A long time ago a guy I dated said he would be more attracted to me if I lost weight. I kindly broke up with him and lost 15lbs. Why do those words still haunt me even though I’m in a good place in my life successfully, physically, and mentally?

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Heartbreak does more than just hurt you emotionally. When you fall in love, your mind starts to ‘build’ on top of the state of having this person in your life. You also build on the image that you feel this person has of you. You also build on the image you have of yourself inside this relationship.

When any of these things are threatened, they can whiplash into a big breakup where everything is thrown away. This is much more likely when we’re young. Young people still haven’t finished developing emotionally. Heck, even many adults never seem to emotionally develop.

When you are still developing emotionally, you will act out of emotions that you don’t feel yourself having. Most of our early relationships are practically dominated by this lack of access to what’s going on inside. Old heartbreaks were more hurtful than we remember them.

The words still haunt you because there’s still an unresolved aspect of the breakup that you have yet to address. You have already addressed all the other parts of your life that the breakup forced you to confront, but one thing you don’t seem to have confronted is the tendency to get your feelings of self-worth from other people.

It’s a bit scary to confront the reality that some people simply aren’t ever going to see more than the surface parts of a person. But that’s the reality. Especially when you’re young. You can access this in yourself as well. Haven’t you ever had the experience of not seeing something beautiful, yet hidden deep inside a person? You ‘judged’ them based on their appearance.

Everybody does this. And it sucks to be subjected to it. But the reason it haunts you, why you can’t let it go, has some deeper reason, that you need to find and resolve before you’ll be able to truly move on. Read the last paragraph again. Did that provoke a revelation in you? That everybody does it, that you do it to, that it’s a natural part of growing up and learning how to relate to others?

If that makes you feel better, then that’s probably all it was. You might get a few more psychic ‘tremors’, aftershocks if you will, of negative feelings coming up.

But if you still can’t let it go, if the knowledge shared above seems maybe a little basic, then it’s likely something deeper is keeping you from being truly healthy emotionally. Maybe a family member caused you to form a belief that your self-worth is tied to whether men are looking at you. Maybe you read it in a book somewhere when you were very young. Maybe it just comes from your core personality.

It’s really hard for anyone to just tell you what or how to get over this. There are great people out there whose jobs it is to help you discover things like this, called psychotherapists. If you can afford one or otherwise have access, it’s very much worth your time and energy.