Face the ache at the Heartbreak Hotel

Book into the Heartbreak Hotel to meet others who share your pain

Heartbreak is everywhere in popular culture and yet has been largely ignored by the psychological and scientific community in favour of the process of falling in love.

Romantic betrayal has a particular psychological architecture, and the trauma it can leave in its wake often maps on to the symptoms of PTSD. It is without doubt a devastating experience, and yet, particularly as women, we are expected to ‘get on with it.’ The Heartbreak Hotel –set up in 2021 by Alice Haddon, a seasoned academic and psychologist of some 25 years and her good friend, Ruth Field, a bestselling self-help author and former criminal barrister turned coach—was created to give women a sanctuary that offered the time and space and powerful therapy that’s needed to begin their journey of recovery. Alice was grieving the death of her mother in 2020 and, when listening to a heartbroken woman speak on Radio 4 about being groomed online and conned out of her money, was moved by her lament of there being nowhere for her to go for help. Alice knew what she needed, and the care that she could provide, something that went far beyond the scope of the 50 minute session, the sort of cocooning wraparound care that’s essential in grief and heartbreak, a place where women could be with each other in their pain and in their process – and move through it together. Their book, Finding your self at The Heartbreak Hotel, replicates the experience of the retreat by inviting the reader on a journey with five other guests – as if the reader is there at The Heartbreak Hotel.

Some tips to help those in the throes of heartbreak or grief…

Go with the natural ebb and flow of your feelings, all of them, even the ones you don’t much like. Feelings, no matter how much we believe to the contrary, will not in fact overwhelm us. Rather, they rise in intensity, have a peak moment and then subside. But when we cut them off early through numbing them with alcohol or sugar or doom scrolling on our phones, we don’t learn this and remain afraid of them. Moving with the pain is paradoxically the only way to release yourself from it. A huge part of our retreats is helping our women guests practice getting in touch with their feelings and through experiencing their natural ebb and flow, learning to trust in them. By the end of the three days they have become feelings experts. Feelings have a purpose too; they hold vital information about our experience. If you’re angry then your boundaries have been breached, or there has been an injustice. If you’re afraid, then there is danger you need to attend to. If you are calm, then you are safe. If you are excited, then you are moving towards what you want. So, feel your feelings, and tune into what they are telling you.

Get outside for a walk and give yourself a DIY EMDR (Eye movement desensitisation reprocessing) session. Bilateral stimulation – when both hemispheres of the brain are activated alternately through left right eye movement – is the foundation of this evidence-based trauma therapy. Walking activates this bilateral stimulation too, and is a fantastic way of helping process heartbreak without you having to do much above and beyond marching onwards. And make no mistake, heartbreak and grief can be traumas, and would benefit from the same processing techniques. In getting outside for a walk (or run), not only will you have helped process the trauma, you’ll have the added benefits of the endorphins and serotonin that a cardiovascular workout in the bracing fresh air have provided.

Wrap up and get cosy. Warm blankets, hot water bottles and cups of tea play a vital role in recovery. The body takes a heavy blow when there is a loss and the physical exhaustion quickly follows, requiring warmth and comfort to recover. Take naps whenever you can. Gentle music, a warm bath and nourishing food all help. Give yourself time – and the permission to take as much of it as you need. At the Heartbreak Hotel, we like to call it wraparound care. If you are able to connect with others while you are being warm and cosy, all the better. A friend to talk to on the phone, a family member nearby are all good – we recommend non-social media contact here. The sense of safety you need in heartbreak is harder to find on the screen.

Try and limit the social media scrolling. You will always find things that will make you feel worse – your ex with another woman, your friends holidaying with their partners. You may think that you are relaxing, or even connecting, but social media often has the opposite effect – it can activate our negative feelings, especially around self-worth and emptiness. Tell yourself you can come back to it later and instead try doing something that will give you some sense of accomplishment, however small.

Radically accept. You don’t want it to have happened and it shouldn’t have happened, but your loss has happened. And no matter how many ways you turn it over in your mind, trying to see it from this way and that, playing out the ‘what if’ and ‘if only’ – it’s still going to have happened. Accepting is not the same as forgiving, agreeing, sanctioning, or condoning – it is just acknowledging with all the pain, that it has happened. And radical, well, because sometimes that’s what it takes.

Let someone else make the household/family decisions whenever possible; it’s important to have someone take care of you while you process your pain and grief. As women, we are so often doing that for others which makes it harder to prioritise ourselves and we take on so many service roles and it’s important when in pain to prioritise our own care. This is one of the main reasons we established the heartbreak hotel – to create a space for women to relinquish their other roles and, for the time they are with us, to really reflect and recharge and to not be in service to anybody. Come along and let us take care of you for a while.

Take time out of your day to relax – and read a brilliant book on the subject, oh wait a second, yes, this one! Our book Finding your self at the Heartbreak Hotel is published in February. Or better still, book yourself onto one of our residential or day retreats We’d love to help you, www.theheartbreakhotel.co.uk/

Finding your self at the Heartbreak Hotel by Alice Haddon and Ruth Field is published on 1st February (HQ, hardback, £20)