There is heartbreak. And then there is heartbreak when you’re a mum.

You’re trying to process the end of a relationship while simultaneously making breakfast, finding school shoes, answering questions, going to work, paying bills and reassuring a child whose world may have changed too. Sometimes you barely have time to fall apart.

I remember feeling as though I had to be strong. I wanted to protect my son from any more hurt, so putting on a brave face seemed like the right thing to do. But I’ve learned something since then.

Being strong doesn’t mean pretending you’re fine.

Healing after a breakup as a single mum isn’t about getting over somebody as quickly as possible. It’s about learning how to feel what has happened without allowing it to consume you, helping your children through their own feelings, and slowly creating a life that feels secure and meaningful again.

I wish I could give you a timetable for that. I can’t. I remember hearing that getting over somebody takes half the length of the relationship. I don’t believe that anymore.

Human beings aren’t equations. There is no date you can circle on the calendar and say: There. I should be healed by then.

So if you’ve found this because you’re wondering how to heal after a breakup as a single mum, I want to share what I wish I’d understood sooner. Not because I handled everything perfectly. I didn’t.

I’ve made mistakes. I’ve hidden from things. I’ve isolated myself. I’ve had to learn how to trust myself and other people again. But I’ve also rebuilt.

And one of the biggest things I’ve learned is that moving forward isn’t usually one enormous decision.

It’s lots of tiny ones.

Healing from a breakup isn’t a straight line

One morning you might wake up and think: I’m actually going to be okay. Then a song comes on. You find an old photograph. Your child asks a question. You have a difficult handover. Or you’re lying in bed at night when the house suddenly feels particularly quiet.

For a moment, it can feel as though you’re right back where you started.

I remember feeling as though I would take one step forward and then two steps back. What I couldn’t always see at the time was that I was still moving.

Healing doesn’t necessarily mean becoming less sad in a perfectly straight line. There can be good days followed by awful ones. You can make progress and still be triggered by something unexpected.

The length and nature of your relationship, what happened during the breakup, your personality, your circumstances and the support around you can all affect how you experience it. So please don’t measure your healing against somebody else’s.

It takes what it takes.

1. Give yourself permission to grieve

A breakup isn’t only the loss of another person. Sometimes you’re grieving the future you thought you were going to have. You’re grieving plans, traditions, security and the identity you had as part of a couple.

Perhaps you’re grieving the version of your child’s childhood you imagined. Maybe you thought you’d grow old together. Maybe you imagined family Christmases, holidays, a particular home or simply having somebody beside you while your children grew up.

Then suddenly the picture changes. That deserves space.

One of the mistakes I made was believing I needed to keep going and be strong for everybody else. But being busy doesn’t make pain disappear.

Try to create small pockets of time where you don’t have to perform being okay. Journal after your children are asleep. Walk. Pray. Cry in the shower. Talk to somebody you trust. Sit quietly with a cup of tea and admit:

This hurts. I didn’t want my life to look like this. And I’m allowed to be sad about that.

You don’t have to spend every evening analysing the relationship, but you don’t have to run from your feelings either. And please stop telling yourself, I should be over this by now.

There is no deadline.

2. Don’t confuse being strong for your children with hiding every emotion

This has been an important lesson for me. When your children are hurting too, your instinct is naturally to protect them. You don’t want them worrying about you. So you put on the brave face.

Of course children shouldn’t be expected to manage an adult’s emotions. They don’t need intimate details about the relationship and they shouldn’t become our counsellors. But I’ve also come to believe that pretending we’re never sad isn’t necessarily what our children need either.

We aren’t trying to raise children who never experience difficult emotions. We’re trying to raise children who know what to do when difficult emotions come.

So instead of always saying: “I’m fine.” you might occasionally say:

“I’m feeling a bit sad today because there have been lots of changes. But it’s okay to feel sad. I’m going to take the dog for a walk and have an early night because I know those things help me.”

There is an important difference between letting your child see an emotion and asking your child to carry it for you.

You’re showing them that you have difficult feelings, feelings aren’t something to be frightened of, they change, and you can look after yourself while you’re experiencing them.

