Hello y'all. I hope the week is treating you well. This episode is inspired by a number of issues that humanitarians I coach brought to coaching sessions this week and by things that I also went through in my life. We're looking at heartbreak today. Super fun. All right. When we think of heartbreak.
Our mind immediately goes to romantic relationships gone wrong, breakups. But in this episode, I really want to be a little bit broader. I want to cover all the potential causes of heartbreak. I think that whenever there is any amount of love invested, whether it's towards your job, your father, uh, your mom, a cause you care about, your values, a very good friend, your lover, of course, wherever there is love.
Wherever your heart is invested, there is a risk of heartbreak. So this episode covers all the times when circumstances happen against your will, an end, a loss, and you feel heartbroken as a result. One aid worker I coach told me she has sworn off dating apps because she has felt very disrespected by men on there and she's just done. She's just done being heartbroken time after time.
Two other aid workers I coach told me this week they are heartbroken because each of them had colleagues say really really painful things to them one of them was accused of harassment another one was accused of not doing her job. And they were both very shocked very sad very heartbroken both of them are in non family and hardship duty station so they are sort of far from their solid loving support systems from their homes and they wanted help in navigating that heartbreak.
Another friend of mine is returning home for the end of year holidays and he has had a very tense exchange with his mom and he told me he was very hurt by it. You might call it heartbroken. And I also had an instance this week where someone I love very, very much sent me what I considered to be a very cruel message. And I was honestly heartbroken for an entire night.
And in general I have a bit of a multiplicity of PhDs in heartbreak, because I tend to go all in with almost everything that I undertake. My love stories, my friendships, my parents, my projects, the presents that I make for Christmas, the dinners that I host. I basically try to pour my heart into almost everything I do. Yep, you guessed it, I may or may not have been called intense more than once.
But the bottom line is that I have a little bit of experience with heartbreak and I wanted to share with you a bit of what I've learned and how I help the humanitarians that I coach when they come to me for heartbreak. So when you're heartbroken semantically, it means you feel like your heart is not whole, like it's in pieces.
Now as much as these moments can hurt, as excruciatingly devastated you might feel, chance to learn to love yourself more, not less. And I basically approach this in like three stages:
- the heartbreak stage, the heart strength stage and the heart growth stage. I'm going to walk you through all three stages in detail but briefly. Heartbreak is where you look at the broken pieces,
- heartstrength is when you pick up the pieces, you put them back together and you plan for a stronger heart, if possible.
- and heartgrowth is basically from that strengthened heart, how do you get to love more and better and cleaner, not just other people, but yourself also.
Now, I don't want anyone to think that these three stages happen in a linear way. I've never seen that happen for anyone. Definitely has never happened for me. This isn't a neat humanitarian programme cycle, it's a lot less organized than that in reality. It's more like being at a music festival where you'd have three stages, three bands playing different vibes of music, and you get to move from one to the other at will as you go through your days and your weeks.
So as I was saying, the first room or stage is the heartbreak one. If you're heartbroken, I want to invite you to spend quite a bit of time in this space. As much time as is needed. And spoiler alert, you're not going to want to. A lot of times we're in so much pain that we may be in a rush to get out of it, to get out of this sense of loss and destruction. I totally get that. I get that urge too. I don't particularly enjoy feeling broken into a million pieces either.
And we need to remember that we need time to just be with all the broken pieces without running away from them, assessing the damage, acknowledging what is happening for us, and looking at what is without trying to do anything about it. Think of it as a humanitarian assessment, really. We'd never jump into a humanitarian response without spending some time figuring out what happened, what's needed. Otherwise, we might find ourselves delivering dignity kits when what people need is clean drinking water, first and foremost.
It's kind of the same with heartbreak, which is the equivalent, obviously, of a bit of a mini earthquake or storm or conflict in your heart, right? I also want to warn about something. In those moments of heartbreak, we feel so powerless sometimes, so out of control that a lot of us may feel the need to lash out in some ways and blame the person who triggered the heartbreak or even blame ourselves, especially if we believe we did something wrong. And so we step into anger. That's a way to react. It feels like some form of control over a situation that often escapes us. But anger is what psychologists call a secondary emotion. It's an emotion that usually hides others. And so in the case of heartbreak, underneath all that anger, there would be a lot of grief and sadness more often than not. And naturally any minute that you spend being angry, accusatory, blamey or judgmental, by definition, you are not spending time in the pain, in the grief and the sadness, which are the actual causes of your heartbreak.
So it's important to remember in those times of intense pain that there's nothing wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with them, whoever them is. Things that break hearts just happen. Sometimes relationships end. Sometimes people get fired, harsh words get spoken. It's just part of the human experience. And it's part of the human experience.
So assessing and spending time in your heartbreak looks something like this. It's like going through the hours of your day accepting that there's pain without trying to intervene. Not trying to forcibly distract yourself from it. Not trying to use coping mechanisms like food or sugar or binge watching TV shows or social engagements or having sex with a bunch of people.
Instead, it's just knowing that there's pain and getting through your day with it accompanying you.
It looks like basically walking through an airport terminal with a super heavy carry-on. You're not going to try to make your suitcase lighter, right? You packed certain things and that's the weight of the suitcase you have today. That's it. It's a fact. You're not going to try to change that. Now you may look for ways to maybe rearrange the weight so that the suitcase is more manageable to carry all the way to your gate, but you're not going to get rid of your suitcase. You're not going to get rid of the weight. You want to take it with you. You want to be very conscious of it being with you and of how it's impacting your day and your journey. So notice the effect of the weight on your body. Notice the effect of the thoughts that it triggers. Notice what you feel you've lost and notice what you're missing. If you feel like you had something that you no longer have, take notice and carry on living your life with all that weight accompanying you. I know, I know that it doesn't sound fun, but I promise you it's a million times more peaceful than trying to fight the weight or try to run away from it.
