How to deal with a broken heart
I recently went through really bad heartbreak when the person I love betrayed my trust in a way I never imagined possible, and as a person who also went through surgery just a few months back, I never thought that the impact of the emotional fallout would be or could be worse than the physical one. At least with my surgery, I could feel my body getting stronger every day.
My progress had a sense of upward direction.
With the emotional one, it was totally unpredictable: I would be totally fine one day, and on the floor crying the next.
Add to that the physiological effects that acted like domino pieces bringing each other down. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t stop crying and I always felt like there wasn’t enough air in the world. And my heart felt like it was going through a meat grinder. So much so that there were times when I wished for the pain to stop for a few minutes just so I can have a sense of reprieve.
While I’m still trying to recover, there are some things I’ve learned so far.
Do not try to personalize it or rationalize it
The first few days, I drove myself crazy trying to rationalize what happened. Why would someone betray my trust the way they did? Did I do anything wrong? Was it me?
Until the day I stopped and realised I should focus on the facts: someone I love betrayed my trust and hurt me deeply. It was a reflection of him and not myself.
I also realized that I got caught between two people who never healed from the pain they inflicted on each other, and so they transferred that pain to me.
In other words, hurt people hurt people.
And while it still doesn’t make sense to me, I found myself reminding myself that when I was being removed from the UAE after the government invested 7 years in my higher education, it also didn’t make sense to me, but the move eventually led to greater things.
It’s not what happens to you but how you react to what happens to you that matters, and I have a history of going through worse before and coming out on the other side stronger and more resilient. Basically, I’d like to believe I’m like Andy Dufresne from the Shawshank Redemption, “who crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side.”
Do the hard work of processing your feelings around it
Repressed feelings show up in sinister ways, and so I’ve learned from therapy that rather than shove all the awful emotions down by overworking, I needed to sit in the pain and feel everything that was showing up. And I decided to embark on a “learn, hang out with children, workout” healing journey (as opposed to eat, pray, love).
1.Label what you’re feeling as you’re feeling it: For that, I read the book Atlas of the Heart by Brene Brown, and I realized it was both anguish and grief for a person who’s pretty much alive, and for a future I thought we were going to have. Also, understand that grief shows up differently for different people and that its five stages are not as linear as you were made to believe. Some days it will feel like you’re taking one step forward, three steps backwards, and two steps to the side.
2. Understand what soothes you and regulates you: My nervous system was completely fried that first week. But ever since I was a child, I found learning self-soothing. When I was bored, or angry, or hurt, I’d distract myself with a book. Nowadays we have a world of podcasts to dive into it in addition to books, and even Tiktok has been interestingly (and addictively) educational with regards to this topic. Also, the process of research itself — acquiring knowledge from different sources — and trying to synthesise my understanding of the topic — comes naturally to me. So I just got curious, why do these things happen? And how do others handle it?
Another thing I reminded myself was that our societies and educational systems have never equipped us with the tools to deal with the messiness of the human experience. Yes, we might get a PhD in interdisciplinary engineering, but when life throws you a curveball, what do we really do with it?
3. Throw yourself a pity party but do not overstay your welcome: This is where I decided to just spend time with my nephew and niece. There’s something beautifully healing when you interact with toddlers under the age of 6. Maybe it’s their innocence, or their ability to inspire awe just by doing something mundane like chewing (half) their food while the other half splatters all over their clothes. I also spent a lot of time in the gym as working out has helped me past my previous trauma of being forced to leave the country I called home my entire life to return to the country whose passport I carried (Kenya).
4. Reach out to your social support system: More than ever, I really appreciated my social support system. They showed up for me with kindness and compassion, and told me all the right things that I needed to hear when I heard them. From the person who said, “You’re the kindest, strongest, most resilient person I know so don’t let this thing change who you are,” to the no-bullshit one who reminded me that, “Your gut has been telling you things for a long time now and you just haven’t been listening.”
5. Understand that even when things don’t work out, they work out: To be more exact, when things don’t work out in the short term, they do work out in the long term. And that is the lens we should look at things through. Someone reminded me, “You’re not entitled to a logical sequence of events, but you are entitled to Divine unveiling.”
6. Show up everyday and do only 3 things: The first few days were devastating for me. It was hard to get out of bed let alone do anything. So I committed to doing just 3 things every day. I also put Brene Brown’s quote as my phone’s wallpaper that said, “Sometimes the bravest and most important thing you can do is just show up.” And I decided to call the day a success if I completed those 3 things.
7. Actively work on your self-esteem: With incidents of broken trust, it is very easy for your self-esteem to take a hit, and this is where actively reminding yourself of your worth, and your values, can help. I found this Tiktok surprisingly helpful and started to do the same. It’s one where Kendall Jenner talks to Jay Shetty about how she puts a picture of herself as a little girl on the bathroom mirror so whenever she’s being negative, she looks at that photo and says, “She’s dope. I love her.”
8. Honor thy values: Nowadays, I carve space for myself to listen to my gut, and honor my values. The idea of letting unease overwhelm me, and then rationalizing it by lying to myself because I trusted someone so much are gone. The only person I am going to trust — and worry about — is myself. And the baby me whose picture I put on the bathroom mirror.
Finally, here’s a beautiful quote from the Selfhealers Soundboard podcast I heard, “Our hearts are meant to break over and over again. They continue to expand and learn and grow and each of these moments of pain and aching. There’s a message there. There’s very deeply kept wisdom within your soul and heart’s energy that has been trying to guide you behind the scenes, but life and conditioning and noise from society tend to get in the way and we get disconnected from that inner voice.”
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