How Do You Mend Your Broken Heart?

courtesy of Sal Petruzelli Marino

A broken heart: you think you will never get over him, and you would rather put aside the immense pain. Wrong! Because this pain sees to it that your broken heart heals and that you can love again.

Maya Lyons, 39 years old, spent many days on the couch, crying. Sleeping was difficult, possible only with the help of medication. Friends did the shopping. She was not able to go to work. Everything was about her ex: the man that she let into her life at an office party and that was her lover for four years, with whom she lived together for four years and was married to for five years. The one that she traveled the world with and the one that told her after thirteen years of being together that he did not want to continue the relationship. He had fallen in love with someone else.

“That Sunday morning when he left the house without saying goodbye, is engraved on my memory. When I heard the door slam shut, I was overwhelmed by an intense sadness: I had lost my soul mate. After that, I panicked: how could I ever live without him? For thirteen years, we did practically everything together and now all of a sudden I had to survive on my own. I didn’t want to. We had a close relationship and the last few years, because of our traveling, we grew closer together. I knew that he liked to flirt. His interest for other women sometimes caused tension between us. We had conversations about that with a relationship therapist. The announcement that he was in love however, was a nasty surprise. Deep inside I knew it was over, but at the same time, I kept on hoping that he would come back any moment. With him I felt safe. When I left, I kept the lights and heater on, so that it would like he was waiting for me when I came home. Everything to not feel that enormous loneliness; it was as if I, besides my past, was also losing my future. I did not understand; he said constantly that I was a fantastic woman. Why did he not want to be with me?”

Protest

Maya did not resist the break up. She asked her ex lover numerous times to clear things up: why not? Why like this? Why not continue? Protest. It hurts us that the other person finds our relationship less important than we do. Feeling broken-hearted usually follows three phases: first, we protest against the break up (protest phase), then we realize that it’s over (resignation phase) and express our grief; we feel despondent and somber (despair phase). Finally, we accept that we have to continue alone. Feeling broken-hearted arises when we are very attached to our relationship. We experience a great loss when this person leaves us. That loss evokes different kinds of emotions. Feeling broken-hearted is a lot like dealing with grief when someone passes away. When a loved one dies, we focus firstly on the past, the loss. Only after some time we know that we have to pick up where we left things and are we able to see the future again.

Hidden pain

How sad we are, is not only dependent on the just ended relationship. A lot of it is dependent on the bond we had with our mother as a child. When she always gave us a safe and protected feeling, we have less trouble with intimacy and a big trust in relationships. If we have secure base behavior, we can deal easier with break ups. We know after all that we can always love. If we grow up with a mother that one moment showers us with love and reject us the next, we have trouble with relationships as adults. We are never sure about love. Not having secure base behavior we tend to avoid feeling the pain of a break up: we don’t completely open up for another person or we become dependent to prevent our partner from leaving. If they leave anyway, it will increase our mistrust in relationships even more. The pain that follows is hard to cope with. Nobody wants to feel the pain of a break up. We want to put away the loneliness, panic and despair. This is a logical reaction, but a wrong one. By ignoring your hurt, you hinder the healing process. If you hide your hurt, you don’t learn to heal from it. You don’t experience that you are strong enough to deal with the pain. Without this knowledge, you won’t start a new relationship because you are afraid to be hurt again.

Damaged ego

A broken heart you did not come to terms with can lead to fear of commitment. Give yourself time to give the break up a place in your life. Don’t start working like crazy. By doing that you ignore the pain and what really happened. You don’t close a relationship and you keep hoping for a reunification. To deny and to keep hoping are the two largest mistakes you can make when you are broken hearted. If you don’t want to make them, then there is one solution: stop contact with your ex completely and become angry with him. As long as you keep in touch, you will feel the pain. You keep hoping that everything will be okay. And, before you know it, you start idealizing your relationship; he was really the one, what we had has been beautiful. That’s why it is so important that you, even though it is over, say goodbye to your ex. You have to cut all ties. Let him collect his stuff, put all your memorabilia in a box and remove his phone number from your mobile phone.

Above all, express your anger. Besides that, you are angry, you are really angry. He, the one that you love the most, damaged your ego by letting you go. You need to express that anger. Write him a goodbye letter with everything that you blame him for and then burn the letter. Alternatively, pretend that you are the director of a horror movie and imagine how you torture him on screen. Do this until you are no longer angry. At a certain moment it doesn’t interest you anymore; the more you express you’re anger, the more negative things you discover about your relationship.

For Maya, everything fell apart after 4 months. At first she hoped that her ex partner would come back, now she could not bear him anymore. “While I was mourning that I lost my partner, he was enjoying his new relationship. He took his new girlfriend everywhere; introduced her almost immediately to our circle of friends. Without respect to me, as if our relationship had meant nothing. Why did I bother? Why did I have all these talks? I felt betrayed. What bothered me the most was that he denied that his girlfriend existed towards me. We used to be close before, now I did not know what was going on. That was really frustrating. Via e-mail, I confronted him with mistakes that he made during our relationship and was making again. Pretty soon, I did not receive responses. I expressed my anger by going out weekly by doing what he did: to flirt with everyone. I hoped to run into him so that I could say, “look, what you can do, I can too”. However, he never showed up on those evenings. After a few months, I was fed up. I didn’t feel like worrying about him anymore. I knew how to get along fine without him.”

After Maya had become really angry, she knew that a reunification was out of the question. The divorce was hard for her. “I was used to discussing everything with him. He took care of finances, went grocery shopping and cooked. All of a sudden, I had to do that. I did not know where to start. With the help of a psychologist, I learned how to divide tasks: what is the most important? Gradually I worked down the list. I cleared away all his things, painted the house, took the wedding pictures down and adopted a kitten. It was hard to do everything alone and that way saying goodbye to him. The first lunch that I made by myself, I cried. Although I have been in a very dark place for months, this pain made me stronger: I gained more confidence and I am more independent. In my new, current relationship I take initiative and make decisions.”

This aqrticle is addressed to women, but the process and feelings of the broken heart are not only a female experience. We hope men too can learn about themselves in such a situation as Maya’s and even learn about the women they left behind…