Coping With The Pains of Love

We all know love as an elusive emotion with a mind of its own. Many of us also know love as a painful emotion. Sometimes loves doesn’t come when we want it to or leaves when we want it to stay.

I have been writing about love now for the past year on this blog. I know that some of my readers are feeling the pains of love in their lives. I know this because some of you have written heartfelt commentary which I have answered.

You have shared the pain of your love with me and my audience on this blog. For that sharing I am truly honored and grateful.

The fact that you have allowed yourself to express your feelings here at my blog has helped other people come forward with their own feelings. Nevertheless, this is the most difficult part of love to talk about. I’m sorry if reading this post and the commentary on this blog brings the pain of your disappointed love back to. The good news is, you could learn something important for your love life.

I now realize that a big part of the reason I created this blog in the first place was because I personally know the pains of love in my own life and know the importance of healing the heart. On several occasions I have experienced a broken heart myself and know how difficult it can be to heal and renew a faith in love again.

I am drawn to the struggles to love and be loved in others because I believe this struggle embodies the best in our nature. By writing this blog I have been hoping to provide to people hurting from the pains of love an opportunity to understand their feelings, feel supported in whatever words are offered, and learn about ways their hearts can heal.

The pain of love feels like a physical and emotional hurt all mixed into one feeling. Ordinarily we human beings keep this feeling out of consciousness in any way we can. It is absolutely understandable why we do so. It simply hurts too much. The problem is our defenses against the pains of love can in some instances remain in place for a lifetime blocking the much needed healing of our hearts.

The ways we can defend ourselves against the disappointments of love that have occurred in our lives are too numerous to even begin to list. Put it this way, anything and everything can be used to hide from our disappointments in love. I wish it were that easy. The problem is hiding does not get rid of the negative effects of these experiences.

Sometimes I think our biggest problem in life is the fact that the world we live in does not teach us how to resolve these disappointments and mend our broken hearts. It simply expects us to put away what we feel and do something else.

So we end up collecting the disappointments of love over the course of our lives. By the time we make it to adulthood many of us have a heart that is so full of so much unfinished business of love it negatively affects everything we do. No one has taken the time to show us how to heal our hearts.

So much of the anger and violence in this world is understandable given the collected pains of love in the hearts of people who have never healed. What was once a need to give and receive love has solidified into a hardness of character, mistrust of people, and a revengeful projection of one’s hurt onto others.

The formula to heal a broken heart is really very simple. The implementation can be complicated. We are born into this world with the capacity to heal our hearts. Unfortunately, many of us lose faith in that innate capacity because we learn to doubt and avoid.

If you can find a way to ‘allow’ whatever feelings are in your heart to come to the surface they start to move (e-motion). This ‘motion of emotion’ is the healing process. Your feelings need to move out of your heart. The difficulty is it takes ‘tolerance’ to allow yourself to be moved by the sadness and hurt feelings disappointments in love have left behind. It doesn’t feel good at first.

The secret is, the feelings of loss and hurt trying to emerge from your heart are the love you once felt transformed into sadness, grief, and loss. By allowing and tolerating the feelings in your heart to reach your thoughts and words, to become e-motions again, the transformation back to love has a chance to occur. Once mobile, the feelings are leaving you. This is how the heart heals.

Your feelings allowed to be mobile again through expression rehabilitates your natural ability to give and receive love. When you talk about what you feel to another person, even to yourself, feelings are on the move and your heart is beginning the healing process. The problem for most of us is, expression hurts.

You should never be ashamed of the fact you may need someone to help you do this. Someone to listen without judgment. Pick someone who truly cares for you, ask that person to be present while you talk about what you feel. If you can tolerate the feelings alone that’s fine too. Let them emerge and begin moving through you.

You could write your feelings down in a private journal if you are doing this alone. The point is to express what you feel, to get your feelings moving again, so you can change your sadness, grief, and loss back into your natural ability to love and be loved.

Comments. Welcome. Dr. Tom Jordan