I went through my first heartbreak at 17. It was your classic post-first-love catastrophe: I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep and couldn’t think about much else. I was, in every meaningful sense, useless.
Since then, I’ve become somebody who holds onto relationships for far longer than feels entirely appropriate. I find it difficult to let go until somebody else comes along to redirect my attention, and I’m prone to returning to the same questions time and again even long after something has ended. Why didn’t it work? Why didn’t they choose me? What did I do wrong? Why can’t I just move on like a normal person?
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Heartbreak, then, is familiar territory for me. But when I first met Five Element acupuncturist Ross J Barr (whose clients have included everyone from Alexa Chung to Meghan and Harry) it wasn’t what I thought we’d be talking about. During my initial consultation, we spoke about how I was feeling generally: a bit tired, overwhelmed by looming deadlines, prone to brain fog and procrastination. Otherwise? Fine. I eat well, sleep well and can easily switch off with a good book. As for my stress levels? I’d describe myself as pretty chilled out, actually.
Later, Barr asked me to lie down and took my pulse. “You have a bit of a flicker in your heartbeat,” he said. “Have you been through a break-up recently?”
Immediately, I wanted to cry. You know that wave of emotion that sometimes comes over you, when someone asks you, sincerely, if you’re ok? Because technically, the answer was no. My last relationship had ended months earlier (and can you even call it a relationship when you were only dating for six months?), but apparently, some part of me was still emotionally holding on.
How acupuncture works
Five Element acupuncture is a branch of Traditional Chinese Medicine that takes a holistic approach to health, viewing the physical and emotional parts of us as interconnected. At its centre is the idea that we’re influenced by five elements – wood, fire, earth, metal and water – each associated with different physical, emotional and energetic qualities. When we’re well, these elements are thought to exist in balance; when something is disrupted – through illness, stress, shock or emotional upheaval – one or more can be thrown out of balance, and that can manifest in ways both physical and mental.
Rather than treating one obvious symptom, practitioners look at the whole picture. Barr took my pulse at different positions on my wrist to look for variations in rhythm, strength and quality. “There are hundreds of different pulse qualities,” he explains. These qualities, he says, can indicate everything from anxiety and anger to shock.
The treatment itself involves inserting very fine needles into specific acupuncture points around the body. For me, these were mostly in my hands and feet, but sometimes in my arms and scalp, too. It doesn’t hurt – every now and then Barr tweaks them, and you feel a dull ache – but otherwise, it’s fairly inoffensive. In Chinese medicine, these points sit along meridians through which or vital energy – flows. Which points are used depends on what the practitioner has identified during the consultation. There is, unfortunately, no acupuncture point marked “get over him”. Shame.
“The points we use are tailor-made to the individual,” Barr tells me. “You wouldn’t necessarily treat every person going through heartbreak or grief in exactly the same way.” This explanation appealed to me. Partly because I’m suspicious of the notion of a universal solution to something that feels so deeply personal, and partly because if there were a single point that could erase an emotionally complicated man from my brain, I suspect social media would have found it by now.
Can heartache manifest in the body?
For Barr, one of the most impactful things about heartbreak isn’t necessarily the sadness – it’s the shock. “If a break-up happens suddenly or out of the blue, you can experience that same fight-or-flight response you might have after another sudden shock,” he says.
Anyone who has been properly heartbroken will recognise the physicality of it: the nausea, loss of appetite, 4am tossing and turning and inability to concentrate on anything except the person you are trying so desperately not to think about.
Chinese medicine has a more poetic explanation, too: sudden emotional trauma can temporarily shock the spirit out of the body, leaving you feeling detached from yourself – as though you’re watching your own life from a slight distance. It might sound a little woo-woo, but to anyone who has spent weeks going through the motions – showing up for work, answering WhatsApps, socialising with friends – while simultaneously experiencing a private emotional apocalypse, it might sound somewhat familiar, too.
How can acupuncture help with emotional stress?
Heartbreak isn’t the only kind of loss we carry around. There’s grief, rejection, disappointment… Some arrive with a bang, others sit quietly in a corner of your life for years. Barr says these experiences aren’t necessarily to be treated as interchangeable. “Some emotions can be felt very acutely, while others can become chronic over time,” he explains. Treatment, he says, is tailored according to what that individual needs. I revisited Barr three more times in the weeks that followed that initial assessment, during which somebody I’d recently been dating – and was genuinely excited about – abruptly ghosted me. (Side note: what is wrong with people?)
Of course, I wasn’t heartbroken by this, but I had allowed myself to get excited, and suddenly felt stupid for having done so. Instead of treating “heartbreak”, Barr asked what I needed that day. I told him I wanted to feel confident, and resilient enough to not turn somebody else’s behaviour into evidence that something was wrong with me.
Barr worked on points around my hands, feet and arms, and immediately afterwards I felt lighter and steadier. This has been the most consistent effect of acupuncture for me. I’ve never sobbed while the needles were in, or experienced some enormous epiphany about my childhood, my attachment style or the men I apparently keep choosing. I simply walk out feeling calmer and more emotionally balanced. Bearing in mind that my journey home from these sessions was via Euston – possibly the most stress-inducing railway station in the UK – this is no small thing.
Can acupuncture help you let go of someone?
This became the most interesting question for me. My last relationship had ended for an irritatingly straightforward reason: I wanted a relationship; he didn’t. Nobody cheated. There was no spectacular falling-out, or great betrayal. Annoyingly, we actually really liked each other, which made the whole thing harder for me to put to bed. On paper, I had my answer. And yet some small, persistent part of my brain seemed determined to keep the case open. “I wish I could just lobotomise that whole situation,” I told Barr during one session.
Clinical psychologist Dr Katie Overbury explains that this desire to keep picking at an ending is fairly normal. “Our brains naturally want to make sense of experiences that have felt painful, confusing or unfinished,” she says. “However, when our mind begins repeatedly trying to understand, analyse or resolve what happened, this is when we can get stuck in thought loops and rumination.”
Over the months in which I’d been seeing Barr, I had noticed something changing. I still thought about my ex, but the questions didn’t demand quite so much attention – a memory could surface without automatically becoming an invitation to pick apart the entire relationship or deep-dive into a full social media investigation.
Barr also wasn’t convinced that thinking about somebody meant I was failing to let them go. I wasn’t contacting my ex, things at work were good, I was dating, and my life was moving forward. Perhaps these were simply the residual feelings of a relationship that had been good, which would naturally recede as new experiences took up their own space.
Overbury agrees. “The aim isn’t to erase a person or memory, or to never think about them again,” she says. “The memory and person can remain, but we want to feel less emotionally charged and less activated when we think of them. Grief is a normal response to loss, and relationships are losses too. Still feeling grief doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not ‘over it’. It might just mean you’re still processing something that mattered.”
I realised I had been treating “moving on” as a destination: a point at which you simply stop thinking about somebody, with anything short of total indifference as proof that you’re still stuck. Maybe it’s less about erasing someone from your mind altogether, and more about changing what happens when they pop up in there.
Four sessions haven’t erased my break-up from my memory, made it any less disappointing, nor magically removed the part of my personality that likes to revisit old wounds. What the acupuncture sessions have done, reliably, is make those thoughts feel less sticky. They pass through rather than attaching themselves to everything else and, for want of a better phrase, I just don’t care as much.
Calm Patches by Ross J. Barr
