The Good Men Project

How To Deal With the Unbearable Pain of Heartbreak [Video]

Matthew Hussey

 

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Are you hurting?

Is that hurt leading to overthinking? Rumination? A downward spiral of negative self-talk?

Do you feel trapped inside your own head, desperate for some relief, and anxious for the time to come when you will finally feel better?

If so, this video is required watching. To do something special for my Love.Life members, I invited the one and only Guy Winch on for a special hour to help people overcome pain and hurt. Guy Winch is one of the world’s foremost experts on dealing with heartbreak and “emotional first-aid.”

This video is a special moment taken from that hour where Guy talks about how to deal with moments of terrible pain in a productive and healthy way.

One of the really powerful distinctions Guy makes in this video is the difference between productive and obsessive thinking.

As Rainer Maria Rilke said: “No feeling is final.” If you’re hurting right now, it’s going to get better. I promise.

One step at a time.

 

Transcript provided by YouTube:

00:00
[Music]
00:00
during a difficult time whether it’s a
00:02
breakup whether it’s
00:04
a pandemic whatever it may be we are
00:08
on one hand told to stay busy
00:11
and on the other hand we’re told do the
00:14
work
00:15
don’t don’t distract yourself from
00:17
actually doing the work and processing
00:19
your thoughts and feelings and i find
00:21
that for a lot of people must be very
00:23
confusing to sort of figure out well
00:25
what constitutes being busy and what
00:26
constitutes me distracting myself from
00:28
the feelings that i need to process in
00:30
order to get over something
00:31
what what do you say is the right
00:33
balance um
00:35
the danger with heartbreak is that you
00:37
can you can drop into rumination and
00:39
elimination means that you’re spinning
00:40
around the same kind of thought in an
00:42
unproductive
00:44
way the goal of thinking things through
00:46
is to gain
00:47
insight about yourself about the other
00:49
person
00:50
about the mistakes you might have made
00:52
the things you might want to do
00:53
differently the things you might want to
00:54
keep the same what you gained from the
00:56
relationship what you didn’t
00:58
what you might want to avoid next time
00:59
etc it’s an endless list
01:01
of things you can you can learn from it
01:03
um so if you’re still learning in that
01:05
self-examination
01:07
go ahead and do it if that
01:09
self-examination
01:10
is very depressing to you then decide
01:13
when you want to do it by all means use
01:15
distraction um
01:16
and other kinds of things to kind of you
01:18
know not dwell on it
01:20
too much it’s when we’re stewing when we
01:23
just keep
01:23
repeating the same you know you know
01:25
people typically go back to the breakup
01:27
talk or to
01:28
the contradiction the thing they said
01:30
the week before the breakup talk that
01:32
contradicted
01:32
how could they say that and then do that
01:34
i just don’t understand it
01:36
and and you’ve asked yourself that
01:37
question 50 times
01:40
you’ve asked your friends 20. there’s no
01:42
more information to be gained there
01:44
certainly not by asking it in that way
01:47
so that’s just rumination
01:49
that’s just you stewing that just you
01:50
know in an emotional hamster wheel
01:52
that’s not useful
01:53
and it’s important to try and
01:55
distinguish between when your thinking
01:56
is being useful
01:58
and when it’s not and if it’s useful you
02:00
it eases
02:01
your feeling after you’re done you feel
02:03
a little easing a little
02:04
uh relief because you’ve figured
02:06
something out if it’s not useful you
02:09
just feel
02:09
crappier afterwards because you just
02:12
took your spoon
02:13
stirred all the muck took a nice big
02:15
whiff of it
02:16
and then that’s what you’re left with so
02:19
so make the distinction between the
02:20
thought process that’s productive
02:22
that teaches you something that gains
02:24
something and one that’s not and you
02:25
know the one that’s not because you’ve
02:26
been having that same line of thinking
02:29
literally dozens of times
02:36
[Music]
02:47
you

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This post was previously published on YouTube and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Photo credit: Screenshot from video

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