We have reached Tip 8 of 8 in our series ‘How to Create a Healthy Me Space After a Relationship Ends’. Me Time is one of the MOST IMPORTANT tips in this series for this is where you allow yourself time to heal, reflect and to create a new norm for your life without said person. The period of time directly after a relationship is one of the most lonely moments for many people. As humans we are creatures of habit and when the habit is broken, we feel it:
No more conversations.
Coming home to an empty house.
No longer having a standard ‘date’ for functions.
Being responsible for all the tasks your significant other previously handled.
Sleeping alone (many cannot sleep in the bed for quite some time because the loneliness is palatable there).
No longer hearing or having the elements of daily family life for those who have shifted to co-parenting due to a divorce.
For those who became a widow, becoming fully responsible for the children on your own; for some they may have no idea of the previous routines their spouse had with the children.
Feeling angry, sad, disappointed, abandoned, physically ill, loss of appetite, fits of crying, emotional, heartbroken, lost, clinically depressed at any given moment often triggered by a myriad of things.
Sometimes people avoid these feelings by self-medicating with other people (sex, entering into a relationship), drugs, alcohol, shopping, partying or anything to not feel or address this change. All this does is delay your healing, it will not make them go away. When you finally stop self-medicating (1, 3, 6, 12, 24 months later) all of those feelings you did not deal with will be there waiting for you along with all the new emotional wounds you may have acquired during your self-medicating binge.
Growing love is not a Quick 5 list or something instantaneously. The ‘heart’ is a complicated space and even though we live in a microwave, instant, disposable culture, the heart and mind do not adhere this lifestyle. You can try to trick and manipulate it in many creative ways but they will not bend to your modern conventions.
This is why the ONLY sustainable method is to lean into the pain, feel it, accept it and use it (along with a therapist) to help you transform it. Everything else is an illusion. Me time is what gives you the space to do all of this because it will take time. Entering into a ‘buffer relationship’ with someone new only prolongs your journey and ultimately transfers your emotional wounds to another because you are NOT emotionally available to begin something new. – Misha N. Granado, MPH, MS