Healing the Emotional Pain of a Broken Heart

An excerpt from upcoming 8/25/11 blog radio talk show "A Fine Time for Healing"

If you’ve ever been in love, chances are that you have suffered the devastating feelings of at least one relationship break up. Immediately following the death of a love relationship, your heart is shattered. The emotional pain you feel seems unbearable and permanent. There is a huge void in your life that you can’t believe will ever be filled again. Age and experience tell us that we will eventually heal, but pain is still pain; it hurts no matter how old or seasoned we are.

It’s no wonder that we feel stuck and paralyzed by the pain of a broken heart. The aftermath of a breakup is shocking to our systems, and it jump-starts a major life transition. Transitions are not always welcomed and rarely come about with ease.

When someone leaves you, there may be feelings of rejection, abandonment, low self-worth. You may ask yourself why you weren’t good enough. In a desperate attempt to save the relationship you may even try to change something about yourself, hoping that it will make the other person love you again. But authentic love is based on acceptance. Though we may want to adjust any dysfunctional behavioral patterns when it becomes obvious that they are interfering with our relationships, we should never have to change who we truly are in order to be loved and accepted. And we have to ask ourselves, in the midst of our broken heart, if our love interest was really well suited for us, or were we holding on to a fantasy of who we wanted that person to be. Perhaps that relationship should have ended a long time ago, but we desperately clung to any hope that would perpetuate our fantasy.

Heart break is not one-sided. Depending on the circumstance, the person who initiates the break up may suffer just as much emotional pain as the person they have chosen to sever their ties from. Sometimes we don’t want to walk away from a relationship, but due to various reasons our hand is forced; there is simply nothing more we can do to fix it. Accompanying the withdrawal pain, anger about having to have made that choice, feelings of guilt for ending the relationship, or worry about the other person’s state of mind may weigh heavily on the one who has chosen to leave.

After a breakup we may have many self-defeating thoughts that keep us stuck in the emotional pain. We may dwell on thoughts of the loss of the future we had imagined, fantasized about, or planned on. Many of us panic with thoughts of being alone or worry about never finding someone else that will love us or that we’ll love. Some obsess over what they could have done differently in the relationship. Healing is not possible without acceptance. As long as you continue to hold on to a shred of hope that you’ll be together again, you will not recover and move on. I used this quote by an unknown author in my memoir, Fine…ly, and it says it perfectly, “Relationships are like glass. Sometimes it’s better to leave them broken than try to hurt yourself putting it back together.”

Listen to the entire show on or after 12 PM EST August 25,2011 A Fine Time for Healing ”How to Heal a Broken Heart: Life After a Breakup“ http://tinyurl.com/3pytyr7