Understanding the psychology of a breakup can help you avoid getting dumped, get an ex back or recover from being left by someone you love.
Here are 11 interesting facts about the psychology behind breakups:
1. The emotional pain of a breakup is felt like physical pain
According to a study by cognitive neuroscientists at Columbia University, brain scans conducted on people recently broken up with, revealed that the areas in the brain associated with physical pain lit up when thinking about their ex.
The participants were initially asked to look at photos of their exes, while thinking about happy times together.
They were then asked to look at photos of neutral, non-sexual friends.
The scientists found that the physical pain centers in the brain lit up when looking at the photos of their ex, but not of their friends.
If you’ve ever been dumped by a woman you love, you may remember how the breakup made you feel a dull, hot, stressful kind of physical pain all over your body.
You may have also felt pain in your heart, which is commonly referred to as ‘heartbreak.’
It can literally feel like your heart is breaking, or is under a lot of physical pressure.
If you want to stop feeling that pain, you need to focus on the solution or cure.
It’s hope.
When you have hope that you can and will get her back, the pain suddenly stops and you start feeling excited, energized and optimistic.
How can you feel hope?
By understanding that there are proven steps to get an ex back and if you follow them, you will almost certainly get another chance with her.
If you don’t want to get her back, then focus on enjoying life without her and moving on with someone else.
If you fall in love with a new woman who is just as, or more attractive than your ex, then you will find it fairly easy to move on.
However, if you struggle to attract women and can only attract a woman that you perceive to be less attractive than your ex, then the pain of losing her will remain.
You will continue to feel rejected and left behind and at times, the emotional pain will build up in your body and will literally cause you to feel a tense, dull kind of physical pain throughout your body.
So, to get past the pain, either get her back, or move on with a new, high quality woman that you honestly see as being just as attractive, or more attractive than your ex.
2. Trying to get over being dumped by someone you love, is like trying to stop an addiction to a drug
MRI brain scans have shown that dopamine (the body’s ‘feel good’ hormone) gets released when you are in love.
It floods your brain and makes like seem so much better, food taste better and her appearance to seem more attractive.
As a result, you love being around her, the sex is great and you don’t want to lose her.
Then, if she ends the relationship, your daily supply of dopamine is gone and instead, your brain gets flooded with stress hormones (e.g.epinephrine, norepinephrine and cortisol).
You then feel like you are in panic mode and must get her back.
From your perspective, you want her back because you love her and don’t want to lose her.
Yet, from a chemical perspective, you are addicted to the drug she has been giving you while you’ve been in love.
You need that back, otherwise you will feel stressed, down and depressed.
To stop wanting her back is like trying to stop feeling addicted to a drug.
You either take the drug again, or you go through a withdrawal period, where you feel horrible, want it, but don’t have it.
3. A breakup can cause you to lose confidence in yourself
According to a study conducted at Stanford University by psychologists Carol Dweck and Lauren Howe, being dumped usually causes a person to spend a lot of time questioning what they did wrong to get rejected.
In some cases, the self-questioning can cause a person to believe that they are unlovable, which then ruins their confidence and negatively affects future relationships they enter.
It can also result in a guy losing confidence in his attractiveness to his ex, which she then picks up.
Since women are turned off by insecurity and turned on by confidence, his ex naturally loses more of her feelings for him and feels more compelled to move on.
This is why, if you are a man who has been dumped by the woman you love, it’s absolutely essential that you build on your confidence, rather than losing confidence in a downward spiral of self-questioning that results in you thinking, “There’s something wrong with me. A woman will never be able to love me and stay with me for life.”
Rather than going down that path, understand what makes a woman feel attracted to a man, fix any issues you have (e.g. insecurity, neediness, lack of manliness around her) and then go through the steps to get her back.
When you see that you can re-attract her and get her to fall in love with you again, you will then realize that you are lovable.
You will also realize that you are in control of your dating and relationship life now, rather than just hoping to get lucky, or hoping she doesn’t suddenly figure out who you really are deep down and then lose interest.
