Four ways to heal a broken heart

“We broke up two months ago by mutual agreement. By this point, it was clear to both of us that our difficult relationship would lead nowhere. I don’t want him back, but I can’t forget him either. All the time I remember those days and nights when we were good together. I often cry. It is difficult to do even daily activities. Advise me what to do,” asks 29-year-old Anastasia.

32-year-old Eugene echoes her: “I have been in love with Marina for a long time, I tried to court, but I immediately realized that this was a hopeless case: she would soon marry another. I would really like to just forget her and switch. I’ve tried dating other women… that’s not it at all! After each meeting, I think that everything would be different with Marina. These thoughts are driving me crazy.”

Immersed in a painful sense of loss, everyone who has suffered from unrequited love since Antiquity asks the question: how to endure this test – one of the most difficult? Who will help to heal from love? The ancient Roman poet Ovid tried to answer this question with a long poem “The Cure for Love”.

Today, the Internet has become the main adviser, where you can find numerous stories on the topic “How I forgot my ex” or cure love with wikiHow, the premier online guide that “teaches you to do everything.” The longest of his instructions on how to fall out of love includes 17 steps.

Society tends to view unrequited love as a nuisance that reduces our social “efficiency.” And since surgeons have learned how to transplant a heart, we are also trying to heal it with the help of modern methods. But which one do you prefer?

We interviewed four experts. Their approaches are different but effective. The choice depends on the goals that we set for ourselves.

Psychodrama to end a relationship

Ekaterina Lopukhina, psychodramatist

Motto: become the author of your life. We often feel that something is happening to us, and we can only worry about it. But we also compose our life, and every author knows that the hero goes through trials in order to acquire new qualities. Psychodrama helps to make trials a part of life experience, to understand how and why they change us.

Principle of operation: come to terms with all parts of your personality. Our suffering is explained by the conflict of parts: one wants to return to the relationship, the other wants to end it. There is one that is angry and one that is sad. The psychodramatist will offer to isolate each part as a separate character and give it the opportunity to express position and feelings. Then these parts can enter into a dialogue, but even the first stage of the work – distinguishing between individual voices in the inner turmoil – already helps the sufferer from love.

It is also possible to discover that part of ourselves that we feel we have lost with the end of the relationship. What was I like in these relationships, what do I miss so much? Our task is to “call” this part with its qualities back and find a place for it in our life. There is a lot to be said in a relationship. And if they are interrupted, the feelings and thoughts addressed to the partner remain unexpressed. Psychodrama offers a conversation with an imaginary partner in a symbolic space.

What has been started must be completed so that there is no endless story that makes us scroll through failed explanations in our heads. In addition, we can come up with farewell rituals and act them out.

Limitations: the method is not suitable for those whose emotionality is difficult to control, whose feelings “overwhelm” or “knock down.” It is also unlikely to suit those who, in principle, find it difficult and do not want to talk.

Hypnosis to calm down

Miriam Ruhr, coach

Motto: do not prevent another from going his way, but go your own. Ericksonian hypnosis is like an ambulance, it offers the victim of love to say goodbye to affective addiction as soon as possible. The client is first asked to remember his grief, then prompted to release the loved one from memory, “dissolving” the emotional charge associated with him. In this way, you can quickly go through the mandatory and necessary stages of mourning: denial, anger, feelings of injustice, sadness and even depression, and then renewal. All this happens in less than six months.

Principle of operation: change the perception of loss with the help of metaphors. Assuming a comfortable position, plunging into a state of slightly altered consciousness, the client follows the therapist’s metaphors. These metaphors show the loss of love in a different light and allow you to take it with more calmness. At this stage, the client is helped to “unanchor” the trauma and then new anchors are created for safer reactions.

A caution in this technique: throughout the process, the therapist checks that the regrets, desire, longing, resentment, or hatred of the former partner have actually been “deprogrammed.” After all, hating him is out of the question (that would be another way to maintain affection).

Limitations: some are not hypnotic. Hypnosis is often associated with suggestion: if an idea, an image, a belief is suggested to us, will the reaction to them be the same as if they arose on their own? Everyone has their own answer to this.

Psychoanalysis to recover

Maria Eril, psychotherapist

Motto: regain narcissistic integrity. Each of us is characterized by narcissism. It breaks down when the relationship breaks. Our social status is changing: we become loners. We are losing our usual support: next to us there is no longer the one who raised our self-esteem, said: “you look good”, “you are the best” …

The period before the breakup is often also painful: we felt wrong, we heard reproaches and accusations. This is how integrity is lost. And psychoanalysis helps to restore it.

Principle of operation: take your time and understand what is going on. If we set ourselves the task of quickly falling out of love, then we achieve the opposite, aggravating suffering with a new failure. It is better to prepare for the fact that we have a difficult period ahead. The more we take care of ourselves, the more likely we will be able to pass it safely. And although the desire to quickly finish the love story is understandable, trying to unwind and get distracted is not the best tactic here.

Some are looking for new sexual adventures, new partners. Often this experience makes the situation worse. Compared to the meaninglessness of random meetings, the value of lost relationships will increase. For the same reason, you should not try to continue your sexual life without a partner. Overall, masturbation is a positive experience, a way to get to know yourself better. But after parting, the images that arise in sexual fantasies are associated with the person we have lost. This can make it harder to access orgasm, and not achieving orgasm is another blow to self-esteem.

Therefore, it is better to turn to the inner child, to the pleasures that the sensation of the physical body gives us: to run, to walk. It is important to understand that “I am good on my own, without a partner, I fill the world, the world is more interesting with me than without me.”

Limitations: this method is for those who have the time and means. And also the desire to look for the origins of their problems. For those who do not want or are not ready to go through disturbing memories, the psychoanalytic method of free association will not be the most suitable.

Philosophy to comfort

Julia Sineokaya, philosopher

Motto: parting with a loved one does not mean parting with love. Learning how to stop loving is impossible, and not necessary. Love is the greatest blessing. In the dialogue about love “Feast”, Plato proves that love is much more important than being loved, love is the main gift of the gods to people, only love opens the way to gaining meaning, self-improvement, immortality. Undoubtedly, losing a loved one is a tragedy. It hurts when he doesn’t love you back. It is even more painful when the feeling goes out of life irrevocably.

Principle of operation: honestly ask yourself questions and answer them. One of these important questions is what exactly torments us: love or desire to possess, an unsatisfied sense of ownership. If you really love, your love cannot be taken away from you as long as you yourself are alive.

If a loved one is alive, but does not strive to be with you, give him the freedom to be himself, and if possible, continue to do good for him without expecting a reward, because you do this from an excess of feeling, and do not lend or engage in an exchange . The greatest joy is to do good to the one you love. You can do otherwise, say to yourself: “I do not know how to love those who do not love me.” This formula can help, heal, and if it works, great! However, this will mean that your feeling was not true love.

To meet a person whom you deeply loved, with whom you spent a happy time, is the rarest gift that you will keep in your soul, having learned over time to draw from it not suffering, but strength. There is nothing eternal, this is the wisdom and tragedy of being. If your beloved has left your life or even left the world forever, this does not mean at all that love is dead – it will remain with you as a joy, as a talisman, as something that will never leave and betray you, warm your soul in harsh times . Do not look for a cure for love – love! Love is the best gift that life gives us.

Limitations: philosophy teaches us to reflect and create our own image of the world, giving meaning to life. It only requires patience, which the Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard said was necessary to become a person.