When Our Hearts Are Broken…

I recently got my heart broken…again. Sigh.

When that happens, a whole chain of meaning-laden reactions get stirred up. It’s not just grief or sadness or hurt or anger. I can’t stop making meanings.

How about you? Do thoughts like this arise?

• There’s something wrong with me.
• There’s something wrong with them.
• There’s something wrong with the universe.
• This always happens this way.
• I will never be able to trust or belong again; it’s all over for me.
• I’ve lost everything that is important to me.
• Life isn’t safe, and I don’t know how to make a move that won’t further endanger me.

That sort of thing. Sound familiar?

And then, after the drama of my understandable response and meanings, I have one final move: I feel guilty about having had all those dramatic responses, and wonder why I couldn’t have responded with the peacefulness that the Dalai Lama surely would have brought to this situation.

If there’s one thing my work teaches me, turning against yourself to get to where you want to go is useless, so let’s see if we can find a better way forward than beating ourselves up for not being enlightened yet, okay?

Making meaning out of something painful is normal. Humans simply can’t help it. But after the initial intensity (which is provided courtesy of our animal fight/flight neurology, thank you very much), what might help moving forward?

New meanings. That’s all that ever helps. Meanings that are truer expressions of our dignity, humanity and creaturely beauty. But new meanings can’t just be forced on, when the old meanings are so compelling. We might pretend for a while that, say, nothing is wrong with us, but eventually the old meaning of our wrongness will sneak back. What transforms old meanings into new, truer meanings?

It always requires work with the unconscious. So in this instance, this is what I did (and there are lots and lots and lots of ways to do this). I wrote out a version of the past event that worked out better and was more reflective of the beauty and dignity of everyone involved, and entitled it “My Probable Alternative Past.” *

Maybe it didn’t happen that way, but it’s a truer reflection of the meaning of everything and everyone. And maybe, just maybe, part of my poor, startled heart-broken unconscious will accept the better meaning of that alternative past. Because in many ways, it doesn’t matter what happened; it’s what the past means.

So, I am respecting my beating heart by telling it a truer, more loving story, and eagerly, it listens…

*Note: This idea comes from my teacher Carl Buchheit, of NLP Marin, who introduced this format to do powerful, deep change work on the memory of very difficult past events.