Help! How do I stop spiraling over my ex?
Post-breakup crash-outs have a limit to their usefulness.
Q:
Hi Melissa! I’m a few months out from a breakup, and I feel like I’m losing my mind. I’m familiar with the stages of grief, and I know that mourning a loss often means moving through the gamut of wild emotions. But sometimes I feel like my feelings are out of control – unhelpful, and even possibly unhealthy. How do I stop crashing out over my ex so that I can find peace and move forward? Thanks!
A:
I know this feeling so well.
It’s one thing to move through an average, normative grieving process. It’s quite another to feel like we’re crashing out and can’t stop.
If your breakup is feeling so painful that you can’t function, if you notice yourself feeling and behaving differently from breakups in the past, if you realize that the size of your response to a breakup is always much bigger than the people around you, it might be time to ask yourself: Is my process actually helping me?
Because while of course there’s no right way to grieve, and there’s no one-size-fits-all way to move through heartbreak, we often do know when we feel completely out of control.
Indeed, I just went through it last year when someone I was into ghosted me. I completely lost it. I was crying non-stop. I couldn’t get out of bed. I was having extra therapy sessions left and right. I was casting spells constantly, trying for divine intervention. And I had to admit to myself: Something isn’t right. This doesn’t feel normal.
“What the hell can I do?” I asked myself.
Sound familiar?
Well, I have some ideas.
But first, I want to tell you that starting in late fall, I’ll be running one of my favorite support groups: Healing From Heartbreak.
It’s a group for education, processing, and (my favorite part) ritual so you can wash that person right out of your hair in time to embrace the new year.
Curious? Get on the launch list: It’s a simple email list that gives you first access to sign-ups when they open!
Now let’s talk about crashing out. Because believe me. I know the feeling, and it feels bad. And while it’s perfectly normal to have some struggles with grief, to have some really tough days, even to think and behave in ways that surprise us, if you’re asking yourself this question – How do I stop spiraling over my ex? – then you seem to know that something isn’t quite right with how you’re feeling.
The ultimate goal, I think, when you’re feeling like this is to come back to the present.
Of course you’re going to process the past and even reminisce. Of course you want to make time to consider how you want your future to look. But anxiety tends to obsess on the past or the future – things that we cannot change, things that we have no control over – and that’s when we start to spiral.
So how do we come back to the present moment? How do we deal with what’s right in front of us? How do we ground in the now, where arguably, nothing devastating is actually happening?
Here are five places to start.
1. Ground in the present.
Yes, “five things I can see” has become a bit of an Internet joke.
But this series of listing out five things you can see, four things you can touch, three things you can hear, two things you can smell, and one thing you can taste has a purpose: It brings you into your current surroundings.
If 5-4-3-2-1 feels like a lot, you can shift it to 1-1-1-1-1: one thing you can savor with each of your five senses (whichever ones you have access to). You can try sitting with each one for a bit longer, asking yourself questions about the flavor and texture of each one, contemplating why you feel drawn to them.
If you need to get out of your space because of the memories being triggered, you can try going for a mindfulness walk: Go for a short walk (yes, a “mental health walk”) and pay attention to your surroundings instead of distracting yourself with music or a phone call. I tend to be really surprised by how much I hear when I’m really paying attention.
Or try grounding yourself in what you know to be true. Fans of The Hunger Games might remember this as the “My name is Katniss Everdeen” series of thoughts. But the point is to pause yourself from ruminating on questions you have about what may or may not be true.
“My name is Katniss Everdeen. I am seventeen years old. My home is District 12.”
What is a list of infallible truths for you?
Stay there, grounded in reality, until you feel less distracted and more regulated.
2. Acknowledge your emotional-somatic state.
Essentially, this is asking yourself: What am I feeling?
What emotion am I feeling? What am I feeling in my body? And if you have the skill set to answer this question: How are these two things connected? (What does this emotion feel like in my body? What is this feeling in my body letting me know?)
Many of us (myself included!) tend to stay in our heads when we’re trying to process: What do I think? What are they thinking? Why did they do that? If you find yourself analyzing, intellectualizing, meaning-making, philosophizing, or psychologizing when you’re upset, my biggest piece of advice to you is to stop.
There is only so much processing your brain can do for you. At some point, you need to process what’s in your body (as they say, “from the neck down”).
This isn’t to say that thinking through our experiences can’t be helpful. They sure as hell can. But we can get stuck there. And very often, the real work we need to do (especially for those of us who over-analyze maladaptively) is emotional, not logical.
