THE LONG READ - A practical guide for dealing with a life transition
In October 2022, my romantic relationship of almost 14 years ended. I can’t claim it was a complete surprise, but I can definitely tell you that I didn’t want it to be over.
My partner at the time had been struggling with his mental health since 2016.
His story is not mine to tell, so I won’t go into that, but despite all of my work on my own various issues and my almost obsessive desire to improve myself through reading self-help books and applying their techniques, I could not find a way to also help him.
So, that was it. Over. Finito. Done.
And so began the process of financially detangling ourselves from one another so that we could start new lives apart. It took about 6 months, but in April 2023, I finally moved out and into my own home.
You might think that this was the end of the story, that those six months might have been enough to have given me time to work through the pain of the break-up, but it was just starting.
You see, while we awkwardly cohabited in the same house, it was impossible really to do any work to begin to process things. When you’re seeing someone every single day, and still working through the practicalities of selling one home while buying another, and also doing your best to stay positive and polite with each other (despite bruised feelings on both sides) you simply don’t have the energy to do anything else.
But finally on 19th April 2023, I could start. I’d decided that at least 2023 was going to be ‘The year of Me’, a time when I would squirrel myself away in my little home, just me and my dog Lara for company, that I’d keep socialising to a minimum, and I absolutely would not date or socialise too much while I processed everything. JOMO was my new watchword.
This was the third long-term relationship which had broken down on me, you see. And I could see that I was in a pattern of ending up in relationships with people which didn’t work out, in the end.
With the first man, I was too young by far. Engaged by 21 and living together. He liked beer and football (sadly I don’t like either of those things), didn’t like me going into another room to quietly read a book and got very twitchy when I read anything which could be termed feminist literature or which encouraged free thinking.
The second man, despite being a financial adviser, was terrible with his own money and absolutely would not consider pulling his own weight when it came to the domestic labour around the house, despite us both having full-time jobs. If I didn’t do things, they just simply didn’t get done. We got married, which seemed like the thing to do at the time, but after less than 18 months I had to leave. I decided I just didn’t want to put his happiness above my own, any more.
And with the third, unfortunately his mental health issues led to the exact same situation. His lack of executive function and inability to see the domestic labour it took to run a home, coupled with his depression and anxiety meant that by the time things ended, I’d moved my personal boundaries to accommodate his needs so often that they were practically invisible to the naked eye.
So. I could see that I was falling into a pattern there, and I was (and still am) very very determined not to fall into it again. But how did it keep happening? That was something I was determined to work out.
I was in a transitional period, and I knew this was the perfect opportunity for me to assess myself and my personal history, regroup and take some learnings forward into the rest of my life. And just under eighteen months later, I’ve managed to do just that.
How did I do it? Well, it wasn’t just one thing which helped, I believe it was a combination of practices that I put into place which allowed me to work through my emotions and grief as well as my new way of life and the challenges I faced in a healthy way - without the need to go for therapy (although I did promise myself that if I felt like I was getting stuck on a particular thing or really struggling then I absolutely would do that, and I still would).
And today I want to share these practices with you.
Sobriety
Yes, I know you might be bristling at this one, but hear me out.
I had a bit of a head start on this one. I’d already stopped drinking alcohol in June 2022, almost six months before the break up happened.
Why? I won’t go too far into it, but suffice it to say that there’s a lot of drinking in my ex’s family and that I could see very clearly - perhaps more clearly than ever before - just how much a reliance on alcohol negatively impacts and limits peoples’ potential.
I’d been an on again, off again drinker for a very long time, to tell the truth. I’d never been the kind of person who particularly enjoyed getting drunk, and the idea of having blackouts and gaps in my memory has always scared me half to death. As a singleton, in my twenties, and then again in my early thirties, I’d had some pretty harrowing experiences when drunk.
I’d even been sober for a year when I was at university, which definitely made me feel like even more of a social outcast than opting to stay living in my parental home, rather than moving into halls of residence or a shared house did to start with!
When I met my ex, he was (and still is, as far as I know) a heavy drinker. Our newly budding relationship in 2008 was launched on a river of cocktails and pub trips, and the inability to form memories. And yet, even with all the social fun and laughter, I still felt deep in my core that being a drinker was not really for me.
