Why Yapping About The Same Thing Over And Over Actually Helps You Get Over It

The second I block my latest situationship, my fingers move just as fast to fire off an “SOS” to the group chat: emergency yap session at our usual coffee shop. And with no questions or hesitations, in comes a flood of thumbs-up emojis. My friends understand the significance of yapping.

I’ve been writing about sex and relationships for six years now, so I’d like to think I have a solid grasp of the dating landscape. But I’m still learning every day — from my own messes, my friends’ war stories, and the experts I admire. And while I’ve picked up plenty of “tips” and “tricks” (you wouldn’t believe what I can do during a blowjob), the biggest lesson I’ve learned (painfully, I might add) is that when it comes to breakups — or ending any relationship — time is the only cure. Well, time and yapping about it.

“Talking is the way our brain processes pain,” Dr. Wendy Walsh, relationship expert at DatingAdvice, tells Betches. “Language is the way we take feelings from our ancient emotional brain and filter them through our pre-frontal cortex to create a narrative that helps us make sense of the pain.”

Some may journal about it (I’ve made a career out of this), some talk through issues with a therapist (shoutout to you, Laquilla), and others vent to friends. I like to do all three. And I’ve come to learn that the latter is just as important as the others. But if I’m already writing about my woes and pinpointing the exact moment my situationship got me fucked up with the help of a licensed professional, then why is it so important that my friends and I dig into the situation over and over and over again from every possible angle? Well, Dr. Walsh explains that there’s a huge psychological benefit to talking through our pain.

Image Credit: HBO

“It helps us become more rational and logical about emotions, which often feel very irrational or illogical,” she says.

Processing is basically a form of sense-making. And sometimes, it takes a little while for our subconscious to connect with what we’re saying aloud to our friends. That’s why we need to hunt down every single important friend in our life and break the situation down repeatedly.

Now, you might think that telling more and more people just creates the possibility for more conflicting advice, but Dr. Walsh explains that sometimes it’s better to hear a wider range of opinions.

“We unconsciously know the advice we are going to get from each friend, so we tend to unknowingly bring our problems to the person who tells us what we want to hear,” she says. So the more people we hear from, the less we’re getting advice that’ll just be a soundboard for what we want to hear.

It’s only unproductive if we take our stories to the wrong friends, Dr. Walsh says. While I hope that we’re all taking constant stock of the people in our lives, sometimes we don’t realize some of our “friends” may not truly support us. So it’s important that we reflect on which of our friends actually have our best interests at heart when going to them for advice.

It’s also unproductive when we ruminate. Listen, it’s important to dissect a situation with your friends as many times as you need (and then a few more times for good measure). But each time you do this, you’re supposed to internalize the advice you’re hearing from your friends. It won’t happen overnight, but it should definitely feel like it’s happening over time. So if there’s no resolution despite constantly talking about the same thing over and over again, you’re just ruminating.

“It’s a feeling of being stuck in one’s emotional brain and unable to intellectually process,” Dr. Walsh says. “If the feelings of loss keep someone from moving forward in life or doing the activities that they once enjoyed, you’re not healing, you’re stuck.”

This doesn’t mean you’re doomed to a life of pining over your ex — it just means you might have “complicated grief,” a condition where it feels impossible to move past the mourning stage of your loss. And if that’s the case, your best bet is to thank your friends for doing everything they could do to help — and then to let your therapist know that you need a little more guidance than you thought.