Love Life with Matthew Hussey - How to Get Through the Worst Heartbreak | Rewind

Episode Date: September 25, 2026

What if the reason your heartbreak isn’t getting better isn’t because you haven’t tried hard enough to move on, but because there’s a part of it you still haven’t allowed yourself to feel?I recently sat down with David Kessler, one of the world’s leading experts on grief, and something he said stopped me in my tracks: “You don’t have a broken mind. You have a broken heart.”We spend so much time trying to think our way out of heartbreak. We compare our pain to other people’s. We distract ourselves. We turn sadness into anger. We tell ourselves we should be over it by now. But underneath all of that may be grief we’ve never really attended to.And I know that because, during this conversation, David helped me recognize some of my own.In this episode, we talk about why heartbreak is a form of grief, what anger may actually be protecting us from, and why avoiding painful emotions can sometimes keep us stuck in them for much longer.Most importantly, we talk about what it looks like to actually show up for yourself in those moments with more compassion and a kinder internal voice.You may not be able to change what broke your heart. But you can change how you meet yourself in the pain that follows.---►► Want to Feel More in Control of How You Respond to Difficult Emotions? Join Me for The CALM Process, LIVE Online September 29–October 1: 3DayCalm.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Your heartbreak will get better the moment you hear what I am about to say. Yesterday, I sat with David Kessler, the world's foremost expert on grief, to talk about the subject of heartbreak and how to find happiness again after we have had our heartbroken. One of the things that became eminently clear, if it wasn't clear to me before, was that heartbreak and grief are like this. People always want to know for me which grief is the worst. Is it this kind of death? Is it a divorce where they're still rejecting you every day on this planet?

Like, what's the worst? And I always go, yours. Your grief is always the worst. It's always the worst. Forget everyone else's. It's just you. Grief, David said, is a change you didn't want. And what is heartbreak, but a change you didn't want?

When someone leaves us, when someone betrays us, when someone decides that they no longer want us, that is a change that we did not want. And the result, we typically call heartbreak, but that heartbreak is a kind of grief. It's a grieving over a person we have lost that we'll likely never have back again. It's a grieving over a future that we thought we would live out, but is no longer our reality. It's the unwelcome arrival of a reality, a new future, that we did not plan to begin today. And are probably not ready to start today. But the heartbreak I wanted to talk with David about was not simply the heartbreak of a romantic

partner who had left us, but heartbreak in general that can occur. in all different forms in our life. Because we can be heartbroken in love, we can be heartbroken in life. Heartbreak is a certainty of life and we are all going to experience it. Now when I was talking to David, something interesting happened.

The truth is that as part of something that I am creating for you in the next couple of weeks, I haven't told you about it yet, but I will at the end of this video. I was speaking to David on you, on your behalf. But he said something at the beginning of the conversation that quickly brought me into the frame

in a way that I never expected. David said something that the moment he said it, I felt my own emotions coming up. We go into comparisons in our own mind. Oh, my grief, my heart breaks, not as much as theirs, or because of this time element, all that. And I always tell people, when you're in your comparing state, you're in your mind. And you don't have a broken mind. You have a broken heart. And we have to go into our heart.

And of course, we do this sometimes, don't we? We may have dated someone for a month. And when that person decides they don't want us or ghosts us or it fizzles out, we may feel heartbroken, but not feel entitled to feel heartbroken in the way that someone who has been dating, for two years and it breaks up his heartbroken or someone who's been in a 30 year marriage and is now going through a divorce is heartbroken. But what David said is that this is all very logical reasoning and it's not your mind that is broken. It's your heart. And when David said that, I thought of my own heartbreak, not a heartbreak in my romantic life, but some of the great heartbreaks of my life in general. I felt myself starting to tear up and I actually tried to

carry on as if nothing was happening in the middle of this conversation. I thought, I don't know if David can see right now that I'm getting upset, but I'm going to keep going because I want to have lots of questions I want to ask David and I don't want to get derailed. But David was happy enough to derail it for me. But I also want to say what I saw on your face and you and I don't know each other that well yet, hopefully. You, there was something that hit inside of you. And I can tell you it's a little unattended grief. And we all live with some unattended grief. I mean, right now that sadness in your eye, there's something there. And we all have it. And I then had to consider, while I was helping all of you, what grief I had not

attended to in my own life. And I'd love to invite you now with me to think about what grief, what disappointments in life, what heartbreak in your life have you not attended to? And why don't we attend to these things? You know, why is it that my instinct, aside from being live on camera, helping you guys, why is it that my instinct was to move on from that and not sit with it? with David, but to speed right past it. It's because that pain that's behind it is so difficult to confront. David said to me, I am the only grief expert who has studied Buffalo. And you may think,

what do do do with grief and heartbreak? He said, well, Buffalo, when they sense a storm coming, they start heading towards the storm. Because they know that by heading towards the storm, they will be in the storm for less time. The storm will be over for them faster. But what we humans do is we constantly try to stay a few feet away from the storm. And by doing so, we remain in this storm's orbit indefinitely. And we have all sorts of mechanisms for keeping the storm a few feet away. We may numb ourselves, we may move on any time the situation gets close, we may try and avoid any potential trigger for our heartbreak, any time it comes up. We may go to an emotion that's more comfortable for us to go to.

