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How Can A Broken Heart Heal?
To love is to put your heart at risk. It is only natural that inevitably we shall all experience a broken heart. Chances are most of us will have our heart broken several times. It is thus imperative that we learn how to assist the heart to heal once it has been broken.
The key to assisting time heal the wounded heart is to understand and support the emotional healing process. What happens when we lose a dream is that we go through predictable stages of that loss. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross identified five stages that accompany loss. Her original work was done around death and dying, however the principles have been found accurate for all severe emotional losses. She not only identified these five stages, she went on to become accepted as the pioneer in this field. Her work has become the standard.
The first stage is denial. The pain is too great to accept, and so the mind refuses to embrace reality. We hide ourselves from the truth. However, reality will not go away. Eventually we have to face what is happening. Denial begins to erode, and reality begins to emerge.
Enter the second stage, bargaining. Once we realize we might lose, we attempt to bargain. We trade. We do anything to keep the status quo. “Please don’t leave”. “No, don’t do that, I will do whatever you want”. “I am in fear of losing you or myself, and I will do anything you have ever wanted from me”.
When bargaining doesn’t work, we enter stage three. Anger. The bargaining hasn’t worked. We are not getting what we want, and so we enter the primal stage of anger. Like the child who throws a tantrum, we become enraged. At ourselves. At our partner. At God. At the entire world.
And so we finally are forced into stage four, hopelessness and despair. Now we enter a deep depression as we come to terms with what has happened. We do not feel happy. We may wish we were not living. This is too hard. But we carry on, and finally we see light at the end of the tunnel.
And then finally, stage five. Acceptance. Peace. Tranquility. We become bored with our constant complaining. We have finally finished the race, and now we can rest. We have arrived. Wiser yet resolved and ready to begin anew.
Once you understand that to be human is to go through these stages, it becomes easier to heal a broken heart. And one last matter. This process takes different amounts of time for people, however I would suggest you not tolerate these deep emotions beyond two or three years. If you are in the first four stages for many years, the problem has become chronic and may require expert guidance to help you recover. Broken hearts do heal. Time and understanding is the key to working with the process to reach that healing.
And remember the wonderful Sufi statement that “only the heart broken open, can really love”. While having your heart broken is hurtful, it is also a necessary stage during life’s many different phases.
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CREDIT: Stephen Martin, MS. MFT
Stephen is a licensed marriage and Family Therapist with offices in San Francisco, California and Sydney, Australia. He is a graduate of the University of Southern California (USC) and has done undergraduate work at Sydney University. Stephen is past president of CAMFT, the largest association of licensed marriage and family therapists in the world. |