Moving on From Longing: A Deeper Guide to Understanding, Healing, and Letting Go
Longing for someone — especially a past partner — can feel like a source of suffering you can’t quite shake.
Even when your mind knows the relationship is over, your heart can cling to a “what if” that feels impossible to release. Sometimes longing passes quickly. Other times, it lingers — years of replaying memories, wishing for one more conversation, for things to be different and imagining what could have been.
If you’ve ever wondered why letting go feels harder for you than it does for others, the answer usually runs deeper than the relationship itself. This kind of longing is rarely just about the person — it’s also about attachment patterns, family dynamics, and the way your nervous system learned to respond to love and loss.
Why Longing Feels So Strong
Attachment Shapes Our Response to Loss
The way we bonded (or struggled to bond) with caregivers sets the template for how we handle relationships as adults.
First, let’s review the basic attachment styles to better understand how they shape our sense of longing and connection.
Anxious attachment often makes us hyper-focus on reconnection and fear abandonment. If childhood love was inconsistent — warm one moment, withdrawn the next — we may find ourselves clinging harder, replaying the past, and struggling to trust that new love will come.
Avoidant attachment can lead to suppressing feelings until the absence becomes unbearable. This often stems from emotional neglect or a family culture that discouraged vulnerability. Longing here might look like busyness or detachment on the surface, but an ache underneath.
Secure attachment allows grief to move through — to be felt and integrated without it defining one’s worth.
Disorganized attachment combines both: craving closeness while also fearing it.
When early experiences taught your nervous system that love was inconsistent, losing someone can unconsciously register as life-threatening — even if you’re a capable, independent adult now.
Family Roles & Unmet Needs
If you grew up in a household marked by dysfunction or unpredictability, love may have been paired with caretaking, uncertainty, or emotional labor. That wiring makes longing feel oddly familiar, even when it hurts.
Children who over-functioned — who took on more responsibility than they should have — often feel magnetically drawn to relationships that recreate those dynamics. And even after a breakup, the pull doesn’t just vanish.
Emotional Scarcity
When love or attention felt scarce in childhood, the loss of a relationship can stir deep fears of abandonment. The longing becomes less about the person themselves and more about the comfort and safety they represented.
If you grew up with conditional love, rare affection, or minimized emotional needs, longing often becomes an old wound replaying itself — an attempt to finally “win” the kind of love that was never steady to begin with.
The Brain Makes Letting Go Physically Hard
Love lights up the same dopamine pathways as addictive substances. A breakup is, in many ways, withdrawal. And if your history associates love with high emotional stakes, the comedown is more intense and drawn-out.
The Story Keeps the Cycle Alive
Our minds crave closure. In its absence, they invent stories: “If only I had done this differently…” These imagined rewrites keep the person alive in your psyche, but rarely reflect the reality of the relationship.
The Path Forward
Letting go isn’t a single decision. It’s a layered process of rewiring old emotional habits, creating new meaning, and re-establishing safety in yourself.
Name What You’re Really Longing For
Ask Yourself:
Am I longing for this person, or for the way I felt when I was with them?
What old wound does this longing touch?
Often, what we’re really missing is belonging, validation, security, or excitement. Naming the core need is the first step toward meeting it in healthier ways.
Trace the Thread Back
Explore your family patterns:
How was love given or withheld?
Did you have to earn love through performance or caretaking?
Did you feel safe expressing needs, or did you learn to hide them?
This helps you see longing as a pattern you inherited — not proof that something’s wrong with you.
Break the Emotional-Addiction Loop (3 Tips)
Limit triggering contact (yes, including social media).
Interrupt rumination with movement, breath, or something sensory.
Replace the “hit” with other dopamine sources: creative projects, physical challenges, new environments.
Rewrite the Story
Balance nostalgia with truth. Write out the relationship as it really was — both the beautiful and the painful. Revisit it when your mind starts idealizing the past. Root in the truth by focusing on facts, not stories of “what was.”
Build Safety in the Present
Longing spikes when life feels uncertain. Create anchors such as:
A grounding daily rhythm
Emotional support (friends, seeking therapy, mentors)
Environments that bring sensory pleasure — look to things like nature, art + music to ground in.
Grieve Fully, Without Shame
Grief is not weakness. It’s how the body metabolizes truth. Let yourself feel the sadness, anger, or nostalgia without rushing to fix it. If you’re struggling to cope with difficult emotions and “feel your feelings” checkout my post on just that HERE.
