“God pulls us through life by the heart.” Martha Beck
As I’ve been building my life coaching practice, I’ve become very clear on who it is I want to serve. The truth is that the people I can help the most are people who are going through something in their lives that I’ve also experienced and come through myself.
That’s why I have a special place in my heart for people who are healing a broken heart.
I have had my heart broken and I have broken hearts – both experiences sucked (quite frankly!). I got emotionally lost for a bit, made some exceedingly poor decisions and cried more that year than I think I had my entire adult life.
But now sitting on the other side of the experience a few years later, I can say I’ve learned a few important and powerful lessons about healing a broken heart:
- You need to forgive the person that broke your heart. That simple – but not easy – act will help you accept an apology that you’ve probably never received.
- Forgive yourself. In every relationship, there are two people at the party and you played a role in this heartbreak on some level. Maybe you didn’t value your heart enough and gave it too freely. Maybe you accepted, tolerated and accommodated more than you should have. Maybe you didn’t open your heart to them fully because you were afraid, so the relationship always felt a little distant and disconnected.
- Stop looking for closure. You cannot logic and reason your way through matters of the heart. You may never know why he did what he did; he may never be able to understand it himself, much less articulate it to you.
- Pain isn’t necessarily suffering. Pain is just alerting us to something we need to pay attention to and heal. If you don’t heal it, you’ll carry it into the next relationship and find yourself right back here again.
- In every breaking, there really is a blessing. I had my heart broken wide open one time in my life and I wondered if I would ever come through it. Here’s the secret: You will come through it, but you won’t be the same person. Because when you dive in to heal your heart, every part of that experience gets used for your good to make you better, stronger and more loving than ever before.
Just because relationships break, that doesn’t mean you’re broken. The experience I had having my heart broken was painful, but I would not change any of it because it helped me to become the woman I am today. And in the end, it was a gift.