Uncoupling: A Healthier Way to Cope With The End of Relationships
(Photo courtesy of Pixabay)
Dr T J Jordan
When a meaningful relationship ends, one that included intimacy and some degree of commitment, we often have feelings of pain, sadness, anger and even hatred. An impact of the loss we experience can be looking back at the relationship through a dark and clouded lens, mistakenly deciding that everything we experienced when we were together was not as good as we had thought. We often tend to toss the whole of the relationship into the over-generalization of a bad and miserable waste of time and emotions.
It has been argued that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. The problem with indifference is that it connotes a permanent lack of caring about the well-being of the person with whom we were in love. When we struggle to maintain a sense of indifference, we tend to prolong our own suffering and essentially train ourselves to become uncaring people.
A preferable option is uncoupling as described by (Melchin)*. He suggests that what we are striving for is the degree of detachment that will help eliminate or reduce our long-term suffering while avoiding poor decisions about our relationship experiences.
