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How to heal from heartbreak


How to Heal a Broken Heart: 10 Tips

Dana Bottari, LCSW, a psychotherapist based in Florida, says that at the start of a relationship, our thoughts tend to be happy and uplifting. “We may have felt good about ourselves — thoughts about the time our ex commented that we were beautiful or handsome or how much they loved us,” she says.

However, when the relationship ends, your thoughts may be mixed. “We have the positive messages that were given by our ex, combined with perhaps our own judgmental thoughts that we are not good enough or thoughts that things never work out for us,” explains Bottari.

Thoughts affect feelings, and feelings affect actions, she says. When you’re feeling down, you may engage in behaviors you typically don’t. For example, you may skip showering or avoid getting together with friends and family. “We may now feel more alone than ever,” Bottari says.

Gina Moffa, LCSW, a psychotherapist based in New York City, adds that the details and circumstances of a breakup determine how you feel.

“If you feel you’re leaving someone in a painful place after you end it, you may be ridden with guilt and sadness. If you’re the one who’s been broken up with, you may be in a state of shock and go through different phases of grief, including anger, bargaining, depression, and anxiety,” explains Moffa.

As you cope with the loss of a relationship, these tips may help you on your journey to healing.

1.

Take time to grieve

If possible, try to think of the loss of the relationship as a grieving process.

“Give yourself time. Do not try to find someone new right away,” says Bottari. “The best thing we can do is to try to honor our emotions and not judge our emotions.”

To validate your emotions, it may help you to reframe your thoughts. Instead of thinking, “I shouldn’t feel so sad,” Bottari recommends thinking, “I am experiencing feelings of sadness, and that’s OK.”

While some people take time to be alone, look inward, or see a therapist to work through the complicated emotions of a breakup, others may suppress painful feelings and jump into another relationship. “I don’t recommend that. We need time to heal what’s been shattered,” says Moffa.

“We need time to look within and take inventory of what patterns we may have taken into the relationship with us that no longer work. We need to tend to our wounded hearts and take the time to allow the healing to happen with time, care, gentleness, and deeper self-understanding,” she says.

2.

Find a new source of joy

When you make time for self-inquiry and self-reconnection, Moffa says that this can lead to connection with what may have once brought you peace, joy, or inspiration but was put on hold during your relationship.

“We may be more open to saying ‘yes’ to new things, people, and experiences as a way to explore a newfound sense of freedom, even if it hurts,” she says.

Bottari suggests pushing yourself to do things, even when you don’t feel like it. “Chances are, even after meeting a friend for lunch, you arrive home feeling better than had you stayed home,” she says.

3.

Make a list of what you like about yourself

When you are feeling low about yourself, consider making a list of all the good things you did for your past partner or all the qualities they liked about you — and the qualities you like about yourself.

For example, you might write a self-love list like this:

  • I made him coffee in the morning.
  • I picked her up from the train station when it rained.
  • I put on her favorite song when she was sad.
  • I reminded him about his dad’s birthday.

You may also find it helpful to write out a list of positive things you’ll do in future relationships.

If you’d rather not think about relationships, Bottari suggests searching the internet for self-affirmations that resonate with you, such as:

  • I am not my mistakes.
  • I am enough.
  • There is no wrong decision.

“Recite these when you are having negative or self-defeating thoughts,” Bottari says.

4.

Acknowledge thoughts about your former partner

When thoughts of your ex arise, try not to stop or block them. Instead, Bottari says, practice being a “witness” to these thoughts. When the thoughts come up, take a step back and acknowledge them.

“You know you are experiencing them; they are passing through your mind. You observe them. You practice observing and letting them go,” she explains.

“The minute you pay attention to one and label it as something ‘important,’ you are no longer witnessing them. You are now judging them. Judging brings more negative emotions since your expectations were not met.”

5.

Express your needs to others

If you’re not feeling up to meeting friends out or are having a hard time following through on commitments, try to share your feelings with others.

“Try to reconsider your needs at this time and let others know what you are dealing with,” says Bottari. “Many people have felt the same way and will understand that you might need some time to return to your normal state. ”

6.

