Recovery After Emotional Loss
We’ve all been there before.
The call disconnects, and we’re left with the phone screen shining back at us.
Just like that, the relationship is over.
A deep sigh escapes, covered with disappointment, sadness and in some ways, relief.
Another failed attempt at love and connection.
So what’s next?
The shift in our daily process must align with the new norm of being alone. We have to sit in our emotions and deal. For a lot of us, this period of change can be difficult. It creates a sense of failure which causes people to avoid their feelings or even pretend they don’t exist. This can make the overall healing process take longer if it ever comes at all. This is also where we game players will dig deeper in our avoidance and focus on conquering the game.
In my younger years (before smartphones), I obsessed over video games. There were days I wouldn’t sleep to see how far I could get in my quest. I used video games as one way to avoid these feelings and pretend everything was fine. This was due to people telling me I was “too sensitive” and to be more like everyone else. For a while, this tactic worked. As I got older, my feelings started catching up with me, forcing me to accept them as they were.
This helped me to understand how I processed the loss of human connection and that regardless of the person or situation, it will always hurt. That’s okay because it’s supposed to hurt and needs to happen on a physical, emotional, spiritual and psychological level (aka. all levels). Consider it a shed of the soul, if you will.
Once people become a part of our muscle memory of routine, we become a part of theirs. So once the disconnect happens, it releases a detox of their energy to move forward. This is not a bad thing but we have to retrain our brains, emotions, expectations and reality to accept what-is and conclude that if we hope for love, we must also hope for pain.
How do we get past the pain?
In today’s world, it should be easy, right? We are a part of a culture that allows us to Google a fix to our problems. Just apply what we find. Yet, we are still struggling when unpleasant moments arise. This happens when we compartmentalize our feelings to avoid feeling hurt/bad as if putting them away means they no longer exist.
We have developed these techniques from a young age to cope and protect ourselves. As we got older, we held on to these notions, thinking that they would help us until our dying days. Though this is a nice thought, in reality, as we evolve, so must our way of coping. What helped us as children, can’t help as adults, especially when looking at ourselves. What we learned as children was the awareness that we can survive, but our perspectives were at a completely different level, simply by the mere lack of experience.
So now we are all grown up and getting to a point where we realize that these redundant tactics of avoidance are no longer working and consider the possibility of trying something new. This part is uncomfortable but needs to be done.
One way you can recognize what areas need adjusting is by paying attention to how you respond to things. For example, consider those moments where you lashed out at someone and don’t understand why. Or might have disconnected/dismissed people that remind you of a traumatic experience, or even worse, show you your own imperfections and fears.
Facing it all!
So how do we face all of this newfound awareness? Well, let’s consider how energy works and with any type of energy, emotional energy needs to flow. If we continue to block its organic flow, we block our emotional growth and awareness and not learn how to look past the pain of what’s hurting us more productively and healthily.
Similar to how we’ve grown from Commodore 64 to NES to XBOX to now mobile gaming, we can grow in learning alternative ways to cope and manage our emotions. One thing isn’t the best for everyone, but it’s understanding what works for you personally so that the healthy energy you give out will come back and cycle through as it should.
With any skill- If you have no practice (avoidance) on working through these emotions, then how will you manage? If you are a person who suffers from a form of mental health, you might not cope with this situation well. After all, what hurts about the break-up is not necessarily the loss of the individual, it’s what the loss represents.
Yes, I know, understanding what it represents makes facing your emotions painful to maneuver. In fact, dealing with the pain is a good chunk of the healing process. But, when you sit down and start looking beyond the layers and look for support and tools to help, you will recognize what your emotional response is (whether it’s fight, flight or freeze) and thus learn how to get to the root of your pain.
Embracing the Change
As you practice the concept of understanding the root of it all, you will develop the muscle memory and emotional tolerance to handle what you are feeling and allow yourself to have a healthier recovery of loss with a better view of yourself and others.
Listen, we’ve all heard a ton of different ways of how we can heal ourselves. Some are real and some are bullshit. However, I would argue that a majority of people’s intent is trying to help each other out. When you remove the subjective nature of their intention, the foundation of healing is present.
One of these fundamentals is to recognize that you are hurting and sit in it. The same way we injure our bodies and acknowledge there’s pain that needs healing; the same applies to our emotional injuries. When we don’t know the root cause, we can’t fix the parts that need healing.
Fixing a cut on our head won’t heal by putting a bandage on a finger. So, when we accept our emotional pain and understand why things trigger us, we can then start a healthier healing process.
Saying that statement does not come with an amicable tone. The healing period takes a lot of time and patience, which it requires you to give yourself. Like that cut on your forehead, the wound will not heal overnight and not without pain.
As much as I dislike taking prescription pills, I know that if I have a severe enough wound or surgery, I will take antibiotics, etc. to ensure that there are no infections, and the recovery will be the best-case scenario.
So, if we can apply our attention to healing our physical bodies in this way, we must allow ourselves to tend to our emotional wounds with the same common sense to be the healthiest version of ourselves for that next human engagement.
No one is Perfect
Look, I’m not saying I have all the right answers and I’m definitely not trying to be the next Google fix. What I am saying is that if you tired of the negative redundancies in your life, why not try something new and give yourself the best opportunity to start and keep healthy relationships? Start using some common sense for more than hacking your way through a game.
As Sam Fisher says, “There’s a fine line between stupid and brave.” So, though you may think that you are taking the brave, strong stands of avoiding your feelings, start paying attention to what is really hurting you and try changing your habitual response to it. You will never know what works if you don’t keep trying. What might seem like failure is actually a step in the right direction.
Earlier I said this shit will be uncomfortable but, if you have seen the phone screen shining back at you too many times, then what do you really have to lose?
Author:
Kelly Brown
Born in Jamaica, her family migrated to Canada as a baby where she developed her own sense of awareness and incurable love for humanity. 20 years ago she started in Customer Service and eventually moved into the world of technology to help feed her sense of curiosity and how to fix things. With her default sense of empathy, she has now merged her way over to writing about life, love and everything in between.
