Finding Yourself Again After the Anger, Hurt and Loneliness
Two stories in The Australian this week stayed with me.
Irish novelist Louise O'Neill writes about the year after her relationship ended. She had just bought a house with her partner of five years. Then it was over, and for a while she could barely eat or sleep. Her way back was bold: more than 100 dates in one year, across Europe and New York, to find her confidence again.
Columnist Charlotte Ree writes about returning to dating apps after a break-up with one honest question: why had she been accepting less than she wanted?
I loved both stories. Both women were brave, and both found something good.
If you are in the middle of your own version, this is for you. A break-up hurts your body as much as your heart. It leaves anger with nowhere to go. You stop feeling like yourself. A part of you miss being touched. Tantra bodywork can help with all of it, and I want to say plainly how.
Being left hurts, physically
If your chest aches and you can't sleep, that is your body grieving. In one brain-imaging study, people looked at a photo of the ex who had left them. The parts of the brain that register physical pain became active.
Your body is carrying this, so your body needs care too. Touch helps. A 2024 review in Nature Human Behaviour pooled 137 studies and almost 13,000 people. In adults, touch eased pain, anxiety and feelings of depression.
It did not have to come from a partner. Therapeutic touch from a trained professional helped as much as touch from someone familiar.
The anger has to go somewhere
A break-up brings more than sadness. There is anger. Frustration. Somewhere the sting of being rejected if you are not the one who ended it.
In one study, people kept an emotions diary for four weeks after a break-up. Their feelings swung hardest in the first few days. Anger and sadness rose and fell in waves; they did not fade in a straight line.
Those feelings have to go somewhere. Most of us swallow them. We stay polite, keep working and tell friends we're fine. The body holds what we don't say: a tight jaw, a knotted stomach, shoulders that never come down and a strange feeling in the gut at times.
In a Tantra session, as your body softens, those feelings can rise. Sometimes it is tears. Sometimes it is anger, or a long shaky breath. All of it is welcome, and you don't have to explain any of it.
Some feelings lift once they have been felt like this in a Tantra session. Others stay, and the bodywork and follow-up Tantra practices session help you make peace with them, from strength and not compromise. Researchers link the skill of feeling emotions in the body with handling them better. Either way, you stop holding them down or being swayed by them.
You lose a bit of yourself too
A break-up takes more than a person. It takes the "we" you were part of, and for a while you can't tell who you are without it. That's often the most daunting part: it can feel like a loss of identity. Research from Northwestern University found exactly this: people were less sure of who they were after a break-up, and that confusion added to the pain.
O'Neill found herself again out in the world, one date at a time. Tantra offers another way in, through your body.
Here is what that means. When you are hurting, you live in your head. You replay conversations and go numb from the neck down. In a session you slow down and begin to feel again: your breath, the oil on your skin, the weight of a hand on your back and sensations in your body that you may not have noticed before and, the messages and meanings they bring to awareness.
That is coming home to your body. You remember that you are here, and that you are whole on your own. That’s rediscovering yourself, bringing together the parts that could have been left behind.
It also sharpens your instincts. O'Neill says her big lesson was learning to trust her gut. Your gut is a real, physical sense, and scientists call it interoception. Studies show that people who feel their body's signals clearly are guided by them more strongly, and that body-based work can train it.
The more you can feel, the clearer your own yes and no become.
Letting yourself be looked after
Ree writes honestly about being the one who gives. She gravitated to people with problems to solve, so she can anticipate what they need and fill every gap. Being cared for is the harder part. Giving becomes the reason to stay, even when your own needs are not being met, while receiving is forgotten or pushed aside, often unnoticed.
If that is you, a Tantra massage is good practice. You lie on a massage table. The touch goes one way, from me to you. You just receive what the tradition has to offer. You don't give anything back. You don't have to perform for anyone. For once, you are the one being looked after.
It can feel strange at first. Most of us are far better at giving. But receiving is a skill, and it gets easier each time.
Missing touch, and missing that part of yourself
Let me be direct about this one. After a break-up you can go months, even years, without being touched. You miss being held. You may also miss feeling sensual and alive in your own skin— and it’s not about sex.
That is touch hunger, and it is a normal human need. During the pandemic restrictions, a survey of 1,746 adults linked going without close touch to more anxiety and more loneliness. Close touch was what people craved most.
You don't have to wait for a new relationship to feel your body again. Tantra gives you a way to explore your sensuality on your own terms. The aim is not arousal. The aim is to feel.
In Tantra, sensuality is sensory awareness, not literal sexuality. The touch is slow and attentive, aiming to awaken sensation where it has become numb or quiet. Everything is agreed with you beforehand. There is no one to please and no goal to reach.
What you gain is knowledge of yourself. What kind of touch you like. Where you feel a lot, and where you feel very little. What makes you soften. What you may be guarding and where. What you need to let go of.
A review of the research found this kind of body awareness supports sexual wellbeing for some women. You take that knowledge into every relationship that follows.
You are in charge
Before anything else, we talk. You tell me what brings you and what you want. We agree your boundaries and write them down, and you can change them at any moment.
You can say yes, no or "not yet", and it is respected every time. After break-up, that matters. Being listened to rebuilds trust in yourself. Many women who come to Sukh Tantra express something similar — that the session helped them reconnect with their sense of permission and control. Apart from feeling safe and calm, they felt empowered in some unexplained way.
One honest note. The studies here are about touch, body awareness and break-ups in general, and cover many aspects involved in Tantra; research on Tantra itself is still young. A University of Edinburgh doctoral study of women in Tantra found they used touch practices to build a stronger sense of who they are.
One more way to heal
Every woman heals in her own way. For O'Neill it was a year of 100 dates. For Ree it was an honest conversation with a sexologist. For others it is therapy, or good friends.
Tantra bodywork is one more way. If you are hurting, angry, feeling lost, or simply missing touch, you are welcome here exactly as you are.
You can find yourself again.
Book your reconnection. Book a session, or start with a discreet Discovery Call.
Sources
Charlotte Ree, "What do you do when there is nothing to fix in a person?", The Weekend Australian Magazine, October 2026.
Anna Silverman, "What I learnt from going on 100 dates in a year", The Times, republished in The Australian, 2 October 2026.
Kross E. et al. (2011). Social rejection shares somatosensory representations with physical pain. PNAS, 108(15), 6270–6275.
Sbarra D. A. and Emery R. E. (2005). The emotional sequelae of nonmarital relationship dissolution. Personal Relationships, 12(2), 213–232.
Slotter E. B., Gardner W. L. and Finkel E. J. (2010). Who am I without you? The influence of romantic breakup on the self-concept. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36(2), 147–160.
Dunn B. D. et al. (2010). Listening to your heart: how interoception shapes emotion experience and intuitive decision making. Psychological Science, 21(12), 1835–1844.
Price C. J. and Hooven C. (2018). Interoceptive awareness skills for emotion regulation. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 798.
Packheiser J. et al. (2024). A systematic review and multivariate meta-analysis of the physical and mental health benefits of touch interventions. Nature Human Behaviour, 8, 1088–1107.
von Mohr M., Kirsch L. P. and Fotopoulou A. (2021). Social touch deprivation during COVID-19: effects on psychological wellbeing and craving interpersonal touch. Royal Society Open Science.
Meston Lab, University of Texas at Austin. The impact of body awareness on women's sexual health: a comprehensive review. Sexual Medicine Reviews.
Bishop S. (2020). Touch in contemporary Tantra: transgression, healing, and ecstasy in women's constructions of selfhood. PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh.
