How many heartbreaks does it take to heal a soul? I don’t know, lifetimes?

If I were to die and be reborn again
I would want to be your tear
To be born in your eye
To live on your cheek
To die upon your lips

– By Melinda Green, age 16

A client once asked: “How do I live with so much sadness? Do I go to work? Do I read a book? Do I exercise? I don’t know how to live.”

I answered: Do all of it. Do none of it. You don’t have to be fake or pretend. Be sad as you read, work, or go to work. Life is not an either/or. Stare at the trees, count the stars, binge on movies, eat popcorn and chocolate.

Feelings are messy. Life is an “and”. Embrace all of you, your story, and your healing.

Learning to hold and express your emotions is healing and a way of loving yourself. Life is for the living. To feel is to live.

“Trauma is incomprehensible and unbearable. It overwhelms the mind, body, and brain and shatters you to pieces. You cannot tell the trauma story — you live it out in your body.” – Dr. Bessell van der Kolk

It sits so deep in emotion, terror, and fear that no words can convey it. Trauma is lived out in heartbreak, gut-wrenching feelings, and intense reactions that hijack the body.

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked. “Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat, “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.” “How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice. “You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.” – Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll

When first opening to give and receive love, a confusing, messy roller coaster ride of emotional trauma bubbles up your nervous system, triggering buried memories and emotions that feel as if you are on the brink of madness. Lack of trust, unworthiness, guilt, and profound loss emerge from the shadows of your soul

Love is the healer, the elixir, the mystical potion of peeling the layers of generational heartbreak. Love will dig up every unhealed part of you.

Sadness and deep grief are the process of trauma recovery.

Embracing this emotional and physical intensity takes radical self-acceptance, loving-kindness, and a compassionate witness/adult who can guide you into the warmth of the light.

Being sad does not make you lose your intelligence, talents, or self-worth. Sadness teaches vulnerability and patience. Sadness allows your inner child to rest in your heart and find nourishment, warmth, and safety.

“For a woman, the greatest loss of all is herself.” Adrienne Rich

At one time, I hated my heartbreak, which meant I hated my inner child. It is the inner wounded child that is brokenhearted. She is the one who needs to heal and recover.

This memory is from a photo I still have: I am two, crying, sitting on my mom’s lap outside the apartment complex in Brooklyn, Clarendon Gardens. My face is red and wet from tears, and my nose is running. I am wearing a pink jumpsuit. My mother is talking nonstop to a neighbor, Lynn, ignoring me. All she does is brush my bangs away and keep talking.

I remember thinking that Lynn’s sweet face was lovely, framed by a soft chin-length bob, blue eyes, and rounded mouth. She always smiled at me. My mother, with cold, ice eyes and twisted blonde hair on her head, was mean. Why did Lynn want to talk to my mother? Doesn’t Lynn know how my mother’s screams hit?

I sob and sob; my stomach hurts bad. My mother looks at me with a grim, cold stare. Her eyes cut me like a knife. They stung like her slaps and pinches on my forearms and her punch down the steps. I had to go numb to tolerate the ice blue freeze of her touch.

No one ever picked me up or soothed me. Not my angry, violent mother, and not my self-absorbed father, who pushed me away when I sought his affection and never looked into my sad blue/green eyes or wondered why Marta cried so much. Aunts and uncles turned me away. My older sister, tormented by abuse as well, turned her abuse on me and treated me like an enemy. Told me she hated me forever. And she did.

Caught between these unavailable parents, I learned early that love is not to be trusted, that people will let me down, and that no matter how urgently I beg– nurture and satisfaction will always remain just out of reach–. The world is a tragic, depressing place where everyone I loved was in pain, and I never got what I needed. My dad never held me, comforted me, or saved me from my mother’s beatings and suicide attempts. My eyes saw it all.

By three, I was basked in sorrow, longing, and a broken heart. At 9, I felt a freeze in my body, and I developed a spastic colon. I hated myself and my family. My pediatrician prescribed me Darvon. He never questioned what was going on in my house. The wall was built… I believed that everyone hated me; I was ugly, stupid, and not good enough. I buried those beliefs so deep and built a wall of nails and broken glass so I wouldn’t dare to climb that wall.

