Crazy Glue for the Broken Heart

Now that you've journeyed through the steps of heartbreak, here are some pointers for overcoming your barriers to love and intimacy and finding love again.

1. Be willing to change your values. You may have been choosing people on the basis of attraction, status or other false values stemming all the way back to junior high school. Consider finding new attributes attractive: a person's ability to be emotionally open, to admit to their vulnerabilities, to be fully present.

2. Choose people who are seeking relationships rather than romances. The difference is subtle. Determine if they are able to be emotionally constant or if they are just looking for emotional highs. Avoid those who base their attachment to you on infatuation rather than commitment, those who pull away when the infatuation subsides. Find those who are safe to attach to.

3. Be suspicious of you. If you find that you only want someone who is a "challenge," this may be your own way of avoiding relationships.

4. Don't resist commitment. If you feel engulfed and want to run when someone is willing to commit to you, consider that it may just be your own fear of abandonment. The key is to hang in long enough to work through your feelings of resistance.

5. Avoid getting into emotional entrapments. Don't become involved with someone who is not available or dangles you on an emotional string. These negative attractions are often more compelling than positive ones -- and often harder to break. If you're in one, it will take all of your willpower and lots of outside support to get out.

6. Stay away from emotional candy. Instead, seek people who offer emotional sustenance rather than the "right chemistry." Chose those you can trust, respect and revere -- people with integrity who are able to commit.

7. Seek mutuality rather than the game of "emotional pursuit." If you start to become critical of your partner and second-guess your choice, consider that some ambivalence is normal. Your perfectionism and unrealistic expectations might be blocking you from achieving intimacy. Perhaps you're having a problem adjusting to the healthy dynamics of a mutual relationship.

8. Be open to love. Love is sometimes not what you might expect. It is often invisible -- the guy next to you at work, the woman you let get away last time because you felt no "chemistry." Don't be ruled by attraction alone. Love is all around you, but it's up to you to recognize it.

9. Be vulnerable. Your vulnerabilities are worth sharing and may be the very reason significant others are able to connect and feel comfortable with you.

10. Turn love into an action verb. Don't expect love to be something that you just fall into. Love is an action not a feeling. A mature relationship happens when two people commit to active caring, sharing and showing one another love.

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