I’ve noticed over the years that my son can sometimes put on a brave face and hide his emotions too. That has made me think more deeply about what I model. I don’t want to teach him that strength means never hurting. I want him to know how to help himself when he does.

And none of us will get this perfectly right. We’re human too.

3. Accept what has happened — without expecting yourself to be “over it”

For a long time after a breakup, your mind can remain attached to what if?

What if they realise they’ve made a mistake? What if things change? What if we could recreate what we had?

You can spend months mentally negotiating with a reality that has already changed. But acceptance isn’t the same as being over it.

You can accept that your relationship has ended while still missing that person. You can accept it while wishing things had been different. You can accept it and still cry.

Acceptance doesn’t mean approving of everything that happened either. It simply means that you stop making your ability to move forward dependent on the past changing.

Eventually, the question becomes:

This is where my life is now. What am I going to do with it?

Try not to pressure, persuade or guilt somebody into coming back. Your healing can’t depend on another person changing their mind.

The most important thing is that you heal regardless.

4. Learn what to do when the pain suddenly hits

Heartbreak creates an enormous desire for relief. When something hurts, we naturally want to make it stop. That’s why it’s easy to reach for things that numb the feeling for a while. Alcohol. Comfort eating. Impulse spending. Endless scrolling. Checking an ex’s social media. Replaying conversations over and over. Staying in bed. Constantly talking about what your ex did.

None of those things mean you’re weak. But it helps to start noticing your patterns.

Try journalling to understand what’s happening

Journalling helped me enormously. Putting my thoughts onto paper created some distance between what I was feeling and what was actually true.

If writing helps you too, try asking yourself:

What am I feeling?
How intense is it from 1-10?
What happened just before I felt this way?
What am I telling myself?
What evidence do I have that this thought is true?
Could there be another way of looking at it?
What do I need right now?
Will what I’m about to do help me tomorrow — or just numb me tonight?

Journalling won’t suit everybody. If writing leaves you repeatedly going over the same events and feeling more distressed, try another outlet instead. Walk. Talk. Exercise. Make something. Speak to a counsellor. Find the things that help you process what you’re feeling rather than simply keeping you stuck inside it.

When the pain hits, focus on the next ten minutes

There will be moments when you don’t need another self-help book. You just need to get through the next ten minutes.

Name it. I’m lonely. I’m angry. I’m frightened. I’m feeling rejected.

Breathe. Slow everything down. You don’t have to make big decisions while you’re overwhelmed.

Move. Walk around the block. Stretch. Shower. Step outside.

Write. Get the thoughts circling around your head onto paper.

Connect. Message somebody safe rather than contacting your ex simply because you’re lonely.

Comfort yourself. Make tea. Put on clean pyjamas. Read. Watch something comforting. Pray if faith is important to you.

Then remind yourself:

I don’t have to fix my whole life tonight. I only need to get through this moment without making tomorrow harder.

Feelings pass. You don’t have to act on every one of them.

5. Be careful about the story you tell yourself

A breakup doesn’t only change your relationship. It can change the way you see yourself.

He left because I’m not pretty enough. I’m not slim enough. I’m not interesting enough. Nobody will ever want me. I’ve failed. I’ve ruined my child’s life. I’ll always be alone.

If you repeat those thoughts often enough, they can start sounding like facts. They aren’t.

I used to think the answer was simply replacing a negative thought with a positive one. I’m beautiful. I’m amazing. Everything is wonderful.

But sometimes your brain responds: I don’t believe you.

I’ve found it much more useful to question the thought. What evidence do I actually have that this is true? Would I say this to somebody I loved? Am I treating a feeling as though it’s a fact? Could there be another explanation?

So: “He left because I’m not good enough.” might become:

“This relationship ended. That hurts deeply, but the end of one relationship doesn’t determine my worth or my ability to be loved.”

You don’t need more criticism when your heart is already hurting.

There is some research behind the importance of how we treat ourselves during separation too. In a study of 109 adults experiencing marital separation, greater observed self-compassion was associated with less separation-related emotional intrusion into daily life, an association that remained evident at follow-up. That doesn’t prove self-compassion causes recovery, but it supports something I’ve come to believe through my own experience: being cruel to yourself doesn’t help you heal.

