How to Get Over a Broken Heart a Professional Counselor's Perspective

When we lose someone who we really love the sense of sadness, loss and anxiety can be overwhelming or even life-interfering at times.

For people who are prone to mental health issues or substance abuse, the high stress levels from losing a strong, close emotional relationship can even be harmful or dangerous.

Although the best relationship science has clearly demonstrated that we are designed to benefit profoundly from being in long term healthy and monogamous relationships, sometimes our current or ex-partner makes this literally impossible for us.

It's always a priority to do our very best to save a marriage or important relationship. But when all reasonable attempts have been made or when our partner is simply unwilling to show the same deep commitment and hard work that we are, it can really hurt our health and well being to try saving the relationship by ourselves.

When a partner is injured, ill or can't make an effort as strong as ours for reasons outside of their control, that's another, very special topic all together.

In most cases though, It takes two partners to dance the couple-dance. We can't dance this dance by ourselves or without a partner who is doing their very best to dance with us.

Even for those of us who are most vulnerable to the painful effects of lost love, knowing how to properly get over a broken heart can be a truly empowering even transformative experience, which can better prepare us for our next, more mutually healthy relationship.

Grieving properly can also strengthen us deeply in our ability to function more strongly and effectively in our most important current and future relationships.

For example, getting over a lost relationship the right way can help a mother or father become an even more effective parent. Getting rid of old relationship "baggage" through proper grieving also makes us better partners in our current relationships.

Here’s a s 7 step strategy based on the best available relationship science, for how to truly get over a broken heart in a away that's healthy and revitalizing over time.


1. Understand, It's a "Process"!

One of the most critical success factors in really getting over a broken heart well, is to start by understanding that it’s a “process.”

Much like the grieving process that we must go through when we lose a loved one from this life, there is also a grieving process we need to go through when we suffer a deep emotional injury from a lost relationship or ex.

We only get in trouble or stuck when we don’t know or refuse to accept this grieving process; when we ourselves get in the way of letting it take its course.

Consider Short Term Solution Focused Counseling for help, If the grieving process gets too overwhelming. Counseling can really help to reduce unnecessary suffering. It also doesn't mean that there's any kind of serious mental health problem.

Many people don't realize that they have access to free counseling services through their (or a family member's) employee assistance program at work (teens and young adults are often covered by their parents' EAP programs too!). Otherwise, checking with a family doctor and talking to our insurance company can be helpful here. There may be free counseling services as well through our local religious or other community resources.

In both cases, in a failed relationship and after the loss of a loved one from this life, we can definitely get stuck in an unhealthy state of perpetual broken-heartedness, if we don’t understand and just go with and even help the grieving process take it’s course.

It was once thought that this universal grieving process took place in the precise stages of “denial”, “anger”, “bargaining”, “depression” and acceptance.

As it turns out, each person goes through their own unique process of healing a broken heart. The best grieving-science teaches that people can enter and exit different, alternating and even co-occurring admixtures of the different grieving stages.

For example, there may be periods of denial towards the end of the grieving process as much as in the middle or start. There may be a sense of depression and bargaining right at the beginning of the process and then short bursts of denial right in the middle and then closer to the end of the process.

Getting over an ex, means knowing, anticipating and fully allowing these grief elements to find their fullest expression in our thoughts, feelings, actions and prayers.

Become an Expert on The Heart Break Recovery and Grieving Process. There is so much spam and unqualified advice on the internet. Most internet marketing experts are simply not relationship experts. In fact, their advice can actually be useless or even harmful for lack of education and clinical experience.

Select 2 or 3 Relationship/Grieving Books written by professional counselors and experts in the relationship grieving process (some of the best are written by Rabbis and pastoral counselors). When selecting your reading materials, make sure to read reviews by previous readers who have benefited in real life from the book. It's also good to choose books reviewed by established relationship experts who rate the book highly.

After a painful break up, there's nothing like re-focusing our negative thinking and energy into a constructive learning process that will help provide us with a reliable map for navigating the difficult terrain ahead.

Reading great books helps us know what to expect and to understand what we should be doing to facilitate the grieving process, so that it goes by faster and so that it's less difficult to get through.

2. Get Lots of Primary and Secondary Social Support

When we’re mending a broken heart, social support from family and friends is incredibly important for us. It’s essential that we make sure we’re getting only emotionally and spiritually healthy social support from others.

This is not a time for hanging out with anyone that does not have our best interests at heart.

Primary Social Support for the purpose of getting over a broken heart is support in the form of a listening ear. This is where we seek out people from our most cherished family relationships and friendships and directly request listening-support during our most difficult times in the grieving process.

It's where we set up a support system of genuinely caring "listeners" so we can talk-the-toxins-out of our system. We share our emotional pain, fears and frustrated wishes in relation to the lost relationship or ex.

In primary social support we intentionally set up opportunities to talk in person or over the phone, when we really need someone to hear us and to offer support and joint problem solving. It's about asking the people who love you to be there for you.

