Broken hearts are really a form of tantrum. We feel broken hearted because our loved ones have not acted in the way we wished them to. We take our hearts out and threaten to break them because they do not listen to us. We smash our hearts into a thousand pieces, thinking, "They'll be sorry now."

We are the only ones who can break our hearts. Nobody can make us feel anything that we do not choose to feel or that we are not already feeling at some level. If we were willing to let the situation be different from what we think it should be, by acceptance, then we could take the great amount of emotion that comes and give through it. We could enter a new birth in our life. We could step into a whole new level of love with a sense of confidence and empowerment.

Today is a day to regain yourself. Go back to your heartbreak situations, and this time use them as an opportunity for healing. Imagine that instead of pulling back from the person or going into another layer of power struggle, you are giving through all that pain, whether they did what you wished or not. At this level, you find yourself reconnecting wires in your heart, your mind, and sometimes in your genitals, which have long since been cut. You feel a new surge of vitality as you renew yourself and come to a new birth.

Excerpt from If It Hurts, It Isn't Love and Other Principles to Heal and Transform Your Relationships by Chuck Spezzano, Ph.D.