumped or did the dumping. They found that those with secure parental attachments recovered a little bit faster, but that 11 weeks was this average. It seems to be the average regardless of the length of that relationship from what I can tell here.
Dedeker: From what I read, there are different factors that can influence the grieving process taking longer, being shorter, things like that. They found that this was the average. When we're recording this, I am on like week 10 or so.
Emily: I was going to ask.
Dedeker: What is really interesting that I found right away was there was a small 2007 study that was in the Journal of Experimental Psychology that found that people tend to mis-predict how long their recovery is going to take, and also, how much distress they're going to feel in the future about the breakup or the heartbreak.
Basically, it turns out that your feelings of heartbreak, they're going to last for a shorter amount of time than you think that they will. They're going to be less continuously painful than you predict that they will. That definitely gave me a lot of hope right out the gate.
Emily: That's good.
Jase: Then, how do we actually deal with this breakup? What do we do about it? We're going to look a little bit at this 2018 study that was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, where they looked at three different coping strategies or recovery strategies, plus, of course, a control group.
The first of the techniques or strategies was called negative reappraisal, which we talked about reappraisal a few episodes ago, actually, but in this particular case, negative reappraisal means making a list of negative qualities of your ex.
Dedeker: Yes, so it's basically all the stuff that gets under your skin or that annoyed you or that you just always really disliked.
Jase: Right, and then they did another one that was called the Love Reappraisal, which is where people were told to read and believe statements of acceptance, like it's okay to love someone I'm no longer with. Instead of fighting how they feel, they were told to accept their feelings of love as being perfectly normal without judgment. That was strategy number two.
Strategy number three was distraction, which when I think distraction, I'm assuming like drinking heavily and playing a lot of video games and watching movies, but in this whole case--
Dedeker: Lots of sex.
Jase: Yes, whatever. In this case, the distraction was prompting them to think about their favorite food, which, I guess, probably a healthier option than what I was thinking.
Emily: Just think about your favorite food but don’t eat it.
Jase: Yes.
Dedeker: Yes.
Emily: They showed each of these groups a photo of their ex, and they measured the intensity of the emotion in response to the photo using electrodes placed on the posterior of the scalp. The EEG reading of the late positive potential LPP, is a measure of not only emotion, but motivated attention or to what degree the person is captivated by the photo. In addition, the researchers measured how positive or negative the people felt and how much love they felt for their ex using a scale and questionnaire.
Dedeker: This is really interesting. Basically, according to the brain scans, they did find that all three of those strategies, the negative reappraisal, the love reappraisal and the distraction strategy, did significantly decrease people's emotional responses to the pictures of their ex, relative to the responses with the control group, which didn't use any prompts.
However, it was only the people who did the negative reappraisal, who did the list of negative qualities that also had a decrease in feelings of love toward their ex, but it came with a catch, which is that these people also reported being in a worse mood than when they started. Focusing on all the negative traits helped them move on, but it was distressing in the short term.
Let me just say, I did try the strategy, basically, right away, I sat down and made a super long list of all the really annoying things, all the unresolved things, all the things that made me uncomfortable, and I got to say, work to help me have some perspective on this person and the relationship also was depressing.
Emily: Interesting.
Jase: Distraction on the other hand, it made people feel better overall, but didn't have any effect on how much they still loved their ex partner. Here's a quote from the study. "Distraction is a form of avoidance, which has been shown to reduce the recovery from a breakup." That's interesting to note that while that helped in the short term, didn't actually help on them getting over the breakup.
Emily: Additionally, love reappraisal showed that there was no effect on either love or mood, but it's still dulled the emotional response to the photo. That's interesting.
Jase: Like thinking positive thoughts about yourself.
Emily: Yes, affirmation, yes. That's interesting. Maybe that's the takeaway is that that's the strategy to do if you were to do any of these, or maybe, no. What do you think?
Dedeker: Maybe, I don't know. In my experience, I think my takeaway was just having any strategy at all was helpful, like having any intention at all, helps.
Emily: Especially in the short term.
