I once dated a guy that I thought I would one day marry.

Although we had never discussed marriage during the course of our relationship, I felt assured of our future.

It was a passionate and intense relationship filled with the highs of making up, and the lows of breaking up.

We fought constantly.

We would fight, go anywhere from a few days to a few weeks without speaking, before one of us would break down, call, and end up right back together where we started, enjoying a few quiet weeks or months of peace, until the cycle restarted itself again.

For years, we went back and forth like this. Over time, the fights didn’t even bother me that much. It just became a natural part of our relationship order.

I had become so accustomed the fighting that I stopped noticing the real damage it was doing on top to our relationship, and underneath to each of us as individuals.

In many ways, I became oblivious to our most obvious problem– that the other person in the relationship was unhappy and miserable. I was so wrapped up in my own fantasies of the future, that I didn’t even notice that he begun relying on a female colleague to vent, and for support.

It wasn’t until we had our last fight that I finally realized the true extent of our problems. There was nothing different about this fight on the surface. We got into an argument, went several weeks with no contact, until one of us reached back out to the other. This time it happened to be my turn.

I sent him a message, expecting that we would go back to our normal relationship pattern, only to receive a reply that he was now engaged to be married to his coworker, and out of respect for his new fiancé, could no longer keep in touch with me.

I kept rereading his message again and again, hoping to find some subtle hint that this was all just a terrible joke.

But as the reality of his words sunk in deeper and deeper, I literally could feel myself slide lower and lower out of my chair, until I was on the floor, sobbing uncontrollably.

From the moment I read that message, my life changed, and I would spend the next several years trying to recover from a break-up that I had helped to cause.

Time doesn’t heal all wounds, but understanding does

Over the next few years, as I stumbled in and out of relationships, I carried this heartbreak with me wherever I went.

Trapped by the guilt of the past and motivated by the fear of the future, I could never truly move on, nor fully let go.

If, like me, you’ve been through a bad break-up, chances are someone’s given you the very old, and very timeless, piece of advice, “time heals all wounds.”

I disagree.

Time doesn’t heal all wounds, rather, it is our capacity for understanding that does. Time merely serves as the vehicle of understanding. By putting more distance between us and the event, it provides the opportunity for growth and understanding, but it isn’t in itself the growth and understanding.

That’s why you have some people who spend years trying to get over a lost love, like me, while others seem to be able to rebound and move on in only a matter of months.

It is the understanding, not the time.

How you heal, and more importantly how long it takes you to heal, is heavily determined by your personality—who you are, your self-esteem, and in general, how effectively you’ve learned to cope with problems in your life.

My road to recovery from this break-up took years of self-reflection, subtle realizations, and the breaking down of old toxic cycles.

If you’ve been through a bad break-up, or are currently going through one, here are several coping strategies, or mindset shifts, I used to help bring about greater inner awareness, healing, and understanding.

Toxic Cycles Are Invisible

I remember the fights with my mother very vividly.

She would have these explosive reactions to the smallest of annoyances, where she would scream how she hated me, and then once some time had passed and she had settled down, would tell me how much she loved me.

This was the constant emotional cycle of our house—explosive fights and then make ups as if nothing was ever said.

The impact of her words and actions were very subtle, yet deep. It created a flawed belief-system in me that somehow chaos and comfort were connected. That one could not exist without the other.

Following this break-up, my love life became a string of broken relationships filled with chronic fighting, emotional manipulation, and never-ending break-ups and make-ups. Although each relationship looked different, they all felt the same in terms of the emotional damage they were doing.

Most people looking in could probably see that I was stuck in a self-destructive love pattern, but for me, it was life, or rather love, as I had always known it.

One of the things that makes toxic cycles so powerful is that we don’t even know they exist. Often motivated by our worst fears about ourselves and our future, they keep us stuck in unhealthy and unhappy spaces in our lives.

By diluting or sense of awareness, toxic cycles, make it impossible to see the true state of ourselves and of our relationship.

So how do you know if you’re in a toxic relationship cycle?  When love becomes a pattern, you’re in a cycle.

Our love patterns reflect something deeper, and it’s worth exploring your past, or taking a closer look at the quality of your relationships to see if there is a common theme between them all.

