Coping
with the loss of a relationship can be one of the hardest things that you might
ever have to do. Regardless of if you were with the person for three months or
thirty years, breakups can leave you feeling profoundly hurt, confused, and
rejected. However, with a bit of effort, you can heal your broken heart if you
work to move past the pain, take good care of yourself, and develop a fulfilling
social life. Now,
leading hypnotist Paul McKenna and psychotherapist Dr Hugh Willbourn
claim they can teach you to mend a broken heart. Using their unique 10 step
method, you can remove emotional pain and feel free to enjoy life fully
again - in days.
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ACCEPT THE PAIN
Accept
that you will have to go through some pain. It is an unavoidable truth that if
you loved enough to be heartbroken, you have to experience some suffering.
When
you lose something that mattered to you, it is natural and important to feel
sad about it: that feeling is an essential part of the healing process.
The
problem with broken-hearted people is that they seem to be reliving their
misery over and over again. If you cannot seem to break the cycle of painful
memories, the chances are that you are locked into repeating dysfunctional
patterns of behaviour. Your pain has become a mental habit. This habit can, and
must, be broken.
This
is not to belittle the strength of your feelings or the importance of the
habits you've built up during your relationship. Without habit, none of us
would function. But there comes a time when the pain becomes unhealthy.
When
you enter your bedroom at night, you switch on the light without thinking. If
you obsess about your ex, and feel unhappy all the time, it's likely that your
unconscious mind is 'switching on' your emotions in exactly the same way.
Without
realising it, you have programmed yourself to feel a pang of grief every time
you hear that tune you danced to, or see your ex's empty chair across the
kitchen table.
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CHANGE YOUR HABITS
Now
you have to break those connections. Turn off the music that reminds you of
your ex. Make your home look and feel different from when your loved one was
around. Move the furniture.
Take
up a new activity. And keep moving: exercise is the single most effective
therapy for depression.
The
point of these changes is to break up the old associations and give yourself a
new environment for your new life. The changes you make don't have to be
permanent. Even if it is just using a different shampoo and deleting your ex's
number from the memory of your mobile, change something. Now.
•
CHANGE YOUR THOUGHTS
The
next step is to do the same thing on the inside - transform your habits of
thought. In a relationship, we build up a huge array of such habits. When the
love affair ends, these patterns can still be running.
To
change your thinking habits, you need to understand a little more about them.
Have
you ever witnessed the same event as someone else, and later found out their
account of it was completely different from yours? Each of you saw the event
through a 'frame', made up of your personal beliefs, feelings and internal habits.
If
you are finding it devastatingly difficult to handle the end of your
relationship, you may need to change this 'frame'. You will need to reframe
your heartbreak. Stop seeing it as the end of your happiness. Instead, turn it
into a challenge; view it as an opportunity.
Being
heartbroken can make you feel worthless and hopeless - but that is because the
frame you are using is too narrow. Learning to see your situation with a
different frame is a wonderful liberation.
•
VIEW YOUR RELATIONSHIP FROM THE OUTSIDE
The
following exercise will help you look at your circumstances from different
points of view, so you gain helpful insights.
1. Think
about the break-up of your relationship. What are the judgments or generalisations
you have made about yourself and your ex?
2. Now
think of someone you admire - a character from history or a real friend.
Imagine they are watching a movie of this part of your life, and step into
their shoes to watch it instead. Imagine what their comments would be.
3. Now
imagine that a neutral observer is watching the movie of your life. Step into
their shoes and watch it from there.
4. Notice
the differences that you see from each point of view. Which ones are helpful?
Which ones make you feel better? Use these perspectives to view your
relationship in a new light.
People
who get over difficulties well rarely see what has happened to them as a
disaster. They frame it as a challenge. It is a matter of a point of view. It
is not what happens to us, but how we interpret it that determines the outcome
for us.
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CHANGE HOW YOU SEE YOURSELF AND HIM
The
next stage is to focus on your mental picture of your lost love. By changing
how you represent your ex in your mind, you can greatly reduce or even
eliminate your distress.
You
must learn to control your 'visualisation'. Every single one of us makes
pictures in our imagination - and we can all learn how to change the pictures.
It is important to learn to do this, because our bodies react to what we
imagine in the same way that they react to what is actually happening to us.
Memory and imagination affect our feelings in the same way as reality does.
We
are constantly altering our state by the pictures we make in our imagination
and the way we talk to ourselves. So it is vital to control those pictures and
not let them run away with our feelings.
•
CHANGE HOW YOU SEE YOUR PAST
1. Answer
the following question. Which side of your front door is the lock on? To
answer, you have had to make a mental picture of the door. You have made a
visualisation.
2. Now
try to imagine what your front door would look like if it was bright orange or
had yellow stripes down it. Make it bigger. Move it away so that it is smaller.
