(Editor's note: the following article was kindly donated by Kenneth Eckersley, writer, broadcaster, public speaker and 20-year campaigner against drug abuse. In this time, Mr Eckersley has advised many people regarding break-ups.

Life, inevitably and by its very nature, is a series of "ups and downs", made up of wins and losses. And it is from the losses that we can learn most about achieving new wins and a happier existence.

In fact life works just that way.  From the very day we are born, life is an exploration, an

As we get stronger and braver, we reach out and explore some of life's "beehives".  We get stung and, if we are normal, we learn how to avoid the stings and soon have honey production going at a great rate.

It's the same with relationships and especially love.
As our bodies and minds mature, we reach deeper and deeper into the "wasp's nest" of girl friends and boy-friends and, because people can be attracted to each other for often quite different reasons, there are inevitably break-ups, and one or both of the partners can walk away feeling well and truly emotionally "stung".

If not interfered with, life says "better luck next time" and "that should be another lesson well learned", and just like a bruise, cut or burn, in anything from 3 days to 3 weeks, the whole episode fades into being just another memory, and we start to look for our next challenges.

Unless we are unlucky enough to have someone around who "sympathises" with our loss, or who seeks to make a personal or financial profit from our new misery.  

We have many friends ready to make our misery valuable and worth holding onto by giving us that apparently loving form of attention called "sympathy".  We just lost the attention of a loved one, and along comes an apparent new source of similar attention - an ally in our misery - and because we can be warmed by that attention in such "cold" times, we tend to hold on to the misery as a means of getting even more attention.


In addition, today we have too many experts telling us what we should think and do, and too many so-called professionals seeking to counsel us on where we went wrong or on what we can "take" to drown our sorrows or to chase the blues away with some new form of prescription or illegal "high" which they assure us it is totally "safe" to use (and which will stop you even wanting to get your ex back).

Even if we are wise enough to avoid the "friend" with the hip-flask of whisky, and the "pusher" with his line of coke or bag of "something to kill the pain", there are other more subtle and even official-looking traps.  Psychologists, psychiatrists and chemical companies seek to take advantage of what would normally be our rather temporary sadness in order to earn their living, and as a result make more profit by helping our normally short-lived despair to become a much bigger factor in life - a factor which even earns us the attention of "experts" and NHS spending.

But no one else can live our lives for us or know enough about us to be able to usefully direct our lives.  Life is a "Do It For Yourself" activity, and when we hand over the direction of our life to another person, or control of it to some addictive substance, we lose our power of choice and start the long descent towards becoming a robotic personality. 

The question is: can you get your ex back? The factor which probably does most to strengthen character and develop resilience is the confronting and handling for yourself of personal losses and break-ups which inevitably occur in everybody's life.

Yes.  Everybody's lives.  Loss of grandparents, Dads, Mums, pets and friends are as inevitable as loss of mother's breast, the feeding-bottle, milk-teeth, hair, hearing, eyesight, the place we were born in, our first school and school-friends and a host of other facilities and faculties.