What Happened When I Began to Stop Avoiding a Broken Heart.
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“The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.” ~ Pema Chodron
The story (of the past)
I am in love and when we are together, I am in heaven. This is the love story I have been waiting for. He fulfills me, he makes me happy. The problem comes when we say good bye after we meet for an amazing weekend. Nobody has taught me how to continue to stay happy and in love when I am on my own.
The anxiety is already starting the night before. There is this onset of an uncomfortable feeling around my heart and in my belly. It is slowly but steadily creeping in on me, eventually taking over my arms and legs and the rest of the body, feeling like a second skin which is burying me. I don’t want to feel the pain of him leaving and I become rigid and cold. This is not the feeling of being in love anymore.
I don’t dare to talk with him about it. I am afraid I am too much in love with him and that he might leave for good if he knew all that is going on inside of me. I am asking myself why I am feeling everything so intensely and why saying good bye at the station seems like a break up – the end of the relationship. By now I feel horrible and am just wondering why I never see anything like this (down to the details) in the movies.
So I pretend to be well when he leaves. I make a happy face while inside my heart is breaking. I am already feeling the panic, ice cold and hot at the same time, taking over my whole body. I barely manage to be human when he is leaving, but I do. Then he is gone. I am already too frozen even to cry. I do not want to feel anything, not the pain nor the panic. I already want to call him. I am desperate.
I force myself to wait and handle my situation by numbing myself out with some occupation. But no distraction works. Everything reminds me of him, us and the hole in my heart. The only thing I know which can numb it for a bit is alcohol. So I start drinking, call my girl friend who tries to reassure me and be supportive. But I still feel lonely and can not understand: How can I feel so alone and heart broken when I am supposedly in love? Can this really be love? Why they tell me that this is romantic? None of this makes sense. I am just simply suffering.
The Reality
I am trying to protect myself from feeling pain. As I have experienced pain as a baby and child (we all did), I started projecting this pain into the future. That means that I accumulated my expectations of future pain by playing past and painful experiences in my mind – over and over again. When having a “dry run” of an expected painful situation in my thoughts, it is accompanied by the corresponding feelings and sensations in my body. And although the whole experience took part only in my imagination, it felt absolutely real to me. So I file it under “real experience” and “bad and not wanted”.
The tricky and overlooked part is, that now I have a highly inflated pain expectation. I have played the “pain movie” (which is not the actual saying good bye) many times and each time added another “experience” to the “bad and not wanted” compartment. That way it has grown into a monster.
The wall, which I originally built to protect myself from feeling pain, is also protecting me from love. Now one might ask: “But why do you do that?”. The answer is that I want to feel the love – just not the pain. I oversee that the nature of life does not work that way A wall is a wall, as simple as that. It does not protect from one thing and, at the same time, is open for another. That is the simple reason for me not feeling the love anymore once I start to be busy with my partner leaving.
There is a way to be free. Here is what you can do:
Allow what is real now to be here. There might be fear or pain bubbling up in this moment of saying good bye or separating for good. You can experience for yourself that in actually allowing and feeling it, there is no harm.
What causes harm and a lot of effort are the attempts to get rid of the pain or avoid it. Try it out for one moment. Do not do anything about the pain which is arising. This might sound scary but you will never know if you don’t give it a try. Let it come up as it is.
When images, thoughts and feelings from the past or the future are coming up, just see them. Do not follow along with them. This is your imaginary movie. Gently come back to this very moment and what you are experiencing now.
My life now
I am still feeling fear and pain when I am saying good bye to a loved one at the station, especially after sharing an intense and intimate time. I am noticing the onset of my anxiety, when I start to tense up and protect myself, in a different light. And in that lies my choice.
I have the capacity to use this moment as a discovery instead of going blindly into panic. I see it as a chance to explore what is truly happening when I am allowing my thoughts and feelings on the spot. I am able, for that moment, to not push them away or blow them up with a long lost past story. That very moment is a true treasure: it is the moment I am meeting life with open eyes.
Out of this one moment grows another and I recognize that all my thoughts and feelings are fleeting, changing their nuances constantly. And when I say good bye to my loved one, another wave of thoughts and feelings may come. I can be grateful and strengthen my muscle to simply experience them – without an old story or a future drama connected to it.
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After a career in international business, at the age of 32, Karen Hartmann had an emotional breakdown. She was stuck in constant fear and negative thoughts. She tried everthing out there to heal herself until she realized that no matter what she did, there always seemed to be something missing. Finally, in 2016, she found ShoomKloom and with it peace, laughter and joy in most life situations. Since then, all that matters to Karen, is making ShoomKloom available to the world.
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