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If you’re going through a breakup, ghosting, or another painful relational loss right now, and it feels overwhelming, disorienting, or unbearable, there’s a reason for that.

What you’re experiencing is not weakness or emotional immaturity. And it doesn’t mean there’s something inherently wrong with you.

For many, heartbreak is a system-wide shock. And until you understand what’s happening inside of you, it’s easy to think you should be “over it” by now. It's important to understand that you’re not failing.

What you’re experiencing makes total sense.

Heartbreak as Systemic Destabilization

When you’ve formed a strong attachment to someone and that attachment is ruptured, your brain, body, and psyche are registering loss, abandonment and that something essential has been taken away.

For many people, this doesn’t only affect the heart. It destabilizes the entire system. Your sleep, your appetite, your ability to focus, your sense of emotional ground, and your sense of direction in life can all begin to unravel.

And for those with deeper attachment wounds, the shock goes even further. It reactivates old pain, fears, and emotional imprints that have been living inside you for a long time. That’s why this experience can feel so disorienting and all consuming.

This is why people often say, “I don’t feel like myself anymore.”

The Nervous System

When an attachment is ruptured, parts of us react as if something essential has been taken away. Fight, flight, freeze, or collapse responses begin to dominate, often without us being fully cognizant of what’s taking place.

This can show up as panic or agitation, emotional flooding or numbness, and an inability to settle or feel at ease in your own body. Your system is on high alert, even when you’re doing everything you can to “calm down.”

You’re not choosing this. It’s automatic. Your nervous system is responding the way it was conditioned to respond, based on what it learned about loss, love, and emotional safety long before this relationship ever happened.

Hormones and Stress Chemistry

When you go through a painful loss, stress hormones like cortisol and norepinephrine surge. Your system isn’t treating this like a minor disappointment. It’s responding as though something not just important, but essential to your wellbeing has been disrupted, and it’s bracing for impact.

These chemicals are designed for short-term emergencies, not prolonged emotional shock. But heartbreak doesn’t resolve in a day or two. So the stress response can stay switched on far longer than it should.

When those hormones remain elevated, sleep becomes disrupted, appetite can disappear or become erratic, and exhaustion begins to set in. The body starts burning through its reserves, expending enormous energy in an effort to restore equilibrium, even while you’re just trying to get through the day.

Brain Chemistry and Fixation

When an attachment is broken, the bonding chemistry in your brain can also shift dramatically. Dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, vasopressin, these aren’t just “feel good” chemicals. They’re part of what wires attachment into you. They shape desire, closeness, bonding, and the sense that this person truly matters.

Over time, that chemistry helps encode the bond. The person becomes familiar. Emotionally significant. Hard to replace. Your system learns them.

So when that bond is disrupted, it isn’t only emotional pain. It’s a biochemical destabilization. And that destabilization can fuel obsessive thinking, spiraling thoughts and memories, fantasies, and the inability to let go, even when part of you knows you need to.

This isn’t a failure of insight or willpower. It’s your brain and body going through withdrawal from a bond that still feels essential.

The Gut–Brain Axis

Emotional shock doesn’t just affect your mind. It impacts the gut. Digestion often slows down, appetite changes, the abdomen tightens, and the entire internal environment becomes more strained. Inflammation can also increase. The body becomes more reactive. And instead of processing what’s coming in, the system starts bracing and contracting.

As the gut constricts and becomes distressed, it continually signals the brain that something is seriously wrong. That signaling can amplify anxiety, emptiness, agitation, and emotional overwhelm. You don’t just feel heartbroken, you feel unsettled in your own body.

This is where a self-reinforcing loop can take hold. Emotional pain destabilizes the body, and the body’s distress intensifies the emotional suffering.

Why This Feels So Overwhelming Physically and Emotionally

Before we go any further, I want to circle back for a moment. Most people don’t absorb all of this the first time through, especially when they’re in pain. So I want to reiterate the key factors at play here, so you can really understand why this feels so overwhelming, emotionally and physically.

