This content was created by Monique Thompson. This content was uploaded by Monique Thompson. This is a YouTube video titled "30 Day Self-Care Guide After Finding Out Your Partner Cheated" (created 2026-01-28) featuring Monique Thompson delivering a solo spoken self-help/talk. She gives practical guidance for coping with rumination and rejection after relationship trauma (e.g., infidelity or threat of divorce), describing a 30-day “brain workout”: schedule a daily 15-minute appointment using a calendar and timer, use a 15-minute music playlist during that period to contain ruminating thoughts, jot notes for later, and repeatedly tell yourself “stop” outside the appointment. She also recommends trauma-informed life coaches or therapies (EMDR, polyvagal, brainspotting, IFS) for deeper healing and emphasizes persistence, self-trust, and biological/regulatory benefits of the practice.
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Whenever you experience a significant event in an intimate relationship, like infidelity or threat of a divorce, or any kind of significant disruption that might mean that you're feeling rejection, or that you're wondering if all hope is lost for love, you might also experience ruminating obsessive thoughts. This is excruciating for most people. It keeps you from paying attention to your everyday life, disrupts your sleep, and can make you think that you're actually having some kind of mental health crisis. Now, you might have a co-occurring— that means that before this event, you had a preexisting mental health issue and now it's exacerbated. But it also could mean that you're simply experiencing the pain of rejection. This biological experience can also be biologically helped, and I'm going to just encourage you to hang in there. For this 30-day workout for your brain, where you're going to train your brain to respond to your command. Likely, if you are trying your best to not think about the event, all you're doing instead is thinking about the event. This behavioral technique that we're going to use is just meant to help your brain begin responding again to your command to stop, but you might need deeper work to heal the wounds that were caused by this experience. In that case, I recommend that you work with a trauma-informed life coach or someone trained in any of the family of therapy for trauma, which would be EMDR, polyvagal theory, brain spotting, IFS, any of those things in the family of therapy for trauma. Okay. All right. So let's get started. For this correction of your brain not responding to your command, you will need a few ingredients. One, you need a calendar. Two, you need a timer. Three, you need a playlist. And you're going to need 30 days. Those are your key ingredients for this experiment. All right. So on each day for the next 30 days, you're going to set aside 15 minutes of an appointment where you keep with yourself to manage this experience by not thinking about it until those 15 minutes. All right. So you got it so far? 15 minutes per day for 30 days. All right, days 1 through 7, most people complain that it just is so hard to do, but by the second week it is much easier, and certainly by the third week it seems like something you don't need to keep doing. But trust me, keep at it for the full 30 days. All right, now here's where you need your timer. You're going to start on time, end on time for each of these appointments that you keep with yourself. This is critical. Your brain is learning to respond to your command, and you're learning to trust yourself. So by keeping these appointments, you're sending a very important message to yourself that I can be trusted and I'll come back. All right, so in those 15 minutes, this is where you'll have your full ruminating, obsessive, grieving, whatever you want to do, any thoughts you want to think about this event. During the day, until it's time for your appointment, you will not, you will not be thinking about it. Instead, you will tell yourself stop. All right, so you'll tell yourself stop. Something comes up, you tell yourself stop. You maybe make a little jotted down note so that during your 15 minutes you can return to that thought, but you just tell yourself stop. Now your next ingredient, remember we mentioned music. You need 15 minutes of music. Create a playlist of any music that you enjoy because we're going to use this music to kind of create a A little bit of a protective barrier around your brain, little dopamine pulse, and a little bit of correction for your heart rate. This helps you out a little bit biologically. We want to get in there and visit this content without overwhelming you. All right? So that 15-minute playlist, you start on time, end on time, play your music, and have that whatever thoughts you want to think, whatever stuff you want to do during that time, cry, holler, whatever you need to do during that 15 minutes, just get it all out and then stop. And then stop. Okay. Then come back the next day, do the same thing the next day, the next day, the next day. So you can do this for 30 days beginning one day, maybe the day you receive this, and mark your calendar for the day that you stop without interruption. Okay. If this pain has been fairly deep, I do recommend working with a life coach that's trauma-informed or working with a therapist that has been trained in any of the family of trauma techniques. And definitely know that my heart goes out to you. This hurts every human being. We are not meant to be alone and choosing to reconnect. Sometimes it's difficult if you're in a lot of pain, excruciating pain, and especially if you're learning to manage your thoughts. This can be very difficult to do, but trust me, try this, do this, and you will feel like you can tell yourself what to do. It returns to you, and that can help you in your work, whether you're working on your own for self-help or working with a professional. All right, good luck. I'm rooting for you.
