Interview with Andrew Gentile

Author of HeartBreak Therapy: Repair Manual for a Broken Heart

Where are you from originally and where do you reside now?

I am originally from a small town in Eastern Ontario, Canada. My town, Napanee, is now somewhat better known than it was when I lived there because it is also the hometown of pop rock singer, Avril Lavigne. I now reside in Toronto.

If you currently reside somewhere besides where you were born, what’s the story that lead from there to here?

After spending years away at university and studying abroad, I taught English in Japan for a year before moving to California to do my masters. I lived, studied and worked in San Francisco for 13 years before moving back to Canada in 2014.

What made you decide to write and publish your first book?

Back in 2003, shortly after completing my training as a hypnotherapist, I had the opportunity to work with a young man who had been devastated since a breakup six months earlier. This man had been introduced to me by a mutual friend who insisted I use my new skills to help his friend. Our mutual friend said that his friend cried every day and couldn’t spend any time alone. In one 45-minute hypnotherapy session, and using a very simple technique, this man’s grief about his breakup dissolved completely. I followed up with him regularly for months and his grief did not return. He continued to feel peaceful about his former relationship and within a few months, began a new one.

This experience made me realize that helping people out of the devastating grief of heartache could actually save lives, since the pain of loss and perceived rejection by a loved one can lead to suicide. I felt compelled to share these little-known techniques with the world, making them available to whomever could benefit.

My initial plan was to launch a simple website with a downloadable PDF that would essentially be a repair manual of sorts, for a broken heart. For a few years, I didn’t do anything with the idea.

A few years later, a friend of mine was going through a similarly painful post-breakup heartache. I did a different hypnotherapy process with him that I had since learned for dissolving an emotional enmeshment. Within 15 minutes he was crying tears of relief, tears of joy. I shared with him my previous experience of helping someone out of heartache as well as my idea to put this content out to the public. My friend insisted that I do it and practically forced me to purchase the website domain, heartbreaktherapy.com, which would eventually become the website associated with my yet-to-be-written book of the same name.

How would you describe your books to first time readers?

My book provides insight into the human psyche in relation to relationships. It helps those who are working to get over a past relationship to understand the mental and emotional factors that led them into the relationship in the first place, and it provides guidance and techniques to help them heal their heart and move forward.

When I write, I like to get to the heart of the matter as quickly as possible. When people are suffering, they don’t want fluff, they want solutions. There’s something wonderfully satisfying about helping people understand themselves better. It feels like sacred work to help people come into clearer relationship with themselves.

Who do you feel is most likely to connect with the topics you write about?

Anyone who wants to feel good and be their best self. I think of my writing as a mirror that helps people to see themselves more clearly, catch their blind spots, address them, and move forward clearer and stronger.

What unexpected or surprising thing did you learn during the process of writing and publishing?

I was surprised at how challenging it was to find my writing style. As a teenager I was a very poetic writer. My writing was playful, flowery, whimsical. But that all got trained out of me over the next many years of being a science writer, which led my writing style to be formal and rigid. I knew that for this book I needed a more gentle and warm writing voice. That took a while to find. So at first, the writing was slow and tentative for me. As I got more comfortable and confident in my voice the pace picked up and the writing flowed more easily.

If you could, what advice would you give to past self yourself before embarking on this journey?

I would advise my past self that before he embark on beginning the book, that he take some time to develop his new writing voice by writing smaller pieces, such as journal entries, blog posts, and individual articles. This way, things would flow with greater ease when he begins writing the book.

How many people would you ideally like to reach with your books?

I would ideally like my book to be known to everyone as a potential resource that’s available to them as needed for when the crisis of a breakup occurs. While my audience is fairly targeted in one way, in that it is for anyone who would like to heal the lingering pain of a breakup, its very broad in another, in that most people experience this pain at some point in their lives.

What has been the biggest challenge and frustration during the process to date?

The process has been wonderful all the way through. I thoroughly enjoyed the professional support that my publishing company provided, especially the insights and and advice from the editor that I worked with. The editing process really gave me useful input and built my confidence in putting moving the book to the final stages.

What’s your biggest strengths when it comes to book a) writing, b) publishing and c) marketing?

I’m pretty comfortable with all areas, but writing is the most fulfilling. Getting abstract content from my head into a structured, linear format through the written word is kind of like making something real that had only previously been conceptual. There’s a certain magic to that process.

What’s your biggest weakness when it comes to book a) writing, b) publishing and c) marketing?

I tend to focus on the next creative project, on what’s on the horizon, which means that I don’t put a lot of energy into marketing the things I’ve already produced. So I’ll have to say marketing is my weak spot. While I know how to do it, it just doesn’t juice me and therefore doesn’t take priority.

When do you think you will you write your next book?

I’ve been writing my next book for the past two years. My partner and I teach a 10-day hypnotherapy certification training. I’ve written the manual for that training, which will be published at some point. It’s a novel approach to hypnotherapy that makes it much more accessible to someone new to the topic. It de-mystifies hypnosis and it highlights how simple and powerful healing the mind and emotions can be.

Are you self published or did you use a hybrid publisher, or a traditional publisher?

Self-published. Before deciding upon this route I talked with some experienced authors who laid out for me the short-comings of traditional publishing and the benefits of self-publishing. The single most important factor in my decision was that I was not willing to sign away the rights to my content over to a corporation, which is required with traditional publishing. I’m very pleased with my decision to self-publish.