Dedeker: I found myself especially like, really at the beginning when things were the most intensely painful, and I felt the most just falling apart, bumping around all those strategies at once, depending on what was happening in the moment was helpful. I wanted to be intentional about not just trying to distract myself and just numb myself out with alcohol or with jumping into going on a bunch of dates with people or just playing video games or whatever.
There were some moments where I was like, I need that right now. There would be some moments where I'd have to specifically ask Jase, I need a distraction right now let's play this video game together or let's go for a walk or whatever it is. Sometimes that was helpful.
Jase: Yes. I will say that being in the support role in this particular case also was being on my toes to feel out which strategy are we doing now, right?
Dedeker: Yes.
Jase: Are we focusing on why you're better off, are we focusing on, no, let's think about how-- There were some positives to it and that's okay, are we more about sympathy right now or are we more about distraction?
Emily: Good time to employ the Triforce of communication.
Dedeker: Oh, yes.
Jase: Right. I think also just being flexible and not trying to come in with like, this is the strategy I'm going to lean into regardless of what you're trying to do, but instead trying to be, I have this feeling being on my toes and you got to keep your knees loose, so you're ready to zig or zag everywhere.
Dedeker: He was on a basketball court the whole time.
Jase: Exactly.
Emily: Additionally, a 2015 study in the journal Social, Psychological and Personality Science found that while too much wallowing after heartbreak isn't a great idea, also, reflecting on a recent breakup can help speed up the healing process. The way the study was done was, they rounded up 210 young volunteers, it's always young people, who had recently experienced heartbreak and had half of them come into the lab regularly to answer questions about their breakup over the course of nine weeks. The other half of the people completed just two simple surveys, one at the beginning, and then one at the end of the study.
The first group, really, they fared better. They answered the researchers' questions, and that really helped these people better process their breakup, and also, "It helped them develop a stronger sense of who they were as single people," and then that, in turn, helped them feel less lonely.
Dedeker: Interesting background to this study, the reason why this study happened at all is because this particular researcher was already doing a lot of studies on breakups, and she had this question of, oh, gosh, as we're bringing people in and asking them all these questions about their heartbreak and their breakup, are we making this worse for them, or could we be doing this better? That was the whole purpose of this. They found that, yes, there's something about this regular structured reflection that did seem to help them just process it and move through it better, rather than the people who weren't really prompted on a regular basis.
Emily: Cool.
Jase: Yes. I feel like there's a lot more research that could be done there too, in terms of what kind of reflection, how often, what is the ideal balance, what constitutes wallowing versus what's reflecting? I think this could be a really interesting area.
Dedeker: Oh, these have been questions I've been chewing on for the past 10 weeks. I will say that, of course, when I dove headfirst into research right away, a lot of the resources were like, yes, it is healthy to reflect on who was I in this relationship? Who do I want to be in my next relationship? What are the good things I can get from this relationship? That's all fine and good, but in the first couple of weeks, I was just like, I can't even go there, I'm too close to it, it's too painful, I'm still dealing with all the emotional upheaval, I can't get the distance. I can't force this insight quite yet.
I wanted to reassure folks who are listening, it's okay, if you're feeling a little too close to it. This insight will show up later, you'll have plenty of opportunities to reflect in this way later on, and it's totally okay if it's hard for you on day two to come up with what you want to take with you from this relationship or what you learned from the experience.
Jase: We're moving on and we're going to look at some various strategies, some specific ways that you could go about some of these and ways that you can think about it, as well as leaving you with tools and resources for processing heartbreak, and also potentially supporting other people who are processing heartbreak.
Before we do that, we're going to take a quick break to talk about our sponsors for this episode. It's really important to us that we are able to pay the people that help us make this podcast possible, and that we're able to keep this coming to everyone out there for free. If you could take a moment to listen to our sponsors, it goes a long way toward helping us to keep doing that.
Dedeker: This next section, I have titled, why does this suck so bad or what can I do about it?
Emily: Why, indeed?
