Moving on From Longing: A Deeper Guide to Understanding, Healing, and Letting Go
Longing for someone — especially a past partner — can feel like a source of suffering you can’t quite shake.
Even when your mind knows the relationship is over, your heart can cling to a “what if” that feels impossible to release. Sometimes longing passes quickly. Other times, it lingers — years of replaying memories, wishing for one more conversation, for things to be different and imagining what could have been.
If you’ve ever wondered why letting go feels harder for you than it does for others, the answer usually runs deeper than the relationship itself. This kind of longing is rarely just about the person — it’s also about attachment patterns, family dynamics, and the way your nervous system learned to respond to love and loss.
Why Longing Feels So Strong
Attachment Shapes Our Response to Loss
The way we bonded (or struggled to bond) with caregivers sets the template for how we handle relationships as adults.
First, let’s review the basic attachment styles to better understand how they shape our sense of longing and connection.
Anxious attachment often makes us hyper-focus on reconnection and fear abandonment. If childhood love was inconsistent — warm one moment, withdrawn the next — we may find ourselves clinging harder, replaying the past, and struggling to trust that new love will come.
Avoidant attachment can lead to suppressing feelings until the absence becomes unbearable. This often stems from emotional neglect or a family culture that discouraged vulnerability. Longing here might look like busyness or detachment on the surface, but an ache underneath.
Secure attachment allows grief to move through — to be felt and integrated without it defining one’s worth.
Disorganized attachment combines both: craving closeness while also fearing it.
When early experiences taught your nervous system that love was inconsistent, losing someone can unconsciously register as life-threatening — even if you’re a capable, independent adult now.
Family Roles & Unmet Needs
If you grew up in a household marked by dysfunction or unpredictability, love may have been paired with caretaking, uncertainty, or emotional labor. That wiring makes longing feel oddly familiar, even when it hurts.
Children who over-functioned — who took on more responsibility than they should have — often feel magnetically drawn to relationships that recreate those dynamics. And even after a breakup, the pull doesn’t just vanish.
Emotional Scarcity
When love or attention felt scarce in childhood, the loss of a relationship can stir deep fears of abandonment. The longing becomes less about the person themselves and more about the comfort and safety they represented.
If you grew up with conditional love, rare affection, or minimized emotional needs, longing often becomes an old wound replaying itself — an attempt to finally “win” the kind of love that was never steady to begin with.
The Brain Makes Letting Go Physically Hard
Love lights up the same dopamine pathways as addictive substances. A breakup is, in many ways, withdrawal. And if your history associates love with high emotional stakes, the comedown is more intense and drawn-out.
The Story Keeps the Cycle Alive
Our minds crave closure. In its absence, they invent stories: “If only I had done this differently…” These imagined rewrites keep the person alive in your psyche, but rarely reflect the reality of the relationship.
The Path Forward
Letting go isn’t a single decision. It’s a layered process of rewiring old emotional habits, creating new meaning, and re-establishing safety in yourself.
Name What You’re Really Longing For
Ask Yourself:
Am I longing for this person, or for the way I felt when I was with them?
What old wound does this longing touch?
Often, what we’re really missing is belonging, validation, security, or excitement. Naming the core need is the first step toward meeting it in healthier ways.
Trace the Thread Back
Explore your family patterns:
How was love given or withheld?
Did you have to earn love through performance or caretaking?
Did you feel safe expressing needs, or did you learn to hide them?
This helps you see longing as a pattern you inherited — not proof that something’s wrong with you.
Break the Emotional-Addiction Loop (3 Tips)
Limit triggering contact (yes, including social media).
Interrupt rumination with movement, breath, or something sensory.
Replace the “hit” with other dopamine sources: creative projects, physical challenges, new environments.
Rewrite the Story
Balance nostalgia with truth. Write out the relationship as it really was — both the beautiful and the painful. Revisit it when your mind starts idealizing the past. Root in the truth by focusing on facts, not stories of “what was.”
Build Safety in the Present
Longing spikes when life feels uncertain. Create anchors such as:
A grounding daily rhythm
Emotional support (friends, seeking therapy, mentors)
Environments that bring sensory pleasure — look to things like nature, art + music to ground in.
Grieve Fully, Without Shame
Grief is not weakness. It’s how the body metabolizes truth. Let yourself feel the sadness, anger, or nostalgia without rushing to fix it. If you’re struggling to cope with difficult emotions and “feel your feelings” checkout my post on just that HERE.
Create a Future That Pulls You Forward
Healing gains momentum when what lies ahead excites you more than what’s behind. Travel, create, learn, build new connections — let your imagination stretch toward what’s next. Go toward people, places and things that bring you joy in the present to help you create a future that helps you to move forward.
Final Thought
Moving on isn’t about erasing the past or pretending it didn’t matter. It’s about understanding the deeper forces — family history, attachment style, brain chemistry — that make you hold on so tightly. It’s shifting your mind toward understanding that “it’s not about them; it’s about the deeper “core issues” that we experienced before they showed up.
