Recently, I got my heart broken. Really broken. It felt as if it busted into a million pieces.

I didn’t see it coming. And yet, I was not surprised to see how deeply it affected me when it happened. In a flash, the future I had been imagining for myself for months was gone. 

In the beginning, there were days when I felt completely blindsided by the intensity of my reaction. My body was reacting strongly. Fears I thought I had moved beyond resurfaced, old wounds demanded attention, and for a little while I genuinely wondered how I was going to function while carrying that much pain.

I’ve spent decades helping people navigate grief, heartbreak, trauma, and major life transitions. I understand the nervous system. I understand emotional patterns. I understand healing.

What this experience reminded me of is that knowledge doesn’t exempt us from being human.

One of the great misconceptions we have about growth is that if we’ve done enough work on ourselves, painful experiences won’t affect us. In my experience, that’s simply not true. Loss still hurts. Grief still hurts. Disappointment still hurts. The difference is not whether we feel the pain. The difference is what we do with it once it arrives. Early on, when I had a moment of clarity, I set an intention and decided that it was not going to take me years to get over it and that I was not going to fall apart. And, that somehow I was going to emerge stronger from it. 

I also found myself thinking about how differently we talk about loss depending on what we’ve lost.

If someone dies, everyone immediately recognizes that grief is appropriate. People bring food. They send messages. They ask how you’re doing.

But when a relationship ends, when a business fails, we get fired, or when a dream quietly falls apart, we’re often expected to recover much more quickly. As though the pain should somehow be smaller because the loss isn’t sitting in a casket.

I don’t think that’s true: loss is loss.

And while the circumstances may be different, what I’ve noticed in myself and in the people I work with is that loss almost always asks something of us beyond simply surviving it.

One of the best decisions I have made was turning toward the things I knew would support me rather than away from them. I exercised, even when I didn’t feel like it, because movement helps me process emotions that otherwise get stuck in my system. Meditation helped too, although I’ve learned long time ago that it works best for me after exercise. Once my body has had a chance to release some of the tension it’s carrying, my mind becomes quieter, and I can actually hear myself think. I saged my house, wrote a few letters and burned them, and with it some of the things that represented the shock the breakup came with.

I also made a conscious decision to look for the blessing inside the experience.

That wasn’t always easy. Some days it felt far more natural to focus on what I had lost than on what I might learn from it. But over the years, I’ve learned that suffering becomes heavier when we spend all our energy arguing with reality. The experience was already here. My choice was whether I would resist it or become curious about what it had come to teach me.

The question that has served me far better, both personally and professionally, is this:

What is this experience trying to show me?

One of the things I teach clients is that life doesn’t just happen on the surface. Events trigger emotional patterns that have often been running quietly in the background for years. Sometimes those patterns began in childhood. Sometimes they are tied to beliefs we’ve carried for so long that we mistake them for facts. I am talking about basic things like worthiness, being loved or belonging.  

One of the things I’ve seen repeatedly, both in my own life and in my work with clients, is that loss tends to uncover much more than the event itself. Getting fired may expose fears of abandonment. Financial hardship can shine a light on beliefs about security, worth, and identity. Even a disappointment that seems relatively small on the surface can activate emotional patterns that have been with us for decades.

As I sat with my own heartbreak, I began asking myself some uncomfortable questions. Where had I ignored my own knowing that things were a bit off? Had I actually abandoned parts of myself in the hope that things were ok? Why didn’t I ask more questions? 

Those questions weren’t about assigning blame. They were about understanding my role in the experience. There is a profound difference between self-blame and self-awareness. Self-blame keeps us trapped in judgment, while self-awareness helps us recognize the patterns we may have been repeating for years. Once we can see those patterns clearly, we have the opportunity to change them.

In my work as a Neuro Emotional Coach, I spend a great deal of time helping people uncover the unconscious patterns driving their choices. Most of us believe we are making decisions consciously, yet much of our behavior is shaped by beliefs, fears, and emotional experiences operating beneath our awareness.

If you hold the belief, as I do, that we come into this life with lessons to learn, then the people and situations that arrive in our lives are not random. They often bring forward the very things that are ready to be healed, released, or understood more deeply.

This perspective doesn’t remove the grief, but it does change the conversation. Instead of asking, “Why is this happening to me?” we begin asking, “What can I learn from it?”

The question that became most useful to me wasn’t what happened. It was why this particular experience affected me so deeply.

That is often where the real insight lives.

That’s where we discover the fear of abandonment, the need for approval, the tendency to overgive, or the habit of staying longer than we should because leaving feels harder than tolerating what isn’t working.

These patterns often remain invisible while life is moving along smoothly. Loss has a way of bringing them into sharp focus. As painful as that can be, it also creates an opportunity to finally address what has been running quietly beneath the surface for years.

Of course, understanding the lesson doesn’t automatically heal the pain.

Loss still has to move through us. It has to move through the body, through the nervous system, and through the stories we’ve been telling ourselves about what happened. For me, that meant exercising, free-form writing, meditating, leaning on people I trust, and giving myself permission to have difficult days without treating them as evidence that I was moving backwards. Some days I felt grounded and clear. Other days I felt like I was right back at the beginning. That’s the nature of grief. It rarely moves in a straight line.

What I’ve come to believe is that grief is not asking us to get over something as quickly as possible. It’s asking us to become honest. Honest about what we lost. Honest about what was beautiful. Honest about what wasn’t. Honest about the places where we abandoned ourselves, ignored our own knowing, or stayed in situations that were no longer aligned because we wanted a different outcome than the one reality was offering us.

Over time, the intensity begins to soften. The loss doesn’t disappear, but it takes up a different amount of space inside of us. We stop organizing our lives around what happened. We stop replaying the same conversations. We stop searching for the missing piece that would somehow make it all hurt less. Instead, we begin integrating the experience into our story and carrying forward the wisdom it offered.

For me, that process ultimately comes back to three things: forgiveness, intention, and gratitude. 

Forgiveness because it changes our relationship with the past. It allows us to stop carrying the weight of what cannot be undone.

That forgiveness often begins with ourselves. We forgive ourselves for what we didn’t know, for the signs we missed, for the choices we made with the awareness we had at the time, for the feelings we had. Eventually, if we’re willing, that forgiveness can expand to include the people and circumstances that hurt us. Holding onto resentment keeps us connected to the pain long after the event itself has passed. Letting go creates space for something new.

Gratitude because despite the pain I chose to be grateful for all the wonderful things this relationship brought to me on so many levels. It showed me how much I have grown as a person. It was actually a gift. I just wasn’t ready to let it go. It had only just begun. 

Intention because I saw it right away as an opportunity for growth, learning and healing.  And of course to practise what I teach. When I look back at the losses that have shaped my life,  I can see clearly that each one invited me to open my heart a little wider and to become more compassionate with myself and everyone involved. 

Loss changes us. It is supposed to.

The question is what we do with that change. Do we allow it to deepen us, or do we spend our lives fighting what it came to teach.

Something new is possible.

Even now.