Healing a Broken Heart: A Guided Journal »

Sarah La Saulle, Ph.D., is a marriage and family therapist.

The loss of a love is a nearly universal emotional crisis, whether the end is divorce, desertion, or a mutually agreed-upon separation. At first, friends and family are there to offer a shoulder to cry on, but after a few months there's an expectation that we just need to get over the crisis and move on. Thus, unprocessed, painful feelings are buried, leaving us numb. Or we repeat damaging relationship patterns over and over again.

The situation doesn't have to be like that. Healing a Broken Heart guides those of us grieving for a lost love through four metaphorical seasons of recovery with provocative questions — and journal pages on which to respond — to help move us forward.

The four seasons serve as powerful metaphors for the stages of the grieving process. Summer is the season for charting the course of a relationship: remembering hopes and expectations, the warning signs that went unheeded. During autumn, journalers accept the reality of breaking up and acknowledge things about the relationship that didn't serve their needs. Winter brings the pain of grief over the profound loss. Finally, spring — and, with it, renewal — invites readers to examine and understand how their family history may have affected their past relationships.

Punctuated throughout with poems and moving meditations, the thoughtful, interactive approach of this book offers the time and space we all need to heal when our hearts are broken.