How therapy can help you heal from the trauma of a breakup

Breakups are one of the most traumatic things that can happen to a person. This trauma can manifest in many ways, such as depression and anger. If you find yourself struggling with these feelings, then it may be time to get some help. Therapy is an effective way for trauma victims to heal from their trauma and move on with their life! In this blog post we will discuss how therapy helps people deal with trauma from breakups!

Why should I go to therapy after a breakup?

Breaking up with someone is hard! It’s even more hard when we have lingering feelings for our ex, or we realize how hard it is to be alone. Here are some common issues people experience after a breakup and how therapy can help you learn the coping skills necessary to move forward.

It Feels Like My Ex Is Still Around

It’s hard to move on when your ex is still around in the form of social media, their friends or family that you see all the time. Therapy can help you find ways to deal with this discomfort and work through trauma so it doesn’t impact every area of life. You’re not alone if you say to yourself, “it feels like my ex is still around”. In my therapy practice I commonly hear this phrase from clients.

You may want to think about what you did in the past that accommodated your ex. For example, did you compromise on things that were important to you? Were the adjustments you made healthy or not? Did they change or limit you?

Recognizing that your ex’s behavior was abusive will curb any desire to romanticize your experience or any lingering feeling you may have.  You can’t change the past, but you can change your patterns. Working with a licensed mental health counselor and finding the right therapist can help you to make this shift.

I Miss My Ex

Of course you miss your ex. You two spent a lot of time together and shared a lot of memories. And that’s okay. There’s a difference between normalizing the experience and romanticizing it. If you find yourself thinking, “I just want them back” or ” I can’t stop loving my ex,” then trauma from your breakup is likely at play in this thought process.

The trauma of a breakup often triggers memories that are tied to our past relationships.  One exercise our therapists use to help turn on your rational brain is to make a list of the pro’s and con’s of the relationship.

When you take a moment and reflect on the times you have together, you usually start to realize the decision you made was the correct one. A licensed counselor can help you find the space to get to this realization.

Being Alone Is Harder Than I Thought

Being single after trauma is hard. It can be an adjustment, especially if you have been with your partner for a long time and now you are on the other side of the relationship.

The trauma triggers old feelings of abandonment which make it difficult to trust yourself or others again. Therapy is one way we work through this trauma so that you can learn to trust your intuition and feelings.

Therapy has helped me a lot with trauma from breakups. One of the things I focused on in therapy was my patterns that made it hard for me to move forward after a breakup, such as getting into another relationship right away or not dating at all because of fear of being rejected again. I learned to take time for myself and work on my trauma.

As you can see, therapy helps people heal from trauma! A therapist near you will help to reduce the anxiety you have about being alone and your counselor can use tools like cognitive behavior therapy to help you re-train your brain and develop healthy coping strategies.

How can a therapist help you through your breakup

Therapists near you are going to have different level of experience when it comes to helping you heal from the trauma of a breakup. Our licensed counselors at Hanson Complete Wellness in Tampa, FL have years of experience help people exactly like you.

You may want to talk about your relationship and the different types of trauma you have experienced or are experiencing.  Sometimes you don’t know how trauma is impacting your life, but a therapist can help identify it in therapy sessions so that we can work through it together.

Talking with friends and family can be helpful but only to a certain point. They don’t have the years of clinical experience and the tools and frameworks to help you move through your current situation. When you find a therapist you can trust, you can move through the stress, anxiety, loneliness and struggle you are experiencing much more quickly.

Using tools like cognitive behavioral therapy can help you replace negative thoughts with positive thoughts. Acceptance and commitment therapy can help to create “space” for your thoughts. This allows you do better evaluate what thoughts are helpful versus unhelpful, and have unhelpful thoughts have less of an impact on you. Having that space also allows you to do more of things that are important to you.

How can this help when going through a breakup?

After a breakup it’s common for your thoughts are consumed by that person. People commonly ask, Have they moved on? If it has been a long time since the breakup, we can feel shame and frustration for continuing to think about that person and try to push those thoughts out of our mind. But our brain doesn’t work that way. The act of trying to push something out of our mind involves thinking about that very thing.

Instead, try allowing that thought or image to be there, but in a new and different way. 

The goal is to learn to be aware of our thoughts, but not get “hooked on them.”

Finding the right therapist near me and the next steps

It’s important to acknowledge them but don’t be hard on yourself for having any of them, it’s normal. Healing is a process. The good news is with the right help you can take control of your thoughts, emotions and feelings and learn to be comfortable with them. By finding the right therapist near you you can build a team to help you feel like yourself again.

Working with a therapist or counseling will help you from running to the next relationship to just fill the void. It will help you learn to understand your patterns and make positive changes so the same problems don’t come back again and again. It will help you reflect on your past relationships and learn how you can be a better version of yourself. So that your next relationship is a healthy, happy one. Click the link below to talk to one of our expert relationship therapists in Tampa,FL.