Letting Go of Needing to Be Right After a Breakup (Be the Pebble, Not the Jade)

Letting Go of Needing to Be Right After a Breakup

There’s a kind of pain after a breakup that isn’t looking to heal: it’s looking to win.

It’s the urge to gather evidence, to reread old messages, to need the other person to admit, at some point, that the mistake was theirs.

The Tao Te Ching has a very specific image for this trap, and research on breakups offers a clue as to why it can prolong the pain.

This article crosses the Tao Te Ching with research in psychology on emotional trajectories after a breakup. It’s meant for general information and doesn’t replace support from a mental health professional.

Being the pebble, not the jade

Chapter XXXIX of the Tao Te Ching closes with an image that’s unusual in a text that, on the whole, talks about rulers and the nature of the universe:

“Isn’t this treating the humble as the root? The highest honor belongs to the one who doesn’t seek it. One should not prefer to be like jade, but like the plainest pebble.”

Jade is precious, carved, recognizable: it puts its worth on display. The pebble doesn’t need anyone to recognize anything in it, and that’s why it loses nothing when someone decides not to admire it.

Chapter XXII completes the image from another angle:

“It stands out because it doesn’t show off. It shines because it doesn’t hold on to itself. It earns honor, because it doesn’t praise itself. […] No one fights it, because it makes war on no one.”

Applied to a breakup, our reading is this: the need to shine like jade, to prove who was right, to have your own version of events validated, may be what keeps open the wound you’re trying to close.

Anger is associated with slower recovery

Psychologist David Sbarra, together with Robert Emery, asked 58 young adults who had just ended a serious relationship to record every day, for four weeks, how much sadness, anger and love they felt, and compared them with people who were still in a relationship.

Two papers came out of those data. The first, published in Personal Relationships (2005), describes the overall course; the second, by Sbarra in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (2006), analyzes what predicted whether each person recovered sooner or later:

• Overall, sadness and anger decreased as the days went by, following the expected course of grief, though with many more ups and downs than among those still in a relationship. Staying in contact with the ex slowed the decline of sadness and of love.
• But not everyone recovered at the same pace. In the 2006 study, those who felt more anger, more love for the ex, or more attachment preoccupation were less likely to leave sadness behind during those four weeks. Accepting that the relationship had ended, by contrast, was associated with a faster recovery.

The finding clashes with a common intuition: anger feels like the “active” emotion, the one that defends something, and sadness like the passive one. The data suggest that sustained anger can delay the way out of sadness. The relationship also works the other way: persistent sadness made it less likely to leave anger behind. These are associations in a small sample, not a law, but they point in the pebble’s direction.

Need for closure: why it’s so hard to leave a story unresolved

Social psychologist Arie Kruglanski developed the concept of need for cognitive closure: the degree to which a person tolerates ambiguity versus their desire to have a clear, definitive answer, whatever it may be.

In his book The Psychology of Closed Mindedness (2004), Kruglanski describes how a high need for closure pushes people to seek firm explanations even when the available evidence doesn’t fully support them. After a breakup, this need frequently translates into wanting a clear story: who messed up, who was right, who should feel worse.

The problem is that many breakups don’t offer that clean verdict, and insistently searching for it, instead of tolerating the ambiguity, keeps attention fixed on the past rather than letting it move toward the present.

What all this suggests, in practice

Neither the Tao Te Ching nor the research cited says you shouldn’t feel angry, or that your own version of events doesn’t matter.

What they point to, instead, is this:

• Feeling angry after a breakup is expected: things get complicated when that anger organizes itself around getting the other person to “admit” something.
• The need for a clear verdict about who was right is often, in practice, a form of need for closure that can’t always be satisfied.
• Letting go of that need doesn’t mean agreeing the other person was right: it means no longer needing there to be a winner and a loser in the story.
• Anger sustained over time was associated, in Sbarra’s data, with a slower recovery from sadness, and accepting the ending with a faster one.

This same dynamic becomes especially intense in certain attachment style combinations, above all when one person needs constant reassurance and the other needs space: you can read more about that specific clash in our article on anxious-avoidant compatibility, and about how to communicate a need without turning it into a battle in communication by attachment style.

If this need for reassurance or for a definitive ending feels familiar beyond this specific breakup, the attachment style test can help you see whether there’s an underlying pattern.

Letting go of this need to be right also connects with another idea we develop in the last article of this series: that we tend to overestimate how much a breakup is going to hurt. We explore it in why you think this pain will last forever.

Sources

• Lao Tzu (anonymous trans.). Tao Te King. Biblioteca Digital, Instituto Latinoamericano de la Comunicación Educativa (ILCE). Chapters XXII and XXXIX.
• Sbarra, D. A., & Emery, R. E. (2005). The emotional sequelae of nonmarital relationship dissolution: Analysis of change and intraindividual variability over time. Personal Relationships, 12(2), 213-232. doi:10.1111/j.1350-4126.2005.00112.x
• Sbarra, D. A. (2006). Predicting the onset of emotional recovery following nonmarital relationship dissolution: Survival analyses of sadness and anger. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 32(3), 298-312. doi:10.1177/0146167205280913
• Kruglanski, A. W. (2004). The Psychology of Closed Mindedness. Psychology Press.