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Five Steps to Breaking up Mindfully
By Daniel A. Linder, MFT
Stage One of recovery — breaking up with the means of relief — comes from the Relationship Model of Addiction. Before getting further into breaking up, it would be tremendously helpful if you had an overview of the model itself.
The Relationship Model of Addiction's founding premise is a simplified vision of humanity. Human beings have two basic needs: the need for love or connection, and the need to relieve the pain when those needs do not get met.
Addiction is a relationship — not a disease — with the means of relief of pain from unmet emotional needs. The underlying driving force of addiction is the need to relieve pain. The greater the pain, the greater the need to relieve it.
Susceptibility to becoming addicted is a matter of how much pain is being held within oneself, and therefore how strong the need to relieve that pain is. These are all subjective measures based on a felt sense and can vary from one person to the next.
The cause is the cure. Non-nourishing relationships are the spawning ground of addiction. Creating nourishing relationships is the cure. The addiction naturally extinguishes itself when deriving nourishment from the relationship with self and your other significant relationships, because it makes the need for relief go away.
Means of relief include mind- or mood-altering substances like alcohol or cocaine; process addictions like sex, porn, and gambling; as well as addictions to people, as in love addiction and codependency.
Recovery is a three-stage transitional journey out of unhealthy, non-nourishing, dependency-based relationships and into healthy, nourishing, self-based ones:
Seeing the relationship for what it is. Acknowledging you have developed a relationship with the means of relief, and identifying the specific means you got involved with. Then taking an honest and objective look at it — seeing it as akin to carrying on an all-consuming secret love affair, and seeing the extent to which your life revolves around this relationship and that it has become your primary relationship that renders all others secondary.
Also getting and seeing that secrecy and deception are involved, and how that affects the progression of the relationship. And seeing how, as the relationship progressed over time, your functioning on all levels — mentally, emotionally, physically, relationally, and spiritually — has diminished, and how disconnected you got from everyone and everything.
With most addictions there's a moment when it registers that you're suddenly feeling better and in less pain. When you first experience that extraordinary sense of relief, we call that your discovery moment. But as often as there is a discovery moment, the formation of this developing relationship occurs over a period of time.
Discovery is about connecting what was going on emotionally and in your relationships at the time you were getting involved in this relationship, and connecting it to your desperate need for relief — and that was always what was driving the relationship. Making unconscious pain conscious fosters humility and compassion for oneself.
Denial is a survival mechanism protecting the dependency, and it operates unconsciously. It obscures reality and disconnects you from yourself. It distorts your perception and impairs your judgment. It takes many forms — an illusion of choice, an illusion of control, repression, projection, and many others — but most importantly, it operates unconsciously.
So in this step, you become conscious of what was previously unconscious. That process of becoming conscious is empowering and liberating in itself.
There is always an emotional fallout after breaking up any primary relationship. Don't underestimate the power of this dependency-based relationship that you've become symbiotically attached to, to cause you a painful emotional withdrawal when you're not in that relationship or when you're without the means of relief.
When left to your own devices, you tend to deny the existence of the withdrawal — the pain of withdrawal — or you try to trudge through it. Expect a period of conscious adjustment. It's painful but necessary. It's part of finding the way back to yourself.
Goodbye to the means of relief, and hello to yourself.
This is where you affirm your intention through action or communication to break up. "We're done. It's over. I'm out." Breaking up creates space for a new primary relationship with yourself to begin. Conscious engagement during this goodbye can be the tipping point for archetypal transformation — ending one relationship and beginning the relationship with your new best friend: yourself.
Daniel A. Linder is a licensed Marriage & Family Therapist, a Self and Relationships-based therapist and Addiction specialist with more than four decades of experience with individuals, couples and families.