Can breakups be breakthroughs?
Seeing breakups differently
“I realized the breakup wasn’t about her, that it was about me,” a friend recently shared with me.
A friend of mine recently went through a breakup. For the first two months, he was caught in the grief of losing someone he cared deeply about.
But the following six months shifted to something deeper. It became less about her and more about him.
What he discovered is something that breakups often reveal if we’re willing to pay attention. (When often we assume they’re about the other person, about what they did or didn’t do, about how they hurt us or fell short.)
Breakup pain is almost never just about the other person. Breakups hold up a mirror, reflecting parts of ourselves we may not yet understand. They show us what’s hurting, what needs healing, and where we have room to grow.
For my friend, that mirror revealed a sense of unworthiness he had carried for years. The ex-girlfriend’s behavior didn’t create the feeling, it simply brought it to focus. It wasn’t about her. It was about the ways he hadn’t made peace with himself yet. It was about the past hurts he hadn’t processed, the deeper feelings that were stored within, that needed tending to.
I’ve been there too.
For years, I blamed breakups on incompatibility, brushed them off as someone not feeling the same way about me, or even on me not feeling enough for them.
Then almost a decade ago, I went through a breakup that unraveled me. The ending of the relationship didn’t just hurt; it made me question who I was and the autopilot I was living in. I was confronted with parts of myself I had avoided for too long.
That experience forced me to take a closer look. Though I was sad about the relationship ending and the way that it ended (even though that’s a story for another time), I felt more upset about what was being revealed beneath the surface.
I started to see how much of my perfectionism came from deep wounds I hadn’t acknowledged, particularly what I now understand as a father wound. That breakup cracked me open. And in that space, I found something surprising: a new perspective. An opportunity to heal. The space to grow.
When we face challenging moments, especially through relationships, it’s so easy to react on autopilot—to blame, to distract, or to avoid. But what if we saw these triggers as invitations, instead? As signposts leading us to deeper questions. What if we asked ourselves:
Why does this situation provoke me so much?
What’s really happening here?
What pattern might I be playing out?
What part of me wants my attention?
For my friend, the breakthrough meant learning to love himself in a way he hadn’t before. For me, it meant re-examining beliefs I thought were keeping me safe, but were instead keeping me stuck.
Breakups have a way of breaking us, yes. But they also offer us an opportunity. We can stay in the pain, holding onto a narrative of victimhood, or we can approach the disruption with curiosity.
They can be the start of a powerful inquiry—not just into what went wrong with the relationship, but into who we are and who we want to become.
All of our relationships can be mirrors, reflecting what needs our attention the most. And if we’re willing to look — really look— they can lead us to a better version of ourselves. A more complete one. A more self-aware one.
Breakups can be breakthroughs.
