Healing Heart Break

Recently a friend of mine broke up with his girlfriend of three years. He was head over heels in love with her still. She left him for another guy. He saw no warning sign and felt she felt the same way. She had been cheating on him for a long time. His heart is broken and he wasn’t able to eat, sleep or get out of bed. He had been like this for a week. He called in sick to work and he spent his time listening to love songs at home crunched up in bed staring at his pictures of her, shouting curses, crying, pulling at his hair, regretting the mistakes he made, wishing he could turn the clock back.

I visited him and saw what state he was in. My first response from him was “Get away from me… none of that PLN shit with me. It was really helpful with the other stuff but nothing can help me now”. I smiled. I had no intention of doing anything like that with him. All I wanted to do was to be there for him as a mate and see if I could help him in some way. He began to describe how lost he felt, how bad he felt about dealing with it so badly… he felt ashamed that he was such a mess. He expressed anger.. then love.. then despair… then regret… about his ex-girlfriend. She was his soul mate, his world, his life.

They say sometimes it feels like your partner is your other half. It’s like you are not whole without them. So when you end a relationship, it feels like grief. You lose a part of your heart. They say heartbreak and it does really hurt there. I remember a movie called “Stolen Heart” or something like that with Christian Slater in it… I remember the character Slater played talked about not wanting a heart transplant in case he would lose the ability to love. The love of his life caringly explained that the heart had no actual connection with love, that it was just a figure of speech. He replied with complete innocence… “Well, why do I feel so much in there (pointing to his heart) when I think of you”.

These figures of speeches represent what we actually feel in our bodies. We feel butterflies in our bellies and headaches with people. The heart is, indeed, the centre of love. Love… that is something we all have. It’s a question of how willing we are to fall in love with people. How willing are we to be vulnerable in front of another person? How willing are we to risk everything to fall for someone?

Now when a person lets go and falls head over heels (again note the expression) in love, what is all this ‘falling’ metaphor about. It indicates that you don’t see it coming and you experience the state of love fast and deeply. It can be manic… one moment filled with jolts of ecstasy, the next full of uncertainty. Many people describe it as like a drug which torments them and clouds their judgment, when their only thoughts are dominated by the face of ‘the one’ and constant future scenarios they can’t help but imagine throughout the rest of their life.

Oh, it’s a terrible state of affairs sometimes. So, as I looked at my friend, describing how awful he felt it was sad. But I began to talk to him about what all of this meant to him. What did the pain and fear and loneliness he felt now really mean to him? What was his lesson? As we discussed it, we discovered something very interesting about love and heartbreak. Often love hits us even harder because of our own insecure way of feeling about ourselves. If they have inspected our souls and given us a ‘No’, then we feel invalidated as people.

So the lesson really was for my friend to begin to appreciate who he was and begin to start to fall in love with himself again. He described how he felt that he needed to evaluate himself and all his positive points. Not simply as a means to make him feel better. Instead to help him really and truly reach the ultimate paradoxical success in the world of relationships: The more you don’t need to be in one, the more you will and the happier you’ll be.

It’s all about neediness. Most of us feel needee from time to time, but when we recognise that we have everything we need to survive ourselves and concentrate on being with others to increase our quality of life rather than to validate ourselves as decent human beings, we get freedom of kinds, a freedom which can last a lifetime and which can provide us with more of what we want in every aspect of life.

Finding ourselves is often the way we describe what we feel like we need to do. If we discover who ‘we really are’, we become smarter and we develop new insights about life and existing. So, avoiding neediness and finding out who we are, become the two steps to take towards enjoying life even more and getting over heart break, disappointment or a troubled life event. The key is, avoiding neediness comes from being self reliant, becoming self reliant comes from being happy with yourself, being happy with yourself comes from finding out who you are and liking yourself.

Finding out who you are and liking yourself comes from taking some time out to STOP, and realise that the person that you can become… all your potential… you at your absolute best…. You when you are doing what you do brilliantly, saying what you say elegantly, feeling what you feel completely…. Is something that you can move towards. It’s about appreciating you are you… you have behaviours that are pretty stupid but when you learn and make changes to different areas of your life and behaviours, when you concentrate on focusing on enjoying and appreciating what you have in life and when you work towards placing your attention on how much better you’re getting… life gets simpler. You feel good, you make better decisions, you think smarter, you live freer, you improve your quality of life, you enjoy your relationships, you exist happily.

So, overcoming heart break of any kind must come with falling back in love with the most important person in your life…. YOU. And to do that you must focus on everything you love about yourself, everything you could love about yourself and everything you will love about yourself!!