Steps to Mend a Broken Heart – Part I

Getting over a broken heart is never easy, especially in the social networking age, when photos of you and your ex in happier times remain plastered on your friends’ Facebook pages. Worse, recent research suggests that romantic rejection can cause physical pain in a way that no other negative emotion—not even anger or fear—can.But it’s actually good to go through the insane despair and bouts of endless tears that result from being dumped, contends bestselling author and relationship expert Susan Piver. We should embrace these feelings rather than run from them, she argues in her book, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart. “As unlikely as it may sound, this sorrow is the gateway to lasting happiness,” she writes, speaking of her own two-year experience recovering from heartbreak. Piver and other experts described ways to ride through those uninvited waves of grief.

1. Make friends with your heartbreak. You may be tempted to try and forge past it, numbing the pain with rebound sex or a date with a gallon of ice cream. Or you may harden your heart and swear off all future relationships. But that’s the cowardly approach, and one that won’t serve you well in the long run. “It takes a lot of courage to be sad,” says Piver, “but a fantastic life is not one that is placidly happy.” With grieving comes increased awareness: of what’s truly important to you; whom you love; who loves you. “Of course, no one wants to feel that way, myself included,” Piver adds, “but if you allow [the sadness] to teach you, it actually will resolve faster than any effort to fight it.” By Deborah Kotz, Angela Haupt http://health.usnews.com/health-news/articles/2012/03/22/8-steps-to-mend-a-broken-heart

Scars have the strange power
to remind us that our past is real.
Cormac McCarthy

Little Deaths

When something serious is happening or has happened that I desperately wish was NOT the case, I usually find myself first in “denial” pretending “this is not happening to me” or that “I am just fine” even though I am not. Next often comes “anger” and feelings like “Why me?” and “This is not fair”. As anger subsides frequently I begin “bargaining” with myself or God with thoughts similar to “if only you’ll do this, I promise to do that”. It rarely works so I move on to “depression” with ideas like “why bother” and “I’m so sad I don’t care anymore”. In time sadness is most often replaced with the belief “everything is going to be OK” as I find “acceptance” for what is happening or has happened. “Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance” are the five steps Elisabeth Kubler-Ross called “The Five Stages of Grief” in her book of the same name. Her conclusions were based on studying terminally ill patients, but I have discovered recovery from codependence involves many “little deaths” as old ways and unhealthy thinking pass away to make room for new and better ones. In each small dying comes rebirth and recovery.

Grief does not change you… It reveals you.
John Green