How can I deal with heartbreak?

Break-ups have often felt to me as if my entire world had been reduced to rubble and ashes. That was because I drew my sense of safety in the world from my relationships. But there is a way to get that safety back even without a relationship. Here are the insights from my own processing.

I would look at heartbreak on four levels:

1. Healthy grief: Grief points to the fact that you have lost something you love. Because it is tied to love, it can actually be a beautiful feeling. You can grieve in a healthy way by allowing yourself to feel the beautiful feelings you are grieving for. That way you can keep alive in your feelings what you lost in physical life (in my case it was the feeling of being safe in the world). Consciously noticing what was beautiful leads to more inner clarity: What are you really grieving for? Which feeling is it that you love and need so much? The moment you decide to feel it, it is there again. You had lost access to that feeling, but you can restore your connection to it at any time.

2. Healthy anger: Grief and anger can and may exist at the same time. You are allowed to be angry at the person, or at the fact that they left you, and you are still allowed to love the positive memories you had with them. But you are also allowed to feel the pain, anger and hate you associate with the person. The more facets of your feelings toward the person you can perceive, the better they can be processed. The more you slip into black and white thinking and idealise or reject the person, the more your feelings can get stuck unprocessed.

3. Loss of attachment: If the loss feels unbearably uncomfortable, it may be that it touches earlier attachment wounds. Then you can start there and ask yourself which loss of attachment, to which close caregiver, is really hurting here, and then try step 1 again with exactly that bond: What is it about your fundamental attachment that you truly miss? Then you can focus on exactly that beautiful feeling you actually love, and/or on the anger.

4. Consequences of the break-up: Another reason break-ups can feel unbearably uncomfortable are the unpleasant consequences that come with them. That can be loneliness, for example, or the fear of being pushed out of the circle of friends you used to share. Here too you can use the "trick" of remembering what you love. You do not have to lose these feelings just because you lose something in physical reality that you associate with them. You can allow yourself to keep feeling them within you.

In summary: the goal of grieving is essentially to restore the lost connection to what you love. It is about allowing the positive memories again, even if the person may no longer be in your life or you experienced something negative with them. You can still invite the positive feeling you long for back into your life.

What is it that you truly love?