You cannot outrun a broken heart

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No matter how fast you run, you can’t go around your broken heart

Are you looking for emotional healing of some sort? You may even be wondering if it is possible, and the answer is YES.

The reality is that you will never be the same person that you were before whatever happened that you are healing from. That can feel scary, but that can also feel incredibly freeing as you attempt to find yourself and experience post-traumatic growth.

Many people have a tendency to want to control the process of emotional healing by minimizing the pain, and avoid feeling and dealing with their grief. Running, hiding and dodging from painful emotions can actually inhibit the process of emotional healing.

The question could legitimately be asked, “Why would people do that?” The answer – even if it seems a bit naive – is another question, “Who would want to feel bad if they didn’t have to?” The solution is not quite so simple. Along with other incorrect ideas about dealing with loss, almost every grieving person is advised to keep busy. Ask any widow or widower; ask any grieving parent or mourning child. They all hear keep busy, and variations on that theme, countless times following the death of their loved one. That advice comes from well-meaning, well-intended people who love them and care about them.

What’s so wrong with keeping busy?

Keeping busy is, at best, a distraction based on another dangerous myth about dealing with emotional pain. That myth is, Time Heals All Wounds. Time cannot heal an emotional wound any more than time could put air back into a flat tire. Yet grievers are constantly being told that time will fix their hearts. The double illusion is that if I stay busy, then more time will have passed, and therefore I will feel better. When the two false ideas are fused together – the illogic of time healing, and the emotionally counter-productive hyper-activity of keeping busy – the result can only be disillusionment and exhaustion. Unresolved grief is unrelenting.  It will track you down no matter what you do to try to duck from it. No matter how fast you run, you can’t go around your broken heart; you can’t go over your broken heart; you can’t go under your broken heart. You must go directly through it or you will drag the remnants of pain with you forever. Emotional exhaustion is the heavy price you pay when you try to run around your heart. In the end, you can’t outrun your heart. You must move toward it no matter how frightening that may seem. It’s the only way out of the squared circle of your pain.

Grief Recovery is Individual

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All Relationships are unique; Therefore, all recovery is individual.

Whether your heartache is caused by death, divorce, childhood abuse, moving, pet loss, or anything else, you experience your feelings at 100%. That is why we, at The Grief Institute, are adamant that there is no hierarchy of losses. When you compare one loss to another, it robs dignity for the person who is made to feel as if their loss isn’t as big.

Grief is based on the unique relationship + time and intensity of the relationship + the value placed on the relationship. All relationships are unique, so no one ever has the same experience.

All grief is experienced at 100%, but that doesn’t mean that all grief is experienced at the same emotional intensity. That depends on individual people and their relationships.

Although grief is as normal as the sun coming up in the morning, every loss experience is as unique as the person going through it. You have a unique story. I have a unique story. Every single person you know has a unique story too. It is crucial to honor that and not try to fit people into a neatly categorized box.

The Grief Recovery Method will help if your heart is broken for any reason. The only requirement being a little courage and willingness to take action.