Here is the full transcript of clinical psychologist Antonio Pascual-Leone’s talk titled “How To Get Over The End of A Relationship” at TEDxUniversityofWindsor conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
My name is Antonio Pascual-Leone. I’m a clinical psychologist, and I do research on psychotherapy and especially on how emotion changes. I’m going to talk today about how to get over the end of a relationship. If you’ve had an important relationship and you felt a bit stuck on how to move on, maybe you have some lingering bad feelings, some emotional baggage, let’s call it unfinished business. If that’s going on, this talk is for you.
So sometimes it could be grieving the death of a person close to you; sometimes it’s moving on when there’s been a betrayal or abuse. It could be with a friend, a co-worker, a parent, and of course, romantic breakups basically cover the whole range, right, from pretty straightforward but painful to very complicated. Most people think that moving on is just a matter of time.
People come to therapy and they ask me, “So how long is this going to take? How much time needs to pass?” I was speaking with a guy who’s getting divorced for the second time and he says to me, so I say, “How are you doing?” And he says, “Well, you know, I wish it was two years from now.” Why? Because that’s how long it took me last time to get over it.
And that idea is fairly common. People think that the bad feeling will just sort of run its course. But if you feel devastated or there’s been a betrayal, then not so much, right? It’s not going to be as simple as sleeping off a bad hangover, right? For some people, this process is really frozen in time.
Studying Unfinished Business
There’s actually a lot of research on this now, but it’s an odd thing to study because it’s hard to know what to call this. In an early treatment study led by Les Greenberg at York University, they actually just put up signs saying, “Do you have emotional baggage related to a relationship, right? Do you need help with your unfinished business?”
And then they just sort of sat patiently by the phone, wondering if anyone would call because it’s not even a diagnosis, right? It’s just a metaphor. Well, it turns out the phone started ringing off the hook. So it’s a very intuitive and common problem. When we do research like this, we usually offer free therapy for people who agree to being studied.
And then you spend a lot of time looking at what people do that seems to predict getting better. Some people are skeptical of the research, right? Often I get, “Isn’t it totally different for everyone?” And the answer is, “Well, no, not as different as you might think.”
It turns out people who resolve these issues often go through three distinct steps. And they actually unfold in an order, although it’s sort of a messy nonlinear two steps forward, one step backward process. I’m saying there seems to be a universal pattern. There is a map.
When people have unfinished business, there are three things that must happen, a sequence of steps. The thing is you can get stuck anywhere in that pipeline. The good news? The good news is we also know a bit about how to get people unstuck from each of those spots.
Step One: Avoiding the Issue
So the first step is something like this. For example, a businesswoman takes on a junior partner and she really invests a lot in mentoring her. They work well together. It’s productive. And then for some reason, the junior partner cuts out, ditches the projects. She wants to work more independently.
So it’s a business scenario, right? But the point is that it was a close relationship and collaborative relationship that ended abruptly. And if you’ve invested a lot personally, it can feel a bit like getting dumped. The businesswoman tells me about industry conventions, things like that, and she says, “Ah, I just cringe. Like what if she’s there? It’ll be so awkward. I don’t know.” And when she says, “I don’t know,” that’s pretty important.
So the issue is we don’t go there. We just avoid the issue. It’s like the person thinks they can wait it out, as if there was a storm passing overhead. But while you’re avoiding the issue, not too much can change. So get in there, keep breathing, tolerate some exposure to the feelings until you start to feel okay with this new normal.
Of course, I mean, the reason why we avoid the person or reminders is because it’s upsetting. There’s usually a sense of very global distress, right? It’s like, “I’m so upset and I don’t know why. It’s so awful.” But what’s it? What’s the worst part of it? And the person usually doesn’t know.
Typically people have a lot of sadness and anger, except it’s all fused together like a big ugly ball of children’s plasticine, right? Except where all the colors are just mashed together, huh? Anger makes you push your chest out, right? Like this. While sadness, you kind of withdraw, you pull back.
