How to Use EFT to Heal a Broken Heart
Perhaps no other life experience has inspired as much great art as that of having one’s heart broken. Countless poems, love songs, novels, movies, and operas have been spawned by this particularly painful kind of trauma.
From Goethe’s young Werther, pining away endlessly for his beloved, to Anna Karenina’s tragic rejection, and Madame Bovary’s devastating breakup, not to mention the mournful songs of Hank Williams and other bereft troubadours, human history is filled with the wreckage of love gone wrong.
Over the years, I’ve been asked many times to write a how-to article about using EFT to heal a broken heart. Now, finally, I’m writing that guide, so that you will understand exactly how to completely and permanently heal the pain of a broken heart.
The Broken Heart of Lost Love
There are, of course, many different kinds of broken hearts. This article will focus on one in particular: the kind of broken heart which is caused by the end of a romantic relationship with someone that you really loved and wanted to be with.
Whether you initiated the breakup or it was your partner who pulled the plug, the result can be the same: deep, unremitting, and often overwhelming emotional pain.
The good news is that when used effectively, EFT can heal every bit of that pain. Once that healing is complete, you'll be as good as new, and even better, for the pain will be gone, while the wisdom and experienced gained will remain.
“Doctoring her seemed to her as absurd as putting together the pieces of a broken vase. Her heart was broken. Why would they try to cure her with pills and powders?” ― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
The Steps to Healing a Broken Heart with EFT
To completely heal a broken heart with EFT, it’s necessary to identify and then tap out the many different aspects of a broken heart. These can vary from person to person, but in my many years as an EFT practitioner, the following tend to present in just about every case of brokenheartedness that I have worked with:
Feelings of rejection
The pain of what might have been, for example: marriage, children, growing old together
Painful feelings of longing and missing the person
The pain of unmet needs (“I needed him/her to fight for me/not give up on us/stay with me/be in love with me”)
Anger
Resentment
Regrets, aka “the woulda coulda shouldas”
Wounded self-esteem
Limiting beliefs stemming from the heartbreak experience. For example, “I’ll never find love again,” and “No one will ever love me like he/she did.”
Fears stemming from this heartbreak experience. For example, “I’m afraid that I’ll get my heart broken again, or, “I’m afraid that there are no trustworthy men/women out there.”
Now that you know what to look for when healing a broken heart, you can begin to unpack it all.
Whether you’re working to heal your own broken heart, are working with an EFT practitioner to help you heal, or you're an EFT practitioner helping others heal their broken hearts, you can use the list above as a guide.
Just go through it, one by one, and find the aspects of brokenheartedness which fall under each category. As you find them, assess the emotional charge of each one, and tap them all out to zero.
The Importance of Tapping Things All the Way to Zero
The sad truth is that most people don’t get the life-changing results with EFT that they’re looking for. There are several reasons for this, and one of the most common is that they stop tapping before the aspect that they’re working on is completely healed.
For example, let’s imagine that you’re tapping out a statement like:
“My heart is broken because ___________ left me.”
Let's say that the emotional charge when you begin is 8. Usually, once the emotional charge of any issue (or aspect of an issue) gets to around a 4 or below, the pain the statement evokes is barely registering in the body-mind at all.
Because it doesn’t really hurt anymore, people mistakenly assume that it’s totally healed.
That’s why I’m such a stickler for the numbers, because when the pain is mostly gone, they are the only way to know that the issue (or aspect of the issue), is not completely healed, and therefore needs more tapping.
So instead of tapping all the way to zero, people tend to stop when the emotional charge is still a 2 or a 3. While a 2 or a 3 might sound like nothing, it’s not nothing at all. A 2 or a 3 is still 20 to 30 percent unhealed.
If you’re eventually going to tap out 20-30 different tapping statements to completely heal your broken heart, and you leave them all at a 2 or a 3, that is a great deal of healing which is being left undone.
Simply put, you’re not completely healing your broken heart. It might feel better. It might even feel a lot better. But it’s not completely healed, and when something is not completely healed, it can still cause you to suffer, and it can still affect your life in negative ways.
“In my solitude, you haunt me, with reveries of days gone by. In my solitude, you taunt me, with memories that never die. I sit in my chair, I’m filled with despair—there’s no one could be so sad.”
— Duke Ellington
How a Partially Healed Broken Heart Can Negatively Affect Your Life
Having your heart broken is a traumatic experience. And trauma breeds fears and limiting beliefs. In fact, as I mentioned earlier in this article, identifying and releasing these fears and limiting beliefs are part of the process of healing the broken heart.
If you leave part of the trauma of having your heart broken unhealed, even if you release the fears and limiting beliefs which have sprung out of that experience, because the trauma they grew out of is still partially there, those fears and limiting beliefs will just grow right back.
It’s like removing a weed in your garden at the surface level, rather than pulling it up from the roots. It looks like it’s gone. It truly seems like it’s not there anymore. But the next thing you know, there it will be again, because you left the roots in place.
To keep your heartbreak trauma from sprouting new limiting beliefs and fears, you must heal it all the way.
How to Know When a Broken Heart Is Completely Healed
The way to discern whether your broken heart (or someone else’s), is completely healed, is to go back over the list from the beginning of this article. To make that easier for you, I’ve created a downloadable checklist that you can use as a guide.
If anything on that list is still left unchecked, you’ll know that either you or the client you’re working with has more healing to do, and you’ll know exactly which area needs more healing. To download my free Broken Heart Recovery Checklist, click here.
In short, you will know that the broken heart is completely healed when you can think about that person, and everything that happened, and feel no pain whatsover. No sadness, no longing, no regret, anger, or hurt feelings whatsoever. Just peace, and the sweet relief of healing.
PLEASE NOTE
When doing EFT on your own, if you aren't able to completely heal the issue you're working on, so that when you think about it, it no longer causes any stress, emotional pain, anger, or fear, I can help. Click here to learn more and schedule an EFT session or free consultation.
BY HEATHER AMBLER
Heather Ambler is a California based EFT practitioner and mindset coach. Through her private practice and online programs, she’s helped over 14,000 people in 81 countries heal the pain of losing a loved one, recover from trauma, release fears, erase limiting beliefs, increase confidence, and achieve goals. If you could use some help with any of these things, click here to learn more and schedule an EFT session or free consultation.
