10 Painful Struggles You Face When Your Heart Is Broken

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1. You find it difficult to open up to people because you don’t trust them.

Every single time you’ve confided in someone you have always been betrayed one way or another. You find it difficult to express your feelings and you assume that they are judging you with every word that comes out of your mouth. Even if you really want to confide in someone, a little voice inside of your head tells you not to in order to save yourself the trouble later on.

2. You believe that everyone will walk away once they get to know you and your past.

You’re ashamed of your past. You think “how can someone want to stay with all the darkness and baggage I carry?” Shielding yourself now makes sure that you don’t get hurt in the future. It also makes it difficult to befriend people who want you to share as much as they share to you. How can someone else deal with what you are and what you’ve been through if you yourself are still trying to cope?

3. You replay scenes from the day or from the past and made alternate endings based on what you could’ve said or done instead of what happened.

You regret your choices and worry about things you can’t change. You live in an alternate reality when you’re alone because it’s the only time you can take control of your life. You live in a fantasy land where everything goes your way until you fall asleep and wake up the next day to deal with reality. You think that you can never do anything right. That everything you do is a mistake. You believe you can always do better and you beat yourself up about it constantly.

4. You can’t bring yourself to love someone because you believe they’ll eventually leave.

It seems like everyone you get attached to ends up leaving one way or another. You give yourself wholly to another person and spend years together, but once they’ve had enough or if fate isn’t on your side, they leave and you’re left alone to pick up the pieces. You often wonder if this is your inevitable fate.

5. You believe that everyone will let you down at some point.

Through the years you learned that even if you have the utmost confidence in someone, they will always let you down. They’re human, but that doesn’t stop you from putting them on pedestals and worshipping them as if they can do no wrong. It doesn’t stop you from thinking you’re inferior to everyone else because you think you aren’t worth much.

6. You expect either the best or the worst in a person.

You expect the best in some people because you need hope in order to get by. You need to trick yourself into believing that person will live up to that expectation of yours, to show you that there are people out there who you can depend on aside from yourself. You expect the worst in order to keep yourself from being disappointed. It’s a security measure to lower your standards for them so that no matter what they do they can’t let you down. Or so you think.

7. You hold yourself up to unrealistic standards.

Because you are broken you feel the need to prove yourself. To prove to other people that you can do just as much and as well as they can, regardless of what happened to you. You expect so much from yourself that you end up lacking sleep, over stressed, and succumbing into a breakdown. You put so much pressure on yourself that you can’t even enjoy the fruits of your labor because you always go on to the next one. You don’t always do it for the recognition, you do it to feed the hunger inside of you, you do it to cover up your flaws. You do everything that you can to mislead people and divert their attention from the fact that you are broken.

8. You are never satisfied with yourself.

Because of your unrealistic standards, you can never feel as if you’ve done enough. You always think that you could’ve done more, you could be more, you could be better. You pile so many things onto your plate, crash and burn from the pressure, unload everything, and when the dust settles, you feel disappointed and frustrated. So then you go back to piling things on and a new cycle begins.

9. You wonder if you’ll ever be whole again.

You don’t even know what it’s like to be whole. You’re in search for something you don’t know because you can’t even tell what you’re missing or who you were to begin with. You struggle to find the missing piece because you don’t know where to start looking or what it is you’re looking for. You’re afraid that you’ll always be broken. That this is how it will be forever. You’re terrified that this will all there will ever be of you.

10. You think you’ll never be good enough for anyone.

You can’t begin to fathom how someone can accept you the way you are. You’ve heard it over and over that they can’t deal with you. You are always criticized even for things you had no control over. You always had to please them. Always had to follow whatever they said but they were never completely satisfied. You think that you don’t deserve to be loved. That you can never be loved by someone else. Because you can’t even bring yourself to love who you are anymore. Because you don’t know who you are anymore.