A heart break is so devastating but what if I tell you their might be
a cure for those wet my pillow tears? wow Ikr? leading hypnotist Paul
McKenna and psychotherapist Dr Hugh Willbourn claim they can teach you
to mend a broken heart. Using their unique 10 step method, you can
remove emotional pain and feel free to enjoy life fully again - in
days.
• ACCEPT THE PAIN
Accept that you will have to go through some pain. It is an
unavoidable truth that if f you loved enough to be heartbroken, you
have to experience some suffering.
When you lose something that mattered to you, it is natural and
important to feel sad about it: that feeling is an essential part of
the healing process.
The problem with broken-hearted people is that they seem to be
reliving their misery over and over again. If you cannot seem to break
the cycle of painful memories, the chances are that you are locked
into repeating dysfunctional patterns of behaviour. Your pain has
become a mental habit. This habit can, and must, be broken.
This is not to belittle the strength of your feelings or the
importance of the habits you've built up during your relationship.
Without habit, none of us would function. But there comes a time when
the pain becomes unhealthy.
When you enter your bedroom at night, you switch on the light without
thinking. If you obsess about your ex, and feel unhappy all the time,
it's likely that your unconscious mind is 'switching on' your emotions
in exactly the same way.
Without realising it, you have programmed yourself to feel a pang of
grief every time you hear that tune you danced to, or see your ex's
empty chair across the kitchen table.
• CHANGE YOUR HABITS
Now you have to break those connections. Turn off the music that
reminds you of your ex. Make your home look and feel different from
when your loved one was around. Move the furniture.
Take up a new activity. And keep moving: exercise is the single most
effective therapy for depression.
The point of these changes is to break up the old associations and
give yourself a new environment for your new life. The changes you
make don't have to be permanent. Even if it is just using a different
shampoo and deleting your ex's number from the memory of your mobile,
change something. Now.
• CHANGE YOUR THOUGHTS
The next step is to do the same thing on the inside - transform your
habits of thought. In a relationship, we build up a huge array of such
habits. When the love affair ends, these patterns can still be
running.
To change your thinking habits, you need to understand a little more about them.
Have you ever witnessed the same event as someone else, and later
found out their account of it was completely different from yours?
Each of you saw the event through a 'frame', made up of your personal
beliefs, feelings and internal habits.
If you are finding it devastatingly difficult to handle the end of
your relationship, you may need to change this 'frame'. You will need
to reframe your heartbreak. Stop seeing it as the end of your
happiness. Instead, turn it into a challenge; view it as an
opportunity.
Being heartbroken can make you feel worthless and hopeless - but that
is because the frame you are using is too narrow. Learning to see your
situation with a different frame is a wonderful liberation.
• VIEW YOUR RELATIONSHIP FROM THE OUTSIDE
The following exercise will help you look at your circumstances from
different points of view, so you gain helpful insights.
1. Think about the break-up of your relationship. What are the
judgments or generalisations you have made about yourself and your ex?
2. Now think of someone you admire - a character from history or a
real friend. Imagine they are watching a movie of this part of your
life, and step into their shoes to watch it instead. Imagine what
their comments would be.
3. Now imagine that a neutral observer is watching the movie of your
life. Step into their shoes and watch it from there.
4. Notice the differences that you see from each point of view. Which
ones are helpful? Which ones make you feel better? Use these
perspectives to view your relationship in a new light.
People who get over difficulties well rarely see what has happened to
them as a disaster. They frame it as a challenge. It is a matter of a
point of view. It is not what happens to us, but how we interpret it
that determines the outcome for us.
• CHANGE HOW YOU SEE YOURSELF AND HIM
The next stage is to focus on your mental picture of your lost love.
By changing how you represent your ex in your mind, you can greatly
reduce or even eliminate your distress.
You must learn to control your 'visualisation'. Every single one of us
makes pictures in our imagination - and we can all learn how to change
the pictures. It is important to learn to do this, because our bodies
react to what we imagine in the same way that they react to what is
actually happening to us. Memory and imagination affect our feelings
in the same way as reality does.
We are constantly altering our state by the pictures we make in our
imagination and the way we talk to ourselves. So it is vital to
control those pictures and not let them run away with our feelings.
• CHANGE HOW YOU SEE YOUR PAST
1. Answer the following question. Which side of your front door is the
lock on? To answer, you have had to make a mental picture of the door.
You have made a visualisation.
2. Now try to imagine what your front door would look like if it was
bright orange or had yellow stripes down it. Make it bigger. Move it
away so that it is smaller. Move it further away and down a bit so you
are looking down on it. Make it open. Change it in different ways.
3. Think about your ex now. As soon as you remember what someone looks
like, you are using visualisation. What is the expression on his or
her face? Observe what your ex is wearing and what he or she is doing.
