By Margaret Paul, Ph.D.

Celine, an only child, was 7 years old, her mother died tragically in a car accident. She and her father were devastated. However, unlike so many of my clients who lost parents and no one was there for them, Celine’s father was completely there for her, even while dealing with his own grief and heartbreak. Celine could call him anytime at work and he would talk to her or come home to lovingly hold her. Because he was so completely there for her, her feelings of grief, heartbreak, sadness and sorrow did not get stuck in her body. Each time they came up, they were released due to the caring, compassion, tenderness, gentleness, consistency and understanding of her loving father.

As a result of her father’s love, Celine did not develop the fear of intimacy and loss that so many people experience as a result of the loss of the parent. She did not close her heart to protect herself from future loss.

However, most of us did not have loving parents to help us move through the heartbreaks of childhood. In fact, many us had parents that caused much of the heartbreak with various forms of abuse. We needed to numb out and find protections/addictions to manage the heartbreak and loneliness of rejection, abuse, and loss. As a result, the pain got stuck in our bodies, causing both physical and emotional damage.

EMOTIONAL DAMAGE

Without a loving parent such as Celine’s father, we had no choice but to learn to buffer the pain. You might have learned to use food, drugs, or alcohol at a young age. Perhaps you became addicted to TV, computer games, tantrums, fantasy or caretaking. You might have learned to stay focused in your mind rather than in your body, and to live in the past or future rather than in the present moment. In one way or another, you learned to disconnect from your deeper feelings of heartache, heartbreak, loneliness, helplessness over others, sorrow, and grief, because you did not have the ability to manage these very painful feelings any other way.

But addictions and inner disconnection cause other problems – loss of a sense of self, low self-worth, fears of rejection and engulfment. The more you disconnect from your feelings, the more you are dependent upon others for approval and acceptance. This leads to relationship problems and to more addictive behaviors. The result is living with anxiety, depression, fear, anger, guilt, and/or shame.

Childhood heartbreak has hugely devastating effects that need to be healed as adults. Now, we can go back and learn to give ourselves what didn’t receive as children – compassion, caring, tenderness, gentleness and understanding – and heal much of the emotional damage. We can learn to manage the deeply painful feelings that we could not manage as children.

PHYSICAL DAMAGE

When children are physically and/or sexually abused, the energy it takes to survive caused a huge amount of stress in the physical body. When stressed, the body goes into flight or fight, which means that the blood leaves the organs, brain, and immune system and goes into the arms and legs for fighting or fleeing. However, when we cannot fight or flee, we freeze, causing the blood to stay stuck in our arms and legs. This gradually erodes the immune system, preparing the way for illness. Much current illness is the result of childhood abuse.

While we can currently eat well, get enough exercise, and heal the emotional stress, sometimes the physical damage is deeply challenging. It is not easy to heal the years of damage caused by the stress of abuse. It is vitally important for you to not judge yourself for the illnesses you might be suffering that started as a child from being abused or from suffering unbearable loss.

Today, you need to be gentle with yourself. Judging yourself for the emotional and physical damage of heartbreak only causes more heartbreak. Instead, you need to be deeply caring, tender and gentle with yourself, consistently giving the love and acceptance to yourself that you did not receive as a child. This is what heals.

Margaret Paul, Ph.D. is a best-selling author of 8 books, relationship expert, and co-creator of the powerful Inner Bonding® healing process. Are you are ready to heal your pain and discover your joy? Learn Inner Bonding now! Click here http://www.innerbonding.com  for more articles and help.

By Lucy O’Brien

You know when you’re in a good relationship; it feels warm and cosy like an old slipper. You feel a sense of belonging and closeness. You can depend on him everything feels good. If this feeling is slipping away from your relationship, perhaps it’s time for some relationship repair. Read on to find out why relationships go cold and how you can make it warm and cozy again.

When you first meet, it’s easy to be nice to each other. You are happy in his company and it seems easy to meet each other’s needs. However, in many relationships, somewhere along the way, the warmth and cosiness fades away and eventually what is left are 2 people feeling lonely and isolated. The honeymoon period is definitely over and deterioration is setting in. Often the point at which it started to go wrong went unnoticed. You just both woke up one day to find that you weren’t even quite sure that you liked each other anymore.

There are various factors that can strangle the love in our relationships. It is said that relationship experts can quickly tell which relationships are doomed by the way that couples treat each other in the early stages. By far the biggest killers are anger, resentment and contempt. If you regularly have these types of feelings towards your partner then your relationship may be doomed in the long-term, even if you think it is OK now.

So why do we exhibit these traits in relationships? Well, often when we first meet, our partner seems perfect but as we move past this phase, we become acutely aware of all his imperfections. This disappointment can be unexpected and hard to bear. Often the things that were endearing to us in the beginning turn out to be the things that irritate us so much when we get to know him properly.

Many of our responses are to do with how we expect our man to behave in the relationship and these expectations and reactions are often learned from our parents. When we were growing up we saw how our parents handled their relationships and now we carry the behaviours and patterns that we learned into our relationships.

Resentment starts to accumulate in relationships when our man does not act according to our expectations and therefore we feel that we are not getting our needs met. Often we are simply expecting too much and we can’t expect him to meet our needs when we don’t know how to communicate them effectively.

If we have learned to exhibit anger as a response, then we may have become a naturally angry person. If we learned to repress this anger, we may accumulate resentment but are not able to express how we feel. Resentment is often hidden but may be displayed openly or subtly in the form of contemptuous gestures such as eyebrow rolling, ignoring or criticising. It is inevitable that we will continue these behaviours in our closest relationship, even though this may not be appropriate.

When we exhibit anger and contempt, our partner becomes defensive and pulls away. He usually does not know how to communicate his needs or what he is feeling. This builds barriers in relationships and leads to mistrust and isolation. A partner who feels hurt often feels justified in hurting the other and so a negative cycle of destruction begins.

So, what can we do in relationships to stop communication break down and our relationship needing repair? Well, firstly keep in mind that a relationship takes work to foster good habits and communication. If you ignore it, the good times will start to drift away. Accept that your partner isn’t perfect and stop expecting so much. Use appreciation, affection and respect instead of anger and contempt to keep it warm and cosy. And finally, learn good communication skills so that both partners get their needs met. If you want a good relationship, don’t leave it up to your man. Take responsibility for creating the strong, loving relationship that you want today.

By Neysa Ellery Taylor