Transforming Heartbreak into Healing: Strategies for Emotional Recovery

Unlock the secrets to navigating the stormy seas of heartbreak with me, Louise Wilkinson, joined by expert psychotherapist Tracy Lynch. Have you ever wondered how to soothe the chaotic aftermath of a breakup and reclaim your peace? Discover the absolute necessity of creating a sanctuary where your emotional safety comes first. Learn how pinpointing your personal needs—whether it's a comforting touch, the solace of solitude, or the fluidity of movement—can be a game-changer in grounding your turbulent emotions. Tracy shares transformative insights into addressing immediate emotional upheavals such as tears or anger, setting you on the path to recovery with a sense of presence and calm.

In the quest for tranquility amidst emotional turmoil, we delve into strategic breathing and visualization techniques designed to soothe your mind and reconnect you with logic. Discover a simple yet powerful three-step breathing exercise, and the art of anchoring yourself with a vivid mental sanctuary. Imagine invoking the serenity of a waterfall or forest, anchoring yourself in stillness and gaining the ability to thoughtfully respond rather than impulsively react in stressful moments. As we guide you in crafting a personal emotional recovery plan, prepare for our next episode’s promise of a comprehensive "diagnosis" with expert insights to mend your heartache with precision and care. Join us on this journey to transform heartbreak into healing.

Chapters

• 0:00 Navigating Heartbreak
• 8:42 Calm and Anchor Strategies for Stress
• 14:38 Prescription Options for Heartbreak

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Going through a breakup, Struggling with being all up in your feels, Finding it hard to get through the day. Heartbreak sucks and we've all been there. If you're in need of some life hacks on how to regulate your emotions, practically manage your life and how to rediscover yourself post-breakup, you've come to the right place. This is your roadmap to navigating out of this time in your life with intelligence, humour, sass and a little bit of tough love when you need it. Welcome to how To Hack your Heartbreak with your host, Louise Wilkinson.

Speaker 2: 0:51

Okay, so here we are. The bomb has gone off, your breakup is still super fresh and perhaps you're still shaking, crying and vomiting, maybe you're raging and maybe you're silent. Well, all of this the full gamut of emotions is completely normal and completely okay. Now, in episode one, I talked about you emerging from the wreckage of the bomb site or the moment of breakup, and the importance of taking an ambulance ride to the hospital or your safe place, be that your own house, a friend or family member that is deeply within your inner circle, or even a bathroom if you live with your partner.

Speaker 2: 1:29

The important thing is is that we need to take time and space to triage. Either you're doing it yourself or you're getting someone else to. Now, triage is the medical term for assessing damage and risk. From there, your medical team will decide what remedies are going to be best suited to you going forward. It's a really important step. You don't ignore a broken leg, do you? Well, ignore a freshly broken heart at your peril? It's firstly, incredibly important to understand how the brain works, so that our treatment plan makes sense to you and isn't just something that I pulled out of the air using incredibly profound Instagram quotes. Tracy Lynch is a psychotherapist specializing in trauma who has a particular passion for sharing information about trauma and the inner workings of our brain to help us understand how we deal with life events. I asked her to take a stab at where the patient or the recently dumped may be emotionally, physically and mentally when they first arrive at triage.

Speaker 3: 2:39

Yeah. So this is something that I've been thinking a lot about recently and I've done some more study from a neurological perspective around what our brain needs and the order in which it needs it in. There's a particular order that our brain prefers in terms of the way we are communicating with our brain. So if we go back to that model of the brain when we sort of hold our hand up and in a fist and our thumb sticks out the bottom, that bottom part of the brain is our brain stem. That bottom part of the brain is what we call our reptilian brain and what it's most interested in is safety.

Speaker 2: 3:25

Yes.

Speaker 3: 3:26

Feeling safe. So if I'm communicating with either a small child or an adult that is feeling emotionally unsafe, there's actually no point in trying to discuss strategies or logical information until safety has been covered first. I see that yes, Because all the brain's concerned about is just keeping itself safe and alive At that point yeah, if I am feeling emotionally unsafe, I actually can't take on anything else until that box has been ticked off.

