How to Mend a Broken Heart
"Man performs and engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything." -- William Faulkner
Understanding how to mend a broken heart can you help you cope with one of life's least desired feeling, heartbreak. No one can avoid the pain of a love lost or a love scorned. Unless you expect to meet the love of your life at age 13 and never love another, which isn't likely, you're going to experience some form of heartbreak in your life.
There's good news, though: human beings are resilient creatures. We undergo a lot of stress before cracking. Anyone can deal with the pain of a broken heart if they do it right. The pains of teenage love and lost teen love hurts so much, because our heart isn't used to the pain of heartache; you eventually develop callouses.
Many adults never learn how to cope with heartbreaking moments, though. You might learn to suffer with a little more dignity or a little fewer moans, but you might not. Heartbroken people begin to collect "baggage" as life goes on, whether they are neuroses, defense mechanisms or a general cynicism about people's motives.
The best way to approach a broken heart is to move on, but that's a lot harder said than done. "The best revenge is living well," they say, but a heartbroken man or woman considers living well to be living with their lost lost. In the end, Mending broken hearts requires making yourself emotionally ready to face the world again, but there are stages of coping that lead to that emotional release.
I'm betting you'll have to suffer heartbreak at some point in your life. You don't have to do it the hard way, though. There are healthy ways to deal with heartbreak - ways that can soften the blow of relationship turmoil. I want to show you three myths and three facts about heartbreak, so you can move quickly through the different phases of a broken heart.
Heartbreak Myth - “Time Heals All Wounds.”
This is the most common response you'll get from people, when you tell them about your broken heart or your recent breakup. It seems like pretty good advice on the surface. Yes, lots of things seem less painful with distance.
Pain in particular is difficult to remember. Try to remember a specific pain, like a broken arm or a dental procedure, and you may find it difficult to conjure up that specific sensation of pain. It's not like remembering a song you once knew, but more like describing a particular taste from years ago.
There's the rub; emotional pain isn't the same as physical pain. Where heartbreak is concerned, time can be your enemy.
If you wait too long to start the healing process, expecting time to do all the work, you could be burying your emotions deep inside. When you repress your emotions long enough, you never give yourself a chance to heal.
Simply waiting for time to ease the pain causes mental or even physical damage. The damage to your emotional state is like the muscle atrophy that occurs when you stop exercising. You need to work out your emotions every now and then, to keep them healthy.
By waiting on the turning of the calendar to heal your relationship hurts, you end up replaying these incidents over and over in your head. This is important to you, so hoping to forget long enough for time to heal your wounds won't work. It's in the back of your mind, whether you focus on it consciously or not.
Stress can cause us to lose sleep, feel physical pain, and even contribute to serious illnesses, like strokes or heart attacks. The lost sleep alone causes all kinds of secondary physical problems: irritation, depression and damage to your immune system. I'm not saying your heartbreak is going to break your heart in a literal way, but I am saying that avoiding action in order to avoid feeling your broken heart can be a physically (not just emotionally) damaging choice.
When you try to forget, you end up repressing. The emotional damage from heartbreak causes you to draw in on yourself, suppressing your natural emotions and causing them to fester up inside you. That's when this lost relationship begins to take on whole new proportions and you lose perspective.
Heartbreak Fact - Take Action in Order to Heal
If simply waiting on a broken heart to mend worked, would anyone ever be broken hearted? The idea that the passage of time is going to end your pain is another person's way of compartmentalizing and minimizing your feelings, in order to deal with them as quickly and painlessly as possible. This culture of the quick-fix solution isn't causing less heartache; it is extending your pain and convincing people to hide their true feelings.
Take action. Start to move on. Focus on self-improvement. Start an exercise regimen. Try a new hairstyle. Do some shopping therapy. Join a club. Read a new book.
Take that first small step towards normalcy and you'll be amazed how easy it is to take other big steps. Get out into the world again and start experiencing new things and stimulating your mind. Eventually, if you string together enough small steps, you may find yourself making a big change.
My mother started out planting an herb garden after a personal loss. A year later, she found herself in a new career in gardening and a whole new set of friends and associations in the gardening world. That's just one example of how a little change can mean big results.
