“If you are the one who is dumped, then you feel like your life is over” – Alex Kingston
Sitting in our session, I listened to my young client whose partner had recently left her. She was sobbing and could barely speak. ‘I feel like a useless piece of rubbish. He’s having a new life and I’m left behind. It would be easier if he was dead!’. Her words hung in the air and later I found myself thinking about them. I understood what she was trying to convey. If her partner had died, she would be in deep grief but she wouldn’t have experienced his death as a personal rejection. Whatever the agony of the loss, she would be able to remember him as loving her and their relationship would not be devalued.
A breakup is so very personal. It tells the world that something was wrong. It isn’t hard to feel that this is the same as telling the world that there is something very wrong with you, even though it takes two people to make a relationship work.