Shankar Vedantam

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.

So as part of the process of unpacking this undifferentiated ball of emotions, you suggest that people get out three pieces of paper and make three lists.

What goes on these lists, Antonio?

So it's almost like a form of accounting in some ways.

You're totaling up the minuses, but also potentially totaling up the pluses.

Antonia, you conducted a study that looked at the effects of the various kinds of stories we tell about our experiences.

Two kinds of narratives had particularly detrimental effects, the superficial shallow narrative and the type of narrative that you call the same old story.

What are these different stories, Antonia?

Narratives...

So in other words, you're looking as a therapist to not just what the stories are, but sort of the form of the stories, the form the stories are taking.