Why do people find it difficult to forget their lost love?

Like it or not, there is a reasonable answer for that.

It is quite often that we hear our family and friends, complaining about the harsh realities of this world and eventually feeling sad about their existence. Especially those, who go through heartbreak or relationship problems find it quite difficult to forget their lost love and move on. Such people tend to feel depressed and spend most of their time, dwelling on their past.

Throughout my 24 years existence on this planet, I have not seen/met a person who has ever felt good about heartbreak or lost love. Literally, no one.

Unfortunately, I am not an exception either. A couple of years ago, when I was in the senior year of my engineering, I also went through a heartbreak. Lost someone, whom I thought I would never lose. As a result, I fell in this quagmire of uncertainty, misery and depression.

Being a 21 years old, going through a heartbreak with no hope of ever recovering, it appeared to me that I would not be able to do anything good from here. I felt done. For almost a year, I couldn’t lift myself up. It was a difficult phase, indeed.

My family and friends, both were worried about me and my lack of motivation to exist. Thus, I sought help. I consulted a psychologist, who helped me in figuring out what to do next and assisted me in getting out of that deep dark hole of sadness and depression.

Fortunately, I survived. And ever since, I have this urge to write about all of it so that I can educate all these teenagers and guys/girls in their early 20s (or any other age group)so that they may end up learning something from my experience.

Moreover, as a student of psychology, I feel that it is also my responsibility to spread awareness among my fellows and friends about this issue and help those, who are currently going through this bitter phase.

So, why people find it difficult to forget their lost love?

Although there are several ways to answer this question, yet I would like to look at it through a prism of psychotherapy.

Back in 1955, an American psychologist, Albert Ellis, developed a theory, called Rational Emotive Behavior Theory, to help us identify the relationship between our beliefs and behaviors. He introduced this technique to help us understand that our irrational beliefs and negative thought patterns often lead us to behavioral issues. Contrarily, as Albert Ellis explained, our rational beliefs help us in adopting right behaviors, ultimately saving us from psychological issues.

In the coming years, REBT proved to be one of the most effective therapies to treat people, going through depression and other psychological problems.

For those who don’t have the basic understanding of psychotherapies, REBT is a type of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and as it is apparent from the name, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy explains why humans think the things they think, why they feel the things they feel and most importantly, why they the do the things they do. Moreover, it explains how our feelings and cognitions (thoughts) interact with each other to shape our behaviors and vice versa, as you can from the following figure.

According to this theory, our feeling shape our thoughts and our thoughts configure our behavior. It is a three-step process, also known as ABC Model. Here, A is the Activating Event, B stands for our Beliefs and C is for Consequences. The following figure explains it quite well.

As you can see in the above figure that for every event there are two possibilities. However, for this piece, we will be looking at the ‘Beliefs’ part only because here Albert Ellis’s theory mainly comes into play. He is of the view that our irrational beliefs often cause mal-adaptive behaviors, as discussed earlier. As dwelling on the lost love or not being able to forget it, can also be categorized as a mal-adaptive behavior, thus, according to Albert Ellis’s theory people find it difficult to forget their lost love because of their irrational beliefs, as illustrated by the following example.

Let’s say a person X has just went through a heartbreak and now, he is feeling sad. He is trying hard to forget all but he can’t. Why? Mainly because of his irrational belief that he cannot/will not be loved again. So, heartbreak happened to be the Activating Event in this case, causing the person to have this irrational belief that he will not be loved again, or he will not find a better person etc. These irrational beliefs, in turn, lead the person to the negative emotional consequences in the form of sadness and depression.

Contrarily, if the same person has this rational belief that some people are meant to stay while others aren’t, he might find it easy to get over this hump and move on.

Although it is not as simple as it appears, as there are a number of other variables associated with it, yet the basic reason why people feel sad about heartbreaks or find it difficult to forget their lost love is because of their irrational beliefs.

Moreover, happy people often find it easy to move on while depressed people struggle to deal with such issues because of the underlying connection between their feelings and cognitions.

To conclude, it is the need of the hour to educate and help those, who are going through this sorry state of affairs and have locked them up inside this cage of depression and sadness. The best way to do so is by assisting such people in developing patterns of rational thinking. Furthermore, with help from the professionals, these people can easily identify the relation between their feelings and behavioral patterns before eventually succeeding in establishing a rational perspective. Once they start thinking rationally, it is quite likely that they will not find it difficult to forget their lost love or overcome heartbreaks.