Relationships: Do Some People Shut Down Emotionally After A Breakup?

There are a number of things that can cause someone to experience incredible pain, and a breakup is one of those things. When someone experiences a break up, it can feel as though their whole has come to end.
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It won’t matter if they had been with the other person for matter of months or years, as the pain can wipe them out. One can then have gone from feeling on top of the world, to feeling as though they are at the bottom of the world.

Knocked Down

However, even if they didn’t feel this way, how they now feel is still likely to be radically different. One could then have a physically strong body, a body that is covered in muscle, but it won’t have an effect on how they feel.

On the outside, then, they will look strong, yet they will feel incredibly weak on the inside. If they don’t have a body like this, they can still feel far weaker than they actually look.

A Loss of Control

Before this point in time, they may have been fairly balanced, and they may have also found it fairly easy to handle their emotions when this wasn’t the case. Now, their emotions will be out of control, and it could be more or less impossible for them to settle their emotions down.

In fact, it could feel as though they are now all at sea and there is very little that they can do about it. One of their greatest needs can then be to do whatever they can to regain control over their inner world.

One Option

What one could end up doing, in order to experience support, is to reach out to their friends. It will then be perfectly clear that they are not going to have the need to hide how they feel; they will comfortable with being vulnerable.

The strength that they are currently lacking internally will be provided by the people in their life. In the same way that scaffolding will hold up an unstable building; these people will hold up their unstable inner world.

Two Ways

As these people are able to be there for them in this way, it will most likely to show that these people also have a good relationship with their own emotions. They are then not going to be emotionally disconnected or believe that there is anything wrong with being emotionally vulnerable.

Instinctively, they may also realise that no one is their own island, and that there will be moments in everyone’s life when they need emotional support. Thus, if they were not in a good way, they would also reach out to others in the same way.

The Healthy Approach

When one is not in a good way and they reach out to others, it is going to stop them from disconnecting from how they feel. This will enable them to work through the pain that they are in.

This might take a few months or it could take even longer, yet the main thing is that they will allow this process to unfold. After a while, they will most likely gradually start to settle down, which will give them the chance to find someone else.

Another Outcome

Alternatively, one could end up using their mind to disconnect from how they feel, and this is likely to mean that they will rarely come into contact with their pain. And, even when this pain does come into their conscious awareness, they will soon do what they can to push it back down again into their body.

This may mean that there isn’t anyone in their life who they can open up to, or it could just show that they don’t feel comfortable reaching out to others. Either way, this pain is going to stay trapped within them.

A Divided Being

What this will do is allow them to settle down without having to work through their emotional pain. The downside with this approach is that it will no longer be possible for them to function as a whole human being.

Not only will they lose touch with their ‘bad’ feelings, they will also lose touch with their ‘good’ feelings. They can then come across as someone who is very flat, and they might even come across as cold.

False Highs

Through being out of touch with the very things that allow then to feel alive, they can end up being drawn to things that will artificially bring life into them. This may mean that they will end up being drawn to alcohol, drugs, have endless casual encounters and/or they may constantly go abroad.

The down side is that the momentary feeling of aliveness that they get by engaging in such things will probably make it even harder for them to handle their normal state. It is then easy to see why they might become addicted to these things.

Awareness

If someone like this was to get in touch with their pain, they may find that they feel too ashamed to reach out to others. Keeping this pain to themselves by disconnecting from it, will then have been a way for them to safe face.

Taking this into account, it will be essential for one to accept that there is nothing wrong with reaching out for support. And even if another person does try to shame them, it would simply show that this person has their own wounds to resolve.

If one can relate to this, and they want to change their life, they may need the assistance of a therapist or a healer.