Turn your attention toward others

When the pain of a breakup is too hard to bear, you may find that focusing on the needs of others can help bring feelings of wellbeing and distract you from focusing on yourself, explains Bottari.

Consider volunteering at a local soup kitchen or animal shelter, helping a friend in need with meals or cleaning, or cutting a neighbor’s grass.

7.

Allow emotions to flow

You may find it helpful to talk to a trusted friend, family member, or therapist about emotions related to your breakup or ex-partner.

If you’re not comfortable sharing all of your feelings, consider writing them down or meditating on them. You can also engage in another project, such as painting, that may help you release what’s on your mind.

8.

Find relief in exercise and movement

Research shows that exercise can reduce stress. “Use exercise as a healthy outlet to manage feelings of anxiety, sadness, lethargy, and stress,” Bottari says.

A daily walk, bike ride, or online workout video are ways to work exercise into your daily routine when you’re feeling sad or stressed about the breakup.

9.

Avoid activities that remind you of your ex

If you continue to feel overwhelmed by unwanted thoughts and emotions, consider staying away from places, music, and people who remind you of your ex for a little while.

“Try to go places that make you feel safe. Surround yourself with people that care about you. Go places that you have never been. Take a day trip and explore,” suggests Bottari.

10.

Make meaning of the breakup

If possible, try to make meaning of the relationship ending, or accept that there’s no meaning to why it ended.

“Over time, you may come to realize that the end of your relationship was ultimately in your best interest. However, it is possible that you might not be able to find any positive in the relationship ending. Both are valid conclusions. Try to have faith and keep moving forward,” says Bottari.

A breakup can leave you feeling sad and alone, no matter who made the decision to split up. Cycling through a variety of feelings after a breakup is normal, especially if it was unexpected.

“We forget that we are meant to grow and change and learn. That doesn’t always happen at the same time or in the same way in a relationship,” says Moffa.

“Sometimes, one person changes and the other doesn’t. So, be gentle with yourself. You’re changing and growing and healing. We can’t do that all by force.”

Remember, it’s OK to not feel OK for a while. Give yourself time to process the loss of the relationship and practice self-compassion.

14 Ways To Get Over Heartbreak & Heal A Broken Heart

1. Avoid contact for 60 to 90 days.

According to Greg Behrendt, the brains behind He's Just Not That Into You, it’s important to avoid seeing your ex for at least four to six weeks. This no-contact rule will give you time to put things into perspective and focus on you and your own needs.

It also provides the distance necessary to sever the bond between you, in a real way. It will be painful and difficult, but trying to be friends immediately or keeping in touch in any way will just make moving on impossible.

2. Don’t romanticize the past.

It can be easy to replay those good memories on repeat—especially if you didn’t want the relationship to end. But for a healthier perspective, you really need to make the effort to see the whole picture.

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3. Fall in love with your life.

Now is the perfect time to get back to you. What have you always wanted to do? What hobbies can you get back into? Take time to show up for yourself and fall in love with your life. That’s how you become the person you’ve always wanted to be and when you become irresistible to others.

4. Forgive them.

Forgiveness is tough. But you don’t have to believe that what someone did is OK in order to forgive them. The point of forgiveness is that it frees you from the emotional burden of anger. Release your bitterness, anger, and hurt by forgiving them and yourself.

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5. Focus on what you want.

Don’t keep rehashing the bad moments. And don’t focus on what isn’t working. In my life coaching practice, I find that single women tend to focus on what they don’t want: “I don’t want to be cheated on again,” “I don’t want to be single forever,” etc.

But words have power. When we focus on what we don’t want, we keep getting what we don’t want. Instead, focus all your attention on what you do want, whether that’s a healthy new relationship or to be single and confident about it. (Here are some characteristics of a healthy relationship to set your sights on.)

6. Speak kindly to yourself.

Your inner critic will use the breakup as a chance to try to bring you down. Don’t let that little voice distract you. Instead of fighting yourself, start to fight for yourself. Be kind to yourself.

