Healing A Broken Heart

When you want to learn how to heal a broken heart, the good news and the bad news are the same: it's not going to heal overnight. The good news is that if could be healed that quickly, you really hadn't experienced the best kind of love. And, the bad news is that the process takes some time - not an eternity - but some time. On some level, you already know this. However, there are immediate steps you can take to reduce your suffering.

First of all, recognize that a break-up, a broken relationship causes trauma. Trauma can cause shock, and many people - myself included - have misunderstood the symptoms of shock. Your systems can only handle so much stress, before the body goes into shock. This is a good thing. It keeps you alive, but in the condition you would prefer. You may be an emotional basket-case, or you may become completely withdrawn. You could experience a wide range of emotions - anger, regret, denial - these are the most common.

When learning how to heal a broken heart, it's important to not attempt to deny these emotions when they come. Repressing them does not clear the emotions so you can re-capture happiness, it just tucks them away - hiding them from your conscious awareness - until they explode in your life at some later - probably most inconvenient - time.

If you are experiencing a broken heart, the first thing you need to do is sit down, breathe deeply for a while, and try to just relax. It may not seem so, but your world is not ending, it is merely changing into something different - perhaps better - but, even so, we naturally fear the unknown, and the fear causes the anxiety and pain. Try to see that, hey, you're hurting, but you're still here, you're still breathing, and you will get through this. Many people have gone before you, and there are many lessons about how to heal a broken heart that you can learn from these people. I make several recommendations in this lens.

I admit there are easier things in life than fixing a broken heart. The emotional trauma can go extremely deep into the psychology of a person suffering from a broken heart. It attacks your self-esteem, it crushes your confidence; it shatters your trust - not only in others, but yourself also.

There are many books written on the topic of surviving heartbreak, and I will give you some great resources here. There are two things I have learned from my own experiences; first, fixing a broken heart is quite similar to overcoming an addiction, and second, suffering a broken heart is a trauma that is governed by very predictable and understandable emotions. It is a process of grieving, the same as when one suffers the loss, through death, of a loved one. Some even say that suffering a loss through death is easier to recover from, since the person is no longer physically present in this world, unlike someone who we may see and hear from in the future. I have suffered both, and I cannot say that one is more devastating than the other. Both wreak havoc on us emotionally, mentally, physically, and spiritually. There are phases that we go through while trying to recover and return our lives to what we defined as "normal". Those phases are universal, the only difference being the amount of time each of us spends in each phase.

When we are in a loving relationship, we allow ourselves to count on, to depend on, our partner. Psychology of late warns us of this, and labels it "co-dependence". Whether or not everyone agrees with modern-day psychology is a topic for another discussion. But, nonetheless, when our relationship(s) fail, we lose the ability and the opportunity to depend on our partner. We are forced to break our dependence, or our "addiction" to this person we loved, and who we thought loved us. This forced "cold turkey" approach can be devastating and difficult to maneuver.