The 5 Breakup Truths That Will Help You Heal and Move On

Breakups have a way of turning your world upside down. They can shake your sense of self, your trust in your own judgement, and your confidence in the future. Even if the relationship wasn’t quite right, the ending can feel cataclysmic.

The grief of a breakup is profound and deserves to be honoured. I’m a big believer in letting yourself feel it — not rushing to “get over it,” numb out, or bypass what’s really happening inside you.

At the same time, there are some hard but liberating truths about breakups that can help you move through this season with more clarity and self-respect, instead of staying stuck in patterns that keep you looping in pain.

1. A Breakup Is Not a Competition

One of the most unhelpful narratives we absorb from social media, pop culture, and rom-coms is that breakups have winners and losers.

You’ll see messages like:

• “Make them regret losing you.”

• “Have the ultimate glow-up so they know what they missed.”

• “The best revenge is to live your best life.”

On the surface, this can feel empowering. Underneath, it often keeps you stuck in comparison and ego. Your worth becomes measured against your ex’s perceived “progress” — who’s happier, who moved on first, who seems more “over it.”

When you’re playing this game:

• grief can feel like failure

• missing them can feel pathetic

• sadness becomes something to hide, not something to honour

On the flip side, convincing yourself you’ve “won” — that it’s their loss, that you never really cared — often masks deep hurt and low self-worth under a layer of bravado.

Healing is not about winning. It’s about turning your focus inward: learning from what happened, tending to your heart, and choosing who you want to be going forward. Your growth is not a performance for your ex. It’s for you.

2. You May Never Get Closure From Them

This one is big, and it’s painful. Many people are left after a breakup with unanswered questions or a sense that things “don’t add up” — especially if the ending was abrupt, inconsistent, or confusing.

It’s completely natural to want answers. Of course you want to understand how someone can say they love you one week and leave the next. Of course you want to know what changed.

But the hard truth is this: The person who left you confused may not have the emotional capacity, self-awareness, or courage to give you the closure you’re craving.

Waiting on them to offer a perfectly packaged explanation puts your healing in someone else’s hands. It keeps you in limbo.

Closure becomes much more empowering when you redefine it as:

• your choice to accept what happened,

• your decision to stop chasing clarity from someone who can’t or won’t provide it,

• your willingness to make peace with the not-knowing.

It doesn’t mean you like it. It doesn’t mean it makes sense. It just means you stop tying your ability to move forward to their behaviour.

3. You’re No Longer Entitled to Know What They’re Thinking or Doing

This one can feel brutal, especially if you’re anxiously attached and information has always been your version of safety.

When a relationship ends (setting aside shared parenting or practical arrangements), you no longer have a “right” to know:

• who they’re seeing

• what they’re feeling

• whether they’re sad, lonely, dating, or having a great time

That sudden loss of visibility can feel incredibly destabilising. Many people respond by trying to regain a sense of control: checking their social media, asking mutual friends, scrutinising every scrap of information.

It’s an understandable impulse — but it keeps you externally focused and internally disempowered.

The work here is gently reorienting your attention back to yourself:

• What am I feeling right now?

• What do I need in this moment?

• How can I support myself through this wave?

You don’t have jurisdiction over their inner world anymore. What you do have (and always did) is jurisdiction over your own.

4. You’re Probably Not the Right Person to Support Them Through the Breakup

It’s very rarely a good idea for ex-partners to be each other’s primary emotional support as they process the breakup.

If you’re calling each other, crying together, debriefing every feeling, and comforting one another as though you’re still a couple, it becomes incredibly hard for your system to register that the relationship has actually ended.

Your nervous system and attachment system need space to recalibrate. They need a period of “this person is no longer my person” for the reality to begin to land.

Leaning on each other for emotional support:

• keeps the emotional bond enmeshed

• blurs the boundary between “together” and “not together”

• often delays, rather than reduces, the pain

It doesn’t mean you have to be cold or cruel. It simply means the kindest thing, for both of you, is to seek support elsewhere — friends, family, a therapist, a coach, your own practices — and let that support scaffold you into your next chapter.

5. Sooner or Later, They’ll Move On — and So Will You

For many people, one of the most confronting aspects of a breakup is the idea of their ex being with someone else. Even imagining them dating, sleeping with, or loving another person can feel nauseating.

And yet, if the breakup is real and lasting, this is almost always what happens over time: they move on, and so do you.

When you see evidence of this — a new partner, an engagement, a holiday, a baby — it can trigger a fresh wave of pain and stories:

• Did they ever really love me?

• What does this new person have that I don’t?

• How could they move on so quickly?

Those questions are human, but they’re rarely helpful.

Their timeline doesn’t invalidate your connection, and it doesn’t define your worth. People move at different speeds for a whole host of reasons. Your task is not to decode their choices, but to keep bringing the focus back to your life, your healing, your future.

It may not feel like it now, but there will come a time when your own heart feels open again. Your life is not over because this relationship ended — even if, right now, it absolutely feels that way.

Breakups are messy, painful, and deeply human. You don’t need to rush your grief or judge yourself for struggling. But as you move through this season, gently notice where you might be giving your power away — to your ex, to social narratives, to old stories of unworthiness — and begin reclaiming it, piece by piece.

Be so kind to yourself. You’re doing something very hard. And you won’t feel this way forever.