The Mel Robbins Podcast
To Anyone Going Through a Breakup: How to Heal a Broken Heart & Move On
Thu, 5 Dec 2024
If you’re going through a breakup, or someone you love is, this episode is dedicated to you.Mel is sharing the #1 cure for your broken heart, and is here to help you navigate the incredibly difficult process of moving forward after a breakup.This is also a resource to share with anyone in your life who is going through heartbreak.In this episode, Mel is joined by her daughter Sawyer, who recently went through the biggest breakup of her life. They reveal research-backed strategies and the real, raw emotions of going through loss and grief, and together, they walk you through the painful task of learning how to live without someone you loved.If you're ready for guidance on healing and moving forward, this episode is for you. Get a copy of Mel’s new book, The Let Them Theory, which she mentions in this episode.For more resources, including links to the studies mentioned in the episode, click here for the podcast episode page.If you liked this episode, listen to this one next: Let Go of Negative Thoughts & Reprogram Your Mind for More Positive ThinkingConnect with Mel: Watch the episodes on YouTubeGet Mel’s new book, The Let Them TheoryFollow Mel on Instagram The Mel Robbins Podcast InstagramMel's TikTok Sign up for Mel’s personal letter Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes Disclaimer
Chapter 1: What is the biggest heartbreak Sawyer experienced?
Hey, it's your friend Mel and welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast. So earlier this year, our oldest daughter Sawyer went through the single biggest heartbreaker of her life. The guy that she had been in a relationship with for two years, they broke up. And I'm going to tell you something. We were all devastated. His family was devastated. We were devastated. But they were really devastated.
And it was one of the hardest experiences I've gone through as a parent. To watch my child mourn and experience heartbreak, I really didn't know how to support her. And I wouldn't have been able to talk about this with you months ago because I want to respect her privacy and his privacy. And we were just in it. But it's seven months later. And Sawyer and I have dug into this.
And we've done the research and reflected on her experience and my experience. And I am so excited to be able to tell you that we have put together the official Mel Robbins podcast breakup survival guide that is going to help you move through heartache. And it's going to help you support people that you love who are going through a breakup.
Because the fact is, as painful as these experiences are, you can move through it. And on the other side of it is an unbelievably powerful, wiser, and more loving version of you. Hey, it's your friend Mel. Welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. I am so thrilled that you're here. I have been wanting to talk about heartbreak and breakup with you for a long time, and today is the day.
Chapter 2: How do you support someone going through a breakup?
And so thank you for being here. If you're brand new to the Mel Robbins Podcast, I want to welcome you. To the Mel Robbins Podcast family, you have picked a remarkable conversation to listen to. I am sure you're listening to this if you're new because somebody that you love sent this to you. And so thank you for choosing to press play.
The fact that you pressed play on this particular episode tells me that you really do know that you deserve an incredible life, that you deserve to be happy, that you deserve to feel love. And the conversation today is gonna leave you empowered. It's gonna give you very specific things to do.
This is stuff that I wish that I had known way back in the day when I've gone through breakups and heartaches. These are tools that you're going to learn based on what my daughter found incredibly helpful as she was going through the biggest heartbreak of her life earlier this year. And speaking of that, Sawyer, thank you for being here with me.
Thank you for having me, mom.
Of course. And, you know, thank you for doing this because you're a private person and this was a extremely painful experience for you to go through this breakup. And I just really appreciate you being willing to come on and talk about not the details of the breakup, but how the breakup impacted you.
And we're going to cover a lot today, and so I just want to start by saying, whether you are listening to us right now, and you're in the middle of the tsunami, you just found out that the person that you love is cheating, it's over. Somebody pulled you aside, relationship's over. You've had the conversation about commitment or taking the relationship to the next level, they don't want it.
You might be going through a divorce or you're in this stage where you just keep dating people over and over and over and now you don't want to date again. This conversation is for you. This conversation is also for you if you are watching someone that you love go through heartbreak or breakup.
And I want to start by saying that I am not going to tell you to love yourself because that's the last freaking thing you want to hear right now. And it's the world's worst advice. Why is that the worst advice, Sawyer?
