At some point of our lives, almost every of us will fall very in love with someone and have our heart broken, and the relationship that was everything we hope it would be. When your heart is broken, the same instincts you ordinarily rely on, will time and again lead you down the wrong path, you simply cannot trust what your mind is telling you.
For example, we know from studies of heartbroken people that having a clear understanding of why the relationship ended, is really important for our ability to move on. Yet time and again, when we are offer a simple and honest explanation, we reject it. Heartbreak creates such dramatic emotional pain, our mind tell us the cause must be equally dramatic.
And that gut instinct is so powerful, it can make even the most reasonable and measured of us come with mysteries and conspiracy theories where none exist. We often think something must happen during our romantic gateway with him/her that soured our relationship, and we become obsessed with figuring out what that was, and so we spent countless hours going through every minute of that weekend in our mind, searching our memory for clues that were not there.
Our mind tricked us into initiating this wild goose chase, but what compelled us to commit to it for so many months? heartbreak is far more insidious than we realized, there is a reason we keep going down one rabbit hole after another, even when we know its going to make us feel worse. Brain studies have shown that the withdrawal of dramatic love, activates the same mechanisms in our brain that get activated when addicts are withdrawing from substances like cocaine or opiods.
And since we could not have the heroin of actually being with him/her, our unconscious mind choose the methadone of our memories with him/her. Our instincts told us we are trying to solve a mystery, but what we supposed to actually doing was getting us fix. This is what makes heartbreak so dificult to heal. Addicts know they addicted they know when they’re shooting up, but heartbroken people do not. But we do now.
And if your heart is broken, you cannot ignore that. You have to recognized that as compelling as the urge is, with every trip down memory lane, every text you send, every second you spend stalking your ex on social media, you are just feeding your addiction, deepening your emotional pain and complicating your recovery. Getting over heartbreak is not a journey, it’s a fight, and your reason is your strongest weapon. There is no breakup explanation that’s going to feel satisfying. No rationale can take away the pain you feel, so dont search for one, dont wait for one, just accept the one you were offered or make up one yourself, and then put the question to rest, because you need that closure to resist the addiction. And you need something else as well, you have to be willing to let go, to accept that is over.
Otherwise your mind will feed on your hope and set you back. Hope can be incredibly destructive when your heart is broken. Heartbreak is a master manipulator the ease with which is gets our mind to do the absolute opposite of what we need in order to recover is remarkable, one of the most common tendencies we have when our heart is broken is to idealized the person who broke it. We spend hour remembering their smile, how great they made us feel, that time we hiked up the mountain and made love under the stars.
All that does is make our loss feel more painful, we know that yet we still allow our mind to cycle through one greatest hit after another, like we were being held hostage by our own passive aggressive spotify playlist. Heartbreak will make those thoughts pop into your mind and so to avoid idealizing, you have to balance them out. By remembering their frown, not just their smile, how bad they made you feel, the fact that after the lovemaking, you got lost coming down the mountain, argue like crazy and didn’t speak for two days. thing that you should to do is to compile an exhaustive list of all the ways the person was wrong for you, all the bad quality, all the pet peeves, and then keep it on your phone.
And once you have your list,you have to used it. When we hear even a hint of idealizing of the faintest whiff of nostalgia in a session, you go, “phone, please.” your mind will try to tell you they were perfect, but they were not, and neither was the relationship and if you want to get over them, you have to remind yourself of that, frequently. None of us is immune to heartbreak. heartbreak is complex psychological injury it impacts us in a multitude of ways. Not just because it explains why heartbreak could be so devastating but because it tells us how to heal to fix your brokenheart, we have to identify these voids in your life and fill them, all of them. The void in your identity, you have to restablish who you are and what your life is about. The void in your social life.
Idealizing your ex instead of focusing on how they were wrong for you, indulging thoughts and behaviors that still give them a staring role in this next chapter of your life when they shouldnt be an extra.
Getting over heartbreak is hard, but you refused to be mislead by your mind and you take steps to heal , you can significantly minimize your suffering. so if you know someone have a heartbroken, have compassion , because social support has been found to be important for their recovery, and have patience. because its going to take them longer to move on than you think it should.
And if you are hurting, know this. Its dificult, it is a battle within your own mind , and you have to be diligent to be win, but you do have weapons, you can fight! and you will Heal!
-TED-