Learning to become a safe person for yourself is part of healing.

6. Create emotional boundaries with your ex — even when you have to co-parent

One piece of breakup advice you’ll see everywhere is: Go no contact.

That’s all very well if you don’t share children. For many single parents, no contact isn’t realistic. You may need to discuss school, appointments, money, weekends, holidays, birthdays and pick-ups and drop-offs.

You can’t necessarily remove your ex from your life. But you can create emotional space.

Where possible, keep communication focused on your child rather than repeatedly reopening the relationship. You don’t need to use every handover as an opportunity to discuss what happened between you.

If seeing your ex’s social media keeps reopening the wound, mute or unfollow them. You don’t need a front-row seat to their life in order to co-parent effectively.

Put photographs and sentimental belongings away if looking at them every day hurts. You don’t have to throw everything away. Put them somewhere safe and decide what to do with them when you’re ready.

And be careful about repeatedly checking: Are they online? Where did they go? Who liked that photograph? Who are they with?

I understand the temptation. But ask yourself:

Is knowing this helping me heal?

Creating distance isn’t childish. Sometimes you have to stop repeatedly touching the wound if you want to give it a chance to heal.

7. Protect your child from conflict — not from every difficult feeling

Your child may be grieving too. Their grief may not look anything like yours. They might become angry, quiet, clingy or defiant. They might appear completely unaffected. Or they may ask the same question repeatedly because they’re trying to understand what their family looks like now.

Give them opportunities to talk without forcing them. I’ve found that children often talk more naturally when they’re not sitting opposite you being asked: “How do you feel?”

Try the car, a dog walk, bedtime or cooking together. Those ordinary side-by-side moments can create space for conversations.

And however hurt or angry you feel, try not to put your child in the middle. Don’t use them as a messenger. Don’t ask them to choose sides. Don’t interrogate them about what’s happening in the other household. Don’t make them responsible for comforting you. And try not to criticise their other parent in front of them.

I think about it this way:

Their other parent is part of their story — and part of them.

A child shouldn’t feel that loving one parent is a betrayal of the other.

UK government guidance summarising research on parental conflict says that it is frequent, intense and poorly resolved conflict — rather than ordinary disagreements — that can put children at increased risk of mental-health, behavioural, social and academic difficulties.

That doesn’t mean you and your ex can never disagree. You’re two human beings. Of course you will. It means trying, where possible, to keep adult conflict between adults.

You don’t have to make your ex the villain to acknowledge that the relationship hurt

It’s easy after a breakup to blame somebody. Sometimes we blame our ex. Sometimes we blame ourselves. Neither helped me move forward.

Where it’s truthful, I’ve found it more useful to separate the person from the relationship. Maybe you were young. Maybe you wanted different things. Maybe your values became incompatible. Maybe you grew apart. Maybe unhealthy patterns developed between you. Maybe things happened that couldn’t be repaired.

That doesn’t mean nobody made mistakes, and it doesn’t mean pretending everything was okay. It simply means you don’t have to carry hatred forever in order to acknowledge that the relationship didn’t work.

When you share children, that matters even more. You don’t have to be best friends. You don’t have to agree on everything. But if you can eventually create a respectful, child-focused relationship, you’re removing one source of stress from your child’s life — and from your own.

A note about safety: none of this means remaining silent about abuse, coercive control or genuine safety concerns. In those circumstances, ordinary co-parenting advice may not be appropriate. Seek specialist professional or legal support and prioritise safety.

8. Don’t let your comfort zone become a cage

This is probably one of the biggest lessons from my own experience.

After I was hurt, I became very good at keeping myself safe. Too good. Somebody close to me had hurt me, and somewhere along the way my brain seemed to conclude:

People can hurt me. Distance keeps me safe.

So I kept people at arm’s length. I shut myself off from relationships. In the short term, it worked. Nobody could disrupt my peace if I didn’t let anybody close enough. Nobody could reject me if I didn’t risk being vulnerable. Nobody could hurt me if I didn’t need anybody.

But there was a problem.

Safety slowly became isolation.

I can understand why I did it. I was healing. Being alone felt safe. I don’t judge that version of myself.