After having my gallbladder removed in 2007, I’d started to feel the effects of alcohol on my mood and physical body even more strongly. Even a couple of glasses of natural wine (made without preservatives) would leave me feeling depressed for two to three days, and I also had almost zero control over what I was eating. For those three days, I’d be drawn to fatty, salty foods, crisps (chips if you’re in the USA), chips (fries) and pizza, and of course gut-busting takeaways.
You can imagine these things didn’t exactly lead to me being someone who was bristling with health, a trim physique, or the drive I needed to push my creative endeavours.
After drinking at the weekend, I’d just be getting over it by Thursday, starting to feel more like myself again and more able to be creative and approaching something like my full potential, and then we’d hit Friday night, I’d have a few glasses of wine and the whole sorry cycle would start again.
So, in 2022, after sitting down and writing a list of pros and cons (the pros list was very, very short), I decided enough was enough. I didn’t make a big deal of it, and I didn’t announce it to anyone, I just said ‘no thanks’ every time I was offered a drink for a couple of weeks. I’m not sure anyone really noticed. The weeks stretched on into months, and at time of writing this, it’s been almost two and a half years since I last had a drink of anything alcoholic.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to kill anyone’s fun. But think about this carefully - does alcohol really bring the benefits to your life as you get older which it did when you were a teenager? Or is it actually holding you back from reaching your true potential, these days?
The alcohol-free movement is really growing in the UK, and indeed around the world, and there are plenty of low or alcohol-free options you can choose, even in pubs and clubs, these days.
You don’t have to be relegated to drinking Diet Coke all night, as I was during periods of sobriety in the 2000s.
For me, though, the main benefit of a lack of alcohol in my life is that I have an increased ability (and willingness) to sit with my emotions, to listen to what my mind and body are trying to tell me, and I believe that the peace I’ve found as the rollercoaster of anxiety and depression I mentioned above was removed from my life has made me a happier and more balanced person in general.
It was a good solid foundation for me to move from a life in a ‘romantic’ relationship into a new one as a singleton…
Openly sitting with my emotions and working through the stages of grief
I don’t remember now where I came across Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ 5 stages of grief, but it’s been incredibly useful to me ever since.
She was a Swiss-American, a pioneer in near-death studies, and author of the internationally best-selling book, On Death and Dying (1969), where she first discussed her theory of the five stages of grief, also known as the Kübler-Ross model. - Wikipedia
The stages are:
Denial
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance
When her book was published (these stages were first associated with acceptance of a terminal illness), she had some criticism, from those who said it was too rigid a list.
What I’ve discovered is exactly what Kübler-Ross said to those critics - that you don’t progress through these stages in a linear fashion, ticking each one off as you go, like you’re completing a to do list.
I heard someone on a podcast a while ago (apologies to whoever this is, I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I can’t remember now who it was) who said:
Grief is not a feeling of deep sadness, it’s a shift from one world view to another - we’re letting go of the life we thought we were leading and the person we thought we were when that other person was in our life, and moving onto another life, without them for whatever reason.
This has certainly been true for me. So while I didn’t lose someone in my life to death (this time), I certainly had to come to terms with the fact that my ex’s mental health battles had stolen him away from me (and from himself, to a large extent) over the six years between his issues starting and 2022 when things came to an end between us.
He was not the man I’d met in 2008, a shadow of himself. Although I class myself as a Mancunian, I’d moved to Leeds to live with him, and my world mostly revolved around him and his family. Wrongly, I’d allowed many of my friendships to largely slide, and so when he told me it was over, I was literally on my own, 60-odd miles away from family and the remaining friends I’d kept in touch with.
I’d also moved from Manchester to Bolton in 2000 for my previous partner, the man who is now my ex-husband.
Can you say ‘repeating the mistakes of the past’ for me? And once again, a little louder for those at the back!
So, yeah. Although my ex didn’t pass away, it’s as if he did, and he did it so slowly that neither of us really noticed it happening.
What I’ve found with the stages of grief is that you tend to hop about from one to another, sometimes in the space of a few hours. And the best thing you can do in that situation is to honour and listen to those feelings.
I never used to do that. As I’ve mentioned, I used alcohol to turn my face away from uncomfortable feelings. And I also used food as a crutch.
Neither of those actually helped me to process any of those emotions. I heard someone say once that those kinds of masking behaviours don’t help, rather they’re just stealing happiness from tomorrow.
You drink and/or you eat, until you pass out into some kind of coma, and then when you wake up the next day, you still have those issues to deal with as well as a raging hangover or the uncomfortable fallout (you don’t need me to go into details, I’m sure) from overeating.
