Goodbye, My Love

By Ron Neff

Goodbye, My Love provides a step-by-step guide to mending your broken heart, beginning with exactly what a broken heart is -- and why it feels the way it does. Lost love is grief, grief has stages, and hence your feelings keep changing along the way. So does what you need to do -- to quickly and effectively process those feelings, moving to the next stage, and soon to resolution and peace. Early on Dr. Neff examines many roadblocks: myths and folk wisdoms that actively work against you, as well as why many of your own natural impulses are best avoided. Mending a broken heart is not a simple matter. It doesn't come down to one, two, or even ten points on a checklist. There are dozens of Dos and Don'ts. It is not necessary to do all of these right, but the more of them you follow -- the faster you'll heal yourself. And Goodbye, My Love lays out all of these guidelines and exercises one at a time, in plain and simple language.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Mar 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483447032

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Ph.D

Copyright © 2016 Ronald L. Neff

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-4704-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-4703-2 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 02/25/2016

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Beyond Folk Wisdoms

Vulnerable No More?

A Chapter By Chapter Preview

Chapter 1   What You Are Up Against

Searching

800 Years of Romantic Script

Of Love And Pain

Where There’s Still Life

No Rituals

The Trouble With Friends

When Denial Wanes

Talking Yourself Into It

The Rest Is Grief

Chapter 2   Stages of Loss – And Renewal

Brief Overview

Stage I: Denial

Beyond The Basics: More And Less Denial

Denial And Stress

Denial And Anxiety

Stage II: Anger

Are You Aware Of Your Anger?

What Happens With Anger: Three Options

Get A Jump On It

Stage III: Sadness

It’s Okay To Be Sad

Nearly Home

Of Sadness And Tears

Crying Cues

Other Sadness Exercises

Stage IV Acceptance

Chapter 3   If It Just Ended: First Measures

What Depends

The Other Person Asked For Some Time

The Person Says They Want To See Other People

The Person Says They Have Met Someone New

One Or Both Of You Have Said It’s Over

Minimize Contact

If You Must Have Contact

Take Care With The Word Love

Don’t Use The Person’s Name

Say Goodbye

Put Their Things Away

Don’t Keep Playing The Tapes

Current Reports From Others

If The Person Calls You

Don’t Try To Avoid Thinking About The Person

Chapter 4   Grief As Opportunity

Sorting This Out

Your Rebound

The Opportunity

Grasping The Reins

How To Take Control

Make Three Lists

Chapter 5   Not On The Rebound

Low Self-Esteem: Why It Dooms Beginnings

Not Good For Them

Not Good For You

Going Too Fast

Your Vulnerability

Not What You Need

If Not Now - When?

Is The Other Person Ready?

Is The Person At Peace With Prior Endings?

Is Their Self-Esteem High Enough?

Watch Out For Downers

Over-Eager Beavers

Beyond Self-Esteem Problems: Our Romantic Heritage

Chapter 6   Of Romantic Love And Pain

The Origins: Knights And Ladies Fair

What Is This Thing Called Romantic Love?

Just Two Components

The First Component: Arousal

Leading Us Astray

The Interpretation: Culture’s Side

The Person’s Culture

The Context Or Setting

The Person’s Background

Personal Experiences

A Flimsy Heritage

Loving Poorly

So What Can You Do?

Chapter 7   Complications: Reasons For Failing To Mourn

Existential Panic

Too Many Losses Too Close Together

Fear of Resurrecting The Pain of Prior Losses

Ambivalence In The Relationship

Fear Of The Feelings Themselves

Fear of Falling Apart

Fear Of Lost Composure

Gender-Role Barriers

Lack Of Social Supports

Not Realizing They Are In Grief

Chapter 8   Rebuilding You: Self-Esteem And Identity

The Value Of Self-Esteem

Some Qualifiers

A Final Advantage

How To Build Self-Esteem

Choose Associates Carefully

But Words Can Never Hurt Me?

And Thee?

Taking Aim On Two Birds

The Power Of Tense

Enlisting Help

Earning Self-Esteem

Overcoming Bad Habits

Reward Yourself

Being Good To Your Inner Child

Liking And Rewards

Meeting Those Needs

Diversify

How Do You Choose Your Friends?

Chapter 9   Next Time Around: Loving Better

Keys To Loving Better

Start With Liking

Not Too Soon

Similarities

Let Me Count The Ways

Similar On What?

Go Slow

How To Go Slow

The Pleasure Bond

Familiarity

Keep Your Friends

Friends: Where Are They?

Friends And Feedback

Start With Friends

Family

Tender Fighting

Companionate Love

What You Need?

But What Of Romance?

