9 Tips For Dealing With Heartache, According To Relationship Experts

When we hear “heartache,” our mind probably jumps to romantic relationships. But as anyone who’s ever lost a family member knows, heartache doesn’t have to be romantic. Losses of any kind can elicit many of the same emotions—and even physical pains—associated with breakups.

As licensed marriage and family therapist Shane Birkel, LMFT, explains, we’re naturally wired for relationships as human beings. From an evolutionary perspective, having strong connections with others was imperative to our very survival. And so now, when we experience the loss of a close relationship, it feels devastating and earth-shattering.

When we feel emotionally close to someone, especially if we’re partnered with them for a significant amount of time, Birkel says we feel validated by them, we consider them in our future, and part of our sense of self comes from how we relate to the other person. That all goes away when the relationship ends, which can be extremely disorienting, as the future you’d imagined and your sense of self through that person is gone.

This kind of upheaval brings up a lot of emotions (think the stages of grief, i.e. denial, anger, etc.), but it can cause physical symptoms as well. Research shows we can become essentially addicted to love neurologically, and even go through “withdrawal” after a breakup. Additional research has found there really is such thing as a broken heart, with “broken heart syndrome,” a type of heart condition, occurring amid intense emotional or physiologic stress.