Latest / Internal Insights / Why Breaking Up Feels Like Losing a Future You Never Had
Transcript
- Ted Thao: Welcome to Internal Insights, a quick, honest conversation about mental health in about five minutes or less. I'm your host Ted Tao, a licensed professional counselor, and the owner of Internal Insights Therapy in San Antonio, Texas. Every episode, we take one idea from therapy, trauma, anxiety, relationships, identity, and talk about it plainly. No jargon, no fluff, just something real. Let's get into it. You ever break up with someone and everyone around you says some version of Well, it's probably for the best, and you just want to scream because it doesn't feel like the best. It feels like someone died. Here's the thing that nobody tells you about breakups. You're not just grieving the person. You're grieving a whole future you built in your head without even realizing you were building it. The apartment you pictured. The way you imagine introducing them to your family, the inside jokes you had and that would have piled up over the years. None of that happened. And now it never will. And that's a real loss, even though there's no funeral for it. I think we get confused because grief has this cultural script attached to it. Someone dies, there's a service. People bring casseroles. You talk about the good times with them, with people who love them. You give bereavement leave from work. Breakups don't come with any of that. You're supposed to just go back to the desk on Monday like nothing happened. Even though internally you're mourning a version of your life that existed clearly in your mind and now has to be let go of. And it gets even more complicated when the relationship wasn't even long. Or wasn't even healthy. People will minimize that. you only dated for foremost. You're better off they treated you so bad. All true, maybe. But you're not just grieving who they were, you're grieving who you thought they were, and who you thoughts that the two you could cut become together. That imagined future is its own thing, separate from the reality of the person. And it deserves its own space to be mourned. Think of it like packing for a trip that gets canceled. You're already picked out the outfits, you already imagined the beach, the food, the photos. The trip never happens, and you still have to unpack the suitcase in your head. And that takes time. It's not dramatic to feel sad about a trip you never took. It's just what happens when we invest imagination into something. I've had people ask me this question why are they upset? They weren't in a relationship for that long, and they know that the relationship wasn't good. Shouldn't they be relieved that they're not in this relationship? Well, here's the answer: Grief and relief can live in the body at the same time. You can have two opposing emotions be true at the exact same time. You can be generally glad that the relationship ended. And still feel loss of what you hoped it would become. Those two feelings aren't in competition, even though it feels confusing to hold both. The length of the relationship doesn't determine the size of the grief either. Sometimes a short relationship holds a huge amount of imagined future. And that's what you're actually mourning. Not the number of months on a calendar. So, if you're finding yourself crying over someone you know wasn't right for you, or you're stuck replaying the moments from the relationship that barely got off the ground, you're not being dramatic and you're not doing grief wrong. You're mourning a future self and a future life that felt real to you, even if it only ever existed in your head. That's allowed. Give yourself permission to miss the idea of something. Even when you're relieved the reality is over. If there's one thing I'd want you to sit with after this, is that grief doesn't need a long timeline or a perfect relationship to be valid. It just needs to be something that mattered to you, even if that something was only a possibility. That's it for this episode of Internal Insights. If this gave you something to sit with, or just made you feel a little less alone, that's the whole point. This isn't a replacement for therapy, but if you're looking for support, you can find me at Internal Insights Therapy in San Antonio, Texas. Thank you for spending five minutes I'll see you next time.