Going For Both

Go For It

Bibliography

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Dedicated to Derek and David,

the best boys wherever they go.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First, I would like to acknowledge that I learned all I would ever need to know about being a good man, a good neighbor, a good fellow traveler in life from my father. He was perhaps summed up best by my mother (who had 7 sons): All of my boys think they are just like Sam. They aren’t really. Aye, but they all wanted to be. Second only to my father, I learned the most from Carl J. Couch, my mentor at The University of Iowa. The fact that Carl’s students felt pretty much the same way about him as my brothers and I felt about my father has now been enshrined in the Carl Couch Center for Social and Internet Research. Third, I must thank my editor and maddeningly charming provocateur, Kirk Hittner. Most important, I wish to cite my many trusting clients, who have often said that I am the only one who ever helped them – but really did it all themselves by doing their homework between sessions. That, doing your homework, is the key to success – in therapy and life.

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION

The night has a thousand eyes,

And the day but one;

Yet the light of the bright world dies

With the dying sun.

The mind has a thousand eyes,

And the heart but one;

Yet the light of a whole life dies

When love is done.

Francis William Bourdillon 1852-1921

When Mary Ann was twenty-one, her brother died … . All her friends came to support her …and Mary Ann understood why she was hurting … .Eight years later Mary Ann got a divorce … .Her friends were concerned but did not go out of their way to help … .There were no official rituals like a funeral … .No one, not even she herself, recognized that she was experiencing a normal, although painful, process of mourning.

Therese A. Rando,

Grieving: How to Go On Living

When Someone You Love Dies.

Losing in love, whether a failed marriage or an ended relationship, is a form of grief. As we will see in this volume, there are stages of grief. We experience the same stages whether the bereavement is over a loved one who dies - or a love that dies. If you are in the midst of a broken heart after a marriage or any serious relationship has ended, you may question your symptoms of grief. I’m a family therapist. Often clients who have lost in love attack themselves, saying, "What’s wrong with me? This is crazy. I shouldn’t be taking this so hard. Hey, nobody died!" It is my job to reply calmly, "Well, yes, I know it seems that way. But your feelings are normal. And there is a good reason for them. Something did die."

Grieving is about loss. And no loss is greater than losing someone you love. It matters not whether the loss is through death or a break-up.

But he was so mean to me. He was a jerk. I should be glad he’s gone, the client may reply. Yes, he may have been a jerk. And you may very well be better off without him. Perhaps far better off. But you still lost something. You lost what it was supposed to be. What you projected into it: all those hopes and dreams.

When you lose a mate you also lose parts of yourself. Parts of your identity. Perhaps the Beatles said it best in their tune, Yesterday. In their words, Suddenly, I’m not half the man I used to be. That’s right. All the things you were: to, for, with and because of the person you shared your life with. These parts of you have been ripped away; things you were, both in your own mind and in the minds of your friends and family. And all the things you did for that person - from bringing home the paycheck, to shopping, cooking, laundry, cleaning, picking out gifts, or leaving quietly in the morning, so as not to wake her, yet leaving her a kiss on the cheek while she slept - all those parts of you are gone. So you feel like you are less. You are! In time, you can put new things in their place. But for a while you will be less.

If you have recently lost in love, you won’t even be sure of who you are. You will be disoriented. And confused - not only about the person you are, but even what kind of person you want to be. You will be unsure of what you want to do, and even of what you believe in. Further, you will tend to be down on yourself. Peoples’ self-esteem nearly always drops sharply after the break-up of a committed relationship. And it takes some time to overcome this negative self-feeling. In the case of a marriage, the average person takes two full years to return to the level of self-esteem they had before the marriage started to fall apart. (Paul Bohannan, Divorce And After.) Interestingly, this happens even if you are the person who initiates the ending! Regardless of who is the active party in pushing for the break-up, you both lose large parts of yourselves.

And you are both angry. A good part of that anger - at times - each of you directs against yourself. So you tend to give yourself a hard time.

As the quotation at the beginning of this chapter points out, all of this is aggravated by another problem. Few people will understand. The virtual identity of grieving a lost love and grieving a death is not yet recognized in our culture. Even the experts have come to appreciate the nature of this losswork only recently. A few researchers have been piecing this together for three decades. But the average therapist is just now starting to learn that a broken heart is a form of grief. Not one therapist in ten learned of this equivalence in their coursework. And not one in a hundred received any training in how to mend your broken heart.

For my part, I’ve been studying and trying to mend broken hearts a little longer. Even before I finished graduate school, my research focused on love, romance and the foundations of successful relationships. My Ph.D. thesis was entitled On Romance and Why It Doesn’t Last. (The University of Iowa, 1977). I have over 20 years of direct experience in marriage, divorce-recovery, dating and other relationship counseling. Along the way, I served 4 years as a full-time psychotherapist at Southwest Behavioral Health Services. (Phoenix, AZ). For three years, I conducted a private practice specializing in divorce recovery: how to get over one’s loss and move on. During this time I designed and implemented many programs for Parents Without Partners, International, the largest single parents’ organization in the world. Most of the members of this organization are products of divorce. All of them are products of losing in love - either through the death of their mate or, more often, a break-up. They can go on to be successful in new love relationships - if, and only if, they first heal from the love they lost. I’ve also taught marriage and family and human sexuality courses at the college and university level for twenty years. In conjunction, I have counseled untold numbers of students with loss issues. (What do you suppose is the most frequent thing that brings students into a college or university counseling center? An ended relationship.) Finally, I spent 5 years in family courts, where I did conciliation counseling, mediation, and designed award-winning programs for high-conflict parents. (Superior Court of Arizona, Maricopa County). Out of all this the thing that consumes the most time has always remained the same: fixing broken hearts.

