“One of our greatest fears about ending a relationship is that in the process of parting we will have to experience feelings that will overwhelm us and from which we will never be able to recover. We all suspect that the ending of our relationship is going to take us into some deep emotional waters. We are already feeling vaguely out of control as we contemplate the possibility of the ending, and we sense that the ending itself will take us in over our heads emotionally and leave us feeling totally out of control.
This fear is so immense — and so pervasive — that even if a soothsayer could tell us unequivocally that in twenty-five years we would still be as unhappy in our present relationship as we are now, we would probably still be afraid of ending it. Many of us would rather do anything — including continuing to live in a miserable, lifeless, spirit-defeating relationship — than go through all the feelings of ending a relationship.
Another great fear is that once having ended our present relationship, we will never love or be loved again. While this
feeling is very frightening, it has been my experience that, for the most part, this is not the case; in fact, an overwhelming majority of my clients who ended relationships went on to establish new and much more satisfying unions.
These happier relationships resulted when people were willing to learn the lessons their previous relationships had to teach. My experience is that if you leave or were left, if you are willing to go through the process of ending it in a directed and thoughtful way, without avoiding any part of the emotional process, you can go on to establish a new and more satisfying relationship.“
Coming Apart: Why Relationships End And How To Live Through The Ending Of Yours, Daphne Rose Kingma, p. 3-4.