But eventually I realised I didn’t want isolation to become my permanent life, so I started small. Inviting somebody for coffee. Having lunch with colleagues. Chatting to people while walking the dog. Messaging an old friend. Accepting an invitation. Letting conversations last a little longer.

You don’t need to suddenly become the most sociable person in the room. You don’t need a huge friendship group, and you certainly don’t have to rush into another relationship.

Just leave the door open a little.

The importance of connection isn’t simply anecdotal. The World Health Organization identifies relationship breakups as one of the major life changes that can contribute to loneliness and describes good social connection as important for health and wellbeing.

I wish I’d understood sooner that:

Protecting my peace didn’t have to mean protecting myself from everybody.

There are good people in the world too.

9. Work out what you actually miss — then start rebuilding some of it

Sometimes we might say: I miss him.

But underneath that sentence might be several different losses. Perhaps you miss feeling financially secure, having another adult in the house, having someone to go out with, sharing decisions, physical affection, being part of a family unit or simply knowing what your future looked like.

Those distinctions matter because some of what you miss can be rebuilt.

If your partner managed the finances, learn about money. Make a budget. Understand your bills. Build an emergency fund when you’re able.

If they provided most of your social life, start finding your own people. If you’ve never made major decisions independently, begin making smaller ones. If you’re missing companionship, build connection rather than assuming another romantic relationship is the only way to get it.

Ask yourself:

What did that relationship provide that I now need to learn to provide — or find — for myself?

This doesn’t mean becoming so fiercely independent that you never need anybody. We all need people. It means gradually building enough security within your own life that your entire sense of safety doesn’t depend on somebody else choosing to stay.

For me, building independence became an important part of rebuilding confidence. If your confidence has taken a knock since your relationship ended, I’ve also shared the practical things that helped me rebuild my confidence as a single mum and move from surviving to thriving.

Learn the things you don’t know

After a relationship ends, you may suddenly realise there are things your partner always did. That can feel daunting. But so many of the things we think we’re “bad at” are simply things we’ve never learned.

I’ve taught myself basic car maintenance, basic DIY, cooking and lots of other practical things over the years. We also have access to something now that I didn’t have when I first became a single mum: an extraordinary amount of free information.

YouTube has tutorials on practically everything. Don’t know how to put up a shelf? Learn. Don’t understand something about your car? Research it. Never managed the household finances before? Start learning. Don’t know how to cook? Choose five simple meals and learn those first.

You don’t need to know how to do everything. You just need to start believing:

If I don’t know how to do something, I can probably learn.

That mindset has given me an enormous amount of confidence.

Create routines that reduce the mental load

I’ve also had to become more organised. When you’re the adult responsible for most of family life, there isn’t always somebody else to fall back on when you’ve forgotten something. Trying to hold everything in your head is exhausting.

Routines help. Bags can be prepared the night before. Meals can be planned. Regular jobs can have regular days. Important dates can go straight into the calendar.

I’ve also taught my son age-appropriate skills that help him look after himself: making simple food, filling his water bottle, making his bed, getting his things together and laying out clothes for the next day.

This isn’t about running your home like a military operation. It’s about creating small systems so every ordinary task doesn’t require another decision.

The more predictable the basics become, the more mental space you have for everything else. If this is something you’re struggling with, I’ve shared the simple routines that have made single motherhood easier for me, without trying to create an unrealistic perfectly organised life.

10. Stop building your life around the breakup and start building what comes next

At some point, healing needs to become about more than what happened. It needs to become about what happens next. I’ve written more about my own journey in How I Rebuilt My Life as a Single Mum — Without Waiting for Permission or Rescue, including how I gradually created a new life for myself and my son.

This is where setting goals helped me enormously. But I don’t mean: Transform my entire life by Christmas.

Start small. Walk three times this week. Sort one financial problem. Apply for the course. Decorate your bedroom. Go swimming. Read the book. Plan a day out with your children. Meet a friend. Learn something new. Save your first £100.

Set a SMART goal

SMART is a simple framework for turning something you vaguely want into something you can actually work towards.

A SMART goal is:

Specific — What exactly are you going to do?

Measurable — How will you know you’ve done it?

Achievable — Is it realistic in your current circumstances?

