How Men Heal from a Breakup:

Men pride themselves on feeling powerful, competent, and effective in their world. They receive a sense of fulfillment in feeling successful and doing well. Men take great pride in being independent and self-sufficient.  Then, they fall in love. They allow themselves to be vulnerable to another, they get close and sometimes they end up getting hurt and their hearts get broken.

Surprisingly, men generally are the first to fall in love and the last to fall out of it. Men have more difficulty handling their emotions than women because they have been trained to be independent so they develop fewer skills for handling their emotions. They become emotionally overwhelmed easily and demonstrate it by shutting off their emotions and withdrawing or going into denial. All of this is a bid to cut themselves off from those overwhelming feelings of hurt and pain.

In the process, those feelings lie dormant and, there is no healing process. If they don’t heal those feelings, they don’t allow themselves to fall in love again and they’ll miss out on one of the most rewarding, healing and satisfying experiences in their lives; that of falling in love again. When men are in pain from a breakup, they go right into the feeling mode and become overwhelmed by those feelings resulting in shut down, paralysis, withdrawal or angry bitterness. Men cannot make good decisions for themselves or anyone else under those conditions.

It’s best for men to throw themselves into an activity or project that they enjoy doing. While they’re doing the activity they love they also process the painful feelings of a breakup. This can contribute greatly to the healing of those feelings.