I was first diagnosed with PTSD when I was fifty-four; after my sister committed suicide, my mother died in a psych ward, and I was in and out of hospitals with an unexplained illness and constant panic attacks.

The psychiatrist said, “You’ve had PTSD your whole life, and so did your family.”

I am now seventy-five. My road to sanity has felt like knives skinning me alive, pins and needles poking at me from the inside out, night terrors, Nazis hanging me from my limbs, fear of nameless faces stalking me, wanting to murder me in my sleep. Paranoia was my shadow. I thought every person I met hated me.

Addiction, co-dependency, and chronic illness were a tangled mess in my mind and body. The medical profession, the psychological profession, and spiritual gurus had no idea what PTSD is and still don’t. Approaches, brain research, and so-called “trauma-informed” strategies are band-aids that cover up the real and true “dark night” of the soul. I had to travel to reclaim my right to be alive, feel alive, and believe I deserved self-love.

There is a deep shame, guilt, and self-hatred that cuts deep into the skin, bone, and blood from PTSD. Recovery, finding peace and safety within, takes a lifetime. Finding the medicine bag that works is personal, generational, and unique for each person who suffers from trauma.

In our addictive society, we are brainwashed to believe that winning, being good, and looking good are the goals. Goodness, appropriateness, and niceness are societal definitions. Who sets those standards? At the same time, we are taught that emotions are weak and to be apologized for. We get hooked on perfectionism. It is all a cover-up—a lie.

The inner child yearns for truth and trust. She needs vulnerability, creativity, acceptance, inclusion, and compassion—not a taskmaster to achieve, to be good or nice. To express heartbreak is a foundation of safety, building boundaries, and empathy. Trust is a fragile part of ourselves and needs strength.

My greatest fear in surrendering to my heartbreak was that I would wind up like my mother in a psych ward or commit suicide like my sister. Neither, in reality, was true. My fear caused me to be dishonest with myself, judging and haunting myself with punitive thoughts and dreams, which limited my life and built a tough wall around my heart.

When I finally accepted the cycle of grief, terror, and heartbreak that comes and goes with trauma, my house of glass cracked and crumpled. I surrendered and waved a white flag.

My heartbreak slowed and humbled me and silenced my cyclic “I am not good enough” mantra. I connected my broken heart with the voice and emotions of my inner trembling child. Then, and only then, did she believe I would never abandon or judge her feelings and need to be loved.

The loss of the feminine is deeply rooted in universal generational, family, and biblical history. Heartbreak midwifed my empathic nature to emerge. It taught me how to love, not a happily after love, but a love that grew wisdom from my pain.

For a long time, I felt shame and judgment around heartbreak. Then, slowly, it all turned to a quiet sadness that guided me to my grief. Renewal, refuge, and radical self-acceptance emerged from my heartbreak. Then, I surrendered to humility, the ultimate equalizer of the heart.

To be in the world with heartbreak gives you the capacity to speak with truth, wisdom, and fierceness to be alive.

My writing, art, healing, inner life, and psyche expanded into a mad brilliance of uncensored expression. My tears nurtured my jumbled nerves, twisted thinking, and neglected feelings, which flourished into a rich, quaking, yelping, green forest of wild beauty.

There are wise and powerful ways to allow heartbreak to heal. They are simple to list but challenging to live. It takes daily practice—over and over and over.

1. Breathing and grounding your emotional chaos
2. Slowing down and talking to your body
3. Awakening your senses. All of them (noticing, receiving, and feeling)
4. Being present with what you are experiencing without judgment
5. Accepting imperfection and the pain of being invisible for so long
6. Understanding the story of your heartbreak
7. Having faith in your worthiness. Being curious about what faith means to you
8. Writing your story of heartbreak (or any creative outlet)
9. Practicing daily to feel, express and receive
10. Painting, writing, and collaging your sadness

Materials:
Oil Pastels, large sheet of white paper, drawing pad, acrylic or dry markers, magazines to paste images from magazines or the internet symbolizing sadness. Go to unsplash.com

Instructions:

• Use lines, shapes, and colors to draw sadness, grief, loss
• Go back to an event or time you experienced these emotions and check out how your body felt.
• Come from your body. Beyond labels and definitions.
• Post the images on a wall.
• What was the process of drawing like?
• What thoughts, feelings, and sensations came up for you during the art?
• Observe the images for similarities and differences.
• Describe the feeling with a memory, poem, photo, or metaphor.
• Stay in the moment with the image’s detail, not what it looks or reminds you of.

