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Are you suffering from a broken heart? Here are helpful tools to handle a tough break up so you heal faster and gain needed insights to trust love again.
If you are struggling to handle a tough break up, you’re not alone. In fact the end of a relationship is known to bring even the strongest people to their knees. After all, you invested a lot of love, time and trust in your partner.
It makes sense you’d feel a huge sense of loss attached to the idea that what could have been will no longer be.
It often takes a long time to accept the feeling of loss associated with being aimed at a different future.
During this time, many people find themselves stuck in the “denial” phase of grief – lacking hope that their future will lead somewhere better.
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Tough break ups can bring up lots of buried emotions – presuming you are open to feeling your “truth” and working through the lessons to be learned.
Indeed, being in an intimate relationship can often serve the function of “distraction” from challenges we need to deal with.
In this vein, going through a tough break up can be a wonderful time to reconnect with yourself!
For many people, there’s a huge chance that the extreme pain experienced in a challenging break up has less to do with the relationship itself. Or the person you have lost.
Instead the painful break up has much more to do with needing to face up to your own lack of self love, self worth and self-esteem.
The majority of people will fight this view.
They will deny that lack of self love is at the crux of the pain in their heartbreak.
But if you take time to explore the hurt you feel, you might soon discover that the cause of your pain is due to the sudden lack of the supply of “love” you’d been receiving your partner.
Basically, the pain of heartbreak comes because you had become dependent on your partner to be your “supplier” of “love.”
Without them, you now feel hungry for the love they had been feeding you.
Studies even report that it’s actually physiologically proven that without love – humans can die. It’s a very real concern. After a tough break up, your brain can literally go into survival mode. You can wind up feeling a strong need to reclaim this love – anyway you can!
The truth is, your brain is hardwired to help you survive at all costs; yet, it relies on your own programming to determine what “survival” looks like. And unfortunately, it can lead you in the wrong direction.
Once upon a time, the brain would be triggered by the sight of a dinosaur and motivate humans to run, run, run. Your brain would instantly administer a shot of adrenaline to put your body in a peak state of fight or flight. Today, it still has that exact same mechanism. But instead of kicking into high gear at the sight of a dinosaur, it kicks in as we go to give a public talk. Or just before a date. Or at the end of an important relationship .
Your brain mistakenly links your emotional survival with your now-ex-partner. Your brain will have seen your ex partner as an important source of love. Now that this source of love has gone, it triggers you to fight for it back.
Yet, just like how a huge shot of adrenaline before giving a public presentation isn’t helpful, this isn’t helpful either.
Imagine now a different break up scenario.In this situation, you have so much “love” inside of you that your brain doesn’t feel starved for love at the end of a break up.
You feel so much love within yourself that your brain doesn’t feel as desperate to reclaim the love it had been outsourcing to your now-ex-partner!
This alternate self-love-from-within scenario can literally make the difference between…
Each of these healing strategies will help you to become better at being your own self supplier of love. As a result, each of these tools will lower the pain and stress of a challenging break up.
We often find ourselves getting consumed by a breakup to the point we lose interest in our daily lives.
We become so wrapped up in the break up we ruminate and obsess about how to make things better, how to win them back, what the other person is doing, and so on…
This is not a helpful way to focus your attention. It can be a very destructive, slippery slope that leads people to a place where they lose themselves.
Energy flows where attention goes! Rather than focus on the negativity of the ending of a relationship, lift your head up and focus on the beginning of something new…something that energizes you… and builds you up!
For instance, do things which are true to your core self. If you’ve always wanted to paint, start painting. If you’ve always wanted to learn yoga, take yoga classes.
The point is this: Every ending holds the opportunity for a new beginning – to bloom into your best and truest self!
Shift your focus to a new beginning – and explore how you can use this time for your own growth and personal development.
Keep your mind, heart and body as busy as possible.
Make plans with friends and family. Go to the movies. Read a book. Take a class.
After all, when you’re not busy, you are more likely to think about the other person or the relationship.
So stay active and out there – so you stop ruminating on the woulda, shoulda coulda’s!
It’s easy to look back on past relationships with rose tinted glasses. So take time to write down all the pros and cons of your relationship – the good bits and the bad bits.
Make sure you are keeping a realistic perspective with regard to how things actually were. A grounded perspective can be very helpful in the process of healing.