Image source https://www.flickr.com/photos/manarianz5/
Break-ups are rough for anyone to go through, but I recently saw an article about a study (yes, we’re going all scientific!) that has shown how your personality type impacts how resilient you are when it comes to getting over a break-up. And more importantly, how it then influences your future attitudes to yourself, rejection and relationships.
This makes a lot of sense, as I’m sure we all know those people who just seem to be able to handle everything that life throws at them with a bit more ease - including break-ups. Why are we in so much pain but they can seem to get over it way quicker and thrive afterwards?
Well, seeing it in this kind of study will hopefully enable anyone who feels that way to know that the way they perceive things can have a huge effect in how they can come through a break-up.
So, here comes the science bit! The Stanford University psychologists found that how you handle your break-up is most largely influenced by how you explain the break-up to yourself. And those who connect the break-up to qualities and characteristics they have that they feel are permanent, experience a much harder time coming through it and bouncing back.
When it comes to emotional resilience, I think this is largely about taking responsibility for yourself and your actions (even if you feel you did come out of it worse). This is all about setting those boundaries and doing the work on yourself after a break-up, and secondly, knowing that your personalities or actions are all malleable. If you go through life believing that your relationship failures are as a sole result of your own shortcomings, bad behaviours or inadequacy in some way, then the future looks pretty bleak when it comes to relationships! And life in general, actually.
Part of why we can struggle so much as that we believe things happen to us and that we can’t control them simply because of how we are. This is where the victim mentality can creep in and that can become quite insidious. I had an ex who repeated the same patterns in relationships and put it down to ‘because that’s the way I am’. Because he believed that, get kept getting the same outcomes.
On the other hand, people who can take the break-up as something to learn from and evolve through (even if that means having a word with yourself, owning up to bad behaviour and committing to change it), tend to heal much quicker, intercept those old patterns and then consequently make better or different choices in future relationships or romantic interactions. And that’s really what I try and help people to do I suppose - take a step out of the emotional attachment for a while, look at your beliefs, how you internalise ‘rejection’, your behaviours, reoccurring patterns and break them down to change the things that aren’t working bit by bit.
It was something I had to learn to do and was the best thing I ever did.
I think this is actually really encouraging because hopefully if you do feel that your break-up or a romantic rejection of some kind is something that was purely down to your ‘flaws’, when you know and understand that these things can be changed, it can make the future seem a lot brighter! It might sound a bit self-helpy to go on about the importance of your internal conversations that you have with yourself but it’s the basis of everything!
Here is the link to the study if you’re curious http://psp.sagepub.com/content/42/1/54.abstract
Would love to hear your thoughts on this!