How to Get Healthy After a Toxic Breakup
By: Katherine Hart
Tags: Relationships, Life Lessons, Divorce, Nonfiction, Love

A Lyric Essay

How to Get Healthy After a Toxic Breakup

Photo by Ansley Ventura on Unsplash

1. Forgive

In some ways this step is the easiest: you just have to think three words, “I forgive them.” But first you need to be ready for those three words. Before you forgive, you have to sit on your bed with your legs tucked up, covering your aching heart, and sob hard into your knees. You have to cry while doing the dishes and at romcoms. The tears will come at random times, embarrassing times like at the supermarket, and you’ll try to hold your head up and look at the roof to stop. You’ll avoid eye contact with the check out staff. Don’t ask how I am, you’ll beg silently. Don’t ask anything.

Then, before you can forgive, you also need to rage. Rage at the unfairness of it all, with a guttural scream that comes from a place deep in your bowels you didn’t even know you could scream from. You need to grit your teeth and feel your jaw lock and your mind race. And throw something. You need to throw something. A pillow is good. (Not anything too hard or breakable.)

But then, when you’re ready, you forgive. You won’t want to. You’ll want to hold onto the rage and punish them with it. Because feeling anger is better than feeling pain. Rage feels like what you need right now. But forgiveness is what you really need.

You need to forgive because if you don’t, your ex takes more of you and you can’t afford to give them one more second.

Because forgiving isn’t for them, they don’t even need to know. You don’t even have to tell them. Forgiving is for you and your health and your state of mind. Because you know unforgiveness causes stress, and stomach ulcers, and maybe brain tumors like your uncle got when he stayed bitter, and who knows what else.

Forgive for your future and being able to have one. Because if you don’t move on, you don’t move on. You lie in bed awake, reliving what they said and did. You go over and over the argument. “I should have said that.” “Why did they say that?” You watch the ceiling and lose hours, because you’re in your head and they’re in your head, and you can’t let it go. And when you dream, you dream of them.

You get stuck.

Forgive because you can’t get stuck. Because then they take all of your life. And they don’t deserve to take all of your life. Because you gave them enough of it already. You gave them birthdays, and walks in the park, and hours of cuddles holding bowls of ice cream and calling them “darling.”

Forgive because they aren’t anything to you anymore. They aren’t part of you or part of your future. They aren’t the person you wake up to, or sit next to, or walk in the park with. Forgive because they have their own life and you have yours and when you forgive you’re saying, “my life is unaffected by you and your actions.” You’re saying, “You don’t have permission to upset me anymore.”

And if you still have to co-parent or see them around and they still make you mad, that’s okay. When they make you mad, be mad...and then move on. Go to the gym and pound it out on the rowing machine. Sit on your couch, your laptop on your knees, and type up an angry letter you’ll never send. Cry with rage. And then forgive.

Because you know deep down nothing they do matters anymore. They are inconsequential. They are past. They are that life. Forgive because why not? Who cares what they think, say, do. You’re someone else now. Someone they don’t even know.

Forgive. And then forgive again when they make you mad. You don’t need to forget or let your boundaries down. Don’t let your boundaries down. But forgive when they turn up three hours late dropping off the kids, just because they like to make you wait. Forgive when they try to emotionally manipulate you because they know what presses buttons. Forgive when they’re rude to your face and say, “I’d expect more from you.” Forgive because you know it’s all a game.

It’s them, their problem, their attempt to try to upset you and control you and hurt you. Because they’re hurting. Because they’ve lost control. Because you’ve placed boundaries. Because you said, “enough.”

Keep them out of your house. Make rules around phone calls. Limit their impact. Stand up to what you need to and then forgive.

Forgive because you can.

Forgive because it’s within your control.

Forgive because it gives you freedom.

Forgive because then they have no power.

2. Exercise, preferably in nature.

3. Eat well, preferably with friends.