I called Orna Guralnik, a psychoanalyst and the star of Showtime’s “Couples Therapy.” Her job, in part, is to help couples avoid breaking up, but it’s also to help them deal with the detritus of former heartbreaks. “People come scarred and with all sorts of haunting histories that color their expectations,” she said. I asked Guralnik what she thought of various breakup-targeted interventions. “It’s not how I work,” she said. “I’m a psychoanalyst. We address heartbreak like any other thing.” Getting over a breakup is a process, she said: “It’s a matter of coming to terms with reality, which is always a complicated thing, or coming to terms with various realities that remind us of things that happened earlier in our lives that brought us to our knees in one way or another.”
In September, I found myself in an alternate dimension. I was floating in space, and a gigantic, translucent heart was barrelling toward me like an asteroid. I braced for impact, covering my face with my hands, which suddenly looked like tree branches. Words appeared before me: “The person you have lost finds a way back to you.” “Blimey,” a voice behind me said. It belonged to Alice Haddon, a British psychologist whom I had invited to the Gazelli Art House gallery, in London’s Mayfair neighborhood. I took off my virtual-reality goggles and handed them to the gallerist. We had been watching “Heartbreak and Magic,” a V.R. installation by the artist and quantum physicist Libby Heaney, who had lost her sister to suicide. It turned out that Haddon had also lost a sibling, a twin brother, who drowned in a swimming accident in Central America at nineteen. “I think people who go into this profession have very sensitive antennae, which makes them good at their job,” she said. “But there was a reason that they had to be sensitive in the first place.”
We stepped outside. Haddon, a forty-nine-year-old blonde who lives in East London, was wearing sporty white sneakers and a long orange wool coat. “I don’t get to this side of town very often,” she said, pointing at a chauffeur polishing a black Mercedes-Benz. Haddon lectures in psychology at City, University of London, and also runs a retreat in England, two to four times a year, called the Heartbreak Hotel. She takes groups of six to ten women to a hotel in either Norfolk or the Peak District for four days of intense heartbreak therapy involving sharing circles, cold swimming, and sessions with on-site psychologists with P.T.S.D. training. She likes those regions of the country, she says, because “a long horizon helps the brain to process things.” She emphasizes the importance of “cocooning” during heartbreak, providing her guests with blankets and hot-water bottles. She didn’t feel comfortable having a journalist attend a retreat, out of concern for her clients’ privacy, but she had agreed to take me through some of the exercises included in the package.
The book she co-wrote, “Finding Your Self at the Heartbreak Hotel,” is also meant to re-create the experience of being at one of her retreats. It contains fictionalized versions of past guests, such as Nadia, a queer woman unable to stop ruminating over her ex-fiancée’s being with a new partner: “I have nightmares about killing them both, then wake up in a cold sweat and my heart breaks all over again when I realize they are both alive and probably in bed together.” Then, Haddon writes, Nadia “laughs through tears, retreats to the back of the sofa, draws up her knees.”
Now Haddon asked how I was responding to the breakup treatments I’d gone through, and I confessed that I felt better but also a bit empty inside. “I miss my wound,” I joked. Haddon laughed. Heartbreaks can be defining, she agreed, adding, “They’re a big part of how we make meaning out of our lives.”
We took a taxi to her home, a small brick row house near London Fields. She had given her husband and teen-age children strict orders not to disturb us. There was nothing she could do about her dog, Bonny, though—a light-brown Lab mix who greeted us excitedly at the door. In the kitchen, she put on a kettle for tea while I looked through the windows. Her small, walled-in back garden was lush with overgrown ferns and an apple tree.
Haddon decided to be a psychologist when she was sixteen, after she read a book called “Dibs in Search of Self,” about a kid who hides under a desk. A therapist comes along and plays a game that draws him out from under it. “I thought, I’m going to do that,” she told me. She studied psychology at the University of Edinburgh, and started working at the Priory, a private psychiatric hospital, in her early twenties. She joined its eating-disorder unit, and then moved to Saudi Arabia, to treat a well-off young woman there. “I think it was a really influential bit of my life, because I’d never seen that kind of wealth before, and that kind of unhappiness,” she said. Haddon’s clients at the Heartbreak Hotel come from various walks of life, but, at around three thousand pounds, a stay there is certainly more expensive than bonbons and a box of tissues.
