My Experience With Broken Heart Syndrome

“Recovery begins from the darkest moment”- John Mayer

Breakups suck big time. It doesn’t matter if it was a short term relationship or one that lasted many years, it still sucks.

When you have loved someone with every fiber of your being, the ensuing heart ache from the loss of your soulmate and the burning questions of where do I go from here can be common themes of the narrative.

WebMD describes this as Broken Heart Syndrome: “Emotional stress can also send out a rush of stress hormones that make you feel like you’re having a heart attack. That’s called broken heart syndrome. And sometimes your identity gets wrapped up in the “we” of your relationship. That means a breakup can disrupt how you think about yourself. You might feel uneasy as you adjust to your new self-concept.”

At the risk of sounding cliché, my broken heart tried to seek comfort from Adele on replay while going through box after box of tissues in a futile attempt to find meaning to the pain, visceral and unrelenting in its intensity, wondering if it was ever going to go away.

Then there are all those late night thoughts one becomes prey to that wreaks havoc on the already fragile self esteem: Am I unlovable? Maybe I’m just not good enough! I’ll probably end up dying single and lonely.

When you’ve been the better half of a partnership for a long time, the idea of navigating the single life once again can be seriously daunting. Friends pepper you with advice that ranges from generic platitudes like “Just give it time” to the quick fix solution “The only way to cure a broken heart is jump into the next relationship.”

So easy to dole out but so darn hard to do.

I was miserable and depressed. And that was not a place I wanted to be stuck in. What I needed was a fresh start and lots of positive energy to boost myself out of the slump. In other words it was time for a change.

Again, easier said than done.

The most important part of the journey to reclaim myself was to accept that the relationship had to end because it had run its course and that it was okay to grieve its loss. As Jennifer Kromberg, a licensed clinical psychologist puts it in her article “Grieving is like digestion: there is nothing you can do to hurry it along. It takes time and the only thing you can do is try to get through it.”

The next difficult task was shedding the old skin of my identity as an SO. I had to rediscover what was left of my pre breakup self, shake off the dust and see what was salvageable.

Through personal research and the insight I gained from a support group, I discovered an eclectic mix of strategies, as opposed to just one, to help me go about it.

1.)Prioritizing me: Relationships gurus say that break ups are normal in life but there’s nothing normal about the pain and devastation even if you are the one doing the initiating. It was so hard to stop judging myself for all the ‘could haves’, ‘should haves,’ ‘would haves’ and learn to love myself again.

Jesse Kahn, LMSW explains the importance of not judging yourself after a breakup in his article for mindbodygreen “Whether that’s judging yourself about productivity, how ‘well’ you perceive yourself to be dealing with your breakup, or how ‘well’ you practice self-care, judging yourself rather than having self-compassion isn’t going to speed up the process,” he says. “An important part of breaking up is not judging yourself…”

I discovered that taking the time to focus on myself and on the things I liked to do worked wonders from a healing perspective.

2.)Making a conscious decision to unfriend people who are only in for entertainment and gossip:

I believe in Steve Maraboli’s definition of what real friends are. “Friends are medicine for a wounded heart and vitamins for a hopeful soul.”

Oftentimes a breakup is a source of entertainment for ‘friends’ who have no real investment in their friendship with you. I’ve realized that a life changing event reveals the true colors of so called friends.

Decluttering my life of fake friends and making room for new friends in my life was one of the best decisions I made for myself.

3.) Out with the old:

It was a heartbreaking task to delete old pictures from social media but a social media cleanse was something I had to do in order to put a close to that chapter and move forward. I repeated the same process with things that acted as painful reminders of the past.

“As we evolve our homes should do”

Engaging in redecorating projects around my home helped immensely with the healing. I discovered that experimenting with bright, cheery colors for paint, throw pillows and picking quirky table lamps worked wonders in making the space once again my own.

More than one good thing came out of my efforts in decluttering and redecorating — the local donation center benefitted from several bags of clothing and miscellaneous household items.

4.) Embracing my faith with all my might:

Sometimes, things happen to us seemingly without any rhyme or reason because of which we have to go through loops, twists and seemingly dead end alleys in our life. Even though I cannot see the big picture, I know things had to happen a certain way in order to make way for new and better things.

The amazing thing about faith is that it leaves no room for the pressure that comes from trying to follow the crowd or the insecurities that can force me to make choices out of FOMO.

5.) Discovered a new passion:

A dear friend suggested I try my hand at writing and am glad that I did! Writing provides me with an avenue for expressing all the unfinished thoughts, unspoken words and pent up frustrations. In essence, I’m communicating those feelings I never got a chance to voice. I’ve found this sort of emotional purging to be very self soothing not to mention very gratifying.

The icing on the cake would be if I am also able to inspire someone else in the process.

You see, breakups have a way of making you feel like you have been cast adrift. I remember having this sensation akin to sailing solo in an endless, blue ocean. It can be at once liberating and scary as hell. Perhaps the greatest gift you can give yourself during this time is to be compassionate and patient as you work towards healing and becoming whole again.

If I could make a slight change to Richard Halliburton’s words, it would be “Yes, even though I’m set adrift, I have determination for sails and lots of nerve for oars.”

Originally published on Medium.com