So when you’re trying to do both at the same time, that’s what stuck looks like. Usually it comes out in a sort of whining complaint, like, “Ah,” right, that sort of thing. You need to take some time to tease these apart, find the right words, and describe what’s so awful or awkward or hard about it. Some people get much more stuck on blaming, right? They get angry and it’s all about rejecting the other person. It’s like, “I’m disgusted. I hate him for what he did to me. She’s so terrible.” That’s all about what you don’t want.
It’s not about what you do want. It’s just not that, huh? Get away, which actually could be a good start, particularly when there’s been abuse or when your boundaries have been violated, but you can’t stay there forever.
You still have to move on to the next step. And in a sense, you haven’t even arrived at the deeper issue yet. So, what to do? Slow down. Where? Where does it hurt?
Maybe at the end of a romantic relationship, it’s the way she looked down her nose at me. So, what did that make you feel, right? Someone who described the last time she ever saw her father tells me, “He threw a pack of cigarettes across the table at me and said, ‘There, that’s the last thing you’ll ever get from me.'” Wow.
Okay. So, what’s the message being implied here? Yeah, it hurts, but what hurts is still implicit. If you want to get past feeling upset, empty, lonely in these very general ways, then you have to take the time to focus on your feelings, the feelings that you have, and figure out what hurts the most.
Step Two: Confronting Deeper Issues
That takes us to the second step. And it might, you know, this might not apply to everyone, but for some people, the end of a relationship leaves them a bit bent out of shape. And this second step, you get stuck because whatever happened jabbed you right in your soft spot, right? Your Achilles heel. The end of the relationship rocked you in some sort of way. It stirred up some deeper, older, uglier feelings.
I remember the first time I really had my heart broken. I was young, and I couldn’t figure out why the relationship was ending. And then she says, like a mercy killing, right, “You just aren’t good at getting stuff done.” Ouch. Right? Because I also already had my own insecurities about that, and it stirred up those self-doubts. I felt like it was a bit true, and so that left a mark.
For most people who get stuck, they end up blaming themselves. Whatever happened was my fault. Maybe I deserved to be mistreated or neglected, or as I was saying, you start doubting yourself. “Oh, it’s true. I am incompetent, unlovable, uninteresting.” You pick your personal poison here. A woman who discovered she was being cheated on tells me how she felt like a naive idiot. She says she felt humiliated.
People get stuck in this particular way. They’re not avoiding, they’re not bewildered like in the first step, right? You see, it’s that they get caught beating themselves up about something related to the relationship. So how do you know if you’re stuck in this place? Well, you feel vulnerable and broken, but it’s also familiar in a way. It’s the same old story. You’ve been here before.
The truth is, some people will actually slide right through this. They just aren’t as vulnerable, whereas for others, especially when it’s tied to a history of abuse or neglect, it feels like this is the story of their life. This is where people get depressed, anxious. They lose sleep. What to do? What to do?
So to work through this second step, you really have to go through the eye of the storm, right? The way out is to get a sense of what you really need. I mean an existential need, the need to feel valuable, to feel lovable. Obviously, it’s hard not to feel like a piece of garbage when somebody takes you out with the trash, right?
But as you start to articulate whatever you most deeply need as a living being, it actually creates a contradiction in you. It’s sort of like, “I need to feel cared for, valuable,” and I can feel it in my bones, right? And yet, here I am, in a pile of trash on the curb. It’s a contradiction, right? And that’s where change starts to happen.
What do you most deeply need, even if you don’t feel entitled to it? Spell it out. Here’s an important point. It’s not what you need from that specific person, right? It’s what you do need to flourish as a human. So this is for you. It’s not about them. It’s not, “I need him to apologize. I need her to admit what happened.” No, no, no. “I need to feel like I matter. I need that somebody has my back, that I’m a priority, useful, worthy.”
Of course, here’s the problem. Life didn’t turn out that way, did it? You got hurt, you got mistreated, maybe betrayed, or you just lost someone.