Relevant — Does it genuinely matter to the life you’re trying to build?

Time-bound — When will you do it by?

Instead of: “I want to get fitter,” try: “For the next four weeks, I’ll go for a 30-minute walk three times a week.”

Instead of: “I need to sort my money out,” try: “By Sunday evening, I’ll list my regular monthly bills and create a basic household budget.”

Small and specific is much easier to act on than sort my whole life out.

Think in 12-week chapters

I also like the idea behind The 12 Week Year: rather than looking at an entire year, focus on roughly the next 12 weeks.

Ask yourself:

What would make the biggest difference to my life during the next 12 weeks?

Choose perhaps one to three meaningful goals. Then work backwards. What needs to happen this month? This week? Today?

Your 12-week goal might be build more financial security or feel more like myself again. Then decide what small actions would move you towards it.

You don’t need seventeen goals. Choose what matters.

Small wins create momentum. Slowly you begin collecting evidence:

I can do things. I can make decisions. I can cope. I can create things for myself.

Learn to trust yourself with decisions

This has probably been one of my biggest areas of growth. I used to feel as though every major decision had one right answer and one terrible answer — and my job was somehow to work out which was which.

Life isn’t really like that. Often we’re choosing between several imperfect options without knowing exactly what will happen next.

I’ve developed my own process. I write down the decision I need to make. I mindmap possible solutions. I research the strongest options. I look at the advantages and disadvantages. Then I check in with myself.

I’ve meditated consistently for years and usually try to meditate for around ten minutes a day. I think this has helped me become better at noticing my internal response rather than immediately reacting to every thought.

Sometimes an option feels calm and settled. Sometimes I notice tension or resistance. I don’t assume that automatically tells me whether a decision is right or wrong. Fear, anxiety and past experiences can affect those feelings too. But I pay attention.

Then I make the best decision I can with the information I have and write down why I’ve chosen it.

Sometimes life throws up something you couldn’t possibly have predicted. With hindsight, you may think: I made the wrong decision.

But I now ask:

Given what I knew at the time, did I make the best decision I reasonably could?

And if I did make a mistake, I ask: What can I learn from it? What would I do differently next time?

Confidence isn’t knowing you’ll never make the wrong decision.

It’s trusting yourself to deal with what happens next.

See the blank canvas

For a long time, a breakup can look only like destruction. The life you expected has gone.

But eventually I began to see something else.

A blank canvas.

That doesn’t make what happened good, and it doesn’t mean you should be grateful for heartbreak. It simply means that if the old picture has changed, you now have some choice about what gets painted next.

What sort of home do you want? What kind of mum do you want to be? Who do you want around you? What do you want your days to feel like? What would you like to learn? Where would you like to travel? What work would you like to do? What have you always wanted to try?

Who might you become when you’re no longer organising your whole life around a relationship that has ended?

You don’t need to answer everything today.

Start painting one corner.

If you’re ready to start putting some of those pieces back together, my step-by-step guide to rebuilding your life as a single mum will help you work out where to begin.

What healing actually looked like for me

There wasn’t one miraculous thing that fixed everything. It was lots of ordinary things, repeated over time.

I walked

I did lots of walking. When I was frustrated and my head felt fuzzy, walking gave me space to process difficult thoughts and let some of the emotion go. Sometimes I thought things through. Sometimes I stopped thinking and simply noticed what was around me. Either way, I nearly always came back with a clearer head.

I wrote

I wrote enormously. I actually wrote the whole story of my breakup into a book. I needed to get it out of me and onto paper — almost as though writing it down allowed me to separate myself from the story that had happened to me.

I journalled too. A lot. I now have a loft full of notebooks and I can’t bring myself to throw them away.

They’re not just pages about heartbreak. They’re my life. Lessons I’ve learned. Things I’ve struggled with. Ideas. Memories of raising my son. Ordinary days together that didn’t seem particularly significant at the time but, added together, have become our life together.

Looking back also reminds me that I was moving forward even when I couldn’t see it happening.

I found out who my real friends were

Breakups have a way of showing you who is really there. Not the people who want the gossip. The ones who genuinely care.

The friend who arrives with a bottle of wine. The one you can call when everything feels awful. The person who comes round for a cup of tea simply because they know you need somebody.

