“To fall in love is awfully simple, but to fall out of love is simply awful,” especially if you are the one who wanted the relationship to last. But to stop loving isn’t an option. “When those you love deeply reject you, leave you, or die, your heart will be broken. But that should not hold you back from loving deeply. The pain that comes from deep love makes your love ever more fruitful.” But how do we get beyond the pain?
When we suffer a deep loss or trauma our hearts can literally feel like they have been shattered into a million pieces. Or we feel that our heart has broken open and we are bleeding metaphorically. At times it can even be difficult to breathe. Our heart is both a living organ that is our life source as well as an emotional mind/body metaphor referred to when we experience heartache and sorrow. It's as if the heart that beats to an electrical energy wave becomes short circuited and burns out, flares out or is broken into many tiny pieces.
After the initial shock of a loss many feel the need to push aside their grief lest it overwhelm them with its intensity. This is understandable, but the longer you avoid your pain and attempt to push it away, the more difficult it will be to break out of the paralysis. Just as birds are drawn to bread crumbs on the ground, the pain will keep returning after you shoo it away.
Here are techniques I’ve gathered from experts and from conversations with friends on how they patched up their heart and tried, ever so gradually, to move on:
ACCEPT THE PAIN
Accept that you will have to go through some pain. It is an unavoidable truth that if you loved enough to be heartbroken, you have to experience some suffering.When you lose something that mattered to you, it is natural and important to feel sad about it: that feeling is an essential part of the healing process.
The problem with broken hearted people is that they seem to be reliving their misery over and over again. If you cannot seem to break the cycle of painful memories, the chances are that you are locked into repeating dysfunctional patterns of behaviour. Your pain has become a mental habit. This habit can, and must, be broken.
This is not to belittle the strength of your feelings or the importance of the habits you've built up during your relationship. Without habit, none of us would function. But there comes a time when the pain becomes unhealthy.
When you enter your bedroom at night, you switch on the light without thinking. If you obsess about your ex, and feel unhappy all the time, it's likely that your unconscious mind is 'switching on' your emotions in exactly the same way.
Without realising it, you have programmed yourself to feel a pang of grief every time you hear that tune you danced to, or see your ex's empty chair across the kitchen table.
Remove all the memories of the person from your everyday life. You're not trying to pretend like the person never existed, just temporarily forget how much they meant to you and how they broke your heart.
Go through your room and remove all pictures of, letters from, references to the person you're trying to stop obsessing over. If you have a journal in which you write about the person, begin a completely new one. It's a symbolic new beginning, but an important one.
Removing is different from destroying. Don't burn or destroy any objects associated with the person, unless you're sure that you never want them to be any part of your life in the future. When you're old and completely in love with someone who loves you just as much back, the memories will be a record of all that you went through to get to where you are now.
CHANGE YOUR HABITS
Now you have to break those connections. Turn off the music that reminds you of your ex. Make your home look and feel different from when your loved one was around. Move the furniture.Take up a new activity. And keep moving: exercise is the single most effective therapy for depression.
The point of these changes is to break up the old associations and give yourself a new environment for your new life. The changes you make don't have to be permanent. Even if it is just using a different shampoo and deleting your ex's number from the memory of your mobile, change something. Now.
CHANGE YOUR THOUGHTS
The next step is to do the same thing on the inside - transform your habits of thought. In a relationship, we build up a huge array of such habits. When the love affair ends, these patterns can still be running.To change your thinking habits, you need to understand a little more about them.
Have you ever witnessed the same event as someone else, and later found out their account of it was completely different from yours? Each of you saw the event through a 'frame', made up of your personal beliefs, feelings and internal habits.
If you are finding it devastatingly difficult to handle the end of your relationship, you may need to change this 'frame'. You will need to re-frame your heartbreak. Stop seeing it as the end of your happiness. Instead, turn it into a challenge; view it as an opportunity.
Being heartbroken can make you feel worthless and hopeless - but that is because the frame you are using is too narrow. Learning to see your situation with a different frame is a wonderful liberation.