Where do you see the picture of them? In front of you, or to the left
or the right? Is it lifesize or smaller? Is it a movie or a still
image? Is it solid or transparent? Now, as you keep that image in your
mind's eye, notice the feelings that arise. Make a note of those
feelings.
4. Now you could remember or imagine them differently. You can imagine
you are a great film director. You can reshoot the scenes of your
memory and imagination in any way you want. You can change the action,
soundtrack, lighting, camera angles, framing, focus and speed. Change
how you are visualising your ex and notice how it affects your
feelings.
5. Bring to mind the picture you had of your ex.
6. Notice where it appears and how big it is.
7. Now drain the colour out until it looks like an old black and white picture.
8. Move the image further away until it is one-tenth of its original size.
9. Shrink it even further, right down to a little black dot.
10. Notice how your feelings have changed and compare how you feel now
to the note you made earlier.
You will notice that some changes have a bigger effect than others.
Images that are closer, bigger, brighter and more colourful have
greater emotional intensity than those that are duller, smaller and
further away.
Standing outside your memories and watching as if they were a movie
helps you distance yourself from them.
• FALL OUR OF LOVE - FOR GOOD
Now you are ready to tackle the central problem using the
visualisation technique. Part of being heartbroken is the fact that
you still feel in love. It hurts because part of you is still attached
to your ex. This exercise helps that piece of you release itself.
1. List five occasions when you felt very in love with your ex. List
them so you can easily call them to mind.
2. Start with the first of those memories. Play with it. Move the
image away from you so that you can see yourself in the picture. Make
it small.
3. Drain out the colour so it is black and white, then make it
transparent. When you look at your memory like this, it will seem as
if the event is happening to someone else, and the emotional intensity
will be reduced still further. You are starting to re-code your
memory.
4. When you have finished re-coding the first memory, do the same for
the next one. Work through them until you have done all five.
5. Remember in detail five negative experiences with your expartner,
where you felt very definitely put off by him or her. List the five
experiences.
6. Take the least appealing memory and fully return to that moment.
Try to relive it.
7. Now turn up the colour and the clarity. Make the memory as bright
and clear as you can, and experience the feelings more and more
strongly.
8. Go through each of the other four negative memories of your
ex-partner, and relive them. Carry on until even thinking about them
puts you off.
When you think about the bad experiences again and again, the negative
memories begin to join up so that there is no space between them for
the feelings of love, yearning and regret.
Concentrate on the exercise and do it methodically. Some people have
found that doing this just once makes them feel different. To make
sure the effect sticks, do it every day for two weeks.
• UNDERSTAND YOUR EMOTIONS
The next stage is to learn to understand your emotional reactions
better. Your feelings of heartbreak are unlikely to disappear unless
you cope with what they are trying to tell you.
An emotion is a bit like someone knocking on your door to deliver a
message. If you don't answer, it keeps knocking until you do open up.
Opening the door to your feelings means learning to understand them.
This can be hard, because heartbreak is complicated by other feelings:
anger, fear and shame.
• BELIEVE THAT YOU WILL FIND LOVE AGAIN
You could fall into the trap of remaining convinced that your ex is
the only person you could ever love. This is unlikely to be true on a
planet with six billion people.
So why do you believe it? Can it be because you are desperately trying
to avoid accepting that the relationship is over? Or are you afraid
that the bad feelings associated with heartbreak will never go away?
That fear makes you anxious, and keeps you feeling bad for longer. The
burden of your heartbreak has grown heavier, and a vicious circle has
been established.
• LIVING HAPPILY AFTER YOUR BREAK-UP
A good way of giving yourself a boost - and coping with complicated
feelings - is to imagine a bright future.
1. Imagine the future as a corridor in front of you. Imagine walking
down it, away from the present, towards a door.
2. Open the door, and see beyond it a world in which you have
recovered from your heartbreaking relationship.
3. See what you look like, what you are wearing, where you are going,
whom you are seeing.
4. Now step into this new world and into the new happy you. Imagine
the whole experience from the inside, seeing what you would see,
hearing what you would hear, and feeling how good and happy things are
now.
It is not a matter of believing the image is real: just imagine it as
vividly as possible.
In heartbreak, there is often a backlog of emotional learning to get
through. Do one bit at a time. Your unconscious mind will protect you,
and give you a rest so that you can deal with the next bit. You will
learn to step out of the memories, leave them behind, and start a new
life.
• Extracted from How To Mend Your Broken Heart by Paul McKenna and
Hugh Willbourn (Bantam Press, £7.99). ° 2003, Paul McKenna and Hugh
Willbourn. Do get it and learn more from Paul and Hugh,
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