Healing Broken Hearts — 4 Pillars

PILLAR 1

ESTABLISHING SAFETY

The first place to begin to heal a broken heart is to establish safety. As feminist trauma expert Judith Herman emphasizes, that includes both physical and emotional safety.

Creating safety helps modulate your nervous system, supporting the emotional work that leads to deep healing.

Creating safe space physically for self-nurturing

Find or create a physical space where you can be present with your emotions, ideally, in a place where others cannot hear you or interrupt you.

Perhaps there is a bedroom or other room where you can shut the door and can create a private place for yourself.

If you don’t have a place in your home, perhaps there is a spot outdoors, in the woods, by a creek, or under a favorite tree.

Alternatively,  if you don’t have a private space, you may look for a dedicated time when others are not around, where you can shut the doors and be alone.

As a starting place, take time to tend your space, cleaning as needed, sorting and culling things that are no longer needed or no longer serve you. In doing so, you’ll reconnect with the things you truly love, and let others go.

Bring in items that may support your healing—a comfy blanket, an inspiring quote, a special candle or stone.

Creating physical safety also has longer term benefits, as chronic lack of safety can imprint in your nervous system and take a toll on your immune system and hormonal system.

In addition to finding a safe space, it's important to tend to your physical self-care—sleeping at least 7 hours a night, eating regular meals, and taking time outdoors for moderate movement.

As you nourish your physical body, you're more able to gather the energy to do the deep, emotional and internal work of healing a broken heart.

Cultivating emotional safety to support your healing

Create more emotional safety for yourself by being thoughtful about how and when to engage with others, and when to step back.

Of course, if you are constantly tending to the needs and concerns of others, it is hard to find time for self reflection and self connection.

Know that your healing is important and investing your time and energy in yourself is critical. 

To cultivate emotional safety, you’ll want to avoid situations or people who tend to bring up criticism, unwanted advice or uncomfortable comparisons.

These can be harmful to your heart.

Those types of  interactions can easily feed your internal voices that dismiss your experience as trivial—or that say your experience is the exception which no one else can understand.

Either way you end up feeling more alone.

Without the added fodder from those interactions, you can more easily quiet your own inner critic.

Establishing safety may sound like a lot to ask of yourself, and you may feel it's insurmountable.

I can say from experience as a single mother working full time, it was hard to find the time and energy to cultivate a safer environment—and once I did, I realized how essential it was for my healing. (Wondering where to start? You're welcome to grab a free copy of my pdf guide on creating a space for self-healing)

To recap, here are some practical ways to establish safety:

• Physically
  • Find or create a physical space where you can focus on your emotional world
  • Tend to your physical self care
• Emotionally
  • Create emotional space by being selective about your interpersonal interactions
  • Avoid situations or people who provide unwanted criticism, advice or comparisons

The next pillar for broken heart healing is moving through your grief.

PILLAR 2 

GRIEVING

Within the container of safety that you have created, you may now be ready to spiral down into your heart. In my experience, emotional pain can sometimes be even harder to navigate than physical pain.

To heal a broken heart, give voice to your grief

Many ancient cultures have rituals of keening or wailing where participants are able to vocalize their grief.  

A friend of mine raised in Scotland in a Celtic tradition, leads keening circles throughout the year, providing women a space to move through the deep grief that builds up over time in our lives—and in our bodies. 

I was also blessed to participate in grief rituals facilitated by Sobonfu Somé. These rituals lasted a weekend or more in a space teeming with people grieving out loud together.

Each person was encouraged by the music and one another to express their grief openly—to cry or sob or wail.

Whether you're alone or with others, there is no denying the healing power of grieving.  

Allow grief to guide your journey of broken heart healing

One October years ago, I entered what I now call my "Winter of Grief."

It began just after fall equinox and continued through the dark time of the year—the inward months of the winter season.

As I spiraled down into my internal world, I found that I touched not only the pain of the current situation, but also the roots that went back much further.

