I’ve heard people say, “Just give it time and it will heal.” or “Time heals all wounds.” or “The only cure for a broken heart is giving it time.”
NO
NO
NO
NO
While it does indeed take TIME to heal a broken heart, a loss, a life-changing event, the WAY the time is spent is what is important to your healing.
You can’t just sit there twiddling your thumbs and thinking that as soon as enough time passes, you’ll feel fine and dandy once again.
You won’t.
What you will have succeeded in doing is modifying your behavior, your emotions and your thoughts so that you don’t have to think about the breakup, the event, the loss.
You may cover it up with a new love interest, a geographical change, food, shopping, etc etc. But that does NOT mean you’re over it or that you are healed.
As John James says, if time was all it took to heal wounds, there would be no unresolved grief. And there is plenty of unresolved grief. And there are plenty times when one loss triggers a mountain of grief because all the other losses come flooding in, screaming “LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!”
And you are overwhelmed and think it’s because of this latest loss. It’s not. It’s from all the unhealed losses in your life.
The only way out is through. You must take a look at your losses (the Grief Recovery Handbook has a nice graphing exercise to do that) and feel about them, look at where your overdeveloped defense mechanisms have landed you (in the soup, in bad relationships, in utter pain), and resolve to change things. Work through your latest loss. Do the Relationship Inventory, do the Life Inventory, work out the bad while working in the good and changing YOU.
If you don’t, then no amount of time is going to matter. Stop running. Turn around, face the pain and heal the wounds.
You can do this.
You are absolutely right, busy busy busy does not mean over it!
Cause I am definitely NOT.
thanks for your post
I find that this is true. When I am having a bad day I like to get out of my house and do something I enjoy to take my mind off of things. However, I feel as though I have made this a habit and instead of understanding why I am upset I ignore the feelings I am experiencing. I’ve really suppressed the way I have been feeling and I think that has caused me to retrogress. I kept telling myself I was “fine” and that I “didn’t care about what he was doing/thinking”. Really, I did (and I think I still do) care about whats up in his life. Time does help but I agree with Susan, you really need to do some work during that time and not just sweep things under the rug. However, I still think that getting out and going for a walk or going shopping (doing something that makes me feel good about ME) really helps me to get back in a happy place.
Just realizing that this recent breakup may have tipped the scales so I see I something bigger needs fixing is almost a gift. Yes a gift.
Thanks for putting validation & words to it. It’s time to get to work.
I have learned what I know about grief and grief work from this blog. Thanks so much Susan. The wisdom to find here as well as support is amazing. Just want to add something from my personal experience. Prior the break up that brought me here it was another break up. Then I ordered the grief recovery handbook, took a look at my losses and got NUMB as what I saw was an endless series of losses from early childhood and forward. I just could not take it only reading that book. It made me overwhelmed. So I escaped. To the relationship that took me here. My point is that if we have allot of unresolved grief. We need help from a grief counselor. And from real life support groups. And be good to us, As well as doing our inventories. Keep hang on the blog, read Susan’s book and choose some books recommended on the blog. All together it helps us to build new life’s. My recommendation, if we have allot of unresolved grief. Seek a grief counselor.
When I read this post today the first thing I thought of was wounds of the body. If you have a wound on your body, say… you fall down on a tent spike and get a deep wound in your thigh. That spike was probably dirty, and introduced all sorts of bacteria into the various layers of your tissues.
The outermost layer of your skin heals the fastest. Many times someone may simply tape up the wound and let it heal. They might think that, “ah it will be okay, just give it time” or they may think, “this hurts too much to let anyone mess with it”. They may not realize that that outer layer is going to heal before those inner layers can. All of that bacteria inside the wound will slowly fester. It may sit for days or weeks, tunneling beneath your skin. Eventually it opens up. The wound looks very infected, with pus and blood. The doctor goes in to debride the wound and finds that what started out as a 4 inch wound is now 6 or 8 inches and is poisoning you. The doctor puts you on an antibiotic and starts cleaning out the wound. He/she may pack the wound to keep the outer layer of skin from doing its very effective job of closing the wound again. It’s irrigated and packed over and over again until the wound is more and more shallow, then the packing is discontinued and the outer layer of skin is allowed to heal and close the wound.
People might try to use homemade remedies to bandaid the sore spot. If you slap some food, alcohol, shopping, sex or drugs over the wound, it might numb the pain of the wound, but it doesn’t treat the source of the infection. It doesn’t prevent that outer layer from closing up and pocketing all that poison. Debridement is painful. But it’s necessary to do, or it stays a suppurating wound.
