Thursday, October 18, 2007
So many relationships end with a broken heart. Many times only one person wanted out of the relationship and that leaves the other person wounded with a broken heart. When a relationship ends it takes a toll on the self-esteem and it may take many months if not years to recover. There are 3 steps to mending a broken heart.
1. Forgiveness. Forgive yourself for all the wrong that you feel you did during the relationship and then forgive the other person for any wrong you feel they did.Forgive and go free.
2. Self-esteem rebuilding. Work on rebuilding your self-esteem.
3. Aloneness. Be alone and feel the loneliness. Give yourself some healing time and work on mending your broken heart one step at a time. You will mend over time and you will find love again. Be patient with yourself. The more you work at forgiveness and you learn how to move forward the heart will mend and become open again.Experience can carry an emotional price and that price is often paid in full by the pain of regretfulness that we continue to suffer. But in order for us to stop punishing ourselves and move forward in our love lives, we must find an empowering value in our past so it can start serving us well in the future.
The following are strategies that are designed to help you lighten your emotional load or convert past experiences into more valuable assets for you to reinvest into your future:
• Convert your past pain into warnings. If you can learn something from your past experiences, they have value you can put to use today and in the future. When a decision results in negative consequences, then that experience becomes a warning not to choose that same course of action again. With this simple mindset adjustment, you can start to steer away from repeating your mistakes.
• Let your past pleasure inspire you to experience more. When we recognize something good that happened in our past, it can serve to inspire us to experience that again. Instead of warnings, these pleasurable moments can be examples of how life rewards you when the right choices and circumstances come together. Remembering your successes can help restore your faith in love and your ability to attract it again into your life.
• Forgive yourself by adding the key missing resources. Many of our past mistakes could have been avoided if we had the benefit of knowing the consequences in advance. The truth is that people do about the best they can with the mental, physical, and emotional resources that they have at any given time. By considering how a key present resource --- like your current level of self-confidence --- might have changed the outcome of a past experience, you can easily forgive yourself and let go of unnecessary and destructive emotional pain.
• Put a new empowering label on your old experience. We have a tendency to describe a past event with an emotional label. For example, we will say something like “It was a humiliating experience.” Now that may have been true when it happened, but for now you can constructively say that it was a “learning experience.” That way, you can recall what you learned rather than how it felt to be humiliated. Another thing you can do is to describe this humiliating experience from the past as “a tad embarrassing” in retrospect. By describing your past with less emotionally charged words, you can access the event without bringing up the same intensity of pain.
• Throw away all of the old anchors. Sometimes it takes bold, radical moves to break the habit of hanging on to negative emotional feelings. In the case of forgetting painful relationships, it may be useful to toss out old photos, love letters, and romantic cards or gifts. It may also help to stop listening to songs of that time period which bring you back instantly to those lost moments. These reminders may be keeping you attached emotionally to unwanted and outdated times in your life and thus prevent you from appreciating what could be in your life today or in the future.
• Get help if you need it. If you need professional help to move forward, seek counsel from a goal-oriented therapist or life coach. Also, a weekly support group can help you realize that we all face challenges in our lives and let you see how others are handling theirs. In addition, techniques like breath work are useful for letting go of lingering difficult feelings. Lastly, remember that we all need to take a break from love at times after a relationship has been particularly painful. Perhaps this is a period when you can just date for fun, taking your time before getting too serious.
• Don’t look back, look forward instead. Once you’ve been able to embrace the lessons of your past, control your focus by thinking, talking, and referring to things in your present. Think of the positive possibilities life could offer you today. Realize that when the mind doesn’t have anything good to focus on in the present or for the future, it has a natural tendency to drift back to emotional events of the past. Also, if you fill your upcoming schedule with an assortment of worthwhile activities to experience, there won’t be any time to obsess about the past.
• Give yourself a new adult identity. How about becoming an “enlightened woman” now instead of continuing to be a “victim” of the past? All you have to do is willingly accept full responsibility for your love life, learn from every experience, and appreciate the healing process of becoming more compassionate toward yourself and others. By seeing yourself as living at a higher level, you can instantly lessen the pain of the past and make your general attitude more attractive to others.
• Remember to love yourself at all times. Having high self-esteem is perhaps the greatest aid to repairing a hurtful past. The more you love and honor yourself, the more you’ll be control of your own emotions. In addition, you’ll feel less at the mercy of unpleasant circumstances --- both in the past and present. The next time you come face-to-face with a hurtful reminder of your past, be sure to have incredible compassion for yourself. Also appreciate your newfound ability to handle challenges.
How you feel about your past will greatly affect your attitude towards your future love-life. As soon as you’re ready, lighten up your emotional load so that you can be free to love again in the future. Don’t penalize your love-life by hanging on to unnecessary and destructive memories from your past.
The Bottom Line
Dating sucks when your past weighs you down and makes your spirit less attractive to prospective men. But dating rocks when you discover how your past can help you grow into a human-being who has more love and compassion to give to the deserving men in your future.
You are why I live for... at -10/18/2007 03:19:00 PM