96: How A Strong Woman Deals With Past Hurt | Dr. Zoe Shaw

Grab a cup of tea or listen as you go, ladies. This is your hour with Dr. Zoe, your life and relationship coach. With encouragement, on-point insight, inspiring guests, health tips, and advice, Dr. Zoe helps busy women keep their mind in the game by redefining your superwoman. You're listening to the Dr. Zoe Show.

Hey there. Thanks for tuning in today. I'm your host, Dr. Zoe. I'm a life and relationship coach and a motivational speaker, and I can work with you virtually to help you get unstuck. Connect with me by texting the word JOIN to 38470, or just go to my website at drzoeshaw.com. And we are all about redefining your superwoman here. Today's topic is how a strong woman lets go of past relationship hurts. But first up, my Superwoman win and my Superwoman fail. So for my fail today, I'm kind of laughing and I really shouldn't because, well, many of you don't know, the people who know me the best are completely aware of the fact that I am clumsy. Now I'm also very graceful. I was a collegiate athlete. I hurdled 100 meters, sometimes 400 meters, and I did it pretty well, but I'm kind of like that ballerina who can look super graceful on the stage and then all of a sudden just totally fall apart and like, you know, fall on the floor and it's really awkward and embarrassing. So that's me. And all my friends know that. So anyway, my husband got a surgery recently on his big toe. And there's something about men that I've noticed, they just don't protect themselves. Like even with our kids, you know how toddlers can kind of kick you and, and they're like all over the place when you're trying to hold them sometimes? I noticed that we women are pretty good at protecting our bodies and men just not so much so. So we're in the kitchen, my son, my husband had surgery on his So he's got it all wrapped up in the splint and, you know, the ACE bandage and stuff, and he's got it just kind of poking right out in the middle of the kitchen. He's sitting at the island and his crutches are there too. And so I'm walking around the kitchen busy doing stuff, and then all of a sudden my foot hits his crutches. I get tangled up in his crutches. I go down, his crutches go down, bam, right on his big toe where he had his surgery. Oh my gosh. My husband screams. I get to feel really guilty. On top of that, I'm injured too. So that's a super big fail. I feel really bad about it, but I just don't understand why men don't protect themselves. He saw me walking all around him and just leaving his foot out there like it's going to be okay. He knows me better than that. It's totally my fault that I protect myself better when I've just gotten a pedicure than he does after surgery. So there's my fail, definitely a bad wife moment. But my win is that school is back in session and we seem to be doing it pretty seamlessly, especially because I'm still kind of a newbie at this whole traditional school thing. I've gone from now homeschooling 4 children to now homeschooling 1, and my son is going off to college next week. My other son just started traditional school, high school in 10th grade for the first time. So I'm home with my first grader and it's quiet. But she's getting some cool one-on-one time with her mama, and our schooling days have been kind of humming along. And so we're doing it. It's definitely a win. I've got kids everywhere, different places, but that's my win is that we're making it work. Remember, sometimes we are killing it and sometimes we fall flat on our face, literally, and we just have to honor the lessons learned and the beauty in our beautiful chaos. So on to the main event, how a strong woman lets go of past relationship hurts. This episode was fueled by 2 questions I received recently from my listeners. So I'm kind of excited to do an episode where I'm really just answering your questions. If 2 women are asking me similar questions, then I know that they are not the only ones out there having these issues. So I'm going to address both of them today. Knowing that the answers will probably be helpful to many of you. So question number 1, I've been hurt. I'm terrified to let it go because I don't want to be the fool and be hurt again. Where's the line? When do I put it behind me? Am I being forgiving or foolish? And question number 2 is related. And so I'm going to, going to be answering both of them at the same time. Question number 2, hi, Dr. Zoe. I listened to episode 87. And I have a question regarding the vow from this day forward. One of you mentioned if it's in the past, leave it in the past. My question is, how far in the past are you talking about? I understand if something happened years ago, you shouldn't dwell on it. However, if you had a bump in the road in your relationship and it happened within the past year, do you still leave it in the past? Thanks so much for any insight you can provide. So my simple answer is, if you haven't dealt with it, worked