Acupuncture For A Broken Heart?
We all remember our first heartbreak. That sense of being so crushed we couldn’t breathe. One would think that heartbreak gets easier as we get older and wiser, but I've seen that it continues to be one of life’s stormiest passages. The pain of heartbreak feels very specific because it is specific. In fact, chemically it is very different from other types of loss.
As a Chinese medicine practitioner, as well as a trained psychotherapist, I've seen firsthand how helpful this ancient healing modality can be through modern romantic heartbreak.
Getting through a painful time using Traditional Chinese Medicine.
While the adage "Time heals all wounds" has a lot of truth to it, it’s not usually helpful in the moment. The time period that must pass before healing occurs can seem like torture, and it feels like we cannot survive without the person we’ve lost. Helen Fisher, Ph.D., a biological anthropologist, has done numerous studies on the science of love and romance. In her TED Talk, Fisher describes that obsession can become even greater after you’ve been dumped, since the brain becomes more active when you need to work out why you can’t get what you want. So although it doesn't sound very romantic, a lot of your feelings are chemical.
While Western medicine tends to repress symptoms like pain, acupuncture uses them to accelerate the healing process. When we are dealing with heartbreak, our mind loops over and over again on the same obsessive thought in what's known as a maladaptive feedback loop. With acupuncture, the person has an opportunity to start to mend a destructive thought process.
Clinical studies show that the needles can help release feel-good hormones like dopamine and serotonin—the same ones released when we fall in love. When we are madly in love, when our system is flooded with those hormones, we then associate those strong emotions with the other person, which can teach our bodies that we need that person to feel good. Once these same hormones are released with acupuncture, we are subconsciously reminded that it is possible to feel good again without our loved one. I've seen acupuncture help the blinders of that association open up a bit, sometimes even a lot. When we feel the possibility of something other than heartbreak in our body, mind, and spirit, we can begin to move on, slowly but surely.
Source - Mind Body Green
