Losing the love of your life in a relationship can be heartbreaking and turn your whole life up-side down. Michelle Walter discusses how you can turn heartache into healing.

When you are in a long-term relationship, or even a short relationship that affects you very deeply, without realising it, you absorb the identity and issues of the other person. In effect, you become merged.

Obviously this makes any break-up totally heartbreaking. However you must remember that although you may feel like you are losing part of you in the other person, you will also loose all the baggage that has been brought to the relationship as well.

The process of letting go of this excess baggage combined with the gradual loss of that heartbroken feeling will actually make you feel free. Free to exlplore a new profound personal relationship with yourself.

A new beginning for my own relationship

Firstly, make a beginning by working out what things that you counted as gains from your partners identity and then think about how you can adapt these qualities in your own way. The better parts of your relationship or indeed your ex can be salvaged and used in the future to create something totally unique to you. One particular more high profile example of someone re-inventing themselves using a previous relationship is Nicole Kidman. Nicole went through a very difficult and painful break-up but has taken the part of the relationship that she shared with Tom, their acting, and has now emerged as an incredibly famous actress in her own right. She has used her previous relationship with Tom to make her more powerfull and certainly not less. Through her own heartbreak she has realised her own potential from being in her previous relationship.

Looking at your realtionship within yourself and how this can help you grow out of your heartache

Too often, we believe that the key to getting what we want lies outside ourselves - in some other person. Whilst it is true to say that in a deep, intimate relationship you become open to new feelings and experiences that help you to grow, the relationship itself is an introduction to these new experiences.

You can’t always rely on your partner. Over time you will get the energy to create these new feelings yourself. Do not look at it as the end of the relationship but perhaps a new beginning. A new form of energy in a new relationship. It can be very easy to get the idea of sharing in a reltationship mixed up and becoming needy because we rely on taking our energies from one an other. We forget our own capacity for continual growth and expansion as human beings and forget our ability to be creative.

Life can be so beautiful and free and yet your partner has opted to leave the relationship and you are left broken hearted. Though the truth is that as you gradually come to terms with it and begin to open your eyes to the new experiences that lie ahead you will feel all the new energies flowing through you and become invogarated. There is so much still to create and feel with all the beauty of a new life ahead of you, and remember, there’s plenty more fish in the sea!