How Fully Embracing Heartbreak Can Transform Us in Profoundly Positive Ways

Getting your heart broken sucks.

Tremendously.

It runs the gambit of not being able to drag ourselves out of bed and complete devastation, to replaying how the outcome could’ve been different, to cringeworthy, public proclamations about how our ex was a di*k to anyone willing to listen.

Despite how terrible it feels to experience heartbreak, it’s an unavoidable part of life and an essential part of the maturation process.

It presents us with the opportunity to look at ourselves holistically, explore the depths of grief and transformation, and take accountability for our faults, feelings, and expectations.

In hindsight, as most things are best savored, it gives us so many gifts if only we are willing to receive its wisdom.

“Our deepest wounds surround our greatest gifts.” — Ken Page.

What Heartbreak Does For Us

It Teaches Us How To Be Vulnerable

Regardless of how a relationship ends, falling in love takes a remarkable amount of courage.

Being seen by someone can feel terrifying and leave us raw and exposed. It can trigger some of our deepest wounds, and a willingness to go to that place means, on some level, you were able to relinquish the need to control the outcome (a complicated thing for us humans to do).

You trusted the process and were willing to be hopeful, which is more complex than defaulting to aloofness or jaded cynicism.

Getting close to someone and letting them in takes a risk, but nothing ever worth having came without it.

We Learn More About Ourselves

It’s almost impossible to engage in any relationship (romantic or otherwise) without discovering something new about ourselves. Whether that be something that triggers, scares, excites, surprises, or arouses us, we learn how we operate when we participate in relationships.

When we reflect honestly on an ending, we are often bestowed with the beautiful gift of insight, a treasure that’s only gained through the exposure of our blind spots.

I learned something new about myself from every single relationship I’ve ever had. Even if it didn’t end a pattern or completely change my perspective, small shifts in my thinking always happened and affected the way I navigated my next relationship.

Sometimes we equate breakups with failure, but the only way we fail is if we refuse to take ownership of our half in the relationship and gain new insights from the mistakes we made within it.

“Most awakenings emerge from an accumulation of insights over time.” — Nicole LaPera.

We Learn How To Use Discretion When Choosing a Partner

Often, we only see what we want in relationships.

We ignore red flags and assume someone will change. We settle, we compromise, and we end up in relationships that are toxic or dysfunctional. Only through hindsight are we able to uncover which parts were unhealthy and undesirable.

As a result of our naiveté, stubbornness, or both, we end up with people who break our hearts. It doesn’t matter how many people warn us or how many bad things happen; we don’t learn until we put our hand on that hot stove and see for ourselves what it’s like to deal with burns and bandages afterward.

Sometimes the only way to make better choices is by dealing with the consequences of making terrible ones the first time.

“To remind me, pain is the best teacher” — Holly Black.

We Become More Resilient

There’s no getting around the fact that we will inevitably experience loss. Since nothing is permanent, becoming attached to something means that we will also lose the object of our attachment.

Each time we feel broken beyond repair or betrayed beyond comprehension, we are presented with a brilliant opportunity to rebuild what we believe was lost or taken from us in a new way.

A study conducted by Gary Lewandowski, a psychologist at Monmouth University, and his colleagues focused on positive outcomes of relationships ending.

The study found that most young adults interviewed said the breakup had helped them learn and grow and that they felt more goal-oriented after breaking things off.

Gary told NPR in an interview about breakups,

“Coping with breakups can help people realize how resilient they are, and that can be empowering.”

When we gain the ability to bounce back and heal from loss, we empower and expand ourselves, developing a more sophisticated arsenal for navigating the unimaginably complex world of love.

How To Embrace Heartache

Allow, Allow, Allow

Surrender. This is crucial.

We have to move through our heartache to reap the eventual positive benefits of becoming a phoenix rising from the ashes. Without paying our emotional dues, we can’t bypass the pain or gloss over the hurt and turn hardship into wine.

In an interview with Glamour on how to get over a broken heart, holistic psychotherapist Rebecca Hendrix says,

“When somebody breaks up with you, you’re going to feel a flood of emotions. It’s a trauma. It’s a shock to your system.” And as with any type of emotional shock, “you want to be really gentle with yourself, and you want to allow yourself to feel your feelings.”

Permit yourself to be pissed, sad, disappointed, empty. Let yourself delete their number, then get it back and drunk text against your better judgment and all your friend’s advice.

Forgive yourself, refuse to get out of bed, rage cry, be melodramatic and drink wine in the tub, then fall asleep.

Be patient and kind to yourself when you slip up, eventually pull yourself together, forgive them for not being the person you wished they were, and move forward.

Stay in Your Power and Avoid Becoming a Victim of Circumstance

Terrible sh*t happens to good people every single day.

It’s a tale as old as time; life isn’t fair. No one gets to cheat death, loss, sickness, irrelevance. None of us get out alive, and sometimes that realization hits really hard.

Yes, it’s essential to have empathy for others and compassion for yourself, and it’s important to give yourself time and space to process grief.

It’s another thing to stay stuck there and have it become your identity.

Being a victim allows us to defer personal responsibility for moving forward, and it will enable us to remain self-righteously angry, blaming others for our problems and misfortunes. It says, “I am giving up agency over my own life, so I don’t have to do the work of changing or growing because I didn’t choose this in the first place.”

It robs us of our ability to make positive changes. It turns us into passive players, stunting our growth and preventing us from turning adversity into wisdom and creative energy that can push us forward.

Let It Trigger an “Awakening”

We have so many different perceptions of what an awakening or enlightening experience might be.

Psychologist and author Steve Taylor, who has researched the topic for over a decade, describes them as:

“This is a fairly typical example of an ‘awakening experience’ –a temporary expansion and intensification of awareness that brings significant perceptual, affective and conceptual changes.”

Typically, these awakenings are triggered by various events, with a third of them stemming from stress, depression, and loss.

Heartache can bring about “transformation through turmoil,” situations where we have a newfound clarity and changed view of ourselves and perspectives on the world once healed. It’s very rare that we go through something devastating and come out unchanged.

Let yourself be changed.

Become Skilled at Being Alone

Nothing will wake you up to the emptiness in your life, quite like the ending of a relationship. If you found your identity in or filled a void with your partner, losing them sobers you pretty quickly.

You might look around and realize all the friends you had were “our” friends…or worse, their friends. Your hobbies were their hobbies, your free time spent with them.

You realize you have no idea who you are without them.

Investing in your relationship with yourself and deepening your relationships with others will help prevent this.

Exploring passions, hobbies, interests, and taking risks will help you find fulfillment outside of another person. Go on trips, treat yourself, and learn how to sit with your emotional experiences.

The more grounded and happy you are single, the more likely you are to find something sustainable when the right person comes along.

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Loss and heartache are innate parts of our human experience. To be willing to love means the risk of loss. In the west, we generally don’t know how to deal with it properly, so we avoid it, losing the opportunity for true transformation.

If we can learn to accept loss as a part of life and befriend our pain, we can move through it and come out the other side wiser, happier, and more self-aware.

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This post was previously published on Medium.

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