Welcome to Ask Away!

Each week I choose one of your questions and do my best to offer guidance and support to help you along your journey. I also encourage everyone who is reading this to offer their words of wisdom as well by leaving a comment at the end. Please click here to learn more about this feature.

Thank you so much to everyone who offered their support to last week’s question! I am honored that you each stepped up and shared your wisdom. Let’s keep that pattern going with this week’s question as well.

And now for the question:

Do you have any suggestions for healing a broken heart?

(The individual who submitted this question has been a dedicated reader of this blog since the beginning. I truly appreciate all of the wonderful feedback they have given to me, and I hope that I’m able to offer a bit of guidance here. They chose to be anonymous. One thing I will say is that they are asking about healing a broken heart after a break up. There are many reasons for one to have their heart broken in addition to a break up, but this is what I will focus on today.)

Heartbreak is never easy to heal from. Opening ourselves up to love and trust and putting our heart in the hands of another can be such a beautiful experience. We get to feel emotions like never before, magnified understanding, and an amazing gift of connectedness.

However, opening our hearts and allowing love to come in can also leave us vulnerable to pain and heartache if the relationship doesn’t last.

My first heartbreak happened when I was 15 when my first love broke up with me. He was being pressured by his friends and parents who thought we were too serious for how young we were. He hoped we could get back together after we graduated. It was a shock. My entire world came crashing down. I cried for days – possibly months. I stayed home from school and sobbed into my pillow. I begged him to take me back. I knew I would never love again. I felt that I would be alone forever. I swore I would never open my heart to anyone else.

Fast forward twenty-one years, and I’m happily married to my best friend and soul mate. And while I will always carry a special place in my heart for my first love, I am forever grateful to him for breaking up with me then or I wouldn’t have been led to this amazing soul connection that my husband and I share.

Perspective is an amazing thing to have, isn’t it? But when we are in the thick of heartache, it’s not so easy to step back and know that this is all for the best, that we are better off without this person in the long run, that our lives will definitely be better now that we are on our own, that we are now open to receiving the love that we deserve from someone who will love us in the exact way we need to be loved. Nope, it doesn’t quite work that way. But it does work out eventually. It truly does.

I am so grateful for each of the relationships that I had prior to meeting my husband. They made me such a better, more evolved person – they helped me be ready for a healthy relationship with a loving man. And he is also grateful for his past relationships for the same reason.

Not every person that we are in love with is our lasting love.
Some of them are here to help guide us toward our lasting love. Some are there to help us see through contrast what we don’t want and what we know we need in a relationship. Some are there to show us that it’s okay to want it all – to know that we deserve to have it all.

Some things that have helped me get through past heartaches, and I hope they will help you, too:

• Spending time actually being heartbroken and really being in that sad, hopeless place. I think that giving yourself permission to grieve the loss of your relationship will help you heal at a faster pace.
• Knowing that I deserved to be loved in a way that this person simply wasn’t capable of. I deserved to be with someone who thought the world of me – who would fly through the heavens in order to be with me.
• Journaling my thoughts and feelings. Trying to figure out what went wrong. What role did I play in this break up? Were there signs of trouble that I somehow missed or was in denial of?
• Pampering myself. Spending time with friends who love me unconditionally, taking care of myself in ways maybe I had neglected while I was in the relationship (such as reading, going within, watching a movie that makes me happy, etc.), and being easy on myself – being my own best friend instead of critiquing what I must’ve done wrong in this relationship.
• And eventually (after I have taken some time to heal) opening myself up again. Staying closed off causes so much resentment, pain, and suffering – and you are the only one who is being hurt by this. Opening yourself up to feeling love again is such a leap of faith – and it isn’t something that I would rush into before you’re ready – but please don’t let bitterness become a crutch for ever feeling anything again. You are worth so much more than that. You are worth love and happiness. You are worth complete devotion.

We all deal with heartbreak differently – some of us attack it head on and move through it quickly while others sit with it for awhile and explore these sad, lost feelings. I think no matter which style we prefer, we all go through similar stages in our own way. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced the five stages of grief when dealing with the deal of a loved one, and I think it also applies to the death of a relationship:

• Denial – In this stage we pretty much go numb. Sometimes we stay here for quite awhile. We don’t want to talk about our heartbreak with others because that will make it seem more real. We just want it to go away. We wish things were the way they used to be.
• Anger – In this stage we become angry at the person or event that caused our heart to break or at ourselves for the part we played in this happening. This is when we are truly willing to feel these sometimes scary emotions and give voice to them. Being angry is an essential part of healing.
• Bargaining – In this stage we constantly question the “what ifs” and seem to play the “if onlys” on an endless loop through your mind. What if you had been a better partner or if only they could’ve seen how wonderful you truly were… Or you could make a deal with your higher power and say that you will do absolutely anything just to feel good again, to feel joy and love, or even to wake up from this nightmare and have things go back to how they were.
• Depression – In this stage, the denial and anger begin to wear off, and you are in a space of hopelessness and inward battery. You no longer want to face the world. You are in so much pain. You may feel as though you will never be happy again – you definitely will never love again. And you wonder what is the point of all of this anyway?
• Acceptance – In this stage you begin to step out of your heartache and accept that this is the situation. No more denial – it is what it is. And you realize that as much as it hurts and tears you up inside, you can’t make someone else love you. You can only control your own emotions. And you begin to pick up and put together the pieces of your life.

When healing from heartbreak, remember to go easy on yourself.
Surround yourself with loved ones who will help boost you up. Pamper yourself. Take time to examine what went wrong, so you can learn the lessons that need to be learned. And then give yourself time to process this heart break. Sometimes we just need to allow ourselves to go through it – to be present – to heal in our own time.

Right now it may feel as though you will never feel happy again, but I know that you will. I know that in time, you will be able to see this hurt as a gift that helped you grow into who you are meant to become. It was a gift that helped you see what you want and need and deserve. It was a gift that will allow you to open up to the possibility of a lasting love – first with yourself and then (if this is something that you would like) with someone else.

I’m sending you a big hug.

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For everyone who is reading, please offer your words of wisdom as well! Let’s all chime in and offer guidance and support for this brave soul who went first!

I would love to answer your question in next’s week’s post!
Please email your question to: info@soulfuljournals.com. (Please put “Ask Away” in the subject line.)

If your question is chosen for that Friday’s feature, I will let you know if I need any additional information. It’s completely up to you if you would like your question to be anonymous or public. If you would like to keep it anonymous, please make sure to leave out any identifying details.