A Woman’s Heartbreak, by Marta Luzim

When a woman’s heart is broken, her soul is lost, and her spirit is frozen. Her whole life becomes obsessed with finding her heart. When her heart has been broken, eaten by mad dogs and scientists, lost and confused, estranged from her soul to guide her, she becomes tired of searching for the pieces. Exhausted, in fact.

Exhaustion is not allowed for a woman. She must get up and do her work to care for everyone and everything.

Exhaustion is not something you cure or an illness written in medical journals. When a woman becomes exhausted, she becomes mean and hateful if she cannot find a hole to crawl up in and cry and scream.

Instead, she is sent to spas, retreats, or asylums to be told to have gratitude, smile, or whatever will numb her anger. Finally, her exhaustion is called depression. She is diagnosed as an inconvenience to the world. She becomes a pathology instead of a human being healing.

After all that, she is prescribed Prozac or any other anti-depressant to give her balance. The world pats itself on the back, believing its job is done. Now, she can fit in, be happy, and belong in society.

A society that feels disgusted when a woman mirrors everything dark, beautiful, and wounded—that reflects the cruel empty hole that lives in the heart of humankind—symbolizes all of the atrocities that man has to offer—rape, incest, war, abandonment, hunger, poverty, greed, betrayal, and abuse, will oppress, shun and punish the vulnerability, sensitivity, rawness, and madness she shows the world.

There is no greater cry than a woman lost and wandering about with a broken heart. She has no place to rest her weary head. It is a silent suffering cry. A cry other women hear only if they have awakened to their own heartbreak.

Once she starts to cry even Hell fears her wrath. No one wants to hear a woman moan, howl, and sob. They say she is being a victim, dependent, a child. So she holds it down, back, repressed.

Then she morphs into the warrior wolf, sniffing, hunting her prey, and howling, I am here. I dare you to touch my heart. I will eat you alive. One day, she explodes or becomes crazy with madness, hunger, and isolation and lays down and dies.

The only way a woman can find her broken heart is to know it is broken and feel its ancient pain. The only way to know she even has a heart is to feel the pain of her heartbreak.

Then she will know how lost she is, how forgotten she has become–to herself—a heart that loves with ferocity, vulnerability, and a soulful song that heals.

That is a woman’s story, her heroine’s journey: to first, with fierce devotion, love her broken heart with warmth, tenderness, and nourishment. Then, she offered her heart to the world with strength and vulnerability. Then, she could take a deep breath and know she had come home. Then, she would belong to herself.

The cry from a woman’s heart is a wild, fierce song of the feminine. It is the harmonic homecoming of the universe. Everything after that is grace.

What is your heartbreak saying to you? Invite your heart to speak its truth.

Photo by Dev Asangbam on Unsplash

Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

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Marta Luzim, MS

Marta Luzim, MS has worked with women, families, and couples for over forty years. She is a Psychospiritual Therapist with an MS in Counseling Psychology and a BS in Education. She is an expert in womens’ story-telling and a Next Level Practitioner in trauma. Marta holds certifications as a Kaizen creative coach and metaphysician; she is an intuitive intimacy trainer, mindfulness breath worker, and Kabbalah of Character expert. She is a self-published author, has published articles in Citysmart Magazine on creativity, healing, and women’s issues, is the third-place winner poet of Smell of Brooklyn Bricks through the Story Circle Network, and is an artist and playwright. Her novel, The Calling, and her book, Heart of A Woman, can be found on Amazon. In addition, Marta is the president of Give Her A Voice, Inc., a 501c3 organization that produced The Telling, a multi-media theatrical performance of women’s stories of recovery. www.giveheravoice.org  She is currently working on her memoir on her soulful journey recovering from trauma. She can be reached at marta@womeswayin.com and her website is: www.womenswayin.com