You’re young, you’re in love, you’re looking forward to a long future together. And then, for one reason or many reasons, suddenly or slowly, your relationship has ended, and you’re single. You know you’re not the first person to go through a breakup, but it hurts so much! You may feel lost, embarrassed, unsure what your future looks like, and like you’re less than or maybe even unlovable.
For young adults, breakups can feel particularly traumatic and hard to get over. This relationship has been part of developing your sense of self as an adult, and was a major part of your life plans, until it wasn’t anymore.
You may spend weeks, months, or even years feeling stuck, like you’re being dragged back into the hurt of the breakup. You may try all the ways to cope, to let go, but you still feel it. Breakup trauma, where you feel stuck in a state of lack of trust, hurt feelings, and a fear that you’re unlovable, is a sign that you need additional support to process your breakup experience.
At Suffolk DBT, our compassionate therapists have specialized training in a type of therapy, EMDR, that is specifically designed to help the brain reprocess traumatic memories. We can help you work through the memories and experiences that are keeping you stuck, allowing you to move forward with confidence and a renewed sense of who you are and the life you want to live!
Why do some breakups feel so traumatic?
Breakups are a loss; you lose the day-to-day connection to your partner, you lose a future you may have planned, and you may even lose the ability to appreciate the good times and the growth.
You’ve had an important, foundational relationship in your life come to an end, and even if you and your ex just figured out you aren’t compatible and it’s nobody’s fault, losing that relationship hurts. If the relationship ended on bad terms, with one or both of you directly causing the breakup? That can hurt even more.
Loss, especially unwanted or unanticipated loss, leads to grief that you need to work through to move on. Alongside that grief, a breakup can also trigger old attachment wounds and reinforce negative self-beliefs, dragging you into a trauma cycle where you feel stuck chasing safety and feeling unworthy.
Breakups cause attachment disruptions that can reignite insecure attachment issues
As babies, our relationships with our closest caregivers are our first relationships, and they set the tone for how we approach all relationships after that. For babies with nurturing, caring parents, this is great!
But for babies with caregivers who are standoffish, cold, missing, neglectful, inconsistent, or just unable to provide a secure, nurturing environment, this lack of secure attachment at a young age can lead to insecure attachments in adulthood.
When you go through a breakup, the disruption can pull you right back into old relational traumas that arose from your earliest attachment disruptions.
What can this look like?
- Chasing closure and reassurance from friends, family, online forums, your ex.
- Lashing out emotionally, trying to hurt people before they can hurt you.
- Feeling anxious about how a future partner will treat you, and trying to plan and scheme your way into creating safety between you and a future date.
- Shutting down communication about the relationship completely, pretending it never even happened.
- Detaching, ghosting, only pursuing shallow connections and ending them when there’s a sign it might deepen, or even opting out of future dating altogether.
- Excess drinking, substance use, gambling, overspending, doomscrolling, risky sexual behavior, or other impulsive, distracting attempts to dull the emotional pain.
A breakup can reinforce negative beliefs about yourself
While it’s common to have some negative feelings about yourself from time to time that come and go, core negative beliefs can be long-lasting, difficult to shake, and can interfere with your life in the present day in some surprising ways.
During a breakup, you may be reminded of earlier memories in your life where you felt abandoned, unlovable, or easy to discard. You might link this difficult experience of loss with other losses that left you feeling empty, or worthless, or like you’re a bad person.
This breakup could even be the starting point for certain (untrue) beliefs, like that you’ll never have the future you want, or that there’s nobody you can trust, not even yourself.
EMDR can help young adults resolve breakup trauma
EMDR can help young adults resolve breakup traumaEye movement desensitization and reprocessing uses a combination of bilateral stimulation (tapping or eye movement) and guided review of memories tied to core negative beliefs.
With EMDR, you can reprocess the memories attached to your breakup, allowing your mind to store them in a way that doesn’t keep you stuck reliving the emotions and thoughts over and over.
Instead of worrying over the details of your breakup to try to make sense of them, or shoving them away and trying to escape the pain, EMDR helps you reshape your connection to those memories and rewrite your beliefs about yourself to reflect the truth.
What is an EMDR session like at Suffolk DBT?
EMDR for breakup trauma is an 8-phase process
The first three phases of EMDR include explaining your history to your therapist, planning treatment (including grounding exercises and emotional safety support), and learning how and why EMDR works. You’ll also choose a target event to reprocess and explore the imagery, feelings, beliefs, and emotions associated with it.
Next, your therapist will help you through a “Float Back” process, revisiting the first, worst, and most recent memories tied to these beliefs while you also use tapping to create bilateral stimulation.
As you explore the common threads of these memories, your therapist will help you reprocess the memories (and the beliefs they instilled in you) by installing positive beliefs that feel true to you. This combination of tapping, desensitization, and installation gives you a sense of control and significantly reduces the distress of the memory.
You’ll end your session with a body scan to help reinforce the positive beliefs and to see if the memory still holds any pain for you. Your therapist will review the target memories to see how the session has changed your relationship with them.
EMDR doesn’t require you to verbalize details
If you’re feeling hesitant to share the details of traumatic memories, we understand. It can be hard to put into words and share with your therapist the events and emotions of a traumatic moment.
One of the major advantages of EMDR is that you don’t have to verbalize your experiences to your therapist; all you need to do is bring the feelings and thoughts of the experience to mind.
EMDR has built-in emotional safety support
People worry that trauma therapy will retraumatize them, and we understand that fear. It’s entirely possible for you to experience strong, difficult feelings during the EMDR process. An important part of the preparation phase in EMDR is your therapist teaching you grounding exercises and supportive ways to manage emotional dysregulation both during a session and between sessions.
Your therapist will be with you every step of the way with the EMDR process, and at Suffolk DBT, you’ll have access to even more specialized emotional support.
Not only are our EMDR therapists trained in trauma therapy, they also have a foundational knowledge of DBT that guides the treatment experience. This dual capacity for mental healthcare means your therapist is able to help you with trauma and can offer you practical, meaningful support for intense feelings that can surface during EMDR sessions.
Structured, supportive breakup trauma therapy at Suffolk DBT can help you move forward
Structured, supportive breakup trauma therapy at Suffolk DBT can help you move forwardBreakups are never easy, but when you’re dealing with breakup trauma, it can be especially hard. You don’t have to stay stuck in the pain of breakup trauma, and you don’t have to fear rehashing painful details in therapy sessions that don’t get to the core of your trauma.
EMDR with an expertly trained therapist at Suffolk DBT is a non-verbal, structured trauma therapy that helps you resolve attachment disruptions, reduce emotional reactivity, and move past stuck narratives. If you’re ready to reframe your breakup trauma and reclaim your story, we welcome you to connect with us. Our Long Island therapists are ready to help you, in person or online throughout New York.