Matters of the heart

Today I want to talk to you about something that brings people to my practice very often, men and women alike: matters of the heart. Something that may sound trivial at first compared with many of the subjects covered in these articles can become real torment for a lot of people. Plenty of broken hearts come through my door, along with others teetering on the edge and others simply drifting like a ship without a rudder, with no clear idea of which way to go.

A broken heart, or one that can’t make up its mind, can cause a great deal of suffering. Whatever each patient’s particular situation, there’s one underlying factor that dominates these consultations: the idealisation of love. Here’s a queen bee, ladies and gentlemen. The idea of love, of the couple, of the soulmate… everything that has been drummed into us for as long as we can remember. Those expectations we use as a guide when looking for our “other half”, and the yardstick by which we measure everything we experience in romantic love. And this is where the spectacular falls come, leaving deep wounds. In these cases, the best thing a psychologist can do is accompany the patient while they heal their wounds, and at the same time help them learn from them.

Intelligent, very switched-on people come to me with deeply irrational ideas about what love is and how it should feel. These ideas are very, very deep-rooted, the product of our upbringing, experiences, books, films, conversations… (even TV adverts that last only a few seconds!). From a very young age we’re taught the well-worn idea of the soulmate, which makes us believe there’s only one ideal person for each human being. Only one person on the face of the earth can make you happy and “complete” you. This implies that if it doesn’t work out with that person, you’re inevitably doomed to failure, condemned to feel unhappy and incomplete. The idea we’re taught that we’re incomplete until we find another human being to keep us company is truly harmful. A relationship should be the result of wanting to share your life with someone who enriches it even more, not a need in order to feel whole. We grow up believing we can’t feel fulfilled until we find someone, and this leaves many people with a sense of dissatisfaction with life, feeling they’re “not enough” unless they’re part of a pair. It’s no wonder that someone brought up with these ideals feels utterly miserable after a break-up.

Not to mention the all-too-familiar relationship OCD, the tip of a pyramid built on dozens of irrational ideas about love and how it should be lived. “I should miss my partner whenever I’m not with them”, “I should feel intense love 100% of the time; if I don’t, it means I don’t love them”, “I shouldn’t find other men/women attractive”…, to name just a few.

It’s hard, because society constantly sends us messages that reinforce these ideals of what love is and how it should be lived. It pushes us to set certain standards and to measure our thoughts, feelings and actions against them. These messages reach us all the time, in many different forms, from the most blatant to the most subtle.

In these cases, a lot of cognitive therapy is needed (working to change harmful, irrational thoughts) in order to reach more realistic and human expectations about how we experience love. And so help the person to recognise it, look after it and enjoy it when it’s right in front of them; to let it go if the time comes; or… if that’s the case, to know what isn’t love, even when it seems to be.