4. A breakup can distort your sense of self
Research by the psychologist Arthur Aron and his colleagues, shows that when people are in close relationships, their individual self becomes intertwined with that of their girlfriend/wife, or boyfriend/husband.
Although that is a part of growing closer in a relationship and is even a good thing (to a certain point), you will naturally feel like you’ve lost a big part of yourself if the relationship ends.
Where guys go wrong, is showing their ex woman how much they need her to feel whole again, or happy, confident and secure.
That’s not what makes a woman feel attracted to an ex man.
What makes her feel attracted is when she can see that he is emotionally independent (i.e. he is confident, happy and forward moving in life, regardless of whether or not she is in life).
When she can see that he doesn’t need her to feel good about himself, but does want her back, she will naturally feel respect for him, which will then cause her to be open to him.
All he has to do at that point is focus on attracting her (e.g. flirting with her, being assertive in a loving way, being more manly in his behavior, using playfully challenging humor) and she will feel new, exciting sparks for him.
He can then go through the remaining steps of the ex back process and get her back.
5. The most hurtful kind of breakup is when you’re dumped for someone else
According to a study from Cornell University, being left for someone else is the worst kind of breakup a person can go through.
Scientifically, this is known as comparative rejection.
Out of all the different reasons that lead to a breakup (e.g. needing space to focus on career or studies, feeling incompatible after a while, losing interest, tired of all the arguing and fighting) the pain of being dumped for someone else lasts much longer.
It also has more lasting negative effects (e.g. the person left behind struggles to move on, has trust issues in future relationships, settles for lower quality women/men in the hope that they won’t get dumped again, always secretly worries about not being good enough).
The way to get over the pain is to either get her back, or have a relationship with a woman that you see as being just as, or ideally, more attractive than her and who also makes you feel just as much, or even more love.
Even still, you will always remember her and might secretly continue to wish you had gotten another chance with her, or at least gotten her to show you real love once again.
6. Breakups in your 20s will influence relationships later in life
In a study conducted by Jessica Kansky and Joseph Allen from the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia, it was found that breakups that happened in a person’s early 20s influenced relationships later in life.
People who had a greater understanding of the reasons for the breakup, recovered better than those who remained in the dark.
Those who understood the real reasons for the breakups, also ended up enjoying better relationships in the future.
This is why, it’s important for you to understand your ex’s real, secret reasons for breaking up with you.
If you never understand the reasons, you will almost certainly make the same mistakes in the future and experience breaks ups, or a divorce.
Some secret reasons of which women rarely tell men, include:
- He gave her too much power over him. She then lost respect and attraction for him because he wasn’t man enough to handle a woman like her.
- He would become emotionally sensitive when she wasn’t being supportive, nice and friendly. As a result, she felt like she had to tone down her personality and be gentle with him all the time, otherwise he’d sulk, become insecure, or get angry and annoyed with her.
- He seemed shy, insecure or even a little fearful around confident men, alpha males or manly men. As a result, she didn’t feel safe and protected by him.
- He gave her the sense that he didn’t feel good enough for her, which then made her feel like she was trading down, or doing him a favor by sticking with the relationship.
- He didn’t know how to flirt with her to create sexual tension and instead, just hoped the spark would last. Yet, without flirting, they ended up feeling more like friends.
How about you?
Do you know why your ex really break up with you?
You can learn more than 70 reasons why a woman will break up with a guy in Get Your Ex Back Super System.
7. Acting like you don’t care doesn’t work
After being dumped, a guy might say things like, “I don’t care. It’s her loss, not mine” to his friends, but deep down, he is hurting, feeling rejected and wishing he could get her back.
Some guys also decide not to contact an ex anymore (i.e. use the No Contact Rule) and if she doesn’t contact him, then he’ll just move on.
Yet, those approaches don’t work if you are still in love with her.
Love never dies and if you still love your ex, it will stay with you for life.
This is why, if you want her back, it’s best to just focus on achieving that while you still can (i.e. before she gets married, has children and is happily settled down).
