People often say that they need to take a certain amount of time off after a breakup. “I’m not ready for someone new,” they say. “He’ll just be a transitional man [or woman]. I need time to heal.” Usually your friends will agree with you if you take this tack. (Your best friends have probably been with you during your breakup, and could use a break themselves, right?!)

And I say, sure. Take a break. Take time to soothe yourself, grieve, express your anger, own up to your own part in the breakup, focus on work, take the dog for a long walk… You need this time.

But you may soon notice that those same friends who agreed with you that you need a break are now trying to set you up with “this great guy I work with,” or they’ll say, “She’s really great! You two would be perfect for each other.” Or—to turn the tables a bit—you may soon notice that it’s you yourself who’s noticing the guy at work, or wondering if you would be perfect for someone new, and your friends are still saying, “No way! It’s still too soon!”

How do you know if it’s too soon, if you’ve waited long enough, if you’re already missing out on your next relationship because you’re “on a break”?

This is where a little self-awareness—along with self-care—comes in. The reason there’s no hard-and-fast rule about getting into a new relationship is because it’s about you, not some outside influence or process. Here’s what I mean: when I had minor surgery last fall (I am now appendix-free), I was ordered to follow a strict six-week regimen of rest, and told that I would notice mild symptoms of pain for up to six months. But breakups aren’t like that. There is no bankable six-week rest period, and your emotional pain (I’m sorry to say) has a mind of its own. You may be happily partnered or married for ten years and feel a flash of pain or regret about something you thought was ancient history. Or you may recover really fast, and feel just fine in what seems like no time at all.

So—back to the “it’s about you” thing. Here’s how to know if you’re going too fast, or too slowly, into your next relationship. If you are going out with someone new, can you notice why that is, and be honest with yourself about it? Usually when we do it for the “wrong” reasons (such as, “It’s awful to be alone, I’m going crazy being alone, I’m desperate!!”), we can figure that out with just a little time of silence, breathing, and simple self-awareness. If it feels too fast, stop for a minute. Notice yourself. Notice your heart rate. Notice your thoughts: are they racing? Do you feel like you’re acting from your core self, from your best self?

This is hard because everyone knows that a new relationship always increases your heart rate, and in a good way! It’s tremendously rewarding (and just a lot of fun) to be attracted to someone and find that the attraction is going both ways. If you’ve been through a recent breakup, it’s more likely—but not a foregone conclusion—that you might be jumping into a new relationship rather than doing the hard work of self-growth. But check it out. Take that little break I mentioned. Notice what’s going on inside yourself. Notice your feelings. Even if it feels like you haven’t been single “long enough,” you might actually be ready to get close to someone new.

And even if it turns out to be another disaster, know this: you’ll survive it. And you’ll learn from it. No matter what choices we make, we can learn and grow from the choice. So don’t force yourself to follow a mandatory “post-op” rest period. Feel free to approach this time in your life with more flexibility, and more self-awareness.

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Want to get the excitement back in your relationship? Try holding hands in public.

It might be hard to imagine how holding hands with your partner can be electrifying, magical. Big deal, you might say. We do it all the time. OK, well… how about kissing each other in an empty elevator and deliberately waiting for the doors to start opening before stopping?

By now you might be rolling your eyes. These are junior high kinds of things. What’s the big deal? These little gestures are usually just that—little. But if you combine them with a new effort to get closer to your partner emotionally, to be more authentic with your partner, to be more fully present in the relationship, you might find yourself going back in time and doing all the romantic stuff over again, but this time in a way that is thrilling, and scary.

Here’s how it works. After a while, many people in committed relationships complain that the relationship has gone stale. They feel stilted, even bored. Sex is fine, oh, we suppose it’s fine, but it’s not like it was in the beginning. Even couples who still enjoy a lot of excitement together—sexual and otherwise—sometimes have an itch to grow or change in their relationship. The solution to this is not what most people think. It’s not about improving your sexual “technique,” or getting back in physical shape, or trying in one way or another to be a better “performer.” (Though I admit those activities might not necessarily hurt!) It’s about approaching your partner in a whole new way.