I know that there have been certain situations in my life, and I'm not speaking past tense, I'm not talking about five years ago, I'm talking about right now, there are certain situations in my life that it's been easier to be angry about. And one of the things that David said that flawed me was that anger is a bodyguard for pain. And so I had to explore what pain is underneath that anger. What pain is underneath your anger? You know, maybe if you think back to a relationship that the way it ended or the betrayal that you experienced, that thing that person did to you,

or made you feel that anger that it brought up for you, that maybe stayed around for a long time. What was underneath that anger? Because I know what was underneath my anger, what is underneath my anger, is sadness. It's that grief. And, you know, there are plenty of things in my life that I feel like there's plenty of storms

I've headed right into very bravely. And there's other storms in my life. where it's felt too scary to get close to that emotion. And as David put it, we have this fear that if we start crying about something, we'll never stop. So we avoid it all together. But in my life, and what this conversation with David proved to me was I want to go towards those storms, every single one of them that I have been avoiding. Because I've done a lot of healing with myself in the last few years,

and I've had the help of some amazing people, but I want to go further and I want to go into those storms that I've been ignoring or staying a few feet away from. You may want to do the same, because the truth is, none of these emotions can stick around forever if we actually head into the storm, if we act like the buffalo do, as David says. And allowing ourselves to feel these emotions,

deeply feel them, engage with them, is a form of show. showing up for ourselves and tending to ourselves. If we really feel our own sadness, the disappointment of what has happened to us in our lives, then we have an opportunity to be there for ourselves. We have an opportunity to exercise self-compassion, but we can't exercise that compassion for things that we're ignoring.

In order to have compassion for ourselves, we have to come to terms with the loss that we have experienced. And the loss might be something that came and went, or it might be the feeling of a feeling lost that comes with something we never had. Really coming to terms with something that we never had and the pain of that. That's a form of showing up for ourselves, that self-compassion. We live in a culture today that sort of demonises the idea of feeling sorry for oneself, especially where I'm from in England. The idea of feeling sorry for yourself is about the worst thing you can do.

but what we have to do is look at feeling sorry for yourself in a different light as feeling for yourself for what you have been through the only time that feeling sorry for yourself is a problem is when it goes hand in hand with a lack of accountability and ownership if i spend my whole life feeling sorry for myself and i never do anything about it, that's when we can waste our lives. But what if feeling for yourself was doing something about it? What if feeling for yourself was the root to doing something about it? Haven't you ever had a conversation with someone where they felt for you? They saw you and they understood you and they showed up for you in a certain way. And by doing that, it was healing for you. And from that place, you were more empowered, you were able to do more because you felt seen.

That was a basis, a foundation on which you could actually start to move again. Well, what if you could do that for yourself? I know that in various parts of my life, for a long time, I never showed up for myself in that way. One of the things David said was he realized about himself, no one ever abandoned me as badly as I abandoned myself. And how do we abandon ourselves? We abandon ourselves emotionally in all sorts of. ways by judging ourselves, shaming ourselves, constantly criticizing everything we do, telling

ourselves we're bad, telling ourselves where unworthy, not sticking up for ourselves. And like I've been saying, one of the ways we abandon ourselves is not recognizing our own pain, not actually sitting with our own pain and exploring it and showing up for ourselves and exercising compassion for ourselves in that department. One of the things that struck me about my conversation with David was the voice that he spoke to me in. It was actually one of the things that made me most emotional was just his voice, because there was such a kindness to his voice. It was so soft and loving and compassionate, and it was in such direct contrast to the kind of voice that I have used with myself so much in my life.

And just having the kind of voice that I want to get better at internally externalized in the form of David was it modeled how self-kindness can feel. And that is a really beautiful thing. There's a real you in there that's so kind and loving. But oh my gosh, that's the hardest voice to find. But that's your voice. And so that's the voice you've got to keep turning up. And it's scary to change. And it's scary to grow.

But we know what staying the same feels like. Yeah, it's scary because it's a whole new way of being. And you don't know how to move through the world like that yet. This video alongside inviting you to look at the area, where you have unattended grief. Alongside being an invitation to head towards the storm can also be an invitation to start to adopt a different, kinder, softer voice for yourself.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Before you go, make sure that you do this one thing today. I promise you that every week you are missing out by not doing what I'm about to say. I send a private email to a group of people who have registered for it every single Friday. The email is called the three relationships

and every email is packed with advice on how you can improve in the three core areas of life, your relationship with other people, your relationship with yourself, and your relationship with life itself. People really look forward to this email. It's not the kind of email people skip. People look forward to it in their inbox every Friday.

Go over to, the three relationships.com to sign up for that email for free. By the way, the three in that domain is the number three, not the word three. So the three relationships.com. And I will see you in your inbox this Friday. Thank you for listening, everyone. I'll see you in the next episode. Be well and love life.