Heal and Move On
Bloomsbury Publishing, February 2011 Buy
Whether your partner left or it’s you who has decided to end the relationship, breaking-up is painful, difficult and sometimes overwhelming. Friends and family urge you to forget the past and reach for the future. However, it is never that simple. Before you can move on, you need to understand what went wrong, mourn the loss and, most importantly, to heal.
In this compassionate book, I take you from making the decision to leave – or hearing the bad news from your partner – through the fall-out from the split, the first steps of recovery and finally onto making a new life. I cover:
- Knowing when to stop trying and accept the inevitable.
- Emotional first-aid to make it through the worst times.
- The difference between looking back and learning, and becoming trapped in the past.
- What helps and what hinders recovery.
- Making sense of your break-up.
- Helping your children cope.
- Learning how to fly high again.
Who will find this book helpful?
Anyone who has left a relationship or their partner has left is feeling distraught, alone and fed-up with people telling them ‘ you’re better of without him/her’. Endings are tough – whether you wanted them or not – and we have little idea about the seven stages of recovery. This book will also help people who officially ended a relationship but somehow can’t stopping thinking about their ex, or has someone still in their life as a ‘friend’ but actually this relationship is mixing up their thinking and preventing them from making a new start.
Full disclosure
I must be honest, I never wanted to write a book about break-ups because I believe most relationships can be saved. However, there are exceptions to the rule and in this book I explain when a relationship is past saving and, if you wish to leave, how to finish things in the most humane way possible. I also wanted to support people whose partner simply refuses to work on their relationship and has unilaterally ended it. If you are a sticker, you need lots of sensible advice and the reassurance that you will recover. I hope my book offers this comfort. In writing this book, I have drawn on exercises and case histories from the final section of ‘I love you but I’m not in love with you’ and the chapter on recovering from previous relationships in ‘The Single Trap’. There is a lot of new material too, especially in the chapter on ‘Helping your children.’
“The dark days today can be a spring board for a new and exciting life tomorrow.” Andrew G Marshall
