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On Attachment

#227: The Most Common Forms of Self-Sabotage After a Break-Up

On Attachment

Stephanie Rigg

Relationships, Society & Culture

4.91.2K Ratings

🗓️ 27 January 2026

⏱️ 20 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Break-ups are painful — but often, the way we try to cope with that pain can quietly keep us stuck in it for much longer than necessary.

In this episode of On Attachment, I walk through five of the most common ways people unknowingly self-sabotage after a break-up, particularly those with anxious attachment patterns. These behaviours aren’t a sign that you’re doing healing “wrong.” They’re understandable coping strategies that make sense in the context of loss, anxiety, and emotional overwhelm — but they don’t always serve us in the long run.

Rather than shaming or pushing yourself to “move on faster,” this episode invites you to bring awareness to where your energy is going after a break-up, and how to gently redirect it in ways that actually support healing.

In this episode, we explore:

  • Why obsessively replaying the relationship can keep you emotionally tethered
  • The belief that you need closure from your ex in order to move on
  • How romanticising the relationship in hindsight distorts reality
  • Why comparing your healing to your ex’s is a losing game
  • The cost of continuing to be each other’s emotional support person

At the heart of all of this is a simple but challenging truth: healing after a break-up requires turning towards your own pain, rather than trying to solve, analyse, or bypass it.

This episode is for you if you’re going through a break-up and feel stuck in rumination, comparison, or hope that’s keeping you anchored to the past — and you want a more grounded, self-compassionate way forward.

Resources

Click here to register for my free breakup training

Transcript

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0:30.1

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of On Attachment. In today's episode, we are talking all about

0:35.9

breakups and five ways that you might be

0:38.9

unknowingly self-sabotaging after a breakup. So if you've been around here a while, you would

0:45.2

know that I am of the view that breakups can be a really beautiful opportunity. And I know that

0:50.9

that sounds a little incongruent with a lot of people's experience of breakups,

0:55.7

which is that they are the worst.

0:57.2

And of course they are really painful a lot of the time.

1:00.6

But they also point us towards our wounds and where our work is.

1:06.9

And I think that if we take that opportunity and turn towards it and really see them for the

1:12.2

mirror that they are, there's incredible growth opportunity there alongside all of the inevitable

1:18.1

grief and the hard, messy stuff. But what I encounter all the time, and this is a big part

1:25.2

of my work, is helping particularly anxiously attach folks

1:28.1

through breakups which I've talked about recently like letting go of someone that you love

1:33.0

if you have anxious attachment patterns is excruciating and it goes against everything in your

1:38.4

system that says definitely don't let go of someone that you love but this is a big part of my

1:43.7

work and so I've listened to many

1:46.3

people's stories. I've answered many people's questions, like thousands. And I know where people get

...

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