You’ve got precisely nowhere, in fact in reality, you’re probably slightly further back than you were. The issues are still lurking, and you’re now also unhappy (and often disappointed and angry with yourself) because you’ve acted in a way which doesn’t support you and help you to grow and move on.
I recently learned that most emotions only actually last for ninety seconds, anyway. So if you can sit and breathe through them, they pass you by, like a wave on the ocean, and you can then move on with your day.
The upshot of this is to say that it’s very helpful if you’re a) aware of these stages in the first place, b) understand that you won’t work through them all in order like some kind of tick list and c) allow yourself to feel what you’re feeling at each point without judging yourself.
I still occasionally feel angry at my mum for not seeking out medical treatment when she knew she had lung cancer, and she passed away over 8 years ago.
This is absolutely normal, and as long as you don’t get stuck on any particular emotion, and can find a way to work through it, then it’s absolutely fine.
Journalling
Journalling can be enormously helpful. We use a different part of our brains when we write things down, as opposed to thinking about them or talking about them with someone.
All of these tactics are helpful, but the cost of talking to someone can sometimes be prohibitive, if you’re paying for counselling. And if you’re just chatting to friends, then sometimes of course they’re not available, because they have lives and likely families of their own. So, where does that leave you?
Journalling. Just sitting down with a pen and a pad (for me, writing by hand feels different again than typing on a keyboard) and pouring your thoughts, feelings, hopes, dreams and fears out onto the page can help you to process them and make sense of them. Sometimes it even helps you to move through them.
And if you empty your mind of all of your worries, then they’re not swirling around in your brain any more, leading to insomnia.
Why does this work?
Because often thoughts won’t get out of your mind because you’re afraid you’ll forget them, and by writing them down, making a permanent record of them, you know you won’t do that.
Think of journalling like Dumbledore using his Pensieve in Harry Potter. And it won’t cost you anything, most people have a pen and some paper in their homes, even in the twenty first century, despite Tomorrow’s World promising in the 1960s we’d all be paper-free by now!
Which brings me on to my final and potentially most important suggestion.
Get professional help
If you do get stuck though, on one particular stage of the grieving process, or with a life transition, I really do recommend getting some professional help.
I’ve been for counselling during several difficult periods of my life, and as I mentioned earlier, I was fully prepared to do this again, if I felt like I wasn’t healing and moving on with my life, after my last breakup.
To tell you the truth, I still might go for some therapy. At the moment, I’m living a very quiet life, almost a hermit-like existence, and while I’m doing it because I made a very conscious decision not to rush straight back into another relationship, any time soon, because I was fully aware that I had things I needed to work through first, I don’t want to be alone forever.
It’ll be a matter of working out what I’m looking for in a relationship and making sure I don’t fall back into my old habits of just latching onto someone who seems to care for me (can you say ‘child of a narcissist, brought up with conditional love?’ for me one more time?!) and I think a counsellor might be helpful for me with that, ultimately.
There are options available on the NHS if you’re in the UK, have a look here - although the NHS waiting lists are long, at the moment.
If you’re not fortunate enough to have counselling options through your health care at work (some do, and if you do, then jump straight on that!) and you have the money, you could look at paying for counselling yourself. Since the pandemic hit, many more therapists and coaches are offering their services online, through video calls or text-based services, and there are also services such as BetterHelp, who seem to be advertising on almost every podcast I listen to, at the moment!
Alternatively, Mind have some information or you could go straight to the UK Council for Psychotherapy here.
Hopefully, like many workplaces, yours is much more accepting these days of people when they’re open about struggling with their mental health and they may even offer counselling as part of a work-based healthcare plan.
It might take you a couple of tries to find the right person (which is very important) and the right modality (talk therapy, CBT, life coaching) but it really is worth persevering.
It’s a huge relief when you have an impartial person, one who’s trained to listen to you, and you can really work through the things which are bothering you, without trying to navigate the difficult waters of discussing your issues with your friends or loved ones - who at the end of the day, just want you to be happy and OK and so often misguidedly try to solve your problems for you, which can be frustrating.
Which none of us need, at the end of the day. Solutions to problems stick much better when they’re your solutions, not anyone else’s!
So, what do you think? Has this article given you some ideas for things you might try to help you to move through a life transition in a healthy way?
Do you have hints and tips, things which have worked for you? I’d love to hear them!