On Attachment

#201: How to Actually Heal from a Breakup

• Stephanie Rigg • Season 1 • Episode 201

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If you’re someone with anxious attachment patterns, the ending of a relationship can bring up some of your deepest wounds: feelings of abandonment, not being enough, being too much, or fears that you’ll never find love again.

In today’s episode, I’m offering a more grounded, intentional path through heartbreak — one that doesn’t rely on ruminating, obsessing, or waiting for closure from someone else. We’re talking about how to actually heal from a breakup, rather than just surviving it.

I’ll walk you through:

  • Why grieving fully is essential (and how we often mistake rumination for grief)
  • The stories we tell ourselves post-breakup, and how they shape our suffering
  • How to find closure within yourself, instead of waiting for your ex to give it to you
  • What it means to really learn the lessons of a breakup
  • Why getting clear on what you want in future relationships is one of the most powerful things you can do before moving on

Whether your breakup was recent or something you still carry with you, my hope is that this episode supports you in finding your way back to yourself — with clarity, compassion, and courage.

🔥 Save 40% on my Healing Anxious Attachment course for 72 hours only! 🔥

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You are listening to on Attachment A place to learn about how attachment shapes the way we experience relationships, and where you'll gain the guidance, knowledge, and practical tools to overcome insecurity and build healthy, thriving relationships. I, I'm your host relationship coach Stephanie Rigg, and I'm really glad you're here.

Stephanie Rigg:

Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of On Attachment. In today's episode, we are talking about how to heal from a breakup in the healthiest way possible. So let's just start by stating the obvious, which is that breakups are really, really hard. And particularly if you're someone with anxious attachment patterns, as I know most of my listeners are, for an array of reasons that I've spoken to on the podcast before. Anxiously attach. People struggle so much with endings and particularly when so much was on the line when we were working so hard to try and hold things together, to try and patch things up, to try and prevent that disconnection, that loss it can feel like being plunged into a level of uncertainty and ruthlessness that we just don't really know how to hold. And all of that can obviously beated by. Our over reliance on relationships to provide us with a sense of steadiness and our difficulties in knowing who we are or how to feel okay if we don't have someone to lean on. And while of course that's a human thing, that we're all wired for connection and we know that anxiously attached, people can overindex on that to the detriment of their own sense of inner safety. So breakups really go to the heart of a lot of our wounds, a lot of our fears, a lot of our vulnerabilities in a way that can leave us feeling very powerless, very lost, very scared, very out of control Now, what often happens from that place is in feeling so out of control, naturally we reach for whatever tools we might have in our toolbox to try and counteract that feeling, to try and protect ourselves, to try and undo all of the pain because it feels so overwhelming and we don't really trust ourselves to be able to hold it. And so we can find ourselves in. All sorts of coping strategies, ruminating, obsessing, stalking, all of the things. And of course, while that might provide some temporary relief or a sense of being in control in my experience with supporting thousands, probably now of people through breakups is that that can prolong our suffering and really keep us from tending to the parts of ourselves that are longing for our care and attention after a breakup. So in today's episode, I wanna offer you. A different way, an alternative path to going through a breakup that doesn't just look like frantically trying to keep your head above water, because I know that that's what it can feel like for so many of us. A way that allows you to honor yourself, honor the pain certainly not just trying to skip past it all and feel better but that equally calls on you to exercise self-responsibility around your choices, around where you direct your time and energy. Because ultimately, and I've said this many times before, I view breakups as a beautiful opportunity and I know that that can feel hard to hear when you're in it, and it feels like anything but a gift. But breakups really do bring us to face with a lot of our staff. And you know, as with anything that holds up a mirror and invites us into deep reflection and intentionality, I think we can really make the most of that if we are courageous enough to do so. So in today's episode, I'm gonna be offering some guidance around what that might look like to approach a breakup in a more intentional, deliberate, self-honoring way, self-supporting way, so that you're not just flailing around treading water, you know, trying to stay afloat until it stops hurting so much. Because you know, spoiler alert, and I dunno if you've noticed this, but that approach, the just survive the breakup approach doesn't tend to impart many lessons. And I think that's a crucial piece of the puzzle when going through a breakup. And that's a big part of making the most of it, is actually engaging with. Our own pain and whatever went on in the relationship and whatever led to its ending. If we can engage meaningfully with all of that without self-flagellating, without shaming ourselves, then we set ourselves up to do things differently next time. To the extent that there are lessons to be learned. And I think that there are always lessons to be learned. So all of that is what we're gonna be talking about today. And in keeping with the theme of today's episode, I have a brand new free training all about breakups. It's titled The Top Three Mistakes, keeping You Stuck After a Breakup. And it goes into a lot more depth than I'll be able to in today's episode on all of those things, the ways that we can unknowingly, unintentionally be prolonging our suffering and maybe, you know, experiencing these energy leakages things like obsessively comparing. Our process to that of our exes. You know, who's moving on quicker? What does it mean? You know, they seem to be fine. Does that mean they never cared about me? You know, talking about how different attachment styles go through breakups and why it's therefore not very useful to engage in all of that comparison. You know how to move on even if you don't feel ready. And how to treat moving on as a choice rather than just waiting for a feeling to land in your lap. How to stop the endless cycles of rumination, and why it's so easy to fall into the trap of just obsessing over someone and what purpose that might be serving. I cover all of this and more in my new free training, so if that's of interest to you, the link to sign up for that is in the show notes, or you can head straight to my website and check it out there. Second quick announcement is just a reminder about my upcoming event in London. It's about a month away now, which is wild. So looking forward to meeting with you in person, those who are already coming along. And if you are in or around London on the 13th of September and you would like to come along, it's gonna be a really intimate event. I'll be giving a talk on the path to secure love. So. Talking about all of the things that can get in the way of experiencing the healthy, secure love that we all long for, and how we can start to do that work within ourselves and our relationships to facilitate. The building of more secure, loving relationships in our lives. And there'll be plenty of time for q and a and meet and greet and all of those things. So I would so love to see you there. If you're in or around London. The tickets for that are linked also in the show notes, or you can find'em on my website or send me a message on Instagram. If you're having trouble, i'd be more than happy to help you out. Okay, so let's talk about how to heal from a breakup in the healthiest way possible. Now, the first and most important step in this journey is that we have to actually grieve, we have to allow ourselves the space to feel, to actually give our pain an opportunity to be seen and felt and heard and tended to and