It has all the characteristics of a deadly disease. It slowly eats away at you, and unless you’re completely cured from it, it will continue to lead to your demise. Sometimes you feel like you’re going to lose your mind. You seek advice and comfort from wherever you can readily and easily find it. You try to logically think it through and solve it, but it doesn’t quite align with how you feel. You become mentally, and emotionally exhausted, and you just want it to be over. And, the worst part is that it can be contagious without your knowledge, and that just complicates things more. Almost everyone over the age of fifteen has experienced some form of this affliction at some point in their life, so it’s definitely not rare, but it’s overall effect can be different for various individuals, even if the affects are the same. The broken heart diagnosis is definitely one of the most painful experiences you will go through in life, but it doesn’t have to ruin you, and you can be completely healed and cured of it too!

Personally, I hate emotions. Anything emotional, I want to avoid like a plague. Experiencing emotional pain will do that to you. It's a natural instinct, when something causes you pain, you avoid it. It's like when a child learns that the stove top is hot by touching it and getting burned, they will completely stay clear of the entire stove. The same is true for emotional pain, we know that we've gotten burned by some part of it, but it's so painful that we want to avoid anything even remotely related to it. We don't necessarily tell ourselves that we want to eventually become some lonely, old, bitter scrooge-like man, or a lady with a bunch of cats, but we somehow decide that if we need to avoid all things emotional in order to avoid that pain, then that's what we will do. And then times passes, and we meet someone, and we remember that there are good emotions too, and there's another natural side of us that instinctively craves those as well. And now comes the contradictions, and additional confusion.

Heartbreak is like the 3rd degree burns of emotional pain. You finally give your heart to someone, finally open up to them, and render yourself completely emotionally vulnerable just for them to carelessly undermine all the effort that it took from you to get there by some selfish act on their part. And it hits you like a ton of bricks to the heart. You'd rather have your arm removed with a dull butter knife than to go through the heartache that you're feeling after this. You're in complete confusion because your mind is telling you to be angry with them, and your heart still wants to love them. You love and hate the same entity and you can't figure out how that can be. You want them, yet you don't. Your trust is betrayed, they've hurt you beyond belief, and yet you still want to feel comforted by them. You want the very source of your pain to comfort and remove the pain from you, and it makes no sense. You spend days and nights trying to figure it out logically and just when you think you have, your heart fights you and you break down again. Yes, the affects of heartbreak for some are more or less this drastic, but the important part is that you can heal.

Like any major injury, pain, or illness, you don't know exactly when you will heal completely, but you do know that the process can be improved or even sped up if you are proactive in the healing process. You can also complicate the situation if you are proactive in the opposite. Heartbreak can be contagious in many different instances. It can be intentionally contagious whereas the person who has experienced the heartbreak plays on the emotions of others, purposely for selfish reasons such as being comforted or pacified physically, emotionally, verbally, sexually, etc., to fuel their self esteem, to see if they still “got it”, or to take out revenge on all males/females because they've decided to blame the entire gender for the actions of the one who hurt them. It can also be unintentional whereas the individual suffering from heartbreak doesn't think they can fall in love with another person because of their bruised trust. They don't think it's possible for them to ever trust or open up to another person, or they think they can control their emotions, so they casually create relationships with others that can potentially grow into more as they are unaware of the emotions that develop overtime and without their control. This can cause hurt for the new person in their life, and deepen the hurt that the heartbroken individual is experiencing because they can potentially lose a great relationship or put someone else through a similar pain that they're feeling, hence the heartbreak being contagious. In either case, it is important to allow yourself to heal.

Allowing yourself to heal doesn't mean to distant yourself from the world, or to wallow in your own self pity. It doesn't mean pretending that you're not hurt or ignoring the pain and wishing that one day it will disappear. Healing means to address the problem head on, lay out the facts, and make a conscious decision to move on with your life with whatever path you've chosen to take. It's like having a broken arm. Sitting over it and crying won't help it heal faster. Pretending that it's not broken and it doesn't hurt won't help it heal faster either! You have to recognize that you're hurt and decide to do something to make the situation better if you want it to heal quickly and properly. Face the facts. If you truly believe that you can no longer trust the individual that hurt you, and you no longer feel they deserve to be with you, despite the feelings you have for them, then make the decision to move on to finding someone who will make you happy, don't stay stuck in the past because life doesn't flourish in the past. Or, if you feel like you can never let go of that person and truly feel they're the only one for you, and you can forgive that person, then give them another chance and put the situation behind you and move on. Either way, you must move on and not live in the limbo of pain and confusion because that will only keep you unhappy, depressed, and horrible company for those around you. You will miss out on the great things in life if you continue to stay in that state, and you're cheating yourself. Don't do yourself the injustice of deciding to stay unhappy, rather than putting your foot down and demanding to do whatever it takes to find your happiness. Deep down, only you know what that is, so don't be a prisoner to fear and emotions. Be healed from the pain and the hurt, and go find your happiness!