Create a Future That Pulls You Forward
Healing gains momentum when what lies ahead excites you more than what’s behind. Travel, create, learn, build new connections — let your imagination stretch toward what’s next. Go toward people, places and things that bring you joy in the present to help you create a future that helps you to move forward.
Final Thought
Moving on isn’t about erasing the past or pretending it didn’t matter. It’s about understanding the deeper forces — family history, attachment style, brain chemistry — that make you hold on so tightly. It’s shifting your mind toward understanding that “it’s not about them; it’s about the deeper “core issues” that we experienced before they showed up.
When you heal the root, you’re not just letting go of one person. You’re loosening the grip of old patterns, reclaiming a part of yourself that’s been waiting — long before this relationship — to finally be free.
An Invitation For You
If this resonates with you:
Read a past post I wrote on the topic: HERE.
Subscribe to my IAMWELL newsletter here, comment on this post, or share any reflections: I’d love to hear.
Let’s stay connected. You can find me on Instagram at @IAMKIMEGEL
*Image by Photographer & Visual Artist Amy Lynn Bojornson.
Radical Acceptance (How to Move Forward after Loss)
how do you move forward after loss? The kind of loss that has cut you wide open and has left you without any hope. A loss that shakes you to your core and challenges your grit, strength and ability to overcome.
First off, I think that the devastation that certain losses bring have the potential to take us to a hopeless place within. Having feelings of hopelessness as apart of your grieving process vs. remaining in a hopeless place are two very different things.
Moving on from our past or past events that have been really difficult for us can be a struggle. Wonder if you don’t want to move forward? What if you can’t get yourself to move on from a situation that you either refuse to accept is done and over or has actually happened. Denial is a stage in the grief process. When something is emotionally difficult for us to process, denial acts as a defense until we can eventually accept the reality of any situation.
If you’re working through emotions around loss; in this post, I’m speaking to you my friend.
If I’ve learned anything at this point in life thus far:
it’s knowing that where there is resistance; there is some valuable insight to gain. Resistance often acts as a compass. It gives us direction toward what we might need to unlock, unblock or change in order to move forward.
Within the body the feeling of loss can present as a tightening in the chest. A heaviness that won’t give, a crook in the throat, a feeling of nausea in the heart, a hard blow to the stomach; loss is, generally, a really difficult emotion to cope with. For more on how to feel your feelings, specifically difficult emotions, find my post on that topic HERE.
how do you cope with the loss of someone or something? I’m referring to the loss of a person, a dream unmet, any sort of loss that you have standing before you that you are being called to move beyond, stomach or live with. Let’s touch base around some perspectives and truths to digest that can potentially help you to see some light.
loss of people (a break up or death)
Here are some of the comments that I’ve received from people in pain over loss:
“the love of my life has moved on and I can’t let them go.”
“I lost the most important thing to me; how do I go on?”
“but i’m “X” age and i have to face it’s not going to happen. It’s over for me”
“but they are gone”
Let me do my best to speak to the magnitude of these statements. First off, there’s no quick fix for any deep loss. I can’t possibility say anything that’s going to make the pain and discomfort of what is happening “go away.” Learning how to cope more healthfully with loss is the work I’m helping you to discover to do for yourself. I, nor anyone for that matter, do not possess the kind of power to “take away” what is only yours to work through, process and heal from.
However, a key healing element that you do have, is the power of choice. With choice, you get to decide how you are going to choose to perceive anything that is happening.
Working through significant loss is a dance of facing the most uncomfortable of truths mixed with catching yourself when you’re attaching to a perspective that holds no opportunity for you to move forward.
Let’s take the comment from above, “it’s over for me.” There’s truth that a certain relationship, person, career, stage of life or specific possibility might be over. It’s also true that something else exists on the other side of the pain and present time space reality that holds a different feeling state and reality for you if you allow yourself to heal, more forward and believe in a different possibility.
Call it hope, or the ability to believe something before you can see it. These are the ways of thinking that will serve you to spend some time thinking about as opposed to the extreme black & white thinking of “it’s done and there’s no point to move forward.”
Final conclusions about your life while you are still alive and living will limit you greatly and destroy your hope and ability to feel happiness.