Alternatively, you can decide that although you do still love her in a way, you no longer want her back and are going to move on.
Then, focus on moving on by attracting a new, high quality woman, or enjoying casual relationships with high quality women.
8. Moving on as quickly as possible, isn’t always a good thing
Some guys try to get over the pain of not being good enough for their ex, by moving on as quickly as possible.
Yet, while that can work (if he meets a high quality woman), it can also backfire.
For example: A guy might…
- Settle for a lower quality woman, in the hope that she won’t dump him. He will then miss his ex, because she is more attractive than his new woman.
- Remain at the same level he was at emotionally when his ex broke up with him (e.g. insecure, emotionally sensitive). He will then be unattractive to high quality women and if he happens to get one, she will soon discover his emotional unattractiveness and potentially dump him.
- Never properly deal with the pain of being dumped by the woman he loves, so he ends up getting stuck in feelings of hopelessness, despair and potentially even resentment towards women.
- Be unable to open up emotionally to another woman, which then ruins his chance of maintaining a successful, long term relationship.
9. Not all breakups have a negative impact on us psychologically
The more confident a guy is in himself and his attractiveness to women, the less of a big deal a breakup will be for him.
It doesn’t mean that he won’t feel any emotional pain if he is dumped.
Instead, he’ll be better prepared to accept that breaking up is sometimes necessary, or that she just wasn’t his ideal match, rather than assuming that he’s just not good enough.
He will also feel more confident about attracting a new, high quality woman and won’t worry about being single and lonely for a long time.
On the other hand, if a guy lacks confidence with women and gets dumped by a high quality woman he loves, then he will struggle to get over it and move on, because it will be extremely difficult for him to attract another high quality woman.
In most cases, he will have gotten his girlfriend by luck (i.e. she liked him easily without him having to do anything, they met through friends and clicked, he grew on her over time by spending time with her as a coworker), not by actually knowing how to attract women on purpose.
He will know that it’s going to be very difficult for him to replace her and as a result, the breakup will one of the worst things to ever happen to him in life.
It will literally scar him for life.
Of course, if he learns how to re-attract her and get her back and then does that, he won’t have to go through all those years of mental and emotional torture as he misses her and watches her move on happily without him.
10. Women are more likely to end a long-term romantic relationship than men are
Women are more than twice as likely as men (30% of women, compared to 12% of men), to say that they have never been dumped.
Similarly, men are almost twice as likely as women to say that they have never been the one to end the relationship.
Additionally, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, approximately 80% percent of divorces are initiated by women.
The reason why is that a woman has a natural instinct is to find a relationship that will last for life, rather than just for now.
So, if a guy is unable to be the man she really wants (e.g. she wants a confident, self-assured, emotionally strong man, but he has become insecure, wimpy and unsure of himself in the relationship), she will usually begin to warn him about her unhappiness.
If he doesn’t change, she will break up with him and move on, rather than waste more of her time.
Time is important to women because women become less attractive to men as they age and therefore, have a more difficult time finding a good man.
Additionally, women become infertile faster than men and if a woman has a baby after 40, she has a 1 in 100 chance of giving birth to a baby that has down syndrome, compared to 1 in 1250 chance if she conceives at age 25.
Men, on the other hand, can impregnate women well into their 70s and in most cases, not cause any problems for the baby.
As a result, women have a natural instinct to find and keep the right man, rather than wasting time with the wrong man.
Of course, the wrong man can become the right man if he changes his ways, but he has to be willing to learn and make changes.
If he just tries to get her back by telling her how much he loves her, or needs her, then she will almost certainly move on.
11. Both men and women become less dependable after a breakup
Researchers in Switzerland found that both men and women become less dependable, or considerate towards other people after a breakup.
This happens because a person usually becomes more focused on themselves and what they want after a breakup.
Focusing on yourself is not a bad thing to do.
However, just make sure that you while you are focused on yourself, you are using this time to improve your emotional attractiveness to re-attract your ex, or another high quality woman.
If you do that, then it will time well spent.
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