Seven steps to healing the lovesick heart.
We’ve all had them. Those icky, sticky, yucky feelings of love gone wrong. The sense of loss. Of abandonment. Of feeling devalued and discarded. Of being ”˜less than’ the light of love in our lover’s eyes. We’ve all had them and sometimes, those feelings linger for longer than is healthy for us to reclaim our sense of self-worth, of beauty, of joy in our essence of being alive.
EMBRACE yourself. You’ve got all you need to hold onto
is a seven step process that guides you through letting go of the love that was (and will never be again) into loving what is and will always be within you. You. Whole and complete. Living the 3Ms of self-eMPOWERED YOU! Magnificent! Miraculous! Marvelous!
EMBRACE:
Engage your heart. Still your mind.
Mindfully watch your words and actions.
Be honest with yourself.
Reacquaint yourself with you.
Allow yourself forgiveness.
Celebrate yourself.
Explore your world.
1. Engage your heart by stilling your mind. Meditate. Walk. Do something to get out of your thinking telling you your heart is broken. It isn’t. It’s just hurting because your breathing and thinking is tied up in thoughts of what he did to hurt you. It wasn’t about you. It was always about him.
In your meditation whisper:
Like me, he is seeking to be loved and this is the only way he knows how.
Like me, he has experienced pain, sorrow, and sadness and is looking for a way to avoid feeling them again.
Like me, he only knows this way he is choosing to behave.
And if you can say nothing else, repeat a hundred x ten times a day: I forgive him. I release him.
2. Mindfully watch everything you do and say. Become conscious of your choices knowing that they are always a reflection of your thinking and your thinking will always create how you are feeling and your experience in this moment.
Ask yourself — what do I want to feel in this moment? What is my intention for the day? Tell yourself you are capable of having what you want by reminding yourself what you’re capable of”¦
I wish to feel peace.
I want to feel peace.
I can feel peace.
I choose to be at peace in this moment now. In my choosing peace in this moment, I create the path for peace to appear in the next moment and the next and the next. I am the source of my thinking, my feelings, my actions and I choose to be responsible for my choices.
3. Be honest with yourself. Your healing will only progress to the degree that you are willing to be completely honest with yourself.
His actions were never about you. His actions, words, what he did were always about him.
You do not matter to him. He was not ”˜out to get you’. He was out to get what he wanted to make his life have meaning.
It wasn’t personal. He didn’t set out to hurt you. He set out to protect himself. He set out with the belief that ”˜you’ were a way for him to feel good about himself. You couldn’t be his way to feeling good about himself. You are not that powerful. Making him feel good about himself is not your job. Feeling good about yourself is your job. It is your responsibility. You get to choose how you feel about yourself. Be honest — are your choices making you feel better about yourself or worse? Is your thinking giving you what you want or is it taking from you what you need to Love yourself exactly the way you are?
4. Reacquaint yourself with you — remind yourself about who you were before he came into your life. Remember the things you did that said — I am a magnificent human being.
Did you used to volunteer at a hospital? At a homeless shelter? Did you used to do things that created value in your life, that created value in the world around you? Remind yourself of your power to do things that make a difference. If you could do those things then, you can do those things now. Let go of ”˜used to’ and get doing. Remind yourself of those things. You need to get moving. Get doing. Get being who you believe yourself to be. Who you say you are. Do them now. Do them again and again. Get involved and get into action.
5. Allow yourself the gift of forgiveness. Forgive yourself. Forgive him. Forgive anyone and anything who ever hurt you.
Holding onto pockets of unforgiveness limits your experience of your life free of his abuse. Forgive him. Remember, it wasn’t personal. He didn’t set out to destroy you. He was just doing what he does and you happened to be in his path. He has since, ”˜gotten over you’. He is off doing what he does in someone else’s life. What’s in it for you to hold onto his bad behavior after he’s gone? Forgive him. Forgive yourself. You didn’t know this would happen. You didn’t know you would be so hurt. So broken. So sad. And it’s okay. Forgive yourself and breathe into forgiveness all the loving kindness you possess.
6. Celebrate everything about you. Celebrate your magnificence. Your brilliance. Your light — even when the voices inside would tell you you’re not — celebrate yourself for all you’re worth! You are worth living it up for. Take yourself out on a date. Do something fun and whacky. Go to the zoo. Go bungee jumping. Take dance lessons. Learn a new skill. Celebrate everything about you in everything you do.
7. Explore life. Life isn’t about searching for the right answers, or the perfect you. Life is in the experience of living it. It’s about exploring your beliefs, what beliefs you want to hold onto and those you need to let go of because they’re not working for you any more. If believing he hurt you causes you pain, let go of the belief. If thinking of him makes you sad, explore new thoughts.