understood. now you might be thinking if you're listening to this, like, yeah, I'm already doing that. I'm in so much pain, I'm in agony. This is like the worst thing I've ever felt. But I would hazard that if you're like a lot of people, particularly again, folks who struggle with anxious attachment anxiety, we do a lot of thinking about our pain, but not so much feeling pain. And I think that's true more broadly in our society. We tend not to provide much space, particularly for things like grief. I think we are collectively uncomfortable with grief and the bigness of it because it is such an all consuming emotion. It feels like, you know, once we open the floodgates of grief, we might never close them again. And so I think a lot of us keep our grief very muted. We try and turn away from it. We try and suppress it because. It is such a big emotion and it's one that we don't have a lot of practice with. But the reality is a breakup is a mourning process. It is a grieving process like any other loss. And so we really need to honor it as that and allow ourselves to feel the depths of grief that we might be holding. And there are gonna be layers of grief. There's grief for. You know, losing the person. There's grief for all of the little bits of our lives that were intertwined with theirs that we feel we may have lost along with them. Grief for all of the memories, grief for the future. Vision that now won't come to pass. There's layers of that and it will come in waves. Rather than, you know, frantically being hit by that. And then feeling like we have to distract ourselves or numb out or undo it or backpedal to try and make the grief go away. Actually allowing ourselves to feel it fully is a very, very powerful thing. And ironically enough, even though it doesn't feel like it when we're in it, the more we can fully go there, obviously in safe and contained ways. The, the more we allow ourselves to emerge from the other side of it. Whereas if we're just trying to bury it, we're turning our backs on it. It's still there, it's still within us desperate to be felt and seen and acknowledged and it does tend to keep us stuck in it and stuck in the coping mechanisms that we've reached for to try and solve it or get away from it for much longer. So a really, really big important part of a breakup, as uncomfortable as it is, is making space to feel the depths of grief. As I always say to people, the bigness of your grief is a reflection of how deeply you love, and I think that grief is actually an incredibly beautiful human emotion. It only exists when we have deep love, care and depth of feeling, and I think that that's an exquisitely beautiful thing and something that we should absolutely honor rather than something we should try and stuff down or turn away from because we don't trust it or we think it's wrong or you know, we just wanna try and solve it with analytical thinking or problem solving or whatever else. So step one is honor the grief, make space for the grief and really allow yourself to feel all of the layers of conflicting feelings that might be there in and around your breakup. The second really important piece in healing from a breakup in the healthiest way possible is keeping a close eye on the stories that you are telling yourself and really being very mindful of the meaning making that you're engaging in. So what I'm talking about here is the tendency that a lot of us have, again, anxiously attach. People will relate to this, that when something happens, when a relationship ends we're very quick to. Internalize, however it went down, whatever unfolded as being about us. So if someone ended the relationship because they said, you know, I can't do this, or, you know, I'm not ready for a relationship, or This is too hard, we take whatever happened and we make it mean i'm unlovable or I push them away'cause I'm too much. Or why am I so easy to leave? Everyone always leaves me or I'm gonna end up alone. I'm gonna be alone forever. There must be something fundamentally wrong with me. I tried so hard and it still wasn't enough. Can be a big one. It can create this sense of failure and not enoughness inadequacy. You know, there are so many. Stories that we can feed and fuel after a breakup that again, take us from pain, which is natural and normal into suffering, which is of our own creation. And the trouble is there that in fueling all of those stories at a time when our self-esteem, our self-confidence is maybe already bruised and battered we then make that so much worse because we punish ourselves, we blame ourselves, we shame ourselves. And that again, creates so much suffering at a time when we're so vulnerable and we need love and care and support from ourselves and from the people around us. And unfortunately, it can also lead us into similarly unhealthy patterns in the next relationship. So if we maybe had patterns of self abandonment in the relationship that just ended, and then we tell ourselves all of those painful stories as we're processing the breakup and we're really hard on ourselves. Then we eventually go to approach the next relationship from a foundation of really low self-worth, because we're harboring all of these stories and beliefs that there's something wrong with me. I'm not lovable. People always leave me I'm not worth fighting for you know, however it might sound for you. I know those are some really common ones, so it's really important that we are vigilant about monitoring those stories and interrupting them and course correcting when we see them popping up. Because that's certainly something that we can choose to redirect. We can choose to offer ourselves different stories, and it's really only in looking more neutrally at what happened that we can seek to learn the lessons, and we'll come to that in a moment, what it looks like to learn those lessons. okay, the next really important piece in healing from a breakup in the healthiest way possible is finding a way to reach a place of closure and acceptance that doesn't hinge on the other person. Giving you an explanation or agreeing with your version of events or apologizing or, you know, there being any sort of peace as between you. Really what we want is to be able to find closure within ourselves in the sense of acceptance of reality. Again, if you're someone with more anxious patterns, it's really easy to push against reality to feel like this reality is so intolerable. I'm in so much pain. And so I have to scramble to try and change it or fix it or argue with it. You know, it's that classic, stages of grief and we experienced the denial and the bargaining and all of these things. We just can't accept reality as it is because it's too painful. And we wanna have one more conversation with