Dealing with Heartbreak

Article written by Kerry Thomas M.Ed., LPC

I am so heartbroken I can barely move. I can barely breathe. I can hardly function. My heart is in a chokehold of pain. I know that I will eventually feel better, but right now I just feel as though I am going to be broken for the rest of my time on this planet. This pain won’t release it’s grip.

It hasn’t been all that long yet, just a few months. I try to remind myself of that. And this person is someone I have loved most of my life, and I know this plays a very big part in my inability to move beyond this as quickly as I would like to.

The pain of true heartbreak is almost debilitating. It has happened to me before, and currently I am convinced that the pain of a broken heart is the most difficult feeling in the world to contend with.

The last time I was this heartbroken I had to literally walk myself through every step of my day. The pain would kick in as soon as my eyes opened in the morning, as soon as I was conscious enough to recognize that I was awake. It would come crashing back down and land like a 500 pound weight crushing my chest.

I didn’t want to get out of bed. I didn’t want to face the day. I didn’t know how to carry this much pain around in the world with me. I just wanted to stay down.

It was not even remotely possible for me to stay down, to stay in bed all day the way I wanted to. Life wouldn’t allow for that. I had to keep it moving, but everything in my body would scream at me to just stay where I was.

I remember just lying there and looking out across my bedroom toward the bathroom door and just saying to myself, “Kerry, all you have to do right now is put both of your feet on the floor and walk across the floor to that bathroom. You can do this.” And the rest of the day would be just like that.

Every friggin’ step.

I guess this heartbreak it isn’t all that different. Although this time I do have the benefit of that past experience. I have been through this before. I know that as big as this feeling is, I have felt it resolve in the past. I am telling myself that experience is evidence for the fact that it will resolve this time, too. I have to tell you though, it is super hard to believe in this moment.

Right now everything is hard. By that I mean I am almost nonfunctional by my typical standards. I can’t seem to concentrate, my mood is so low you could wipe up the floor with me, I don’t really have an appetite at all, or maybe I just really can’t be bothered to put much effort into eating like I should. I am about as grumpy as a person could possibly get away with and not have someone just put a fist through my face.

Thankfully, I am somehow able to pull myself out of this fog once I walk into my office and begin working with my clients. It is the mornings that are the hardest.

Fast forward two years later, where I am now sitting at the computer reading my own words as though it were someone else’s life. I can remember the pain, but not clearly. I read these words as though someone else had written them. My life went on. I got over the pain. But it took a really long time. It took patience. It took a willingness to allow myself to feel what I felt.

I remember sitting out in the woods, talking to my tree, or really rather talking to God, as someone pointed out to me recently, and begging for this pain to just be taken from me. I had no desire to feel this way, of course I didn’t. No one does.

Our resistance to uncomfortable feelings prevents our healing

What I finally realized was that something was holding me back. It may be holding you back, too. What prevented me from healing from that heartbreak was that I was resisting the pain. I was angry with it. I just wanted it to go away and leave me alone. I had had enough pain in my life after all. Did I really deserve more?

In resisting the pain what I was doing was inhibiting the healing process. You cannot possibly process the experience, the feelings and learn from them when you stay in constant resistance to their very existence.

I feel that this is so often what happens to our hard to manage feelings. No one knows how to manage them. I didn’t for a while. They were too big, they had too much force. So we resist them. We just want them to go away. Of course we do. They are uncomfortable. We will do everything we can to distract ourselves from them, override them, push them down, run from them. This isn’t helpful.

Feelings don’t resolve while we are in a state of resisting them. They are meant to be our greatest teachers. We learn so much from our emotions, but we have forgotten how important they are to informing us of what matters to us, who we are, what we like and what we don’t. How are they going to do their job if we do everything in our power to ignore them or fight with them?

Sometimes we therapists don’t always see our own issues. We are often blind to our own nonsense as much as the next guy.

What I needed to do was to stop resisting, stop being angry that I felt this way. Stop fighting the feeling and just allow it to happen. Allow it to move through me. If we resist the pain, it can’t move either. It gets stuck.

Was it Dr. Phil that said “What we resist, persists?” I hate quoting Dr. Phil.

I then stopped shouting at God to take this feeling away already. I realized that my being heartbroken made sense. I realized that my being heartbroken actually meant something about me that I deeply loved. I loved that I could love so deeply that my heart could actually BE broken in that way.

I decided to try something different. I chose to became grateful for that pain; for what that pain stood for. What it indicated was that I had deeply loved another. I realized I should celebrate that I was able to feel that much love for another human being. I began to accept my heartache. I began to talk with it and ask it what it was here to teach me.

Two weeks later (yes, just two weeks later), the pain began to lift. This heavy darkness lifted from the world, and I began to see the world through a brighter lens.

And because I leaned in with curiosity about what that pain had to teach me, I learned so much from it. I learned how deeply I loved and realized how precious that was. I realized that my ability to attach so deeply meant that I would need to approach my relationships more cautiously so that I would not set myself up again to be so annihilated. I learned to look for and pay attention to the signs and my gut instincts that may indicate someone’s emotional unavailability. And those lessons will come in very handy I imagine.

---

Kerry Thomas M.Ed., LPC is a Cognitive Behavioral Therapist with 20 years of experience specializing in the treatment of eating disorders, depression, and anxiety in both adolescents and adults. Her therapeutic approach integrates traditional as well as holistic methods of addressing mental and emotional wellness. Kerry has worked with clients all around the United States as well as internationally. Kerry can be reached at klthomas14@hotmail.com.