How Can You Mend a Broken Heart? Here’s How

Hearts are broken every day, but somehow the rate of occurrence doesn’t diminish the sting for anyone. Even the mighty are brought to their knees by rejection from a loved one. And in the interest of keeping this apolitical, we won’t name names.

For a pre-Valentine’s Day tonic, we’ve asked a few professionals about love gone wrong, specifically how to mend a broken heart.

Clinical psychologist

Marcia Lamm, West Valley Psychological Clinic, Encino

Clients come into Lamm’s office, asking: “Can you take the pain away?”

“Allow yourself the time to heal,” said Lamm, a clinical psychologist for 11 years.

Many social scientists have developed formulas for recovery: It takes half the time of a relationship; it takes the entire time of the relationship. There is no simple formula, Lamm said.

“When a couple is together for any period of time, they merge,” Lamm said. The two form an entity that is separate and larger than each person.

When a couple breaks up, “the loss is really about refinding the self and being able to say goodbye,” Lamm said. And not just saying goodbye to the other person, but to the couple itself and the expectations involved in the relationship.

The goal to healing, she said, is to regain “a sense of power and a sense of being able to salvage that part you’re really losing.

“The first step is a pervasive feeling of emptiness. Time heals, but the best thing you can do is to try to fill yourself up again.”

Lamm doesn’t mean to go find another relationship but, rather, to fill yourself up with friends and activities that are emotionally fulfilling.

“Joining groups allows a person to reconnect with people and the world,” she said. Charity clubs, art classes and religious-studies groups allow a person to interact with a lot of people without deeply connecting with anyone.

“Groups allow a person to interact in a relatively risk-free environment,” she said.

Lamm also encourages various forms of self-calming, such as meditation, exercise and yoga.

“Eating excessively, I don’t suggest,” she said.

A breakup is also an opportunity for self-discovery. It’s a chance, Lamm said, for “reclaiming of the self, for finding out what was wrong with the relationship, what was empty.”

Self-forgiveness is the goal, she said. “Accept that the relationship didn’t work.”

And be comforted that breaking up is defined in therapy terms as an “adjustment disorder.” It is in life’s normal realm of human experience, she said.

Even widowed people who have had good marriages share with the divorced and broken-up “the same feelings of abandonment, betrayal and anger. The recovery process of moving on is very similar,” Lamm said.

Psychotherapist

Rachel Berkowitz, director, the Healing Center for Eastern & Western Medicine, Beverly Hills and Encino

If you call the Healing Center, the message machine will tell you, “Be kind to yourself, and the world will be kind to you.”

“Eastern medicine teaches self-love,” said Berkowitz, who began her career 22 years ago as a captain in the Israeli army working with trauma patients and war-torn families.

She immigrated in 1985 to the United States, where, for eight years, she has explored Eastern medicine, deciding that it is a perfect complement to Western medicine.

Her clientele is varied, ranging from children with attention deficit disorder to couples in distress to people with eating disorders.

A client getting over a breakup usually needs very short-term therapy full of assignments, including writing journals and meditating.

“The first thing is to decide what is the next step, to stay with the pain or go beyond it,” she said. “It’s OK to stay with the pain.”

A person coming out of a 20-year marriage may have to stay with the pain quite awhile, she said. “I’m the first to say, ‘That’s great, but don’t sink with me, work with me.’ ”

Work includes journal writing, meditation and making a list of “two or three nonnegotiable items” the person wants from the next relationship. She also urges clients to take time off from dating and figure out what soured the previous relationship.

“You have to sit down and do a list. What are the good things? What are the bad things?”

Berkowitz gives new clients 20 or so options for treatment: yoga; meditation; martial arts; group, movement or drama therapy; journal writing.

Berkowitz tries to keep her clients off psychiatric drugs, instead using dietary changes, relaxation techniques and herbal remedies.

She works with a yogi and a dietitian. The yogi teaches, “Time, time, time.”

Many of her clients, however, say, “But we don’t have time. We’re in pain now.”

Berkowitz’s goal is to teach a client self-love: “People come, people go, the only thing that stays is you. Parents are going, lovers are going, children are going. You have to connect a very deep love with your heart.”

The Dalai Lama teaches, “when we are in pain, our heart is closed,” Berkowitz said. To open the heart again one must love the Creator, and in essence, to love oneself.

The Ice Cream Makers

Country music, power shopping, Voodoo stick dolls. There are many tools to mending a broken heart, but one stands out. Without incurring an eating disorder or even extra poundage, many have found solace in a bowl of ice cream.

Neither Baskin-Robbins USA nor Ben & Jerry’s does market research as to why ice cream is such a comfort food, but two representatives have theories.

Terry Murphy of Glendale-based Baskin-Robbins suspects it’s all tied to childhood. “Ice cream and childhood is something that everyone has positive memories about. I think it’s tied to happiness.

“In our busy world, it’s such an easy to way to find a moment of happiness,” she said.

Rob Michalak, spokesman for Vermont-based Ben & Jerry’s, agreed. “There’s something about ice cream that people have a real personal relationship with. They seem to use it as a real comfort food or a food to reward themselves.”

Letters to Ben & Jerry’s from customers indicate that people use ice cream throughout a relationship. Early on, Michalak said, some use it as “an agent for insight and calm amidst this amorous storm.” In other words, they sit on the couch, alone in sweat suits, eating a bowl of ice cream and hiding out from the intensity of it all.

Later in a relationship, Michalak said, people write that “certain flavors, the more intense flavors with more chunks and swirls, have initiated a certain amount of vigor when it comes to l’amour. People have written us saying that it’s really kind of gotten them perky.”

The two most popular flavors, by the way, for Baskin-Robbins are vanilla and pralines and cream.

For Ben & Jerry’s, they’re chocolate chip cookie dough and Cherry Garcia.