Maybe you won't be able to fully move on until you find a new love. When that happens, you're naturally going to think less of your former romance, if you have something to take your mind off that old situation. Don't force things, though, which brings me to my next point.
Heartbreak Myth - “Get Back in the Game.”
First, let me point out that thinking of relationships as "games" is part of the overall problem we're dealing with. People who advise you to "get back in the game" are probably not the best sources of information. I've heard this advice from my less scrupulous friends time and again - and these guys never have working relationships.
Jumping back into dating when you're dealing with heartbreak could be truly disastrous. You're bringing a whole new set of emotional baggage to your next relationship, especially if that relationship starts really close to your breakup. You're more likely to lash out at the next person you're with, to be moody, or not be truly "part" of that couple.
You might be asking yourself, "Why jump onto a ship that's destined to sink?" If you jump in too quickly, you're probably not giving this person a fair chance. That's not fair to them.
Ask yourself this: Do you want to date someone who is fresh from a painful relationship? Of course you don't. Don't turn yourself into the person you wouldn't want to date.
Heartbreak Fact - You Need to Start Dating When You Feel Ready
There are so many reasons to avoid getting back into dating too soon, that it's difficult to condense them. For one thing, whatever caused your heartbreak is still out there waiting to show its face. Maybe you cheated, or you were cheated on; in either case, that's a lot to handle.
Whatever demons and angels are still flying around your head are going to waste no time getting involved with any new boyfriend or girlfriend.
Another great reason to wait before you date is your own emotional health. During and after a heartbreak is the best time to improve yourself, and the only time in your life when you have actual "me time". If your heart is broken, start mending it by spending your time and effort on yourself.
Think about this: if you start dating too quickly, you aren't focusing on yourself. You buy into this notion that you can find the answer to your problems in other people. In the end, you'll only be good in a relationship if you find your own problems. You can't expect another person to do that for you, so now's a great time for self-focus and self-improvement.
If you want to focus on relationships, read up on advice, get an idea of who you are and what you need out of life. Set your focus on the future - not the past. Even the best chess players in the world know when to admit defeat, so admit you're heartbroken and learn new strategies to avoid that in the future.
Heartbreak Myth - "You Have to Feel Worse Before You Feel Better"
You may also hear this as "It is always darkest before the dawn", or any number of Hallmark card inspired "wisdom". This is such a downer piece of advice, it's a wonder that more people don't get punched in the face for offering it. How dare someone approach a person who is obviously in pain and suggest that their pain needs to get worse in order to get better?
People don't often think about the things they say before they say them, of course. That's why you hear so many platitudes. So when you get this piece of advice, really consider what it implies.
Getting darker means your pain is not strong enough. It means that you aren't at the "bottom" of your pain and that there's is a better place coming. They are comparing you to an addict, who needs to hit rock bottom, before they rebound.
Most people probably want you to focus on the dawn rather than the "darkest", as if they are somehow giving advice how to get to the next dawn. Unfortunately for them, it's terrible advice, because it's no real advice at all.
Heartbreak Fact - You Can Start Feeling Better Right Now
There's no need to wait around for your pain to swell, then decrease gradually, as though it were some kind of black eye or sports injury. There's no need to prepare yourself for even more emotional turmoil. If you're experiencing heartbreak, I'm sure you'll agree that you've gone through enough.
Tell yourself, "The dawn is now." This is the first day of the rest of your life. The future stretches out ahead of you. People hate change, but if life isn't so good right now, then change should be good for you. Expand your horizons through improving yourself and you'll expand your options. Make yourself the kind of person people want to be around.
If you felt inadequate in your last relationship, now is the time to change that feeling. Reinvent yourself. Stop kicking yourself around and realise that you're also the same person that someone chose to love. Find that part of yourself that stoked that affection and focus on it. Bring that part of you to the surface again and expand it.
Dating Myths and Facts
Listening to the advice given through the veil of these myths and facts is the first step. Spend time with yourself, take baby steps, wait to date, listen to your friends: all of these are little things you can do today. Start them right now - this moment - and begin the process of mending your heartbreak.
There's no reason to put off your pain or to sit around moping about your heartbreak. Get out and start improving yourself today. The world hasn't stopped spinning. Time marches on and so should you. You'll thank yourself, once you've crawled out from under this cloud.