All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.
Illustrations by Robert Gentile.
Cover graphic by Alberto J. Palacios.
Disclaimer
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This book was designed to help individuals wishing to help themselves and is not meant to replace the work of a professional therapist or counselor. For individuals with a diagnosis of a mental illness, implementation of the techniques provided in this book and the accompanying audio should only be done under the guidance of a mental health professional.
Every effort has been made to make this book as complete as possible given the nature of the topic. Much of this book contains information based on the experience of the author, who does not claim that each article of information has been empirically studied or proven. Doing so would preclude sharing this valuable information.
This book is for educational purposes only. The author and publisher shall have neither liability nor responsibility to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the information contained in this book.
A deep love resides inside each of us. This love is independent of the desires, thoughts, and opinions, good or bad, which are readily offered to us. It is a love that is gentle and kind, accepting and nonjudgmental, playful and spontaneous, courageous and curious. It is always encouraging and always evolving. This love can be discovered only through turning off the noise around us, coming to ourselves in silence, meditation, and prayer. If we listen carefully, we will hear the murmurs of our inner voice tell yearnings of our truest selves. What is available to us is a profound understanding, appreciation, and full acceptance of self, all of the good and all of the bad.
Only when we truly know that we are able to tap into this part of ourselves can we begin to love others fully. Love for others is the manifestation of love for self. We cannot love another more than we love ourselves. Life is a mirror. If you want to know what love for yourself looks like, look at your love for others. If you want to know what your love for others look like, look at your love for self. When you love yourself this way, you love God this way. This relationship is the divine love triangle: self, God, and others in any order.
Marlon Hartley Lindsay
Acknowledgments
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This book could never have happened without all of the broken hearts that have been brought to me over the years by all of my beautiful clients. It was their tears-turned-smiles and their imprisonments-turned-liberations that inspired my own heart to share this work with the world. I honor their honesty, their openness, and their commitment to themselves that they displayed in seeking a better life experience. Each of these clients taught me something about the nature of the heart, the nature of heartache, and the methods that help in its healing. I am especially grateful to Andrew Childers, who upon hearing my idea for this book insisted that I make it a reality.
I am also grateful to those whom I have loved and to those for whom I have allowed my heart to break. It was in the loving that I learned the most about the heart and love, and it was in the breaking that I learned the most about heartache and the pathways to healing. Some of the techniques presented in HeartBreak Therapy were refined partly from using them to extricate myself from periods of emotional turmoil resulting from breakups, while others are commonly found within the repertoire of hypnotherapists and Neuro-Linguistic Programming practitioners everywhere.
Thank you to my teachers, Marlene Mulder and Randall Churchill, at the Hypnotherapy Training Institute. Your heart-centered training many years ago gave me the skills to bring healing to so many and provided a foundation of love and integrity that continues to weave its way through my work and my philosophy.
Thank you to those dear friends who believed in this project and volunteered their time to review, edit, and provide feedback on the various iterations of this text: Erika Atkinson, Karin Ott Kristensen, and Stefana Serafina. Thank you to Alberto Palacios, who designed the cover graphic out of the kindness of his soul, and to my genius and comedic brother, Robert, for generously enlivening the book with his playful illustrations, asking nothing in return but to simply join me on this adventure.
Lastly, I give thanks to my loving partner, Andrew Nolan, who is not only a brilliant healer, but who unceasingly teaches me and inspires me to think bigger and bolder.
Introduction
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The ending of a loving relationship can be one of the most devastating of human experiences. Romantic heartbreak is often experienced as a shock to the system on par with other human tragedies, such as death, war, disease, and natural disasters. And while these other forms of human tragedies are commonly acknowledged and commemorated with societal gatherings (funerals, cleanup efforts) and interventions (relief efforts, compensation, grief counseling), when we lose a loved one through the ending of a relationship, we are commonly left to our own emotional survival skills to sort ourselves out. For most people, emotional survival skills are at a minimum, and all too often heartache sufferers end up in addiction, depression, or worse.
It is my hope that HeartBreak Therapy offers a healthy healing pathway to those with nowhere else to turn and that it provides an expanded array of therapeutic options and perspectives on a topic that gets far too little attention from mainstream mental health practitioners.
It is also my hope that the book and audio format of HeartBreak Therapy provides a new model for other hypnotherapists and neuro-linguistic programmers to explain their beautiful and powerful healing work to the layperson and to bring the mechanisms behind these healing modalities out of the shrouds of mystery and into the light of day.
Andrew Gentile
Chapter 1
My Experience Working with Heartache
My greatest joy in life is helping to alleviate suffering. Working with heartache has been one of the most satisfying aspects of my hypnotherapy practice. I am always humbled and honored when a client seeks my help in rising out of their pain into a more peaceful state of being.
Clients seeking help with heartache often arrive in great distress, feeling torn up inside, and are often embarrassed at their loss of self-control, both emotionally and behaviorally. Most of us have been therethese experiences are well known to anyone who has had an unrequited crush, a broken first romance, or any intense love connection that came to an end. We are often obsessed with our former partners activities and sometimes engage in stalker-type behavior, even though such compulsions are completely out of alignment with our typical day-to-day personalities and ethics. These out-of-character feelings and compulsions are often overwhelming, and they give us a feeling that we have lost touch with who we are. This sense of being out of control emotionally deals a major blow to our self-esteem and our self-confidence.