through it, and come to a resolution, it's still in the present. Your job is to work through it as much as possible so that you can leave it in the past, whether it was last week or last year. But that's the simple answer. And I'm so glad that you ladies have asked the question. Of course, all questions are anonymous if you want to be anonymous. So the past is not really a time thing. So when people say, you know, time heals all wounds and, you know, put things in the past, the past isn't a time thing. It's a process thing. If you haven't dealt with it and processed it, then guess what? It's not really in the past at all. It's been hitchhiking in your heart and your brain all the way here to the present right now. And I think this is where people get so caught up in, in the whole, it happened so long ago. So why are you still, you know, why aren't you over it now? It happened so long ago. Now, sometimes we truly do choose to hold onto something, but more often than not, We never dealt with it in the first place. We swept it, we buried it, we buried ourselves, we denied it, whatever we felt we needed to do, consciously or not, to get through life, but we didn't really deal with it. And so we haven't gotten over it. So for question number 2, you say a bump in the road. I have no idea what a bump in the road is, but my guess is that it was probably more like a boulder. If almost a year later, you're writing me about it. So you ask, if it's recent, do I still put it behind me? And how do I? If you can't get over it, then your relationship will forever remain frozen in time in an unhealthy place of hurt. So is that the kind of relationship you want to live in? I don't think so. And I'm not telling you to get over it. I'm not telling you to stay together or accept him because you don't have to do that. But I am telling you that you can't do both. You can't stay in a hurt, unforgiving place and have a healthy relationship at the same time. You have to choose one. I once had a couple and the wife had cheated 10 years earlier and he was so angry and indignant. And this was really a lot of what our sessions were about. And he was very self-righteous that he hadn't left her and he wanted some credit for that. So he would say things like, you know, I stayed in this marriage even after you cheated. And eventually I had to correct him. And I said, no, actually, you didn't. You left her emotionally, physically, and psychologically the moment you found out she cheated. You didn't divorce her. You continued to live with her, and you made both of you miserable. But you actually left the marriage a long time ago. And when I said those words to both of them, he said, wow, I never thought about it that way. But you're right. And he had every right to leave the marriage. But instead of choosing one, he decided to stay with her and not let it go at the same time. And many women do that in relationships as well. So what are the steps to letting past hurts go? The first step is you have to make a logical decision about whether this is a one-time incident or an ongoing thing. If it happened once, or, you know, even for a period of time, It's in the past. If it's ongoing or it still happens occasionally, friend, this is the present. You can't put it behind you, and you will make yourself crazy trying to put something that is currently going on behind you. A lot of women make that mistake. You have to face this thing straight on and be willing to have difficult conversations and to make some hard decisions if something is still ongoing. The second step is you gotta feel all the feelings. You've gotta unbury the hurt, take the layer of denial off for a minute or 2 or 10, and accept what happened. Name what happened and talk about it. A lot of people wanna skip over this step and just go to, okay, let's just get past it. Let's not talk about it. Now, some people do dwell in this a little too long, but you have to go through this process of acknowledging it and naming it. The next step is that you've got to stop trying to make the hurt make sense. So many women get caught up in needing an explanation, needing it to make sense in order to have some closure. This is the biggest lie of the century. You create your own closure. Believe me, whatever he says will not satisfy you. I promise. It'll just lead to more questions, more information for you to ruminate over. It's not that you shouldn't get some answers, that's okay, but you can't make your ability to have closure over this situation dependent on it making complete sense in your head because it never will. You create your own closure by acknowledging to yourself that all behavior makes sense in its context, even if it doesn't make sense to you. And just because we say a behavior makes sense doesn't make it. okay, it doesn't make it right. It was still wrong. It shouldn't have happened. You can choose to close the door on it. You don't need anything from the other person in order to