How to Heal a Broken Heart in 30 Days A Day-By-Day Guide to Saying Good-Bye and Getting on With Your Life

Day 1 Independence The Emotional Circus YOUR FIRST REACTION to the end of your relationship is likely to be shock. As soon as the shock wears off, grief arrives. Next, a whole emotional circus stirs: "I'm free. I'm relieved. Yet I'm devastated. I'm furious, hopeful, afraid." Your feelings may broaden into a multicolored panorama. They may include everything from the awesome sense of liberation you felt as a kid on the last day of school, to the nightmare sense that you've just failed your final exam. Back and forth... Please, relax. For better and for worse, your liberation has arrived: it's your Independence Day. As soon as you can bear to share the news of your loss with friends and other loved ones, you're more than likely to find sympathetic support--for at least today. But prepare yourself. Soon enough, though hopefully not on Day One of your recovery, some self-appointed Calvinist will remind you, "You have to work on yourself." Or more primitively: "You gotta do the work." That's when dread may set in. Your precious relationship has just died, and now someone wants to sentence you to hard labor. Your reaction of dread will be deepened by the serious tones in which this grim advice is usually offered. At best, the work will sound like doing chores for Mom, as though you must take out all of your emotional garbage. Phew! Skeptics might well deny the need to do this "work." They'll say: "The work? What work? I was in a romantic relationship for quite a while. For much of that time, it was good and rewarding." Is the impulse to deny this "work"stuff something to feel guilty about? No. At the ultimate level of insight, you must always remember that you are whole and complete, a perfect person, destined to be just as you are. Using the guidance of the authors of this book, your next thirty days will see you through a journey of self-recovery. You'll not be overloaded with new ideas about love and human nature. Instead, you'll be strengthened with no work at all. If you want to build your body's muscles, you go to the gym. You work out. Here, we offer a cerebral spa for your wounded emotions. It's designed to help you realize your will's healing strength and ability to reintegrate the pieces of your broken heart. Helpful Hurters SO WHAT ABOUT this "work" stuff that others talk about? How long do you have to do it? And why bother? As some people speak about it, this "work" sounds like a prison sentence. All you did was lose or outgrow a love. Now you need to begin the new adventure of healing. Why should you have to do hard labor for this? The growing sense of confinement that such ideas of work may inspire could just add to your pain and confusion. Everyone will seem eager to give you easy answers. Too few of those answers will make complete and immediate sense. Your sole certainty is that you hurt, really hurt, right now. That which had once seemed comforting has been wrested away from you. You find yourself in murky darkness. You need strong, clear light, yet all those near you have to offer are candles and matches. You're in a susceptible state. Sad songs make sense like never before. Whether you feel vindicated and defiant or defeated for all time, you may be more wide open than usual, more vulnerable. Your friends and advisors may suggest that your broken spirit requires long-winded, obscure instructions about how to get through these difficult times. If you ask for it, advice will arrive from all sides: via face-to-face contact, e-mail, voice mail, or ordinary mail, even as rumors passed on the wind. There's so much advice out there, however, if you listen to all of it your confusion will certainly deepen, and you may forget one simple fact. That's the trustworthy words of the good witch of Oz, which offer all of thBronson, Howard is the author of 'How to Heal a Broken Heart in 30 Days A Day-By-Day Guide to Saying Good-Bye and Getting on With Your Life', published 2002 under ISBN 9780767909082 and ISBN 0767909089.