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Moving on from someone can be one of the hardest things you have to do. Often there’s no real sense of closure. You don’t understand why things didn’t work out and you wished that they did. You wonder why you were rejected, what you did wrong, what you could have done to make it better. The more important they or it were to you, the more it hurts and the harder it is to get over. You go through emotional withdrawal because you no longer get to feel the way they or it made you feel. And it’s a major change to your life. Those are always hard to adjust to.

One of the first things you need to do is go easy on yourself. All of these feelings are perfectly natural to have after a loss of any kind. There’s nothing wrong with you for feeling them. by accepting the existence and validity of your own feelings, it can help reduce a good amount of second-hand stress.

Sometimes expressing yourself is a good way to go. You can write down what you miss about it or them. Think about the ways it affects your life now, and properly mourn the loss. Heck, you can even write a eulogy for it if that helps. It can be hard to find someone who really listens but do your best to find them and talk to them about how you’re feeling, it can be a friend, a parent, a therapist, or even an online support group.

After you’ve gotten a handle on what exactly your loss is, you can see if there are things you can do to ease the effect of the loss on your current life. This is harder with people, but can be hard with things, too. If you’ve lost a valuable possession, like a photo album, maybe you can see about finding things to replace it. As your friends and family for pictures of the time period you lost, things like that. It won’t replace it fully, but it can ease the pain of it’s loss.

If what you’re trying to get over is a loss of a person, try to help fill the gaps with the friends and family you have left. Sometimes you miss little things like I do, like going grocery shopping together, or going out to the movies or even just sitting there and cuddling each other while you watch tv. You can ask your friends and family to do this. Moms and Dads are frequently more than glad to hug their babies when they’re having a hard time. And you don’t have to worry about an awkward rebound fling resulting from your neediness like sometimes might happen with friends.

The biggest solution is of course time, you’ll get over everything in time, but I find it’s not a very useful answer. I hope my advice helps you shorten the amount of time needed to recover from whatever you’re going through. Good Luck.

That sounds a little like a complaint, to be honest, but this time it’s just an honest question of wondering. On a thread in a blogging forum on facebook, I asked a question and it ended up into a long conversation with someone where I sort of made a mini post about it being okay to grieve.  Someone commented on it and asked how I come up with what I said and stuff like that and that really got me thinking.  I kind of answered but my brain is still going and I didn’t want to turn that thread into more of a ‘me’ fest that it was starting to be.

How did I get to this point? How did I get to believing and understanding and knowing what I think I do? It might be relevant to the people who are reading I guess in terms of credentials, I dunno. But I decided to blog about it, If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ve seen me go from okay to a complete and utter breakdown this summer. I do not have it all together, even remotely.  That is one thing I’m never going to claim.  But I am intelligent. I always have been. And I’m creative and sometimes intuitive and think outside the box. I love reading and I love learning and for as long as I can remember I’ve been trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with me.

I started out reading self-help books up the ying yang. My favorite was Deepak Chopra’s The Way of The Wizard, which I thought was something else when I picked it up, but it was great and inspiring and did me no good and I can’t remember a word of it now. I’m kind of afraid to read it again in case I find it as vapid and limited as a lot of self-help books look to me now. This was before the internet was as useful as it became, and so self-help books from the library were it. Nothing helped. Nothing. I eventually grew so sick of them that I couldn’t even look at them anymore. They just frustrated and angered me so much and I couldn’t pinpoint why.

Then I went to college up in Connecticut (in my early twenties) and studied psychology, sociology, criminology, and as many other social science classes as I could fit in. I was hooked, but I was also severely depressed and anxious and untreated and having trouble taking care of myself and my living environment and my daughter.  I had to leave college and ended up crashing so hard I ended up in Maryland, homeless in a shelter, trying to find treatment for my mental illnesses.

I ended up in a day program and a residential program where I had my first classes. They were kind of terrible. I was in my twenties so I went to the young adult class, which consisted of a very large jovial young man having the same three conversations over and over and over again. I’d memorized them at one point. I can still remember  ‘That Donald Faisan he’s a trip.’  It drove me insane. All our outings were being piled into the van and driven around for a few hours, not to anywhere, or anything, we’d just drive. I hated it so much. I just brought notebooks and wrote and tried not to yell at the big guy to shut up. I succeeded but my blood pressure didn’t fare too well.

I’ve been in an eating disorder clinic, with Shepherd-Pratt, and been to their partial hospitalization program.  I’ve been in DBT (dialectical behavioral therapy) groups. I’ve been to various other day programs that actually taught stuff. I’ve had intellectual discussions with my doctors. I’ve researched topics and articles and psychological questions online going to reputable sources such as psychology today or the new york times and places like that for the information.  I’ve spent hours in deep introspection trying to figure out where things went wrong, who to blame, what to do.

Even in high school I was a little junior psychiatrist.  I think one of my most mortifying moments was when I was in high school and ended up telling my dad I wasn’t a virgin anymore and that I had decided that I slept with a couple guys because he didn’t pay me enough attention. I still don’t know what I the hell I was thinking. But I guess self-help books and talk show psychiatry had a hell of a lot to do with it. Plus my being a friggin dumbass teenage idiot.

Anyways I have been studying in one form or another psychology, mindfullness, self care etc since I was a teenager, so like 25 years. And I’ve had my own experiences and moments of improvement and a general upward progression, granted with some severe dip. I mean I’d never have been able to do this blog at all even five years ago.  I learned hard lessons, and am still learning, will always be learning. I know so much, but the problem is that it’s incredibly hard to do practical applications of psychological concepts. This science is so incredibly new. Treatment is often a lot of guesswork and trial an error, and that’s with medication, the most scientifically sound part of it. We still don’t always know exactly what works with whom and why it does or doesn’t.

It’s been incredibly hard for me to realize that I would have to find out what works for me and that it probably wouldn’t be a cookie cutter solution presented to me.  And that’s because I have my own unique personal set of problems and strengths, and challenges and limitations and advantages, all of which affect my life. And that’s not even taking into account what I’ve learned about how diet and gut flora imbalances can also affect your mood and energy.  The recognition of how mind and body aren’t actually as separate as everyone thinks is only recently becoming acknowledged in the psychology world and it’s not nearly widespread enough of an idea.

I’ve been studying and experimenting with psychological concepts and self-improvement techniques both in school and out of it for most of my life. The only thing I’ve been doing longer is writing.  Hopefully, I’ll find my way into a niche that allows me to live and prosper and grow into the person I was meant to be.  Even more hopefully, chronicling my journey on my blog, the highs and the lows, will help people with their own journeys. Maybe they can help me with mine, too.