5 Ways Your Mind Cheats On You When Your Heart Is Broken
Another aspect of the broken heart phenomenon that should interest us, and which has been the subject of numerous studies in the field of social psychology, is the fact that we are all far more afraid of social or emotional pain than of pain. physical. When we think about the possibility of breaking a bone, we don’t take it as seriously as when we project ourselves into disappointment, failure, or emotional breakdown. Our bodies know perfectly well how to react to a physical injury or infection, which is not quite the case when our emotions are at stake.
When the relationship between body and mind is broken, we can remain paralyzed for a while. Experts tell us that our brains interpret this split as a burn. To put it another way, the emotional pain that we may feel is experienced by our brain as a physical injury. The problem is that he cannot apply the same remedies as when he is working to “fix” a broken bone, for example. This is why our brain will become, for a certain period of time, the source of emission of contradictions, false hopes and illogical reasoning.
Your brain is fooling you when your heart breaks
Your brain is unwittingly cheating on you because it feels a deep wound, for it loses all of its power when the heart is broken. Faced with this situation, he does not know how to react. He does not know how to manage the rejection, the disenchantment, the loss of a person who was for us a universe. When this happens, we become totally paralyzed by triggering a network of defense mechanisms. Our first instinct is to deny reality and, at the same time, our brain deploys even more complex and harmful mechanisms.
Our secondary somatosensory cortex and the posterior dorsal insula are activated very intensely. These two brain structures are linked to physical pain. As we told you previously, our brain very often assimilates emotional suffering as real physical pain. All of this has several consequences for us: we no longer manage to think clearly and we deceive ourselves. We will see, in the rest of this article, how this happens.
1. You have lost the most important person in your life
Emotional pain causes anguish, and anguish leads us to seek refuge, to snuggle up in nooks and crannies to feed ourselves with our own despair. In this stage after the breakup, it is common to observe an idealization of the person who has just left us, and this process is not without consequences: “ I lost the most important person in my life, the only one who managed to make me happy ”.
Your brain is cheating on you; he’s kidnapping you. The most important person in your life is you. The partner who just turned their back on you was an important person at some point in your life, that’s for sure, but it ends there.
2. I did something wrong, I have to tell him that I can change
As we told you earlier, negation is the first step in grieving. This is obviously a very difficult process to manage. During this period, it is quite classic that we blame ourselves, that we tell ourselves that we have failed, that we still have the means to mend the now broken relationship.
We then obsessively try to convince the other person that we have to start all over again, that this is a possibility not to be missed: “ We cannot lose everything that we have built ”. Again, your mind is deceiving you, your heart hurts, and your good intentions, real as they are, are just the fruit of your blindness. The other person doesn’t love you anymore and you have to face this reality to draw consequences.
3. I want to know everything and know everything about the person who is leaving me
We live in an era of immediate communication, instant reinforcement, of the inability to tolerate frustration: “ How do I accept that the person I love does not write to me anymore? How can I understand that she is blocking me and that she no longer wants to know anything about me? “.
Our mind will then invent thousands of excuses to explain its silence, its refusals or the delay it can put in responding to us. It’s even worse: he will develop thousands of strategies to write the ultimate message, the one that will put everything in order. These destructive dynamics can last a long time, at least until our dignity puts an end to them. These moments are necessary and we must cross them. They will generally lead to an emotional survival reflex: removing our ex-partner from our address book and our social networks.
4. My life will never be the same
This statement, however exact it may be, should not generate unbearable suffering. However, there are two ways to see it. Your mind whispers to you that if your life is going to change, it is for the worse; happiness will never reappear in your existence because you are not worthy of love and you will not meet anyone who is able to love you in this way.
These constant negative thoughts are real torture for those who suffer them. It is absolutely true that your life will not be the same, but you should not hear this sentence as a value judgment. It will be different, it will be new and it will certainly be better. It is better to be alone than in bad company, popular wisdom tells us. Therefore, why regret not sharing the life of someone who no longer loves us?
5. I absolutely must know why my partner stopped loving me
We must objectively answer this question once and for all: can there be a clear, objective and precise reason for the phenomenon of disenchantment? Not always. We can despair as much as we want when we no longer feel loved, we can become obsessed with it , but many times love goes out without anyone really knowing why.
There may be another person, there may be a set of little things which gradually swallow up love. But, in most cases, disenchantment cannot be explained in words. All we have to do is accept the other’s decision and believe in their honesty. After all, our partner was brave enough to express this powerful feeling he feels.
To conclude, we need to realize that we cannot always trust our mind when our heart is broken. However, in most cases, these feelings and reasoning are an integral part of the grieving process. Accepting what may have happened is the only way to bring order to the chaos. Little by little, we will become able to rebuild our self-esteem. After this step, the most difficult of trials will come: to heal our heart.
Images by Jarek Puczel
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