Dedeker: The science touched on that a little bit or we've touched on the fact that it sucks so bad, because your brain is literally processing it as actual pain, and pain sucks. In my particular situation, or if you're in a situation where you've been ghosted, for instance, or maybe you've been broken up with in a really inappropriate way, as in like a really long relationship, and they broke up with you via text or they just completely stonewalled you or whatever it is, not only can something like this be traumatic, but it also, in my opinion, falls under the purview of shock trauma, in the sense that, this came out of nowhere and your nervous system didn't have the time to prepare for it.
Especially in a situation where maybe somebody ghosts you or someone like maybe this other person has been thinking about the breakup for a long time and they've had the time to sit and reflect and think and mull it over and maybe even talk to a therapist or stuff like that. They've had more of an opportunity to prepare their nervous system for the loss and you haven't necessarily. That wasn't necessarily what happen in my case but I'm just speaking to folks because I think this is a common situation where you're just like totally blindsided by a breakup.
Jase: As far as that term shock trauma, what does that mean? I know you've studied a fair amount of trauma in your trainings that you've been doing. What does that mean and how is that different from other kinds of trauma?
Dedeker: Well, often it's layered on top of other kinds of trauma, right? It's not necessarily something that lives on its own, but for me it's situations where there is just like, there's no preparation. You're blindsided by something, something happens completely suddenly, there was no warning or anything like that.
Basically, they find that like lab rats where they're doing experiments with little electric shocks that if an animal can predict when the pain is going to happen, so if it's like, oh yes, when I get a pellet or something, I get shocked or when I touch this wall, the cage I get shocked. It's a lot easier for the nervous system to manage it versus if you're shocking an animal at completely random intervals, and it's hard to predict.
This shows up, I think on a human level sometimes with people who have been abused either by a parental figure or something like that, where it's like if the pain or the abuse is really unpredictable, it can really mess up your nervous system and your ability to be calm and regulated and centered because your body's instantly like, oh my god, how can we protect ourselves from the next thing? We don't know what to do because we don't know when it's going to happen.
Emily: I think you two visibly watched shock trauma happen to me when I got a phone call that my colleague had been killed in a drunk-driving accident, and I think it's very much one of those moments where your body and your brain are doing two different things at once. Your brain is trying to process but also maybe tell yourself-- in this instance, it was right before a drunk Bible study was going to happen and I was like, no, I can go on, I can do this.
You immediately were like, no, you're not going to do that, and then having that delayed response where your body and your brain come together and kick into more potentially normal things occurring like intense grief but I think that shock is a very interesting way of putting it because sometimes the two need to catch up to one another and in that exact moment if you're not prepared, it can be really intense in a variety of ways.
Dedeker: Definitely, and I think the shock really sets us up for things like really obsessive thoughts, like really anxious thought cycles because it is your brain really trying to figure out, oh my god, what happened so that we can be ready next time. I think this is when we start getting into not being able to stop thinking of the person or picking the relationship apart or picking particular interactions apart because your brain is trying so hard to protect you and just to make sense of it and try to put it into a narrative. Sometimes it doesn't neatly fit into a narrative.
The way that's been helpful for me to think about this is, especially in the very early days of dealing with this was to just think about being sick and to treat myself like I was actually sick. Like I'd gotten really bad food poisoning, and it's the kind of thing where when you have food poisoning, you can sit there all day obsessing over, oh gosh, what was it that did me in? I shouldn't have had that burrito or oh gosh, I knew I should have thrown that bacon away or whatever, these are both autobiographic stories--
Emily: Shouldn't have had that burrito.
Dedeker: Yes, you can obsess over what caused it but you still have food poisoning at the end of the day and even if you figured it out, it's not going to fix your food poisoning in the moment. It's like in the moment, what you need is to take care of yourself to rest, to be gentle, to drink water, and to avoid the food that made you sick in the first place because you're probably not going to want to eat it. To me that means avoiding like this person's social media, avoiding combing over text messages or photos of them or things like that, and that is very hard to do, but you just-- I'm sorry folks. You just, you got to do it.
Jase: Yes. It's interesting too that this talk about the shock trauma thing is making me also think about situations where someone has, even if they haven't broken up with you but maybe have gotten upset with you about something maybe that you've been doing for a long time or something that you didn't even know that you were doing, that was sudden--
Dedeker: It's like my nightmare.