Identifying a toxic pattern will help you evaluate your relationships from a different perspective, giving you a chance to gain a clearer insight into the true health of yourself and your relationship.

“But What If There’s More?”

I was out having lunch with one of my friends, and as most of our conversations went, I inevitably managed to bring up the topic of my ex.

Very patiently and graciously, my friend, listened once again to no doubt the hundredth time I had probably told her my same sad love story about my ex. But this time, instead of her usual response of ‘things will get better,’ she looked at me and asked, “But what if there’s more?”

I looked up at here with a confused look on my face, “huh?”

She shrugged her shoulders nonchalantly and said, “I don’t know, haven’t you ever wondered if there was more out there? You know, that maybe you could love another person more than him, and that maybe there was someone else out there who could love you more than he did?”

The conversation went awkwardly silent for a few moments, before I sheepishly answered with a quiet “no.”

Honestly, in all the years since I had been broken up from my ex, I had not once ever considered the simple possibility that maybe there was more.

Although I told myself, and everyone around me, that I was ‘over it,’ deep down, I knew I was still longing, waiting, even hoping for this person to return.

Even though my ex had gone on to get married and start a family, I was still holding on to the impossible possibility that fate would one day find us, and bring us back together.

I had somehow convinced myself that if I let go too soon, I would miss out on us, never realizing that the longer I held on, the more I missed out on life, love and opportunity.

Holding on is holding you back. It prevents you from seeing the truth in your past, and the possibility in your future.

Consider the simple possibility that there may be someone else out there who you share a deeper compatibility with, have common future goals, and is better equipped to meet your needs.

The love you’ve experienced in your past is not a reflection, or a prediction, of the love you are capable of experiencing in your future.

Acceptance is Freedom

About three years after my break-up, after a long day at work, I was lying in my bed, just feeling run down from the stress of the day.

Commonly, during periods of high-stress, when things in my life seemed to be going every way but right, I oftentimes found myself thinking of my ex.

This time was no different, and as I closed my eyes, and tried to decompress, my thoughts began to drift back to that familiar point in the past, to that message that had changed everything.

As I thought back to my ex, tears began to run down the side of my face.

I felt embarrassed, weak, and stupid, because after all these years, I still felt hurt. I was still angry at him for leaving and getting married right away, for never giving me an apology, for never giving me a proper goodbye, and for all the years I had given to that relationship that I would never get back.

Even after all this time, I still felt like he was to blame for everything that went wrong in our relationship, that my pain was all his fault.

And as I lie there, silently crying, replaying all our best and worst moments in my head, a subtle thought entered my mind. For whatever reason, I said to myself, “you know, it was your fault too.”

I don’t believe that this was a spiritual moment, but I do think it was one of the rare occasions in my life where I was able to connect with a deeper part of myself, where my conscious aligned with my subconscious to form a single, coherent message.

It was with that thought, that I was able to let go of the future we never had and the past I couldn’t change.

My relationship broke down for many reasons. Some of those reasons were my fault, and some of them were my ex.

Accepting the part I played, helped me to let go of a lot of the anger I still was holding onto. By admitting that I too was a part of the problem, that I too started fights, that I too did things for attention, that I behaved badly and embarrassed not only him, but myself, in many private and public settings.

I could accept that he probably didn’t want to hurt me, but just like me, he couldn’t find a way out of our toxic relationship cycle.

I still had many more things I had to work out in time, but it was one of the few moments in my life where I never revisited the pain of that relationship in the same way.

There is a great fear in acceptance, because by accepting responsibility, we feel as though we must also accept blame.

I believe most of us are good people, and when we have a relationship fall apart, it’s hard to admit to ourselves that we might also have been a part of the problem.

But the opposite of this is true, there is freedom in acceptance, not blame.

Acceptance creates accountability and responsibility, and once we become aware of negative patterns in our life, it then becomes possible for us to change our behavior, let go of past regrets, and positively move forward into the loving future we see for ourselves.

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If you have been in a toxic relationship, or had a relationship end, and learned to let go, please feel free to share what helped you to move on in the comments.