Why Resisting Breakup Pain Makes It Last Longer (What the Tao Te Ching Teaches About Water)

Why Resisting Breakup Pain Makes It Last Longer

The harder you fight the pain of a breakup, the longer it takes to go away.

It sounds like something embroidered on a pillow, but behind it is a text roughly 2,500 years old and several psychology studies that, each in its own way, point in that direction. With an important nuance we’ll get to at the end: not every way of “processing” pain helps.

This article crosses Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching with research in psychology and neuroscience on romantic breakups. It’s meant for general information and doesn’t replace support from a mental health professional.

What the Tao says about water

The Tao Te Ching devotes several of its 81 chapters to the same image: water doesn’t fight, and that’s why nothing overcomes it. Chapter VIII reads:

“The highest good is like water. Water benefits all things and fights none. It settles in the places people despise, and so it is close to the Tao.”

Later, chapter LXXVIII pushes the idea to its extreme:

“Nothing in the world is softer or weaker than water, yet nothing is better at wearing away the hard and the strong, for nothing can replace it. That the weak overcomes the strong, and the soft overcomes the hard, is something everyone knows and no one practices.”

It’s an idea repeated, almost in the same words, in chapter XLIII: “The softest thing in the world overcomes the hardest.”

None of the three passages talks about resignation. They talk about a different kind of force than pushing: water doesn’t confront the rock, it simply follows its shape, yields where it needs to yield, and, given enough time, wins.

The brain doesn’t fully tell a broken bone from a broken heart

In 2011, researcher Ethan Kross (University of Michigan) recruited a group of people who had gone through an unwanted breakup in the previous six months and put them in a functional MRI scanner.

He asked them to do two things: look at a photo of their ex while thinking about the rejection, and receive a painful heat stimulus on the arm.

The result, published in PNAS, showed that the brain regions activated by the memory of rejection overlapped with those activated by real physical pain, including areas tied to the sensory component of pain (such as the dorsal posterior insula and the secondary somatosensory cortex).

At a very basic level, the brain doesn’t fully separate the two experiences.

A year earlier, anthropologist Helen Fisher and her team had scanned people who had recently been rejected by a partner and found intense activity in the ventral tegmental area and the nucleus accumbens, the same regions associated with the reward and craving that light up in addiction.

Fisher’s reading of these data, in our words, is that heartbreak, in the brain, resembles withdrawal. It’s best taken as an analogy: the study had fifteen participants and measures activation, not addiction.

Why avoiding pain makes it last longer: David Sbarra’s finding

Psychologist David Sbarra, of the University of Arizona, has spent a good part of his career following people through the months after a separation, tracking how their sadness and anger evolve over time.

One of his most cited findings, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (2006), is that accepting the fact of the breakup is associated with a faster recovery from sadness, while high levels of anger, of love for the ex-partner, or of attachment preoccupation slow it down.

Put differently: people who accept the reality of the loss, instead of fighting it, tend to come out of the rough patch sooner. Not necessarily because they suffer less in the moment, but because they don’t stack a second layer of struggle on top of the first.

Clean pain, dirty pain: the concept used in acceptance and commitment therapy

Psychologist Steven Hayes, creator of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), popularized a distinction that fits the water image almost literally: clean pain versus dirty pain.

• Clean pain is what comes directly from the loss: sadness, longing, the physical sensation of emptiness. It can’t be avoided and, according to Hayes, it’s better not to try.
• Dirty pain is the added layer generated by fighting the first one: guilt over still being sad “for too long,” anger at yourself for not being over it already, anxiety about feeling what you’re feeling.

Within the ACT framework, it’s that second layer that stretches the process out the most.

The Tao’s image fits if read carefully. In it, water doesn’t break the stone in one blow: it flows around it, adapts to its shape and keeps going. Whoever resists pain is more like the stone, rigid against something it can’t stop; whoever accepts it is more like the water, which yields where it needs to yield and still moves forward.

One nuance: accepting isn’t endless dwelling

It would be easy to conclude that the more a breakup is processed, the better. A study by Sbarra himself and his team, published in Clinical Psychological Science (2013), partly contradicts that.

They randomly assigned 90 recently separated adults to three tasks: classic expressive writing about their emotions (Pennebaker’s method), a narrative version of that writing, or a control writing task on neutral topics. Up to nine months later, those who were deeply absorbed in searching for meaning in the separation fared worse with the two forms of expressive writing than with the control task.

The authors’ reading is that, for someone already caught up in going over what happened, a task that invites them to keep going over it can feed rumination. Accepting pain isn’t the same as examining it without rest: the Tao’s water keeps flowing, it doesn’t stay circling in the same eddy.

What this research suggests, in practice

Neither the Tao Te Ching nor the studies cited suggest you have to feel fine about the breakup, or force it along faster. What the evidence associates with a less drawn-out recovery is, instead, this:

• Acknowledging the emotion as it arrives, instead of immediately covering it up with constant distraction (work, going out, shows, your phone), without turning it into a topic of permanent analysis either.
• Not turning the pain into a personal failure: feeling sad after a breakup isn’t a sign of weakness or dependency, it’s what’s expected.
• Telling the loss itself (clean pain) apart from the story you tell about it (“I shouldn’t feel this,” “I should be over this by now”), which is usually the part that weighs the most.
• Letting the process have its own pace, without an outside timeline or comparisons to how someone else handled it.

If you notice that the distress isn’t easing with time, or that your day-to-day wellbeing revolves too much around the relationship that ended, our emotional dependency test can help you put a name to that pattern, and the attachment style test can help you understand what part of how you bond might be behind it.

There’s also a very specific pattern that tends to go along with this resistance: trying, through sheer willpower, to stop thinking about the other person.

That’s the trap we explore in the next article of this series, the rebound effect of trying not to think about your ex, where a very specific experiment shows why suppressing a thought tends to keep it alive.

This pain, moreover, is almost never just emotional: if you recognize the feeling that a broken bond feels like a physical wound, our article on why ghosting hurts so much digs into that same mechanism from another angle, and our piece on emotional self-regulation gathers broader tools for holding an intense emotion without it becoming the only thing happening in your life that day.

Sources

• Lao Tzu (anonymous trans.). Tao Te King. Biblioteca Digital, Instituto Latinoamericano de la Comunicación Educativa (ILCE). Chapters VIII, XLIII and LXXVIII.
• Kross, E., Berman, M. G., Mischel, W., Smith, E. E., & Wager, T. D. (2011). Social rejection shares somatosensory representations with physical pain and emotional suffering. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(15), 6270-6275.
• Fisher, H. E., Brown, L. L., Aron, A., Strong, G., & Mashek, D. (2010). Reward, addiction, and emotion regulation systems associated with rejection in love. Journal of Neurophysiology, 104(1), 51-60.
• 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.
• Sbarra, D. A., Boals, A., Mason, A. E., Larson, G. M., & Mehl, M. R. (2013). Expressive writing can impede emotional recovery following marital separation. Clinical Psychological Science, 1(2), 120-134. doi:10.1177/2167702612469801
• Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (1999). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: An Experiential Approach to Behavior Change. Guilford Press.