Moving On: Breaking Up without Breaking Down

Suzie Hayman

INTRODUCTION

Nothing is forever. Fairy stories and Hollywood films want you to believe that the story finishes with a wedding or when the happy couple ride off into the sunset. And that once that happens, nothing more of note will occur. Once boy and girl have got together, we are persuaded that their idyll will continue, unchanged and undisturbed. The conclusion most of us come to is that once we have our relationship, there is and should be a ‘Happily Ever After’ for all of us. In the real world, we sadly discover that it isn’t quite like that. Virtually everyone, at sometime or another in their lives, has to face up to the ending of a relationship. This is a hurtful and difficult experience, whether the twosome was one that had lasted ten weeks or ten years and whether the other person finished it or you dumped them. Endings happen, and if you’ve invested time, effort, emotion and a little bit of yourself into being with another person, when there is a parting there will be pain. Dealing with the pain is often made that much more difficult by the belief that it shouldn’t be happening and that, if it is, we must be uniquely incompetent or singularly bad people to have allowed this to happen.

Loss and separation are nothing new. Whenever it was that our ancestors first invented pair bonding – whether they were still in the trees or had just moved into caves – the fact is that shortly after finding the joys of being together, someone would have discovered the agony of losing their other half. However, over much of human history the parting of the ways for a couple tended to be when death did them part. In most cultures, marriage was for life, and marriage was felt to be the only social arrangement that made a sexual relationship respectable. ‘For life’, however, didn’t mean what it does today. The average life expectancy at the beginning of this century was late forties for men and early fifties for women, and was an even younger age in earlier times. Coupled with late marriage that meant that the average union probably lasted less than twenty years. Today, even twenty years of marriage still leaves you with a major part of your life to lead. For more and more people the reality of modern life is that one person, one love, one relationship or marriage is not going to see you through from the beginning of your sexual life to the day you die. Quite apart from anything else, many of us now start off our sexual lives with permanency the last thing on our minds. The average age for first intercourse is seventeen while the average age on a first marriage is 30 for men and almost 28 for women. Twenty-five per cent of us have had intercourse before the age of sixteen and the vast majority by the time we’re twenty. While some people are celibate in the gap years between sexual maturity and eventually finding the perfect mate, and some do marry early, most play the field in their teens and twenties knowing this time it’s not for ever. It’s only as we approach and enter late twenties and thirties that most people do make relationships which we hope will last. Sadly, a large number of us watch them break up sooner or later. According to the latest figures, two in five marriages end in divorce and we have no figures for the number of long-term relationships that end in painful separation. By 2010 it is predicted that cohabitation, marriage, divorce and remarriage will be the normal pattern of family formation. It may not be easy to recognise we’re in the middle of a social trend, but we are. Make no mistake – it’s already here.

But while more and more people are having to cope with break-up, we seem to be no better at dealing with the situation. Endings are always difficult and it can be enormously hard to let go, either of the other person, the relationship or the feelings of anger, guilt or despair brought on by the break up. Depression, anger, lack of self-esteem and feelings of failure are all common responses to the break-up of a relationship. Whether a partnership has lasted twelve months or twenty years, whether it was with or without ‘benefit of clergy’, realising that a parting of the ways is approaching can be the signal for misery, hostility and even violence. Couples and individuals can frequently become ‘stuck’, unable to move beyond their anger or pain. A break-up so often leads to a break down, as everyone involved struggles with destructive emotions, and becomes bogged down in destructive behaviour.

This is true equally for a couple who only have themselves to consider, as it is for a couple with children. When there are children involved, however, the couple have the added complexity of having to cope not only with their own emotions but the confusion and upset of others too. According to the latest statistics, three in five divorcing couples have children under the age of sixteen, which is why it is estimated that 28 per cent of children will experience their parents’ divorce before the age of sixteen. Official statistics don’t count how many cohabiting parents separate, so the figures for children seeing their family disintegrate about them is actually even higher.