Life is in discovering where you’re at is exactly where you are meant to be. Explore this place you’re at right now. Explore your perimeters., Explore your life beyond this place where you find yourself caught up in living small, living less than your dreams.
Get up. Get moving. Quit talking about him. Quit explaining to yourself and anyone who will listen why what he did was so wrong. Wrong or right, it is what he did and all the explanations in the world will never make sense of his nonsense — so give it up. Let it go. Engage yourself in your life. Engage yourself in shining so bright upon your path the whole world lights up around you.
EMBRACE what is. And, if the thought it should be some other way interferes, embrace it and love it to death, or at least until it doesn’t hurt you any more to believe it should be some other way. It isn’t. It can’t be. Embrace what is, love yourself as you are and let yourself go to that place where you are free to explore and experience life on your terms. Free to love fearlessly. To live with abandon. To dance in the rain and run naked through wildflower strewn meadows. It is, and always has been, your choice to embrace what is and live it up for all you’re worth!
Are you willing to do it? It is your life. No one else can live it for you.
buttons – tyso much for your thoughtful reply. 🙂
i have quite a lot of experience dealing with my health and fibro and have by and large chosen alternative routes. there are many therapies i could move toward right now, but i have no money. I have cut my supplements down to ester c, b’s, d, adrenal support, coQ10 and a smattering of other things i have left. i have had fibro for 20 years, and arthritis in a few joints, but this is alsmost the worst i have ever been.
my experiecne with diet is similarly developed. i am challenged right now, am eating a lot form the food bank. my biggest problem with diet is that i am eating too much. period.
this huge flare started with not havign shoes. literally. i finally got some money to buy them, and took them to the orthotics guy for an okay, and tried them out, and within two days they crippled me – took my knees out – my body is a sensitive system and once one piece goes…
i have had repeated and difficut chemical exposries in the last year and a half. i have things wrong with me i can’t even figure out. i am on a waiting list to see the folks at a major hospital in the env. health unit.
the pain study i started – simple nerve reflex exercises. well, obviously too much for me. and just a bunch of things i have done in the last 2 wks were too much – it tipped me over, and ususally i can recover but in the last year with a lot of formaldhyde exposure, everything has changed.
‘attending to myself’ right now also includes poverty, looking for work in a very depressed area, no longer being able to afford a car (which means getting food means lugging the wheeled cart around), trying to keep a roof over my head, struggling to function daily. i have a lot of challneges. it’s a lot. and there is not much support in my life. i am tapping ‘services’ but there is little personal support. i am in outrageous pain and am feeling crazed from it.
EB – think you are being a little simplistic and it’s irritating. you are not standing in my shoes (well, neither am i ;)) but i could use a hug a lot more than your ‘diagnosis’ of my situation. did i mention that i am grumpy?
Louise, I am using the “Embrace” formula on a reguar basis. Today, I’m going to go and try to keep my electric on because I, like so many others, am living in a place with a high unemployment area, my business has gone down the drain and I’m still paying off bills from the ex-spath. I’m trying to release the anger and tell myself that I will be OK. keep the faith and all will work out. It WILL all work out, it’s just a matter of time. In the meantime, NC is one of the BEST things I have going. I hear this guy’s name and I get hives.
Buttons, I hear you. I’m “attending to myself” right now and I’m just now starting to get outside help. I don’t have support around me either and the reason I love LF is because I can come here and read all the comments and know I’m not alone. I’m not going to be able to stay in the place I’m in. I can’t afford it and my son and I will be moving soon. I’m going on faith. Just plain faith. In myself. In God. I can’t imagine handling all of this while in physical pain such as you have. My heart goes out to you. Hugs and prayers! Cat
{{{{Cat}}}} Positive, healing energies to you, my dear. Good for you, Cat – sometimes, we have to MAKE things change, and make sacrifices in order to see them through.
One_step – same goes for you. There’s this pinpoint of light, and it’s at the end of the long, dark tunnel. It’s tiny right now, and may be difficult to see, but it’s there.
Brightest blessings.
a note on fibromyalgia and auto immune diseases. I too was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia ten years ago. I did a case study on 20 paients for my holistic thesis when I trained 10 years ago having left my husband and could hardly walk down the stairs because of the pain. Chrohns.
Every single person who I interviewed with the exception of one person had a history of severe abuse or childhood neglect.
A year later after looking at “me” and why I had stayted rather than what they had done to me the pain stopped and the chrohns miraculous healed up.
My ex husband wasn’t a P but my father was although my ex husband was a bit of a controller. When I met my recent P after being with him for five years I ended up sick again.
When we stop being the victim the symptoms get better which enables us to get the work we couldn’t get and do the things we couldn t do. My own mother too had fibromyalgia married another “clone”. Within months of him leaving her and not emotionally abusing him and learning not to be the victim anymore pain gone at 72 when she was in an electric scooter before she is doing the decorating !
