Why do Breakups Feel Exactly like a Drug Withdrawal?

“The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.” -Meghan O’Rourke

“And ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.” -Khalil Gibran

People you love become part of you — not just metaphorically, but physically.

You absorb people into your internal model of the world. Your brain refashions itself around the expectation of their presence. After the breakup with a lover, the death of a friend, or the loss of a parent, the sudden absence represents a major departure from homeostasis.

In this way, your brain is like the negative image of everyone you’ve come in contact with. Your lovers, friends, and parents fill in their expected shapes.

Just like feeling the waves after you’ve departed the boat, or craving the drug when it’s absent, so your brain calls for the people in your life to be there.

When someone moves away, rejects you, or dies, your brain struggles with its thwarted expectations. Slowly, through time, it has to readjust to a world without that person.

To love is to live always with the possibility of loss; to sorrow with loss is to have loved.

Grief is a force of energy that cannot be controlled or predicted… Grief does not obey your plans, or your wishes. Grief will do whatever it wants to you, whenever it wants to. In that regard, Grief has a lot in common with Love.

What I learned from crisis, loss and grief is that those are the moments in which change is the most possible. Those are the moments when your life is the most malleable… if there was ever a question that you needed to reflect on; or if there was ever a ‘life changing pivot’ you wanted to make; doing it when change is possible, the most goes a long way in healing and eventually time will lift the weight off of you… gradually.

I don’t know if this is a part of growing up or if this is just a by-product of time itself, but there are certainly many things in life that no one teaches you. I have certainly come to discover that every breakup amplifies my degree of emotional numbness by a small bit. If I were to draw parallels with a word that comes to describing the feeling would be-

“Kenopsia”- The feeling of emptiness of places left behind. The eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that’s usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet — a school hallway in the evening, an unlit office on a weekend, vacant fairgrounds — an emotional afterimage that makes it seem not just empty but hyper-empty, with a total population in the negative, who are so conspicuously absent they glow like neon signs. Taken from ‘The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows’

The Feeling of Alertness…

This feeling… of alertness to the inner-spirit of things — this humming — comes from a hard-earned understanding of the impermanence of things and, indeed, our own impermanence. This lesson ultimately animates and illuminates.

We become witnesses to the thrilling emergency of the present — a series of exquisite and burning moments, each extinguished as the next arises. These magical moments are the bright jewels of loss to which we cling.

Thank You for Reading! 🌟