Science says this is how you recover from a breakup

Feel free to talk on and on … and on … about your ex. (Photo: Getty Images)

Remember the “Sex and the City” episode where Carrie can’t stop talking about her break-up, and her friends — who can’t take it anymore — tell her she needs to stop obsessing and get a therapist? (You may also recall this as the episode involving one very sexually charged game of Twister between Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw and Jon Bon Jovi’s Seth.)

Turns out, talking about your ex ad nauseum might actually be just what the doctor ordered when it comes to getting over a break-up, a new study suggests.  

The study itself even begins with a very Carrie-esque question, musing, “Can we study psychological responses to negative life events without substantially altering those responses? Tentative evidence suggests that the answer is no.”

Grace Larson, a doctoral student at Northwestern University studying social psychology, published her findings alongside her former academic adviser, David Sbarra, PhD, a psychologist at the University of Arizona in the current issue of Social Psychological & Personality Science. Larson and Sbarra had been conducting research on divorce and break-ups… and then started wondering how being a part of their research was impacting the participants themselves.

“It might seem intuitive that the best response to a breakup is to avoid thinking about it,” Larson tells Yahoo Health, “Who wants to be reminded that they’ve just gone through such a painful experience?” The two, who started warning subjects in past research that they might find it difficult to re-live these difficult moments, were shocked to find that, instead, participants seemed to be able to heal and move on faster by talking about their break-up and being forced to regularly self-reflect on it. “This study shows that reflecting on your breakup can be a good thing,” Larson explains.

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The process of completing regular and intensive self-reflection exercises about their break-ups allowed participants to “build a stronger sense of who they were as single people,” Larson says in a statement about her findings. In other words, maybe Carrie Bradshaw was on to something.

The authors note in their paper that one of the hardest parts of a break-up is that “[i]n romantic relationships, self-identity — one’s understanding of who he or she is as a person — is often dramatically shaped by one’s romantic partner, and partners typically experience intertwinement of their identities.” So, the loss of this other person’s presence in one’s life can really damage sense of self. However, they predicted — and showed — that “[a]s people repeatedly talk about their breakup and recovery, we may also expect them to rebuild and clarify a sense of identity that is separate from their ex-partner.”

In the study, Larson and Sbarra divided subjects into two groups who had all experienced non-marital break-ups within the past six months. Over a period of nine weeks, researchers regularly worked with one group to observe coping and emotions up close (utilizing questionnaire and interviews, amongst other metrics). The other group was only given questionnaires at the beginning and end of the research period.

The group that regularly met with researchers to discuss their progress in coping with their break-up left the study in significantly better shape in terms of post-break-up recovery than the control group.

The study is the first-ever to examine “whether the methods used in typical observational studies of well-being and coping can in and of themselves affect well-being.”

“I was surprised that such a simple set of procedures could have an effect on participants’ break-up recovery,” Larson explains. “I was also very happy to see that we had a positive impact on participants’ self-concept recovery, rather than a negative one.” Even though it might seem intuitive that the best response to a break-up is to avoid thinking about it, Larson and Sbarra’s research found exactly the opposite.

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While Larson and Sbarra have not been able to isolate exactly what components of their research caused subjects to better get over their heartbreak, Larson speculates in the statement that “it might be simply the effect of repeatedly reflecting on one’s experience and crafting a narrative — especially a narrative that includes the part of the story where one recovers.”

“To us, the idea that you could improve people’s adjustment quite substantially without creating (in our participants) the expectation of such change was quite surprising. From this perspective, you don’t need a therapist or talk in-depth with your friends, but instead simply monitor and reflect over how you’re doing,” Sbarra tells Yahoo Health. He clarifies that you don’t even need to be a research subject yourself to see these kind of results, adding that “the research tasks themselves, of course, do not create change — it’s what people do as a result of participating in the research that actually changes how they feel.”

Sbarra also notes that the research could have implications — and success — in helping individuals with “self-reported loneliness” by helping them utilize simple methods to improve “their self-concept.” This idea of being able to work on the idea of yourself separate from that of a past partner is perhaps the most radical finding of Larson and Sbarra’s research: “Self-concept recovery, then, is very critical for overall recovery from a break,” notes Sbarra.

Don’t have the chance to sign-up to participate in a research study? Try regularly reflecting on a bad break-up yourself. Feel free to talk aloud to yourself or write down your feelings — anything to help you process and articulate where you are with your newly-single status.

Larson and Sbarra’s research indicates that regular self-monitoring can be hugely helpful in helping a person re-build his or her sense of self after a break-up. Case in point: The researchers found that those engaged in regular self-monitoring use much fewer plural first-person words when talking about themselves. In other words, self-monitoring might be all you need to transition from a “we” to a “me.”

Because as Carrie tells Seth when he asks her why she needs to be in therapy: “I pick the wrong men“ — then adding in voice-over — “I believe in therapy, this moment is called ‘the break-through.’”