Here’s the new approach: you turn off the Censor inside you which keeps telling you to squelch yourself—the Censor tells you, “Don’t ask her to change the sexual routine. She’ll get insecure and offended, and besides, you probably don’t really need to change it anyway.” Or the Censor says, “Your fantasies are weird, and he’ll think so too.” Or it says, “You don’t really need to get closer to her emotionally. You’re together, life is pretty good. What more could you want?” After you turn the Censor off, go to your partner with your deepest desires. You may find yourself saying things like, “I’d like us to open our eyes during sex so that I can get closer to you. I want to see you seeing me.” You’re inviting your partner to go with you into a scary—but thrilling and transforming—territory. We’re closer now, and the other person is really intense, so we’re both afraid of being annihilated!!

Expect your partner to resist. Most people react to this (to quote a friend of mine) “like a forest animal.” They run for cover. If you asked for open-eyes sex, your partner might only take quick peeks at you when you’re doing it. Be kind, be sweet. If your eyes meet, keep looking, and smile! Take it easy, but hang in there. And this is why hand-holding can be so intense. If you’re really getting closer emotionally, if you’re really being more authentic, more fully yourself, in close proximity to your partner, you won’t need sexual acrobatics to get excited. Just doing a small, new behavior (like stealing a kiss in public) is thrilling because you’re doing it with your beloved. You’re doing it with a living, dynamic, intense human being who is really close to you.

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I’m on a “definition of terms” kick, I guess! I recently worked with a client who was trying to help someone deal with a difficult situation and needed to sort out the differences between empathy, sympathy, and compassion. I’ll define them here, and tell you why it’s helpful to notice their differences.

First, empathy. Empathy is just this: noticing and understanding someone else’s experience, or situation, or perspective. Empathy does not mean you agree, or share the feeling, or see it their way. It only means you get it, you get how they see their problem. If someone you know is going through a hard time, you might be relieved to hear that all they really need from you is empathy. They don’t need you to feel their pain, and they certainly don’t need you to solve their problem (even if they ask you to!). It really helps for you to say, “I can see how hard this is for you. I can see why it’s so upsetting.” It also helps to simply repeat back to them what they said. “You’re mad at him because he betrayed you. I totally understand!” That’s an empathy statement.

Next: sympathy. Sympathy is not just understanding another person’s perspective. It is also feeling the same way the other person feels about their problem. This is why I don’t like “sympathy” greeting cards. If my friend’s mother just died, I don’t feel sympathy. I might empathize with them—my mother died 11 years ago, so I absolutely understand what they’re going through—but I am not going through it myself. I am not grieving like they are. If I open a greeting-card shop someday (which isn’t such a far-fetched possibility, by the way!), I will have a section called “Empathy Cards,” not “Sympathy Cards.” The good news for you—if you know someone who’s going through a hard time—is that they don’t really need your sympathy. They don’t need you to experience their loss the way they are experiencing it. They just need your empathy.

Finally, compassion. Compassion is empathy-plus-help, or sympathy-plus-help. Here’s what I mean: if I empathize or sympathize with someone, I haven’t really done anything yet, at least anything active or concrete. I might be offering them a helpful presence, just being there, just listening. But I haven’t really tried to assist them in their recovery or anything. Compassion adds this part to the transaction. Compassion means that not only do I empathize, not only do I sympathize, but I want to do or say something that will help them. I want to work with them on their problem. To take the above example: if my friend’s mother just died, if I am choosing to offer my friend compassion, I will invite my friend to go with me to a grief workshop, or I’ll ask my friend if she would like to visit her mother’s grave, and if I could tag along to support her, or help her with a ritual of some kind. The good news for you—if you know someone going through a hard time—is that they might not need very much compassion. Again, most of the time the best gift we can give others is simple empathy.

I say that this is “good news” just because sympathy and compassion are not the kinds of things you can just conjure up out of thin air. When someone you know is hurting, you might feel anxious, and helpless. You might love them, but feel lost about what you’re supposed to say, or what you’re supposed to do. Don’t worry! Just offer simple empathy: let them know that you understand what they’re going through. That’s enough. You can offer to help with something specific if you like… You could say, “I’m bringing lasagna over tomorrow, how does that sound?” And they can let you know if they want that. But don’t worry about easing their pain, or solving their problems.

