A It’s odd, isn’t it? We think that, just because we initiated a break-up, we shouldn’t feel pain. Why shouldn’t we? It hurts. Every relationship breakdown, whether it’s with a lover or a friend, causes emotional waves, some pretty formidable. We don’t like pain, so we apply all sorts of rationalisations to explain it away. We barricade ourselves behind “shoulds” and “oughts” and all manner of imperatives: “I made the break, so I shouldn’t feel this way”, or, “It wasn’t working, so I ought to be pleased it’s over.”

You don’t know why you are in a terrible state. You think it is to do with your ex, as that’s the most obvious and urgent hurt. If you go back to your lover, it’s problem solved. The pain will go. But will it? The moment we feel pain, we try to rationalise it away or find a cause to hang it onto. What more convenient peg than another person?

What if it has nothing to do with him? What if the state you’re in is your heart yelling for attention — but your attention, not somebody else’s? There is no “should” about the way you feel — it is simply the way you feel. So pay attention to it. Acknowledge the pain. Find out what it’s trying to tell you. One of my therapists used to call this, “Staying in the pain room.” It’s no fun, but unless you stay with the pain, you’ll have no way of knowing whether it’s attached to your former lover or something else entirely.

I hate being abandoned. And I mean real, stay-in-bed, duvet-dive, hate it. It’s taken me a while to understand that it is not the person who is driving me nuts so much as the abandonment itself. It makes me feel like a lonely child and it fills me with a terrified sadness. But I now understand that it is my problem, and nobody else’s. The only person who can deal with it is me. Handing it over to somebody else doesn’t solve it, it merely delays it.

Our fear of abandonment makes us behave in irrational ways. We buy into the romantic nonsense of “happy ever after” and insist that a relationship must be perfect, for ever. We provoke our lovers by testing them, or criticising them for small, inoffensive details. We find reasons to be angry and do apparently illogical things like sacking a lover before he can sack us. All this to avoid dealing with the real issue, which is a fear of commitment — simply a fear of showing another person who we truly are. We are human, we are messy, we are all imperfect.

Separating from somebody with whom we were intimate triggers a whole slew of unwelcome emotions that has little to do with reality and a lot to do with buried pain. Confuse the source, stick the pain on another person and there is a lot of damage you can do. We know those push-me, pull-you couples who break up, make up, break up and make up again. There’s happiness only in the brief window when they have just got back together and think the other person is going to mend their poor, wounded heart. They’re not. They can’t. Nobody else can — or should — be responsible for our happiness.

Think of a relationship as a pair of trees. In a bad relationship, the trees are leaning so far towards each other that they are propping each other up. They grow messy and distorted as they fight for space, light, air and water. Neither thrives. In a good relationship, those trees stand side by side, just touching, with enough light and air around them to grow tall and free. Both thrive.

So listen to your heart and pay attention to your pain. You did it once, enough to know the relationship was wrong, and you chose to get out. Perhaps you made a mistake, perhaps you were wrong. So listen again, and listen good — for at least six months. Time is important. It takes time to know how you feel, to get a perspective. This situation is important enough for you not to want to mess with somebody else’s heart and head (again) without care and attention.

Then, if you can honestly say you want to be with your ex because you love, honour and respect him — and not because you want him to fix your pain — then, by all means, ask him. If he’s up for it, great. But if he refuses, honour his truth as well as you have honoured your own.

If you have a relationship question for Sally Brampton, e-mail sally.brampton@sunday-times.co.uk. In case of publication, names will be withheld. Regrettably, no correspondence can be entered into

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