Not sure where to start? I’ve got ideas:
Identify what you’re feeling (emotionally or physically). A great place to start is with the Emotion-Sensation Wheel from Lindsay Braman, which you can find here.
Try sitting in difficult feelings for 90-second intervals. Research shows that trying to distract ourselves from hard emotions doesn’t help. But letting the feeling complete its cycle does. Set a timer for 90 seconds and actively feel that tough feeling instead of trying to get rid of it. Set the timer again if you need to.
Ask the feeling what it needs from your body. Are you feeling compelled to cry? to scream? to punch something? Do what your body is asking you. (A pillow can be helpful here: to scream into or to punch.)
The idea is that your feelings need to be felt. That is, the only way out is through.
3. Create a safe space for yourself.
My last partner and I would call this a “sensi” space, acknowledging my sensitivity to my surroundings.
He would put on soothing lighting (he even got one of those night-sky projectors exactly for this purpose), fill the essential oil diffuser with a relaxing scent (lavender tends to be the go-to for folks), and put on calming music.
Feeling safe from an external standpoint could help me feel safer internally.
Try engaging your senses: Light incense. Run a bath. Do a breathing exercise or a guided meditation (my favorite guided meditations come from Vanda Ciceryova and Chani Nicholas).
Let your space be one in which you can be calm, one where you can heal.
4. Perform a ritual (or two, or ten).
I read once that a ritual is, essentially, any routine that we give purpose to.
For example, many of us sweep as part of a regular cleaning routine. But what if you sprinkled salt onto the floor first and made it a salt sweep? (This is a common folk practice, wherein the salt is believed to absorb negative energy, so sweeping that up is spiritually cleansing to the home!)
How can you use ritual to play a role in your healing process?
Maybe you already have a spiritual practice, like prayer or spellcasting, that you can incorporate.
Maybe you need ideas for creating a ritual practice! Here are some of my favorites:
Write down an intention for how you hope to move forward. Bury the small slip of paper in a house plant. Every time you water that plant, imagine that you’re nurturing the intention for yourself.
Create steam in your shower that is infused with the emotion you need more of. Use an associated essential oil (like orange for happiness, rosemary for protection, or ylang ylang for self-love) in your shower. Practice breathing in that which you need, and then breathing out that which you don’t.
Write out a list of hopes you have for your ex, unrelated to you. This is not a manifestation ritual for them reaching out or missing you. This is to manifest that which they need in their life. Read it back and send that energy to them when you find yourself ruminating. It’s a reminder that you have no control over them, but you can wish them well.
If the idea of ritualizing your process sounds really exciting or intriguing to you, then I highly, highly recommend joining the Healing From Heartbreak group. Get on the launch list to find out when sign-ups open!
5. Practice radical acceptance.
Radical acceptance is exactly what it sounds like: How do I accept what is happening in the most radical way possible – by letting it be true without trying to change it?
I’ll be the first to say that radical acceptance can be challenging. But the idea is to sit in what is true right now. If you want to change that material reality, great! You can make moves to do that. But that’s not the point in the moment of radical acceptance.
For example, “What is happening right now makes sense, given all that came before it.” You an apply this to your breakup or to the Trump administration: This didn’t come out of nowhere; other events led up to it. And right now, this is where we’re at. That doesn’t mean that your breakup can’t be painful or that you can’t engage in political action against Trump.
It's a step in the process: You have to accept what is true – be really situated in reality – before you can make meaningful change.
Some examples of radical acceptance statements that I like include:
I can’t change what’s already happened.
The present is the only moment I have control over.
This moment is the result of a million other decisions.
It’s a waste of time to fight what’s already occurred.
You have only this current moment to try something different.
If these resonate with you, I recommend checking out The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook, which you can access for free here.
In case I haven’t already made this obvious: You are not alone.
Breakups are hard for everyone. They’re especially hard if you struggle with rejection or abandonment. And they can be especially hard when they hit you in a place that you didn’t expect, creating this crash-out experience.
But you are not crazy. You aren’t going to be stuck on this person for the rest of tour life. You are not going to be alone forever. You’re in a process. Hopefully something in here can help with that.
And if processing in a group sounds supportive to you, I hope to see you in Healing From Heartbreak, a six-week workshop series for babes struggling with a broken heart. Be the first to know when sign-ups open.
Lovingly,
Melissa