My patient looked me in the eye. Tears poured down her cheeks.
“It hurts so bad. Why does it have to hurt so bad?”
I often sit in a room with another person in emotional agony. It’s part of my job. I sit. I listen. I don’t interrupt. I tolerate the feelings, and do my best to understand.
“Why won’t he call me? Why doesn’t he love me?”
I told her what I knew to be true.
“This guy isn’t worth your time. He isn’t worth these tears. This isn’t about him. It’s about you. And these are old tears – the tears of a heartbroken child. Your heart was broken long before you met this guy.”
A child’s first love affair is with a parent – and a little girl’s is typically with her father. She instinctively adores this powerful man who controls the world. She would do anything to win his attention, his delight, his love.
Sometimes things go wrong.
The father might be distracted by other things – his career, his marriage, something. His baby daughter adores him. But his attention turns elsewhere.
For that child, his rejection is akin to abandonment – which is akin, for her, to death. The resulting pain is cellular, and unendurable. It is a child’s heartbreak. She thinks she is going to die.
That’s what my patient was feeling now.
We talked about how it felt, attempting to physicalize the symptoms to make them more conscious.
A cold steel ball in the gut. A choke in the throat – like a cry rising up and getting stuck. An ache at her core. She cried all the time, and couldn’t sleep.
This was heartbreak.
We returned to her childhood, to see where this hurt began.
Her father sounded awful – a swaggering bully, who verbally and physically abused his wife.
Still, when my patient was little, he became the positive focus of her life. She recalled afternoons spent sitting on his lap, being fussed over.
That ended abruptly when she was 10. Her father left with a mistress, then moved back in a year later – with the mistress in tow. After that, her childhood was a blur of drunken rages. Her father fought endlessly with both wife and mistress. The little girl got lost amid the drama. She spent most of her time alone, wounded by his rejection.
Now she was repeating the pattern. She’d found a guy like her father – a swaggering, charismatic bully who paid attention to her for a few weeks, then lost interest.
An adult doesn’t waste time on someone who doesn’t return her care. But a child loves differently – without question. The child seeks to please. If the child’s love is rejected, she locates the fault within. She must be to blame for refusing to please.
This is the formula for heartbreak – the pain of a rejected child.
My patient was pining for a someone who never existed, any more than the father who made gestures at parenting before he disappeared into his own self-fascination. Both men constituted a promise, not a reality Both appeared when they felt like it, then left. Neither deserved her love.
The first step in recovery from heartbreak is to recognize that this is a child’s pain – and address it as such. This is a cry of need that you have to answer yourself, by bringing your child the parenting she craves.
Instead of assigning importance to someone for whom you are unimportant, start treating your child as important. If you are there for yourself, you will not experience solitude as a child experiences it – as abandonment. You will feel secure in your own care.
The message for your child goes something like this:
You are good and unique and important. I love you. You deserve my love. I’m never going to put anyone else’s needs before yours, because you are mine – you belong to me – of me, and with me, and rely on me for care. You are my special love, always first in my heart.
Those are words a parent should tell a child, each and every day.
No one should ever break a child’s heart. Or let a child’s heart stay broken.
When I first started therapy, I was shocked by the cliche of “tell me about your childhood.” But it’s true–it defines everything. I found reading Alice Miller very, very difficult for that reason.
I’m still not convinced that childhood defines everything for a person, especially the complicated emotional things that are always going on. So many things happen in childhood, you are bound to be able to find a cause for anything there if you look. But just because the causal relationship makes sense doesn’t mean it exists.
thank you for this posting, Will. It makes a lot of sense to me.
This is absolutely right, in my decades of trying to recover from being abused and abandoned by both parents, I continually chose to be around the same. It was quiet frightening when I realized it. I wish I could fix it but I believe it to be too deep in the core of who I am. Its like a giant catch 22, I would love to open it all up and try to heal but because of the very issues, I have not been able to acquire in my life the type of love and support one would need to get through opening up that much heartache. I tried once with a therapist and spent three days physically sick and my husband got mad at me and stayed away instead of supporting me. I’m never okay for anyone in my life just like I was never okay for my parents. I can look back at it and say it was their problem, not mine, but that isn’t how I absorbed it as a child and I truly believe the damage to be permanent.
So many heartbroken children. So much suffering. I, too, am one of the heartbroken… by a mother who, herself, was heartbroken by her mother. I vowed to myself at some point early in my life that, if I did nothing else in my life, I’d stop the chain of unhappiness. Didn’t mean I was able to wave a magic wand and “get happy.” No, I’ve spent a lot of years struggling with depression, feeling unworthy. Spent a lot of years, too, in and out of therapy. Discovered my beautiful inner children (the five/six-year-old AND the teenager). It was easy to connect with the younger child but the teenager? Lots of anger there! At first, I was afraid of her. Then I began, slowly, to really listen to her and let myself discover all the positive things about her. I became my own parent. I’ve also begun experiencing feelings of “universal love” towards others in general. Sometimes when I’m at the grocery store, I look around at all the people (young, old, fat, thin, happy, sad, all types) and I feel such incredible love and affection for them… because I am they and they are me. We’re all the same… we all suffer… we all want to love and be loved. Finally, I’ve been reading on Zen philosophy – no mind – letting go of noisy thoughts which bring pain – and being focused on the present (which is the only place happiness can exist). Doesn’t mean I don’t experience frustration or anger, but I’m aware now of the impermanence of things. Reading THE GRAND DESIGN by Stephen Hawking was helpful in that regard. The universe is constantly changing and so are we. Nothing is permanent. I’d say to Karen (who wrote the previous post), you are not permanently broken. Your beautiful inner Karen is waiting for you to hold her tight and tell her how much you love her. She needs you. Don’t deny her love.
Thank you. I am going through a period where I work hard on what happened to me during my parent’s long and messy divorce. This brought some very healing tears. It managed to bring together, encapsulate and validate some fragments from the last few weeks. Thank you for helping me realise I am on the right path, and leaving a guidepost.
I’m crying.. endlessky crying, for mysekf, my young self, i never realised how heartbroken i was until now.