Shankar Vedantam

Have you come up with techniques of your own to move past a breakup and discover a better version of yourself?

If you'd be willing to share your question or comment with the Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org.

Two or three minutes is plenty.

Use the subject line, breakups.

Again, that's ideas at hiddenbrain.org.

There are many situations in life where the end of a relationship brings endless questions.

Sometimes those are questions we can answer for ourselves, but other times we need answers from a lost partner or an absent co-worker or a dead parent.

Answers that are not forthcoming.

Without being able to understand how and why the relationship came apart, we feel we cannot move forward with our own lives.

Antonio Pasqualeone is a psychologist at the University of Windsor in Canada.

He is the author of Principles of Emotion Change, What Works and When in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life.

Antonio, you say that one reason grief is sometimes complicated is because our current situation stirs up older and sometimes deeper hurts.

I understand that you once got to know a woman who discovered that she was being cheated on, and instead of getting mad at her former partner, she got mad at herself.

Tell me that story and how in some ways it points to this idea that sometimes when we have setbacks in our lives, it makes us question ourselves rather than question the setback.

There was one time when you had your own heartbroken Antonio and the woman who was saying goodbye to you left you with a parting shot that really stuck with you in a distressing way.

What happened?

Another reason our grief might be complicated is that we learn something about the person we've lost that is hard for us to accept.

I want to play you a clip from the 2011 movie The Descendants.

It features a man named Matt, played by George Clooney.

His wife suffers a serious injury and goes into a coma.