How to Heal from a Broken Heart

Have you ever suffered from a broken heart? Where the pain of losing someone, you shared your life with, was so overwhelming it felt as if you couldn’t breathe? Maybe it slumped you into a deep depression and the very thought of leaving your house felt pointless unless that person was still with you.

Well, my dear friend, I think we all have felt this at one point or another. Some have even gone through it multiple times.

Every time it happens our lives feel as if they can’t go on. It feels unfair. It feels as if we wasted time trusting someone with our hearts only to revert to square one where we have to repeat the entire process all over again. Then others end up refusing to date anyone at all because the thought of love seems mythical.

Something I hope to help you with is to understand that failed relationships are not steps backward but massive catapults forward. They are part of the growing process, but only if you decide to see them that way.

Those that fill with revenge, hatred, fear, or sadness, due to heartbreak, are the ones who end up being alone and/or stall their overall independent potential as a man/woman.

It’s time we shift our mindsets. It’s time to reveal the silver linings that hide within the cracks of our broken hearts.

Think back to a particular breakup you went through. One that hurt so intensely you weren’t sure at the time if it was the “right” thing to do or not. How long did it take for you to realize that particular relationship wasn’t serving you anymore? Most of us delay the inevitable due to fear. I know countless couples who remain together because they settle, they’re scared, they try and force it to work, or they stay together “for the kids”, etc., etc., etc.

You know you’re in the wrong relationship IF your partner does any of the following:

• Settles in their personal development while you continue to strive on your own.
• Physical/mental/emotionally abusive.
• Refuses to communicate or work on the relationship with you.
• Is stuck fighting an addiction they refuse to get help for.
• Is in trouble with the law.
• Lacks motivation and blames everything on everyone else. (Zero accountability)
• Open-ended promises to keep you hoping that it gets better one day.
• Is lazy and tries to guilt you into things.
• Gaslights and/or is a narcissist
• Is a pathological liar

All of the above situations are examples of people who will halt you in your own spiritual growth. Especially if you begin changing your truest self in hopes of making them accept and/or love you more. If that is the case, neither one of you are ready to be in a committed relationship anyway.

There’s an old saying that states, “you must unconditionally love yourself before you can properly love another.” This is a quote my sixteen-year-old self would have laughed at and said, “yeah, whatever.” But I wish I would have listened and understood what that powerful statement meant all those years ago.

From the time I was fourteen, till the time I meant my first husband at twenty-five, I had many long-term, “he’s the one”, relationships before I realized none of them were going to work out. Ironically many of them shared very similar characteristics. When I met my first husband, who was unlike anyone I had met before, I fell hard. He was doing well for himself and treated me like such a lady. It was something I had never experienced before. Due to the newness of this exciting relationship, I completely ignored the deeper aspects, at the time, when it came to our compatibility. I chose to ignore it for years until things slowly started to make us resent each other. In our last attempt to make it work and share something in common, we decided to have our daughter together. She did turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to either of us, but it was at that point we realized it was never going to work. We divorced when my baby was just six months old.

It was the deepest heartache I had ever felt because my heart didn’t just feel broken when we separated, and I only got my baby 50% of the time, it had slowly been cracking in the many years before. A new fracture was created every moment I tried to change and become someone that I wasn’t. I know my ex-husband felt the same way, but we were both scared, I think.

I am now with an amazing man I met during my divorce process. We were there for each other at a time we both were hitting reset and starting our lives completely over (with kids from our previous marriages). We are engaged to be married in 2023. I’ve been with him for two and a half years and I have learned SO MUCH about broken hearts and spiritually healing myself.

I hope I get others to realize that sometimes it’s not as easy to turn off our attraction towards someone so we can focus on growing ourselves first. Sometimes we cling to things like love because we struggle to feel love for ourselves. We need to release the thought that someone else completes us because we are whole all by ourselves.

The relationships that leave you with a broken heart, are not meant to hinder your abilities to move on in your life but are a steppingstone on the way to meeting the other “whole soul”(who’s working just as hard on themselves as you) who you eventually spend forever with.

However, you MUST take the lessons and learn from the relationships that came before. What’s even MORE crucial than that, is you need to take that lesson and implement it into your next relationship, so you stop riding the breakup merry-go-round like I did for 12+years.

Sometimes when we refuse to recognize the areas in our life we need to work on, whether that be, self-worth, self-esteem, lifestyle habits, etc. God will send us someone who makes it more distinguishable. We don’t always see it right away, because we’re too busy enjoying the warm fuzzy butterflies this new relationship provides us with, but eventually, we understand this is not our forever person- This person does not influence or support us in being our best selves.

It might hurt, it might seem unbearable to push on, and it might confuse the shit out of you, but every person who breaks your heart was put there to help you understand the areas of yourself that needed to grow. And once the breakup occurs, that is when you are launched forward and given the gift of a fresh new start.

It is up to you whether you utilize that fresh start to learn and grow forward or to remain stuck and possibly reexperience another heartache similar to the last one until you stop resisting the lesson God is trying to get you to see.

There is nothing wrong with loving someone. Just as there is nothing wrong with having or causing a broken heart because you know it’s not meant to be. It’s all part of the process. Chances are if you decide to accept it, let it go, and then choose to grow from the lessons that revealed themselves to you, ten years from now, you will look back on every broken heart you experienced and understand how crucial they were in helping you find the person you are now spending your happily ever after with.