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7. Don’t badmouth your ex.

It can feel therapeutic to use your best friends as a sounding board for your emotions, but it isn’t productive. Focus on sharing things you love. Talk about the things in your life that are working well, your dreams and desires. You never know what will happen in the future, so it’s always better to sow seeds of kindness.

8. Avoid social media stalking.

It might be wise to just remove your ex from your social media feed. Facebook’s “take a break” feature lets you avoid seeing their pictures, etc., without unfriending them.

Especially if you’re still confused about the breakup or pining for your lost love, social media stalking is the worst thing you can do. It just breeds speculation and suspicion and keeps you stuck in the past.

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9. Stop overanalyzing it.

You did the best you could with what you knew at the time. Be kind to yourself and stop overanalyzing and replaying every detail, thought, and conversation gone awry. It is what it is, and it happened the way it was supposed to happen.

10. Trust the process.

There is a process to your life—a beautiful, graceful unfolding of possibilities and potential. Relationships are part of our purpose—to love and be loved. Some loves are not meant to last a lifetime. Be thankful for the experience. Every experience helps you grow into the person you’re meant to be.

11. Believe in love.

Don't close your heart. Don’t retreat from the world. Don’t let the pain take over. Believe in yourself and love. It will be there waiting for you when you’re ready.

12. Prioritize self-care.

Make sure you take care of you. Focus on your health and what makes your body feel good. Spend time in nature. Prioritizing self-care means learning how to be your own best friend and cherishing your beautiful self because when you love yourself, you will attract someone who loves themselves, too. (Here's more on how to get over a breakup the healthy way.)

13. Follow your heart.

We live in a beautiful world. Care for it, protect it, play with it. If you want to go to Machu Picchu, run that half-marathon, or adopt a child, do it. Life is short. The only dreams that will come true are the ones you pursue.

Four Methods for Healing a Broken Heart

32,184

Man and Woman Know Yourself

“We parted two months ago by mutual agreement. By this point, it was clear to both of us that our difficult relationship would lead nowhere. I don't want him back, but I can't forget him either. All the time I remember those days and nights when we were good together. I often cry. It is difficult to do even daily activities. Advise me what to do,” asks 29-year-old Anastasia.

32-year-old Eugene echoes her: “I have been in love with Marina for a long time, I tried to court, but I immediately realized that this was a hopeless case: she would soon marry someone else. I would really like to just forget her and switch. I've tried dating other women... that's not it at all! After each meeting, I think that everything would be different with Marina. These thoughts are driving me crazy."

Immersed in a painful sense of loss, all those who have suffered from unrequited love since Antiquity ask themselves: how to endure this ordeal - one of the most difficult? Who will help to heal from love? The ancient Roman poet Ovid tried to answer this question with a long poem "The Cure for Love".

Today, the internet is the go-to guide, where you can find numerous stories about "how I forgot my ex" or cure love with wikiHow, the premier online guide that "teaches you to do everything. " The longest of his instructions on how to fall out of love includes 17 steps.

Ovid's recipes

In the second year of our era, when Ovid was accused of wasting his talent only on singing love, he responded by writing a poem of 814 verses in which he teaches "the art of falling out of love." Here are some quotes from her.

“Avoid idleness: idleness breeds love and nourishes it. She is both the cause and the food for this so sweet affliction.”

***

“Keep apparent calmness, and this calmness, at first feigned, will become real. May you have the strength to consider yourself healed, and you will definitely be healed.

***

“Isn't it wiser to remain silent than to keep repeating that you no longer love? The one who says, "I don't love anymore," still loves. Gradually, and not immediately, we extinguish our flame. Hurry slowly and you will be saved from adversity.

Society tends to regard unrequited love as an annoying hindrance that reduces our social "efficiency". And since surgeons have learned how to transplant a heart, we are also trying to heal it with the help of modern methods. But which one do you prefer?

We interviewed four specialists. Their approaches are different but effective. The choice depends on the goals that we set for ourselves.