As you are able to do so, the key in healing from loss is beginning to sit with the most uncomfortable truths of the loss; feeling it, breathing into it, working through the pain and discomfort that the reality or “story about” your situation brings up.
loss of a dream
I want to also speak to the loss of our life dreams. Sometimes there’s truth that certain things didn’t happen for us that we really wanted to happen. If this is true, we may need to grieve those unborn dreams. Some dreams do require us to grieve the loss of them in order for us to fully let them go.
2 types of dreams
unborn dreams that are still possible and have not happened for us yet.
unborn dreams where the window of opportunity has closed or is not possible.
Radical Acceptance: A Skill to Help you Move forward to “a life worth living”
There are four possible responses that we can have to any problem that we encounter.
Our 4 choices are;
1- solve the problem / make a change
2- change our emotional reaction to the situation
3- radically accept the situation
4- stay miserable
I don’t know about you, but number 4 is immediately out for me. I’m going to assume that true for you as well, being that you’re currently reading a wellness blog and more importantly because I want more for you; even if you’re willing to settle for “stay miserable,” I’m willing to hold higher expectation for you until you believe it for yourself.
For the purposes of this post, I’m going to focus on the option of choice #3, radical acceptance.
Radical Acceptance : Radically Accept the Situation
The term “radical acceptance” is a DBT (Dialectical Behavioral Therapy) concept and is a distress tolerance skill. Distress tolerance: Distress tolerance is a person's ability to manage actual or perceived emotional distress.
What is radical acceptance?
Radical acceptance entails finding acceptance without judgement for situations that are outside of our control, which in itself, reduces our suffering toward “what is.” Much of our suffering and struggle is often due to a lack of acceptance of our reality and our judgement about what is actually happening to us and in our lives. Radical acceptance invites us to detach from our feelings, which does not mean that we don’t allow ourselves to feel our feelings. What it does call for is for us to be able to experience and see our emotions for what they are, instead of overly connecting with them, which leads us to live in our pain.
As you can imagine, not attaching to our feelings can be really difficult to refrain from doing, especially when we’ve created a habit of doing so. Many people who struggle with depression have a habit of overly attaching to difficult feelings. This is not a fault; it’s a way of learned or habitual coping that doesn’t allow us to see the light and move on from our pains and hurts.
Over identifying with our emotions can keep us stuck in the past and in our pain.
Radical acceptance does not mean that you have to like or even agree with what has and what is happening in your life. Rather, it offers hope and the potential for a clear and unlimited future because it asks for you to accept things as they are, without judgement vs being stuck in non acceptance and fighting against reality.
3 steps toward further coping & healing
1. facing fear. Gaining the courage to face the reality of your situation and the feelings that it brings up by allowing your emotions to surface is how we begin to heal. We can’t heal something that we are avoiding to deal with. By looking the situation (and our feelings about it) in the face without trying to deny it or twist it into something it is not, we can find relief.
2. working toward acceptance. Working to accept the reality of your situation is what, ultimately, will set you free.
3. build positive events/experiences. Reengaging with life after loss by building new connections and experiences in present time is what will further help you to move on in a healthy way. After all, that’s what living life is, right? It’s a dance of ebb and flow; knowing when to hold on and when to let go. It’s allowing things to come in and out without our force and control.
Trust that the people & things that are for you will stay & what’s not for you will go as you rebuild.
2 types of experiences to focus on building:
Short term experiences – focus on things that are possible right now and can help you to feel better in this moment.
Long Term experiences – invest in things that give you a lasting sense of happiness and contentment ; experiences that contribute to building a life worth living.
summing it all up
The truth: we can change how we cope with hardship & struggle. No matter how much we feel stuck in our ways, with a desire for change; change is always possible.
when we accept what has happened, we then can work toward thriving in our lives no matter what the reality is or isn’t.
Some final thoughts for you.
Working through feelings of loss requires time and space. Be gentle with yourself as you are healing and working through difficult emotions. Give yourself grace and be mindful of getting caught up in timelines or rushed energy of when you think things need to be done and checked off.
Ultimately, work toward surrendering resistance toward what you cannot change.
I know, easier said than done. I hope my words have helped provide some perspective and ideas for you to carry with you toward moving through any loss you might be facing. Much love, from me to you, along your journey through it.
Recommended read for more on radical acceptance: book, “Radical Acceptance” by Psychologist Tara Brach
*Above Image by Photographer, Amy Lynn Bjornson.