How Does Someone Regain Their Self-Worth After a Break Up?

It is very easy for our self-esteem to take a nosedive the moment we have had a breakup, especially when we did not instigate it and feel rejected, because breaking-up is emotionally draining. Nothing prepares us for it. The reasons for the low self-esteem are threefold.

First, we all want to be liked and desired and tend to judge our worth by the significant others in our life, the ones we admire the most. Once they reject us, we are likely to believe that we are worthless and have no value to anyone else either. It would take quite a while for us to feel differently.

Second, if we did not love ourselves in the first place, that rejection would have cemented the negative view we have of us as 'bad', or someone not capable of being loved. To break-up with someone we really care for confirms our worst subconscious fears.

Third, many people expect their relationships to last a long time and when they break up it leads to self-blame and deep disappointment as their expectations are dashed. But relationships often break because there is one taker and one giver instead of two givers. This usually happens with people who expect to be loved but give little back in return.

The best way to keep a break-up from affecting our self-esteem, and to retain our worth, is to recognise five main things.

1. Our life is a journey from birth to death. Everything we experience is designed to develop us, to help us evolve, to make us more resilient in coping with setbacks and forms the route to where we are going. Events in our lives are like signposts to the next stage, not ends in themselves. They are means to achieving what we really want. Just because one relationship did not work does not mean there is anything wrong with us. It is likely to mean a need for more experience in dealing with relationships, or a greater understanding of potential partners and their needs.

2. Begin the process of self love by daily affirmations. Most people don't really love themselves at all because they are more used to finding fault with who they are than to appreciate their uniqueness. They expect others to love them instead to compensate for that lack, but no one can love what we reject. We have to start to accept ourselves as we are, to affirm ourselves daily as wonderful human beings before we can begin to love another person and appreciate their feelings for us. We have to stop the self-criticisms and self-negation and be happy with ourselves before anyone else can truly appreciate us.

3. Know who you are. We cannot have successful relationships and greater self-confidence if we do not know who we are, what we want in life and where we are going. Otherwise we won't recognise what we want when we actually see it. For example, the signs of incompatibility in a relationship are always there at the beginning, but a lack of self knowledge and our desire to make others 'fit' our grand plans blind us to their presence.

4. Accept that life consists of both pleasure and pain. We cannot have one without the other. Like pleasure, pain is a natural part of our lives, a natural twin of the pleasure we seek: birth and death, joy and sorrow, happiness and sadness - they are all double-sided coins in life. We have to accept them totally when they come our way, without seeking to expect just the pleasure. It is not possible in this life. By expecting pain as well as pleasure we will keep the self-blame and the self-pity to a minimum, strengthen the way we cope with break-ups, and enjoy every new day instead.

5. Accept that we do not need someone else in our lives to make us lovable human beings, but they are desirable. It means learning to love and nurture ourselves first, to know who we are, what makes us happy and to value our independence. It keeps us from being dependent upon another human being to reinforce us. When that person is no longer there, it is easier to accept because we were the cake in the first place. They were mainly the icing and, as we all know, icing is not mandatory!

6. Let events in life unfold and try not to control them. Often we burden new relationships with our expectations of perfection instead of accepting whatever they bring and letting them gradually unfold before us and. We want the fairy-tale ending so much, we tend to worry and fret about what might happen in the end when that day could be our last! The best thing is to just enjoy life, each moment at a time, without too many expectations of what we want. In that way, we allow life to give us some surprises.

The essence of preserving our self-worth with any breakup is to learn to love yourself, and reduce the blame. By learning self-love and appreciation we will gradually accept that people will come and go in our lives but we have to live with ourselves 24/7. In that way a lover's departure might affect us briefly, but loving ourselves as we do, our journey would continue with greater determination and self-acceptance than ever before. Hopefully, we would have learnt more from that association about ourselves and move on with greater pride and clarity in who we are, our self-esteem fully intact, and perhaps even higher than before.

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