I’m so grateful that this site and its posters are here to help me with the healthy treatments for the wounds of the heart and soul.
:)
Lele: Nicely written!
I’m using the “Time Heals All Wounds” phrase differently….I am using it to give myself time to heal. This past marriage (my 3rd) was the most volitale and dangerous one I’ve been in and I do not want to repeat my history.
This is the first time I have not jumped into another relationship and this is the first time I have lived alone without a man or children in the house. I have cried a river, been so angry that I had all sorts of horrible (and childish) things in my head that I wanted to do to him and his possessions. I have shopped, and wandered around aimlessly wondering where I fit in now. And, I am still uncomfortable with myself. HOWEVER, I am working on “D E B” for a change…and reading, journaling, going to therapy, trying my best to focus on what I want, what I need, and who I am. Sometimes it is a “one moment at a time” sort of focus, but I am getting there.
I am not even close to being “out of the woods” with the crazy feelings of self-loathing, emptiness, anger, and sadness. I can say I am much better than I was once the shock of the domestic violence wore off. And, I have waves of healthy Deb feelings and strength and waves of the “scared little girl” inside me who so desperately wants to be loved and cared for…and at all costs. I am learning to work on her needs in healthy ways. I am focused on LEARNING…and walking through the darkness until I feel whole.
I am thankful for Susan and your book and web site. It seemed to come to me exactly when I needed it: “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” I know that the book is sound therapeutic advice because it is what my therapist and I have been working on now for 3 months.
If you do not have Susan’s book, GET IT and read it and study it! If you want to get better and move away from the crazy dramatic, emotional mess, you will have to do the work…Gandhi said, “be the change you want to see in the world.”
Thanks for allowing me to have a voice here!
Deb
It’s funny because I’ve always been told that “time heals all wounds,” after anything bad happened. It’s really a huge load of bull. I’ve spent years dwelling on one loss after another and not really making peace with any of it, despite thinking I did. It’s only after the split with my ex that I had a nuclear weapon explode in my face and realized just how many things I had pushed aside without really sorting them out.
For example, I thought I made peace with my father’s emotional (and at one point physical) abandonment of me, and so I kept him in my life for years after the fact. During that whole time, I sought out friends or people that would hurt me or verify to me how unloveable I felt I was. It was self-fulfilling prophecy to the nines. Now that I’ve learned how damaging my choices have been in my life and now much better things are now on the flip side, my dad had to go as well, because there was no room for such unhealthiness in my healthier life.
Time didn’t cure anything. Hard work and honest self reflection did.
I agree, “time heals all wounds” is completely useless as advice! Without reflection, some fresh ideas and perspectives and doing some work on changing or accepting things – time actually makes things get WORSE!! Hurt becomes hard-wired and a natural reaction to the world, heartbreak starts to define our personality. I only realised how attached I was to these emotional states when I started doing the work and coming out of them. Kind of felt like I was velcroed to my negative feelings, then releasing them was like pulling the two materials apart.
Stuff happened, but I’m not just that. We have all different emotions rushing past each day – but we’re not them. Sitting back and letting those big defining statements “I’m THIS, my life should be THAT by now …” go, really makes a person feel lighter! And it frees you up to change your mind and try new things – you can work out who you are as you go along, and change it every day. Some of the things I was so desperate to prove, so attached to to show who I WAS are just not that important to me now.
So strange, when you have the tools to face how you really feel (which I didn’t have, or didn’t think I had, for years), you start to realise that lots of your habits and thoughts are really out of date with who you are! And updating them and letting the old things just slip away is such a great feeling!
TangoLola
[...] 12/29 TFTD ~ When The Person You Love Doesn’t Love You; Getting Past Your Breakup; and Time Does Not Heal All Wounds. She’s written an excellent book, Getting Past your Breakup: How to Turn a Devastating Loss into [...]
yes yes yes…i couldnt agree more about this post…which is oddly weird that after reading a section in the book one night it mentioned grief…and i thought to myself..i dont have grief…the last bf to leave was a reoccuring and i was glad he was gone..but i couldnt sleep and the longer i thought the more and more i thought about a relationship a few years ago i realized i never grieved fully…i wasnt properly grieving and then my grief turned into a relationship with someone else a year or so later…i never officially fully gotten over that relationship….so no..time does not heal all wounds..
To me thats what Fellowship is all about – helping one walk through the pain, step by step, to another reality.