One of the guests at Haddon’s first retreat was a woman in her forties—I’ll call her Olivia—who lived in London. Her partner had had an affair with a co-worker, and paid for Olivia to attend the retreat after she found out. “Guilt,” Olivia said wryly, when I called her up. By the time she arrived at the Heartbreak Hotel, she had tried everything else. “I was seeing, like, five therapists.... I did hypnotherapy,” she said. “I think I read every single blog post since, like, 1992 on betrayal and heartbreak. I listened to every single podcast. I was obsessed.” Olivia was struggling with what she believes was P.T.S.D. “I would cry for days on end, and I’d never really been someone with mental-health problems before that, so it was really scary,” she said. At the Heartbreak Hotel, Olivia found E.M.D.R. therapy especially helpful. “I had a lot of visual triggers really causing a lot of pain for me,” she said. “I’d seen photos of my partner and the other woman. It was just a constant—like, I close my eyes, and they were just always there.” Finally, they began to fade.
In Haddon’s bright kitchen, the tea had finished steeping. “I want to hear about your heartbreak,” Haddon said. By way of diversion, I offered my therapist’s theories for why I’ve struggled in my love life. “I purposefully pick people with whom it won’t work out,” I said, “where there’s some baked-in conflict.”
“If we were at the hotel,” Haddon said, “this is when I’d ask, ‘If you think that somewhere deep down you deserve rejection, how do you try to keep yourself safe?’”
I knew where this was going. I told her that I had never, to the disappointment of many a therapist, had big feelings about my father not being in my life. My parents had not been a couple. “He was my mom’s high-school math teacher,” I said. For her, it was four years of thinking nothing would ever happen, and then something happened, and suddenly I was there and he wasn’t. “It’s my mother’s heartbreak, not mine,” I said. Haddon said nothing. “He was twenty-three years older,” I continued. “If anything, I’ve always felt that him leaving me alone—I’ve met him only a couple of times—is his single act of love toward me.”
“Is that how you learned to protect yourself?” she asked. She was sitting close and was very still. Somewhere between asking and answering, I said, “To pick people whose rejection wouldn’t hurt me.”
“So,” Haddon asked, “how is that going for you?”
My jet lag was working like a truth serum. “It’s a life with very little love, very little warmth, just very little,” I told her. “I have this fantasy of coming home and someone cooking me dinner and offering me a glass of wine.” I let out an embarrassed sigh. “It’s the simplest thing, and it’s been the most elusive. And I’m, like, Why? Why haven’t I picked people who would do that for me?”
“Finish this sentence,” Haddon instructed me, beginning a cognitive-behavioral-therapy-inspired exercise that she does at the Heartbreak Hotel. “If I don’t have any needs in a relationship, then...”
“Then,” I supplied, “I would be loved more.”
“Where does that idea come from?” she asked.
“My mother was eighteen when she had me,” I said. “She was all alone. And I knew...” My voice was getting shaky. “I knew that I was this big imposition on this young woman’s life, and that she was still heartbroken. I tried to be self-sufficient whenever I could be. I felt like if I didn’t need too much, it would be O.K., like it would be O.K. that I was here.” I could hardly speak. “I was the same way in my marriage,” I told her. We both started nodding. She brought me a tissue.
“It can be very relaxing when people are clear about their needs, Jennifer,” she said. I took another sip of tea. “Very relaxing,” I repeated.
“Some might say my prescriptions are hard,” Ovid had warned. “Best to think twice if you’re counting on help from the sorcerous herbals.” There would be no magical shortcuts. The day after I got back home to New York, I stretched and went for a run in the park—an old hobby I had decided to take up again.♦