Speaker 2: 4:05

So there you have it, folks. Safety first. Our reptilian brain is the first thing we need to treat, before anything else, before we can even begin to process what's just happened to us. Now, just to recap on your instructions in episode one you need a safe environment, comfortable clothes and hydration. Now is not the time to be solving the world's problems or plotting world's domination. So what does safety look like when we're in this state? Well, Tracy tells me that it can look very different for everybody.

Speaker 3: 4:40

There'll be different things that people feel make them safe. It's an individual thing, so let's, I'm going to ask you a question.

Speaker 2: 4:49

Okay.

Speaker 3: 4:49

So let's just say that you had to rush into work and you were feeling really, you know, activated, yes, and stressed out what is it? Even if you had only a few minutes, is there anything that you know can help bring you down and regulate you and help you to feel safer?

Speaker 2: 5:08

Yeah, hugs are great.

Speaker 3: 5:10

Hugs physical touch.

Speaker 2: 5:11

Yes, excellent.

Speaker 3: 5:12

Excellent. So for some people, if they're again children or adults, if they're feeling really unregulated emotionally and feeling really unsafe, a hug will be just the ticket, Whereas for others, a hug will be exactly what they don't need in that moment. Yeah, so for some people, taking some time out just to gather themselves will be something that brings them safety.

Speaker 2: 5:41

Yes, yeah, understand.

Speaker 3: 5:43

Other people using some deep breathing will help to calm them and regulate them. Other people going for a walk or movement will help them to be calm. So what's really useful is having a conversation with those people around us and asking them when you are feeling emotionally flooded or emotionally unsafe, when your brain's feeling unsafe, what is your number one thing that I can offer you? What do you need in that moment?

Speaker 2: 6:14

Well, that's a great question, isn't it Tracey? So let's try out. What do you need in that moment? Do you need to be alone? Do you need a hug? Do you need to talk it out? Maybe you still don't know, and again, that's okay. As we've mentioned, you're not operating from anything close to logic at this point. It really will be instinct. In this acute stage, you may be experiencing uncontrollable crying, shaking, stomach upset, feeling faint and even rage. The team and triage are not concerned with a long-term treatment plan. That's very important to establish. They just need to treat the acute, almost pressing symptoms before they do anything else. Essentially, you are not grounded in the present moment. Your mind and your heart, and probably your spirit, are definitely hovering over the scene of the moment of impact. Your medical team, be that you alone or the others around you, need to pull you back into the present, and Tracy has some fabulous tips to help us achieve that.

Speaker 3: 7:23

These external circumstances that can cause overwhelm and stress and flooding, and there's lots of different strategies that we could talk about, but the first two that I find most accessible I'd like to share with you today. So the first one some of you might have heard about before, but it's to do with our breathing. So what we know is when we are feeling flooded, our heart rate actually goes up, our adrenal system gets activated and our body moves into that fight flight state and we now know that there's other F's included, and not the four letter F, which potentially is part of the gang but there's fight flight freeze, where we we go into a bit of a survival mode in that moment. So we've been activated and our blood pressure goes up, our heart rate goes up and our nervous system is sort of switched on. So the first thing that we can do in that moment is really take control over our breathing, because when we slow our breathing down, our whole nervous system believes that the threat is now over. Okay, now, potentially the threat is not over, but it gives us a moment to come back online with our logic.

Speaker 3: 8:52

So our breath can be the bridge to our logic when the flood rise on that bottom part of our brain, the top, the frontal cortex, starts to unravel and then we have no real connection between our reason and our logic and our nervous system.

