A broken relationship subjects you to a lot of pain and trauma. You may even feel life is not worth living. So how DO you get back to living again?
There is no darkness without light, no knowing good without knowing bad, and love and loss are two sides of the same coin. Yet platitudes seem useless when you’re suffering from a broken heart. Losing someone you love can make you feel insecure, powerless and undeserving. It can make you feel as if you’ll never be happy again. But heartbreak has its seasons as everything else. There are phases you will pass through as you heal from a broken heart and hopefully you can find hope in learning that there is light at the end of the tunnel.
The initial shock and grief you feel when a relationship ends can be devastating. One of the reasons for this is that you’ve identified yourself in terms of this person, through a kind of interdependence. You blend your energies in terms of dreams, hopes and plans so losing someone can feel like you’ve lost a part of yourself. This can happen whether the breakup or loss was your decision or not! But the pain you feel means that you’re thinking of yourself now instead of thinking in terms of another person’s needs, that you’re pulling back and reclaiming your own identity. You’re evolving in a way, trying to become an independent person while incorporating what you’ve learned in and from your relationship.
What you need during this time is to allow yourself time to heal. If you try to ignore or suppress your grief and sadness, you can become numb and paralysed. You need to allow these feelings to pass through you in order for them to pass on. So you may feel confused and surreal, hopeless and tearful, angry and bitter. You may have no desire to see anyone, eat anything and find it hard to take joy in anything. You may feel lonely while you’re surrounded by others. You may feel something akin to physical pain in your chest or stomach. Heartbreak symptoms share many of those associated with withdrawal from alcohol, drug and food addiction.
It’s okay to feel sorry for yourself. It’s okay to relive experiences and memories in your mind. It’s okay to cry, listen to sad songs, and talk to others about how you feel. You may experience triggers everywhere at first but this kind of revisiting allows you to look for lessons and clues about your relationship, the choices and roles involved, the good and the bad.
There is no rule about how long this phase of heartbreak lasts. You may heal quickly after a long relationship and grieve for years over a short one. It’s a dramatic adjustment to think of yourself and live your life on your own after you’ve been so connected to someone else. Of course, some of us can become obsessive, picking off the scab every time the wound begins to heal.
Try scheduling time to obsess over the relationship or your pain if this is true of you and stick to that schedule so that you can still accomplish your daily activities. If it seems that the intensity of your grief doesn’t wane when you allow your emotions to flow during this period or if it goes on for what seems to you is too long, contact someone and get help or get in touch with me as I also help people dealing with heartbreaks and emotional losses.
Avoid over-indulging in alcohol or drugs. Avoid calling the object of your loss excessively if you call at all. Numbing out makes everything worse in the long run and calling or contacting someone who has left you is asking to be re-wounded again and again. Cherish the distance from the object of your grief: it is essential for your recovery.
Towards the end of this phase, make a commitment to rebuild past connections with others. Connect with people that you may have neglected when you were involved in your relationship. Make plans, invite people over, even if it’s difficult. Just going through these motions can distract you from your grief. And a good ear is priceless during this time. Your social network really becomes your life-support system when you’re suffering a broken heart.
Don’t fill your time up to avoid feeling and thinking however, as your brain needs time to review, reorganise and renew. You may have to do some soul-searching to understand why you were in the relationship you were and why it went wrong. Author Harville Hendrix advises thinking with your new brain. He posits that love and heartbreak is associated with the primitive reptilian brain, the one that reacts with fight-or-flight. This brain keeps recreating pain from our past, not only that of the relationship but that over the course of our lives. Rather than leave the reptilian brain on autopilot, Hendrix recommends using logic and thinking, trying to insert rationality into our thoughts about the person or relationship, being realistic about their feet of clay or about what is and could be really good for you.
Your learning will help you build a better plan for future relationships and move you from despair to hope. While you may still think that you’ll never love again or never feel that way again, thinking can help you move past this baggage weighing down your heart. All relationships are paths of exploration. You learn about yourself from your experiences with others. You learn better what you want and don’t want, need and don’t need.
The next phase of heartbreak involves some boomeranging. You may find yourself smiling or enjoying life again. You may find yourself free of thinking about the other person for a few hours at a time. You may consider the future and even the possibility of dating once in awhile. At the same time, you may feel guilt at your ability to recover and then sink back into grief. Your despair may ebb and flow during this time but the waves will become less frequent and less intense. You are recovering yourself. You need to love yourself and be gentle and patient with yourself. One anonymous author wrote: “Real loss only occurs when you lose something that you love more than yourself.” When you begin to love yourself again, above others, you’re on your way to recovery and on your way to truly fulfilling relationships.
The next period of recovery from heartbreak covers this recovery of your identity as an independent person again. You return to some semblance of normalcy, even if you still feel sad. You’re able to concentrate, to think back on the relationship with objectivity, and to consider the future. This is a good time to get involved in new things, to take on new challenges and start new projects. Your experience so far may have revealed much about yourself that you hadn’t known or understood before. Your needs change throughout your life and perhaps you are better able to see now why the relationship wasn’t useful to you anymore or what you need now. Another useful quote: “Until you are broken, you don’t know what you’re made of.”
At this point, you may find it much less painful to think about or even see the person you lost. You realise that you can survive heartbreak and that it contains many lessons. Don’t ever shut yourself off to love because you don’t want to feel pain. Those lessons will help you to avert such intense loss by helping you to realise that you can survive, that you know better and sooner what you need and desire, and by helping you make better choices to begin with. You can be happier than you ever were in a future relationship when you know more about yourself and you can end a bad one before you lose yourself in unhealthy codependence.
There are a number of exercises that can help you through heartbreak: meditation, role plays, visualisation and writing.
When you feel as if your grief and pain are overwhelming, try deep breathing exercises. Pay attention to your inhalations and exhalations and allow the emotions to flow through you. You’ll find that your resistance is what drives intensity up and that by allowing and experiencing your feelings, they will naturally ebb and flow.
You can use visualisation exercises to imagine your heart healing and expanding, to imagine yourself flowering through pain, or to imagine yourself on the other side of your experience: happy, strong and vital.
Writing about your pain and suffering can be very useful. The British Psychological Society found that writing about emotions can even hasten the rate at which physical wounds heal. Writing is cathartic and reading what you’ve written can help you to see things more objectively so that you glean many more lessons from your experience than you might otherwise.
If you find yourself very stuck, feeling very wronged or like there are too many questions left unanswered you can do a role play. Place two chairs facing each other and sit in one. Close your eyes and do some deep breathing. Open your eyes and imagine that the person you’ve lost is sitting across from you. Say to them whatever is on your mind; ask them whatever questions you’d like answers to. Then move to the other chair. Take a moment to truly imagine that you are them because telling yourself simply what you want to hear won’t be useful. Speak as that person to your imaginary self in the other chair. Shift back and forth until you feel relief. You may be surprised by the insights you had and hadn’t acknowledged before.
Take hope that your broken heart will heal and take note that you’ll be stronger and better informed because of it. Take steps to move out of heartbreak while allowing yourself the time you need to heal. Take care not to wound yourself over and over. If you find yourself doing this extensively, get help because your pain isn’t because of the other person, but due to past and personal issues you may need to resolve.