Those friendships mattered enormously.

I also went to a counsellor and developed a really positive relationship with her. She helped me process what had happened, understand myself better and begin directing my life towards something that felt more authentic.

I leaned on my faith

My faith was important too. I went to church. I prayed. I looked for healing in ways that felt meaningful to me.

I also saw a spiritual healer who told me that she felt I was carrying a great deal of pain. That was part of my personal spiritual experience rather than a substitute for professional mental-health or medical care, but the idea stayed with me.

Emotional pain can feel incredibly intense. I needed places where I could acknowledge it rather than constantly pretending it wasn’t there. For me those places included prayer, counselling, writing, movement and people I trusted.

I moved my body — and had fun again

My friends and I took up Jazzercise, and I loved it: great music, dancing, exercise, friends and laughter.

When I think back to that period, I don’t only remember sadness. I remember those classes too.

New memories gradually begin appearing alongside the painful ones.

I decided what I wanted my life to become

At one point I made a vision board from a piece of card. Nothing fancy. I chose five images representing things I wanted for my life and stuck them onto it.

Within about a year, all five things had happened.

I don’t believe sticking pictures onto cardboard magically made them appear. What the board did was make me decide what I wanted. The goals became visible. I thought about them. I noticed opportunities. And, crucially, I took action.

That taught me something I’ve carried ever since:

You have more influence over the direction of your life than it can feel like you do immediately after a breakup.

There will still be obstacles. There will be days when you want to give up. As a single mum, there may genuinely be practical barriers other people don’t have to navigate. But every time you find another way forward, you learn something about your own resilience.

I created a home that felt like ours

Creating a home that feels calm and safe has mattered enormously to me. I like our home clean, tidy and organised — not because I think a home needs to be perfect, but because I feel better when my surroundings aren’t chaotic.

Over time, our home became ours. Our routines. Our things. Our memories. Our safe place to come back to.

Home stopped representing the life that hadn’t happened. It became part of the life we were creating.

I kept learning

I’ve never stopped learning. Over the years I’ve learned about car maintenance, art, music, languages, writing, parenting and countless other things.

One of my favourite things to do is simply go to the library and wander around the non-fiction section. I don’t always go looking for a particular book. I explore. I see what I’m drawn towards. Sometimes curiosity is enough of a reason to learn something.

After a breakup, so much of your thinking can become centred around the relationship. Why did this happen? What are they doing? What should I have done differently?

Learning gives your mind somewhere new to go. Suddenly you’re thinking about a language, a painting, psychology, money, history, writing or something else entirely.

Your world starts expanding again.

I let people back in

At some point I had to acknowledge that I’d become quite reclusive while I was healing. I understand why. Being alone felt safe. I don’t judge that version of myself.

But eventually I realised I didn’t want isolation to become my permanent life.

So I started small: coffee with somebody, lunch with colleagues, a conversation on a dog walk, accepting an invitation or letting conversations last a little longer.

I didn’t need to become somebody completely different. I just needed to leave the door open.

I created memories with my son

This matters enormously to me.

Eventually, you do start enjoying life again. And when that happens, I think it’s important to be intentional about it.

I don’t want life to become a collection of Tuesdays, with one ordinary week disappearing into another.

Childhood passes incredibly quickly. So we make plans. We go places. We try things. We travel when we can. We walk the dog. We go for something to eat. We find things we both enjoy.

Not every memory needs an expensive holiday or elaborate day out. Often it’s the ordinary things you remember. The point is to be present enough to notice them.

Heartbreak can make you spend so much time looking backwards that you forget life is still happening in front of you. Your children are growing while you’re healing.

Savour it. Laugh together. Take the photograph. Have things to look forward to.

Don’t postpone all of your living until you feel completely healed. Sometimes living is part of the healing.

I worked towards things that mattered to me

Finally, I started working towards things that were mine. Goals that had nothing to do with whether somebody else stayed or left.

One of the most incredible feelings for me was getting my degree. There was the certificate and graduation, of course, but what it represented mattered even more.

I’d set myself something difficult. I’d worked towards it. I’d kept going. And I’d achieved it.