Emily: It's so surprising and shocking. Exactly, and it's like, wait a minute, I thought that's how our relationship was going and it was okay to discuss X, Y and Z things or, do X, Y, and Z thing.
Jase: It can run the gamut from being something like it's like, oh, some pet peeve or annoyance that I didn't know that my partner had to like, oh, I actually was doing something harmful to this person and I had no idea that I was, and the severity of that shock trauma either way but I think it's really worthwhile to take a moment to, I guess, let that sink in and be wherever you are in that situation to realize like there's at least a lowercase 't' trauma that happened there and to give yourself time to process that.
I think we often think like, oh, well, if I was in the wrong, I don't deserve any recovery or care or whatever there but to realize, no you do because otherwise you're not going to be able to heal and process that and learn something from it either. That just came up in thinking about ways that we can have that shock trauma even not just in a breakup.
Dedeker: For me, just giving myself permission almost to feel all those emotions and just, again, treat myself like I'm sick and I'm in recovery and I need to do the things to take care of my body. After that, I don't know, in my experience then it's just going through the stages of grief. This is a loss, this is something to mourn.
On a certain level, your brain doesn't know that it's any different from somebody who died. All your brain knows is this person was there and now suddenly they're not, and your doesn't really distinguish between those two things, and so it's totally normal to have all the different stages of grief come up and we will review them just for the fans of stages of grief out there. You know them, you love them, we're talking about--
Emily: Denial, wait.
Jase: They don't necessarily go in order, but they're but they tend to go in order, right? Yes, denial and then anger, and then bargaining, depression, and then acceptance.
Emily: Okay.
Jase: You'll often jump back and forth between them. They tend to go sort of in order but sometimes you'll get to a step and then you'll jump back a few and then you'll get back to the step and back a few and then jump in, then maybe get to another step and then jump back a few. It's not like a linear process but it's like that denial, this can't be happening, anger being upset about it, bargaining is like, well, but what if I did this different or what if I'd done this or maybe it could work out if I did this and then depression and then acceptance.
Dedeker: I, personally, as I went through the intervening weeks, I felt like a six-sided dice that was just randomly being tossed about every morning, and it'd be like, oh, I'm on the anger side today, okay, that's the version of me that's showing up and then the next day, oh, I'm on the denial side today. Okay, great, that's what's showing up for me and it just really moved through sometimes all six sides in a single day, to be totally honest.
Jase: What was the six sided dice?
Emily: Yes, exactly. I'm like, wait, it's five stages. Oh, acceptance and uber-acceptance. I actually never thought about that. Gosh, I've been talking to my therapist all these weeks about there being a six-sided dice and she's never questioned me.
Jase: She's sitting there being like this lady doesn't how to count.
Emily: Yes.
Dedeker: Oh gosh. I feel really silly. The sixth side was probably, just like maybe numbness, apathy.
Jase: Tired, maybe.
Dedeker: Being a ghost, perhaps. There were some times that Jase commented on me being very ghostly, some disassociation, I don't know where disassociation would fall but I especially
Jase: I think that's maybe the denial part or not?
Dedeker: I don't know.
Jase: Could be.
Dedeker: It was something a step beyond just denial into just like, I'm just completely numbing out, I don't know.
Jase: Maybe if anyone questions you on it, you be like, "I know that's part of the experience. It's like a six-sided dice with five options on it. Can you wrap your head around that? No, exactly", just get little metaphorical about it.
Dedeker: What if it's like actually it's a D4, it's a four-sided dice, like a little pyramid shaped one.
Jase: Acceptance is one.
Dedeker: Yes, maybe.
Jase: Okay.
Dedeker: You let us know what you think.
Jase: Yes. Let us know in your comments and in the patron group--
Emily: What the sixth side is.
Dedeke: There's this other framework and metaphor for thinking about grief that really resonated with me as well that I picked up from an Instagram account that I follow that specifically has to do with grief, usually grief related to death, but it's called the ball in the box. It's the idea that, you're this cardboard box and on the inside, there's this little button that's your grief and pain button and then there's this big inflatable ball, I think, like a Foursquare ball inside the box. It's so big that it's constantly pressure pushing that pain button. It's so big and so overwhelming. It's constantly being pushed, constantly being pushed, constantly being pushed.