Just let them know that you get it. You understand that they’re going through a hard time. You know what? They will probably be relieved that you aren’t anxiously trying to fix them!

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Do you feel caught in an endless loop of fighting with your partner? Is it hard to get out of it once it’s started? You’re probably right about a lot of things that make you mad. But then—and just stay with me here for a minute!—so is your partner. When two people are arguing, most of the time they are both right about something, even if one of them is only 0.01% right!

Let’s assume it’s your partner who is right only 0.01% of the time. (I’m guessing you’re OK with that!) If you’re fighting, consider this: tell your partner that he/she is right about that one little tiny thing. Your partner says, “You didn’t support me last night when I was telling you about my bad day!” You could say, “You’re right. I wasn’t supportive the whole time we were talking. I wasn’t there for you when you needed me.” Then you could just stop talking, and let your partner take in the fact that you didn’t defend yourself. You acknowledged the 0.01% thing that your partner was right about. (Maybe you were supportive 99.99% of the time, but you just chose not to point that out!)

Your partner is stuck now. How can I respond when someone agrees with me? Attack again? Most people won’t attack again, at least not right away. Agreeing with your partner—just a little bit—can open a moment of silence in the middle of a fight. It could get you talking again, but this time without shouting.

Therapist and author David Burns came up with this technique. He calls it the “disarming technique.” It can be a simple way to change the way you communicate in your relationship. It could stop the fighting. (Just be sure that you’re agreeing with something that’s true! Be authentic!)

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A few weeks ago I recommended a great book on forgiveness. This book talks about forgiving those who have hurt you, but it also talks about forgiving yourself, especially if the person who hurt you is unwilling (or unable) to work things out with you.

This is important because most of the time, when people are angry or bitter—or just deeply sad—because someone hurt them, they are also angry with themselves for being vulnerable to the hurt. “How could I have been so stupid?!” I hear clients say. And it’s easy—when you’re really upset—to forget that you didn’t know then what you know now. Most of the time, you couldn’t have protected yourself from being betrayed, or lied to.

So one of the most important tasks before you in your recovery from a hurtful relationship—or a relationship that ended in a way that was hurtful—is to look with compassion on yourself, to reconcile yourself to yourself … to give yourself a break. When it happened, you did what you were able to do. You thought and felt and acted with all your might. Now that it’s over, you might be kicking yourself for not doing this, not saying that. I encourage you to notice this (understandable) self-scolding, and treat yourself with more compassion, more understanding, and yes—more love.

Click on the image below if you’d like to purchase Janis Abrahms-Spring’s great book on forgiveness:

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A colleague of mine has a great tool for clearing the air in your relationship. It’s a simple process of stating your feeling, your thought, and your request to the other person. But for some reason, as simple as it is, it can be hard for a lot of people to do it! Hard because you might not like the response you get, or hard because the feelings and thoughts you have are painful. But it’s worth it, and you become stronger and healthier the more you talk honestly with your partner.

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I know someone who left her husband because, she said, “staying with him would have been like stuffing my parachute into a shoebox.” (I have her permission to write about this.)

What she meant was that staying with her husband made her smaller: she had to accommodate his wishes on almost everything, which meant that she did most of the household chores and child care, and she didn’t get to have the intimacy and connection that she wanted in her marriage. She would ask him to come closer to her, to work with her on the relationship, or just to help with cleaning up the kitchen! But no, he wouldn’t budge.

By the time I met her, she had left him. And she had found herself grieving. Weeping, feeling depressed, mourning over her loss of a marriage, a dream, a hope that she and her husband could make it work. It seemed odd to her that she was so sad, because it was she who decided to end the relationship.

As she began to make sense of her new situation, and as she continued building a new life for herself and her family—her new two-household family—she slowly realized that her life was bigger: she was feeling more connected to friends and co-workers, more flexible and free with the time she could give to children and career—and maybe new love. She still occasionally grieves the loss of her marriage—she was serious about the promise she had once made to her ex-husband. But she’s glad that her “parachute” is so full now, and so colorful.

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When I was in college I had a roommate–and she’s still a friend, believe it or not–who took a long, long, loooong time unpacking her boxes when we moved into our off-campus house. It bugged me. Since I was only about 20 years old (this was a great long time ago), I decided to try a passive-aggressive approach: I’d see the boxes in the kitchen and call out to no one in particular, “Whose boxes are these?!”

