For you and your broken heart….

For you and your broken heart

First let me say how very sorry I am that you are going through this. Betrayal is without doubt the most painful thing imaginable and I hate that you are in the middle of the pain. That being said, there are a few things you need to know.

I have stood in your shoes. Exactly in your shoes. In another letter I will tell you about it but for the time being just trust me. I know exactly how you are feeling.

The physical pain, the obsessive thinking, the crazy thoughts, the deep despair, the feeling that you will never be the happy person you once were, the feeling that you will never ever trust anyone again, the idea that you must be the dumbest person alive not have seen this coming, the idea that life will always suck and you will never get what you dream off. The fact that you can’t eat or sleep or get your brain to shut up. The fact that you are being tortured by memories and little events in your life which everyday stab you again through the heart. The fact that there are times you literally can’t breath. The fact that you hate him but worse you hate yourself for still loving him in spite of what he has done to you. Believe me sweets, I understand.

I have had my heart broken. I know what it feels like.

Losing love is the same as been stabbed. The wound goes deep and it is life threatening. The pain is very real, very physical. It affects every aspect of your soul. It stabs through everything you believed about life, about yourself, about others. It tears your ability to trust into tatters and leaves your heart forever scarred.

Trust is such a necessary part of a good life. I think losing your ability to trust is the biggest wound. There is no lie more soul destroying than knowing you were not worthy of the truth. I can forgive almost anything but I struggle to forgive someone who claims to care about me, but lies to me either by not telling me something they know they should have or by telling me something they know to be a lie. That destroys me.

But here’s the thing. You will come to a place in your life where you are able to step back from the pain and see that although his problems caused this train wreck that is now your life, you are not defined by someone else’s problem. You are the CEO of your own life.

You made one mistake – you loved with all your heart. Your mistake – you put your trust in someone who was not worthy of that gift. You tried so hard to fix him that you ended up feeding him parts of your own flesh and now you feel like you are the one dying…well perhaps you are the one that is finally healing, finally choosing life, finally stepping away from the dysfunction.

Good relationships are supposed to be the fusing of two souls but when one of the partners is unable to respond in a healthy way, the other partner becomes affected by the problem.

Unfortunately like the frog sitting in the slowly heating water who doesn’t realize he is being cooked, you become used to the dysfunction.
You begin to accept unhappiness as a normal state of life. There are enough good moments to drown out the sound of your dying soul screaming. You turn inward and blame yourself when it doesn’t work. You read books and try strange techniques to try and motivate, cajole, manipulate. You can see it could be so good if only he would cooperate, try, care enough.

Here’s the thing, you can’t make, manipulate, love, cajole, dream or force someone else to be healthier, motivated or different than who they choose to be.
Just because you see the way life could be so perfect doesn’t mean he sees it that way. Maybe he sees it but it isn’t his idea of what is perfect for him or maybe he doesn’t think he can ever achieve your idea of perfection or maybe he is too damaged to try or maybe he really never loved you enough in the first place. I don’t know the answer but what I know is this.

You have taken the first step in self-awareness. You are now forced to look at the truth of the love and the character of the man. You have stepped back away from a situation that was making you unhappy, ok perhaps forced to step back but the beauty of life is that it forces us to do things we know we should have done long before but didn’t have the courage to do,

I think probably a part of you alternates between anger and fear and hoping that he will discover his mistake and come crawling back on hands and knees. Truth is he might but even if you got back together, once things calmed down, they would be exactly the same as they were before because nothing fundamentally has changed in this picture. He remains dishonest, incapable of a healthy love and still as dismissive of you and your feelings as he was in the beginning.

As painful as this is the truth is…sometimes, you have to be pushed to leave behind someone who you have outgrown so you can move towards the life you are meant to live and with someone who can help you reach the place you were born to reach. Painful but at 55 years old, I promise you, that sentence is true. Read it again. The sooner you get a heart understanding of this, the sooner you will be able to move forward.

Let me tell you how to survive this and heal in a healthy way.

First of all let me tell you that you will not always feel the way you do now. I promise you. This will heal. There will come a day when you will find it hard to remember this guy’s name. You will be able to look at pictures of him and feel absolutely nothing. I promise you. Hard to believe right now but that day will come.

This journey is painful but by embracing it, you will become a new, strong, woman and have a much better perception of who and what you want in your life. There will be a day when you will thank him for this. Again hard to believe but I promise you this is true.

Becoming a healthy, whole, self-supporting, self reliant, self-validating person is your next step. Healing the wounds, making decisions with your mind and not your heart. Building character through sorrow. It is a hard, harsh, self-examining journey. It is lonely and sad. There are a lot of tears. But done properly there is also a lot of cleansing, of letting go, of rediscovery and most importantly, you will learn to live above your emotions. You will learn to control the stories your brain tries to torment you with. You will learn to rise above the chaos and drama and pain of love. You will learn to be strong in the face of loss. You will begin to have a steel backbone.

