Hypnotherapy for a broken heart?

After a relationship breakup, you will probably feel broken hearted. Functional MRI scans show that the pain centres of the brain are triggered much the same way as if you have physical pain.

Being broken hearted is a form of grief and has similarities to bereavement. Grief is a process with distinct facets – there is plenty written on the subject which you can research and it will not be discussed in detail in this article. (You could try Googling Kubler-Ross for starters).

Some people have the ability to move on relatively quickly and seem largely unaffected by a relationship break up. It can depend on how serious the relationship was. If it was a long term relationship it can take a long time to grieve fully. The important thing is that you keep making gentle progress.

Others of us may find it difficult to release our emotions and progress through the grief process causing us to get stuck. After a few weeks, even our most patient of friends may have run out of patience and they may have compassion fatigue. Helping you get stuff off your chest can release pent up emotion and is an important part of the process for many. Hypnotherapy and counselling can help with releasing emotion relatively early on. 

Yet months or even years on, some of us will analyse what went wrong. Constant analysis underlined with a huge dose of emotion and anxiety can cause us to get stuck in “analysis and bargaining mode.” We may feel that we have strong feelings of love for that person long after there is no prospect of reconciliation - the other person may have moved on - they may have even moved on whilst still in your relationship which can make it very hard to analyse. The hurt just underlines your thoughts and it may be very difficult to let go of them.

To further complicate things we often anchor emotions to objects, places, music and all sorts of things such as food. Many months after the break up these items can still cause twinges of pain every time you come into contact with them.

Eventually continual analysis and bargaining with yourself – the “what if”, “if only” becomes a habit. Stuck in this habit and a constant cycle of thoughts that don’t help you move on you may even find yourself longing for contact with the person that has long since moved on. At times (sometimes fuelled by alcohol) you may find yourself texting them or looking for them on social media sites.

At this point what you are experiencing is nearer to something else – your thoughts are obsessive. You feel compelled to think these thoughts and you have been doing it for more than six months. Suffer a symptom for long enough and it can be classed as a disorder. Your broken heart now has many similarities to something that people would commonly associate with extreme tidiness or cleanliness – obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). You may need support.

It may sound clichéd, but learning to love and respect yourself, developing yourself and feeling totally at ease with yourself is probably the best root to a happy future relationship. First, you must work on your relationship with yourself.

Hypnotherapy can help you to manage your anxiety and depression. It can help you release pent up emotions and help you change your perspective. It can help you refocus your mind on moving forward. It can help replace those emotional anchors with a more positive visualisation. Teaching you to relax and let go is very important. Encouraging you to live for now and keeping it real, rather than in the past and helping you to develop a loving relationship with yourself.