"Everything I Need to Know I Learned From...": Using Breakup Advice to Deal with Other Life Issues

I wanted to share this great post on B.oB.'s running blog which uses a breakup analogy to explain what a running injury is like.  Not only is it clever but it's a good reminder of something that comes up all the time in my conversations as The Breakup Coach: "breakups" don't just happen in romantic relationships.  We end up having a lot of the same feelings and problems when there's conflict or breaking off with our friends, our jobs, a favorite activity (like B.o.B's running), and lots of other life situations.


Just this morning a friend who's quitting smoking was tweeting about how much she missed it and was comparing her jones for her favorite brand to missing an ex-boyfriend.  It reminded me of a comment on an old BUC blog post from back in the MySpace days (Remember MySpace?  Soooo early millennium, isn't it?)  In our discussion of why it's important to take a break from contacting your ex I wrote:

...and if you were quitting smoking you wouldn't have cigarrettes at home, hang out at a lot of places where people are smoking cigarrettes, or call the cigarettes "just to see how they're doing", right?

It cuts both ways. Since we have the same feelings and experiences (and make a lot of the same mistakes) in a bunch of situations outside of romantic relationships, we get to use a lot of the same knowledge and nifty tricks to deal with them.


Even if you're not going through a romantic breakup you just might find some of the advice here helpful--so use it wherever it works for you, ok?


The Breakup Coach