Psychodrama to complete the relationship

Ekaterina Lopukhina, psychodramatist

Motto: become the author of your own life. We often feel that something is happening to us, and we can only worry about it. But we also compose our life, and every author knows that the hero goes through trials in order to acquire new qualities. Psychodrama helps to make trials a part of life experience, to understand how and why they change us.

How it works: reach agreement with all parts of your personality. Our suffering is explained by the conflict of parts: one wants to return to the relationship, the other wants to end it. There is one that is angry and one that is sad. The psychodramatist will offer to isolate each part as a separate character and give it the opportunity to express position and feelings. Then these parts can enter into a dialogue, but even the first stage of the work - distinguishing between individual voices in the inner turmoil - already helps the sufferer from love.

It is also possible to discover that part of ourselves that we feel we have lost with the end of a relationship. What was I like in these relationships, what do I miss so much? Our task is to “call” this part with its qualities back and find a place for it in our life. There is a lot to be said in a relationship. And if they are interrupted, the feelings and thoughts addressed to the partner remain unexpressed. Psychodrama offers a conversation with an imaginary partner in a symbolic space.

What has been started must be completed so that there is no story without an end that makes us scroll through failed explanations in our heads. In addition, we can come up with farewell rituals and act them out.

Limitations: the method is not suitable for those whose emotions are difficult to control, who are "overwhelmed" or "knocked down" by feelings. It is also unlikely to suit those who, in principle, find it difficult and do not want to speak.

Hypnosis to calm down

Miriam Ruhr, Coach

Motto: do not interfere with another to go his way, but go your own. Ericksonian hypnosis is like an ambulance, it offers the victim of love to say goodbye to affective addiction as soon as possible. The client is first asked to remember his grief, then prompted to let go of the loved one from memory, "dissolving" the emotional charge associated with him. In this way, you can quickly go through the mandatory and necessary stages of mourning: denial, anger, feelings of injustice, sadness and even depression, and then renewal. All this happens in less than six months.

How it works: change the perception of loss through metaphors. Assuming a comfortable position, plunging into a state of slightly altered consciousness, the client follows the therapist's metaphors. These metaphors show the loss of love in a different light and allow you to take it with more calmness. At this stage, the client is helped to "unanchor" the trauma and then new anchors are created for safer reactions.

A precaution in this technique: throughout the process, the therapist checks that regrets, desire, longing, resentment, or hatred towards the former partner have indeed been "deprogrammed". After all, hating him is out of the question (that would be another way to maintain affection).

Restrictions: some cannot be hypnotized. Hypnosis is often associated with suggestion: if an idea, an image, a belief is suggested to us, will the reaction to them be the same as if they arose on their own? Everyone has their own answer to this.

Psychoanalysis to recover

Maria Eril, psychotherapist

Motto: restore narcissistic integrity. Each of us is characterized by narcissism. It breaks down when the relationship breaks. Our social status is changing: we become loners. We are losing our usual support: next to us there is no longer the one who raised our self-esteem, said: “you look good”, “you are the best” ...

The period before a breakup is often also painful: we felt wrong, we heard reproaches and accusations. This is how integrity is lost. And psychoanalysis helps to restore it.

How it works: take your time and understand what is happening. If we set ourselves the task of quickly falling out of love, then we achieve the opposite, aggravating suffering with a new failure. It is better to prepare for the fact that we have a difficult period ahead. The more we take care of ourselves, the more likely we will be able to pass it safely. And although the desire to quickly finish the love story is understandable, trying to unwind and get distracted is not the best tactic here.

Some are looking for new sexual adventures, new partners. Often this experience makes the situation worse. Compared to the meaninglessness of random meetings, the value of lost relationships will increase. For the same reason, you should not try to continue your sexual life without a partner. Overall, masturbation is a positive experience, a way to get to know yourself better. But after parting, the images that arise in sexual fantasies are associated with the person we have lost. This can make it harder to access orgasm, and not achieving orgasm is another blow to self-esteem.

