Shankar Vedantam

Now, of course, you're far from the only person to have had a hard time with a breakup.

In the 2011 movie Crazy Stupid Love, the actor Steve Carell plays a character who is trying to get over a breakup.

Here he is talking to his ex, with whom he is still in love.

So, Antonio, you're a therapist.

Do you see examples of this kind of behavior in real life?

So if one model is basically people trying to plow ahead and not look back, you also have people who do the opposite, who basically are fixated on what happened in the past.

In the 2019 movie Marriage Story, we hear the voice of the actor Adam Driver, who plays Charlie, a man in the middle of a very nasty divorce.

In this clip, he's addressing his soon-to-be ex-wife.

Antonio, what do you hear when you hear that very dramatic scene?

Well, it's horrible.

Whether we spend our days brooding for people we love or desperately trying to fill the void of relationships that have slipped away or exploding in rage at an ex who has wronged us, there are many ways to badly handle the end of a relationship.

When we come back, why we are so bad at breakups and the key to parting well from people we love.

You're listening to Hidden Brain.

I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is Hidden Brain.

I'm Shankar Vedantam.

There are lots of ways to do breakups badly.

We can torture ourselves, behave badly toward others, and drive everyone to exasperation.

At the University of Windsor in Canada, psychologist Antonio Pasqualeone studies how and why we go off the rails when it comes to moving on with our lives.

So your research has found, Antonio, that people who don't deal with their feelings can get stuck in an undifferentiated state of negative emotion that you call global distress.