Heart Break - How to Get Over It

How to get over a heartbreak.

There are a number of things that can lead to getting your heart broken although love lost is the one that comes to mind first. How to get over the heartache most often will seem totally impossible. But chances are you will be able to use this heart ache to become a stronger more powerful you. Believe it or not, this can be a good thing.

The heart is a very fragile thing. It is what makes us human. There are a lot of ways to have your heart broken. You can experience the loss of a loved one through death or estrangement. You can loose a pet or a dear friendship. You can be betrayed by word or deed. Someone might have hurt your feelings; cut you down or otherwise made you feel small. You can be let down by someone you had counted on. You may have been abandoned or turned away by someone who mattered. You can be fired or quit for your own good. The bottom line is you feel hurt, soul sick, physically and emotionally ill that you feel like you might just curl up and die. You may experience a crushing pain in your chest, a lump in your throat and tears either flowing or backed up just behind your eyes. You may even manifest illness in your body as your immune system crashes due to the pain of it all.

Heartache leaves you feeling like you are stuck in a cycle of misery caused by the constant reminders both inside your head and triggers from the outside. All in all it is a really uncomfortable feeling no matter how it occurs.

So, how do you get over it? Well, first off. Don't cry into a mirror. Don't do things that feed your heartache. Don't watch yourself cry, don't dig through memories and triggers that will compound your grief. Don't isolate yourself for the purpose of making yourself feel more miserable. Doing these types of activities only makes our suffering more intense. Don't rush yourself. Be kind to you. It is okay to experience the pain. Not allowing yourself to feel causes more long term damage than letting it all out in safe ways.

It is supposed to hurt when you get your feelings hurt or the loss of something or someone that mattered to you. You don't have to explain it or justify it to anyone but you. Accept that you feel pain. Sit with it and explore it. Feel all your feelings. Do all of this knowing that everything in life is seasonal. This too shall pass. If it doesn't ever go away it will in time lesson to a degree that allows you to function. If you journal you can record your pain, answer questions for yourself, why are you hurting? How does this experience mirror past experiences? In what ways? Did you expect it? If so why? Could the situation have been avoided? If so, then how? If not, how come? What have you learned from the heartbreak? Paint a picture, Take a few unwanted dishes out to a cement wall and throw the ceramic plates at the wall. Get some bubbles and blow the bubbles and before you blow them imagine putting your unresolved issues and grief into the bubbles and let them go. If names were exchanged write the nasty names on paper and cut them into labels and look at them and then burn or destroy them. Know that these words are not you. They never were you.

Set a time limit for your grief. It is okay to throw yourself a pity party but you can't make it your life's purpose. You can feel your pain but don't let it identify you. You are more than your heartache. What ever you are feeling allow yourself to feel it but also allow yourself to let go of the grief.

Grief, and that is what heart break is, is cyclic. This means it will come and go, ebb and flow. Knowing this is important to your healing. It is okay to feel good some days and less on others.

These are the stages of a grief cycle. The important thing to remember is that the cycle isn't really in order all the time. It can be very random. You can be in denial one moment and acceptance the next and back to shock again depending on the triggers, the distance in time from the heartache and the resolution to the events that caused the heartache. The important part of these stages is they are a normal process in getting over the heart break and on to your next emotional level.

Shock: The stage when you first get your heart broken.

Denial: (Not the river in Egypt.) You can't believe it or process it. This is when you might try to avoid the problem; pretend it never happened or try not to think about it.

Anger:: You might get angry or feel frustrated, snap at people as your emotions come to the surface. This is one of the most dangerous parts of the cycle as you might want to retaliate and make a bad situation worse. If that occurs call someone who is on your side and talk it out.

Bargaining: You might try to make a deal with your loved one, or tell yourself if you just make yourself better, make a deal with God if God will provide a way out of this heartache.

Depression: You feel resigned to the facts, and you feel powerless and helpless and hopeless.

Testing the Water: This is when you try to go out again, try new ways of coping, make resolutions; take actions you believe will help you come out of the heartbreak.

Acceptance: You finally feel like you can go on and put your heart out there again. You are ready to move on.

Time is the great healer. There is no magic pill, or geographic location or spell you can say to get your heart to mend. However, taking your B-vitamins, taking a trip, even a walk around the block, exercise, talking with friends and supportive people, using the time to go to new places instead of places that bring back bad memories, starting a new hobby, monitoring your self-talk and correcting yourself every time you say something negative to yourself can go along way in helping you heal faster.