What to Do When You Miss Someone and Just Want the Pain to Stop

No magic pill helps you know what to do when you miss someone. Some people are just imprinted on our hearts forever. But take heart, it won’t hurt forever.

Is there anything worse than when the person you love more than yourself isn’t in love with you anymore? Breaking up is never an easy situation, not even when you are the one to end it. When someone else pulls the trigger, it makes it that much more excruciating. There are ways to wallow in your own pity party, and there are things that help get you past the hurt hump. It is all about knowing what to do when you miss someone.

Missing someone is a mindset. Often, we make ourselves miserable by holding onto the loss. How many times do you stop yourself just to remind you that you are supposed to miss them and that things aren’t right? The key to stop missing someone is to distance the feelings and put them on hold.

What to do when you miss someone – 15 ways to ease the pain

What does that mean? Psychology tells us that the human brain was not designed to analyze its own feelings within a situation. Unfortunately, it is also wired to try to do so. When you go over a situation in your mind to try to find closure or to make sense of what happened, you only keep yourself stuck.

At the heart of the feelings of loss is you. No one makes you feel the loss but you. If you want to move forward, it takes the will to let go of the hurt, move past the emotions, and put the entire situation on the back burner until a time when you can think of it without it hurting. Stop continually pulling yourself back into stuck, and let yourself move ahead with these tricks.

#1 When the thoughts creep in, push them away. It is natural for loss to creep in and ruin just about any moment you have, but only if you allow it.

Once you start to think about the person you miss, which you inevitably will, disallow the memories the ability to overcome you. As quick as they fly in your face, push them away and make a commitment not to honor them. [Read: Letting go of someone you love minus the bitterness]

#2 Try new experiences. The best way to let go of the past is to move on with the future. By performing the same old habits and living in groundhog day, you keep yourself stuck in a rut. If you mix things up a bit, then you change patterns in your life that may be keeping you miserable.

Patterns are ways our brains get stalled into making assumptions and assuming we know things about the future that we don’t. If you overhaul your life to include new things and experiences, they overshadow the habits that keep you from healing.

#3 Stop convincing yourself out of moving ahead. When you end a relationship, it is human nature to feel some allegiance to it. If you forget about it too quickly, there can be guilt and remorse at not grieving it too much.

Stop convincing yourself that it isn’t time to move on just yet. There is no magic timeline to start to live again. If you feel it is right, don’t let anyone tell you it is too soon to start over, especially not you. [Read: Self-discovery after a break up – How to happily move on]

#4 Realize you aren’t going to solve loss through reason. The problem with loss is that we have a tendency to try to make sense of it. There is no sense to love. Even the best psychologists and scientists can’t explain why we love who we love, or how we fall in or out of love.

It is nothing more than a mystery. Trying to reason through it to figure out what went wrong only leaves you endlessly searching for something that isn’t there and stops you from moving on and finding someone to fill the hole. [Read: The 7 stages of heartbreak when you become someone’s ex]

#5 Stop allowing the triggers to get the best of you. Triggers are emotional hot buttons that catapult us back into hurt long after we’ve moved on. We all have emotional triggers from our childhood, past relationships, and any hurt we experience.

If you know that something is a trigger and elicits a backslide to your healing, then make a special note of it. Make sure never to put yourself in the position to let that trigger go off again. In time, emotional triggers hurt less and less. But, while still fresh, they are very destructive to whatever progress you make.

#6 Stop the negative thoughts. Constantly trying to go over what went wrong will do nothing but bring up negative thoughts of your breakup and loss.

Rehashing the situation never gives you the answers you need, it only brings back the negative ending of your relationship. Negativity does nothing but hurt you emotionally. It keeps you stuck in a cycle of hurt, so stop dragging yourself back in.

#7 Avoid running into them or things that remind you of them. Sometimes we have an illusion that if we just see them that it will make the hurt less. The truth is that running into them only opens whatever part of the wound you could heal.

Avoid the places where you bump into your ex and all those things that remind you of your time together, even if it is just until the hurt fades. [Read: 14 things to keep in mind when you accidentally bump into your ex]

#8 Don’t hang onto memories. Memories can be awesome, but sometimes they can be too soon. If you want to get over someone, the worst thing you can do is sit and daydream about all the awesome things that you used to do together. When relationships end, we typically hold onto all the good times and negate the not so good.

That leaves us with a false sense of what the relationship truly was and what we lost. If you want to get past the hurt, then you should stop hanging onto the memories and reliving them. It isn’t doing you any favors.

#9 Stop talking about it to friends and family. Talking aloud can be very cathartic. But, after a breakup, we often try to make some sense out of the part we played and try to place blame or absolve ourselves from any.

If you want to move on, then stop asking for the opinion of others or talking to your friends about how you feel. They already know, and continually bringing it up over and over, will only keep you in a rut and eventually pushes them away leaving you more isolated.

#10 Don’t bring yesterday into today. If you want to know what to do when you miss someone, it is all about starting each new day anew. That means not bringing yesterday into taint today. If you lost someone, they are gone, and as hard as that is to accept, you simply must start to live a new life instead of holding onto the one that is no longer there. [Read: The rules of life: 22 secrets to never be unhappy again]

#11 Go out with anyone and everyone. Don’t limit yourself by only going out with those people who are sensitive to what you are going through. Pushing yourself to meet new people brings out a new you that you might not know existed.

It also shows you life is meant to be full of new experiences, relationships, and that you will probably go through hundreds of different lives before you leave this one.

#12 Find something you like to do alone. At times the hardest part of loss is feeling lonely. The thing about loneliness is that you can only be lonely if you stop enjoying being by yourself. You don’t need someone else to make you feel fulfilled. Being happy comes from within, not from the love of others. If you learn to love yourself, then you only need you, anyone else is just additional joy.

#13 Let go of those people who allow you to wallow. Some people are good for us, and some are not. When you break up, it is sometimes the case that misery loves company. Misery is not the type of company that you need to move on and heal.

Find people who are positive in their life, are okay with being on their own, and aren’t suffering through their own emotional hurdles. It isn’t that you should abandon those who you confide in and who confide in you, it is just that there are people who bring you up and those who drag you down. Choose someone uplifting, at least for now, to get you off the ledge. [Read: 17 bad friends you should unfriend from your life]

#14 Get rid of reminders. If you have an altar to commemorate your ex, it is time to dismantle it so that you don’t have it staring you in the face as a continual reminder. You don’t have to get rid of things that remind you of your past, just putting them away to start living, is a good step on your way back to the new normal.

#15 Give yourself permission to heal and let go. Out of guilt we hold ourselves back. If your last relationship didn’t work and you feel partially or completely responsible, self-flagellating isn’t going to get you anywhere but more marked and hurt. It is not only time to let go, it is time to forgive your misgivings and learn a lesson from the past. Stop judging yourself or thinking that it was all your fault. Breakups take two parties not just one.

Losing someone is one of the hardest things that we can do in life. You never make it through a breakup unscathed. Each person that enters and leaves your life leaves a notch on your heart, some bigger than others.

[Read: 8 post-breakup questions you should be thinking about]

In the end, when it comes to knowing what to do when you miss someone, it makes no difference what happened. It is over, and you need just to let it be and enjoy the time, learn what you can, and realize that if it were meant to be, you would still be.

The post What to Do When You Miss Someone and Just Want the Pain to Stop is the original content of LovePanky - Your Guide to Better Love and Relationships.