do that. Next, you have to stop blaming and stop being the victim. A strong woman recognizes when she's been wronged. She asks herself, what was her part in the process that caused her pain? And she does her best to figure out how to prevent that hurt in a healthy way in the future. Notice I said healthy way. And yes, sometimes your part may have just been that you allowed it, and sometimes you were a part of that process. But deciding that you're going to avoid relationships or avoid getting close or put a big old wall around yourself is not a healthy way to avoid getting hurt either. It's just another form of self-harm. You are hurting yourself because you are scared of being vulnerable. And of course, it might sound like you're doing a smart thing, you're protecting yourself, but it hurts you in the long run instead. You need to learn how to be vulnerable in a healthy way. Now, being vulnerable in a healthy way, I think that's going to be a whole nother podcast. Next, you've got to get real with your why when it comes to letting go of the hurt. Write down why is this hurt important to move past? How will your life be different when you move on from the past? How will your relationship be different When you move on, how will it feel to be free from this burden? This writing this down will help keep you motivated to stay in this place of moving on. Now we're all going to have times when it's harder to let go than others, but being committed to the goal of constantly letting go with a purpose will help you stay focused on this path. Now your brain, your thoughts, and your emotions are a muscle that can be trained. You can train yourself to hold on to negativity. and pain, or you can train yourself to let it go. These are habits that we often don't even realize we formed, but these habits get formed really early in life when it comes to kind of holding on to pain or not, and they determine the trajectory of our life. You've seen the difference between someone who's often happy and someone who always seems miserable. They don't even notice their moods like you do. And the reason why is because they're so used to them. We grow so accustomed to our moods and our emotions that we don't always notice How they are affecting us in our daily life. It's like going nose blind. It's like you go emotion blind when you don't even notice a smell anymore because your brain accommodates for it for so long because it needs to focus on other things. The same thing happens with our emotions. So you've got to notice intruding thoughts. Once you've processed the pain, you've done all the steps I already talked about, you've talked about it, you've acknowledged it, et cetera, it's time to ignore. And reframe the negative intrusive thoughts. This is different from burying because you've already processed it and acknowledged it. And it's okay always to acknowledge the memory, but don't dwell on it now. You need to immediately replace it with a positive distracting thought. The more you do this, the more that muscle will grow and it'll develop muscle memory so that it will kind of almost do it on its own. So bottom line, if it's been 8 months in the past or 10 years in the past, you need to leave it there. If it's still continuing to happen, it's in the present, and most of this podcast doesn't apply to you because you need to first make a change in your life so that it becomes in the past, and then come back and listen to this episode. If you're scared to move on because you're worried you're going to get hurt, You're living in the past too. Apply these steps. If you get hurt again, which is part of life, it's part of loving, is that we as humans inadvertently hurt each other. But remember, it really is better to have loved and lost than to have not loved at all, because we humans are made to be in connection with each other. And just like you get hurt by others, you hurt others too. It's part of how we are in relationship with each other, and you deserve to be forgiven. So does your partner, as long as it's in the past. And by not allowing yourself to continue to connect, you hurt yourself. So it's doable. You've got this. Reach out if you need some help. And thank you so much to the women who asked these questions. If you have any questions you'd like to ask me, hit me up. I'd love to answer them. So thank you so much for listening to the Dr. Zoe Show. We are redefining your superwoman here. Connect with me. by texting the word join to 38470. And I look forward to connecting with you guys on social media throughout the week. Have a super week.

You've been listening to the Dr. Zoe Show, redefining your superwoman with your host, Dr. Zoe Shaw. Don't forget to sign up for her monthly newsletters to get encouragement, tips, and skills for keeping your mind in the superwoman game. Connect with her now at www.drzoeshaw.com. Tell your friends and subscribe to her podcast on iTunes. Join us next time for another edition of the Dr. Zoe Show.