Heartbreak is a very strange distress. It is exquisitely painful, and yet we cannot find an injury on our body. It is like one big emotional pain but it also seems to spark off hundreds of other emotions. We hate the feeling of heartbreak, and yet we find ourselves compelled to go over and over memories, ideas or fantasies which make the feeling worse. What is going on?
I can remember a relationship that ended after two years. Emotionally it fizzled out, so neither I nor my ex felt heartbroken. However, directly afterwards I had another relationship that lasted only four months but completely wrecked me because I had believed I would be with that girl forever. She used to talk about marriage, and at the time she probably meant it. I created a future
in my imagination where we were a happy couple with a passionate romance and an exciting social life. I thought about what our kids might look like. All this thinking and fantasizing built up a strong network of neural pathways in my brain. As far as my nervous system was concerned, I was already married to her. When I found out she was two-timing me, in an instant my dreams and ideas seemed ridiculous. Added to all my lovely future fantasies was a huge negative feeling: Cancelled. The meaning of the pictures in my head flipped. All I could see was her in bed with another guy and think what a fool I had been. As I lay awake going over and over why this had happened, I was reinforcing how sad I felt and what a loser I must be. I felt terrible, and then even worse because I didn't know if the feeling would ever end.
One day I said to myself, “This is ridiculous! I've got to stop!” But the thoughts wouldn't stop. I didn't want to think about her, but I couldn't help it. I realized that I wasn't in charge of my own brain. I was powerless while it buzzed away. This was one of the experiences that led me eventually into writing this book. I wanted to get my mind on my side, instead of having it keep me awake at night.
When an important love relationship ends, a range of different responses is triggered. We feel loss and pain. Our normal ways of thinking about the world are disrupted. Our balance is upset, and our feelings change from one minute to the next. We pine for our ex-lover, then we are overwhelmed with anger at them. One minute we are desperate to see them, the next we can't bear to have anyone mention their name. This volatility and confusion add to the misery.
Heartbreak is caused by the end of a relationship. It can also be caused when we fail to get a relationship we fervently desire. It can even happen slowly when we realize that we are in a relationship from which all the love has gone. However it happens, after the shock, it takes some time for reality to sink in. Then we experience a welter of feelings. We can be angry, sad, devastated, despairing, distraught, desperate, remorseful, regretful, ashamed, embarrassed. The emotional bombardment is overwhelming.
In the long term, we have a natural way of dealing with these feelings. We have an emotional mechanism that allows us to recover from losses and from pain. If we didn't have it, the whole world would be in mourning forever! Bereavement, parting and suffering are unavoidable parts of our life experience. The natural way we recover is by grieving.
How grief heals
Grieving is a specific process by which we gradually let go of our attachment to the people (or places or things or even possibilities) we have lost. Of course, in the first shock of heartbreak it is not much comfort to be told that things will improve in time. We might not be ready for our feelings to improve-part of us might not even have accepted what has happened yet. And even once we do accept it, it is possible to misunderstand grief. Grief happens one bit at a time. You feel bad for a while and then it stops. You feel fine, then you feel sad again, then the sadness stops. It is important to know that grief works like this, so that we are not frightened that it will carry on forever. It won't. It will stop. But while it does happen, it is important to our recovery.
You see, we experience only as much sadness as is necessary for our feelings to adjust as far as they can at any one time, then the feeling stops. When we have become used to that amount of change and loss, the unconscious lets us feel a bit more, and so on, until we have fully absorbed the whole significance of the loss. By the same token, when grief does stop, there is no need to feel guilty that we didn't care enough. Some people have told me they feel guilty about feeling all right so soon after a loss, and I have to tell them not to worry, and reassure them that they are simply being well looked after by their unconscious mind.
This process of grief can be divided into four stages. The first, denial, is where we try to reject what has happened. In the second, we accept it, but still feel angry about it. In the third stage we acknowledge our sadness, and when we reach the fourth we have accepted our loss and are able to look back and enjoy the happy memories we have.
The trouble with heartbreak, however, is that the natural process of grief does not always work properly. People can get stuck, repeating the same painful feelings over and over again. I first understood why this happened when I was working with a woman whose second husband had left her for a younger woman. Her first husband had died. As we worked together she told me, in a hesitant and ashamed tone of voice, that it had been easier to recover from being widowed than it was to recover from being left. When her first husband died her world was changed forever, but his love for her, and hers for him, was not questioned. It was an extremely painful loss, but an absolute one.
When her second husband left, it called into question the love they had had together, and the fact that he was still living in the same town made it all the more difficult for her to forget him and move on. It is these sorts of questions about the past and the future that can make heartbreak so painful and complicated.
None of us can avoid feeling some pain and sadness at the end of a relationship we cared about-as we will see, a certain amount is even necessary. But this book is dedicated to helping you avoid the unnecessary repetition of pain and distress. It helps you change the way you think and feel about the past and the future by working with your fundamental systems of thought and feeling. Better still, as you make these changes and understand them, you prepare yourself for a richer and stronger relationship in the future.
