The by far biggest reason for suffering after breakups is painful emotional wounding that comes up to the surface when a relationship ends.
Emotional wounds and trauma are created in early childhood when the emotional needs of a child are not sufficiently met by the parents or caregivers. We become emotionally wounded when we do not get enough love, acceptance and approval as children.
We can heal emotional wounding only through our own efforts – whether it is with the help of a therapist or in self-therapy, as described in this book.
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Nobody has a perfect childhood and so everyone is emotionally wounded to some degree. Most people cannot remember the origin of their wounding and pain. Not only are early childhood events difficult to remember, but we also habitually use all our will to suppress these very uncomfortable experiences into the subconscious.
However, suppressing the pain of emotional wounds never really works. Inevitably, emotional wounds come up again and again in situations which resemble the original situations in which the wounding occurred in childhood.
What do emotional wounds feel like?
When emotional wounding comes up, it always feels very uncomfortable and even painful. Emotional wounding is usually accompanied by deep sadness, extreme rage, hopelessness, emptiness and other similar emotions.
Since we are so used to suppressing and not really feeling these negative emotions, we may only notice that our body becomes tense and uncomfortable.
When you focus on this tension in the body (around the neck or in the belly, for example), you may notice that it is there because you are not acknowledging some uncomfortable emotion, such as sadness, fear or anger.
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Especially after a breakup a lot of emotional wounding comes painfully to the surface.
The main reason why this happens after breakups is that in most relationships the partners develop at least some degree of emotional co-dependence. This may not sound like a big deal, but co-dependence is always a very unhealthy dynamic.
When a co-dependent relationship ends you literally feel like a junkie on withdrawal, though in this case the “drug” was the co-dependency.
Co-dependency is based on emotional neediness. The reason for this neediness is the emotional wounding we already talked about.
Authentic needs vs. neediness
It is quite important to clearly distinguish between true emotional needs on the one hand and neediness on the other.
We all have the natural authentic need to feel loved, appreciated, and so on. Neediness and needy behavior, on the other hand, is always based on emotional wounding. Neediness is not authentic.
When people are needy, they try to fill their painful emotional holes in co-dependent relationships. In other words, co-dependency means that people try to lessen the pain and discomfort that their emotional wounds are causing them. They do this by filling these “holes” from the outside – with the love and attention of their partner.
However, the big problem of co-dependent behavior is that filling the holes from the outside never heals the wounds. When the relationship ends, the emotional wounds come back screaming to the surface, as they are no longer “filled” by the partner.
The only way to get rid of these wounds is to heal the holes yourself. Each wound needs to be healed only once – then it is gone for good.
Neediness is also often the reason why relationships end. Some people try to control their partner because of their neediness and insecurities. Other people become too attached or clingy to their partner for the same reasons.
In all these cases, the underlying cause of the neediness and the insecurities needs to be addressed – they need to heal their emotional wounds.
A sure sign of neediness is the feeling that “I cannot live without that person”.
True Love vs. Pseudo-Love
Unfortunately, neediness and co-dependency are very often confused with being in love. Yet true love has nothing to do with emotional addictions, neediness or co-dependence.
True love in a relationship is always based on the self-love of both partners.
For someone who lacks self-love it is almost impossible to love someone else. Emotional neediness like “I cannot live without you” is an addiction and has nothing to do with love.
True love does not give you withdrawal symptoms when a relationship ends. You may feel natural grief and sadness for some time, but this also passes relatively quickly.
