Fix This Broken Heart

So I am going out on a limb (again)
I desire to reach out in order to reach inside myself.


To be quite blunt, I am really down and grey.
I have many things on my mind in efforts to process and make sense of things, but the reality of it all is that it doesn't make sense with my heart.
Once again, (surprise, surprise) I decided to open up my heart to some people with "my" truth and visions,  only to be belittled and swashed.
In all my 32 years of my life the reoccurring nightmare of being rejected has continually manifested itself somewhere in my life. It sneaks up on me out of nowhere and blasts me in the chest.
I have tried everything that has crossed my path to heal my emotional ailments: church, faith, counseling, yoga, meditation, spiritual healing, reiki, acupuncture, and psychiatric medications...(and on and on it goes...)
With faith, spiritual healings, yoga and meditation, I have found these things to be the most effective in every area of my life, except this one: 
Rejection. 
Social rejection.
I just have no answers or modalities that are enlightening for this... 


Here is an interesting article I read about this... explains a lot about what I have felt in the past week or longer (not to mention other times in my life)..."In this study, scientists discovered that the autonomic nervous system responds to emotional pain by slowing the heart rate"...and..."The emotional feelings of being socially rejected caused physical reactions to the heart. The physical reactions to the heart are what we think of as our “heart breaking.”"


Before you read the article, I give my apologies for the rather downer of a blog today... it was more of a need to put it out there, in hopes that I could "jump start" my heart again.  Everyone craves friends (and good friends at that), so when I lose one that I love so very much, or when someone that I love says something that hurts me.... it f***king hurts. I am just human after all.

Skinned Knees are Easier to Fix Than Broken Hearts

BY JEANETTE GUARDINO

Tears, depression, loneliness, disappointment, and insomnia; these all are symptoms of rejection. Having to deal with the emotions that go along with social rejection is enough and now we have to deal with a physical one as well. Not only do we emotionally get down but our hearts are getting down too! Social acceptance is very important in our society, whether it’s being liked from friends, teachers, family, or especially a significant other. We all want to gain approval. When we don’t get that feeling of acceptance we feel bad about ourselves. We can all relate to feeling the pain of being left out, rejected, or isolation sometime in our lives. The term “heartbroken” is usually thought as a figure of speech. But what if our hearts really do have a role in this whole rejection process?

A study conducted, by Bregtje Gunther Moor, Eveline A. Crone, and Maurits W. van der Molen of the University of Amsterdam and Leiden University in the Netherlands, with 27 volunteers found that when rejected heart rate actually slows down. The volunteers were asked to send a photograph of themselves and told that the study was on first impressions. They thought that students would look at the photos to decide whether they liked them or not based on their picture. This was a hoax for the volunteers. The actual experiment was to see the physical and emotional reactions of the volunteers once they found out the students’ opinions about them. The volunteers were hooked up to electrocardiograms and had to look at pictures of unfamiliar people. They then had to guess whether or not they thought the person in the picture would liked them or not. They were then told if the person liked them. The researchers found that in anticipation to finding out what the other person said about them, the volunteer’s heart rate dropped. When told they weren’t liked, the volunteer’s heart rate dropped even more. It was found that heart rate took longer to return back to normal when the volunteers were told they were not liked. The heart rates were even slower in the volunteers that were surprised to find out the other student didn’t like them. They were expecting to be liked.

In this study, scientists discovered that the autonomic nervous system responds to emotional pain by slowing the heart rate. Pervious research has shown that the brain processes social and physical pain in the same region. In this study the researchers wanted to see if social pain could cause physical reactions. They found out it was true. The emotional feelings of being socially rejected caused physical reactions to the heart. The physical reactions to the heart are what we think of as our “hearting breaking.”

George Salvich, from a different study found social rejection to lead to inflammation. The participants had to do certain tasks in front of an audience and they were sensitive to being judged. They had an increase in two proteins associated with inflammation, interleukin-6 6 (IL-6) and tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-alpha). This suggests that social rejection, or stress, triggers activity in the brain, which then triggers the inflammation in the body. Like with an injury inflammation occurs to repair it, in the case of social rejection the inflammation is activated in response to the pain of rejection.

Social support is a huge part of our well-being. It affects not only emotional, and psychological aspects but also physical ones. I agree with the findings because if you’ve ever felt rejected you’ve experience the low energy and lack of motivation. This can relate to the decrease in heart rate you get from being socially rejected.  Social rejection can cause many other problems in a person’s life. The more rejection a person faces the more likely they are to be “down in the dumps” which also accounts for their heart rate to be slower. I think gender and age play a huge role in the outcomes of this study. A male might not feel as rejected by another male as he would by a female, for example. Although I do not necessarily see a decrease in heart rate as a health issue because the heart is going back to normal after sometime, but when thinking about the elderly or someone with a heart condition, rejection may cause more of an affect. The study is not clear on who their volunteers were, I think they should be further research done on the elderly and those with heart problems. But all in all, this study slows that our hearts really do physically play a part in heartbreak and rejection. It also shows how important social support influences our self-esteem.