them. We wanna, you know, close all of the open loops. We wanna make it all make sense. But again, as I've said so many times before, the person who leaves you feeling that way, the person who maybe didn't have the emotional capacity or willingness in the relationship to have those hard conversations you know, to communicate effectively, the likelihood of them appearing post breakup, having magically developed emotional capacity and willingness that they lacked in the relationship and making themselves available for some sort of closure conversation that resolves everything for you and allows you to feel at peace. That's really, really unlikely. And even if there were some universe in which that was. Going to happen. It still places the ball in their court rather than yours, and it leaves you in this holding pattern, this story of I can't do anything. My hands are tied unless and until they show up and give me an explanation, tell me why they did what they did. Tell me what they're really feeling like. All of these things that we can desperately long for but we're really unlikely to get so. Shifting the focus instead to closure being something that I decide to give myself by way of accepting the reality as it is, rather than as I wish it were. And that is challenging and your anxious parts are not gonna like that. But it's also very empowering because. Places the ball back in your court. It focuses on the things that are in your control, the things that you have direct agency and responsibility over. And that is really how you get your peace back rather than bargaining and fighting against all the things that you wish were otherwise and you feel are so unfair. All of that. Makes so much sense and we can have so much compassion for those parts of us. But ultimately moving forward and finding our center again, is about focusing on the things that we can control. Now the, the final piece of the puzzle that I wanna speak to around processing and healing from a breakup in the healthiest way possible is turning towards the future. And just to be clear, this is not something you have to do two weeks after your breakup. This might be many months later. But starting to really reflect on and engage with the lessons that need to be learned and having a level of intentionality around, okay, what comes next? What would I do differently next time? Again, never from a place of shame or blame, um, not about, you know, this was my fault or I messed everything up, but just looking hopefully with a level of neutrality and honest engagement at what actually happened here. Where were the points along the way that I may be self abandoned or that I wish I'd spoken up for something that wasn't okay with me, or, I continued to tolerate things that I wasn't comfortable with or maybe where I can see that someone was giving me clear signs that I was refusing to see or accept where I sort of pushed past someone's lack of capacity and just kept trying. All of these things we can start to kind of reflect on and learn from and develop a really clear framework, a set of intentions for ourselves moving forward around, okay, what do I want my relationships to look and feel like? It sounds so obvious, but most people who I work with don't have clarity around that. They just want a relationship with someone who loves them. And while of course we all want that it's actually not a very reliable thing to have as your soul intention or your soul desire. Because love is is great, but it's not enough. And I think when it doesn't have, alongside it things like trust and safety and reliability and dependability and all of these other qualities that are so important in the overall picture of what it takes to build and sustain a healthy, secure relationship we can become very attached to people on the basis of intense emotions, intense love and attachment. But maybe we're lacking that solid foundation. So actually taking the time to get very clear on what are my standards, what are my non-negotiables, what are my deal breakers? What's the vision? This is important work to do before you rush back into dating. And I know how tempting it can be to just wanna find a new person to distract yourself with or to attach to. If relationships are really your comfort zone and you feel much more yourself when you're attached to someone, it can feel really hard to go slow to take the time to be single and to be discerning about who and where you're gonna devote your time and energy. But that is a very, very important part of not just repeating the same old patterns again and again, is getting so clear and being so steadfast and so committed to your own standards that you're actually not interested in entertaining connections that fall short of those standards. And of course that's not about being, you know, overly rigid or guarded or kind of wary of people. It's just recognizing the importance of your own wellbeing and knowing that relationships that lack certain qualities like trust and consistency and reliability, that those do more harm than good and that they're actually not worth investing in. So spending the time to go through that process for yourself will always pay dividends and will always be well worth the weight. Okay, I'm gonna leave it there. I really hope that that's been helpful. As a side note, what I just stepped you through is more or less the structure of my higher love breakup course. So if you're nodding along and feeling like all of that makes sense and sounds like an approach that really resonates with you consider checking out my higher love course. If you do my free breakup training as well, there's a special offer to join the course at a discount. So you might wanna consider checking out the free training first and then perhaps looking at joining Higher Love if you're looking to go a bit deeper. Okay guys, I'm gonna leave it there. Thank you so much for joining me. If you are going through a breakup, I'm sending you so much love. I know it's hard but you are strong and one foot in front of the other. Not only will you get through this, but with a bit of intention and courage you can get through it. Bigger stronger, brighter, better than before. I really deeply believe that to be true. So, sending you so much love and I look forward to seeing you again next week. Thanks guys.

Speaker 4:

Thanks for joining me for this episode of On Attachment. If you wanna go deeper on all things, attachment, love, and relationships, you can find me on Instagram at Stephanie under Reig or@stephanierigg.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, I'd be so grateful if you could leave a review on a five star rating. It really does help so much. Thanks again for being here, and I hope to see you again soon.