Young people exhibit a variety of reactions to the upheaval of family change. Some withdraw into silence, moodiness or truculence. Some show open anger, with destructive impulses directed outward to others or inwards to themselves, in risk-taking or anti-social behaviour. Some express guilt and distress and blame themselves, others vent their feelings on other people, often at the members of their family they feel will stand by them. Young people who are members of a separated family are more likely to truant, leave school early, get fewer qualifications, experiment with sex early, marry early and have children early. But often their behaviour, which is a cry of protest and pain at what is happening around them, is misunderstood by parents and professionals. As an agony aunt I get many letters that complain about children being out of control and delinquent, and add as an after-thought ‘I’ve got enough on my plate at the moment as our relationship is going through a bad patch’, as if the two events have no link whatsoever. As Peter Wilson, Director of the children’s charity Young Minds, that helps parents who are worried about their children’s emotional wellbeing, has said: ‘What it means is that you’re getting a lot of children labelled as bad kids or difficult kids and what they really are is sad kids.’

But some couples and some families pass through the experience of separation and/or divorce, with all its potential for damage, and emerge confident, happy and whole. What turns divorce and separation from a disaster into just another passage of life that can be met? Some people, while not exactly sailing through it, do at least appear able to cope with what others find devastating and overwhelming. All the evidence suggests that it is how you manage change that matters, not the fact that you experience such a change in your life. You may have thought that it’s all the luck of the draw. Whether you go under or manage to deal with such a difficult situation isn’t all down to fate, innate character or your stars. It’s my firm belief that how you deal with setbacks in life has everything to do with the lessons you learn as you grow up. There are reasons for why you may find a break-up particularly difficult and what could make it more bearable. Once you understand the buttons that are pushed in you that hold you back, you can set about managing change to make it easier. This book will help you identify your particular trigger points – the particular events or emotions that hurt or make you feel overwhelmed – and so aid you in getting on top and in control. This may be especially important in relationships that are violent or abusive, physically or emotionally, or turn ugly when one partner declares the intention to leave.

The aim of this book will be to help you acquire the skills to deal with break-up confidently, competently and well. I intend to offer insights and explanations, suggestions and ideas to help you and your family face up to the ending of a relationship. We will examine how we, as adults, feel and act when our relationships crumble, and how we might approach the event in as constructive a manner as possible. We will explore how children may see a break-up – their fears, fantasies and hopes – and how adults may help them cope with the inevitable. If we could understand our own feelings and those of any young people involved in such a difficult event, and offer support, rather than being overcome by our own concerns or casting blame, the painful experience of seeing your family separate would be more manageable. What is most important for any child is that their parents may stop being a couple but can never opt out from being a parent. The emphasis throughout the book will be on managing the change, on being honest but tactful, sympathetic but firm. The overall aim will be to look at how family break down and re-partnering affects children, and how best we can manage such events.

For those who are not parents, it may seem that making an ending should be simpler. You may kick against accepting that your relationship is over, you may be the one to skip off into the sunset, glad to be free. Whichever, once you have separated, there may only be memories to hold you together. Those people who have left a relationship because of unhappiness or even abuse, or who experienced a particularly bitter parting, may be tempted to wipe out even memories and consign this relationship to the trash can – out of sight, out of mind and out of your life for good. But it is important to recognise that even a bad relationship has something important to teach us. Indeed, such an experience is part of your life and so part of your history and personality. Trying to delete it deletes an important part of yourself. Probably the most important task when a relationship finishes is to make a distinction between ending and erasing. When you make a good ending, you don’t do it by wiping out a person or a part of your past. You do it by embracing what has gone before, having closure and moving on. It would be far better to accept and celebrate the good bits and accept and learn from the bad. Remember, those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.

But before we look at how to deal with endings we need to explore just exactly why the skills may be hard to acquire and difficult to apply. The challenge is to move on – to be able to accept the breaking up of a relationship without letting it destroy you. Part of that process is to let yourself experience the sad, angry, desperate feelings that losing something and someone you value will naturally give rise to. You can’t put an ending properly behind you, indeed, until you have wept, screamed, argued and mourned. There is a way that we can view problems that can help us approach and work to finding an answer in unhappy relationships. It’s called The ‘Four Steps’ rule. This is:

Working out what’s really wrong or what’s making it difficult
Getting the picture
Working out what we want to do
Doing something about it

‘Working out what’s really wrong’ and ‘Doing something about it’ are probably the hardest of the four steps. We often think we know what is wrong, and just as frequently concentrate our complaints, bitterness or anger on a red herring. For instance, couples and individuals sometimes focus all their efforts on arguing money and law, when what they really need to discuss is feelings. You and a partner may have endless arguments about being untidy, being late, being inattentive when the real complaint should be ‘I feel you don’t love me and you don’t value me’. Even once we are aware of the problem, and have worked out what’s wrong, why it’s happened, and what we would like to be different, actually putting it into practice can seem impossible. By helping you do the first step and face up to the other three, Moving On – Breaking Up Without Breaking Down will help you put the fourth, final piece of the jigsaw into place.