Step Three: Expressing Healthy Emotions
So the third step is where you actually go back to how the relationship ended. Maybe you’re pissed off, and you hate him, and you want to, yes, you want to burn all his stuff, okay, but what are you fighting for? “I’m fighting for my dignity, my value, my sense of myself as someone who’s fun, funny, lovable.” It goes back to the need.
So you often have to assert yourself in some way, and that usually comes in a healthy anger. A woman who survived a really predatory relationship, an abusive relationship, she says to me, she says, “I got a lot of love to give, and when I love, I love hard. So that’s worth something, even if he didn’t notice it,” assertion. But when it comes to feeling hurt in relationships, anger and sadness are often two sides of the same coin.
One sees this in romantic breakups all the time, right? You’ve been let down, you’re disappointed, and you’re angry, but now that you’ve created some distance, well, I mean, you kind of miss the person too, right? And then you flip-flop back and forth between assertive anger and grieving the loss. Both are true, two sides of the same coin. Still, it’s important to experience each of these in their own right.
Grieving a loss is a healthy process. It’s hard to move on and enjoy a new horizon in life if you haven’t let go of what’s behind you. And even if you’re the one who ended the relationship, right, there’s still a loss. Because when you started it, you were hopeful. Nobody planned on the relationship ending.
When we work through grief, we usually focus on the good things, the things we enjoyed, right? We’ll never get together again for a first swim, for a barbecue, no more Wednesday family dinners. You have to say goodbye to these things and actually put up little tombstones for them. But one of the reasons people have trouble finishing the grief process is because there are actually so many undeclared losses. These are the hopes, the dreams, right, that you had together.
When couples split up, for example, sometimes they imagined what it would be like to have children together, right? Children that now will never be born. And for the business partnership that fell apart, these are all the unfinished projects that will never materialize.
When I was doing therapy with a man, an inmate in prison, he knew his partner had already left him while he was serving time. So he was like, “We’ll never go on that holiday together. The one we were saving up for. The trip we kept all those brochures for.” So goodbye to that.
Similarly, when someone dies, there usually are a lot of things left undone that will never be finished. What to do? In the third step, you just need to follow and express the healthy need. The issue to explore is, what do you resent? And then, what do you miss?
Remember, if you don’t know what you’re fighting for, the specifics, then it’s probably not adaptive. And grief, it’s not just about feeling sad. It’s about identifying specific losses. So this third step is about using emotion to help organize you in a healthy way.
Conclusion
Going back to how we started, this is where maybe, maybe it is a matter of time, right? Healthy emotion has a vitality curve. It emerges and you feel it and you express it and then you’re done, right? You say goodbye and life looks different now. You have to finish the feeling. Going through that is the last step. Sometimes we’re doing these things even without knowing it, which is great. That’s the upside, right?
The downside is that we get stuck and we don’t even know why. We don’t know where we’re getting stuck. But this is actually part of healthcare research and it’s being studied. There is a unique solution to each sticking point. Finally, how does it all end, right? If you are depressed, then treatment should make you not depressed. But if your problem is unfinished business, what does a good ending look like? What counts as a good outcome? There are three viable outcomes to this whole thing, okay?
Number one, well, either you forgive someone and you reconcile. Basically, you get back together. Number two, you forgive them, but you don’t reconcile, right? You forgive them, meaning you give up the grudge you had. That’s what forgiveness is. But you decide not to reconcile. It’s like “forgive, but don’t forget.” You let go and you move on.
And number three, you don’t forgive, you don’t reconcile, but it’s still a good outcome. It’s like holding the other person accountable, right? Which often comes with a shift in power and seeing the other person in a very different light.
Last thing, last thing. Just like when you get a bruise or a cut on your skin, right? Even when you aren’t stuck, there is a minimum amount of time it takes to heal. So time is part of it after all. Thank you, and good luck with your unfinished business. Thank you.