Could this woman REALLY cure a broken heart in 10 days?
Devastated by her break-up, SOPHIA MONEY-COUTTS just couldn’t stop thinking about her ex. Enter a radical new therapist, so...
TEARS are running down my cheeks and dropping on to my chest as I sit on a bed in a small clinic. I’m being told to repeat various sentences about my ex-boyfriend and our recent break-up over and over again.
These sentences include ‘I miss my best friend, ‘this really is the end,’ ‘I can’t share things with him,’ and ‘the thought of him gone makes me sad.’
Malminder Gill, a 36-year-old hypnotherapist and life coach, is instructing me to say these statements while using her fingers to tap certain points on my face and body — the top of my head, on my temples, along my collarbone and on my forearm.
She also taps my upper lip and underneath my nose. We spend 20 minutes doing this, with Malminder saying each statement and me repeating it in turn, before she tells me to open my eyes.
This is the second day of an intense, ten-day therapy course which Malminder has devised and says will help anyone ‘get over’ a break-up or separation in that relatively short span of time. It’s a bold claim.
My boyfriend and I broke up towards the end of last year and it’s been a brutal few months. I’ve wailed loudly and often. Two weeks ago, I cried when I opened my knicker drawer and found a football sock hiding in there.
I’ve wallowed while listening to sad music and since banned myself from listening to any at all. I’ve tried to meditate, been for long walks, been running, been to yoga, I’ve downloaded multiple motivational podcasts, and I went to Sri Lanka over Christmas and New Year for a change of scene and perspective. In short, I’ve been a massive break-up cliché in an attempt to feel better, but am still hit on a daily basis by his absence. Some mornings I’ll wake up feeling normal, but then I’ll read something funny, or see somethe thing I know he’d laugh at too, and wish I could send it to him.
I can’t though, because that’s what a break-up is. Losing your best friend.
Breaking up in mid-life is tough. Malminder says that the majority of her clients, both men and women, fall into this age bracket. ‘When you’re this age, you’re splitting from someone you thought you were going to have children with. Society tells people at this age that you should be doing all this, and if you’re not, then you’re doing life wrong. It’s social conditioning.’
My ex-boyfriend and I went out for a year and a half, so it wasn’t decades. But I’m in my mid-30s and, at one stage, I did imagine our future life together.
Now I stomp around the park on my own, looking at couples laughing while pushing buggies on the weekend, and feel great pangs of loneliness. If Malminder’s course can help, then great. But I’m sceptical. After such a painful break-up, can ten days in a row of therapy really make any sort of difference?
The first session is an armchair chat while I tell Malminder everything — the break-up, about the relationship, and about my past relationships. I also talk about my current fears. These include my ex-boyfriend moving on and hearing he has a new girlfriend, and that I’m going to be on my own until I’m 90. At end of our hour, Malminder asks where I’d put myself if I had to score my feelings about the break-up out of ten in terms of pain. I tell her eight or nine. It’s the second session with Malminder when things get weirder. First, she tells me to sit on the massage bed while she taps my body and I repeat those painful statements which make me cry.
These are bespoke statements Malminder has written, based on what I told her the previous day. This is called Emotional Freedom Technique or EFT. Often referred to as ‘psychological acupuncture’, it’s a form of therapy developed in the early Nineties by an American therapist called Gary Craig (although derived from ancient Chinese principles), based on the idea that by tapping five to seven times at certain pressure points of the body, you release emotional blockages.
By simultaneously voicing my fears out loud, the idea is that I’m lancing the pain like an abscess. I weep so much that, at certain points, I want to shout ‘stop!’, but I forge on. Malminder later tells me a previous client found this process so traumatic they had a spontaneous nose bleed. After the tapping, we move into a 20-minute hypnotherapy session. I lie back on the bed, while Malminder tells me a story about two friends, sitting in a cafe ordering milkshakes, as they talk about a break-up.
I’ve never been hypnotised before. I remain awake, only conscious of a tingling in my hands. It was a ‘nested story’, Malminder explains once the session is over — a story designed to address my sadness in an indirect way. The two friends send their milkshakes back because the order wasn’t right, ‘alluding to the suggestion to return what is not right for you’.
IGO home, have a bath and get into bed for an early night. I feel emotionally exhausted. I’m not sleeping well at the moment because my brain constantly ticks with anxious thoughts. In the third session, however, I sense a shift. I tell Malminder that I want to get my thoughts under control and stop obsessing about my ex, talking to him in my head. Malminder says this is common among her clients. If you’ve recently broken up with someone, the brain will often create a fake relationship as a form of comfort, she explains. To counter this, Malminder talks me through an exercise where I close my eyes and imagine putting this fictitious relationship with my ex into a bin. Sounds hippie, right?
I feel absurd, but also soothed. This, Malminder explains afterwards, was neuro-linguistic programming, or NLP. It’s a visualisation technique that supposedly helps rewire the brain and our subconscious mind, to stop old repetitive thought patterns. This was the biggest breakthrough of the course for me and we spend the next seven sessions working on similar exercises to create healthier thought patterns.
In our sixth session, I lie down and am hypnotised for half an hour, while Malminder asks me to imagine a metal ball rolling down a hill and staying on its path, not being diverted off course. It’s another visualisation technique designed to help me become more assertive and confident, not knocked or buffeted by other people.
In other sessions, Malminder helps me tackle my fear of being alone for ever by repeating statements in a more positive way. ‘It was the first relationship I’ve had with someone who understood my work,’ I tell her about my ex, before she makes me say it again, but altered.
‘It was the first relationship, but it won’t be the last, with someone who understood my work,’ I repeat back to her. Saying sentences such as this out loud had a reassuring effect.
Malminder’s break-up course is personal training for the brain. Malminder isn’t married, but has had ‘plenty of heartbreak along the way’. Her Indian grandmother taught her to meditate from the age of four, and she started reading self-help books as a teenager after her first major relationship.
The optimum time for a client to come to her is a few weeks into a break-up, she says, because the first week or so is too raw and often people are still in contact with their ex. How can she gauge the success of her course, though?
‘Well, where would you put your pain now, on a scale of one to ten?’ Malminder asks in our last session.
Mmm. I’m no longer a nine or an eight out of ten on the pain scale. I’m probably more like a three. It turns out you can make progress in ten days, and for that I’m incredibly grateful.