I am going to start off as cheery as I can before we sink into talking about heartbreak. I am very, very grateful you are here because first of all, I have learned so much by asking questions about heartbreak this week and second, I know this is a very difficult subject to discuss and would you all, whether you are listening now or in the future, please take a moment to acknowledge to yourself the courage and vulnerability that it takes to listen to and ask questions about healing after heartbreak? Your willingness to be here is your first step to healing any heartbreak. So thank you, and I am happy to be interrupted anytime you have questions.

I listened to my favorite heartbreak songs while I prepared for tonight. Do you ever just indulge in pretty sad songs and let yourself fill with the intensity of whatever emotions come up? What would breakups be without love songs? I remember when I broke up with someone and cried over every song on the freaking radio, sure that each one meant something like we should be together and what does it all mean? Should I call? Why hasn’t he called? 

I assumed that the goal of a relationship was to have so much passion that you suffer over each other. You long to be together every second. You love each other so much it hurts. You are lost without the other so of course the end of a relationship would have to be painful and dramatic.  How romantic! I know I make several references to John Cusack movies, but I used to watch a movie called Better Off Dead, which was a comedy about a guy who tries to kill himself in various ways because his girlfriend broke up with him and it really was funny but when I describe the story out loud it sounds awful. 

And the non-movie reality is that many people do kills themselves and I have no stats to share but I know that many if not the majority of suicide starts with feelings in reaction to either a break up or sexual rejection. There are too many stories of kids killing themselves because they are being made wrong for their sexuality to some capacity. And many people are terrified of ending up alone. 

We are also influenced by the words we are taught around love and relationships, not just from the movies but from everywhere, at least in America, breaking up, getting dumped, heartbreak, ending a relationship, divorce, alone… these words alone cause us to conclude that being in a relationship is vital, and not being in one is for losers, and you will lose out on love if you don’t have a relationship like everyone else. B.A.R.F!

Start paying attention to the words you say or even think about when it comes to love. Words are what we use to create and destroy not only our relationships but our entire lives. My grandmother was an English teacher and said that it was the most dangerous class to teach and I agree. We need to stop pretending we have no clue about how we create or destroy relationships with words. And what would change in our relationships if we were willing to look at the words we use and where they came from?

Relationship means to share the burden. 

Heartbreak. 

A broken heart, also known as “heartbreak” is a metaphor for the extreme emotional and physical distress caused by the pain one feels at experiencing longing for someone you broke up with. Its usage dates back to at least 3000 years ago.

Emotional pain which gets severe can cause broken heart syndrome, which causes physical damage to the heart (often termed as “heartache”). The heart is called the plethora of emotions; hence the broken heart is considered an emotional breakdown.

emotion (n.)

1570s, “a (social) moving, stirring, agitation,” from French émotion (16c.), from Old French emouvoir “stir up” (12c.), from Latin emovere “move out, remove, agitate,” from assimilated form of ex “out” (see ex-) + movere “to move” (from PIE root *meue- “to push away”). Sense of “strong feeling” is first recorded 1650s; extended to any feeling by 1808.

Feelings and emotions are transient. They move through you unless you choose to hold onto them. The physical stress and stirring emotions start with longing for someone or something. 

long (v.)Middle English longen, from Old English langian “to yearn after, grieve for,” literally “to grow long, lengthen

So if someone leaves you, you desire to go toward them physically, and turns into those longing emotions, such as… drumroll please…. Anger, rage, fury, hate, doubt, fear, guilt, jealousy… and these emotions pull on us, keep us spinning in circles, take over our thoughts completely if we let them…. But why does that physical longing for someone, turn into emotional suffering? 

The physical longing makes sense *improv joke. Its natural that our bodies desire more touch, but why can’t we let that natural process be what it is, if it was about what our bodies long for, wouldn’t they and don’t they touch themselves or find another body to be close to or have sex with?

Where does the emotional pain, and the stress that causes physical heartache come from? And what if we could let emotions move through us instead of holding onto them? Would that be natural? And what if, those emotions I mentioned, jealousy, fear, blame, guilt etc.. are actually not natural? Do birds get jealous of other birds mating? Do flowers feel guilty for soaking in the sunshine all day? Do animals stress over bad dates and cryptic text messages?

So if emotions are not natural, we invent them or buy and believe someone else’s invention of them, and keep trying to make them our own. Just like relationships we see on tv and then try to invent for ourselves. If something happens in our own relationships and it’s not like the story we bought, we believe we are somehow wrong or we got something wrong. What if you could recognize emotions as they come up, and ask is this mine? That question alone allows the emotion to keep on moving. If we ask this question instead of saying, I’m sad the moment we feel sadness, or I am jealous the moment we have any sense of jealousy, we can stop being locked up by our emotions. 

If there is one thing to take away from this call, I encourage you to ask that question with every thought, feeling and emotion you are aware of, and when you feel yourself spinning in jealousy or fear, or regret after heartbreak, you can ask : What is true for ME? If I knew not this, what would I know? Is this heartbreak actually what I think it is? Who does this belong to?

If you notice that you have a lot of resistance to letting go of the emotion, you can also ask:  what do I love about this feeling? And there is 100% nothing wrong with choosing to feel emotions, but if we lie to ourselves that our emotions are happening to us and they mean something to us, and we can use them to control our heartbreak, and to control whoever we desire to be in relationship with, are we on our way to healing or are we adding to the pain of our heartbreak?