15 Times You Broke Your Own Heart

We often share stories or provide advice on how to mend a broken heart. Those articles are based on being hurt by a significant other, who either broke up with you unexpectedly or hurt you beyond belief. That awful feeling of having your heart broken is devastatingly painful and can affect you for years. Like the saying goes, some people never get over their first heartbreak. And it doesn't only happen in dating relationships, when you lose someone, this can also break your heart, and for anyone who knows this feeling, they know all too well how much mending it takes to move on.

But this article discusses something a little different. In fact what we will focus on here is how you might be causing your own heartache. Some people unintentionally cause their own unhappiness by pushing away relationships and potential happiness. This is not only about your love life, you might be keeping yourself from happiness in other aspects of your life. This is not fair to yourself and the people around you as you could be keeping yourself from a lot of amazing things.

If you think this sounds like something you might be doing, read on to find out more. Once you can understand your own behavior, you can begin to work on fixing it.

15 You Wait For A Better Day.

A better day to begin your blog, to share your story, to discover all it is you know. You wait until the leaves have fallen to walk through the park. You wait until you're not so shy to take your camera and snap photographs of people on the street. You wait to be asked on a date before trying a popular restaurant. You wait for a new love interest to sleep over before burning your favorite candle. You wait until you've cultivated better sleeping habits before taking up yoga. You wait until you've taken up yoga to declutter your closet and welcome joy into your home. It's a life-enhancing domino effect that you plan for but which you resist putting into motion. Basically, you'll find any reason to delay taking on the very desires you imagine will engage your heart, satisfy your soul, and amplify your life. What you fail to understand, however, is that the surest way to not have the best life is to wait for a better day to begin it.

14 You Fall Out Of Touch With Family.

To fall out of touch with your family is, in so many ways, to fall out of trust. It's why a distrust in partners and skepticism toward love in general is often directly correlated with a fractured parental bond. Because, unlike with romantic love, this is more than a fallout from a person, this is you falling out from the reality that created you, from the source who brought you to life. It doesn't just happen from pushing your family physically away either, but from judging them, too. While everyone needs a break from their parents every once in awhile, you can't turn your back on where and who you started from forever without suffering. Because, even if you are numb to your disappointment, you are still estranged from your emotions and, without the faith in your family to center you, you're only hovering over your own life. The point is to forgo judgment; if you can't love them, forgive them.

13 You Apologize For Every Little Thing.

A child is riding her bike, training wheels and all, when she overcorrects herself and just about wheels you over on the sidewalk. You leap backwards and apologize profusely to the mom. You're about to walk into a coffee shop, when a guy who's leaving holds the door open for you. You look up flustered, kind of rush in, apologize quickly and look down. Any questions? Your professor asks. He calls on you and you lower your hand but not before saying, “Sorry, I just have one question.” Classic, and yet why? Every time you absentmindedly apologize for __fill in the blank__, what you're really apologizing for is showing up in the world. Enough already. You've got a stake in this life, too! Quit minimizing your presence. Throw your shoulders back, get into the habit of smiling, and learn to say “it's okay,” “don't worry,” and “thank you.”

12 You Compare Yourself.

You want to believe it's the typical social media trap, when really it's your ego's problem. You scroll through your feed, feeling two dominate emotions. Envy and suspicion. Envy that some part of a person's reality is theirs and not yours, and suspicion over whether that person is deserving of whatever it is you envy. This is your self-esteem struggling with the fear of scarcity, the erroneous idea that what is rewarded or available to others automatically becomes unavailable to you. This fear also comes from the desire to stand alone, to be the first person the world provides for, to be the enviable one. When your ego overtakes your thinking though, you fail to see that comparison is rooted in redeemable qualities. To resolve your resentment and bridge this gap between you and others, you must flip the script. Instead of looking out impressively and wondering “why not me?” the more creative, imaginative, and liberating question to ask yourself is “how can I?” Start here.

11 You Don't Take Pride In Your Home.

It's not that you hate to clean or could care less about a made bed, a spotless sink, and the tidiness of your home, it's just that it takes guests coming over to motivate you to clean house. This is one of your most upsetting tendencies because it's an obvious demonstration of your ability to make life nicer for others than you make it for yourself. Think about it, you'll bend over backwards to get something done if it means someone will be left with a better impression of you but what about your impression of you?

