What to Do After a Breakup

Nothing leaves you feeling more alone than heartbreak. You feel lost, afraid, and sometimes you also feel deeply unworthy. The worst part is wondering if you’ll ever feel happy again.

But there is a way to heal, and it starts with first understanding what the source of your pain actually is. In today’s new video, I share a way you can rewire your brain . . . not to ignore your grief, but to see it with fresh eyes and start to mend your broken heart.

To anyone going through a breakup, I hope this video is the start of you feeling better. I wanted to bring you over the next couple of months a couple of different sections from my new book, Love Life. There is an entire chapter, Chapter 14, that is called “Surviving a Breakup.” And I wanted to talk about the first of the five principles that I outline in that chapter today.

The first point I make in this chapter on surviving a heartbreak is that when we get out of a relationship, we are preoccupied, monopolized, overcome with our pain—the pain of having lost something that felt so deeply important to us and still does. But in all of that pain, which is tremendous, one of the things we forget to do is to connect with the newfound sense of peace that we have now that we are no longer in that relationship.

Now, for many of you, that is going to be an incredibly difficult concept to latch on to at first. “How could I feel peace? I’m in the worst moment of my life. How could that be connected to a sense of peace?”

Well, let’s explore it a little bit.

Think back to that relationship for a moment. I want you to start to, instead of looking for all the good things, I want you to start to look for the moments in that relationship that caused you pain. What were you missing in that relationship? It could have been quality time with your partner that you craved, but you never got in the way that you wanted. It could have been having your needs met on a physical level or feeling wanted by that person, or feeling important to that person, as important as the other areas of their life. It could have been pain caused by genuine mistreatment by someone who was verbally or physically abusive, by someone who put you down, who made you feel insecure, who betrayed you in ways big or small, who wasn’t loyal to you, who didn’t stick up for you, who didn’t make you feel special.

In what ways did you hurt in that relationship?

When we retroactively look for these red flags, we often find that there were so many things that we chose to ignore in the relationship that actually caused us tremendous pain and sickness while we were in it. You may be heartbroken that you lost this relationship, but you are no longer feeling those sources of pain. And that is a form of peace. It’s just a form of peace that we struggle to connect to when we’re only focused on the pain of the loss. You lost something you didn’t want to lose, but you also lost a lot that you did want to lose.

Now, I also know that some of you will be hearing that and it won’t resonate with you, because you will look back on your relationship and you will say, “Matthew, this person was perfect. This person was my perfect person. They were everything I ever wanted. The only problem was they didn’t want me. So, how am I supposed to look back over that relationship and tell myself there were all these horrible things going on in the relationship that caused me pain that I no longer have to endure?”

Even with someone who behaves well, treats us well, has integrity, or is an all-around good person, here’s what’s still true: Almost no one breaks up with us on the first day they had the thought to. Usually, when someone breaks up with us, we find out about the breakup on the day they tell us. They knew about the breakup weeks or months before. It’s one of the reasons people can move on so quickly. It’s because while we’re finding out about it today, they’ve had months to prepare, sometimes even years, mentally distancing themselves, finding ways to move on in their mind. Moving on in their mind is one of the ways they get up the courage to tell us that they no longer want to be with us.

So, ask yourself this: In any relationship where someone is already thinking about breaking up with someone else, are they likely to make the other person feel safe? Is it possible that during the time that this person was having doubts, you felt unsafe, you felt insecure, and you didn’t even know why at the time?

Can you look back on your relationship and say there was a time where you really felt insecure and you just couldn’t tell where it was coming from? People on the outside thought you were in a great relationship but something didn’t feel right to you? You felt scared and you didn’t know why? And the problem is when we don’t know why because someone isn’t telling us—they’re not revealing their doubts to us—we internalize it. We think it’s our fault. We think that we’re crazy. “It must just be my anxious attachment style playing up again.” “It must just be my insecurity.”

And then we shame ourselves for feeling all of these things. “Why am I not happy in this ‘incredibly happy’ relationship?”

My point is this: Even when someone is a good person, when they’ve decided on some level that they’re having doubts or that they don’t want to be with us, we can still be having, on an unconscious level, an experience with them that causes us suffering. And that means, once again, that when you’re no longer in that situation where you felt unsafe and didn’t know why, you can actually start to feel peaceful again. Yes, you miss the relationship, but you feel peaceful because you no longer have to feel unsafe in the relationship.

