how to change yourself

September 22, 2024

What Can We Learn From Heartbreak?

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” — James Baldwin

It may be that everyone who ever reached the age of reason has suffered from a broken heart. Even those afraid of approaching someone for romance might imagine the person they desire and pine away.

Real hearts are resilient. They keep pumping, indifferent to the wound.

The loving kind of hearts have their own type of resilience. They mourn, endure, and often try again. Changed? That can be for the better, though it is a costly loss that leads you there: the end of courtship and countless plans and hopes.

Since we all have or will suffer in this way, might something positive come from the experience? Something to help us lead our lives and learn from hardship?

I think so.

Here is a short list of ways to enhance ourselves in the aftermath.

  • Learning Who We Chose And Why

One of the most valuable tasks we can undertake is to reflect upon the kind of people we are drawn to. Are they hard to get? Have they had many broken relationships themselves? Do they often blame others to justify their actions rather than take responsibility?

Did we ignore the danger signs our friends warned us of? Do the people we pursue remind us of someone else? Were we so taken by their appearance and sparkle that we ignored their minds and hearts?

We cannot change our former lovers, but we can change ourselves and increase our chances of finding a better-suited person.

  • Enhancing Our Empathy

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” wrote the French philosopher, teacher, and activist Simone Weil. It is possible to enlarge one’s empathetic capability by experiencing pain.

Weil’s life exemplified not only witnessing the suffering of another and giving the attention of which she spoke; she chose to experience it herself. Though this woman came from a privileged background, she took on punishing factory jobs for a year, entered the Spanish Civil War battlefields, and worked in the harvest.

None of us choose heartbreak, yet it offers something to learn about adversity. We can apply our experience and awareness to help those who have lost the one they loved in whatever way.

  • Acquiring Knowledge Of Our Resilience

When my patients explained their affliction, they often doubted they could take it on and get past it. I asked the following frequently: 

“Please tell me of the hardships you lived through before this.”

They ran down a mental list of such situations. 

“What inside you enabled you to survive?”

The sufferer proceeded to identify the human characteristics within him that got him through his previous misfortunes. 

“Do you still have those abilities and qualities inside yourself?”

The answer was yes, more often than no. Thus, the client affirmed the forgotten strengths he could still draw on.

Life contains everything imaginable: beauty, wartime horror, hope, and despair. If our ancestors lacked resilience, the planet would be without humankind.

Not everyone is resilient in every circumstance, but most have elements of a hard-won or inherited capacity to survive the heartbreak caused by a lover’s departure. We live to love again or not, as we choose.

  • Learning Kindness

The pain of breakups sometimes adds insult to injury. There are many ways to say, “We are done,” and some people hurt us with cruelty or indifference. 

Think of those who blame the person they left while failing to recognize his value or visible torment. Some people end a relationship by ghosting the other or sending a text rather than face-to-face. A few tap an intermediary to deliver the bad news.

Once we experience this kind of ending, it can instruct us on what not to do when we break up with someone. If we have loved another, the best we can do is honor what made them desirable in the first place and show them the respect we would wish for ourselves in the same circumstances.

St. Paul advised the Ephesians to speak “the truth in love,” not hate.

  • Changing Ourselves

If a gentle ex-partner had been insightful in revealing what we lacked, valid shortcomings might have been understood despite the pain of taking in this information. 

With former partners who were less wise, some of us might have thought the indictment unfair when hearing the list of our deficits. Others among us flee from the truth. We do well to discount falsehoods when considering the judgments of others in any case.

Most of us avoid or regret these discussions. The closure we seek then must be found alone.

There is an alternative path to the same knowledge. We can recognize our deficiencies by looking in the mirror and reflecting on why the relationship ended.

If we conclude that the mirror provides a sense of recognition worthy of internalizing, the future offers us a chance to change.

A long pattern of breakups leaves us with this task—not on the first day or the 50th day, but someday.

  • Enlarging Our Humanity

As James Baldwin wrote in the quote at the head of this essay, his heartbreak led to a new awareness about the human community:

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

I wonder why we find it so hard to remember the connection Baldwin describes. Perhaps it is because a significant portion of the shared pain of life—the unhappiness we all experience—is hidden. Maybe it is also because much of it happens to people we have never met or who live far from us.

We persuade ourselves we will outsmart fate.

Imagine this: one day a year, as if by magic, we could see through the momentary gladness of our fellow men to the physical and emotional scars they hide. On the same day, we would witness the tears they carry from the episodes we call the Dark Night of the Soul.

Would that cause us to treat each other more kindly?

