Ask Julia: Why Does a Breakup Feel Like a Death?

Interviewer: Often in life we have separations from loved ones who haven't died, like breaking up with a partner. And often it feels like a death and in many ways it is, because we often don't see them again. Is that grieving process similar to when someone actually dies?

Julia: Definitely. I mean, I would term that a living loss. A breakup of a relationship or a divorce has all the emotional components of grief from death. But at some level it has its own particular significance because the person is alive and getting on with their life. So you can really derail your grieving process, if for instance you're following them on Instagram and you're seeing they're having this happy life without you. Or you have a lot of unresolved issues with them that they refuse to talk to you about. So how relationships end, how the partner continues in life and what your outcomes are that you have another relation has a massive influence on how you manage that living loss.

Interviewer: And so do you have any advice on the best ways to do this? Is it better to cut off 100% and delete them from your Instagram?

Julia: I mean, most divorces where you have children, the thing that damages the children most is the difficult relationship with the partners. Children's outcomes, if you've separated as parents, you have to find a way of building a good enough relationship that you can communicate, make decisions, that you're not being brutal about each other, behind each other's backs. If you've had a relationship with someone where there is no present reason to be connected with them, I would suggest certainly for the first two years that you have no connection with them because the minute you see them, your body remembers, your body holds the score and it ignites all the longing and the good bits that you had and you forget the bits that led you to break up. So that you... I mean, often you can want to have sex straight away and then you throw yourself back to have to do all the work again. And that happens all the time. And I think social media makes everything from that point of view much more difficult.

Interviewer: It prolongs our pain. It prolongs the pain.

Julia: I mean, one of the things that I would say for all losses, which is why I believe in the app so much, is that we need to support ourselves to do this. We cannot do it alone. Straightforward loss for someone you have a straightforward relationship that isn't a death out of time, that isn't a very significant loss. You may be able to just be a bit sad for a time and get on with your life. Most relationships are not that straightforward and we cannot do them on our own. So we need all the tools that are available to us. We need Love and Connection to others. We need the app. We may need therapy as well. We need to take care of ourselves. We need to do the things on the eight pillar because otherwise the process gets stuck in us and then that affects all our outcomes going forward, all our future relationships.

Interviewer: Do you think we're more isolated these days from our loved ones and family who typically years ago would give us support and actually it's making the grief process more difficult for us than it would have been 200 years ago?

Julia: I think in some ways we're more virtually connected, digitally connected, but we are socially disconnected and what matters in our lives is the quality of our relationships and the meaning that we have from those relationships. And for that we need to prioritise our relationships. So if you look at all the research, there's a brilliant Harvard study that looks at outcomes and what that says is that people who have good, reliable, loving relationships live longer, are wealthier, healthier, have better memories and don't suffer so much pain. So if there's a single thing that matters to us most in our lives is love. And that includes the risk of loving where love can end and that can be through death or through separation. And so it's a tricky one, but when we don't have love, we have much worse outcomes on every level. If you look at the transgenerational trauma in families from losses, from unspoken suicides, from murders, from depression, from alcoholism, you can track the patterns of behaviour and the patterns of psychological fragility in a direct line from the transgenerational injuries. And so if you want to know yourself and support yourself, go back and track your family's history and that will explain and give you many answers.

Transcribed automatically; may contain small errors.