Experiences like that slowly changed the way I saw myself. I wasn’t only somebody recovering from a breakup. I was learning, growing, raising my son, building a home, achieving things and creating a future.

Alongside all of that, I’ve tried to practise gratitude for what is already here because rebuilding doesn’t mean spending your whole life chasing the next achievement.

Sometimes I stop and think:

Look at what I already have.

A home. My son. People I love. Ordinary days. Things I’ve learned. Things I’ve survived. Things I’m still looking forward to.

And eventually all these small pieces led me here — to creating Lily in Bloom.

I started taking what I’d lived through and asking whether some of it could help another woman sitting where I once sat.

None of these things erased the past. They simply started filling my life with something other than the past.

And I think that’s one of the most important parts of healing.

You don’t necessarily wake up one morning and discover the heartbreak has disappeared.

You slowly build a life that becomes bigger than it.

How do you know you’re healing after a breakup?

This is another reason I like keeping journals. When you’re living inside your healing, progress can be almost impossible to see.

You cried yesterday, so you think: I’m still not over it.

But go back and look at where you were three months ago. Perhaps then you thought about the breakup every ten minutes. Now whole afternoons pass when you don’t. Something that once destroyed your entire weekend now hurts for an hour.

Perhaps you’ve stopped checking their social media or rehearsing imaginary conversations. You made a decision without wondering what they would think. You went somewhere alone. You laughed properly. You made a new memory. You started looking forward to something. You caught yourself imagining a future rather than replaying the past.

Those things count. Healing isn’t necessarily the day you stop caring. Sometimes it’s simply the moment you realise:

This doesn’t control me in the way it used to.

When should you get professional help after a breakup?

There isn’t a time limit after which you’re officially supposed to be “over” a relationship. But there is also no prize for struggling alone.

If your distress feels overwhelming or isn’t easing, you’re experiencing persistent low mood or anxiety, you’re struggling to function day to day, or you’re worried about how you’re coping, consider talking to a qualified mental-health professional or your doctor.

I went to counselling myself, and I’m glad I did. Sometimes another person can help you see patterns that are difficult to recognise when you’re standing in the middle of them.

If you’re in England, NHS Talking Therapies provides psychological therapies for problems including anxiety and depression, and many adults can self-refer without first speaking to their GP. If you live elsewhere, look for equivalent services through your local healthcare system or a suitably qualified mental-health professional.

Build a support network before you reach breaking point if you can: friends, family, other single mums, community groups, people from church or another community meaningful to you, or a counsellor.

You don’t need twenty people. You need a few safe ones.

One of the things heartbreak tempted me to do was retreat. But isolation wasn’t healing me. Connection was part of finding my way back.

If you’re trying to carry parenting, work, heartbreak and everything else alone, you might also find my post How to Avoid Burnout as a Single Mum helpful.

You will not feel like this forever

If you’re reading this in the rawest part of a breakup, perhaps all this talk about blank canvases, goals and rebuilding feels a million miles away.

That’s okay. You don’t have to rebuild your whole life today.

Today your job might simply be to get out of bed, eat something, shower, take your children to school, go to work, cry when you need to, resist sending the message you know won’t help,call somebody and get through the day.

Then tomorrow, you do the next thing.

Heartbreak is part of being human. Somewhere, somebody else is lying awake tonight wondering how their life changed so quickly too.

You are not alone in having to rebuild.

And you don’t need to know yet whether you’ll meet somebody else or exactly what your life will look like five years from now. Those questions can wait.

The most important relationship to rebuild first is the one you have with yourself.

Give yourself time. Feel what you need to feel. Let your children feel too. Create boundaries. Ask for help. Stay connected. Learn the things you don’t know. Build your own security. Make decisions. Make mistakes. Learn from them. Create memories.

Take one small step outside your comfort zone. Then another.

Your breakup is part of your story. It doesn’t have to be the end of it.

One day, you may look back and realise that this wasn’t simply the period when your old life ended. It was also the period when you began — slowly, messily and imperfectly — to create your own path forward.

And perhaps that’s what healing really is.

Not forgetting what happened. Not pretending it didn’t hurt.

But reaching the point where the pain is no longer writing the rest of your story.