As time goes on and the heart starts to heal, it can be very helpful to set up weekly pre-set talking time with representatives of our primary social support network.

When we’re learning to function independently again, it can really strengthen us to try and put off thinking and talking about our sense of loss until our regular primary social support talking-appointment for the week arrives.

This is also the best time to be reading and learning all that we can about the grieving process as mentioned above.

This is where we can say to ourselves, “I’m not going to think about my ex right now, I have important things to get done, such as getting healthy in every way. I’m going to put this on hold until the weekend when I get together with so and so”.

The more effective we get at putting off thinking about the old relationship until the appointed time, the closer we are to putting it aside for good and moving on or to assessing getting our ex back in a healthy, realistic way.

Secondary Social Support is less intensive and directive than primary social support. It's not so much about having people we love to talk to about our heart-break directly. It’s more about having friends and family to just hang out with; people to go for walks with and to do positive social activities together with on a regular pre-planned basis.

Secondary social support allows us to be positively distracted and indirectly but strongly supported during our healing process. This is because during the healing process, it takes time for our whole mind, body and spirit to make the gradual but important changes they need to make.


3. Positive Self Care is about really taking care of our spiritual, emotional and physical health and wellbeing. It’s about taking our negative feelings of sadness and hopelessness and transforming them over time by acting in spite of how we feel.

This is where we need to regularly initiate healthy activities designed to facilitate our personal healing and re-growth.

This can be a real challenge at times, getting started. However, it’s critical to remember that this is a difficult process, especially at first. There’s no fast or easy way around it. But the more we get and stay positively active, the easier and more pleasant it will become over time.

Eventually, our broken heart is welded back together even stronger than it was before. Any welder will tell you that a properly welded metal structure is often stronger than a solid metal object in the first place. It's the same with proper relationship grieving and the human heart.

Regular Exercise and proper nutrition are very important positive self-care strategies. It’s best to talk to a family doctor to set up an optimal diet and a plan for regular physical activity.

Getting Enough Sleep is another critical self-care strategy. Getting enough healthy restful sleep optimizes our ability to manage the stress and negative emotions that go with our broken heart healing process.

It’s very important to stick to a regular sleep routine and to do sleep improvement techniques whenever we find that we’re not getting enough high quality, restful sleep. A well-rested heart heals much faster than an exhausted one.


4. Stay Away from Alcohol and Drugs at all costs when healing a broken heart or getting over an ex. It’s during the emotionally difficult periods after a break up that many people are at increased risk for developing substance abuse problems or seriously delaying their healing and growth process by over-intoxicating it.

Although substances can create the illusion of emotional comfort, they really only retard the natural heart-healing process. The long term negative consequences of self-medicating during the grieving processes far out-weigh the short lived and illusory positives.

It’s always best to find a healthy replacement-behavior to any substance use pattern. For example, exercise regularly and engage in active social support instead of or in place of drinking and or drugging. Get to know any high risk situations you may have for any unhealthy behavior and pre-plan a healthy alternative.


5. Journaling or keeping a detailed thoughts and feelings diary is one of the most powerful self-help tools around. A private journal or diary is always available to listen to and absorb our most personal and intense thoughts, feelings and longings.

Just like in primary social support, expressing or getting the emotional toxins out of our system from the break up, also allows us to process and re-internalize the information in a very healthy way. Journaling helps the heart express itself, and a well expressed heart is a healthy heart. We can say things to our journal that may be to painful or angry for telling another living person.

6. Positive Spiritual Development and re-connection is the most important heart-healing or self-care strategy there is. Surrendering to and connecting with the Creator of the Universe in a sincere and positive way, asking for support and guidance, all combine to provide the kind of healing power that no psychology or other human healing strategy can ever come close to.

In fact the best and most effective counseling strategies most often just approximate established best-spiritual-practices and become that much more “clinically effective” through positive spiritual connectedness.

It’s up to each person to study, ask questions and learn about the best spiritual choices available to them. Finding and learning from a properly trained spiritual professional can be very, very helpful in this process.

7. Plan to Eventually Be in A Healthy Long Term Relationship, once a broken heart is healed. This is because what the best relationship science has proven beyond any doubt that we are designed to be in and benefit from such relationships.

Once things begin to stabilize through the implementation of positive self-care and social support strategies, start to learn the basic relationship maintenance skills that are the foundation of just about all healthy long term marriages and partnerships.

In all likelihood, the previous relationship failed because core-relationship needs (the most important ones) were going unexpressed and unmet, for way to long. This may have been a relationship skills-deficit in one or both partners.

Basic relationship maintenance skills are like safe driving skills. If you don’t learn safe driving and try to drive from the usual point A to point B, someone is bound to get hurt.

But once we learn and practice safe driving for a few months it becomes second nature to us. We don’t even have to think of “how” we’re driving and we most often arrive safe and sound.

The more we learn how to be and thus to recognize a truely healthy future partner or soul mate, the far less likely it will be that we will have to work on getting over a broken heart ever again!