A few years ago I began a series of internet affairs where I fell in love and then was hurt badly when the relationship broke apart. There was a lot going on there—mental illness, self-destructive tendencies, etc—that I have described elsewhere. The key, for me, is what I learned—which was how to deal with heartbreak.
Not surprisingly, a broken heart feels a lot like depression. Serious depression seems like it will never end. It feels like a physical weight, like the proverbial millstone, is pressing down on your chest. It feels like you won’t survive this loss. It feels like there’s really no point in going on. No one loves you, and you are unlovable, anyway.
To heal, you need to learn a few skills. These skills can be taught in therapy, but they can also be taught in meditation or yoga classes. Exercise, as @Cruiser points out, is also very helpful. In addition, there are many books you can read about mindfulness—an effective technique for dealing with feelings like this.
When the love of your life rejects you, it’s a double whammy. Not only do you feel crushed because he or she doesn’t love you; but that rejection makes you question your value and worth and whether you are lovable at all.
This is what you have to cope with. It’s a lot, but also it’s simple. These feelings you have about yourself are basically lies. You are a perfectly fine person whether or not you are with this other person. Your feelings about yourself just aren’t helpful or useful, and so the trick is to learn how to not pay so much attention to these feelings—not to identify with them so much.
That’s where mindfulness comes in. I can’t do it justice here (or anywhere, since I’m not trained in it), but for me, it worked like this. A some point I realized I could not fight my feelings of self-loathing. So I gave into them. Oddly, this took away some of their power. It seems I was giving the feelings more power by fighting them so hard,
With the burden of this fight off my shoulders, I could actually do something useful. I learned how to observe my feelings without feeling like I had to hold onto them. I could let them pass by, and not necessarily feel they were me.
It’s not so easy as it sounds. I had the help of a therapist, a psychiatrist and a support group. It took a long time—a year or two. About the same amount of time as it took me to get over my first love’s rejection. But I was dealing with a good deal more than heartbreak. Still, it can take time. A lot of time. That’s ultimately what heals most of us.
It sucks big time to go through this. It can seem like the pain is endless. It seems like we’ll never get over it (actually, we won’t, but we can learn from it). I wish you the best. Find friends, or better yet, others who are going through this. They understand and that can be enormously helpful.
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