Because you hate yourself after a breakup. You feel insecure. You feel disgusting. You feel unwanted. You feel undesirable. You feel rejected. And trying to, quote, love yourself when the person you really wanted to to feel love from is impossible and I think no one knows how to just fall back in love with their self immediately
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Chapter 3: What is the #1 advice for healing after a breakup?
I want to punish myself by going on a revenge diet or doing this or stalking them on Instagram or checking their location or making fantasies up in my mind about what their kids are going to look like with some other girl. And I think that that is the issue is that people going through a breakup We all want to keep the idea in our mind of what the life we had could have been.
And we do that through...
Everything. What are the ways in which you kept your boyfriend front and center in your mind? And I'm talking after you broke up because I want you to normalize because we're going to break our conversation today into two huge revolutionary epiphanies. The first one is to teach you what it means to process a breakup.
And we're not going to just talk about it on like terms that you can all relate to. We're going to dive deep into what's actually happening in your body. Because processing a breakup is a neurological, physiological, and chemical process where you unlearn the patterns of your life.
Because when you're in a relationship, you become intertwined neurologically, physiologically, and psychologically with the other person. So you're going to have to process the untangling and deprogramming of having this person in your life day to day. And it's why Everybody who gets broken up with does whatever they can to keep the person front and center in their mind because you're used to it.
You're intertwined. So what are some of the things that you would do every day that kept your boyfriend like right there on your mind and kept you in the middle of the breakup instead of truly processing it through your body, mind and spirit?
So first I'll talk about what I was doing wrong to keep us intertwined. And then I will tell you about what my therapist shared with me to start the unwinding process, which was painful, but very, very effective. So how I kept me and him intertwined in my mind was what I think a lot of us do these days, which is stalking them on Instagram constantly, posting photos of myself that...
with the goal of not, oh, I love this photo of myself, but more so, did he like it? Did he like it? Did he see it? Did he see it? And I think other ways are just thinking about him 24-7. And instead of doing a meditation or trying to switch the channel in my mind or go for a walk or distract myself...
I would just spiral in my mind and I would end up sobbing and it would just be, how can I make myself think about his future with other people that's not me? And it's true. It's like, how can I keep our...
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Chapter 4: Why is self-love the worst advice during heartbreak?
And then he talks about how he goes to the city where this person is and he says, I'd die if I saw you, but I'd die if I didn't see you there. Oh my God, it just makes me cry. And Sawyer, you really worked on this part of the book in the middle of this and you write this paragraph. You'll live in the fear and in hope of bumping into them. You'll watch their life play out in pictures.
You'll be terrified of the day that you'll learn they've met someone else. The hardest part about a breakup is that you have to go through it. There's no avoiding it. You experience it in every cell of your body because you must unlearn what it was like to be with them and learn how to live your life again without them. This is why so many of you hold on for so long.
And let them will not make this easy. Let them will not remove the pain. LetThem helps you process the reality that they're no longer there. Totally. And that brings me to this rule of thumb that my therapist, who also happens to be your therapist, we talk about her as the smartest person we've ever met. Her name is Ann Davin.
And Ann has this incredible rule of thumb that we also write about in the LetThem Theory book. And this is not easy. You're going to hate this. But here it is. No contact for 30 days. None. No contact, 30 days. And the reason why is that any contact at all, whether it's seeing a photo or but particularly their voice, she said. You cannot watch videos.
You cannot listen to voice memos because their voice is so supercharged in terms of its coding in your body and your nervous system and your brain that the second you hear their voice, it will activate all the old patterns in your nervous system and it forces you to take a huge step back in the processing and unlearning of life with this person. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Because you went through it and I'm going to be honest with you. When you told me that Anne said, no contact, 30 days, no photos. And I was a good mom. I went to our Aura digital frame and they got a handy feature where you can hide photos. And I remember sitting on the couch, just tearing up, hiding all the photos of the two of you so they wouldn't be on the frame in the kitchen.
