How To Mend Your Broken Heart Overcome Emotional Pain At The End Of A Relationship

1: What is heartbreak? 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 improvepart 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 aWillbourn, Hugh is the author of 'How To Mend Your Broken Heart Overcome Emotional Pain At The End Of A Relationship', published 2005 under ISBN 9781400054046 and ISBN 1400054044.