If you are suffering from a broken heart, you may fall into the trap of believing that your feelings of hurt, sadness, or betrayal will never end. If you find yourself wondering exactly how long does it take to heal a broken heart, we’ve laid out the healing journey for you.

Neither of us found love early or easily. We became Love Coaches because we both struggled into our 40s to find lasting love. We both suffered our share of heartbreak and know from personal experience that you can move on from your grief and find soul-satisfying, long-lasting love on the other side.

How long it takes to heal from a broken heart may not be a prescribed timeframe that fits everyone, however, taking a look at the journey from heartbreak to lasting love will allow you to evaluate where you are on the path and speed up your healing.

What you resist persists.

You can’t heal a broken heart by pushing through it, or getting back out there right away, or being in denial of your sorrow. Your feelings exist for a reason and trying to ignore them will only make matters worse.

Ignoring your feelings disconnects you from yourself and at a time of heartache, it is important to stay present to your emotional experience. Your EGS – emotional guidance system exists to give you information about the present moment.

Emotions are information from your subconscious signaling that there is something occurring for you to pay attention to. The purpose of this emotional system allows you to connect with yourself.

When you ignore or try to push down your feelings you lose rapport with your inner self, your inner guidance system. When that happens you end up like a small cork tossed about on a stormy sea. The longer you avoid the feelings of grief and sorrow, the longer the storm and the untethered feelings will be present.

As a human being, you are here to feel the full range of human emotion. The sooner you make peace with that, the happier you will be. There is nothing wrong with these feelings – they are appropriate to the situation you’re in. Resisting these emotions simply keeps you in pain longer.

In order to heal choose to feel.

In order to heal from a broken heart, you will need to feel all of your feelings. This does not mean that you wallow or become self-indulgent in your sorrow. Instead, you want to be intentional about the process.

When you are wallowing, you are stuck in the story of the situation and all the details of the plot points that occurred. “Why did he leave me?” you may find yourself mentally repeating, hoping that when you find the answer it will all make sense. Unfortunately, the answer to this question will not make you feel better, no matter how much your mind tells you it will.

There is no logical answer here that will provide you with any peace of mind. Emotions are not logical or linear the way our conscious mind wishes everything would be. Why someone chose to break up with you is not about you, it’s about them. Plus if you had the answer you would still have all the sadness and loss to deal with.

Set aside time to feel your feelings, all of them. Schedule it in your calendar and set a timer. For example, give yourself 2 hours in the evening after work to do nothing but feel your sadness, hurt, anger, or whatever it is you feel in the moment. See if you can fully feel your feelings for the entire 2 hours without distracting yourself or getting into a dialog with yourself in your mind.

Play heartbreak songs over and over again while you cry. Scream into your pillow and hit it over and over again to release your anger. Indulge yourself in fully expressing your emotions over the situation. Another option is to fill a bath and scream underwater. Then when you’re done, you can relax and enjoy the bath.

These exercises allow you to release your emotions so that they recede and leave space for new feelings to come in. Emotions are energy and need to be expressed otherwise they get stuck. Over time stuck emotions can cause disease within the body.

Connecting with yourself through your emotional experience is a great way to stay grounded in your body and to support your own well-being through any experience. It will also speed up the mourning process and allow you to heal from a broken heart.

When your heart breaks it breaks open to hold more love.

As you evolve and move toward your highest and best self the good times are the reward and the difficulties allow you to become a better person.

Love is limitless. When your heart breaks it creates space for even more love. Like in the cartoon The Grinch Who Stole Christmas when your heart becomes bigger, it can hold even more love. Love for yourself as well as love for another.

A broken heart is a vulnerable heart and a vulnerable heart is an open heart. Keep your heart open while you’re nursing a broken heart and you will find that love will fill the space inside of you.

There is no time limit on grief.

Are you asking, “How long does it take to heal a broken heart?”

When you feel happy or blissful you never make the mistake of believing these feelings will last – you know they’re temporary. And yet, when you feel badly you can’t even imagine that you will ever feel good again as if you can get sucked into some time warp where you’re doomed to suffer forever.

This is a delusion. The truth about emotions is that they are constantly changing from moment to moment. Acknowledging and expressing them allows them to release to their proper ebb and flow.

You may feel grief again in the future and that’s not because you’re broken or something is wrong with you, it’s just the nature of emotions. Healing takes time so embrace the slow pace of healing your heart from a break-up.

All emotions compound and it is the most obvious to see how this happens with grief. When you experience a loss, you feel all the losses. This is part of your humanness and it is important to accept it.

The truth is you will probably have scars from your past experiences. Hearing a certain song, eating at a particular restaurant, or traveling to a specific romantic locale can all trigger feelings of grief about a past relationship.

These triggers are normal. Just because something triggers feelings about an ex doesn’t mean anything other than that was an important person at one time in your life.

Allow and honor your feelings of grief when they show up.

Blame will keep you stuck and forgiveness will set you free.

When the intensity of heartbreak feelings have waned the next step is to release yourself from the energetic dance you did with your ex.

Blaming yourself or your ex will keep you tied to him/her. You can think of this connection as energetic ropes or strings that keep you from moving forward.

Moving into forgiveness will allow you to cut the cords and free your heart to love again. Forgiveness doesn’t mean that you excuse bad behavior. Forgiveness is acknowledging someone’s humanity and having compassion for their shortcomings.

Take responsibility for your mistakes and forgive yourself. Acknowledge your ex’s deficiencies and forgive him. Ultimately forgiveness is for you, it allows you to leave the past in the past. It is the gateway to allow better opportunities to come your way.

When you are done grieving, look for the Golden Nugget.

The final step in the healing journey is to find gratitude for the experience. This person and these events showed up in your life to teach you something.

Discovering the Golden Nugget of learning allows you to grow from your experience and become better at selecting an ideal partner and at being a partner for your beloved. If you never learn, you are doomed to repeat the experience again.

Breaking patterns and choosing a partner consciously only occurs when you gain the learning from your experiences.

This is the final step in the journey to heal from a broken heart because it’s the most difficult. The other steps prepare you to dig deep and discover the answer to why you were in relationship with this particular human being.

Seeing your ex as a teacher of sorts will move you toward your soulmate. He (or she) may not grow from the experience of being in partnership with you, but you can.

When you are with your beloved it won’t matter how many others it didn’t work out with. It won’t matter how long it took you to find each other. You will be living the best years of your life with the love of your life and that is all that will matter when you get there.

If you’re tired of struggling and worrying about whether the right person will show up in your life and you’d like to dig deeper into what may be in your way, book a Soulmate Strategy Session with us. This complimentary call will allow you to connect with us so you can heal your heart and find lasting love.