10 steps to heal a broken heart
The searing pain of a failed relationship is the greatest suffering many of us will ever experience. Being heartbroken can make you feel worthless and hopeless - but that is because the frame you are using is too narrow. Learning to see your situation with a different frame is a wonderful liberation.
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Here are ten things that one can do in that situation.
Accept the pain
Accept that you will have to go through some pain. It is an unavoidable truth that if you loved enough to be heartbroken, you have to experience some suffering.
When you lose something that mattered to you, it is natural and important to feel sad about it: that feeling is an essential part of the healing process.
Change your habits
Now you have to break those connections. Turn off the music that reminds you of your ex. Make your home look and feel different from when your loved one was around.
Move the furniture.
Take up a new activity. And keep moving: exercise is the single most effective therapy for depression.
Change your thoughts
The next step is to do the same thing on the inside - transform your habits of thought. In a relationship, we build up a huge array of such habits. When the love affair ends, these patterns can still be running.
To change your thinking habits, you need to understand a little more about them.
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View your relationship from the outside
The following exercise will help you look at your circumstances from different points of view, so you gain helpful insights.
1. Think about the break-up of your relationship. What are the judgments or generalisations you have made about yourself and your ex?
2. Now think of someone you admire - a character from history or a real friend. Imagine they are watching a movie of this part of your life, and step into their shoes to watch it instead. Imagine what their comments would be.
Change how you see yourself and him
The next stage is to focus on your mental picture of your lost love. By changing how you represent your ex in your mind, you can greatly reduce or even eliminate your distress.
You must learn to control your 'visualisation'. Every single one of us makes pictures in our imagination - and we can all learn how to change the pictures.
It is important to learn to do this, because our bodies react to what we imagine in the same way that they react to what is actually happening to us. Memory and imagination affect our feelings in the same way as reality does.
Change how you see your past
1. Answer the following question. Which side of your front door is the lock on? To answer, you have had to make a mental picture of the door. You have made a visualisation.
2. Now try to imagine what your front door would look like if it was bright orange or had yellow stripes down it. Make it bigger. Move it away so that it is smaller. Move it further away and down a bit so you are looking down on it. Make it open. Change it in different ways.
Fall out of love - for good
Now you are ready to tackle the central problem using the visualisation technique. Part of being heartbroken is the fact that you still feel in love.
It hurts because part of you is still attached to your ex. This exercise helps that piece of you release itself.
1. List five occasions when you felt very in love with your ex. List them so you can easily call them to mind.
2. Start with the first of those memories. Play with it. Move the image away from you so that you can see yourself in the picture. Make it small.
Understand your emotions
The next stage is to learn to understand your emotional reactions better. Your feelings of heartbreak are unlikely to disappear unless you cope with what they are trying to tell you.
An emotion is a bit like someone knocking on your door to deliver a message.
If you don't answer, it keeps knocking until you do open up.
Opening the door to your feelings means learning to understand them. This can be hard, because heartbreak is complicated by other feelings: anger, fear and shame.
Believe that you will find love again
You could fall into the trap of remaining convinced that your ex is the only person you could ever love. This is unlikely to be true on a planet with six billion people.
So why do you believe it?
Can it be because you are desperately trying to avoid accepting that the relationship is over? Or are you afraid that the bad feelings associated with heartbreak will never go away?
That fear makes you anxious, and keeps you feeling bad for longer. The burden of your heartbreak has grown heavier, and a vicious circle has been established.
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Living happily after your break-up
A good way of giving yourself a boost - and coping with complicated feelings - is to imagine a bright future.
1. Imagine the future as a corridor in front of you. Imagine walking down it, away from the present, towards a door.
2. Open the door, and see beyond it a world in which you have recovered from your heartbreaking relationship.