I struggled to move on from a heartbreak — until I tried acupuncture for emotional healing
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?
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 really okay? 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 qi (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.