I know its hard when your struggling financially and you have no money and you cannot find a job or have no car but the more you focus on all the cr** they left us with the more it takes over us emotionally.
Only six months when I booted my P ex out I had nothing. I lost my house I lost my job, a pile of unpaid bills to pay off which I will be paying off into retire. I had no car and was walking the supermarket every day buying the “special offers” along with having to decorate a sqaut because I had lost my home. I had just come out of hospital having had a major operation that left me losing a litre of blood. I didn t even want to get out of bed in the morning but I forced myself to get up every morning at seven. I have two children to support as well one at college. My son goes to a special school and I didn t even have the money to pay for his bus fares or lunches.
The old fibromyalgia symptoms started creeping back and I said NO. I am never going back there again. I was not prepared to go back to being in pain everyday or worse have my chrohns come back and be an invalid in the toilet 20 times a day.
I am not going to let this man beat me and something switched in my brain. Its about having the motivator to fight back. I think the motivator for me was my son seeing me bleed all over the floor from the operation on xmas eve and thinking he wasn t going to have a mum anymore.
Six months on I am working part time. The flat is nearly finished. I am paying off all my debts slowing and looking after me and the kids.
As buttons says keep focussing on that tiny pinpoint of light. It gets brighter every day.
x
I found art to be a great help. I came from a profoundly sociopathic “home” and as a result have been a magnet for these types all my life. I am also deeply sensitive and easily hurt. I did a lot of painting over the years to deal with it. some happy some horrific but they all worked in the end. I would suggest that people try and use their creativity to get out of the ruins of sociopathic assult. Writing in journals, painting, poetry – just do something.
Here are some of my artwork inspired by my childhood and the other messes it got me into later in life. Hope LF does not mind me posting them:
http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc3/hs383.snc3/23423_108889145796677_108690602483198_177910_7775575_n.jpg
http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc3/hs494.snc3/26984_109216405763951_108690602483198_179210_5064599_n.jpg
http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash1/hs494.ash1/26984_109216429097282_108690602483198_179214_260840_n.jpg
Frank Lee, beautiful work.
Bravo.
A month ago, I dicovered I wasn’t crazy. I started to uncover the lies and deception of a man whom appeared to be a devoted father and the love of my life for the past eight years. My intuition that I had ignored for so long was so painfully right and the more I searched the more painfull it became. I was lucky though, a beautiful friend came to see me and made me go to a Doctor to seek help as I had completely unravelled right before her eyes when I opened the door. I was so angry, like never before and so hurt and deeply humilliated. He had bankrupted me financially and emotionally. We where ‘running’ a business and he was hiding all the spending in boxes, we borrowed more and more. Then borrowing from my mother all to fund his sexual appetite for prostitutes, one in particular for what I know of for the past five years. We have a beautiful little boy together. I just cant believe that he could do this to us. I read this blog every day to get strenght to stop running and hoping as he has promised to fix it all, some things just cant be done. I know I have to forgive him but that will take time and I just dont have the strength for that right now. Thank you all for sharing your experiences as it gives me hope when I am feeling alone and scared of what I have to face in the future. I didnt deserve this, I wanted a person to share my life with not give it away to. Thank you for holding me up.
AussieLisa, sorry to hear you are going through so much pain right now, it sounds like you are no loger with him, is that right? I know it’s hard to believe people can be like this. Don’t worry about the forgiveness right now (God knows, we have had some very interesting threads here about forgiveness) just take care of you and your boy right now. I am glad you have such a good friend who you can rely on. Hope you stay with us, there are a lot of great articles here and some really wonderful people who have helped me too!!
@....... Frank Lee, I really like your artwork,
speaks volumes,
you are very talented. Thank you for sharing
and that is really good advice!
AussieLisa,
My h-spath (we’re separated) kept his paperwork (eg. mail, bills, etc.) in big card board boxes. He is so unorganized, chaotic. He is a businessman who scares the hell out of me, due to his willingness to be a screwball. My advice to you is to take care of yourself and your child (to the best of your ability) and plan a way to get him out of your life. My h-spath has no problem lying to me (it’s part of his sickness) and I really doubt that the man that you’re with is going to change for the better. Like you, I went through a time of disbelief, that he (or anyone) would do what he’s done – my h-spath is capable of lying and stealing, not a pleasant fact to realize about the person you’re married to. It will continue to be the same with the man in your life – he will keep doing what he’s doing, literally not caring about your emotional state or well-being. I tried to steer my h-spath in the right direction, but he wouldn’t listen to common sense, wanting to do things his way, even if the end results were less-than-desirable. I feel for you, knowing that you’re in a hard place.