Thank you for that. You're welcome. And can you talk a little bit? Because I was thinking there, I don't know if I could go 30 days. I was like the most anxiously attached person. I would have been a stalker. I would have been that psycho girlfriend that shows up on your doorstep. I don't know that I could have gone 30 days, but you stuck to this. What was it like? And what did you do?
And why did you do it?
Yeah. So the thing about this heartbreak is it's not my first, but it's definitely the worst. And so I definitely learned from my first heartbreak in that I reached out immediately, we got back together, and that set the standard for the next five years of my life. It was a constant coming in and out of each other's lives. I could not get over him. And I was so miserable.
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Chapter 5: How does the nervous system react to breakups?
That when your children are born, they would not be with him. I did not accept that.
And that is what, like, kept him around for so long. Is I... In your mind, in a fantasy. In my mind. Because he was not around. No. Not in my text, not in anything. It's dry. Just like your vagina. No, literally. No, literally. Cobwebs. Especially when you're living at your parents' house. But it honestly is all about the fantasy. I think that that was what happened in my last relationship.
That's what happened in this relationship is after it was over, I was accepting of the fact that we had broken up. I was accepting of the fact that, you know what, there probably is someone else out there for me. You know what, like we didn't agree on this or that or the other thing. And maybe there is someone better. I don't know. And everything happens for a reason.
Like I was able to accept that. And whenever anyone came to me and said, you know, maybe this is for the best, I was able to receive that and process that. But what I wasn't willing to accept is that later on, he wouldn't come back in my life. And I think that that is what...
fantasizing about that life that I thought we were going to have is what kept me so anchored in this heartbreak and in this depression and it made me like I loved feeling that sadness it was like crack because it made me feel like this is not actually over Sawyer you can hold on to this And that's what I held on to.
But as soon as you kept saying to me, let them, let them, let them, like, this is over, Sawyer. It sucked to hear, but it also made me realize, like, he's not reaching out. Like, there's not... Anything I can do that's going to change him because I can't control him. It's true.
And that's what you'll learn in the Let Them Theory book is you cannot control another human being, their thoughts, their feelings, their actions, anything.
And so... I kept saying to you, if he wanted to, he would. Yeah. And he's not. And you have to let them. And you have to move on. And just to widen this out a little bit, I've got friends in my life, I'm realizing as you're sharing that the sadness was an anchor and you refused to let go of it because it kept you tied to him, who have been divorced for years.
And yes, they share custody, which is a whole nother complicated ball of wax, but they hold on to so much anger And it's as if that anger means they're still married to them. The anger keeps them in a relationship with them and they refuse to give it up.
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Chapter 6: What is the 30-day no contact rule?
I think that is such good advice. And it's as simple as moving your bed to another angle or part of your room. Or you don't have to buy anything. Just remove the stuffed animals. Remove anything that they... may have given you and give your room a makeover.
It's also a fun project that makes you feel like you are changing your environment and starting a new chapter, but not in a way that is related to them.
And if you're supporting somebody, this is one of those things where you can help by helping provide an environment for change. So you could say, how would you feel about giving your bedroom a makeover?
Like instead of taking your friend out for drinks and covering the barbell, take them to a store and buy them a new blanket for their bedroom or that sticky wallpaper that could give their room a makeover. The third thing is that since you're unlearning life with this person that you just went through a breakup with, there's a big hole to fill.
So reach out proactively and let people know what is happening. Your roommates, your siblings, your coworkers, your parents, you're not a loser. And tell people for the next three months, will you check in on me? Will you invite me to do things so I don't die like a mole in my bedroom crying under the sheets down here like a nocturnal animal? We've all been through it.
But if you have people that understand that you just need help getting out of the house, you need help getting out to dinner, you need help getting to an exercise class, that is something that I think makes a big difference because even the act of doing it is a sign to yourself that you're moving on.
And for those of you like me supporting, just ping those friends of yours, not right after the breakup, but seven weeks after the breakup. Want to go to a yoga class? want to go away for the weekend and my folks invite it, we can go to my parents' house, it goes a long way.