Chapter One

FACING UP TO ENDINGS

‘When my marriage ended, I knew it would hurt, and hurt for some time. We’d been together eight years and I had thought we were going to be together for life. There were tears and moments of real, black despair when he left, but I did think it would get better after a time. Two years on, I was still paralysed by fear and depression. I couldn’t believe how long it affected me, and how badly. I couldn’t think straight, I couldn’t do the simplest things. I just felt so useless and such a failure. And it wasn’t because he’d dumped me. I was the one to say the marriage was over and throw him out, not the other way round. But it was as if I couldn’t go anywhere from there. I couldn’t believe it was really over and face up to life without him, for such a long time.’

WHEN A RELATIONSHIP comes to an end, you would think there would be a moment when you’d realise it’s over. Perhaps a day, an hour or a second, when you know the love you shared is gone and the relationship just isn’t working. An objective bystander might be able to tell you that’s the time to pack up and move on, but it’s far easier said than done. Around 160,000 married couples untied the knot in the UK last year, and who knows how many called it a day after living together without going through a formal ceremony? Some may appear to have been able to shake hands and kiss cheeks at the farewell, wish each other good luck and pass on to a new life with a few regrets and only a little hurt. Many find the transition from being a couple to being alone again devastating. What most of us would like, when a relationship ends, is to make sense of what happened and why, and to cope with our feelings. In effect, we want to stand up after that knockdown fight, dust ourselves off and stride on. What so often happens is that we get stuck. The experience is so painful, so confusing, so overwhelming that we crumble. We can’t move on and resume our lives. The break-up really breaks us up.

THE MYTHS

Myths often slow us down and hold us back from dealing with the tragedies in our lives. One is that men are somehow less romantic than women, looking for sex rather than love, and being quick to trade in an old partner for a younger model. Many people believe men get over a break-up more easily and even prefer the footloose, fancy-free life of a single person while women crave safety and security. Men can appear to confirm this, by rapidly losing touch with old partners and their own kids, while women seem to confirm their needy, dependant status by being quick to cry over and mourn a relationship that has come to an end. Seeing men as hard and strong, women as soft and weak may stop you understanding what has happened and why. It may prevent you seeking answers to how to deal with a break-up, and how to maintain links if you have a family. This book is about taking on the challenge of a relationship that is ending, and winning. Not winning in a battle with another person, but winning in the fight against despair and depression and all the feelings of failure and blame that we so often heap on our own heads when a relationship breaks down. The last thing you may need is someone standing back, lecturing you and trying to tell you how to cope with a broken relationship. What would be helpful, however, is some encouragement and a guide to marshalling the skills you already have, to help yourself make the very best of the rest of your life. This is what I hope you will find, in these pages.

In order to move on, it helps first to understand why we may find it so difficult to cope with breaking up. Well, that’s easy, you might say. Having a relationship end is enough to knock anyone for six – isn’t it? But there is more to it than just the shock and pain of having love turn cold on you; this particular love, at this particular time and in this particular fashion. Losing contact with people who mean something to you is always going to be painful. When a person or a relationship dies, you feel regrets and sorrow. When you part company with a person or group of people with whom you’ve spent time, as a couple, or in a group, at school, work or even on a short-term experience such as on holiday, you are bound to feel sad. But there are other losses that hurt in similar ways. Even coming to the end of a film, a day out or something as terminally trivial and short-lived as an ice cream, you are ending an experience which you have enjoyed and might wish would go on a bit longer. You might think that how you cope with and how you feel about the end of something has to do with its relative importance. So, you might assume you would feel a whole lot better about coming to the end of a stick of rock than you do with facing up to the end of a twenty-year marriage. As anyone who has gone through a traumatic period in their life can tell you however, sometimes it’s the apparently little things that push you over the edge. Having coped with an admirably stiff upper lip to your house burning down, your partner leaving and the dog dying, you may be reduced to hysterical tears at breaking a tea cup. The truth is that how you deal with an ending, any ending and all endings, whether it’s the end of a phone call or the end of twenty years of on-going friendship, are one and the same skills. Some people seem to go to pieces when they lose touch with someone they’ve known for a couple of weeks, or are terrible at drawing a line and ending a chat. Others can survive the loss of a parent, a partner, a child, and are always the ones to sign off and put down the phone. The difference between being the one who can withdraw and cope with an ending and the one who can’t, is how you have learned to cope with endings, not the particular thing you are losing.

