One ship sails East,
And another West,
By the self-same winds that blow,
Tis the set of the sails
And not the gales,
That tells the way we go.
Like the winds of the sea
Are the waves of time,
As we journey along through life,
Tis the set of the soul,
That determines the goal,
And not the calm or the strife.
- Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Both before and
after I became an attorney, I spent years as a therapist and coach. I specialize in helping people move past breakups. I wrote my undergraduate thesis, my graduate thesis and my law school thesis all on grief.
Over the years I have done countless speaking engagement, given seminars, workshops and boot camps for people getting out of a relationship. I started one of the first internet blogs on breakups and have written countless articles for many publications about it. That work led to the publication of my first book Getting Past Your Breakup: How To Turn A Devastating Loss Into The Best Thing That Ever Happened, which has been a consistent best-seller and places on several “best breakup books of all-time lists.”
In GPYB I say that getting past a breakup can be the best thing that ever happened to you because it’s a great opportunity for change that you’ve always wanted. It’s the best time to think about steering your life in the direction you want to go in.
I always come prepared, to speaking engagements, media interviews, workshops, seminars and classes, to answer the most profound questions. My life has been one of scholarship but I have also done this work both as a client and as a therapist. I am always anticipating lofty, philosophical questions. While that sometimes happens, the ones that touch my soul and my heart are the ones that come from someone, usually with tears in their eyes and maybe a trembling hand that asks,
How do I begin? I’ve been in this pattern my entire life.
It takes me aback almost every time. I forget that I once didn't know that I didn't know, and that I was that person with tears and trembling hands without the knowledge and the expertise. I can forget that so I do feel grateful when someone reminds me of that as they did today.
Advertisement
For for that lovely person I met today, I will return to basics here
and hope that this will help anyone looking for the way out of pain and
sorrowWhen hurting from a failed relationship, people are overwhelmed. They don’t know how to start to change things. In GPYB I tell people that it begins and continues with 3 things: observation, preparation and cultivation. What does that mean?
Observation
You can't know where you're going until you know where you have been. Many people have been in chaotic lives or dysfunctional situations. They are so busy with action and reaction, with having the same reaction to the same old stuff, being ingrained in their patterns, that they don't even know what their life is really all about.
When you’re in emotional pain, it’s tempting to want to dive into a distraction. Technology has made it easier than ever to be distracted. Let’s play Candy Crush for the 500th time today instead of thinking about life. Let’s tweet this cute cat photo rather than listen to the thoughts in my own head.
But as hard as it is, it's time to listen to your own thoughts. You have to learn to pay attention to what you tell yourself about yourself. You have to learn to listen to your own thoughts. Are they highly self-critical? Are they full of gloom and doom? Are you full of self-pity?
I suggest that people start to ease into being unplugged for some time each day and increase that time on the weekend. Take a walk without technology. Go to a mall or a park and just sit and be. What is going on inside your head? Keep a notebook and write it down. For now, you don’t do anything about it, you just let it be. Record your thoughts and your feelings.
Feelings are important. How many times do you feel hurt during the day? Is this your comfort zone? Do you spend your days (and ultimately your life) feeling wounded? insecure? misunderstood? powerless? afraid? walked upon? invalidated? unimportant? used or abused? or do you feel angry and sullen and moody? Depressed and withdrawn? You need to clue into how you are feeling from day to day and even hour to hour.
Advertisement
Think about where you are most comfortable. Are you comfortable
being on the outside? Even if you don’t like it, is that where you have
learned to be? Are there people, places and things in your life that
bother you and need to be extinguished?Finally, spend some time each day thinking about what you want for the future. Do you want to make a career change? Live somewhere else? Take up a new hobby? Go back to school? Will that make you happy? Do you know what happy looks like? Do you think you deserve that? If not, why not? Whose voices are in your head telling you you don't deserve it? It's time to throw them out and realize you do.
Preparation
Change is a choice. Becoming healthy and throwing off the hurts of the past is a choice. It's work and it involves SETTING YOUR SAILS in the direction you want to go.
To be yourself in a good relationship, you have to believe in yourself and that you have worth. The more robust your life is and the more independent you are, the easier it is to believe in who you are and to insist that others value you as well.
To prepare to change, you have to get your mind moving along that path. You have to believe in yourself and in your goals. You have to affirm that you deserve to be happy and that you can be happy no matter what. You have to affirm that you are a good person.
When you’re fresh off a breakup, this might seem like a tall task.
Affirmations, done the right way, as it teaches in the GPYB work and workbook, work and work well. If you have a negative mindset, if you don’t believe in yourself, you have to change that. Check your journal. Read your thoughts. What needs to change?
Ask yourself: is your negativity still out of control? Are you being a victim? Do you feel powerless? Why? What is standing between you and your empowerment? You figure this out by becoming an OBSERVER of your thoughts, feelings and actions. You start to change it with PREPARING yourself for change. Changing your self-talk when it’s negative or self-pitying or feeling like a victim. It's telling those negative Nellie's in your head to take a hike. You're in charge now.
