Struggling with purpose after breakup

[UmbrellaEllaEllaElla]

My ex and I broke up in Feb, haven't spoken since May. It was his choice. I wanted to stay together. It was based on my behaviour and I feel very regretful and sad.

A byproduct of the grief is I've noticed that I just don't care about work anymore. The money doesn't go towards the future I'd dreamt of with him. We aren't working from home together. Having dinner after work together. It just feels so hollow not having him to share it all with at the end of the day/week.

I've thought about not wanting to be here anymore.

I've just finished 8 weeks of therapy and advised to have a few months pause. Already on antidepressants. Just so sad without him.

When it comes to dealing with loss (bereavement, the end of a relationship, the loss of our job etc.) our mind can conclude that the thing we have lost was so integral to our idea of what happiness is that we can never be happy again, which can lead to depression. Our mind perceives no possibility of future happiness so they stop triggering any emotions, good or bad. In these instances, we need to ‘zero the scales’.

To explain; when we want to weigh out ingredients to cook something, we place a bowl on the scales and hit the zero button so that the weight of the bowl does not confuse our calculations. Then we add the ingredients and the numbers go up; were we to remove the bowl, the scales would read a minus number. To continue weighing anything accurately we must hit the button to zero the scales once more, now the bowl isn’t there. When we have a tragedy in our life we can be plunged into depression because our happiness levels now read a minus.

Any attempt to improve our life would result in slightly less of a minus... but a minus all the same. Depression is when we don’t see any way of getting back to zero. A person’s ability to move on from tragedy depends entirely on their ability to adapt to where they are now and to effectively ‘zero the scales’.

If we can accept where we are today (minus that loved one, or that relationship, or that job), we can start to once again build on our happiness levels.

Human beings are, in fact, excellent at resetting the scales and adapting to new circumstances (we do it every time we improve our situation or circumstances but we very quickly take that for granted).

Think of your current zero and how you could start to build on that; what would make you heart beat that tiny bit faster?