Endings are always hard

There is no such thing as a Good Ending

ENDINGS ARE ALWAYS HARD

Many of us, when forced to deal with a parting, assume that how we are coping – or not coping – is to do with the relationship, the other person or our own inadequacies. We may focus on the here and now, and assume that this is where the problem lies. We may blame the partnership, assuming that it was doomed from the beginning and saying we never should have settled down and trusted it. We may blame the other person, and become convinced that they were evil, vicious, cheating and cruel and were so from the beginning, if only we’d realised. More often, we blame ourselves and beat ourselves up for being failures, neither attractive nor worthwhile enough to have kept the other person interested, and for not deserving to be loved. What we often fail to realise is that our ability, or lack of it, to deal with such sadness is actually something laid down many years before.

How we deal with saying our goodbyes and whether we can draw a line under an experience and walk away or bog ourselves down in misery, is a skill we learn at our parents’ or carers’ knees. But this is not just a question of what you yourself have undergone in your life. It also has a lot to do with the messages that your family passes on to you about facing up to leaving and letting go and to sadness. All families teach those within them the hard and sad rules of loss; but some families teach you how to deal with it and some, how not to.

Sandra, for instance, is an example of someone who learned lessons that undermined her ability to cope with bad things happening to her. Sandra came from a family that seemed to be happy and together. She had a younger brother with whom she got on well and her parents never seemed to have any arguments or even minor disagreements. Sandra excelled at school. She never failed an exam and got top grades in all her final tests. As far as friends were concerned, Sandra seemed to have experienced the same golden touch. Sandra was one of those people who always seemed to have a wide circle of friends, and never seriously argued with any of them. She was never dumped by any of her boyfriends nor did she dump them. All her relationships just ‘sort of tailed off and she remained friends with most of her past boyfriends. She went to university, got a First Class degree and married the young man she had been seeing for most of her time at college. Sandra sailed through life with very few problems or hold-ups, until she was 27. Then, she encountered what felt like her first setback in life. Sandra applied for her dream job and was turned down. At which point, to the total surprise of all her family, she tried to kill herself.

In fact, Sandra’s reaction to what she and everyone else felt was the first and only time she had ever faced a failure would have been less of a surprise if she had had the opportunity to examine herself, her family and her background more carefully. In the aftermath of her suicide attempt, Sandra saw a counsellor. On one level, you could say that Sandra never learned to cope with an ending because she had been protected from ever having to acquire that skill. Since her life had been so charmed, she simply hadn’t come face to face with failure and didn’t know what to do. But not being given a chance to learn about sadness and loss is often an indication that there is more going on under the surface than simply being lucky. What emerged in Sandra’s story was that there was a pattern in her family of avoiding looking at problems, and at endings. Sandra said that her parents never fought or argued. What she realised actually happened was that fights and arguments happened behind the scenes, hidden and denied. When tempers were lost, silence and disapproval made it clear that such behaviour was not to be tolerated. Any anger that anyone in her family felt or expressed was swiftly smoothed away. Disagreements – just like her relationships – ‘tailed off’ without a proper and conclusive ending. When something nasty happened, it was avoided and wasn’t talked about. Sandra remembered that at the age of ten her mother had an argument with her closest friend. There were no recriminations or raised voices but somehow this woman was never spoken of, spoken to or seen again. It was as if she had been ‘edited out’ of her mother’s and the family’s life. When she was eleven, the family cat, who had been a part of the family for as long as Sandra could remember, died. It had been taken to the vet and simply didn’t return. Nothing was said openly. Tears might have been shed, but in private and quietly. A new kitten appeared a week or so later and the old cat was never mentioned again. So all through her life Sandra had seen how negative motions were tidied away and ignored. She learned that both little and large endings were so frightening and the feelings they aroused feared to be so overwhelming that they simply weren’t allowed to happen. Nothing ever ended in Sandra’s family and in her life. Friendships, events, people ‘tailed away’ in an ending that wasn’t an ending because everyone either pretended they hadn’t existed in the first place or the leave-taking was so extended it faded away with no clear finish. What she had been trying to ignore just before she attempted suicide was the fact that her husband had been saying, at first quietly but later with greater force, that he had doubts about their relationship. He had been about to tell her he wanted a divorce when she took an overdose.

