Alyssa Luboff, PhD

Many of us were taught as children to hold in our anger and to hide it. We didn’t feel safe to embrace our emotions or to express our truths. Many of us believed – and still do – that our anger is bad and hurts people. So, we hold it in, often to protect those we love. This strategy becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. We hold in our anger as long as we can—like a balloon that we’re filling with more and more hot air—until it just can’t possibly hold any more.

Here’s a variation on a familiar saying: Life is what happens while you’re trying to get your work done. For many of us, balancing the demands of work and relationships feels impossible. These can be relationships with parents, partners, children, friends, and also ourselves. What we need to do to make a living feels at odds with the art of living itself—that is, the art of cultivating healthy connection with ourselves and others.

The death of a loved one. The rupture of a relationship. The loss of a job. The failure of a project. The dismantling of a dream. The end of an era. There are many reasons that the heart breaks, that we feel an emptiness in the center of our chests as the world around us seems to cave in. Sometimes, it hits abruptly, out of nowhere, and other times, it crashes down on us only after a long period of foreboding. And yet the anatomy of a broken heart, regardless of the timing or

You may think from the title that this post is about being selfish or taking advantage of people. It’s actually about learning to love more. And it’s not written for sadists or manipulators; it is for caretakers and codependent types. We each have different styles of loving, and with them comes different healing work to do. This work is for those who love so deeply, so selflessly, at times, it seems, that they cannot bear the thought of hurting those they love the most.

On really hard days, if I’m lucky, the theme song to the children’s show Arthur pops into my head. “Just believe in yourself,” a voice sings, “Well, that’s the place to start…” I smile, feel refreshed, and keep running uphill, ready to face my demons and what felt, just a moment before, like the whole world turned against me. It’s a great message, one I wish I had heard more while I was growing up. Young children are newly building their models of who they are and how the wor