No matter how you cut it getting your heart broken by someone not wanting to be in a relationship with you is tough stuff.
You have put yourself out there and chosen to show up and express your feelings for someone and they don’t want to make the relationship work. You have the emotions of sadness, hurt, and even some anger towards the other person. You are tired of getting rejected and fear you always will. You have a ton of evidence that they liked you when the relationship started so what happened to make it so they all of the sudden don’t want to anymore? You are filled with confusion, doubt, and fear of ever having to go through this all again. Having your heart broken may keep you from putting yourself out there and trying again. You can replay how much time, energy and effort you put into this relationship and you can be filled with regret for time wasted. Do you see all of this negative that you are dealing with. And if that isn’t enough we add onto the heartbreak in ways we don’t even know.
That is what I want to share with you today, and give you some practical ways of not adding onto the heartbreak but creating a softer landing if heartbreak should happen again in the future, or if you are still recovering right now.
Here are 5 ways we add to the heartbreak.
You struggle with your relationship with yourself.
So this person just rejected you and said, there are some things about you that make it hard to like or love you. The problem is that when they do this you already have some thoughts about parts of you that you have a hard time loving or even liking about yourself too. When they share their disgust with those parts you too feel that same disgust. So not only do they reject you, but you join in and reject yourself too. This is super hard for you because your negative self talk compounds the thoughts that you have about their negative thoughts about you. Wow, that is a lot of negative thinking and it is all about you. Which feels pretty awful.
You don’t feel safe with you
You know that they don’t have your back, they are abandoning you, and you feel like you are abandoning you as well which does not feel safe to you. You’re filled with a ton of negative thoughts about them, you, and the whole dating experience, that just happened. That is all surrounding you and you aren’t tapping into thoughts that make you feel safe and secure but rather at risk and susceptible to more danger. You don’t trust yourself in making good decisions because clearly this is where it gets you…. to a ton of pain.
You don’t know how to feel the emotions of rejection, hurt, heartbreak, not being wanted, desire unfulfilled, or sadness
So you do whatever it takes to avoid this negative pain by buffering , which is doing something externally to change an internal feeling. But that makes you turn to things like overeating, over drinking, overspending, binge watching TV to numb out, or moving onto another relationship to avoid the pain of this one. All of that buffering doesn’t solve for the negative emotions and after you do those things you have even more negative emotion about what you just did. Further giving yourself more evidence that you don’t make good decisions, you are messed up, and there is no way to escape all the horrible in your life.
You struggle because you rethink everything about the relationship and how you should have done things differently or been different
This one is just the default of your lower brain. It’s job is to scan your environment and look for danger, when it can’t find any in your apartment or surroundings it goes to work in your past looking for danger or red flags to make you aware of. As one client recently said so while I am shopping and going down the produce aisle I have these ridiculous thoughts about the outfit I wore in 4th grade and how people made fun of it. What is going on there? Just your lower brain doing it’s job. But since you have a ton of thoughts about your relationship that didn’t work out, you just replay them over and over. Each conversation, and action you did or didn’t do being sifted through and the negatives highlighted. Your brain believes this is helpful to you so that you can learn from them and NEVER do that again. But really that is just creating all of the negative emotions coming to the surface again. Add onto it you think maybe you are wrong; overweight, not pretty enough, not trendy enough, not athletic enough, the list goes on and on. Just bring out even more negatives all around.
You don’t know how to let the other person go
You have thoughts that still make you desire him. You still care and you still want to know what he is doing, how he is doing, and you still might want clarity as to why he doesn’t want to choose you. This keeps your brain wanting to collect information about him. You keep scrolling his social media, you drive by places where he might be, you try and bump into him or hear about him whenever you can. These actions are fueled by desire and curiosity. But both of those feelings are getting you into more trouble now because it just keeps you connected which adds even more pain to this wound.
Here are 5 ways to lessen the pain of heartbreak.
Know your way back to you
You have to know who you are before you are ever in a relationship. Understanding that your thoughts about you are going to be how you feel about you. There are parts of you that you don’t have to love but you choose to love regardless because that is how you want to show up to you and even others. When others choose to not choose you that is okay, they don’t have to because you always will. Add onto it the thoughts that God always chooses you, so that makes two against one. By the way, you didn’t make you, you are just choosing to love who God made you to be. See that feels a lot better.
Secure with self
Remind yourself that you will always have your own back. If and when others don’t have your back, that is okay, because you always will. You know that you can think about you and others in a way that makes you feel safe and secure. You can remind yourself that every decision you make is not good or bad, but what you make of it. When I make mistakes or fail or do something that I don’t love I always greet myself with love and curiosity. I greet myself the way I would my 5 year old. I am so sorry that happened, that stinks, tell me all about it. Now that is a safe landing and a place that my 5 year old loves to be when hard things happen. I want you to create that same safe place for yourself.
Learn to feel your emotions and open up to all of them
This is exactly what I teach all of my clients to do. They learn how to feel those feelings, the positive and the negative ones. When you decide that you are willing and open to all of the feelings then your whole human experience opens up to an even bigger experience. You are not afraid of what might happen because you know that you can handle any of it. You don’t have to get away from the negative emotions by buffering and then creating even more negative emotions, but you can just feel the negative ones in the first place. So you can stop the overeating, over drinking, overspending, and the binge watching and start replacing it with intentional actions creating the life you most want. I know so many women who are creating the life they most want just by doing this right here.
Re-write the story and tell only that version
When your brain goes back into your past and starts digging up the dirt, you just allow it and understand that your brain thinks it is being helpful. Nothing has gone wrong, nothing went wrong, and you my friend are not wrong or messed up. It all happened. It happened for you. You can look at it however you want. Let’s start rewriting the story so it serves you into your future because that is where you are headed. You are not going back and redoing the past, you are creating a new future and new relationships. Let’s learn from this one and grow and become who we most want to be. Stop telling the old version that keeps you spiraling and feeling all horrible. Start telling this new story about growth, and gratitude, and who you are becoming because of that experience.
Let them go
Knowing that your brain wants to keep you connected is helpful because you can know and believe that keeping you connected may only add onto the pain and keep you stuck. When you let them go, you also let yourself go into the future. It is like you stop adding fuel to the fire and you can just let it smolder out. I know that seems hard to your brain but let’s just rip the band-aid and let it start healing. When you stop giving yourself more information to process then your brain doesn’t have to process him, the relationship, what did and didn’t happen. Any questions your brain thinks it can answer by getting more information just answer without any more information. Thoughts like is he dating someone? Is she prettier than me? Is he happy? Just decide for yourself and move on.
Heartbreak may be a part of your journey to getting married, but we don’t have to make it miserable. You want to show yourself that regardless of the outcome when you are getting to know someone or dating, if they don’t choose you, you will and you know how to create a safe landing space and learn and grow from all that happened while you were showing up in this relationship.
Relationships are such a great opportunity to learn about yourself, about the type of guy you are wanting to partner with, and about relationships in general. When you decide that you can handle heartbreak, nothing can stop you from showing up and learning a ton and becoming even more of who God intends you to be.
So, here’s to heartbreak, or at least being open to it,
Angie
