How God Healed My Broken Heart

On Thursday the 13th March 2008, I wrote a journal entry that started like this,

“It was supposed to be our one and half year anniversary today. We broke up on Sunday.”

Now this break up came after a 6 week break, where we were still technically together (Facebook still said I was in a relationship, so you know it’s still real) but we didn’t speak. That decision came after my Hollywood blockbuster moment when we were away with friends (we hadn’t seen each other in a week and he wasn’t acting “himself”). I can’t remember what I asked him exactly or what he said, but I pulled away from him, looked deep into his eyes as the ocean lapped up against our ankles and said,

“But you still love me don’t you?”

He just stared into my eyes with an, ‘I’m so sorry’ look about him.

In an instant my entire world shattered.

To put it all in context, he had just spent a week away being a leader at his church’s youth summer camp, where we barely spoke (which I found really weird and so annoying that like, he couldn’t take 2 minutes to call his girlfriend, or text her goodnight? *said in American teenage movie accent) and he spent all his spare time asking God if this relationship was “right” and “honouring” – SPOILER ALERT! It wasn’t. My ex just worked it out before I did. Or he chose to see where it wasn’t right, where as I chose to ignore that because I loved him, and wanted nothing more than to marry him one day. So if I looked at the bad, deep down I knew the good wouldn’t come.

Now if you’ve ever had an actual emotional broken heart, you know the pain I’m about to explain. And for those that haven’t experienced it and are thinking, “yeah whatever, it’s not a real thing”… Well Wikipidia tells us the following:

A broken heart (also known as a heartbreak or heartache) is a common metaphor for the intense emotional—and sometimes physical—stress or pain one feels at experiencing great longing. The concept is cross-cultural; most often, though not exclusively, cited with reference to a desired or lost lover; and dates back at least 3,000 years.^[1]

Emotional pain that is severe can cause ‘broken heart syndrome‘, including physical damage to the heart. Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, also known as transient apical ballooning syndrome,^[1] apical ballooning cardiomyopathy,^[2]stress-induced cardiomyopathy, Gebrochenes-Herz-Syndrom, and stress cardiomyopathy is a type of non-ischemiccardiomyopathy in which there is a sudden temporary weakening of the muscular portion of the heart.^[3] Because this weakening can be triggered by emotional stress, such as the death of a loved one, a break-up, or constant anxiety, it is also known as broken-heart syndrome.^[4] Stress cardiomyopathy is now a well-recognized cause of acute heart failure, lethal ventricular arrhythmias, and ventricular rupture.^[5]

I know, lots of big words, but it’s an actual thing. The next day we left our little holiday, and endured a 3 hour snail crawl drive home on what was then the F1 from The Entrance to West Pennant Hills where I lived at the time (there was a truck on fire, so our 45 minute trip took 3 hours, in his car with no air conditioning on a 30 degree day). We said little to each other on that drive. I cried in silence, tears streaming down my face, sweat streaming down my legs, I had no idea what to think except, “How could he not love me?”. We pulled up to my house where he helped carry my bags to the front door. He looked me in the eye and said I need space to think. But if you need me, you can still call me. And with that, I said, “okay”, closed the door and cried the loudest and hardest I ever had in my entire life. Instantly my head started to pound, my chest felt like someone had hooked me up to a defib machine to shock me and I felt like I was going to vomit.

For days my stomach was in knots, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, I was just really sad. It was like a part of me had died.

The only thing I knew how to do was to journal. Back and forth are conversations where I just open up to God and let Him have His way with my heart.

Step 1. God let me rediscover His love and our safe place.

Which at the time was at the beach, on top of sandy dunes and the sparse tall grass. It was always overcast and chilly, a winters day. He would let me snuggle into Him and wrap me up in his hoodie. He would just love me, hold me, and that’s where I would experience peace. It was the place where I rediscovered my daddy’s love.

Step 2. Opening up to conversation.

This is when I would journal and ask questions and as I would write, God would take over my pen and write back to me. At first it was loving and soft. And some days He would just let me be angry. Be angry at my ex. Be angry at God. But then he started to show me, me. How I acted and how I treated my ex in our relationship. Without realising it, I was manipulative, I was controlling, I was selfish. Why was I like that? Because I would want my ex all to myself. I would want to spend as much time as my extrovert little self would allow. Not caring how his introvert little self would suffocate from it. Yes, it takes two to tango, and no, he never really stood up for himself in his needs, but I knew he needed and enjoyed space – from everyone and everything. But I didn’t care. I thought, well if he doesn’t ask for space, he doesn’t really want it. That’s how I rationalised it. But letting God speak to me so strongly was exactly what I needed to open the door to healing. Knowing how I went wrong let me learn more about myself.

Step 3. Learning to love myself without the attachment of my boyfriend. 

So going on from step two, learning more about myself let me love myself more. And I had to learn who I was without the attachment of my ex. And a lot of that came into play over the six week break. I had to attend a party without him, I spent Valentine’s Day without him, but I had so many friends rally around me. And through their love for me, which was unchanged, I realised that I have a lot to offer, including my faults, and my true friends love me warts and all! It sounds like a bit of a cliché but, “He didn’t love all of you, you can do so much better!” was kind of true. Learning to be my own person again, making decisions on my own and without having to consider someone else all the time, gave me so much freedom. And made me realise that he didn’t love all of me, and thats OK.

Step 4. Re-learning to give God all my burdens.

So one of the biggest things I would do while in this relationship is to not take time with God at all, but to only rely on the strength of my ex. He would be my “saviour” and I would put him on a pedestal. This my friends, is not healthy! So I started to retrain myself to give everything over to God. And in one entry, when God was opening my eyes up to this, He said to me, “I don’t care if you have to give [insert BF name here] over to me every second of every day, if it means you’re giving me the burden of him.” And some days, I did have to give him over multiple times a day. But it meant that every time I was getting upset, angry or would start to miss him again and long for our relationship, I would say a short prayer. ‘God I hand him over to you. Take him in your hands and I trust you with him.’

#BYOB