To understand emotional detachment, let’s first define emotional attachment, its opposite. Being emotionally attached means you are emotionally invested in something. You channel your emotional energy into it. Our emotional bandwidth is limited, so we must choose wisely where to invest emotionally.
When we emotionally invest in something, we expect a return, usually emotional as well, on our investment. For instance, a child gets attached to a parent or a family member in hopes of getting love, care, and support back. When the child grows up, emotional return is expected from friends and a romantic partner as well.
Similarly, when you get emotionally attached to an object, like a car, you likely get some kind of emotional return from it. It increases your status and makes you look cool.
You can get emotionally attached to anything- people, work, things, situations, ideas, etc. As long as you keep getting an emotional return for what you put emotionally into that thing. But what happens when you emotionally invest a lot into something and get little or no return?
Detachment
Since our emotional energy reserves are limited, your mind can’t afford to waste them on bad investments where you get almost nothing back. The process called emotional detachment kicks in. This process makes you withdraw your emotional energy from a bad emotional investment so you can redirect it into a good one. Continuing to put emotional energy into something that doesn’t yield a return is the road to emotional exhaustion.1Wu, Q., Qi, T., Wei, J., & Shaw, A. (2023). Relationship between psychological detachment from work and depressive symptoms: indirect role of emotional exhaustion and moderating role of self-compassion. BMC psychology, 11(1), 344.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably not getting a return for your emotional investment and want to learn how to emotionally detach. Even though you can get emotionally attached to anything, in this article, I’ll primarily use the context of a romantic relationship because that’s where people struggle with emotional detachment the most.
Ways to emotionally detach
1. Emotional distancing
Emotional distance from the object you want to detach from can be easily achieved by establishing physical distance. What you see is what you think about. What you think about constantly is what you get emotionally attached to. Out of sight, out of mind works.
So, if you’re going through a breakup and want to completely emotionally detach from your ex, removing all visual reminders of them is an effective strategy. That means deleting all the photos from your phone, removing them from all social media platforms, and so on. You shouldn’t be able to communicate with them in any way at all.
2. Emotional processing
When you emotionally over-invest in someone, you keep thinking about them. This happens when you have a crush on someone, are in the limerence stage of a relationship, or have recently gone through a breakup. Your mind gets consumed by the person. What you can do at this point is process how you’re feeling by dumping your thoughts in a journal or talking to a trusted friend.
This emotional processing frees up some of your emotional bandwidth. If you don’t process your emotions linked to the thoughts of that person, those thoughts will keep doing rounds in your head, consuming emotional bandwidth.
Related: Emotional detachment quiz
3. Close the gap
This is an effective cognitive technique you can use if you’re stuck in an unhealthy relationship or have recently gone through a breakup. In both scenarios, you’re likely to find yourself overconsumed with the thoughts of your partner and the feelings accompanying those thoughts. On one hand, you know your partner is not, or was not, right for you. On the other hand, your mind pushes you to stay with, or go back to, them. You’re essentially stuck in a gap between attachment and detachment.
You can close the gap by increasing the perceived pain of being in the relationship. For example, you can take a negative trait of your partner or ex and ask yourself:
“What would my life look like 5 years down the road if I keep tolerating this behavior?”
What you’ve done is magnify the pain of being in the relationship. When pain becomes greater than love in a relationship, detaching forces get activated. You’re greatly motivated to emotionally detach from your partner.
4. Cognitive reframing
If you’re stuck in the situation described in the previous section, you can also use cognitive reframing. That means interpreting a situation differently so you feel differently. Your mind does what it can to keep you emotionally hooked to bad emotional investments like an unhealthy partner. So even when you leave them, your mind may selectively recall good memories with them:
“It was so good. Let’s go back to that.”
“You overreacted. Nothing bad happened to you.”
“You were too harsh in leaving them.”
“You should’ve forgiven them. They’re only human.”
Forcing yourself to remember the bad things that happened to you counters these ‘tricks’ of the mind and helps you see your current situation differently. Instead of seeing yourself at a position of disadvantage for not being with them, you feel grateful that you no longer have to deal with their unhealthy behaviors (increasing perceived pain). It’s not easy and takes time, but over time, the mind drops these tricks.
