As a therapist and teacher of psychology, I spent most of my adult life listening to the stories of individuals free falling from the summit of love, crashing down into the relational desert of mourning and heartbreak,  bewildered by the fact that a heartbreak transforms an otherwise functional adult into a cognitive dimwit.

This book explores how love is at the core of every therapeutic approach, and how both its bitterness and sweetness are fundamentally factors of evolution and liberation. Yet, love is also easily corrupted, which explains why none of the usual admonitions to let go,  and none of the popular theories based on stages of mourning  have succeeded in providing healing. 

Neuroscience demonstrates what happens in the brain to explain the misery and medical risks of heartbreak, but it is psychology which has the tools to force the brain  to evolve.  It is the first time, in the history of psychology, that some of its basic assumptions about the unconscious aspects of the psyche are confirmed by neuroscience, pointing at what works and what doesn't.

New evidence demonstrates how a traumatic experience (such as the rejection from a partner, the mourning of a child, a family feud,  a loss of professional or national  identity) cannot be erased from the folds of our brain,  which explains how it does not work to try to forget the relationship, its beauty, or its pain.  The brain can only add new aptitudes to the repertoire of responses, and these new responses, over time, will over-ride the earlier ones.  This book reviews those new aptitudes that bring healing and evolution.

The pain of heartbreak and mourning is truly a push from nature, to propel all of us beyond our contemporary dysfunctional myths about love, freedom and relationships.  No one volunteers for a devastating heartbreak, yet, it happens! Those who succeed in liberating their captive heart gain an advantage over others, because they learn, at great cost, what supports love and what doesn't.