How To Heal a Broken Heart (Real-World Tips to Help You Deal)

The pain that comes with illness or injury can be intense. But the pain of a broken heart hurts at a whole different level.

A Long Time Ago ...

I was walking along a moderately busy street, on a cold, drizzly night in South Bend, Indiana. I was only vaguely aware of the traffic whizzing alongside of me. My face was so wet from tears I barely noticed the rain.

The man I loved, the one who I’d been in a relationship with for years, the one who probably wouldn’t have gotten through school without my help, the one who I thought I wanted to marry, was cheating on me. As best I could tell, he’d been cheating on me for most of the time we’d been together.

I shouldn’t have been surprised.

Somewhere, deep down in my gut, a tiny voice had been niggling at me for years. It tried to warn me that something was wrong. But I pushed the voice aside. I silenced it with “reason.”

I didn’t want to know that the man I Ioved more than life itself was cheating on me.

But it had gotten to the point where I could no longer deny what I didn’t want to believe.

That’s When I Started to Wonder …

What would happen, I wondered, if I just walked out in front of those cars? The road was winding. In the dark and the rain a driver might not see me until it was too late.

If I got hit at the speed the cars were going, would I die? Or would I just get seriously messed up and have to live the rest of my life in a body that was broken as badly as my heart?

I paused to watch the traffic go by. As I did a car whirred past me, drenching my clothes as it raced through the puddles on the side of the road. The shock of the cold water on my legs brought me back to my senses.

Shaken, I turned forward and continued the long walk home.

I didn't realize it at the time, but as I turned away from that road, I had already started to heal.

How Do You Heal a Broken Heart?

If you Google, “how to heal a broken heart” you’ll find advertisements for everything from therapists and “breakup coaches,” to spellcasters who promise they can bring your lost love back.

The articles you’ll find in that same Google search are filled with advice like, “take time to grieve,” and “find a new source of joy.”

That’s great advice.

But when you’re crumpled on the floor sobbing your guts out, and it feels like the shards of your broken heart are ripping through your chest, telling yourself to “find a new source of joy,” just doesn’t cut it.

That’s especially true when the pain you’re dealing with comes from a divorce.

Not only have you lost your lover, your partner, and maybe your best friend, but you’ve also endangered your financial security and turned your family upside down.

It sucks.

While you can’t instantly eliminate your pain, you can take steps to understand it at a deeper level. That understanding helps.

The Five Stages of Grief

In her pioneering work with the dying, Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross identified five stages of grief that everyone experiences when someone dies.

Those same stages of grief apply to any kind of major loss, including divorce.

The five stages of grief are:

Denial – (No! It’s not over! We can fix this! Just work with me!)

Anger – (F@*# you! I don’t need you!)

Bargaining – (Please come back! If you come back, I’ll be better! I’ll change!)

Depression – (I’ll never find love again.  Ever. Life sucks.)

Acceptance – (This relationship is over, and that’s okay. I’m going to be okay.)

Knowing these five stages of grief is helpful. It makes you realize that you’re not alone.

You’re not the only human who has ever had to deal with loss.

What’s more, there’s a pattern to your loss. There’s a beginning, a middle and an end to your suffering. All you have to do is not let yourself drown in a sea of sorrow in the middle.

Believing that you can do that, though, isn’t always easy.

Embrace the Suck

When Sheryl Sandberg’s husband unexpectedly died of a random heart attack at 47 while they were on vacation, her Rabbi told her to “lean into the suck.”

That wasn’t what she wanted to hear.

But there’s wisdom in those words.

Avoiding grief by pretending to be okay doesn’t work. Distracting ourselves with work, food, alcohol, or anything else we can find to numb the pain, ultimately leaves us feeling worse.

The only way to get past the pain is to feel it.

You’ve got to work through all the stages of grief before you can have any hope of getting to the other side. That means that, for a while at least, you’ve just got to live with a life that sucks.

That’s not easy – especially in today’s world.

We’ve all gotten used to getting what we want, when we want it.  Instant gratification is usually only one click away. We can do, and have, what we want, when we want it, and usually as often as we want it.

We’re not used to having to wait. We’re not used to having to wade through the muck and messiness that comes with a broken heart and a fractured life.

But you can’t rush through heartbreak like it’s just another item on your “To Do” list. (Finished with heartbreak? Check. Ready to move on? Check.)

You’ve got to live the heartbreak. You’ve got to give in to the pain and let yourself experience it. Once you do, then - and only then - can you start to let it go.

Easing the Pain of Heartbreak

While much of your healing happens over time, there are things you can do that will help you deal with your heartbreak faster.

1. Establish a “No Contact” rule.

Not seeing your ex every day will give you the space to grieve without being constantly reminded that your relationship is over.

Of course, to do that, you’ve got to be strong enough to tell your ex that you only want to communicate when it’s absolutely necessary (like when you need to talk about the kids). It helps to only communicate through text or email. Face-to-face communication makes grieving harder.

You’ve also got to be strong enough to resist the urge to break your own rule whenever you’re feeling down.

