The Mind Deceives You When Your Heart Is Broken

Hearts can be crushed as easily as bones. When this happens, your thoughts often deceive you. The mind deceives you. It pulls you into despair and convinces you to hold on to the smallest impossible hopes of reconciliation. But little by little, your heart returns to reality, and your mind returns to its normal state. The stage where we with dignity unite to go through the grieving process of our broken heart.

The theme of a broken heart is sadly frequent, but we never get used to it. In the 70s, one of the most successful songs was a Bee Gees song that included the following lyrics. “How can one heal a broken heart? How can you stop the rain from falling, how can you stop the sun from shining? ” We can see a little despair in these words. Words that seem to tell us that the loss of love causes a wound that never heals.

“It is better to have loved and lost than to have loved at all.”

–Alfred Lord Tennyson–

Something that social psychologists have often pointed out is the fact that people, on average, fear social or emotional pain, much more than physical pain. For example, the thought of breaking a bone scares us as much as suffering disappointment, being a victim of infidelity, or an emotional breakdown.

Our bodies know what to do and how to react to a physical injury or infection . But when a relationship is broken, our organs and minds experience a complete blockage. Experts tell us that the brain interprets this form of separation as a form of combustion. It experiences emotional pain in the same way as physical pain, but the difference is that we do not know how to repair the emotional wound. Therefore, our minds fall for a time into a mixture of contradictions, false hopes and meaningless reasonings. The mind deceives us in a way.

The mind deceives you when you have a broken heart

The mind deceives you, albeit unintentionally. It does so because it is hurt, lost, and still attached to your broken heart. To a heart that does not know how to deal with rejection particularly well, or how to say goodbye to a love that was everything to you until recently. When this happens, we are trapped in a complex network of defense mechanisms that try to deny what happened. And if that were not enough, even more sophisticated and unfavorable processes occur in our brains.

Our brain activates the secondary somatosensory cortex and the posterior dorsal insula. These are the structures associated with physical pain. As we have previously pointed out, emotional suffering is often experienced in the same way as physical suffering. All this means that we cannot think clearly and that we are deceiving ourselves. Let’s look at how this process usually works.

When your mind deceives you, it does so unintentionally because it is hurt.

1. I have lost the most important person in my life

The emotional pain evokes anxiety, and the anxiety searches for a refuge, for nooks and crannies, where it can nourish itself in desperation. At this stage after a breakup, it is common for harmful thoughts to arise, such as “I have lost the most important person in my life, the only one who could possibly make me happy”.

The mind deceives you. It actually takes you as a prisoner. The most important person in your life is you. Your former partner was someone who was important to you at a time in your life that is now over, and that is something we must accept.

2. I have done something wrong, I can change!

Denial is the first part of the struggle, and this is where we inevitably grab for straw. It is common for us to blame ourselves and to tell ourselves that we have neglected the relationship, that we have done something wrong that can still be repaired.

Then we almost obsessively try to convince the other person that we should try again. That we should start with a clean slate, go back to the beginning. Because what we just had should definitely not be thrown away like that. Once again, you are deceiving yourself. Your heart hurts and your good intentions dazzle you. You just have to accept the cold reality – the other person no longer loves you and there is no other part.

The obsession of connecting and making contact

We live in a time of immediate communication, immediate help and inability to tolerate frustration of any kind. How can I accept that my loved one is no longer sending me messages?  How am I to understand that he has blocked me and that he no longer wants anything to do with me?

Our mind will invent a thousand excuses to explain the silence, the rejection, or how long it takes him to respond. Moreover, it will even devise a thousand strategies to be able to give one last message to him or one last desperate request. These destructive dynamics will last until our dignity finally tells us that enough is enough. And that is the moment we take the necessary steps, such as. to delete our former partner from our list of contacts and on social media.

“Sometimes when a person walks, the world seems empty.”

4. My life will never be the same again

This statement is true. In fact, our lives will no longer be the same after suffering this emotional breakdown. But your mind deceives you once again as it often whispers to you that you will never be happy again. It tells you that you do not deserve love again, that you ruin everything you touch, and that you will never find anyone else like the one who has just left you. Such thoughts are a form of absurd torture. Of course, life will not be the same again . It will be different. It gets new and it gets a lot better because we do not want anyone by our side who just did not love us. Or maybe he did, but not in the right way.

5. I must know the reason he stopped loving me

Let’s admit it. Is there ever a clear, objective and concrete reason why we stop loving someone? Maybe sometimes, but not always. We may become obsessed with it and even despair , but the flame of love sometimes goes out without us really knowing why. There may be others involved. There can be many small things that create something big. But most fractures cannot be translated into words . In these cases, the only way forward is acceptance and honesty. Acceptance on our behalf and honesty from the person who has stopped loving us who bravely makes it clear to the other person that there is no turning back and no future in the relationship.

Eventually we know we can not always trust our minds when we have a broken heart. The mind deceives us in that situation . But most of the time, emotions and logic are part of the struggle. If we accept what has happened, it will help bring sense to this chaos around us. Little by little we will begin to find our way back to the protection of our own self-esteem. And there we begin the delicate, yet important task of healing our heart.