![]() ![]() Specifically, we need to consider that when we are heartbroken, our mind is likely to bombard us with highly idealized snapshots, memories and thoughts both about our ex and about our relationship. First, we need to frame the task differently. We might accept, on an intellectual level, that by focusing on our ex’s faults we’re doing something important but it can still feel wrong (unpleasant), unbalanced, unfair, and even disloyal.Īs a clinician, I’ve found that there are two things we can do to minimize these feelings of unpleasantness and thus feel freer to practice negative reappraisals of our ex. Unfortunately, it is those very feelings of “unpleasantness” that make it challenging to use negative reappraisals as a way to recover from heartbreak. However, doing so did increase feelings of unpleasantness. The researchers found that only negative reappraisals were truly effective in reducing love feelings. The last condition used distraction (eg, questions about the subjects’ favorite food) to get the participants’ mind off their heartbreak. In the second condition they were asked to reframe their loving feelings as less problematic (eg, by endorsing prompts such as ‘It’s okay to love someone I’m no longer with’). In the first condition, subjects focused on negative reappraisals of their ex-partner (eg, by responding to prompts about their ex’s annoying habits). The goal of the study was to examine three kinds of emotional regulation strategies to see which of them would help heartbroken subjects reduce their love feelings. While that might seem terribly obvious, consider that heartbreak often makes most of us do the opposite: We enact thoughts and behaviors that actually reinforce our love feelings (eg, stalking our ex on social media, reliving our best moments, poring over old images and video of happy times). The premise of the study was that to recover from heartbreak we need to diminish our feelings of love for our ex-partner. ![]() Yes, time helps, as does social support, but new studies are verifying that there are all kinds of other steps we can and should take to soothe the emotional pain we feel and expedite our recovery.Ī recent study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology examined cognitive and behavioral strategies for recovering from heartbreak. As I describe in my book How to Fix a Broken Heart, the biggest mistake we make is that we go on “autopilot” and assume the only thing we can do to recover is give it time. Despite recent advances in our scientific understanding of how we are impacted by heartbreak, little has changed in how we go about recovering from this emotionally devastating experience. We’ve been experiencing heartbreak for millennia and yet most of us still use the same coping and recovery mechanisms we did thousands of years ago: time, social support, and unfortunately, substances (eg, alcohol, drugs, food). “Aren’t my feelings supposed to fade?” She asked me. It was the best relationship I ever had.” Melissa came to see me after several months had passed and J.J. She cried for days and could barely function at work, “I’ll never find a better match for me. A year and a half into the relationship, Melissa began raising the issue of marriage. We had very similar lifestyles.” Melissa and J.J. “He was into triathlons and obstacle courses like I was. ![]() It felt weirdly authentic,” Melissa told me in our first psychotherapy session. “We were both winded and covered in mud yet we still managed to flirt. met on the finish line of an obstacle course race. ![]()
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