For example, if you need a sitter for the kids on Friday night, the only question you need to ask is “Can you take the kids on Friday night?” Asking, “What are you doing on Friday night because the kids need a sitter,” is NOT the same question!

2. Re-Discover You!

Every relationship involves some amount of compromise. That means that you probably stopped doing certain things you liked doing because your ex hated doing them. Or maybe you started doing things you really didn’t enjoy just because your ex liked them.

Now you can change that.

Take some time to re-discover what really makes you happy. Maybe you liked to read, or watch drippy movies, or hang out in coffee shops on Sunday morning. Maybe you liked camping, but your ex’s idea of “roughing it” was staying at a Marriott. Whatever you used to like to do, do it now!

If you don’t know what makes you happy, try thinking back to when you were a kid. What made you happy then? What if you did that again now? It doesn’t matter that you feel a little silly sitting on a swing next to a five year old. If swinging makes you happy, then swing away!

3. Move.

Exercise is the cheapest drug on the planet.

When you move, your body releases endorphins, powerful “feel good” chemicals. Those natural chemicals can help lift you up when you’re feeling down. (Plus, as you start to get in better shape, your self-esteem will get a boost, too!)

Exercise will also help you sleep better. It will help you clear your mind (even if only for a while). It will also help you fill your time AND make you look better too!

So, instead of turning every night into a sob-fest, you can spend a couple hours at the gym first. You can always go home and have your sob-fest later.

4.  Resist the Urge to Make Stuff Up.

When a relationship ends – especially one that you wanted to last forever – we all have the tendency to rewrite history.

We either look at the relationship through rose colored glasses, or through glasses covered in black smoke. We tell ourselves that the relationship was awesome, wonderful, amazing – the best thing since sliced bread! Or we convince ourselves that everything sucked, our spouse was a shit, and that we were stupid for getting duped into staying in a marriage that was so bad.

Neither one of those scenarios is probably true. Instead, the truth probably was that your marriage – just like everyone else’s marriage – was both good AND bad. Some things WERE amazing. Others sucked.

You’ll get through your grief a lot faster (and with much less pain!) if you can acknowledge the reality of your marriage, rather than glamorizing or demonizing it.

5.  Practice Gratitude.

The last thing you feel like doing when you’re grieving a loss is to be grateful for what you have. Yet nothing will help you heal from divorce faster than focusing on what’s positive, while acknowledging what’s negative.

That doesn’t mean you have to walk around like Pollyanna, pretending that life is prefect. That’s called denial. That doesn’t work.

What WILL work is finding things in your life that you CAN be grateful for – even when it feels like your life is falling apart. Think you’ve got nothing to be grateful for? Are you alive? Are you healthy? Can you see, hear, taste, touch, and smell? Did you eat today? Are you living under a bridge, or do you have a roof over your head?

We take all of those things for granted. Yet, they’re all blessings. They’re gifts. Plenty of people would be thrilled to have those things in their life. So, instead of focusing on everything that’s WRONG with our life we spend a little time focusing on what’s RIGHT, we can at least start bringing things into balance.

Doing that WILL make you feel better.

How Do You Know When Enough is Enough?

While giving yourself time to grieve is important, there IS such a thing as grieving too much. Many people get attached to their grief. When that happens, they get stuck in it.

As counterintuitive as it seems, you can get comfortable grieving, or being angry or sad. Being down becomes more than just a stage you’re going through. It becomes a way of life.

That’s not where you want to be. That is not the place from which you can rebuild a life that you love.

You want grief to be like a thunderstorm in your life. It should come in and do its thing for a while. Then, it should leave. (With luck it may even leave a rainbow in its wake!)

But, if grief has been raining in your life so long that you need an ark to keep from drowning, your grief has gone on too long.

Of course, knowing when you’ve crossed the line from healthy, natural grief into permanent misery is hard. Everyone goes through grief at their own pace. Some people will get through it more quickly. Others won’t.

What’s more, trying to rush through grief only prolongs the process. So knowing when your grief is becoming pathological can be hard to tell.

Even still, there are ways to judge whether you’ve gotten stuck in your grief.

For example, if you measure the time since your breakup in years rather than months, it may be time for you to get help to get over your loss. If your friends have stopped asking you out because they can’t bear to hear your breakup stories yet one more time, that’s also a sign that it may be time to move on.

Letting Go and Moving On

Letting go of a relationship or a marriage, especially one that took years, or decades, of your life, is hard. No matter what you do, you’re going to experience pain.

But if you can face that pain, embrace that pain, then allow yourself to let go of that pain, you will heal.

Give yourself time. Give yourself permission to be a little selfish and self-absorbed for a while. All of that is okay.

If you need help along the way, get it. Therapists and grief counselors can be an enormous help to get you through the roughest parts of your divorce. They can also provide you with the reality check you need when your grief has continued for longer than what’s healthy.

Never worked with a therapist before? That’s okay. There’s no shame in reaching out for help.

It’s far better to get the help you need than to stay stuck in a life you hate.

Finally, do your best to focus on the future and let go of your past. Take it one day at a time. Eventually, you will heal your broken heart.

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This was originally posted on April 25, 2013 and updated on June 3, 2022.