When You Know It's Over With Someone But Can't Move On, These 6 Questions Always Help
DARKMODE CINEMA | Pexels If you're struggling to figure out how to get over a breakup, you're not alone. Learning how to move on and deal with the stages of a breakup — particularly if it was a difficult one — might leave you questioning how you could have done things differently.
Every relationship reveals a different part of your psyche and emotional state. Perspective usually leaves the room when a love relationship ends. Suddenly, you fall into a spiral of emotions, and in the quiet moments that follow, you start questioning what's real and what you might be imagining.
When you know it's over with someone but can't move on, asking yourself these 6 questions always helps:
1. Was I truly present in the relationship?
Presence is the lifeblood of any relationship. No one is fully present all the time, and that’s normal. But ask yourself: Did I practice mindfulness and presence? And what if you didn't?
That is the opportunity for introspection. It's part of the cycle of growth. Each experience brings us closer to how we want to show up for ourselves and others. In the long run, this kind of inner search is what turns the tide from pain to moments of peace.
2. Did I take responsibility for my part, without carrying all the blame?
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I don't know about you, but understanding I'm not responsible for it all gives me some serious relief. How can you create shifts in how you receive and practice love if you're concerned with what's not yours?
Research on present-moment awareness shows that you can only stay grounded in your own emotions when you stop fixating on things you can’t control or truly understand. Oh, you may have some well-cooked ideas about what's going on for the person whose love you're still grieving, but you don’t know what’s actually going on inside them.
You have to respect that their heart has many spaces belonging only to them. It's not about you in those places. It's their sacred journey. Now, you can focus on your responsibility toward yourself and your healing.
3. Did I honor my heart throughout the relationship?
This is where you dig deep into your authenticity.
- How did you give of your heart — was it honest?
- Did you honor your heart in the relationship or give it to your lover at the cost of your well-being?
- Were you protective of it during arguments and the decision to end things?
- Did you leave it out there to be trampled without a scrap of a safety net?
No matter how you answer those questions, the key is awareness. Without awareness, you'll make the same mistakes over and over. Be kind to yourself, especially if you realize that you've been following unhealthy patterns.
"Self-aware individuals understand that constant stimulation creates mental noise that drowns out their inner voice," advised personal development coach Patrick Williams. "These are strategic pauses designed to reconnect with themselves and reset their emotional state."
Love is a practice. The more you understand yourself and your motivations, the closer you come to loving yourself.
4. Was this relationship exactly what it needed to be?
A hard one to accept, I agree. "What if" is a beguiling question. However, if it were meant to be, it simply would be — because you would have manifested it.
Neurolinguist Kristina Kasparian, Ph.D., explained, "It’s easier to look around than within, especially when we hit roadblocks with our ideas, but the surest way out is always through. Even when every sentence I write frustrates me, I stay with it for as long as I can, until it eventually unblocks. And, if it doesn’t, I can genuinely say I tried."
Everything exists through the power of your thoughts and the action you take as a result of those thoughts. The reality in front of you is the situation you're dealing with right now, even if it doesn't make sense yet.
Once you accept what is, you can let go. In the letting go lies a beautiful gift: Clarity — one that's not governed by pain, but by wisdom.
5. What can I do with my life right now?
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Right now is where joy, gratitude, and hope live. The past is a memory, the future is a story we tell ourselves, and pain often grows when we're mentally stuck anywhere but the present.
There is innate grief for the moment you're missing. The first time I realized I was grieving how much time I'd spent mentally elsewhere. I understood how precious a gift "now" is. This moment, where everything is possible, according to your thoughts and intentions, is the miracle. Choose the miracle of now. Everything else pulls us away from what we can actually change.
6. How do I keep my heart open without hardening it?
When the instinctual impulse hits you to harden your heart, to shelter it from the tenderness of love and loss, you stand at a delicate precipice. It's a choice between feeling it all or feeling only what seems supportive.
Love and loss are the best teaching grounds of what truly is supportive. To stay soft is to know the depths of the heart. People are empathic. You must feel to make sense of your environment.
Some research suggests that the heart plays a role in emotional awareness, not just physical function. When people emotionally shut down after loss, it can affect how freely they express themselves and how confident or grounded they feel in their own sense of power.
The solar plexus is where you draw confidence, self-esteem, and self-worth from. Each of these centers, though separate, operates holistically, and that is why hardening the heart leads to a form of self-aggression.
In conflict with yourself, you attract more relationships that reflect this inner conflict. Keeping it soft and open supports your self-empowerment and ability to take your full place in the world; to speak your truth and desire.
"Some days you feel more vulnerable and insecure than nurtured and safe," cautioned life coach Kelly Rudolph. "So, imagining yourself in a beautiful, safe bubble can feel like a sigh of relief. Use your imagination to feel the warmth and comfort inside and stay in your bubble all day. You can play with it as if it's a powerful force field that bumps negative people out of your way. Just the visual of that alone will make you smile."
In the end, two things remain. It does not matter whose fault it was; the blame is irrelevant if you're to rise empowered. Secondly, we can choose to take full responsibility for our relationships. Free from agonizing over minute details of where things derailed, we can focus on what is most important: self-care and moving forward.
Letting go is probably the most difficult journey any human being can undertake. We're in a constant state of releasing, it seems. You'll experience sequences of growth with an almost unlimited number of opportunities to level up, spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually.
Life is not constant progress. It is a growth spurt, a win, a challenge mastered, and then a dip, a perceived failure. Later, another win, another span of time where everything has lost its wrinkles, and you have it all under control. Then, the cycle repeats itself. It's not you, it's the nature of things. On this planet, you are a creature of seasons and change.
Breakups are part of the cycle, just as love. You will notice how nature is quite adept at this, and humans are not separate from this phenomenon. Just as trees drop their leaves, you shed layers of your heart. You go inward, rest, heal, and when the time is right, turn your face to the sun once more.
The magic is in what happens between. That "between" space is where the soul finds its wings.
When your heart is broken, there are intuitive ways to move through the pain without forcing yourself to rush the healing. You can be completely unaware of how you participate in elevating your anguish and grief. It's natural to lose perspective. When you lose perspective, you offer yourself an opportunity to work out some unhealthy patterns.
When the heart, mind, and ego are absorbed in grief over lost love, support them with every act of loving-kindness you can imagine. This mindfulness practice will lay the groundwork for your healing. Every time.
Monika Carless is an author and intuitive coach who has written over 350 articles on relationships, mindful life, and spirituality with clients worldwide. She has been published in Eden Magazine, Radiance, Rebelle Society, The Urban Howl, Vista, Natural Life, Vitality, Countryside, the Canadian Organic Grower, and more.