Create a New Future
There is a field of thinking within positive psychology that says the way through pain includes becoming your own architect and actively engaging and involving yourself in the planning of a new future. The victim in us will want to remain on the floor curled up in agony, wishing to avoid any future painful experiences that life may present to us. One who is engaged and empowered realizes and accepts that the past is the past and all we have now is the present moment and the future. It's all in the next breath in and the next breath out and creating in your mind's eye a future storyline for yourself. Dare to dream and be wild with your imagination. Have the courage to dream any positive, loving, creative future with no bounds. Remember, after death comes rebirth!It's your storyline you are creating, like writing the next chapter of your life in a novel. But in your story I challenge you to JUMP into the water, catch the next wave and maybe you will just be surprised and delighted to experience yourself riding that new wave with confidence, joy and possibility!
Laugh. And cry.
Laughter heals on many levels as I explain in my “9 Ways Humor Heals” post, and so does crying. You think it’s just a coincidence that you always feel better after a good cry? Nope, there are many physiological reasons that contribute to the healing power of tears. Some of them have been documented by biochemist William Frey who has spent 15 years as head of a research team studying tears. Among their findings is that emotional tears (as compared to tears of irritation, like when you cut an onion) contain toxic biochemical byproducts, so that weeping removes these toxic substances and relieves emotional stress. So go grab a box of Kleenex and cry your afternoon away.UNDERSTAND YOUR EMOTIONS
The next stage is to learn to understand your emotional reactions better. Your feelings of heartbreak are unlikely to disappear unless you cope with what they are trying to tell you.An emotion is a bit like someone knocking on your door to deliver a message. If you don't answer, it keeps knocking until you do open up.
Opening the door to your feelings means learning to understand them. This can be hard, because heartbreak is complicated by other feelings: anger, fear and shame.
Learn from your mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. It's how you learn from them that defines you as a person. Learn from what went wrong in your last relationship what caused you to be heartbroken and make sure that doesn't happen in the future.
Show confidence to yourself.
Know that everything happens for a reason, maybe it happened to let you know that you are brave or that you should not repeat the mistake again.Reflect on all the other types of "love" you have in your life and not on the love you've lost.
It really helps if you have good friends who can watch over you and prevent you from doing and/or saying something that you will end up regretting!
Do not go on any dates with the person from whom you are trying to heal. This is not productive and will not lead to healing. There is no more closure. There is only healing. Think of it as cutting a wound open that has stopped bleeding and started closing.
Think of the bad things that caused the relationship to end rather than the good because it will help you to move on.
Focus on you. Do things that make you happy.
Take a moment to lie back and breathe. The stress can block your brain from thinking clearly.Just take a breather. It's going to hurt for a while. Try not to hook up because its just not healthy.
Stop obsessing over the person!
Find hope.
There’s a powerful quote in the movie The Tale of Despereaux that I’ve been thinking about ever since I heard it: “There is one emotion that is stronger than fear, and that is forgiveness.” But forgiveness requires hope: believing that a better place exists, that the aching emptiness experienced in your every activity won’t be with you forever, that one day you’ll be excited to make coffee in the morning or go to a movie with friends. Hope is believing that the sadness can evaporate, that if you try like hell to move on with your life, your smile won’t always be forced. Therefore in order to forgive and to move past fear, you need to find hope.Love deeply. Again and again.
Once our hearts are bruised and burned from a relationship that ended, we have two options: we can close off pieces of our heart so that one day no one will be able to get inside. Or we can love again. Deeply, just as intensely as we did before. I urge You to love again because the heart only expands with the love we are able to pour forth.
The more you have loved and have allowed yourself to suffer because of your love, the more you will be able to let your heart grow wider and deeper. When your love is truly giving and receiving, those whom you love will not leave your heart even when they depart from you. The pain of rejection, absence, and death can become fruitful. Yes, as you love deeply the ground of your heart will be broken more and more, but you will rejoice in the abundance of the fruit it will bear.
Comments
Post a Comment