Now, for some of you, you’re thinking, “But how do I get over missing the relationship? How do I get over feeling like I’ve lost this incredible thing? Even if they were having doubts, I feel like I’ve lost the best thing I ever had.”

 Inherent in missing a relationship that badly is a story about how great that relationship was, about the romance, the passion, the great love story that was your relationship with this person. But we have to start to connect not with the love story we have in our mind, but with the reality. And the reality is that what we know for sure is that if someone broke up with us, they must have been having a very different experience of that relationship than we were, even if we were blissfully happy in our mind, even if we were feeling so good, even if we felt like this was our great love story, that was not their experience.

 We thought that we and that person were inhabiting the same world, when in fact, we were on different planets even if we were in the same room. And when we realize that, that’s when we can come to a place of genuine and radical acceptance—that this great love story that I’m grieving does not need to be grieved, because it did not exist in the form that I am telling myself.

Maybe there was a real attraction there at one point. Maybe there was even a long period of time where this person and I were on the same page. But at a certain point, we were having completely different experiences. We begin to realize that that relationship was a shaky stage set that we filled with all of our beautiful, loving intentions and ambitions for the relationship. And they, from a certain point onward, filled with pretending.

This is one of the hardest realizations to come to, because it means divorcing this idea of what we thought we had with someone. It’s a head trip to have to recontextualize the relationship through this new lens, and there will be a part of us that is married to the old story that does not want to let go of it.

But letting go of it is the beginning of feeling better and realizing we haven’t lost nearly as much as we thought we did, and making space for the kind of love story that we were longing for all along that can still show up in our lives. This requires real grieving. And that’s why there’s no heartbreak that doesn’t involve grieving. But what are you grieving for? Are you grieving for the great love story of your life, for the perfect partner, for the love of your life? Or are you grieving the loss of a reality that you’ve come to realize was not the case?

I promise you, the second kind of grief is temporary. The first kind of grief lasts a very long time. Because no one finds it easy to get over the idea that they lost the love of their life. But when you realize someone wasn’t the love of your life, you can actually begin to move on.

Now, as I’ve said, this is just one small excerpt of some of the content from my new book, Love Life. There is an entire section of the book on surviving the worst breakups of your life. And the book is available for pre-order right now. I know so many of you have it on pre-order already. And I wanted to tell you today, if you haven’t watched my other videos this month, that this month only, I’m doing something really special for people who pre-order.

I have an entire series on heartbreak, more specifically, on finding happiness after heartbreak, that I am gifting you as a bonus for pre-ordering the book right now. What I did in this series is I assembled a group of people that I believed would be some of the most powerful people in the world at helping you heal from your heartbreak. So, I interviewed Dr. Nicole LePera, the Holistic Psychologist. I interviewed Dr. Ramani, world-leading expert on narcissism, David Kessler, the leading expert on grief, Lewis Howes, Glo Atanmo, Lisa and Tom Bilyeu, and Amy Porterfield.

All incredible friends of mine who have amazing wisdom on how to move on from heartbreak. Every single one of these conversations is yours for free as a bonus for pre-ordering the book this month. It’s only available through the end of February. You’ll get the Heartbreak series for life, which is amazing because it’s not the last time we’re all going to be heartbroken in some way in life. Heartbreak is a part of life, but knowing how to move through it is a superpower.

And all of this I give you completely free just for pre-ordering a copy of my book, as my way of saying thank you for supporting me before the publication date. You’ll get the book in the mail in April, but right now, immediately, when you pre-order, you’ll get the entire Heartbreak series that I’m talking about. Go to heartbreakseries.com to pre-order the book. You could do it through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and a bunch of other places. And when you pre-order, take your order number on your receipt, go back to heartbreakseries.com, and you can put it in there for instant access to all of these conversations I’m talking about. And when you do, you’ll get them for life.

All right, heartbreakseries.com is the link. I’m so sorry that you’re in pain right now, but I promise you, it will get better. I just want to help you get there a little faster than perhaps you would on your own. Thank you for watching, and I’ll see you over at heartbreakseries.com