Broken Hearts in Quarantine #FindYourTribe

Hi there everybody I’m Maggie O’Connor at Breakthrough MFT helping you reach your breakthrough moment.

What happens to a broken heart in quarantine? I’ll tell you, it breaks.
Like a falling tree thunders when it crashes to the ground, whether anyone is there to hear it – it breaks.

But a broken heart needs witnesses.

WE need witnesses.

To feel seen and heard by others to validate that our experience is worthy, or it’s even happening at all.

And in quarantine, those opportunities for witnessing are fewer, and further between.

But here’s the good news – though the opportunities may be fewer, they have potential to go deeper. Your witnesses, your friends and family – are more available and less distracted.

Also a side benefit is that everyone in the world right now is grieving a loss, at least of control and freedom – they are going through something ‘with’ you, or at least at the same time.

Also on the down side is that you have fewer opportunities to distract yourself from the pain of your loss – which is how we get relief from the intensity, and part of how you’ll eventually come out of it. Going to work, or a party even though you don’t feel like it, rebound dating or whatever – we don’t have it available.

So we are left with ourselves. And the body wants to do its work. The body wants the grief to move through, and discharge it.

And so, you can take the opportunity to become your own witness – to become curious about the parts of you that chose to be with someone who wasn’t right for you, or who would hurt you so bad.

It helps to acknowledge what was so good about the relationship and recognize what was important about that for you, what it ‘fed’ in you. Name it, and you know what you need more of in your life.

You may need to create your own distractions, especially if you’re not living with other people – kids and homeschooling can get you out of your head as much as going for a run, doing a puzzle or learning a new skill.

Broken hearts need witnesses; whether from outside or inside of you.

I’m Maggie O’Connor, hoping this helps you to break on through.

‘Killing It’ Today and ‘Losing It’ Tomorrow #CoronaCoaster

Have you had moments in this pandemic in which you felt like,

“All right I got this! It’s not it’s not so bad, it is what it is, we’ll get through this… it’s fine…”

…only to find yourself the next day or maybe even the next hour, teary or angry looking for it to get back to normal? (which is a little bit of denial, we’re not gonna lie…)

You’re not alone. What you’re feeling is totally normal!

I feel it; as much as information as I have about managing anxiety and grief! It doesn’t matter what you know when you feel like this. The point is that we feel like this because it’s real. We’re all at the point in which we’ve lost someone or we know someone who is sick or we’re worried about friends and family on the front lines. I want to take a little deeper to even say we have all lost a sense of control, in the losses of certain freedoms.

And so for that all of us are grieving; and you know from dealing with grief in your life before that is not a linear process. It doesn’t go from #1 to #5 like – “…Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance… OH, there we are!”

We can easily be triggered away from a sense of acceptance, the stage in which we say ‘It’s okay, it is what it is…’, back into one of those other stages because we were triggered by something that reminds us that we don’t have the control, or that this this is really hard. Later we’re going to develop a meaning from all of this, but we can’t do that while we’re in the middle of it.

We are not supposed to live like this, and that’s not about it being unfair, it’s about it being sad and sometimes lonely. Even when you’re surrounded by other people and if you’re talking about it with people that you know and love and getting your Zoom calls and that’s the most important thing to know that you’re not alone.

And if you don’t have people around you or if you need to talk about it on a different level, Breakthrough is not the only place that’s open online for therapy. There are therapists all over the country and I imagine all over the world who are doing sessions online… give us a call.

As I was writing this, a cardinal landed on the branch outside and the branch kind of swung and shook a little – it’s kind of windy outside – and he didn’t seem concerned at all… I can say today that I see that we all have wings. We will get through this we’re just in the middle of it right now… and you don’t have to be alone.

I’m Maggie O’Connor, hoping this helps you to break on through.