Written and verified by the psychologist GetPersonalGrowth.
Last update: 15 November 2021
Like bones, the heart can also break. When it happens, the mind deceives us, pushes us into a phase of hard despair where we cling to any small breath of minimal and impossible hope. However, little by little, the heart is resigned and the mind returns to its tracks, back to our home, where we can reconcile ourselves with our dignity and mourn.
Having a broken heart is one of the most frequent realities, without making it a habit. Just out of curiosity, in the 70s one of the most successful songs was that of the Bee Gees which said: “And how can you mend a broken heart? How can you stop the rain from falling? How can you prevent the sun from shining? ”… In these words there was a slight desperation, which suggested that falling out of love is a wound that, apparently, never heals.
Another aspect that attracts our attention and which has been studied very often by social psychologists is the fact that we humansOn average, we fear social and / or emotional pain much more than physical pain. For example, thinking about the breaking of one or several bones does not scare us as much as having to face a disappointment, an infidelity or an emotional breakdown. Our body knows what to do and how to react in the face of a physical injury or infection.
However, when a relationship ends, the body and mind get stuck. Just as the experts say, the brain interprets this separation as a sunburn. In other words, emotional pain is experienced by our brain as a physical injury, but we don't know very well how to fix it. Consequently, for a certain period of time the mind falls into a succession of contradictions, false hopes, meaningless reasoning ...
Does the mind deceive us when the heart breaks?
Our mind deceives us, it does it unwittingly, it does it because it is wounded, lost and connected to a broken heart, who does not know very well how to handle rejection, the farewell of a love that until not long ago was her everything. When this happens, we are trapped in a complex network of defense mechanisms where we deny what happened and, as if that were not enough, even more sophisticated and adverse processes take place in the brain.
Our secondary somatosensory cortex and the posterior dorsal insula are activated very intensely. These structures are linked to physical pain, since just as we pointed out earlier, emotional suffering is often experienced on a par with physical suffering. All this means that we cannot think clearly, that we are self-deceiving. Let's see now how we usually do it.
When our mind deceives us, it does it unwittingly because it is hurt.
1. I lost the most important person in my life
Emotional pain causes anguish and anguish seeks shelters, meanders in which to feed despair. In this post-breakup phase, it is common for idealized, but harmful thoughts to arise, where we repeat things like "I lost the most important person in my life, the only one who could make me happy".
The mind deceives us and takes possession of us. The most important person in our life is ourselves. Our ex has been an important person for a period of our life which, however, has ended and this is something we have to accept.
2. I did something wrong, I have to tell him that "I can change"
Denial is the first phase of mourning and it is at this moment that we inevitably experience them all. It is common to blame yourself, to tell yourself that you have neglected the relationship, that you have done something wrong, but that there is still time to fix it.
So let's try, almost obsessively, to convince the other person to give us a second chance, to try again, to make a clean sweep, to reset, to start over "because what is between us" we cannot throw it away like this. The mind deceives us, the heart hurts us and good intentions overwhelm us while we keep a blindfold: the other person no longer loves us and in the face of this reality there is no room for sequels.
3. The obsession with hearing the person and having information about him
We live in the era of immediate communication, instant reinforcement, the inability to tolerate frustration ... So how can you accept that your loved one is no longer sending us messages? How can we accept that he blocks us, that he no longer wants to know anything about us?
The mind deceives us by inventing a thousand excuses to explain its silence, its "no" or its latency. He will devise a thousand strategies to get him that last message or that desperate proposal. These destructive dynamics will last until dignity tells us enough. Time in which we will take those necessary steps, such as deleting our ex from the contact list and deleting him from our social networks.
4. My life will never be the same again
This statement is obvious, our life will never be the same after a couple breakup. However, the mind deceives us by whispering quietly and continuously that happiness is not for us, that it is denied us, that we do not deserve love, that what we touch breaks or, even worse, that we will not meet anyone like. the person who left us.
Thoughts like this are an absurd way to torture us. Given that life will not go back to being what it was before, it will be different, it will be new and much better if we do not have at our side someone who does not love us. Or maybe yes, but in the wrong way.
5. I need to know clearly why he stopped loving me
Let's face it, is there a clear, objective, tangible and precise reason why we stop loving someone? Not always. We can be obsessed with it to the point of despair, but sometimes love ends without knowing the reason.
There may be another person in the middle, there may have been a lot of little that created a lot, but most of the time the falling out of love cannot be translated into words ... In these cases, we just have to accept it, especially in the face of the honesty of those who no longer love us, of those who courageously told us clearly that there is no possibility of returning to the past, nor a future waiting for us.
To conclude, we know that we cannot always rely on our mind when we are heartbroken. However, most of the time this feeling and reasoning is part of the grieving process. Accepting what happened will make some order in this chaos and, little by little, we will return in our footsteps towards the refuge of self-esteem, where we can begin a delicate and indispensable job: heal our heart.
