Lessons from a Broken Heart: Part 2

Heartbreak is the destruction that dances alongside creation. It is painful, and it is full of wisdom.

Our lessons of a broken heart continue, as it acts as a catalyst to bring up our deepest wounds and rearrange our orientation to ourselves, those around us, and the world.

Heartbreak stirs the past and makes the vision of the future ache:

Sometimes we mourn many heartbreaks at the same time. Old traumas like to fester in open wounds. The feeling of heartbreak resonates with all other past heartaches, almost like bringing them back to the surface, and so it amplifies the original pain.

The bigness of the ache floods our feelings of the present and pours into our visions of the future. Everything is temporarily cloaked in this pain.   

Remember, we don't know the future; we just know this current pain is leaking its way into our vision of it. 

It's so easy to focus all on them or all on yourself:

In navigating the pain, we often hyper-focus on the person we have the heartache with or on ourselves.

Hyper-focusing on another person might look or sound like:

Trying to decode their behavior, blaming, seeking revenge, attending to only what they did wrong, checking their social media, and making them into the villain or heroes.

Hyper-focusing on ourselves might look or sound like this:

Self-blame.

Replaying in our mind what we could have done better or differently.

Wanting to change for them.

Focusing on our lack of worth and what's wrong with us. 

Hyper-focusing on ourselves or the other person is often a distraction from being in touch with the underlying feelings and vulnerability required for healing.  

Healing a broken heart is a dismantling of what we know, and an opportunity for rewiring bigger patterns:

The unfortunate and fortunate truth is that while we are mourning our broken hearts, we are most biologically open to change. It's hard to focus on growth, rewiring, and learning while the ache is so big. So be gentle on having to learn or change too much, too fast. 

The shift to the superficial can hurt:

Often when trying to maintain contact and some version of the old relationship, the exchanges feel shallow. The superficial is a reflection of the withholding of vulnerability and the truth that the bridge of intimacy is (at least temporarily) closed. This shift from depth and closeness to superficiality can be painful as you have experienced the meaningfulness, perhaps the sense of being seen from that old depth of connection- and now feel its absence. 

If the shift to superficial exchanges feels like picking a scab of what has been lost, it's ok to communicate this and, if needed, create more space and distance.

Hope can fuel anxiety:

Perhaps not a popular truth, but sometimes hope fuels our anxiety. It keeps us toggling between what we internally know as truth and the fantasy of what we wish was different.  

Hope can veil the reality of our circumstances, keeping us in limbo and pushing us further into the discomfort of the unknown.  

Acceptance temporarily brings us closer to the pain, but it also brings us back to our truth so that it can be processed.

While we don’t know the future, it can be kind to ourselves to relay what is true in the here and now, a form of acceptance:

“While I don’t know what could come, I know what is real at this moment, and I can respond and process from the truth of the here and now.”

What has heartbreak taught you?