As with anything painful, the body, soul and spirit try to find something, anything to stop the pain. Self-medication with drugs or alcohol is a popular choice. Going back to your ex or finding anyone new, both are other traps often used to kill the pain. Sleepless nights and mental self-torture is another part of this journey. Sometimes suicide beckons and you are forced to decide if your life is worth living because YOU are worth living for or if your entire existence revolved around someone else’s flawed opinion of your worthiness. You know the answer in your brain but now you have to teach it to your heart. Tough lessons but ones well learned.

Teaching your heart to become in tune with your brain, teaching your brain to rewire itself to begin supporting you and the person you need to become. Teaching your soul to remain open to love, open to trusting again but wise to the lies and quick to find the holes in the story when needed. It is an amazing healing process that allows us to fully love again, to fully forgive and yet never again allows us to sacrifice ourselves on the altar of someone else’s dysfunction. You learn discernment. You learn patience. You learn to wait for what is right regardless of the cost rather than settle for something we know is going to end badly.

No one likes this school. It is natural to fight it but I am going to tell you to surrender to it. There is a step-by-step process and there are many of us who will lead you through it. I am here for you. I will continue to call you to come towards the side of healing and of restoration. This is about your healing. This is about you and only you. This is about your journey to becoming whole, healthy and able to shine again.

The first step in this process is to surrender to the process. Stop fighting it. Walk directly into the pain and embrace it. When it hurts, that deep burning physical gut ache when you think of him, embrace it. Intensify it if you can. Let it burn. Make it really really hurt and then release it. Blow it all out. Cry if you need to, scream if you need to, but get it all out.

Try reading “The wisdom of a Broken Heart” by Susan Piver. She goes into detail about steps you can take to work through this and they work. I have done them all.

Give yourself time to heal. Discipline your mind. You are not to think about the situation again for however long you can manage it. Say 30 minutes at first. Be tough on yourself. If he comes to mind, mentally banish the thought. Stop everything you are doing and consciously banish the thought. Imagine yourself with an axe, cutting the ties that hold him in your mind. Swing that axe and cut that tie. Then mentally imagine yourself washing your mind out with bleach. Imagine you and your bucket and your rag and scrub away, baby. For 30 minutes you are forcing yourself to care more about loving you and caring for you. After 30 minutes you can embrace the pain again, obsess again for a few minutes but then you get another 30 minutes or 40 minutes of peace.

In time you will find that you go 30 minutes and then 40 and then an entire afternoon and then a whole day. And eventually it will only be at night and first thing in the morning when you feel the pain and eventually the pain will be only once a month and eventually only on occasions. By that time you will be such an expert in dealing with it that it will only be a momentary blip, which you will acknowledge and deal with and move on.

That is step one in reconditioning your brain and stopping the natural but unhealthy tendency to obsess.

Step two
Obsessions. Obsessing over how it ended, what happened, what should have happened, what is he doing now, who is he with, how much you love/hate him is unhealthy. It is your brain’s attempt to understand the make and model of the truck that just ran over you. It is the brain’s attempt to create an emotion that will make you feel better such as anger, resentment, guilt, sorrow, insanity. It is your brain’s flawed way of coping with your severe stress because your brain recognizes this as a threat to your health, which it is. You have to reprogram your brain. You have to commit to becoming whole and healthy again at whatever cost because you are worthy of a great life. You are worthy of a great love. You will become capable of loving again.

Rewire your brain. You need validation. It is part of closure. This is why you have to keep talking about what happened and you need people to say “Yes, you are right, you were wronged.” It feels good to have people agree with your side of the story BUT this need also leaves you at the mercy of other people and their patience with you. What if they choose to accept his story instead of yours? What if they don’t want to hear the story over and over? What if your need for validation is never met by those around you?

Self-validation is just as nurturing and healing and it is within your control so your needs can always be met by you. Self-validation can be done a few different ways but my way is to write it all down. All the pain, guilt or anger, accusation, whatever. Get it out of you and onto paper. Deal with every painful incident and how it made you feel. The reason for this is so that you can teach your brain to let go of things. Once it is documented on paper you can insist that your brain leave it alone from then on. When it comes to mind and that tightening of the chest begins you must tell your brain, “No, we are not going there. I have that written down in my journal and if I ever need to revisit that, I can read what I wrote, we are not obsessing over this again now.” And you discipline your brain to move along. You stop the torture and begin the healing.

There are more steps but that is enough for now.

Choose to commit to healing for a better life

Choose to deal with yourself with compassion and forgiveness and extreme loving care

Choose to surrender to this journey KNOWING that there is a better, healthier, richer, more fulfilling life at the other end of this hell and that you will be a healthier, stronger person for having gone willingly into the fire.

We are going to go through the hell whether willing or not but when you surrender to the process with the understanding that you will not always feel this pain, this despair – you will hold onto hope and that act alone will save you.

You are loved. You are not alone. You are worthy. You will not always feel like this. You will laugh again. You will love again. You will be healthy and whole again. Trust me. I have been on this journey. I know the road well but more important I know where the path leads. Keep coming this way.

Love you to the end and the new beginning