Here is the full transcript and summary of relationship expert Gary Lewandowski’s TEDx Talk: Break-Ups Don’t Have to Leave You Broken at TEDxNavesink Conference.
Listen to the MP3 Audio:
TRANSCRIPT:
So we need to talk. Hearing those four simple words from your relationship partner never feels good. Your heart sinks, palpitates, your stomach flutters, your palms get sweaty, because it’s never ‘we need to talk about what a great relationship we have, how we’re best friends, and how we’re going to spend the rest of our lives together’, it’s never that; it’s always ‘we need to talk about the beginning of the end.’
And whether your relationship is awful, good, or great, we don’t like endings, we don’t like to lose things. And especially, we don’t like to lose things that are important to us. And make no mistake, relationships are the single most important thing to you in your life. It’s the source of all of your best memories, it’s the source of all of your worst memories.
When you think back on your life when you’re 95 or 100 years old and you look back over the course of your lifetime, you’re not going to think: “‘I wish I owned a better phone’, ‘I wish I spent more time on the Internet’, I wish I spent more time at work or sleeping’”. It’s going to be any of those kinds of things. It’s going to be: ‘I wish I spent more time with the people I loved’, because our relationships they build us, they define us, they sustain us and they can break us too.
And we know relationship breakup can be tough, right? Research is pretty clear: Loneliness, depression increased crime, increased drug use. Some of my own research shows that breakup leads you to experience a loss of self.
But it’s often not as bad as we think. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon and Northwestern asked people who were currently in happy relationships to look out into the future, to make a prediction, and said, ‘You know, if your relationship were to end, how bad would you feel about it?’
And then those researchers do it, researchers do is they waited and they waited for those people, those happy, happy relationships, they waited for those people to break up — because only then could we actually see or could they actually see how bad was it, right? And so they waited for them to break up, and said, ‘So how bad — how bad is it, now that you broke up?’
And they compared what the predictions were to their actual breakup experience. And what they found was people were wrong. They were wrong. Their breakup simply wasn’t as awful and devastating as they thought.
So I’m curious, by show of hands, how many people here have experienced a breakup or divorce? Show of hands. All right. Please keep your hands up if you survived that experience. Perfect, good. I’m glad you’re here. Now please keep your hand up still if you learned something about yourself, about having better relationships by going through a breakup or a divorce, right? Perfect.
It’s, as well, Ralph Waldo Emerson said, ‘Our greatest glory is not in never failing but in rising up every time we fail’. No one emerges from their dating life unscathed. Breakups happen, relationships fail. And when they fail, it hurts because you start your happy vibrant person, very much in love, things are going perfectly. You break up and you’re alone. You’re sad, you’re disappointed, things hurt, your heart broken, right? You’re confused. This is not good, we’ve all been there; it’s awful. We’ve been there, we saw, we’ve been there. No one likes being that.
But life thankfully happens on a continuum. There’s good things and there’s bad things, right? So it goes the other way too. Sometimes your relationship really isn’t perfect and it could be improved. So sometimes breaking up in a relationship that’s not that great, like being paroled, right? You’re free now. You don’t have this other person to weigh you down with negativity, nagging, asking you to change how you look or how you act, right? Sometimes it’s a pretty good experience, right? This experience, getting out of that relationship, restores your heart, right? You’re back to be the person that, you know, you can be.
Some breakups, I would argue, are worthy of celebration. I don’t know if you’ve had any of these kinds of breakups but I have and they’re glorious. It’s really fantastic. But I acknowledge that, I mean that sounds you don’t talk about breakup which is typically sad, and sounds a little counterintuitive to say that it can be such a good experience. But I know, I’ve had it. But it’s also entirely possible that I’m weird. I mean, look at my stick figures, right?
So it’s possible I’m weird. So the scientist in me said, ‘You know, let’s go out and look. Let’s go see if people, when they break up’ — does anybody else — is it just me that feels happy about it sometimes or is it true of other people too?