The second room or stage that you can enter when you feel ready is the heart strengthening stage. And again, nothing is linear here when it comes to emotions. So you can go back to stage one and spend time in heartbreak periodically in a cyclical way as needed. It doesn't mean that you're doing it wrong. It's just how it goes. Heart strength is where you pick up the pieces. It's an invitation to gently clean up the mess you feel and decide what to do with the rubble, with what you've got left.
What do you want to keep and rebuild with? What should remain intact? What do you want to modify slightly? And what do you want to ditch altogether, because it clearly doesn't fit in your life anymore? So we're going to look at certain behaviors you've had. Which ones served you? Which ones didn't? Certain belief systems that you've had. Which ones helped you? Which ones got you trapped in pointless cycles of hurt?
Are there certain things you've accepted and certain things you wish you hadn't? What boundaries would you like to learn to set moving forward in order to no longer suffer unnecessarily? In humanitarian terms, this would be the planning and the resource mobilization phase, if you want to think of it that way. And the two central questions here would be, who do I want to be in this time of crisis and how can I rebuild so that next time a storm comes around I can be more resilient.
So in the case of a breakup, maybe this person really insisted on going out a lot and you were kind of following them along. But really, you're more of a stay at home and read a book or invite a friend over type of person. Or maybe you got used to accepting being talked too badly. And maybe that's something you don't want to do anymore.
In the case of a change in your job situation, if you got fired or your main portfolio was unfairly taken away from you, or if you suffered a different type of massive disappointment with a friend, your mom, dating apps, whatever, again, who do you want to be in this situation of pain and heartbreak?
What changes do you want to make in terms of your time management, relationship management, emotional management and, basically, how do you want to go about investing your heart moving forward? Get clarity, but get clarity from a place of pure love for yourself.
A lot of people, when they go through this kind of excruciating pain, which can often feel like we're going to die from it, frankly, naturally they decide consciously or unconsciously never again. That's when you start putting minimum effort at work or you quit dating apps forever. You just disengage. You assume friends and family are going to hurt you inevitably, and you decide to avoid investing too much of yourself moving forward.
But that makes you miss out on the good aspects and the benefits of investing your heart in people, in jobs, in causes, in projects. And it doesn't have to be so costly, because if you use the opportunity to rethink your approaches in the heart strengthening phase, you get to redecide on purpose how you want to show up in your life and build back better, stronger and cleaner.
So for example, one of the most important things I learned from my repeated heartbreaks is that I cannot change people and that actually I really shouldn't want to because wanting people to change is by definition not loving them as they are. And I'm very, very clear on the fact that I want to be someone who loves people the way they are. Wanting people to change is not love.
So I've pretty much given up on trying to change anyone and it's the best decision I've ever made and I owe it all to the faceplants and the heartbreaks that I went through. So I'm super, super grateful for those.
So yeah, stage two is about redesigning how to rebuild your heart in a healthier, stronger, more resilient, more self-confident way so that when storms come, they don't cause so much destruction, because storms will continue to come, my friends, no matter how much you decide to shield yourself, barricade yourself, storms and earthquakes are a part of life.
So rather than try to avoid them and make them disappear from your existence, my invitation is to assume that more storms are coming and figure out how to withstand them and manage them better.
The final stage or space that you get to be in is heartgrowth. I think that every heartbreak, if you follow this careful process that I'm presenting to you, can turn into a massive opportunity for expansion. When you decide the heartbreak happens for you, instead of to you or against you, you develop that heart strengthening plan, you implement it, and then you get to enjoy living life with the capacity to love and invest your heart in your job, in people, in passions, in projects in a way that is way bigger than anything you could have ever imagined. In my little humanitarian metaphor, this would be the implementation and monitoring phase where you get to reap the benefits of the assessment and the planning work that you did, and you get to look at this post-disaster setting, enjoying the fruit of all the resilience building and all the capacity strengthening work that you did.
Your relationships are better. Your mind is more at ease. Your nervous system feels less easy to trigger, less fragile and less out of control.
Now again, again, again, none of this is linear and you will find yourself in the heartbroken and the heart strengthening stages, moving up and down all these stages repeatedly, it's all normal. Nothing's gone wrong. It's a cyclical repetitive process. It is not linear. I really, really want to emphasize that.
Stay with yourself, follow your own pace and keep moving without judgment.
One other thing that I've learned from working on myself and going through endless cycles of breaking and strengthening and growth is that love for people or for projects and things doesn't hurt. Love does not hurt. Love is the best feeling ever.
Whether we are talking about your job or people, it is all the noise around love that hurts. It's the need for control. It's the expectations. It's the insecurities. It's the disappointments. It's the jealousy. It's the graspiness, the righteousness, the sense of entitlement, the constant fight against reality. All the add-ons to love that we tend to include when we invest our hearts into anything. That's what makes us suffer. And that's what breaks us, not love.
So no matter how heartbroken you are feeling or have felt, that's my invitation to you this week. Don't stop investing yourself into the things and the people that matter to you. Instead, look for ways to invest better. Spend time in your heartbreak zone. Ask the questions you need to ask to rebuild back better and enjoy life in the post heartbreak growth that you get to create in response.
Thank you for spending time with me today. I send you a massive, massive shipment of love. I'll be right here next week. And until then, I ask you please to invest your heart into taking care of yourself. Bye.
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