Speaker 3: 9:11

So we need to do something to bring our frontal cortex and our logic and reason back online. So what we want to do is we want to take in inner breath and then hold it for a moment and do a longer out breath. There's a whole lot of fancy methods, which are all awesome, but what I'd love our listeners to start pract. Practicing is just that simple three-step breath In-breath, hold and then longer breath, pushing the belly out on the out-breath, and what we're actually doing is when we so we might have like overwhelm in the driver's seat or panic in the driver's seat, stress or fear, using the breath, it forms a bridge to a calmer driver that can be in the driver's seat. So the breath is the bridge to wake up a different part of us that has more resources to deal with what is going on in that current moment.

Speaker 2: 10:14

So that's a great way to wake up the wise one that might be sleeping at the back of the bus.

Speaker 3: 10:18

Exactly exactly, yeah. So once we've got that, once we've physiologically calmed ourselves down, then we have better access to our wisdom, our experience, our knowledge, our step-by-step processes. So that one that I just described then is almost like a first aid strategy that we can grab and do on the spot. Yeah, but it's really helpful if we've got some preventative strategies that we use more often, that are building those neurological pathways, so when we need them, they are available. So this next one is about having what we call an anchor. That's already in place. Okay, right, so the anchor that I'd like to introduce today is called our calm, safe place.

Speaker 1: 11:15

Yeah, so what I'm inviting people to?

Speaker 3: 11:18

do, and if you're driving right now is called our calm, safe place. Yeah, so what I'm inviting people to do, and if you're driving right now, then I want you to be very mindful of your driving part as well as this other part that I'm about to introduce. But I invite you to think about, potentially, a holiday or somewhere that you go in nature, where you notice, you just exhale. Where's that for you, louise? Where, would you say in your imagination or your experience, is a place where you actually land and go?

Speaker 2: 11:51

where's that for you? I can see it in my head. It's a forest. It has a waterfall and it has beautiful greenery and some rocks that I sit on, with just some sunlight peeking through those trees. That's my place.

Speaker 3: 12:02

Excellent, excellent. So in that place, I would want you to activate those pathways even more by thinking about the colours, the smells, the temperature, the feeling in your body when you are surrounded by that forest. So what we're doing in this moment is called a technique, called vivifying, which means to make more vivid, and by thinking about our calm, safe place and all of the sensory experience involved with being in that place, we are actually activating neurological pathways and waking up that part of us. So, as you've woken up that part, what would be one word for you that captures the essence, the energy of your calm, safe place? Stillness, beautiful. Okay.

Speaker 3: 12:56

So then what you would do is you land on that one word, stillness. And where do you find that in your body when you're in that place of being in the forest? Where do you most feel the stillness in your body? Solar plexus, I think Great. So you put your hand on your solar plexus now and you say the word stillness. And the idea is, the more you practice this, the more those pathways will be available for you. The first thing we want to do is activate that place. So when I can come into my anchor and have that on hand, I am going to respond rather than react?

Speaker 3: 13:36

But we've got to practice it. It will not be there for us as we want it to be, unless we're practicing it.

Speaker 2: 13:42

I hope this has given you a little bit of food for thought on what your flooding strategies will be.

Speaker 2: 13:49

While this will certainly happen in the minutes or hours after your breakup, there will be times that you'll circle back to this state, and for me it was 2am on a random Friday about three weeks in.

Speaker 2: 14:06

So it's always a good idea to have these strategies in your bag of tricks to pull out when you need it. I go into more detail about triage in my how to Hack your Heartbreak online course and workbook and it's got loads of added meditations, breathwork techniques, affirmations, supplements and help for you to develop your personal emergency safety plan based on your own needs and preferences. If you feel like you need some extra help, you can also book a break glass emergency one-on-one session with little old me to help you through and help you formulate your very own first aid kit. Check out howtohackyourheartbreakcom for what prescription might suit you best. Now, while triage immediately post-breakup is a swirl of emotions and racing thoughts, fear not, your medical team are on their way to give you the once-over and confirm your diagnosis in our next episode. I'm Louise Wilkinson and you've been listening to how to Hack your Heartbreak.

Speaker 1: 15:05

Thanks for listening to how to Hack your Heartbreak. Head over to howtohackyourheartbreakcom for loads more heartbreak hacks.