So I use the science in my training and research to see if breakups could be a good thing for other people. And so as all good research does, it might start with a very simple question: Overall how did your break-up influence who you are and how did it impact you, right?
And what I did — I didn’t just ask anybody, I asked people who were likely to be especially sad. I asked people who had recently broken up in the last three months, broken up a long-term relationship, they’ve been in this relationship for a couple years. And they hadn’t found a new relationship partner yet.
So if anybody who was going to be sad about their breakup experience, it was this group, right? And what I found was: some people were sad, they characterized their break-up as negative. But it was one out of three people, right, which sounds like a lot. I don’t know if that’s what you expected.
But it means that two out of three people didn’t consider it negative. In fact, one out of four said it was neutral, little bit of both, as many emotional experiences are, a little bit of both. 41%, most people characterized their breakup as positive. And remember this was supposed to be in a especially sad group. So 41% are saying: you know what that experience — overall I am not saying it had zero negative, this thing overall it was a positive experience.
So what research is about is why? Why are those people feeling that way? And in relationships there’s a lot of things that factor in to what makes a relationship good. But one of the things I focus on my research is the self, because who you are as a person touches every aspect of your life, including your relationships. In particular, I focus on self expansion. This is the experience of a relationship that helps build who you are as a person, it helps you grow, it helps add your sense of self. Being in this relationship makes you a better person. These are the good ones. These are the ones you want. But it’s a continuum, right? It goes the other way, too.
Sometimes, your relationship is impoverished, it lacks self expansion. Your partner’s not building you up, they’re holding you back, in fact, right? These ones are stagnant, stale, those relationships like when you’re stuck in a rut, your partner’s not helping you grow, if anything, they’re preventing you from being the person that you can be.
And so I thought if you get out of one of those impoverished relationships, it’s literally going to be addition by subtraction, right? This relationship is holding you back; by getting out of this, I’m going to now thrive as an individual. And this is exactly what we found in people in break-up.
People who have gotten out of a low self-expanding impoverished relationship, they reported a full range of positive emotions, they’re relieved, they’re calmed, they’re energized, confident, strong, happy; they’re doing wonderfully, right? It’s like their world opened up. Things are getting clearer for them. They’re experiencing less loss of self. They’re experiencing more personal growth.
And importantly, they’re experiencing more, what I call, rediscovery of the self, which is recapturing those things that you may have sacrificed or diminished while you were in a relationship. So these people are doing better, because they got out of a relationship.
When your relationship doesn’t help you become a better person, ending it does, which is important to realize, because it’s again a little counterintuitive. What if you’re not inherently strong? What if you don’t have the luxury of getting out of such an impoverished relationship? And so I want to take those findings and think: how can I help people who have experienced a breakup or divorce accelerate their coping? How can I help them get better?
And so looking back at the previous, say you look at, rediscover yourself and that looked really good. So I’m going to focus on that and I’m going to take people who have recently broken up, I’m going to bring them into my lab, I’m going to randomly assign them one of two groups. We’re going to go out in the world, do activities for two weeks, they’re either going to rediscover your self activities or they’re going to do routine activities. Those rediscovery of the self things are things that the previous relationship prevented them from doing.
So if you like going to the beach and your partner didn’t, going to the beach now is a rediscovery of self activity. OK, routine activities are those things that you already like doing: hanging out with your friends, could be going to gym, going to movies, whatever it happens to be.
Now importantly both of these should help: rediscovery because it helps you regain some of that — those aspects of your self that you lost; routine because it helps prevent you from sitting at home alone eating pints of ice cream and binge watching television, right? It’s forcing you to sort of go out in the world and get better.
And as I expected, the rediscovery of the self, those people, it was like the dawn of a new day. They had less loss of self, less negative emotions, less of lots of loneliness, things like that. Also, an increase of positive emotions, the same ones you saw before but also increased overall well-being, purpose in life and self-acceptance. They were doing much much better, simply because of the types of activities that they chose to do over two weeks.