When you heal the root, you’re not just letting go of one person. You’re loosening the grip of old patterns, reclaiming a part of yourself that’s been waiting — long before this relationship — to finally be free.
*Image by Photographer & Visual Artist Amy Lynn Bojornson.
How to Cope with the Feeling of Longing
What do you long for?
Is it a person, a place, a lifestyle, an adventure, a level of health……….?
How does longing show up within you? How does it feel?
Does it ache, hurt and cause frustration? Or does it inspire drive and excitement……?
Recently, I had a client reach out with a blog topic suggestion: “I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the subject of longing.”
Ironically, as life would have it, I’d spent the two hours prior to receiving this topic suggestion “trying” to connect with my next blog topic. After a continuous pattern of writing followed by deleting, I decided to close down my computer and remove myself from the task at hand since nothing was transpiring.
(*Life Reminder: Don’t try so hard, when you stop forcing is when the next step is often revealed.)
For me, when I write, or when I do most things for that matter, I need to feel connected and aligned with the topic or task I’m doing. You have my word that I’m never going to write just for content. My writing comes from somewhere deep within that has no agenda and I will not compromise that.
With that said, thank you to my client for this topic suggestion, for it resonates with me in so many ways and the timely suggestion reminds me to believe in the divine timing of it all. Cheers to that.
Now, lets get to the subject of longing. For me this single word is filled with powerful emotions and depth.
It’s a beautiful word. It’s an intense word.
Longing for something or someone is an involved and in-depth experience. It has deep roots and days of emotional gusto.
Whether you’re longing is coming from what you desire to create, a loss of love or what once was, an adventure you’re seeking or a relationship you’re yearning for, your experience of longing can work for you vs. against you. Longing is defined as “a yearning desire.” (I love that.) The intensity and level of emotional charge that a feeling or experience has often matches the level of self growth and change that can manifest from it. Within that space, where the feeling of longing lives, is where you can create some big shifts from within.
“Desire directs energy; and when you are clear about your desires, you are more precise in your creative aim.”
Our lives are constantly presenting us with situations and experiences that we get to filter in any way we choose. Longing can be a miserable and frustrating feeling if we become too focused on what we perceive is lacking. Meaning, getting caught in believing that what we long for is “not” showing up or, worse, ultimately, coming at all.
On the other hand, if we can harness our longing in the form of hopeful desire while keeping our focus toward the something which is on the way, we will allow ourselves to feel excited anticipation vs. discomfort. This presents two approaches to the same emotion, resulting in two very different paths. Believing that what you're seeking and longing for is on its way creates a very different energy than believing that you've missed "the" opportunity.
Also, for the record, you will miss opportunities in life. We all will because that’s apart of the life experience for all of us to some extent. However, if you do feel that you “missed” a significant opportunity, do your best to believe that another one is coming because it is. That is the true rhythm of life; If you miss one boat, another one is surely coming. It’s just the way it works and don’t forget it.
“You missed AN opportunity; not THE opportunity.”
The work lies within where we focus our mind when our sense of longing is triggered. Do we dwell in it? Ache about it? Avoid it? Get depressed about it? Or, do we walk toward it? Do we acknowledge our longing while staying true to our desire? Do we stay in belief that our desire is coming?
Q: What we desire also desire us, right? Wy would we have a desire that has grown from deep within if it weren't meant to transpire?
There’s also the piece to longing that I very much want to speak to, which is the part that can ache so painfully. The part that causes the kind of pain and hurt that you question if you can stomach. As much as I wish I can take away this intensity and level of pain that we can feel at times as humans, I simply can’t. What I can offer is to guide you toward putting attention in doing for yourself which you outwardly desire.
For example, if you desire love; give yourself love. If you yearn for respect; treat yourself respectfully. If you desire quiet; give yourself the space for a peaceful reflection and solitude. In the simplest of terms; give to yourself what you're longing for. There’s always a way to twist what you desire from the world and contort it into a form where you can give it back to yourself. As you do this, you simultaneously, open up the pathway to bring toward you what you want.
This is how you bring toward you what you desire in a super organic way.
Remember: What you give, you get back. Give out what you long for and it shall appear in some way, shape or form.
If you can become curious about your longing and believe that the intensity of it is here to teach you or direct you, that perspective can help you shift the energy around this potentially “tricky” feeling.
Be with your longing. Trust it. Tap into it and see what flows your way. Cheers friends.
For more perspectives & tips check out and feel free to SUBSCRIBE to my youtube channel. Also here’s two books that I recommend to encourage your self growth process. These books could be supportive as you work through your unique feelings around longing: The Untethered Soul & Letting Go.
* The above image was taken by Amy Lynn Bjornson, lifestyle & wedding Photographer.