How to learn the skills necessary to deal with your broken heart
BEING in love can be the best feeling in the world. Thrilling, exciting, exhilarating; when we’re in love we can feel like we’re on top of the world and we’re capable of anything.
Unfortunately, feelings of love aren’t always reciprocated and relationships don’t always work out. When that’s the case, being in love can feel like torture.
At these times it can be easy to sink into pain and anguish and to turn to short-term fixes like alcohol or one-night stands to try to fill the void. Although short-term fixes might ease the pain temporarily, they rarely help for long and often end up making the situation worse.
In the approach I specialise in, dialectical behaviour therapy (or DBT), I help people to understand emotions, including love, and how they influence our thoughts, feelings and behaviours. When it comes to a broken heart, having the skills to manage how we feel more effectively can reduce the impact it has on our daily lives.
One of the core skills I teach for reducing painful or unwanted emotions is called “opposite action”. This means identifying the urges to act that are associated with a particular emotion and taking action that is the opposite of your urges.
When love is not reciprocated or when a relationship is either destructive or incompatible with your life goals, as hard as it seems, you may need to act opposite to feelings of love.
In order to act opposite to love, first you need to pinpoint what your urges are. Do you want to spend all your time pining for the person you love or pouring over photos and mementos? Perhaps you want to contact the person and plead with them to give things another go? If the person has hurt you perhaps your urges are to send them abusive messages or to try to make them jealous.
Once you understand your urges you can start practising opposite actions. This might involve distracting yourself from loving thoughts, avoiding places and objects that remind you of the person, writing and rehearsing a list of the cons of being in love with that person, changing your emotion by changing your body chemistry or focussing on other important relationships.