If you’ve ever had a relationship end, you’ll know it’s really easy to make bad decisions post break-up.
As a case in point, I was talking to a friend recently who’s going through a marriage break-up. There are young kids involved, she’s a wreck and she wanted to talk to me about all the big, scary decisions she was trying to make. In a hurry, no less.
This is, I think, the worst thing any heartbroken person can do. Because you’re not really thinking straight.
The days and weeks that follow a break-up are discombobulating in the extreme. You feel hopeless, helpless, sick with nerves and completely out of control. In the worst way, you just want your world to return to the way it used to look.
For me, the best way to describe how your brain feels at this point is like walking into your house and finding everything off-kilter – pictures are tilted, the cushions are all over the floor, clothes are spilling out of your wardrobe, the sink’s full of dirty dishes. Nothing’s in its rightful place.
And, it’s tempting at this time to flail around and do something, anything, to restore order, but it’s probably not a great idea when you’re clouded by sadness, desperation and in all likelihood, an irrational kind of panic that’s especially hard to ignore.
Acting on that troubled trifecta may well lead to those bad decisions post breakup that we look back on and feel sick about.
The kind of decisions that involve telling everyone your ex’s deepest secrets, badmouthing them or doing cringy oversharing on social media, texting when drunk, doing numerous drive-bys, sleeping with them, or … er, spray-painting their car.
Decisions you can and should make right now include anything involving long hot baths, good movies, books, boxset marathons, cups of tea, naps, walking by a river, sitting in the garden in the sun, or lying in some long grass watching the clouds drift by.
Anything else can wait until your temporary tilted world rights itself, and you’re in a better place.
Made any bad decisions post break-up yourself? Did you have any regrets?
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1 Comment
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I don’t know if this is a place to do this , but I am , just like you said, feeling hopeless and irrationally in panic, so instead of writing this to the wrong person, or texting it to myself…
I’m waking up wishing this was a dream, and instantly look at my phone wishing for a text from him saying he’s stupid and he knows he has a problem but I am way more important and he wants to make it up for once.
We are that topical story where there have been many break up, two felt real, one was suddenly, shocking, breath taking and very painful, the next one was extremely painful and hit my self-stem really hard, this time it was shocking yo to some extend, somehow I was subconsciously waiting for another mental breakdown from his part. Even though I know there’s a sick pattern , tanta I should not go back or even wish to, I still do, still wake up wishing it was a dream. I hate I know we’ve always got back and I am anxiously waiting for the story to repeat as if this one was going to be differed but i know I won’t, so I hate I want it again. It’s like a cycle I am not able to break.
I always tell come friends when this happens and later be like, think we’re together again, they’ll just usted and support me, they have spoke their minds so there’s nothing else they could do, I know I need to use this pain as energy moving forward, but right know it feels real and I can feel pain
Maybe not the right time to take any sort of action
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