So how is it done? How do you mend a broken heart? Some of my therapist colleagues suggest, in fun, that I must have a magic wand or an arrow remover to pluck out Cupid’s oft misguided barb. But human emotions are not simple matters. It’s not one, two or even five things. There are dozens of specific things you should do - if you want to speed your recovery. And there are many other things you should understand, many facts about the way romantic love works, that will help empower you to get over someone as quickly as possible. Too many things to cover in any short pamphlet, seminar or other brief format. I’ve tried, but I’ve never been able to clarify my secrets to fixing broken hearts in a brief format. Hence this book.

Summaries of each of the chapters to follow are provided at the end of this introduction. The remainder of this introduction will be devoted to a few widely held non -solutions. This is a good place to begin - because the first step to recovery is overcoming these errors.

Beyond Folk Wisdoms

Not only do friends and family typically fail to understand the nature of your pain, they will often tell you little gems of folk wisdom that actively work against an early recovery. For example, Only time. Time heals all, they may tell you. This is a half-truth. Yes, people usually heal with enough time. But come to family court and you will see plenty of exceptions – people who get stuck somewhere in the grief process, typically in the anger stage – and often stay stuck there for ten years or more. These cases account for the bulk of the work that family court conciliators face – the 10% of our cases who take 90% of our time. Why? Because they just keep coming back.

Even in the normal case, when you would probably heal with enough time, this folk wisdom still misleads. Time is not the only medicine. You will heal much more quickly if you know how to do your losswork.

The time heals all folk wisdom always reminds me of a comment made by the brilliant economist John Maynard Keynes. In the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s, the classical economists kept saying, In the long run, the depression will go away on its own. In the long run, supply creates its own demand. Young Dr. Keynes replied, In the long run, we’re all dead. In brief, the short run matters.

Not only does the short run matter. But the reference to death is more appropriate than one might think. Another popular folk wisdom tells us, Nobody ever died of a broken heart. Wrong. People in the midst of grief can and do die from it. A recent study found that, in the day after the death of a loved one, the risk of a heart attack is 14 times higher among the aggrieved than among others of the same age. Losers in love are also at sharply elevated risk to heart attack. While the magnitude of the risk declines in the weeks and months to follow, it remains elevated until the grief has past. (Robert S. Weiss, Marital Separation. New York: Basic Books.)

Other popular folk wisdoms are still worse. It is widely believed that we recover best by taking up, right away, with someone new. The best cure, the guys at the bar may tell you, is a cold beer and a warm body. Not so. People are unique. You can’t replace them. You have to grieve them, facing the pain of your loss. And you don’t accomplish this in one sitting. You have to work through all the major stages of your losswork, one at a time. Only then are you ready for someone new. The person who runs straight to a new partner is vulnerable: an easy mark to fall in love on the rebound with the first person who renews some of their lost self-esteem. The first person who says, You’re a wonderful man (or woman). Or even I really like you. And when a new love is rushed into the two parties rarely have enough in common for the relationship to succeed. So the rebound lover nearly always fails in this new relationship - and quickly. Now they have another loss: more pain, more disorientation and more anger stacked on top of the initial heartbreak. Meanwhile they are spreading the disease. Hence the experts will tell you that one absolute rule in starting a relationship is this: Never take up with anyone who is less than six months over someone else.

Accepting the advice of a cold beer and a warm body poses another problem. Alcohol will not help you mend a broken heart. You were the first thing I thought of when I thought I’d drunk you off my mind, say the words of a country-western song that made Clint Black famous. The sudden fame this song yielded Mr. Black was no accident. These words hit squarely on a reality. When I encounter a client who is still in love with someone he or she lost ten or twenty years ago, I know one thing. I’m dealing with an alcoholic. Alcohol does not speed recovery from the pain of a broken heart. It extends it. It keeps you stuck.

Another popular folk wisdom maintains that some form of revenge is a key to healing a broken heart. Just last evening I saw this old wives’ tale played out in a rerun of the popular sitcom Mash. Hawkeye, Hunnicut, Hot Lips, and the rest of the crew set out to help a soldier overcome his pain after receiving a Dear John letter. They collectively author a letter of response in the jilted serviceman’s name, the key passage of which reports that he wishes to return her photograph, but he can’t remember which one is hers! The crew has collected about twenty snapshots of attractive females, and they have explained in his behalf that he is returning them all, so she can reclaim her own. He trusts, of course, that she will return the others. In this sitcom episode, the bereft soldier is greatly buoyed by this - and gaily suggests an additional put-down to combine with theirs. This is not reality, however. In reality, the recently bereft lover is still very much emotionally embedded in the one he loves, and anything he does to hurt her will soon add to his own pain. This is why you so often read in the newspaper about a person killing his estranged lover, and then turning the gun