Finding Your Self at the Heartbreak Hotel: Moving Beyond Betrayal

Psychologist Haddon and life coach Field (Get Off Your Ass and Run!) team up for an empathetic guide designed to simulate a retreat for the lovelorn. Readers are first encouraged to write down their own breakup story to “gain clarity over your feelings and experience,” and later to test out breathing and meditation techniques to foster “radical acceptance” of their situation. Much of the book is devoted to group therapy sessions in which five brokenhearted “retreat participants” work through their pain, including a woman who fears she’s “too old to start again” after her husband of 28 years left her following her multiple sclerosis diagnosis, and a 20-something woman who dissects the insecurities that fostered her infidelity-ridden relationship. Haddon and Field note that while “heartbreak changes futures, often obliterating them,” by the same token it gives readers an opportunity to take control of their destiny, starting with drawing up a list of new guiding values. While the pseudo-therapy sessions can feel stilted, the emphasis on healthy if sometimes painful emotional processing—“Struggling against your feelings means living in fear that they will overwhelm you if you let them come, and this fear alone will intensify their potency”—resonates and the psychological insights are elegantly distilled. For the brokenhearted, it’s a solid first step toward healing. (Feb.)