What to Do About Heartbreak?
Heartbreak hurts. It’s literal heartache. And alongside that, there can be all kinds of other emotions competing for priority — like anger, disappointment, jealousy, sometimes even a desire for revenge. Images from the past can keep haunting your mind, about how nice things were together and that that time won’t come back. You might also start feeling fear about the future. Will I ever find someone as wonderful as him/her again? Now I have to go to friends, parents, and holiday celebrations alone. Loneliness can creep in — sitting alone on the couch under a blanket.
So it can be an extremely intense period in which you sometimes feel like you’re going crazy from all your emotions. And on top of your emotions, you also have all your thoughts. Where would he be? Who would he be with? Does he like someone else better than me? Was it all not real, then, when he said he loved me? All those thoughts create more unpleasant feelings, and before you know it you’re on a rollercoaster you can hardly get off. Then you often get the tip “time heals all wounds” or “go find some distraction.”
There are a number of phases you go through. Heartbreak is a kind of grieving process.
1. Denial phase: “This isn’t happening to me.”
It’s like a bad dream. You can hardly believe it’s true, and you need to recover from the shock.
2. Period of anger: “Why is this happening to me?”
A period in which you realize it’s over, and in which you feel many intense emotions such as anger and fear, and sometimes jealousy too, if someone else is involved. It’s a period in which you’re often hard to approach for the people around you. Underneath the anger lies your pain.
3. The bargaining phase: “I promise to become a better person if…”
This often means you start trying all sorts of things to undo it after all. For example, promising to do better, showing different behavior, adapting yourself just to keep the other person with you.
4. Period of grief: “I give up.”
In this period you start accepting the situation, and other sad things can also surface, making the grief feel even bigger. In this phase you’re also hard to reach for others. At the bottom of the grief there’s often anger. Suppressed emotion is often the cause of depression.
5. Acceptance: “I’m moving on with my life.”
Once someone has had enough time, and often also some help, to go through the phases mentioned above, they start accepting reality. A sense of peace sets in, and one is able to detach, to let go. Letting go isn’t the same as forgetting. It’s giving the loss a place in your life and moving forward.
What I recommend for heartbreak:
- Make time and space for your feelings. Let your feelings be there, but don’t stay stuck in them.
- Talk about it, if that feels good to you, with someone you trust and who can support you through your grief.
- Thoughts determine your feelings, so also see if you can find some positive thoughts.
- Don’t keep sending all kinds of messages to your ex, and don’t start making accusations — see if you can deal with your own feelings first.
- Even if you long for continued contact with your ex, it can sometimes be useful to first take a time-out and process your grief. Afterward you can look at whether you both still want to stay in touch.
- Keep taking good care of yourself — eat healthily, exercise, see other people.
- If you can’t manage on your own, seek help.
Bio
Jacqueline Evers is a relationship therapist who helps couples build a loving, fulfilling relationship instead of a bitter and costly divorce. Over the past 16 years, she has helped more than 1,350 people through individual and relationship therapy. With her book ‘Cheating. Moving Forward Together in 5 Steps’, she offers couples affected by infidelity a new way of loving. She regularly works with expats and wrote the e-book ‘Cheating. 5 Steps to Recover from Infidelity.’ She works from her practices in Huizen, Almere Poort, and online, and is regularly heard on NPO1 radio. The Loveworkx podcasts can be heard on Spotify, among other platforms.