And better yet, show up at their house to pick them up for the fitness class. Don't just text them and obviously someone is going to say no. When you're going through a breakup, you don't want to be around anyone. You want to be alone. You want to be sad. Show up. in person because it really matters.
And whether that means drop off toilet paper or drop off a meal or order them Uber Eats for dinner because I guarantee you they're not spending a ton of time cooking. And when you go the extra mile to actually show up for people and drive them to the workout class or invite them to your parents for the weekend and
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Chapter 7: How can you process a breakup effectively?
I just don't want to date anybody else, basically. And it's been over a year.
Fabulous question. And I think very common. And the first thing I'm going to say is you need to follow the advice of this episode, because if you're dating to get over someone, you're not going to find the right person. And I wonder if you really let what we've shared today sink in. Did you process this? Have you grieved it?
Or are you going through life knowing, okay, I've accepted the breakup, but I have a fantasy that I'm going to walk into a restaurant one of these days and they're going to be there and it's going to be instant and we're going to be right back in it. And if you haven't given up on that fantasy yet, you need to let them. And you have to truly do the work to accept that this is over.
They are not coming back. And until you do that, I don't think you're going to be interested in dating. Because what I hear in this question is you don't want to date. And that's okay, too.
What I was going to say is, I think for me personally, when I first met Darren, I also was uninterested in dating. I also was completely over it and still not over even another guy that I was seeing before that. And so I think
you feeling like no one is good enough or I don't want to date and I'm so uninterested in these people is not only normal, but I do think that paying close attention to who makes you feel safe, who sparks your interest, who makes you smile and laugh, those are all little pieces of data that can tell you, oh, maybe I want to explore this. And are they going to be here forever? No.
But I remember when I first met Darren way back when, I wasn't interested. I wasn't... It took me a long time to become and develop and develop that safety and that love and that support. And it's just not immediate with anyone.
You know, one of the things that I think happens after a breakup is if you haven't given yourself the true time to process and mourn this and truly let them and accept that this is over and get the fantasy out of your mind... you will always and forever have their ghost in your relationship now. That's number one. Number two, it is okay to not be out there dating.
In fact, there's a lot of people that feel this way. And here's what I want you to know. You don't have to be dating to meet somebody. There are people all around you. There are people at work, there are people at the spot you buy lunch, and simply being out and about in the world as yourself and happy, and if you're the kind of person that's just open, you will be very surprised.
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Chapter 8: What are the stages of grief during a breakup?
I love that. So question number three is from Tim, who is 27. Even though we've broken up, so much of what I do still involves my ex. I want to look good in case she sees me. I want to post on social media for her to see. I want to date someone else to make her jealous. How do I stop living my life for her and start living it for me? Tim.
Bless you. I have been there.
Yes.
Let them. Tim, your life is not going to begin until you let her live hers. She's gone. And the reason why you're living for her and you're posting for her and you're thinking about her is because you have not actually grieved this relationship.
And the more you think about her and the more you navigate your life based on how she would react or how it would impact her, the more you are holding yourself hostage to a relationship that's over. You have to let her leave. And you have to accept reality that this is over. And that's really hard to do.
And I would recommend you go back to the beginning and you re-listen to this and you go through the 30 days and you unfollow her on social and you remove all the things from your... or your house, that you drive in different patterns, that you start to step into and learn how to live life without her. Because that's the piece of this breakup survival guide that you haven't done.
And it's only when you allow yourself to process the reality of what's happened that you'll stop giving your power to somebody who doesn't deserve it. And you'll take it back and you'll learn how to create a life without her and a life where you are happy. The sad thing about hearing this is that you can't see it yet.
But in listening to your question, there are now millions of people listening that see you in a jail cell that you locked yourself into. The good news is you hold the key. She's gone. you're not getting married, but you have your whole life ahead of you. And I would focus on the things that this taught you. I would move through the 30 days and remove all reminders of her.
And I would allow you to truly grieve this because you're still living as if she's here and she's not. Here's the choice. You can live the rest of your life in this mental and emotional jail. Or you can use the keys that we've given you. And you can use the let them theory. And you can let her go and set yourself free. You have a huge, beautiful, amazing future ahead of you.
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