The Bloody Business of Detachment

The Hidden Reason It's So Hard to Move On After a Breakup

I had to detach from the man I loved the most.

I didn’t know there was an ‘art’ to detachment at the time.

It was more of a case of withdrawal.

People talk about detachment as though it’s some graceful ‘Zen’ practice.

And in some circumstances, it is.

With hindsight and wisdom

But in my case, back then, it wasn’t Zen,

It was visceral.

Like death in the movies versus dying in real life, it’s a far grislier spectacle when it’s for real. We are okay for three days, then we spend the next week sweating and crying, trying not to text the ex and cause a drama, because we are addicted to it, I mean him or her.

If we could open a ‘detaching’ human and take a look at their gnarly, needy little hearts, you would find they are full of hooks, as we latch onto the ones we love.

Especially romantic partners onto whom we’ve projected all our hopes and dreams, only to discover years later that we wanted completely different lives.

But we jump right in because of the hot ‘chemistry’ without asking some basic questions about….well, anything future-oriented.

But it’s too late, those hooks are deeply embedded in our hearts.

So, how to detach with the least bloodshed?

Well, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, otherwise known as the 90’s Heathcliffe asked me to marry him.

At first, I said yes. Then I had the sort of deep think I should have had four years earlier. But we were young, passionate about each other and laughed a lot and generally had a great time.

We were best friends and beautiful lovers.

I didn’t really consider the future. It was there in the back of my mind, of course it was, but we were being very ‘zen’ and living in the present….man.

However, I already had two children, and I knew the moment he asked me to marry him that I didn’t want any more.

But he did.

So, I knew I had to let him go.

I wrote him a letter explaining that I loved him deeply. The sort of love that changes the architecture of your entire life and it wasn’t an exaggeration.

I adored him.

He understood that I had lived through a difficult stepfamily situation, and I knew firsthand exactly what could happen when adults followed their desires and children paid the price. And I wasn’t willing to gamble my children’s happiness on the possibility that everything would work out.

So, I left, moved away and started a new life. I bought a dog, which ended up being four dogs.

This was the hardest detachment I have ever experienced because I was totally alone, unprepared, and I was the one who had walked away.

But then came the withdrawals, the rumination, the what ifs? They tortured me for five years. Being an adult means making decisions that can feel like swallowing broken glass.

Standing in the truth of having to detach was the hardest thing. There were no magical memory wipes. I did try NLP. Did it work? I honestly couldn’t tell you, but I did stop smoking, so something happened.

Acceptance is one of the hardest things a human being can do. Because we are story-making creatures. I would fantasise about the children we would have had. I decided they would be boys and be thugs, which helped curb my fantasies.

We don’t just experience loss. We negotiate, argue and interrogate it, but mostly we have to go through it alone, especially if it was our decision.

So how do we cope with the loss and move into acceptance?

I wrote a fantasy romance novel about alternative timelines where everyone made different decisions or maybe even suffered more than I had. Human beings are brilliant at suffering over things that have already happened.

The exhausting part of heartbreak and trying to detach isn’t always about missing them. It’s the fact that it goes on for so long; the monotony of the pain is incapacitating.

I liken heartbreak to a chronic spiritual malady.

What was the turning point in all this?

Well, it was gradual because life carried on despite the strange paralysis I was living with in my heart, and a gnawing feeling that I wasn’t living the life I was supposed to.

Even though I was in fact living the life I had chosen, I just had to let myself inhabit it.

And eventually something strange happened.

My brain, mercifully, took over.

The human brain is remarkably practical like that. Eventually, I stopped thinking about him every day. He’d pop into my mind maybe once a week, which was an improvement to the heinous rumination.

Life carried on, I made new friends, developed my spiritual practice, wrote books, walked my many dogs, (although full disclosure: only one novel is published as of writing this) and after five years, I started a new relationship.

I brought up my children unencumbered by a second family, and I never lived with the man I was seeing.

As time went on, I knew I had done the right thing in leaving Heathcliffe, even though the detachment process had been utterly traumatic, and my recovery from it had happened in micro baby steps.

I worried about entirely different things now. The grief I felt became part of the background scenery, like a distant landmark on one of my walks.

And that’s about as detached as I could get.

My time with Heathcliffe became like a bench on one of my walks. I could visit it if I chose that route.

The bench periodically moved further away. It started on my main walk, but after a while it moved to its own grove that I would have to deliberately visit, but the visits became less and less until I only thought about him once or twice a year.

I would pause for a while and smile at the deep, passion we had shared in our youth, and be grateful to the universe that I had experienced such a great love.

The truth is that most people don’t heal because they discover some secret technique or framework to follow.

They heal because we come to terms with what has happened, it’s a painful, slow and ugly process at times, but life keeps dragging us forward whether we like it or not.

Do we ever fully get over it?

I thought not because of the bench in the middle of my secret clearing.

But then came an unexpected plot twist.

My life changed suddenly and I had to move back home and leave behind my thirteen-year relationship with a lovely man. We’d had some wonderful times together, but when it was time to say goodbye, I was able to let him go easily. It was all very Zen indeed.

This perplexed me for a while, but then I realized two important things.

1) Not all relationships are created equally in passion, intensity, or future planning. Some, even though they may last successfully for years are light and transient on the heart.

They were meant to keep us safe for a while before throwing us back into the jaws of the world.

2) Real detachment isn’t detaching from the person. It’s detaching from the identity you imagined becoming with them, a phantom of a future that can never be.

The fantasy has to die before the heart can heal. Otherwise it can consume us. Sometimes, as in my case, for years.

With my thirteen-year relationship, I had made no plans, and we certainly didn’t share a relationship identity. I had mine and he had his, and there was no cross-over.

But with Heathcliffe, we’d imagined an entire life together. We weren’t just grieving each other—we were grieving the future we’d invented for a little while.

So, I moved back to my hometown.

I opened a little restaurant and late one night after closing,

there was a tap at my door.

It had been almost two decades.

I opened the door

And there he was.

Heathcliffe had turned up on my doorstep.

He’d grown into a very handsome silver fox.

We were in our mid 40’s.

I used to think detachment meant removing someone from your heart.

Now I think it means letting go of the person you imagined you were going to become together.

That’s the true torment that keeps us awake until three in the morning.

Because some people aren’t just people.

They’re whole imagined futures.

Heathcliffe came back.

But he didn’t come back to the woman he’d left.

And I never met the man I’d once loved again.

We met each other as two entirely different people who had finally let go of the life we’d imagined. We had detached from our past and were free to make enough room for each other to return as someone new.

So we shed our old skins and met each other for the first time.

As for that old bench...

I honestly couldn’t tell you how it’s doing anymore.

Maybe it’s still there.

I never walk that way.

Well, hardly ever.

As for Heathcliffe and I?

We were married in May 2026

Until next time...
Stay wicked. Stay aware. And remember, people aren’t just people. They’re futures. Choose yours carefully and consciously.

If this article resonated with you, you’re exactly the sort of person I’m building something for.

This September, I’m opening the doors to the Lick My Evil community.

We’ll begin with heartbreak, because that’s where many of us find ourselves. But this isn’t really about exes.

It’s about learning who you are, what you truly want from your life, and how to stop accidentally building futures with the wrong people.

If you’d like to be there from the beginning, subscribe below, it’s free. I’d love to investigate all this with you.

Love

Micky