On a daily basis, you'll allow yourself to coexist in conditions that are subpar even if it means grimacing at the sight of your bathroom as you brush your teeth. And yet, you would never let anyone see your bathroom like this. You would never expose them to a grimy shower or insist on having them dry themselves with a hand towel. So, why in the world do you expect yourself to? Hold yourself to higher standards and treat yourself like a guest. Clean house, dry off with a fresh bath towel, and shine. You're with yourself forever.

10 You Think Everyone's Judging You.

When it comes to relationships, you're convinced that whoever comes after you is a reaction against you. If his new girlfriend is blonde and you're a brunette, you think, “wow, so he never was attracted to me.” If he's dating a woman who has a startup, you convince yourself that he didn't see you as a risk taker. If he marries the woman he dates after you, you now have proof that you're someone not worth building a life with. Your ability to reach new conclusions based on the tiniest, most far-fetched and irrelevant details is manic, delusional, and self-destructive. Because you are the one creating these storylines though, it's almost as if you are shooting bullets into your own chest. And the reason you do this is you don't trust in all you are. If you could separate yourself, you'd see that you are your own person. And, the beauty is no one can touch that.

9 You Take On The Thoughts Of Everyone Else.

Whenever anything happens to you, you have to know what someone else thinks about what happened to you. Your compulsive inquiry comes from a hypersensitive resistance to self-reflection. You don't go “there” because you don't know what you'll find and what that will then feel like. This all boils down to your discomfort surrounding power. You're afraid that accessing your own thoughts will either make you feel powerful or powerless, and you feel unprepared for the responsibility wound up in either outcome.

Because you don't know what you know though, you tend to remain tight as bud. You don't blossom because you never put yourself out there. And since you lack self-direction, you never challenge yourself to grow because you don't believe you have it in you. Your reliance on the input of others, inevitably, leaves you feeling like you are on the outside looking in. And, guess what? It's from the inside looking out, that you feel most empowered and least alone.

8 You Ignore Your Intuition.

When you follow your intuition, you're choosing to listen to the truth in your heart. It's no wonder then, that the times you ignored your intuition always left you with the most devastating heartbreak. Nothing is more painful than enduring a heartbreak that could have been so obviously avoided. The question becomes why you would fight against yourself, your intuitive side, the side that's bidding in your favor.

The idiom “better the devil you know, than the devil you don't” nails it. You cling to what isn't meant for you because you fear the unknown which is typically, or at least momentarily, your own aloneness. And yet, the devil you choose never does you any favors. Knowing that you were the one responsible for silencing your heart and overlooking what's right for you, you lose faith in your ability to protect and care for yourself. This is a harrowing experience because it leaves you with the loneliest mystery of all: if you cannot trust yourself to do what is best for you, who will?

7 You Try To Fall Back In Love.

When it comes to relationships, you have a talent for dancing in circles, spinning out of control, and emotionally imploding. Your own love confuses you. To begin with, you have a difficult time judging the integrity of your own romantic intensity. You have this feeling that you haven't been so much in love as you have been grasping for it. But you don't know why.

Why would you try to pull together something that isn't there? Because you imagine that there is a grandiosity somewhere for you to still claim-you imagine that there is hope-and that touching it will redeem you from an otherwise pathetic period of your life where you've been trying to lead yourself blindly back into a love that has gone amiss. What's heartbreaking is watching you play this game with yourself, watching you invest so much hope where there is nothing left to claim. To overcome what is missing, the secret is you must free yourself from any commitments you have to what is no longer there.

6 You Run Away From Life.

Some days you feel impossibly isolated. Paralyzingly self-conscious. You look out your window and want to be apart of that life, a life you feel excluded from and not strong enough for. You can't remember the sound of your own laughter so you take comfort in whatever you hear unfolding on TV. You don't want to be in bed right now but, when you're escaping the world, where else can you go? You cry and think about the friends you have who never check in. Now you know that when you pull away, people stop reaching out, even friends.