Therefore, it is better to turn to the inner child, to the pleasures that the sensation of the physical body gives us: to run, to walk. It is important to understand that "I am good on my own, without a partner, I fill the world, the world is more interesting with me than without me."

Restrictions: this method is for those who have the time and money. And also the desire to look for the origins of their problems. For those who do not want or are not ready to go through disturbing memories, the psychoanalytic method of free association will not be the most suitable.

Philosophy to console yourself

Julia Sineokaya, philosopher

Motto: parting with a loved one does not mean parting with love. Learning how to stop loving is impossible, and not necessary. Love is the greatest blessing. In the dialogue about love "Feast", Plato proves that love is much more important than being loved, love is the main gift of the gods to people, only love opens the way to gaining meaning, self-improvement, immortality. Undoubtedly, losing a loved one is a tragedy. It hurts when he doesn't love you back. It is even more painful when the feeling goes out of life irrevocably.

How it works: ask yourself questions honestly and answer them. One of these important questions is what exactly torments us: love or desire to possess, an unsatisfied sense of ownership. If you really love, your love cannot be taken away from you as long as you yourself are alive.

If a loved one is alive, but does not want to be with you, give him the freedom to be himself, and if possible, continue to do good for him without expecting a reward, because you do it from an excess of feeling, and do not lend and do not doing the exchange. The greatest joy is to do good to the one you love. You can do otherwise, say to yourself: "I do not know how to love those who do not love me." This formula can help, heal, and if it works, great! However, this will mean that your feeling was not true love.

To meet a person whom you deeply loved, with whom you spent a happy time, is the rarest gift that you will keep in your soul, having learned over time to draw from it not suffering, but strength. There is nothing eternal, this is the wisdom and tragedy of being. If your beloved has left your life or even left the world forever, this does not mean at all that love is dead - it will remain with you as joy, as a talisman, as something that will never leave and betray you, warm your soul in harsh times . Do not look for a cure for love - love! Love is the best gift that life gives us.

Limitations: philosophy teaches you to think and create your own image of the world, giving meaning to life. It only requires patience, which the Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard said was necessary to become a person.

Text: Elsa Lestvitskaya Photo credit: Getty Images

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Is it possible to heal a broken heart from the point of view of science?

Psychology

The universal spell "time heals" until recently was the basis of restorative therapy for broken hearts. Fortunately, science does not stand still, and scientists have finally found something worthwhile, embodied in an effective (and fast!) Way to solve the problem.

"Love and Other Medicines"

The breakup of a relationship is an ordeal that is difficult to overcome. Separation turns the world inside out, knocks you down, drives you into tears, twists your stomach, and does not let you fall asleep. Psychologists have found that suffering becomes especially unbearable if you are left for someone else. “Apart from the fact that the breakup due to infidelity forces the abandoned to endlessly torment themselves with questions about what is better than the other, experiences about this increase the conflict between a growing sense of alienation and an internal need for belonging,” explains one of the recent articles in the Journal of Psychology personality and social psychology”.

“Love and Other Medicines”

But there is good news: emotions can be corrected after a breakup! A recent study at the University of Colorado Boulder showed that the pain associated with a tear can be alleviated with the help of a placebo (the so-called “dummy” given to the patient as real medicine).

"Love and Other Medicines"

Forty men and women who were victims of love drama volunteered to participate in a study on how the brain reacts to the breakup of a relationship. Participants were asked to bring along a photo of their loved one. After looking at the picture and thinking about the recent breakup, all respondents underwent MRI of the brain. After that, they were expected to continue the experiment (no less cruel): they were inflicted with physical pain (for sympathizers there is a detail - it is not clear what, but in the forearm) and again sent for an MRI.

"Love and other drugs"

As a result, it turned out that physical and emotional pain activates similar parts of the brain. As the lead author of the study, professor of psychology and neuroscience Thor Wager summarized: "Emotional suffering, in particular the experience of a breakup with loved ones, is not inferior to physical and is just as real from a neurochemical point of view."

"Love and Other Medicines"

But that's not all.

Learn more