Every day, I cried.

As much as possible, I gave voice out loud to the grief so that it could move through me and out of my body.  

When working with grief, let her be the guide. If memories come up, acknowledge those as an opportunity for more complete healing.

You may find places of tension in your body, where your grief or emotions have been stored.

Give yourself permission to vocalize your grief to help release tension in your heart and your throat.  this allows your energy to flow freely through your body.    

PILLAR 3

EMOTIONAL REGULATION

Intense emotional pain can put your body into a state of fight or flight, scanning for possible threats. You may wish to shut down and close off. To bring yourself back into a relaxed and embodied state, it's helpful to practice regulating your emotions.

By regulation, I don't mean suppressing or turning off your emotions. Rather it's about finding ways to bring your body out of a place of high alert and back into a calmer, parasympathetic state.  

Emotional regulation techniques to soothe and heal

Some common techniques for emotional regulation include:

• Focusing on your breath, such as inhaling for a count of 3 and exhaling for a count of 5—or holding a word in mind with your inhale/exhale, such as “calm”
• Tapping your fingertips on your chest around your heart helps dissipate anxiety,  resets your energy, and regulates your nervous system.
• Yoga or meditation
• Movement and exercise

Experiment to find which methods you find helpful and enjoyable, and weave one or more into your daily routine. If you wake up in the middle of the night feeling anxious, bring yourself back into your body with your breath or tapping with your fingertips.

Cultivating self-empathy validates your experience

In addition to these physical techniques, self empathy is a powerful way to regulate emotions. My students often share that they’ve found connecting with their feelings and needs to be transformational in their internal healing.

Here are two simple steps for self empathy:

1. Take a moment to ask, “What am I feeling right now?”
2. Dig deeper and ask, "Which of my needs are not being met?"

Identifying and naming your unmet needs is a way of saying, “Yes, there is a reason for this emotional pain, it’s not all in my head—it's actually valid." 

Ready to go even deeper? Likely the roots of your emotional pain may have originated in childhood. Take a moment to connect with your inner girl child and ask her, "What are you feeling? What are you needing?"

PILLAR 4

SELF REFLECTION

The fourth pillar of healing broken hearts is self-reflection—or self-reflective information processing, as it is known in the trauma healing community.

Questions to explore for self-reflection

Self-reflective information processing means looking at your situation through the lens of a witness.  Start by noting the memories and feelings coming up in relation to your current heartbreak.

Then begin to dig. Ask yourself questions like . . . 

• Where did those feelings show up in your relationship and what happened next?
• What were the outcomes and what were the impacts?
• Do you have similar memories or feelings from another, different relationship? What happened there?

Keep digging to explore what might be recurring patterns. Now, take care—this is not to say that you're at fault! 

You can't control the actions of others and the recurrence of difficult feelings. You can explore ways to move through those moments with self empathy and care—and you can understand your patterns and the choices you make. 

Self-reflection modalities for understanding your patterns

As you delve into self reflective information processing, choose what style(s) you prefer, such as:

• Journaling
• Visual art
• Women’s circles
• Sharing with a trusted friend

My favorite forms of self reflection have always included journaling. I filled journal after journal through my healing process.

Writing can be a way of expressing emotions that have been held up inside so that you can spiral back through grieving and vocalizing. 

Personally I believe there is power in using words to do this type of self reflection—however, I have also found that expressing visually through art is also quite powerful.

Women's circles can also support self reflection with the additional power of being witnessed.

My preferred format is that each woman has the opportunity to speak her truth, uninterrupted. Her words are not analyzed or commented upon. It is a place to be witnessed and heard without feedback or advice. 

If you don’t have a women’s circle near you, you could also use this format with a trusted friend who will listen and accept you regardless of what you share. This helps to break down old shame and guarding around the heart.

With the information you gain from self-reflective information processing, you can begin to strategically address specific patterns that came up. And recognize the beliefs that are fueling those patterns, to make wise choices of where to focus your healing attention.