So, until she had the opportunity to consider it, Sandra would have said that she had such difficulty coming to terms with painful events because she’d never really faced any. Bill, on the other hand, was an example of someone who might have said they’d had plenty of losses in their life. One of his grandfathers died when he was a baby, both his grandmothers died within six months of each other when he was seven, and his remaining grandfather died when he was ten. All of them had had regular contact with him, looking after him after school and during holidays. Bill’s younger sister died in a car crash when he was thirteen and she was eleven. However, both Sandra and Bill shared one thing which is that in their families of origin unhappy feelings were swept under the carpet and unhappy events were dealt with by being ignored. Bill had not been taken to see any of his grandparents during their final illnesses or his sister after her death. He was denied the opportunity to say a final farewell because he was not allowed to go to any of the funerals. Bill’s parents did their best to protect him from their own grief and pain by being brave and not crying in front of him and by reassuring him that after death people went to heaven, a happier place. The message to a young person, of course, was that heaven was far more attractive than staying behind to be with him which put him thoroughly in his place.

DENYING THE UNPLEASANT

Many of us have moments when we prefer to disregard something hurtful or unpleasant, and try to make it go away by ignoring it. Both Bill’s and Sandra’s families carried this to an extreme. Anything unpleasant, whether a situation, a person or an emotion, was covered up. In such families, anger and pain and other negative emotions are seen as so frightening and so dangerous that the fear is, once faced, they may be totally overwhelming or destructive. But plenty of us deal in similar ways to loss or endings, too. Without realising it, we are often scared that if we once acknowledge our anger or pain, it might sink us entirely. We may be scared that if we unleash rage it could be so powerful and destructive that the person we’re angry at might never recover. Or that the hurt we feel may be so great it would paralyse and destroy us. So we may sit on it rather than let it out the bag. The result of this isn’t that anger, pain or sadness vanishes. What happens is that it continues, under the surface. It’s contained, but usually bursts out sometime, somewhere or somehow. Bill and Sandra adopted family patterns of running from and trying to ignore conflict and pain. Sandra kept hers at arm’s length until something so obvious happened that she couldn’t ignore it, when she was turned down for the job she’d told everyone she wanted. At which point, she also had to face up to the fact that the one event she’d been trying to ignore was finally on the horizon – the bust-up of her relationship. Up until then, her coping mechanism had always been that of her family, to smile and pretend everything was fine and to turn away from arguments and messy emotions. Bill’s way of coping with his fears was to keep them at arm’s length and not to get too involved. He had affairs, frequently and regularly. He also had another way in which he dealt with the pain of endings, which we’ll look at later.

COPING MECHANISMS

Acting in a particular way in order to deal with something that makes us unhappy is called a ‘coping mechanism’. Children have a wonderful coping mechanism that they use among themselves to deal with anything unwanted. If one child says something to another that they don’t want to hear, the second child will often stick their fingers in their ears and sing or shout loudly to drown out the unwanted words. If one tries to show the other something they don’t want to see they will cover their eyes and turn away. Adults have more subtle coping mechanisms but these tend to be just slightly more sophisticated ways of covering eyes, sticking your fingers in your ears and going ‘La, la la’ at the top of your voice.

A common coping mechanism, then, is simply to avoid what is bothering us. Sandra’s parents didn’t argue because it was too frightening, too painful and she learned to do the same. There were no raised voices and no outward anger. What there was, however, was just as, if not more, destructive and effective. Veiled disapproval can be far more hurtful and long-lasting than an explosion of anger, and Sandra learned to fear her mother’s silent rage. The problem, of course, with ignoring hurt and anger in the belief that if you pretend they’re not there they will go away, is that nothing of the sort happens. Lack of communication and difficulties in a relationship are not improved by not talking about your feelings; on the contrary, the situation gets worse. But if you grow up in a family that believes ‘least said, soonest mended’ you may not learn the skills to start or engage in a discussion. You may only learn how to avoid.

