When a relationship ends, it’s not just a couple that disappears: habits, projects, a family and sometimes an entire imagined life together also collapse. For Amélie Boukhobza, clinical psychologist, this multiple loss allows us to understand how a breakup can cause a real psychological collapse.
“The pain was too intense, too oppressive”
While the actor admits to not usually giving in, his separation from Angelina Jolie – which occurred in 2016, at her request – devastated her. “I have never had suicidal thoughts. It’s just not in my nature. Except for a short time“, he tells the media Esquire.
“During that short period of time, I told myself that I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t see a way out. The pain was too intense, too oppressive. I wasn’t going to do anything, but I felt the cold steel of the bullet in my head, and it was like a relief. And I said to myself: Ah, okay, now I understand… I understand suicide, in the sense that it’s just relief. It’s just trying to relieve the pain.”
But how can a breakup cause such deep suffering? How can it lead someone to no longer want to live?
Simply because in reality, during a separation, we don’t just lose love.
“We lose a person, of course. But also a family, a daily life, a house, habits, a place with the children, projects, a certain self-image. And above all, a whole future that we had already begun to imagine, perhaps even an ideal that we had built for ourselves. This explains why certain breakups can produce a real psychological collapse.” indicates Amélie Boukhobza.
In other words, here, we don’t just mourn someone. “We must also mourn the life we thought we would have with him,” confides the psychologist. “And the more the relationship occupied a central place in the person’s identity, the more the separation can temporarily give the impression that there is nothing around anymore. explains the specialist.
This is also what can make some breakups so difficult to get through. The person does not just lose their partner. She suddenly has to deal with a life she hadn’t planned for.
When suffering feels like there’s no way out
That being said, not every breakup (fortunately) leads to suicide. “On the other hand, it can act as a powerful triggering factor in a person who is already weakened, isolated, depressed, faced with other losses or whose psychological resources are overwhelmed,” recalls Amélie Boukhobza.
The desire to die can then have a different meaning than what we imagine.
“In these moments, suicidal thoughts do not always mean: “I want to die”, but rather say “I can no longer bear to suffer like this”. An essential distinction”,
recalls the specialist.
In other words: the person can no longer imagine any other way out of their pain than their own disappearance. “The psyche finds itself locked in a present that seems definitive: ‘what I feel today will always be there’. Even if it is false”, underlines the psychologist.
This feeling is fortunately not meant to last
If all suffering deserves to be heard and taken seriously (because in these moments, it is difficult to see a way out), an emotion, even extremely violent, is not necessarily expected to last.
On the other hand, to move forward, it is important to accept this stage of mourning, to surround yourself well (friends, family), to talk to your loved ones about what you are going through and to seek support from a professional if necessary. A way of gradually finding a way out, a meaning in one’s life; where we no longer see them.