Recovering From A Break Up with Lauren Mathues

Hey, girl. Welcome to the get yout Guy coaching podcast. My name is Anwar White, but you can just call me your own personal dating and relationship coach. Each week you'll hear actionable advice, tips, and strategies that you can implement in your own love life. I'm talking about healing your heart, dating effectively, and understanding men so that you can. You guessed it. Get your guide. Are you ready to level up your love life? All right, let's go.

I never felt the way I do without anyone but you.

Hello, my loves, and thank you so much for joining me today on the get your Guy coaching podcast. I have an amazing guest that I cannot wait for you all to hear. Her name is Lauren Matthews, and she is a dating and relationship coach. Lauren, thank you so much for joining me today.

It is so good to be with you, Anwar.

Girl, stop flirting with me. You're already doing much.

Girl.

Now you know I'm taking, and you're taken, too. We can't be doing this on the slide.

Okay, okay, okay. Let me get professional. Okay. Okay, girl.

Thank you again. I'm just, like, really happy that you're here, and I really wanted to have you on here because I know that you know so much about how to deal with a breakup and how to do it in a healthy way. And I talk to so many people in consults every day, and they're generally coming from a breakup, and they just, like, don't know how to deal. So I thought I would have you on here so that we could really talk about what's going on physically, mentally, intellectually, emotionally, and also how to overcome those moments. But before we get into that, talk to the lovely people out there about what you do, all about your business and how you got into it.

Sure. So, like you said, I'm a dating and relationship coach, and I help people who are struggling with feeling their agency in their romantic life. So it's not always easy, but sometimes we can find it easier to execute on an educational level, on a professional level. If we have community activities that we're involved in, we can find it easy to make a plan and figure it out for those things. But then our romantic life feels like it's categorically different. And while there are important differences, I love helping people figure out their strengths that they've been able to use in other areas and bring it over to romance and love and find their forever date, find that love that they're looking for. And a big part of my motivation for this is because I know so many wonderful people, amazing people. Some of the Most loving, giving people. I look at them and I'm like, you're going to be such a great partner. But something inside of them just like has them closed off. And so I love coming alongside people who know that they want that forever date, but are having a hard time figuring out the path toward it. I help them with a goal oriented, values based approach to their dating lives.

I love that so much. Now, you know, we have to get into like breakups and everything. I guess I've broken up quite a few times with different individuals. For me, the way that I have really dealt with that is I'm on my couch for a day and then I'm like, okay, I gotta get through this. I'm either like watching TV and just like numbing and buffering for the day. And then the next day I'm like, let's go, let's hit it. In the way that you have experienced breakups, like, what has been your go to?

I in general, in my life, like to pretend that I'm not having an emotional response. I'm okay.

I think a lot of listeners will definitely resonate with that.

The pain of the experience, on the surface, not even doing any of the emotional work is a lot because we're dealing with a rejection and that sends us into some not really happy places in our minds. So in the times that I have broken up or been broken up with, my go to is like, nope, this was a good decision. I get really cerebral about it, really. I go to my safe intellectual space and I'm like, here are all the reasons. It was great. It's a good decision and I'm moving forward and I tried as little as possible engage with the hurt and engage with the pain. But I think there's a better way. And it's been really cool to see the wisdom that I can access when I'm willing to tolerate the pain of the relationship. There's such wisdom there for us as we heal.

Yeah, I love that you and I have both talked a little bit about how difficult it is to kind of get over a breakup a bit. In our own past experiences in general, you talked about rejection. Why else is it so hard to just be done, be over, move on with a breakup?

I mean, the pain is the biggest thing that comes to my mind. Pain hurts. To say the obvious, it's a painful experience. And I mean, we're human beings. So the process of having to learn and grow, that's just part of being a human, also includes these experiences of pain. And we're also Hardwired to want to protect ourselves from pain. So I think it's hard to move on because it's hard to become more willing to, like, deal with the parts that hurt on the front but are going to really help us.

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I remember when I was going through a really harsh breakup with a guy in Germany, and I was in Germany, and all my family and friends were in America. And I'm on the phone with my mom at this basement of my former boyfriend's house, and I'm like, mom, it's not gonna happen. It's not gonna work. And she was saying, you know, grieve. It's okay. It's a death.

Yeah.

Relationship. But more importantly, it's a death of a dream that you had about where the relationship was going to go.

Absolutely.

Who you are going to be in that idealized version of that relationship that hit me so hard. Obviously, I haven't forgotten about it. It's been almost 20 years now, and she knows about it. She has been married a few times, been around the block, and so she gets it. And I think it's a grieving process. It's a death in so many ways. At least that's how I've experienced it. What about you?

Absolutely. Yeah. I think another thing that what you said brings to mind is it's not just it's a death of the relationship and what you had hoped for. It's also a grieving for the work that you put in. Yeah, grieving. And I like to say an honoring. Like, when we take the time to grieve a relationship, we're honoring all the hope that we had and all the work we put in into continuing to get to know this person, into figuring out the balance of maintaining my sense of self while I'm getting to know this person, learning to love them, getting to know their friends, figuring out rhythm. So when the relationship ends, we're also looking at our hard work and our vulnerability, our openness that has been put away for that time. Taking the time to really let that be real. It's. I keep thinking of the word honor. You want to honor ourselves in that process.

I'm really glad that you brought this up, because so many times people will feel like, oh, my God, this was such a waste and it was such a failure, and it's never going to happen to me because I've broken up with this person. I think that is, like, toppled on top of the hurt and the pain and the grieving that we're already going through, which makes it 2, 3, 10 times worse. Also, it's the beating up of this was considered a failure. So I'm a failure. And all of these thoughts that we have around what this breakup means about me. Right. As well. Which is, like, so hard. Talk to me a little bit about. Because not only is that happening, but I feel like there's also some chemistry and biology happening as well in our bodies during this time that can also, like, weigh so heavily on us Right. After a breakup. What does the research say? What do you know about that?

Yeah, I like the way you're kind of building that picture, Anwar, of all the things that are crushing us. And this biochemical reaction to our breakups is definitely a part of that as well. So there was a professor, Dr. Edward Smith, out of Columbia University, who did research on this exact thing. He did research on our biochemical reactions to a breakup. And what he found is that our brains process the emotional pain of a breakup in the same place in our brain that physical pain is processed. And I find that fascinating. I find it fascinating that when we're going through emotional pain, what's triggered in our brain and what reactions are started is the same one that happens when I'm in physical pain. Right. So when I'm alerted in physical pain to protect myself from danger, to figure out what the source of the pain was and remove myself from it as quickly as possible, that same thing is being triggered in me when I'm having an emotionally painful situation. So to your earlier question about why is it so hard? It's so hard because our brain is actually being triggered to just protect, just get out. And for our emotional responses, we need more than just get away from the pain, though. We need to do that. We need to do more than just get away from the pain in order to move forward. So I think it's really interesting to think about that. Another thing that shed some light on how our body chemistry is experiencing the pain of a breakup is to think about the trauma cycles that we have gone, that people have gone through. So can you talk a little bit.

More about these trauma cycles and, like, what the cycles are? Exactly, yeah.

So in a limited way, I can say when we experience trauma, simply, we go through cycles of trying to distract or avoid the emotional.