That's like in the early stages of grief when everything is just so raw and so painful and so intense. Then over time, as you become more active in your healing process, as time goes on, it's like that ball shrinks and gets smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller, but it's still bouncing around the inside of the box. It's not hitting the pain button all the time, but occasionally, sometimes completely unexpected, it will hit against that pain button, and you'll still feel it.
The whole point of that metaphor, I think was really about just not shaming people for still feeling pain later on in the process. Sometimes feeling very intense unexpected pain later on in the process maybe even years later, just your ball's gotten smaller, but your buttons still there. Sometimes stuff is going to brush up against it and that's okay. That's definitely something that I've also held with me as I've been moving forward.
Emily: Let's talk about some tools and resources that you found in addition to the ones that you already described especially in the previous section of this. Were there things that really were your go-to, that you sort of went to over and over again, during this really difficult time?
Dedeker: Yes, well, to be totally honest, I think it'd be impossible to compile a list of everything that I leaned on. I certainly didn't want to dive back into my very sick journal from the past few weeks or so to see every single question and every single prompt and every single angle that I explored but there are definitely some recurring themes of, I want to say, where I got the most bang for my buck, as it were, in this recovery process. I encountered this Buddhist poem several years ago, that was a translated poem of a very, very early Buddhist nun. We're talking, I don't know, like, eighth century Buddhist nun or something like this.
Emily: Is this from the first free women?
Dedeker: Yes, from the free women. Highly recommend that book.
Emily: It's a beautiful book.
Dedeker: I'm not going to read the poem to you even though I'd love to but basically, the whole point of it is about the central image of the poem is the way that we cross the flood is slowly and just feeling for one stone at a time. That was an image that really stuck with me is this idea of you're just figuring it out as you go along. It's just about what's the next stone I can land on today, in this moment whether it's going to a therapy session or if it's just sitting on the couch with a close friend of mine, and watching trashy TV or whatever. It is just this one stone at a time recovery process and sometimes you'll use a tool, or you'll turn to a resource, and it'll be great and you'll absolutely love it.
Then maybe the next time you turn to it, it's not great and it feels like it's not working. Doesn't necessarily mean that it's not working but I think it's just this incremental healing process where sometimes even little things are still helpful for you.
I think the biggest thing that has helped me has just been having a really robust support network. There's really no replacement for it. I think that, to be totally honest, having the two of you so tuned into my life and caring so much about what's going on with me and the fact that I could show up and just bring whatever was on my heart or on my mind throughout the day has been really helpful combined with having a really wonderful therapist. A therapist who's on a platform where I can text her whenever so that if I'm in a moment of distress, I can just write a wall of text and just have a place to put my feelings and put my emotions and then just send them was fantastic.
To be totally honest, it was like I was literally turning to anybody that I trusted, which is not necessarily a huge circle of people and it wasn't like, "Oh, I'm going to go around and tell like my sad breakup story to everybody." It was just realizing I actually have a really wide circle of people that I trust enough to be intimate with in that way of just being able to be honest of when they reach out and ask how I'm doing that can be like, "Actually, I'm having a hard time. I just went through a breakup."
It doesn't mean that everyone had to sit there and hold my hand or even listen to the whole story or ask questions, but just being able to be seen was huge. To a certain extent, a little bit of this made me realize my privilege in the sense that I'm out to most of the people who care about me and love me, out about being non-monogamous, that is, and so that includes people like my sister, like my mom, like some extended family members. When people do reach out, I can be honest about, hey, I'm going through this.
That's not always the case for other people where they're not out about being non-monogamous, or they're in a context where maybe a parent or even a partner is just really not supportive of their relationship and so they have to carry that all by themselves.
I think that was just the biggest thing is, if you're listening to this, and you're not going through a breakup right now, great, congratulations, work on having a support network, seriously. Actually really, proactively spend some time thinking about who those intimate relationships are, and fostering your friendships and your family relationships, in addition to your romantic and sexual relationships.