I can only say that the message we take from heartbreak and suffering, however long or short, informs us of one of the reasons we are here, not alone but among others of our kind: that our foremost purpose in life is not to gain wealth, status, victory, or material things but to care for others.

To this, I believe Simone Weil would say yes.

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The top image is a Broken Heart symbol by Orazon. It is followed by photos of Simone Weil and Her Family in 1916 during World War I and Weil in a Cafe. Finally, a Kid Caring for Young by Joseph Lionceau. All of these were sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

December 10, 2023

Changing the Self We Hide

Therapy is about our future and the stories of our past. We all have made mistakes, but don’t talk about each one. Our shames are put in a closet. The inside, non-public story is unique to who we are.

Everyone else’s understanding of our existence is incomplete. It lacks the private awareness of what we consider most genuine about how we came to the present moment. 

Accurate or not, the concealed individual we call “me” is who we find in the mirror. He is the person who must change.

The imperfect self-observations none of us can escape are the difference between your opinion of me (knowing less than everything and nothing directly inside of me) and my opinion of myself (having forgotten or blocked some of what you remember about me and can see in a way I cannot).

If you are astute, you might detect my blindspots. By definition, I am unaware of them.

We each possess a meaningful personal narrative, even if unwritten, unseen, untold, and unconscious. Our yarn sums up the events, actions, and inactions attached to our names, enlarged or reduced, decorated, and fashioned into a historical thread of our lives.

Some of our self-characterizations and conclusions are in error. That’s why Socrates directed us to “know thyself.”

We live with and live out the meanings embedded in our autobiography. They account for the inevitable repetition of old, unchanging interpretations that have governed us for decades. 

Any misunderstanding of ourselves leads to potholes, sometimes unseen and rarely escaped. A portion of the human race walks around them while another falls into them and crawls out. The most unfortunate, having fallen down many times, decide the climb up is too much trouble, believing they are safer in a trench than out of it.

A new saga must be written to avoid the jarring ruts and unfortunate repetitions we suffer to produce a more fulfilling and joyous time on the planet. If well done, the new vision of ourselves can offer pathways to the fulfillment we failed to pursue while in the grip of our longstanding understanding of who we are.

Without a fresh set of directions, we journey to dead-end destinations, the equivalent of serial bad vacations. With a redrawn picture of our behavioral highway, we open our lives to new possibilities and the reformation of our inner and outer selves.

Think of how a single individual might invent, modify, and reinvent himself, perhaps by altering his condemnation of himself or others and his education, occupations, assertiveness, friendships, fears, and matters of faith.

Our beginnings permit several ways of leading a life; most try a few that emerge within our youthful circumstances. The typical human course is to conclude that one of these works sufficiently to justify following it unaltered. 

Too often, they fail to read the “use by” date that comes with any attempt to solve human problems. A permanent solution, so they thought, had been found.

Some of those beliefs were derived from parental opinions and or demands on us and statements about us, right or wrong. Teachers and fellow students contributed, as did bosses and lovers throughout our lives. 

Without therapy, creating a vision of our existence and who we are is a do-it-yourself project. No rules exist to restrict or enlarge our behavioral choices except dedication to change. We can make and remake our character, principles, politics, and more. The next chapter of the story awaits this creation.

The world moves, and we need to reconsider and reevaluate all that is changeable inside us to keep up.

Start with what kind of person you wish to become, then ask what prevents metamorphosis, like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis.

There are many versions of unfortunate personal stories. Some people inflate them to boost their ego, impress their friends, or both. They fake it to make it. For others, grudging injury can create a personal mythology and justify a decision to hide from the world.

Regardless of the truth of these opinions, one must proceed beyond them lest we spend all of life enraged or broken over losses and grievances.

No small number attribute life’s disappointments to themselves. Some of our fellows resist the idea that they might have misunderstood or misinterpreted the meaning of their particular life path and how they managed it. Recognizing you might have missed half your years discourages many from taking a backward look.

On the other hand, such an idea enlightens those who can summon courage and openness. They never considered that the design of their life (and the labels they applied to it) contributed to their current unhappiness. Recognizing a pattern of poor choices offers both sadness and the sunrise of a better future.

The souls who do this imagine a better time ahead, no matter their inability to relive their youth. Creating a new and more fulfilling path presents a hopeful opportunity.

As Emily Dickinson wrote:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –
 
And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –
 
I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.

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The three photos are the work of the superb photographic artist Laura Hedien, with her permission: Laura Hedien Official Website.

The first is a Vintage Truck on the Backroads of IL, 2022. 

Next comes Approaching White Shoal Lighthouse Near Mackinac, Michigan, 2023. Finally, Mass Ascension at the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta, October 2023.