Dating & Breakups
Dating and breakups are some of the most emotionally intense experiences a person moves through, and they are too often treated as too minor to bring to therapy. They are not minor. How you date, who you are drawn to, what happens to you when a relationship ends, and how you rebuild afterward touch your deepest patterns of attachment, worth, and belonging. This work is for the individual navigating dating, heartbreak, and the long work of building relationships that are actually good for you.
What people bring to this work
- Heartbreak and the grief of a breakup, which can be as disorienting and consuming as any other loss, and which the culture often expects you to get over quickly
- The patterns that repeat in dating, including being drawn to people who recreate old hurt, struggling to leave relationships that are not working, or finding that the same dynamic keeps appearing with different people
- The anxiety, exhaustion, and self-doubt of modern dating, including dating apps, mixed signals, ghosting, and the particular loneliness that dating can produce
- Attachment patterns as they show up in dating, including the anxious pull, the avoidant retreat, and the cycles between them
- Questions of self-worth that dating tends to surface, including the sense that your value depends on being chosen
- The specific landscape of dating for marginalized folks, including the racism, fatphobia, transphobia, and ableism that show up in dating culture and on apps
- Rebuilding after a breakup, including the work of grieving, learning, and slowly coming back to yourself
- Figuring out what you actually want in a relationship, separate from what you have been told to want or have settled for
What this work can look like at MLC:
- Holding the grief of a breakup as a real loss that deserves space, rather than something to rush past
- Tracing the patterns that keep appearing in your dating life back to where they came from, with compassion
- Working with the attachment patterns that shape how you reach for and pull away from connection
- Addressing the self-worth questions that dating surfaces, and the belief that your value depends on being chosen
- Holding the specific harms of dating as a marginalized person, rather than treating them as personal bad luck
- Supporting the rebuilding after heartbreak, at the pace your healing actually takes
- Getting clear on what you genuinely want and need in a relationship, and what you are no longer willing to accept
The therapists at MLC understand that dating and breakups are not trivial. They are where some of our deepest material about love, worth, and belonging lives.
