What Can Make It Easier for a Broken Heart to Heal?

randiguntherphd
2 hours ago
5 min read

Finding strength: Factors that aid healing after profound loss.

I have never known a person who has not suffered a painful loss of some kind. In my five decades of practice, I have witnessed the sorrow and bravery of many people living through grief. I have watched them struggle through the weeks, months, and sometimes years, searching to embrace a life that might never be the same again.

No loss is the same, no one person is like another, and not all people have the same resources to rely upon. In the midst of tragedy, some may also be unable to marshal the resources they need. Even if there are people who do reach out to help, they may not know how or what they can do to alleviate the suffering. And, often, people who are grieving may not know how to express what they need. Faith is challenged. Hope may falter. The future disappears.

Those who have faced losses in the past have some tend to have more options to rely on, but many have never known overwhelming sadness until it is upon them. They have not developed any kind of plan for devastating loss in advance nor examined what they would do if the time came when they had to rely on others to guide them who may not understand what is best for them.

If people are willing to explore and understand in advance what their resources are to face a potential tragedy, they can strengthen their ability to manage when it does strike. This is not to suggest worrying or borrowing pain that may never happen, but to know oneself deeply enough to be able to become a more courageous and resilient person through that process.

There are some crucial internal and external factors that help people cope when tragedy interrupts their ability to function. Though they will show up differently for different people, taken together they can predict how a person will be able to heal their broken hearts through the process of loss. Knowing what those are in advance allows people to alter or deepen them before an unpredictable loss will ensure a more positive outcome.

Childhood Teaching

Everyone has experienced their own losses or watched others struggle through them, whether they were more easily resolvable or life-changing. The nurturers who raise children are the first models that show them how loss can be handled. How a child is treated as they experience their own losses helps them form internal responses that they will rely on later to guide them. Children are helpless witnesses to those life experiences and will become stronger or more frightened depending on what is shown to them.

Available Support

Some people are fortunate to always have people around them whom they can count on when times are hard. Though those support networks can wax and wane, they are reliable for those who have built them by reciprocal acts of caring and support. Isolation always makes pain worse and last longer. Bolstering a support network throughout life is crucial for that help to exist when needed.

Depth and Length of Tragedy

Whether an unexpected or a long-term suffering occurs, it is important to remember that help too often comes in waves at the beginning and doesn’t hold up as well over time. If those who care deeply for you arrange staggered and effective help, you will be more likely to get through your loss more successfully.

Cultural Practices

Those people who come from a strong cultural way of dealing with tragedy have a sense of belonging and a comfort with traditional practices. They can more easily let go and allow others to take over when they have been immersed in those experiences since childhood. If a person has parted ways with those rituals for whatever reason they felt necessary, they might be at more of a loss when they have not replaced, and practiced, new rituals with those that are more currently meaningful.

Emotional and Physical Resilience

Some children are more able to endure loss, or are forced into resiliency by neglect. They usually end up taking care of their caretakers when they are faltering, and don’t allow themselves to work through their own grief. Each loss increases that level of toughness, which others may see as strength and reward it with praise. Working hard to increase your resilience may help you hold on when you are facing a painful loss.

Transformation of Focus

So many people have shared with me how a loss they thought would take them down forever became a pillar for a strength they thought they would never have. The loss becomes a beacon of light, a way to re-examine their entire life choices and to replace them with a better set of values and behaviors. They transfer their focus from getting back the life they lost to creating a life they would never have considered without that loss.

Options for Diversion

Grief comes in waves, even when it is severe. People who do not feel guilty when they can have moments of laughter or pleasure between those anguished moments are more successful in the ways they process their sadness. I have known people who feel they must be in continual suffering to prove that they are grieving enough, rather than trusting their own path. Parents who have small children know they must allow their children to love life even as they are doubting it.

Faith

Faith can be religious but doesn’t have to be. It is believing that there can be growth from pain, liberation from sorrow, and hope for better times to come. People with a formal deity or without one can still draw on a power beyond themselves to hold on to when all seems lost. It is always easier to do that when experiencing a shared grief because people can bond together and help one another hold onto that faith. Those practiced in reaching for faith in hard times and who are healed by it have an easier time than those trying to find it in the midst of tragedy.

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