After the Breakup: Emotional Pain as a Catalyst for a Beautiful Life

“What is to give light must endure burning.” ~ Viktor E. Frankl

In the dark, there’s a space that’s calling me
There’s a flame of light that’s burning
And the sun never casts a shadow here
And the daylight doesn’t matter

Take me inside
Take me inside

You’re the journey that keeps taking me
And the parts of your heart discover
And the tide is rushing over me
Your taste is like a treasure

Take me inside
Take me inside

Lyrics from Take Me Inside, sung by Dannii Minogue

After the Breakup: Emotional Pain as a Catalyst for a Beautiful Life

In the dark, there’s a space that’s calling me

Do you feel your painful emotions, or manage them?

There’s a big difference! If you’re like me, you may have spent much of your life managing rather than feeling your painful emotions. At some point in your early years, you probably learned that controlling and managing your internal feelings, rather than experiencing and expressing them, just seemed to make your life easier all around. This way, you didn’t upset anyone. You hurt less, worried less, and felt calmer (or so you’ve thought).

Now you feel a calling to something deeper.

There’s a flame of light that’s burning

So what does it look like to manage your emotions?

When you become an able manager of your painful emotions, you might feel that you notice them when they surface, but then you become good at intellectually reasoning with yourself about them. And often you will do this at your expense. Only you don’t know it at the time. Instead, you may think of yourself as evolved, mature, wise, and as having an ability to let things roll off your back.

This emotional management style can seem to work until one day something happens, and your emotions are too big to manage like during a breakup or divorce. When a relationship ends, emotions are spilling out uncontrollably, and the pain can feel too much to bear. Your able manager is now rendered unable to function the way it usually does.

You’re the journey that keeps taking me

The journey of emotion after a breakup escapes no one. No matter how well you’ve managed your feelings before, now all bets are off. As hard as this can be to tolerate, you may be surprised to notice that in this mix of painful emotions, are also moments of incredible joy, passion, and love. These feel so newly vivid and beautiful, especially for the emotional manager. You may wonder, was I numb to the beautiful feelings because I managed the difficult ones?

And the parts of your heart discover

Waking up to painful and joyful emotions can be very profound. The world might look very different. You may discover many people who seem to be sleeping walking through their life like you were. Suddenly, you have new eyes by allowing and experiencing all of your emotions. Your heart is waking up and it’s full of wonderment.

Feeling the painful emotions that come with loss, such as grief, sadness, anger, and fear are necessary, not only to heal, but to also be able to appreciate the beauty of feeling joy, love, abundance, and all of life itself.

And the tide is rushing over me

Learning to be okay with your feelings requires an understanding that you, as a living being, were born to feel. A newborn baby enters the world with a healthy cry as if to say, “The journey was painful, but it’s so beautiful out here! Hello, world! Here I am!”

Part of being in your world is learning to regulate your emotions. Sometimes, however, you learn to control them into suppression and denial.

To deny or manage your feelings to such an extent is to deny your very self. To feel the beauty of this life, to be able to have meaningful connections with others, you must learn to embrace, accept, and express your emotions healthily. ALL of them.

Your taste is like a treasure

One treasure of going through a breakup and the painful feelings that go with it is that you feel incredibly, sublimely alive. You taste the beauty of becoming a feeling human being that is vital and vibrating aliveness. Through this experience and your awakening, you can retain this state of delicious aliveness if you continue to embrace and express your emotions fully. In time you will heal from your breakup, and when you do, it’s all too easy to fall back into old patterns.

SO, brave hearts, when painful and joyful feelings surface, learn to stay comfortably in your emotion. Go inside yourself. Let your feelings rush through. There’s so much beauty waiting for you.

Take Me Inside, (Christophe Goze Mix), sung by Dannii Minogue