Heartbreak Academy 101

Today’s Oprah article, Lessons from 'Heartbreak Academy by Martha Beck was on the homepage of CNN this morning.   I can find no argument in anything she says.  In fact she is right on about our loneliness not coming from our lack of having a partner, but from something inside of us alienating us from other people. 
As a young woman I was always lonely, whether I was married or not.  I did not have a clue how to connect with anyone, least of all myself. 

Indeed we do have to learn a lot of lessons from our heartbreak if we are to have any hope of getting out of the interminable loneliness that we often suffer from. I also agree that the source of that loneliness is a childhood or adolescence trauma or loss.  That event, whatever it was, led us to distance ourselves not only from other people, but also from ourselves.  It left us fearful of the feelings we hold inside, because at the time we experienced them we could not process them fully. We were to immature developmentally to intellectually be able to work through the impact.  So what we do is to separate ourselves from the feelings and sometimes even the memories of the things that stumped us. This leaves us alienated from ourselves, and of course, others. 

What is wrong with us?

It also leaves us feeling that there is something wrong with us.  Children traumatized in whatever way,  always feel “bad”,  the “bad” feeling is pain from the losses that occurred, but no one tells the child this crucial piece of information.  The child internalizes that “bad” feeling; they think THEY are bad.  So then we carry this sense that we are bad forward into our lives and our relationships.

“Positive Thinking”?

Telling ourselves this isn’t true seldom has any impact if it is just words like: “I'm fascinating, I'm beautiful, I'm funny, I'm important,” as Martha suggests. These words have to accompany a feeling of empathy for the child that we were at the time of the loss or trauma.  We have to have a logical understanding that we were not really as bad as we feel we are.  We have to then offer the child part of us the love and reassurance that the adults in our lives didn’t offer for whatever reason. This allows us then to extend empathy toward the little child part of us that is in so much pain. 

The keys are this:

1. Logically know that a child is cannot really be responsible for the things that happen around them and
2. Give the child empathy for the fact that you were a victim at that time.


Our capacity for Love

When we can do this for the child part of it opens up our capacity to love ourselves freely without reservation. That doesn’t mean that we are blind to our flaws, it does mean we are able to own what we do that is not so perfect along with what we do that’s great. It means we respect what we had to do in order to grow up even with the tragedies and losses we suffered. 

What’s the real problem here?

Of course the real problem with doing what either Martha or I suggest is this: in order to grieve the losses and process the trauma’s – we have to know what they are.  Most of us have pieces of our lives that we have repressed, suppressed or dissociated from our awareness.  So then we carry pain we don’t understand. We tell ourselves, “I have nothing to feel bad about.”  One thing can be certain: if you have had repeated failures at intimate connection you have a history of some type of trauma or loss you have not processed. The inability to become intimate with another person is a clear sign of having unprocessed grief or trauma from your past. It changes everything when you go to the source of the problem and stop trying to medicate it with fixes, like "the right relationship."


What about you?

Have you processed your grief or trauma? Do you still carry that sense of not being good enough? Do you struggle from relationship to relationship never quite being able to connect? What do you think about the need to work through your pain in order to connect? Am I completely out of bounds? Comment below.