You can only say no so many times and you are always saying no, especially to yourself. In the very beginning, no felt brave. Now you just want to say yes to life. You want to fall asleep and in the morning lift yourself out of fear. You want to walk out into the world and talk again. This, for you, is a dream and one you have the hardest time holding yourself to. In the morning, you will feel pathetic in some small way and this will be enough to drive you straight home. This eats you alive. You miss the world but you don't know how to be in it. You want to thrive but the only thing in your heart is tears.

5 You Are Stuck On Your Exes.

You still don't know what went wrong in your last relationship. You don't understand what about you wasn't good enough to love. Not having these answers has arrested your development, keeping you looking in the rearview mirror where you give your power away to your past life. Somedays nostalgia still washes over you but mostly it's regret and anger. By focusing exclusively on why your ex did x, y, and z, you've let him take precedence over your own healing. This keeps you from discovering the silver lining in your breakup and seeing that the challenges of your relationships are actually gifts offering you growth. By not looking at your relationship history as stepping stones in a stronger, better direction, you aren't inspired to make stronger, better choices in love. This breaks your heart because your relationships all wind up being resentful, fear based reactions to the last guy rather than choices made with nothing but insight and pure love.

4 You Refuse To Help Yourself.

Before you were helpless, you were capable of reaching out and receiving help. You had every resource at your fingertips except, of course, willpower, humility, and self-love. It's a courageous thing to ask for, no doubt, but to survive and thrive you must be comfortable putting words to what you need. No one is a mind reader. When it comes to your own unease, you are the only one who can account for it. Articulating the needs of your heart will never, ever make you one of the weaker ones. And yet, by assuming otherwise, you weaken out in an unnecessary bubble of your own making. But you don't have to live in this illusion of self-protection and, believe it or not, no one wants you to. You think it's a burden to tell a friend you need to get out of the house but everyone wants to be the one who is called upon. You think it's too early to call a therapist but you can never start taking care of yourself too soon.

3 You Don't Have Time For The Smaller Things.

You have the same amount of hours in the day as everyone else and yet not a moment to spare. Not a single moment to notice the sunset spreading over the sky. Not a single moment to walk across the room and say hi to a buddy from forever ago. What has become of you? Maybe it is adulthood or really just your self-importance. Maybe it's your fear of how life feels when you're tuned in at a slower tempo.

The rat race keeps you moving, to be sure, but it does little in the way of moving you. If you don't make time for these moments, you will eventually despair, wondering how you never managed to appreciate your days, your hours, your life. Don't wait for that sobering moment. Give yourself permission now to not take your days for granted. Wake up fifteen minutes earlier and order your coffee to stay. Sit somewhere new and look out on the day. Who knows, you may find someone right in front of you who could transform your life.

2 You Focus On Unhappiness Rather Than Joy.

When you're sad, you're desperate to become happy; when you're happy, you're afraid you'll fall back into sadness. This does you no favors because, for one, what you focus on expands. So, by focusing on falling back into sadness, you take yourself out of the very happiness you've been after and end up looking at your life, instead, from a place of limitation and fear. This way of living also works against you because it never honors where you are, and the reality is that where you are is where you are meant to be. The point is to learn all you can from it. By resisting where you are though, you also resist the very learning that is necessary for you to grow beyond a certain place. You break your own heart by letting yourself fear your potential brokenness instead of celebrating your wholeness, where you are, and how far you've come.

1 You Stop Short Of Your Dream.

You're the kind of person who can update her look, thinking a fresh style will make you walk taller and help you speak to yourself with kindness. But even though you look beautiful, you don't treat anyone more beautifully than before. Not even yourself. This is just one example of how you fall short of the great vision for your life. There are other ways, too. You invest in new business cards then never hand them out. You fly to a new country but never walk through the city with new eyes. You spend all your time mapping out your conquest but shy away from devoting yourself to every step on the list. You can feel yourself holding back and your enthusiasm burning out. This is not for a lack of love though, this is just the chokehold fear has on you. You're afraid that achieving your dreams will not change your life so you live in anticipation of change but cut yourself off from really making it happen.