Why may we turn away from the things we fear? It probably comes from a deep, ancestral memory that says if you lie still and pretend you’re not there; the biggest trouble in your life will pass on by. This might have worked when the worst thing that could have happened to you was to be noticed by a sabre tooth tiger and turned into lunch. It’s no longer applicable when your biggest fear may be you and your partner falling out of love with each other. We often operate on the superstition that if you don’t put a name to something, it fades away. So, not saying there is a problem means the problem ceases to exist. Again, this doesn’t work. And we also often go by the emotions we had as tiny babies. A small child has to learn momentous things while growing up – how to love and hate and how to deal with the seemingly impossible trick of realising you can both love and hate the same person or thing. A child loves the carer who shelters, cuddles and feeds it. But when anything the baby wants – a feed, a cuddle – is delayed, the child can be swept with terror and anger, feelings which can seem enormous and powerful.

Children really do believe they are the centre of the universe, and all-powerful. They can become horrified at the thought that, if their anger was truly unleashed, they might actually harm their parents or themselves. If you come from a family in which anger and any other uncomfortable feelings or the finality of loss are avoided or denied, this fear of the power of emotions and their destructive effect if allowed free rein, seems confirmed. You may find that the idea of facing feelings, of bringing anything to an end or a halt, or of accepting that something is over, virtually brings on panic attack. This makes facing up to endings so very hard.

If we’re scared of endings, whether it’s death or divorce, losing touch or turning way, we may find ourselves falling into a variety of coping mechanisms. One may be refusing to see any problems, or acknowledging that there are difficulties. One partner may insist the couple never argue and that everything in the garden is lovely. The other may try to raise concerns over a period of time and find their mate simply doesn’t hear them. When, in desperation, the unhappy partner finally leaves, asks for a separation or otherwise makes their feelings felt in no uncertain manner, they may be astounded to hear the other swear, with apparent sincerity, that they had no idea the relationship was in trouble. Another common coping mechanism that occurs in unhappy relationships is for one partner to have an affair.

HAVING AN AFFAIR

One of the most common reasons given for the ending of a relationship is that one or other, or both, members of a couple have an affair. When an affair happens there is a range of explanations that we will usually give ourselves and other people. Men may claim that it meant nothing, was just sex and since it was offered on a plate they would have been crazy to have turned it down. Both men and women may argue that the affair happened because they fell in love with the other person and simply couldn’t resist acting on this, in spite of the potential difficulties or hurt to other people. Frequently they, and indeed their partners, may argue that everything in the marriage was fine until this other person came along. The betrayed partner may paint the other man or woman as a seducer and blame them entirely, while the betrayer may claim that the new person, and new love, simply overwhelmed them. There is an alternative explanation which is that affairs are a coping mechanism to get over facing up to an ending. On the whole, affairs don’t come out of the blue and don’t happen in well-founded, happy relationships. By the time an affair begins, a relationship is usually already beginning to show cracks or come apart. It could be argued that for someone who doesn’t want to face an ending, an affair provides a new beginning that can paper over and obscure the ending that they may otherwise have had to confront. Have an affair, and you can fix your mind on that and drown out any feelings which you may have about your other relationship finishing.

There are many coping strategies that can be used that allow us to hide the fact, from other people and from ourselves, that all is not well in our particular happy-ever-after. Carrying on an affair or a series of affairs may be one way of avoiding an ending, by ensuring that a new relationship starts before another can end. This may be a pattern of behaviour that started as a teenager when you first began dating. Early relationships can be intense even though they may be short-lived, and part of the learning experience in adolescence is to go through both falling in and out of love. The high and lows can be both exhilarating and painful but both extremes of early love are enormously valuable. In a sense, learning how you stop loving or being loved is the most important bit. How you cope with being left or leaving allows you to learn how to deal with disappointments and with endings. If, however, the pattern you evolve is one in which endings are fudged this may be not only an expression of how you have been taught how not