But what shouldn’t be a stretch is facing your losses. All healthy people understand that life involves loss and it’s time to stop running from that.
Affirm that you are ready to work through your unresolved grief. Make a commitment to yourself every single day that you will work through it and find out what has gone on in your life to bring you to this point. Affirm that you are ready to finish the unfinished business in your life. Do this through therapy, support groups, the Relationship and Life inventories in GPYB and the GPYP workbook.
These tools can help you chart the course, but you are the one who has to set sail to a new life. So many people repeat the same mistakes over and over again in relationships because they haven't committed to change. If nothing changes, nothing changes. If you don't change the person who failed at your last relationship, you will simply fail again.
It's time to think about goals and prepare for reaching them. Don't let your timidness hold you back. Now is the time to allow yourself to dream and set goals for yourself. It's time to make your life what you've always wanted it to be.
Cultivation
It is important that you take baby steps and cultivate the tools of change every day. Figure out where you want to go, what you want to do and make a commitment to yourself that you will do it every single day.
Take “unplugged” time each day. Listen to your thoughts and feelings. Write them down. Look at your patterns and feelings. What represents the “hamster wheel” of your brain? What self-defeating thoughts and feelings are coming up? How do these thoughts and feelings translate into destructive actions?
After looking at your patterns, look at your negative self-talk and decide what needs to change. Now that you’ve journaled your comfort zones, understand that you have to move your comfort zones only a little bit at a time. If you try to move too far from where you are, you won’t be able to believe it and if you can’t believe it, there won’t be any effect. Many times people say they have tried affirmations and they didn’t work. The only answer is that they were not done correctly.
It’s very important to move your comfort zones a little bit at a time. If you see, in your journal, that you spend a lot of time saying you’re so stupid, this is a pattern that has to change because it's probably holding you back from a lot of things. If you've been told you're stupid or you believe you're stupid, just changing it to, “No I’m smart!” will not work. You can't erase a lifetime of destructive thinking that easily. If you could, everyone would! But this is the problem--some people have misrepresented positive self-talk and then dismissed it when that way didn't work. The way to do it and to cultivate it is one step at a time. So the next time you hear, “I’m so stupid!” it's better to replace it with, “No, I’m learning every day!” Because you ARE learning every day...that much is TRUE! And if you wipe out the "I'm so stupid!" every time you catch yourself saying it, you'll stop saying it and you'll stop believing it and you'll stop acting like it's true. That is cultivation!
As you go through your journal thoughts and feelings, come up with thought-stopping phrases to combat negativity the next time it comes up. That is the purpose of keeping the journal, so you can work on phrases to combat your negative thoughts.
Cultivate change by reading your journal and thinking of new things you can say in place of the negative thoughts so that when they come up you now have new positive statements at the ready. That is cultivation.
Visualize meeting your goals. Use this post-breakup time to see how much opportunity you now have the ability to make good things happen in your life.
Visualize those goals coming true. Spend some time each night visualizing your dreams coming true. Either sit in a chair with the lights low and relax or set the scene in your mind every night before you fall asleep. In GPYB, I write about the woman who had a fear of public speaking but needed it to be promoted. She affirmed that she was a decent public speaker (she didn't say the greatest or anything she couldn't believe--just something that made her a bit uncomfortable) and then every night before she fell asleep, she visualized herself giving a speech and being poised, confidence and exuding expertise. After a few months, she did exactly that. Visualization of your goals is important.
Healing is about BALANCE. Building your own life is about being good to you and learning to be alone with you AND getting out and doing new things, meeting new people, going new places. DO IT IN BALANCE. Or do it at the same time: taking a train trip alone and just watching the world go by is an example of getting out and doing stuff AND learning to be alone and okay with that.
Think of things you can do to build your own list and then: DO IT!!
Not everything was successful...but give yourself credit for trying.
This is NOT just busy work. This is learning to build a life and to care, REALLY CARE, about what you'd like to do--what you're all about. It's about giving yourself enough validation to figure out what you want to do and DOING IT. It's about learning to be alone while learning to be out in the world as a single person. It's about CRAFTING a life that is rich and full of meaning even if some of your interests and hobbies seem a bit goofy.
And you will value you and your life and it will be a nice place to be. You'll be surprised at how much fun it is to think: wow, I wanted to do that and I did it!
And that is how you begin. Every day have your daily goals at the ready. Know what you are going to do to OBSERVE, to PREPARE and to CULTIVATE. Do it little by slow and if you have a setback, it's okay, just go back and do it again. Don't be negative or critical of yourself. You're new to all this.
When you're green you're still growing, when you're ripe, you start to rot.
You can do this!!!! You just have to start. And now you know how!
No comments:
Post a Comment