5. Counter Zeigarnik effect
The Zeigarnik effect states that we keep thinking about our unfinished business or open loops, as some call them. You don’t want unfinished businesses or open loops in your mind because what you keep thinking about, you get emotionally invested in.
Say you encounter a problem at work at the end of your workday, but can’t work longer due to company rules. That problem will open a loop in your mind, and you’ll keep thinking about it. You’ll struggle to emotionally detach from your work when you’re at home with your family.2Meier, L. L., & Cho, E. (2019). Work stressors and partner social undermining: Comparing negative affect and psychological detachment as mechanisms. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 24(3), 359.
One way to close the loop is to set goals and create plans to tackle that problem at the end of your workday.3Smit, B. W. (2016). Successfully leaving work at work: The self‐regulatory underpinnings of psychological detachment. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 89(3), 493-514. When you do that, you close the loop because your mind knows you’ll work on the problem tomorrow.
Similarly, if you can’t stop thinking about your crush, it’s an open loop in your mind. Your mind wants you to do something about it. If you make a plan to approach this person, your mind will be at rest.
6. Dial, not a switch
The default tendency in us is to treat emotional attachment as a switch. You’ve likely heard something along these lines:
“I really liked him, but that day it was like a switch flipped and I became emotionally detached.”
This statement shows we treat emotional attachment like a switch that is turned ‘ON’ or ‘OFF’. This is all-or-nothing thinking.
“Either I’ll be fully attached or completely detached.”
This thinking creates problems in our interpersonal relationships because it can make us over-attach to someone before we get to know them. Or it can make you cut off good people from your life because they made one mistake.
Instead of treating emotional attachment like a switch, try treating it like a dial that goes from 0 (full detachment) to 5 (full attachment). Adjust the dial based on how people treat you.
So if you get attached to level 3 to a person and they return only a level 1 attachment, you dial down your emotional investment to 1. This way, you can maintain connections with people in your life even if you don’t want to get emotionally attached to them too much. This helps you save some of that emotional energy to be poured into other, more mutually-beneficial-to-the-same-degree type of attachments.
7. Identity work
Often, a sense of identity is the emotional return that we get when we emotionally invest in something. The people we associate with shape our identities. Our romantic partners often have a big impact on shaping our identity. While some, like the anxiously attached, derive a bulk of their sense of identity from their romantic partners, others, like avoidants, don’t identify with their partners as much. Still, the latter have to put their emotional energy into something. They have to identify with something. Usually, it’s work and/or hobbies.
Regardless of what you identify with, when you emotionally detach from the source of your identity, your identity gets fragmented. You now have to rebuild your identity. You can build a whole new identity from scratch, or you can return to an older one. Or you can keep parts of your older self and join them with your new self.
Whatever path you choose, such identity work requires you to find things to emotionally invest in. Maybe you want to invest in yourself, your hobbies, friends, etc. Maybe you want to find more meaning in your work or your romantic relationship.
The point I’m trying to make is that emotional detachment in one life area frees up emotional energy that seeks re-investment in other areas. It’s hard not to emotionally invest in anything. The mind doesn’t know what to do with all that energy.
When you allocate that emotional energy into worthwhile investments, you rebuild and redefine who you are.
Successful detachment
It’s easy to claim that you’ve successfully detached from something, but have you really? If I had to check whether you’ve emotionally detached from something or not, I would just check how much emotional energy you still give to that thing.
Because if you still give a lot of emotional energy to it, you haven’t completely detached. You’re still in cognitive dissonance about this thing, which means your mind is still pushing you in the other direction. Cognitive dissonance consumes a lot of energy, and emotional detachment is energy conservation, not energy consumption.
Using the example of an ex, if you keep talking about your ex, I know you’re still emotionally invested in them. If you claim to have left a political ideology but still comment angrily on their social media pages, I know you haven’t emotionally detached. If you keep bringing up a thing, that means you’re constantly thinking about that thing, which likely means you’re still emotionally attached.
When you’ve successfully detached from something, you won’t think and talk about it, except when you have to. And when you do talk about it, you’ll talk about it dispassionately, as if it’s just another casual. random, everyday thing. You’re not pretending you don’t care. Pretending takes energy and, thus, signals emotional investment. You really don’t care.
