With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, we all start thinking about current relationships, past relationships, and everything lovey-dovey that has happened in our lives. We’ve all had dysfunctional relationships, but we often overlook what sometimes is the most dysfunctional relationship we have: the relationship between our heads and our hearts.
When your head obsesses over guys, your heart sinks when that obsession isn’t reciprocated. When your head starts blaming yourself, the guy, the other girl, your heart breaks. No matter what questions or how many questions your head asks, your heart hurts and they never seem to agree. Our heads think too much and our hearts feel too much—but it’s what they’re made to do. Its as if they’re always in a constant battle that has become so routine that we often don’t realize that we’re allowing ourselves to settle in the broken relationship between the two most important parts of us that govern how we act, think, and feel.
We’re used to this constant battle. It’s drama that we can’t run from because it’s trapped inside of us and we can’t take sides with ourselves. We don’t know how to deal with head vs heart conflicts, and most of the time we just end up ignoring them. However, most of us don’t realize that the more we ignore them, the harder we break. When relationships don’t end well, the head vs heart battle becomes the ultimate showdown that consumes us because we don’t know what to do. But we always get over it not because we find a solution, but because we try to avoid the drama and our heads and hearts move onto other things to think and feel about to replace what was once there. And every time a new showdown happens, everything from our past showdowns resurface and we break harder than we did before.
So sit down with your head and heart and tell them “hey, we have to talk.” Don’t avoid the last battle that happened between them. Let them break up—with each other, and with yourself. Let the head think and let the heart feel. Eventually one will break up with the other, and it won’t become a recurring showdown that they always have. They will break up, but they will also make up. This isn’t going to be a solution to the ongoing battle brewing inside you, but it will ease whatever battles may come in the future. Maybe there isn’t really a hard and fast solution to breaking up this dysfunctional relationship, because hey, they’re meant to work together. But like all relationships, we need to acknowledge whats wrong to make things work.