5 Unsexy Ways To Heal A Broken Heart
Healing takes time.
Marjan Apostolovic | Shutterstock When your relationship just ended, you're not always thinking about how to heal a broken heart.
You’re too busy reeling from the discovery that your "happily ever after" isn’t happening. You're probably wishing you could just curl up and make all the pain go away.
A broken heart can pull the rug out from under you and have you on your knees, rethinking every step you’ve made in the dance of a relationship.
Going on a journey of healing after a heartbreak can feel daunting at first. But you have the ability to heal and create love again with another — it's one of the most profound experiences on your journey to long-lasting love.
If you're in excruciating pain from a freshly broken heart, remember that the world is not going to end. You can rise out of the ashes of a broken heart like a phoenix to connect with the love of your life.
RELATED: How To Heal A Broken Heart & Get Over Someone You Once Loved
Here are five unsexy ways to heal a broken heart:
1. Cut off all contact
Unless you share children, property, or a business, disengage from all contact. Unfriend, unfollow, and block across all your social media accounts.
It doesn’t have to be this way forever — it’s temporary so you can heal. Having contact with your ex while your heart is still raw from the breakup will keep the wound open and slow down the healing process.
If your ex suggests that they want to stay "friends," set clear boundaries and ask them not to contact you. You'll contact them in the future when you've healed your heart and can spend time with them without the pain of wanting more.
There's a huge difference between being "friends" and being "friendly." Offering friendship is a way to ease the guilt of the person who initiated the breakup.
There doesn’t have to be animosity in asking your ex not to contact you. It’s simply a way to get some distance so you can heal.
A friend is someone you call to share joy or sorrow, a person you hang out with, and have over for dinner. If you’re not going to do these things with your ex, then there is no friendship there.
You can be friendly with your ex — meaning if you were to bump into them in the future, you’d stick around to for a quick chat.
Rushing into a friendship with your ex right after breaking up leaves you vulnerable to prolonging the pain of heartbreak. You can’t heal a broken heart this way.
Do yourself a favor and nip it in the bud. No contact and time are your two best friends.
2. Don't idealize your ex
Believing that this person was your one true soulmate and that you’ll never find another like them will keep you stuck.
They're not some rare, unique individual. You can — and will — meet plenty of other people worthy of your love.
You may even meet someone you'll love more than you could have ever imagined loving your ex.
You can’t heal a broken heart when you're stuck believing that you screwed up your only chance at love.
Love is infinite and has infinite expressions. You may have lost a relationship, but you can never lose love.
The love you're seeking is inside of you. It is this love that you share with another.
You don’t get love from someone, so you can never lose love.
You create meanings from events.
Whether those meanings are true or not, they end up defining you over time — you collect and bundle these meanings together in your subconscious mind which then looks for corroborating evidence to the case in point.
This is a fancy way of saying that what you believe is true about you or what is possible for you when it comes to love or anything else is based on your past experiences.
However, you can break free of those meanings and change them to be more useful to you to create what you desire.
Know that deep down, even though this relationship didn’t last, you're not broken, you didn't screw it up, and you can meet someone even better suited for you.
3. Show yourself kindness, compassion, and love
Conversing with your inner critic and allowing it to run rampant while attempting to heal a broken heart is counterproductive.
It doesn’t matter what you did or said. Now is the time to open up to love yourself no matter what.
You may have not been perfect — it’s okay.
You may have said or done things that you wish you hadn’t — forgive yourself.
You may have good days and bad days — allow your feelings to exist and flow through you.
Take extra-special care of yourself, like you're the most precious thing on this Earth — because you are.
Allow yourself to sleep in. Maybe splurge on something you’ve been wanting to buy for yourself. Spend time in nature.
There is no time limit on grief. Healing may take longer than you thought, and that’s okay.
You’re not on some made-up timetable your brain would like you to be.
The one thing you can count on is that your feelings will shift and change. They always do.
When you feel good and happy, you're never so delusional to think you’ll feel great forever.
Unfortunately, when you feel hurt, sad, or in despair, your ego mind will lie to you and tell you that you won’t ever feel differently.
But your heart will heal, and you’ll find love again.
4. Open your broken heart to love
To heal your broken heart, be aligned with this truth. You are love, and it can't be taken from you — because it's you.
The experience you’ve been through has a silver lining — a blessing.
Why do bad things happen to good people? Here are some answers:
- To make you better and become better for whatever it is you’re going through.
- To discover how strong you are.
- To get crystal clear on the kind of relationship you want.
- To discover your purpose in life.
- To end up being helpful to others.
- To learn to love yourself more.
Be grateful for the experience you’ve had. That person came into your life for a reason and when you discover it, you'll become a better person for it.
Healing your heart means you can have gratitude for even the worst of experiences and you'll come out on the other side, changed for the better.
5. Drop the false hope for reconciliation
Endings are hard because we start a relationship with a lot of hope — it's the first thing that comes into a relationship and the last thing to leave.
When you kill the hope, you can move on and release the other person for the highest good for all.
It may sound cruel, but killing hope is the fastest path to healing a broken heart. Give up on what you had hoped would be.
Let the dreams and plans you had with your ex die on the vine because this will create the space for something new and better to come into that space.
Death is a symbol of change and new beginnings. Treat the end of a relationship like death and mourn it.
Schedule time in your calendar to feel your grief and set a timer when you do — it’s good to put that kind of finality on it.
You’ll be amazed at how quickly you start to feel better when you stop resisting your negative emotions. These feelings can only hurt you when you resist them, allowing them to get stuck in your body and create disease.
You are a human being — not a human doing. Leave open space in your calendar to just be with your emotional life.
Invite a good friend over to just be with you. Cry, scream, punch a pillow, do whatever you need to do to allow the emotions to flow through your physical body.
Then, kill the hope of that relationship ever returning. When you do, you'll finally be free to love again.
Orna and Matthew Walters are Soulmate Coaches who have been featured guest experts on Bravo’s "The Millionaire Matchmaker." They're the authors of the free ebook, "7 Steps To Soulmating," which can be found on their website.