Move it further away and down a bit so you are looking down on it. Make it
open. Change it in different ways.
3. Think
about your ex now. As soon as you remember what someone looks like, you are
using visualisation. What is the expression on his or her face? Observe what
your ex is wearing and what he or she is doing. Where do you see the picture of
them? In front of you, or to the left or the right? Is it lifesize or smaller?
Is it a movie or a still image? Is it solid or transparent? Now, as you keep
that image in your mind's eye, notice the feelings that arise. Make a note of
those feelings.
4. Now
you could remember or imagine them differently. You can imagine you are a great
film director. You can reshoot the scenes of your memory and imagination in any
way you want. You can change the action, soundtrack, lighting, camera angles,
framing, focus and speed. Change how you are visualising your ex and notice how
it affects your feelings.
5.
Bring
to mind the picture you had of your ex.
6. Notice where it appears and how big it is.
7.
Now
drain the colour out until it looks like an old black and white picture.
8. Move the image further away until it is one-tenth of its
original size.
9. Shrink it even further, right down to a little black dot.
10. Notice how your feelings have changed
and compare how you feel now to the note you made earlier.
You
will notice that some changes have a bigger effect than others. Images that are
closer, bigger, brighter and more colourful have greater emotional intensity
than those that are duller, smaller and further away.
Standing
outside your memories and watching as if they were a movie helps you distance
yourself from them.
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FALL OUR OF LOVE - FOR GOOD
Now
you are ready to tackle the central problem using the visualisation technique.
Part of being heartbroken is the fact that you still feel in love. It hurts
because part of you is still attached to your ex. This exercise helps that
piece of you release itself.
1. List
five occasions when you felt very in love with your ex. List them so you can
easily call them to mind.
2. Start
with the first of those memories. Play with it. Move the image away from you so
that you can see yourself in the picture. Make it small.
3. Drain
out the colour so it is black and white, then make it transparent. When you
look at your memory like this, it will seem as if the event is happening to
someone else, and the emotional intensity will be reduced still further. You
are starting to re-code your memory.
4. When
you have finished re-coding the first memory, do the same for the next one.
Work through them until you have done all five.
5. Remember
in detail five negative experiences with your expartner, where you felt very
definitely put off by him or her. List the five experiences.
6. Take
the least appealing memory and fully return to that moment. Try to relive it.
7. Now
turn up the colour and the clarity. Make the memory as bright and clear as you
can, and experience the feelings more and more strongly.
8. Go
through each of the other four negative memories of your ex-partner, and relive
them. Carry on until even thinking about them puts you off.
When
you think about the bad experiences again and again, the negative memories
begin to join up so that there is no space between them for the feelings of
love, yearning and regret.
Concentrate
on the exercise and do it methodically. Some people have found that doing this
just once makes them feel different. To make sure the effect sticks, do it
every day for two weeks.
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UNDERSTAND YOUR EMOTIONS
The
next stage is to learn to understand your emotional reactions better. Your
feelings of heartbreak are unlikely to disappear unless you cope with what they
are trying to tell you.
An
emotion is a bit like someone knocking on your door to deliver a message. If
you don't answer, it keeps knocking until you do open up.
Opening
the door to your feelings means learning to understand them. This can be hard,
because heartbreak is complicated by other feelings: anger, fear and shame.
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BELIEVE THAT YOU WILL FIND LOVE AGAIN
You
could fall into the trap of remaining convinced that your ex is the only person
you could ever love. This is unlikely to be true on a planet with six billion
people.
So
why do you believe it? Can it be because you are desperately trying to avoid
accepting that the relationship is over? Or are you afraid that the bad
feelings associated with heartbreak will never go away?
That
fear makes you anxious, and keeps you feeling bad for longer. The burden of
your heartbreak has grown heavier, and a vicious circle has been established.
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LIVING HAPPILY AFTER YOUR BREAK-UP
A
good way of giving yourself a boost - and coping with complicated feelings - is
to imagine a bright future.
1. Imagine
the future as a corridor in front of you. Imagine walking down it, away from
the present, towards a door.
2. Open
the door, and see beyond it a world in which you have recovered from your
heartbreaking relationship.
3. See
what you look like, what you are wearing, where you are going, whom you are
seeing.
4. Now
step into this new world and into the new happy you. Imagine the whole
experience from the inside, seeing what you would see, hearing what you would
hear, and feeling how good and happy things are now.
It
is not a matter of believing the image is real: just imagine it as vividly as
possible.
In
heartbreak, there is often a backlog of emotional learning to get through. Do
one bit at a time. Your unconscious mind will protect you, and give you a rest
so that you can deal with the next bit. You will learn to step out of the
memories, leave them behind, and start a new life.
References
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-165247/10-steps-heal-broken-heart.html