How do you cope with the pain that occurs when you have had your heart shattered into tiny pieces? How do you get rid of that sick hole in your stomach? How do you sleep at night? How do you learn to forget about the person you loved? How do you not focus on the past and learn how to move on?
When I learnt that the guy I had loved had lied to me and that instead of coming to see me as he promised, he had used the money he had left in his account to see someone he barely knew. I couldn’t sleep, knowing another woman was in his arms. All I could think about was how he had broken his promises and had lied to me. I couldn’t sleep, I was in terrible pain. So I turned to alcohol. It was a bad move and only made things worse in the long-term.
Another blogger has kindly offered some great advice in dealing with the pain of a broken heart.
Here is her advice:
“I know it’s so very hard, oh so hard, to go through the pain all on your own. But do NOT drink or drug away the pain. Don’t. There’s several reasons.
One, all your problems are waiting for you when you sober up or come down. Only now they’re compounded, because you’re hungover, or coming down, and broke. Do you know what you said or did when you were high/drunk? Did you go out and sleep with someone else, just to Get Back At HIM? He doesn’t give a rat’s ass. He isn’t feeling your hatred. He doesn’t even acknowledge you exist anymore. Because you never did.
I know. It hurts like you cannot believe, you think it will never, ever end.
If you think of it as dying, it is. Part of your heart, your soul, dies when a relationship ends. You’re hurting. You miss him. You hate yourself for loving him and being used, and you hate him for hurting you, you cannot bear the betrayal. Killing the pain, rather than accepting it, only kills something else: your resolve. It’s only temporary. All you’re doing is forestalling the inevitable.
Yes, you need to lean on someone or some thing. My “”thing” was my beloved cat, Wren, who was there for me through thick and thin. She gave me a reason to keep going. If I killed myself…and yes, the thought occurred to me…who would care for her? Would she end up at the shelter? Is that what I wanted?
No. You need to find something to involve yourself. When the ex left me, I was in college (having gone back to school because I’d lost my job). I dove into school with everything I had. It kept me involved, it busied my mind, I met and worked with people who didn’t look like him, or even know him.
Find something to keep you busy. It can be anything: yoga, running, artwork, volunteering (another thing I did to keep me busy on weekends was volunteer with an environmental restoration bunch).
I remember one day, when I was in the very depths of hell, I looked at myself in the mirror and realized that there, in the mirror, was the one person I had always been able to depend on. The one person who had never, ever, ever let me down, who had always been there for me.
It was ME. That me in the mirror hadn’t used drink or drugs to escape the pain. That me in the mirror had been there with me all the time.
I know this sounds maudlin, but I hugged myself, in the mirror. There was no one else to do it for me, so I hugged myself.
That’s why you don’t drug away the pain. You have to go through it. The flames of pain, the flames of hell, aren’t just hurting you…they’re cauterizing the wounds, too. Hell yes, it hurts.
But when you come out of that hell, when the flames do their very best to kill you and don’t, you become stronger. One day you realize, god DAMN that hurt, but I’m still here. That lying, cheating effer didn’t win. He didn’t, he didn’t beat me. He didn’t, like my ex said, “I expected to come home and find you dead on the floor.” He hurt me, you bet, but he LOST. He lost!
There is a saying: “The hottest fires forge the strongest steel.” That’s true for this situation. No matter what happens to me, I know I am strong enough to survive. There’s a disco song by Donna Summers (I think, and yes, I know, disco sucks) titled “I will survive.” That was my anthem.
“They” say it takes a year for every four years you were together.
I realized that I was having days when I was happy. When I didn’t think of the ex every living second of the day and dreaming at night. When I didn’t hurt.
And I began to realize that I liked being single.
I didn’t have to worry about Mr. I’m So Fucking Important and You are Shit. He was no longer my problem. I didn’t have to worry where was he now, is he sleeping with some other sucker. I didn’t have to worry about the Collections Agency calling AGAIN. I didn’t have to wonder, is he going to lie to me again? I didn’t have to walk on egg shells, didn’t have to cram myself into the horrible little cage he’d manipulated me into building around myself. I was the most important person in my life (well, right after my cat.). I could go where I wanted, when I wanted, eat what I wanted, do whatever I wanted.
I had ME.
I began to like ME.
I began to love ME.
I believed, at the time, that I couldn’t trust any man any more, and suddenly, being single for the rest of my life didn’t seem so bad. If living life like the Ex had made me was the alternative to being single and alone the rest of my life, single didn’t look bad at all.
You can stay up until midnight watching chick flicks. You can sleep diagonally in the bed with all the covers on you. You don’t have to worry about him stinking up the bathroom or leaving his effing dirty boots on the carpet. If you want to spend the entire weekend shopping or curled up reading a good book, that is your RIGHT. Not a privilege, not worrying will he be angry or pissed or what.
If you stay off the pain killers, if you take every day as it comes, one day at a time, if you wake up every morning with a ‘gosh, it’s good to be alive!” you will make it.”
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