Finding Your Self at the Heartbreak Hotel: Moving Beyond Betrayal

by Alice Haddon, Ruth Field

Overview

You can’t seem to get over the breakup. You feel stuck in cycles of rumination and pain. This revelatory guide provides brand-new therapeutic tools to revolutionize the way we overcome loss, as well as seek and welcome love, within and outside of ourselves.

"A solid first step toward healing.” —Publishers Weekly

Alice Haddon, psychologist with over twenty-five years of clinical experience, and Ruth Field, bestselling self-help author, show us how we can dissect heartbreaks, mine them for strength and live our most empowered life.

In these warm, welcoming pages, you will meet women of different cultural backgrounds and ages who successfully picked themselves back up to become more confident than ever through the work that Alice and Ruth are doing at the Heartbreak Hotel—a therapy retreat providing intensive care to the heartbroken.

Bursting with compassion, humor, sass, and courage, this book will take you into the actual exercises conducted at the retreat. It will teach you how to:

• face your deepest hurt without shame or judgment
• ask for help and lean on the collective
• be kind and forgiving to yourself
• turn your heartbreak into an abundance of love and pride.

Providing you with a clear pathway to recovery, Alice and Ruth draw on their wealth of professional and personal experience to help you Finding Your Self at The Heartbreak Hotel.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798212898270
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	02/06/2024
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Alice Haddon is a psychologist and psychology lecturer at the University of London. She ran her own busy private practice in London, and her writing has been featured in the Times, Harper’s Bazaar, and HuffPost.

After ten years as a lawyer, Ruth Field published three coaching self-help books, including Run Fat Bitch Run, which was the bestselling title in Ireland for twenty-four consecutive weeks and a top-ten Sunday Times bestseller. She ran a much-loved Agony Aunt Grit Doctor column in the Irish Times for five years and her work has appeared in numerous publications and magazines, including the Times, the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Irish Times, Irish Tatler, Grazia, and Red. She is a motivational speaker and coach.

Kristin Atherton is a voice talent and audiobook narrator.

Editorial Reviews

01/15/2024

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.)

Publishers Weekly

[P]sychological insights are elegantly distilled. For the brokenhearted, it’s a solid first step toward healing.” — Publishers Weekly

“Finding Yourself at the Heartbreak Hotel offers practical, relatable advice for healing and rediscovering joy. Each page is a step towards understanding that even in the depths of despair, hope and renewal are not just possible, they're within reach.” — Amy Chan, author of Breakup Bootcamp: The Science of Rewiring Your Heart

"This book that is filled with science-based advice is going to change how we deal with heartbreak. An enlightening read for anyone in grieving" — Nicole Vignola, neuroscientist and author of Rewire: Your Neurotoolkit for Everyday Life

From the Publisher