The brain processes intense emotional pain and physical pain through overlapping neural pathways. Areas involved in physical pain perception are also activated by loss, rejection, and separation. That’s why heartbreak doesn’t stay in your head, it registers in your body as real distress, emotionally and physically.

Grief, loss, and other distressing emotions are often felt most strongly in the chest, but they rarely stay contained there. They’re experienced throughout the body, while also creating a pervasive sense of heaviness, tightness, agitation, and emotional weight. Stress hormones released in response to a painful loss amplify this response even further. When those stress hormones remain elevated, sleep becomes disrupted, appetite can disappear or become erratic, digestion becomes impaired, and exhaustion begins to set in. Over time, the whole system can start to feel depleted.

Heartbreak is rarely only about what’s happening at this time in your life. It often activates old attachment wounds, the impressions of past losses, including earlier experiences of abandonment, rejection, invisibility, or instability, along with the emotions tied to them that have yet to be fully processed. You’re experiencing the pain of what just happened, while at the same time it’s evoking what has been living inside you for a long time.

In addition, some of your most basic needs, the need for secure and stable attachment, and the need to love and be loved, are not being met. And for some people, these needs have never been met. When the emotional bond you’ve formed to another individual is disrupted, your entire system reacts.

Present-day hurt, longstanding attachment wounds, and neurochemical shifts, when combined, add to the devastation. And when that happens, life can begin to feel bleak, pointless, or stripped of meaning and significance. This is why such a loss can leave you feeling as though the world has ended. It’s not that there’s anything inherently wrong with you, it’s just that multiple aspects of your system are being hit all at once.

Why You Can't Just Think Your Way Out of Heartbreak

Heartbreak isn’t something you can reason your way out of, because it isn’t happening only at the level of thought. It’s a body-level shock. It’s a form of relational trauma. Telling yourself you just have to stop thinking about it, let go, and move on doesn’t calm your physiology, or the deeply wounded parts of you that are in crisis mode.

Insight can help you understand what’s happening. But understanding alone can’t resolve the deeper layers of what’s taking place inside you, the emotional wounds that have been activated, and the physiological crash that often comes with loss. This is why heartbreak can feel so persistent and inescapable, even when you know the person or relationship isn’t good for you, or that it’s over.

In these moments, it’s important to reframe what you’re experiencing. The fact that you’re struggling doesn’t mean you’re failing, and it doesn’t mean you’re damaged or defective. Like so many other people in these situations, your system is coping the best it can with limited resources, while trying to find its way back to equilibrium.

Stabilizing the Body While Digesting Lived Experience and Emotions

Heartbreak overwhelms the system. The nervous and endocrine systems, the brain's neurochemistry, and gut can all be thrown out of balance at once. When the body and mind are in crisis mode, we find it difficult to process what either has or is currently happening, and the deeper layers of grief, longing, hurt, fear, and other emotions.

Some widely available practices such as yoga, Tai Chi, breathwork, exercise, and other body-based practices can be genuinely beneficial, in that they help bring relief by stabilizing your mind, emotions, and physiology. I often encourage people to incorporate these practices and activities in their lives. But it’s also important to be clear about something: stabilizing the body alone does not heal the deep emotional wounds so many of us are carrying.

Healing is impeded when these practices become a substitute for facing what actually needs to be felt. I’ve seen countless individuals achieve a surface-level calm, yet remain profoundly disconnected. Their bodies are still holding trauma, other adverse lived experiences, and the distressing emotions that have never been metabolized, because the deep level processing required for true healing hasn’t taken place.

The individual healing sessions I facilitate establish grounding and stability in the body, along with the capacity to work directly with your emotions at a deeper level. This is what allows pain to be metabolized rather than suppressed, managed, endlessly recycled, reenacted in relationships, or eventually expressed through your body as illness.

If you’d like to learn more, you can message or call me at (332) 333-5155 or visit HealMyHeartache.com, BreakupFirstAid.com, or BenOofana.com.

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