Why Do Bad Breakups Happen?

Breakups hurt as anyone going through one will attest to. Some people feel sad for a while, change some routines in their lives, reconnect with friends, and bounce back rather swiftly. Others, however, become entrenched in insurmountable sadness and gut wrenching grief. Why is it that some have a harder time getting over a breakup than others? Why do bad breakups happen in certain cases and not in others?

The Origin of a Bad Breakup

During childhood your childhood you are very impressionable. Throughout your upbringing you use the feedback from around you to define your 'working models' for relationships and affection. As a child only a healthy relationship with at least one of your primary caregivers ensures a healthy social and emotional development. The absence of a secure relationship will affect how you feel about yourself, your choice in romantic partners and how you function in that relationship. Your relationship with your primary caregivers can be categorized into three distinct styles: Assured attachment: Close caring relationship with both parents Ambivalent attachment: Parents do not attach, connect or feel intimacy as easily Avoidant attachment: Disconnected, conflicted and chaotic relationship Identifying your attachment style can be a clue that can help explain your choice for a partner as well as your functioning throughout the relationship and during the breakup. Throughout life you use your 'working models' for relationships and affection as reference, to guide yourself in making choices for attachments - both for friends as for lovers. What's more - you tend to recreate the relationships we had with our parents. You do this because that is the way you've learnt to love. The negative side to this is that you unconsciously pick partners that have similar unfavorable traits your ambivalent or avoidant parents had. If you're caught in this situation you hope to change these new attachment figures in order to fill the emotional void that exists within yourself. This behavior is also known as repetition compulsion. As the name suggests, this pattern repeats itself.

What Makes a Breakup Bad?

Coming from an ambivalent or avoidant family, your caregivers were likely not always there for you. When you're young and impressionable, hurt and rejection from your parents, is unbearable. These initial encounters with loss leave a lasting impression and are referred to as emotional abandonment. As a child you haven't developed the ability yet to deal with these kind of intense emotions and you disassociate yourself from the feelings by suppressing them deep inside youself. The combination of both repetition compulsion, and early abandonment issues, sets you up for a horrific feeling of double abandonment during a breakup. The old, unprocessed trauma from your parents and the brand new abandonment from your lover. Old wounds you were never aware of, are now torn open. This results in excruciating pain and despair in what is known as abandonment depression. We know it as a broken heart or a bad breakup. The best advice for getting over a breakup is recognizing and acknowledging your old wounds and allowing them to heal. Healing involves analyzing your background and deducing underlying themes in your relationship. You might be asking yourself how long it takes to get over a breakup. In fact, you can minimize your recovery time with a lot of careful inflection. But more importantly it is a critical step for you to be able to engage in healthy relationships going forward.