It didn’t work. My roommate saw what was going on and responded in a very healthy way to my maneuver: she slowed down her unpacking and let the boxes sit in the kitchen far longer than she had first intended.

Now that I’m a little older and wiser, I think I know the answer to my question about the boxes: whose boxes are these? Mine. They’re mine. They weren’t bothering my roommate. They were bothering me. To her they physically were boxes, but they didn’t make much difference to her. She’d get to them eventually. So they’re mine–mine in the sense that I’m the one getting angry about them, I’m the one trying to manipulate my roommate, and I’m the one who needs to figure out a more effective way to ask for what I want.

If you find yourself doing this kind of thing, I hope this story reassures you that it’s common. Most of us resort to passive-aggressive games from time to time. (Especially when we’re talking about college roommates.) But the answer to your questions, your maneuvers, your use of sarcasm or subtlety or sarcastic hints to get what you want–the answer is you. It is up to you to think through what you want from others, own up to your own behavior, and be the better roommate, or partner, or friend.

I could have just told my roommate the boxes were getting underfoot, and ask if it’s OK for me to move them into her room. Now, wouldn’t that have been a lot easier?!

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If you’ve just experienced a breakup and you can’t get past your feelings of sadness, loneliness, and low self-esteem, you might want to think about two illusions most people have. If you see them as illusions, it might help you feel a little better about your situation and move forward in your life.

The first illusion is this: when people are in a relationship, they have the illusion of not being alone. I’m in a relationship, so I’m set, right?! There’s someone sleeping next to me, or going on trips with me, or making a home and a life with me, and so I’m not single, I’m not on my own, I’m not alone. But–you are alone, in certain important ways. You’re still responsible for your own behavior, your own happiness, your own daily rhythm of life and work. Your partner can’t live your life for you. Though you are with someone, whether it’s dating them or living in a partnership or marriage of many years, you’re still an individual. Your relationship doesn’t protect you from the bumps and bruises of life as an individual.

The second illusion is this: when people lose a relationship, they have the illusion of being alone. It’s understandable, of course. You’re living alone–and maybe you had to leave the home you shared with your ex! You’re sleeping alone–or if not, you’re sleeping with new sexual partners, and sometimes that can feel pretty lonely in the immediate aftermath of a relationship. You’re “picking up the pieces” of your life by yourself. But…you still have the ability to connect with friends, family, co-workers, whatever and whoever it is you call community, to sustain and strengthen you during this time. If you feel lonesome, again, it’s understandable. And your existential condition of being an individual human being hasn’t changed. But you can connect with others. Even if you don’t feel like it, make the connections. Say yes to the holiday party you think you can’t go to without your ex-partner. Say yes to walks or coffee with friends. Say yes to brand-new activities that get you out of your head, out of your emotional darkness.

Bottom line: whether we’re in a relationship or not, we are alone and not alone. And whether we’re in a relationship or not, we have more power to change and improve our thoughts and feelings than we might think.

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Why does it have to hurt? This is an ancient question for human beings. “It” is anything that changes us, forces us to grow, forces us to grow up. Relationships. Loss. Change. Connecting with another person. Separating from another person. Connecting with yourself. So many of the people I work with are asking this question. They don’t always ask me… most of the time they’re asking themselves, or the Universe, or God. And there never seems to be a good answer!

Staying with someone and working through your problems - this is painful, but it helps you gain new strength as a person.

Staying with yourself and working through your problems - not self-medicating or avoiding them, and not distracting yourself with endless activities, but paying attention to yourself with silence, stillness, journaling, exercise, and breathing… people usually avoid this because it can be painful and stressful to get closer to yourself. You might want more from yourself, or your life, or others… and that might mean more loss, more change. Ouch!

I walk this path myself, and in my work I walk alongside others who are sometimes doing it for the first time. The poet Rumi can help us, I think. Here’s one of his writings, entitled “Sky-Circles”–

The way of love is not
a subtle argument.

The door there
is devastation.

Birds make great sky-circles
of their freedom.
How do they learn that?

They fall, and falling,
they are given wings.

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