Jase: I would say the same for preparation for being more of the support role in that case, where I found for myself, through this has been this thing of wanting to be really supportive but also like, I've got my own emotions about it. It's changed my life in terms of our travel schedules and things like that. I also had some attachments to this person and just there's a lot of things that changed for me as well but I don't want to have Dedeker be my support for that while she's also dealing with this.
It was similar to that thing of who do I trust? Who can I talk to you about this? It's like, being able to talk to Emily about it, being able to talk to some of my other friends, even if it was something just as simple as being able to go somewhere to say, "I'm having a hard time with this and I don't want to make this about me but I also need to express that this is hard for me too." Having that support network is just really helpful, however you're connected to this grieving process and heartbreak process.
Emily: Definitely.
Dedeker: Short of that, short of the times when I had Emily's mom's voice in my ear, being like, "Get it together. You can't keep talking about this." Then I would just turn to my trusty old journal. As I said, it's gotten quite thick from the last few weeks, not as thick in recent days, and actually even recent weeks where there's been less emotional upheaval, for sure. For probably the first five or six weeks of this is every single day, multiple times a day really puking all over that sucker of a journal.
Emily: I feel like when we all went to Disneyland together, which was a month ago or so.
Dedeker: Oh, gosh.
Emily: I felt like there that had been a turning point a bit. Like you were moving in a direction of being a little bit-- I guess moving on maybe in a way that you hadn't been before you're emerging out of it.
Dedeker: Something that I told my therapist very early on. First of all, I recognized very early on that I felt so lucky to be surrounded by so many good people. Like I said at the beginning of this episode, I felt more equipped for this breakup than I ever have for any other breakup in my life. I think it was because of the people around me.
Emily: And the work that you've done yourself too, I'm sure. Of course.
Dedeker: Thank you. Well, but really, though, but because of that it was the first time in years, and especially the first time since the pandemic, where I felt this sense of Oh, my god, I physically want all my people around me. I want to invite everyone over for a sleepover. I want my mom and I want Emily and I want my friend, Ben, I want Jase and I want all these people next to me.
A couple of weeks ago, when we took a trip to Disneyland where I got to be with the two of you, and with my sister and her family, and just to have that little sense of okay, some of the crew is together, and I'm surrounded by some of these people that I love really, really healing and really wonderful. My heart was so full after that trip. What do y'all feel about closure? Thoughts? Opinions?
Jase: Boy, so sure thing people talk about a lot, ain't it?
Dedeker: Oh, yes, they do, especially with breakups.
Emily: I don't know if I'm particularly good about it, I think time helps but some relationships time- it takes a lot longer than others to feel a sense of closure, whatever that means. I don't know if there's ever a particular moment in time where you're like, and closure. I feel like it's suddenly waking up one day and realizing, wow, I'm not thinking about this person every single day and having very intense emotional feelings about them. I can look back on that time in my life, maybe fondly and then that's it, and that's okay.
Jase: I'm realizing that this is something that Dedeker and I have talked about a lot over the past few months too, but basically this closure. Closure, at least in the way that it's talked about normally, conventionally is not really a thing. It's closure in the sense of like, “Oh, well, if I just knew the reason, then I'd be okay.” Or like, "Oh, but if I just got to tell them how I feel about this, then I'd be okay." Or if I just-- and it's instead, it's not really about getting some completion about this, it ends up being more about like, Oh, I think that, Oh, what if I just did this? What if I just did this? What if I just did that? Like, Oh, I just need this thing. If only I had that, which I think is also how people tend to think of about happiness in general.
Like, well, if I just had this thing or if my life were just this way, or if I just was with this person, or if I just had this type of relationship, then I'd be happy. Both of those are not really-- that's not how happiness or I think recovery works.
Dedeker: Yes. I spent a lot of time thinking about these two concepts in my mind and the way I distinguish them is I label one as closure and I label the other one as completion. Basically, yes, I think that closure, especially when it comes to relationships ending, I also think it's a bit of a myth. I feel like closure means I need to get something from the other person so that I can feel good about the ending of this and I can feel satisfied about the ending of this.
