Dear Shelbyville:

You wrote that you are “understanding exactly what happened and not understanding at all. I guess that’s the head and heart fighting… Rationally I know…. I get the logic, the ‘science’ of it I often joke, but still not sinking in”.

I want to give your heart a voice, best I can, based on having read your posts and my life experience-

Heart says: I can’t live without him! I am about to die! Got to have him back, now!

That’s all the heart says. The desperation of the heart affects your rational thinking and you end up with wishful thinking: “The breakup is no doubt killing him too”. It is wishful thinking because he broke up with you and if it was killing him, he would have contacted you.

Next, you try to talk sense into the irrational part of the brain, the part accommodating the heart’s desperation: “if he wanted to be with me, he would CONTACT me. He hasn’t.. it doesn’t seem as though he wishes to be in contact with me, so apart from the quick hit I’d get from inserting myself into his existence again for a brief moment, where will it get me.”

Sometimes you manage to calm the heart, but soon enough the despair awakens, the heart gets scared again, “when I open my eyes super early to start my shift, it hits me like a brick. Despair you might call it”.

The heart is so powerful not because it makes sense. It doesn’t. It is so powerful because it feels, and the feeling is intense. And it is not that you are made of two separate, non-interacting parts: the heart that feels and the brain that thinks rationally. It is not as simple as that.

What happens is that the rational brain is affected by the heart and doesn’t think rationally. Sometimes it does, often it doesn’t. “The breakup is no doubt killing him too” is the best example of that irrationality. But there are other indications in your writing of that irrationality. Another example, regarding him breaking up with you, you wrote: “I suspect he feels he did it for me”- wishful thinking, expanding this irrational, wishful thinking, it goes something like this: he broke up with me because he loves me and he will be back into my life real soon because he loves me!

What to do/ my suggestions: it is first necessary for you to be less afraid. Somehow you have to relax into the reality that you are not going to die because he is not in your life. You can live without him.

Once the fear is lessened then it will be possible for you to think rationally consistently. Specifically you will consistently understand that he broke up with you because he didn’t want you in his life, that you want him but he doesn’t want you. This simple fact will sink in.

You will feel sad but not scared. Sad doesn’t interrupt rational thinking; scared does. You will be sad, then tired of feeling sad, then the motivation to feel alive again, to experience love again, to learn, to thrive, these will awaken again.

anita

Dear Shelbyville:

“How does one become less afraid?”-

There is only one way that works beyond the feel-good of the moment (food, drugs, entertainment, fantasy, wishful thinking, etc.)-

and that is fitting our thinking to reality, making our thinking and believing congruent with reality.

Start here: you know, don’t you, that your life, really,  is not in danger for not having him in your life, don’t you?

anita

Dear Shelbyville:

You have survived the past few weeks without him in each and every way. You can think, feel, type, work, you communicate with others and try to help others, you listen and respond. You just don’t feel wonderful. But then sometimes you didn’t feel wonderful when you were in the relationship with him.

And during these few weeks, sometimes you felt okay, better than other times. Sometimes you felt joy too, for a moment here and there, no?

anita

Dear Shelbyville:

You are welcome.

The dread in the past couple of weeks is based on a belief that you can’t live without him. No wonder you felt dread, it is dreadful to believe one’s life is over or about to be  over. My point is the dread itself is based on a false belief.

If you want,  if you can, meditate on this, think of it while relaxing, taking deep breaths, think and let it sink in that your life is not  over, that your life is not in danger. Stay with the thought, keep saying it to yourself. Let me know how that works for you, if you try it.

I will be away from the computer for the next sixteen hours or  so. Take good care of yourself.

anita