So refocusing in yourself and rediscovering who you are accelerates coping. And so that’s very helpful. This is all part of a broader message: Relationships are important. Time is short. Mistakes are costly. Relationships should be the best part of your life. Hopefully you have found one that builds you and sustains you. And hopefully you have that.
But if you don’t, you have to ask yourself: what is one hour, one day, one week, one month, one lifetime of your happiness worth, because great relationships seldom fail. Bad ones do as they should. And when they do, when those relationships fail, they end because the relationships are broken. It doesn’t mean you have to be broken forever.
In fact, Japanese have a word, have an art form Kintsugi, which is this art form where you take broken pottery and you repair it using precious metals like gold, platinum and silver and you use that to make the pot more beautiful. And it’s beautiful, it’s stunning real. It’s not just an art form, it’s also a philosophy which treats damage and its repair as an opportunity — something to take advantage of, not to conceal, right? This is exactly what can happen in your relationship.
Sure your relationship might leave you with a few cracks but those cracks, those imperfections, those are sources of strength and beauty, because breakups don’t have to leave you broken, because you’re stronger than you know.
Thank you.
Want a summary of this talk? Here it is.
SUMMARY:
Gary Lewandowski’s talk titled “Break-Ups Don’t Have to Leave You Broken” discusses various aspects of breakups and how people perceive and experience them. Here’s a summary of the main points covered in the text:
1. Introduction to Breakups: The talk begins with the common phrase “we need to talk,” which often precedes a difficult conversation about relationship issues. The speaker highlights that breakups are generally associated with negative emotions and the end of a significant phase in one’s life.
2. Importance of Relationships: The speaker emphasizes that relationships are one of the most important aspects of people’s lives. Relationships shape both positive and negative memories, and they contribute to personal growth and identity.
3. Misconceptions about Breakups: People tend to believe that breakups are overwhelmingly devastating. However, research shows that the actual experience of a breakup is often not as bad as people anticipate.
4. Personal Experiences with Breakups: The speaker asks the audience about their experiences with breakups and divorce, highlighting that many people have been through such experiences.
5. Learning from Breakups: The speaker acknowledges that breakups can be difficult, but they also offer opportunities for personal growth and learning. Failures and challenges in relationships are part of life’s continuum.
6. Different Perspectives on Breakups: Not all breakups are negative experiences. Some relationships are not fulfilling or supportive, and ending them can lead to positive outcomes. The speaker mentions that some breakups can even be celebrated.
7. Research on Breakup Experiences: The speaker conducted research on people who recently experienced breakups. He found that while some individuals felt negative about the breakup, a significant percentage viewed it as a positive experience.
8. Self-Expansion and Relationships: The speaker’s research focuses on the concept of self-expansion within relationships. Self-expansion refers to the idea that relationships can contribute to personal growth and development.
9. Positive Effects of Breakups: Individuals who were in relationships with limited self-expansion reported positive emotions and personal growth after breaking up. Ending such relationships led to feelings of relief, energy, confidence, and rediscovery of self.
10. Rediscovering the Self: The speaker conducted an experiment where he compared activities that encouraged individuals to rediscover themselves after a breakup with routine activities. Participants who engaged in self-discovery activities reported increased well-being and positive emotions.
11. Embracing Breakup as an Opportunity: The speaker concludes with the idea that breakups, while challenging, can lead to personal transformation and growth. He uses the concept of “Kintsugi,” an art form where broken pottery is repaired with precious metals, to illustrate that the repair process can enhance beauty and strength.
Overall, the talk aims to challenge common negative perceptions of breakups and encourages individuals to view them as opportunities for self-discovery and growth. It suggests that breakups don’t have to leave individuals permanently broken, but rather can serve as a catalyst for personal transformation.
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