People sometimes think they like have a right to some closure, and we really don't in life, in relationships, in death, in grief, in whatever. We don't really have a right to this and often it's really disempowering to put yourself in a position where it's like, I need to get something from this other person. This other person who may feel completely differently about the relationship or about the breakup may have completely different values, maybe was directly harmful to you potentially. It's always felt a little backwards to me to be like, “Oh, I need to put it on them to make me feel good about the ending of this.”
Again, we get into cocaine withdrawal brain and it all seems like it just makes sense. If I can just get a hit from this person, that's going to be the thing that's going to make it feel good, but it's not.
For me, I spent a lot of time thinking about completion instead, which is the idea of maybe I don't feel good about it, maybe I don't even fully understand happened, maybe I don't know everything, and maybe I don't feel satisfied, but I feel like it's come to an end. It's complete. The book is closed, or the chapter is ending. It's maybe a very subtle nuance, but for me, I like putting the emphasis more back on, “What do I need to complete this?” As opposed to, “What do I need to get from this other person in order to have closure?” I think that's an important distinction to think about.
The way that completion tends to manifest for me is in looking at ritual in particular, and sometimes like, especially if you've been ghosted, for instance, sometimes it's like, you got to create your own completion, right? Our nervous systems really like this idea of something having a beginning, middle and an end. I think it's just really important to find the rituals that are important to you to help that land in your body and in your heart and in your mind.
One of my therapists that I've been consulting with recently introduced me to this concept of taking grief to tea is what he called it. It was this idea of setting aside time for yourself, maybe once a day or once a week where it's like, "I'm going to take my grief to tea right now. I'm going to make myself a cup of tea, and I'm going to sit there, and I'm going to sit with my grief during that time. Then I'm going to finish my tea, and then I'm going to move on with my day.”
That's just one example of a little ritual that I think that you can do for yourself to create a little bit of a container around this that's a little bit different from just, “I'm the confusing six-sided dice that's blowing about in the wind and coming and going." My personal therapist also introduced this concept of building a fire ring. She talked about how, like when you're camping, and you want to light a fire, the first thing you do is you create a ring. You have to contain it in some way.
The idea of giving yourself a container to be able to feel your biggest feelings, whether that's crying or rage or like punching a pillow or dancing it out or screaming it out or whatever. Creating a container for yourself to do that, whether it's, “I'm going to go on a camping trip.” Which is all about sitting with these feelings, or “I'm going to set a timer for 20 minutes and dance it out and just let these feelings move through.”
These are just really wonderful rituals that you can do that are on the micro level. You can also look at macro level rituals for what you want to do to honor the end of the relationship with the completion of a relationship, and I think that's very, very personal to each person.
Emily: Well, we wanted to end this episode with some resources from our own discussions on this topic as well as a couple other resources. There is the exes social media episode and the rejection episode. That was Multiamory 245 was your exes social media and then Multiamory 344, which was handling rejection. You can go and check those out for even more ways to be able to deal with breakups better.
Dedeker: Yes. Let me tell you the social media episode, because we did the social media episode, I think having that knowledge personally has been what's helped me to stay motivated to completely cut off from my ex's social media and to not even go there so super helpful. I also really recommend a podcast that I've been listening to a lot called Help Me Be Me. In particular, her episodes 107 kicking a toxic love and 80, which is all about loving outcomes just regarding lingering feelings towards an ex is fantastic.
Then also I discovered this book called Break a Bootcamp by this woman, Amy Chan, which I thought was going to be just like salesy and superficial. I found that it was actually fantastic. They go into attachment style, they go into trauma, they go into all kinds of stuff, still take it with a grain of salt. In the back half of the book they start going into, “This is how women brains work, and this is how man brains work" which I'm always a little bit skeptical of, but really good information up to that point.
Jase: We're going to go on and record a bonus episode where we're going to talk about a few more, maybe less conventional or more esoteric rituals and things like that for dealing with breakups. Stay tuned for that. That's going to be exciting. I'm excited to talk about it. I know some of it is all going to be new to Emily and some of it's brand new to me. This will be a fun discussion.