5 People You Lose, But Never Really Get Over
Some losses stay with us for a lifetime
Some of the most common advice sounds like let it go, move on, and get over it. But there are some things we don’t ever truly get over.
We might keep moving forward and put it behind us. We might even say that we’re fine and all is forgiven — or we’re fine and nothing is. If we do the work, we might even heal from the losses we sustain — but we never truly get over anything. It becomes a part of who we are, and even when we’ve healed, we’re changed by it.
5 People You Never Really Get Over
While death is can a great loss or trauma, my focus is on those who are still living that we lose and never completely recover from.
The Best Friend Who Betrays You
One of the single most impactful losses is a best friend who betrays you. These losses can rock the foundations of your world.
When it happened to me, I never fully grieved it. I didn’t cry. I didn’t even get angry. At the time, I was struggling with multiple medical and mental health diagnoses in my family. I was doing everything I could to survive what was happening in my own life. I was too shattered to lean on anyone, and I couldn’t find the energy to try to convince my best friend not to abandon me.
Later, I could look back and see we were both struggling in ways that made it difficult to support one another. Yet, the experience still felt like a deep betrayal. I’ve made peace with it, but don’t think I’ll ever fully get over it. Instead, I’ve tried to love people enough to let them leave and to love myself enough to stop trying to convince people to stay.
The First Love
I love you never tripped easily off my tongue. I was too guarded. I had experienced too many relocations and lost relationships to easily give away my heart. When my first relationship ended, it stuck with me for a long time.
The loss of a first love can feel like a death of our innocence. We realize love isn’t enough to sustain a relationship — or that we can’t love someone enough to make them love us back. It might make us less trusting in our next relationship because we understand the pain of loss.
The First Love to Ghost You
Being ghosted is unsettling. It creates feelings of rejection, grief, and confusion.
The first time I was ghosted was one of the most brutal experiences of my life. I couldn’t believe it. I kept reaching out. I tried calling mutual friends to make sure everything was okay. But it slowly became obvious nothing was wrong. He chose to cut me out of his life with no explanation.
It took me a decade to heal. It impacted the way I looked at the world. It eroded my trust. It left me forever changed.
The One Who Got Away
I’m a fan of saying the one who got away wasn’t actually “The One”, but it sure can feel that way. The relationships we want the most are often the hardest to get over — and take the longest time.
While I know that someone who leaves is unlikely to be the right person for us, I also know hearts are stubborn. We want what we want — until we don’t anymore. We can accept and heal. But the enormity of the loss lingers.
The Version of Yourself You Betrayed
The biggest loss is the betrayal of ourselves every time we sacrifice a piece of who we are for someone else. There are so many versions of me littered throughout my relationship history. I kept cutting off more of who I was to make myself smaller. I kept trying to become a version of myself that was acceptable to the people I dated.
It was only after an horrific heartache that I began to make myself more expansive. I stopped trying to be less. I started being the realest version of myself.
I can point to low self-worth, childhood trauma, and other reasons for why I kept betraying myself. I did the best I could but I sabotaged myself with every repeated cycle, every lesson that went unlearned, every time I ignored my intuition in favor of someone else’s voice. I’ll never recover the version of myself I left behind, but I’m grateful she helped me become who I am today.
As angry as we get at those who hurt us, we’re often most guilty of hurting ourselves. We do this every time we’re hard on ourselves and refuse to practice self-compassion. We do this when we trade our self-respect for acceptance or shift our boundaries to accommodate someone else. The betrayals add up, and we are changed by them.
Healed and Integrated — Not Over It
I have learned to process and integrate the experiences of my life while healing. We can get over it through avoidance or denial, but it doesn’t make us better. It only complicates our healing.
People say let it go, move on, and get over it. These platitudes are well-meaning but often misguided. What they mean is — get better, we care about you, and try not to let this one thing define your whole life.
We don’t get over it — but we can heal. It changes us, but in the end, we choose how we’ll change and who we’ll be when we do.
Crystal Jackson is a former therapist turned author. Her work has also been featured on Medium, Thought Catalog, Elite Daily, Your Tango, Mamamia, and The Good Men Project. When she’s not writing, you can find Crystal traveling, paddle boarding, throwing axes badly but with terrifying enthusiasm, leading yoga classes, or curling up with her nose in a book in Madison, Georgia where she lives with her two wild and wonderful children and one precious puppy.
