If Your Ex Moved On and Crushed You Completely, THIS Is How You Heal | Matt Monday

This person was this way with me, and now they are a completely different way with somebody else, the way that I always wanted them to be. They are that, but just with another person. Have you this year or in the last couple of years, had your heart absolutely destroyed by someone? Someone that maybe you thought you'd be with forever, Someone that maybe you gave every part of yourself to, someone that you fought for, only to find that that person broke up with you and moved on to somebody else? I was told a story recently of a guy who was in a relationship for seven years. And for at least the last three of those years, his partner had stopped being affectionate with him. Had, for all intents and purposes, begun to find him unattractive. She didn't feel any attraction for him anymore. They were had an all but sexless relationship. When he went to get close to her and kiss her or put his arm around her and just have those daily moments of affection that he craved, she would physically push him away because she didn't want to. And she came to see him just as a friend. During this time when they would go to weddings together, she would say to him, I don't think I'm ever gonna get married. You know, I just don't think that's something I want. Eventually, she broke up with him. And a couple of years into the breakup, he saw pictures of her engaged to this new person that she had met. And in the pictures, there was affection and love. The way that she looked at her new fiance was the way that he had always hoped she would look at him. And it crushed him. It's a particular kind of ego death when, well, a, we get broken up with and we go through the heartbreak of that. But B, when that heartbreak comes on the back of certain needs that we have that weren't being met in the relationship. Things we desperately wanted to be true, whether it's to have affection, to have their attraction, to feel safe with them, to feel loved by them. When we don't feel those things, and we may somewhere in our minds think that that's to do with them. It's their stuff. Maybe there's something going on with them. They're broken. They're not that kind of person. But then we see that they are that kind of person with somebody else, that everything we wanted that they could seemingly never give to us, they g gave to someone else. And in his case, that was both the affection that he'd always wanted, but also the fact that she said she never wanted to be married. And what became evident to him was that she was saying that at the weddings that they were going to because it was a reflection of how she felt at that time in the relationship with him, not a reflection of what she ultimately would have wanted in her life. This is one of the hardest kinds of ego deaths because it feels so apparent to us that there's no logical get out. This person was this way with me and now they are a completely different way with somebody else, the way that I always wanted them to be. They are that, but just with another person. The logical conclusion that that leads us to is that there is something wrong with me, Plain and simple. Not feeling like we're enough and having very direct evidence in front of us that that is true. When we were in the relationship, we were living this life where daily our self worth dial was fluctuating in response to how much attention, energy, love and security this person gave us. And we were always living at the mercy of that, which is why most of the time, because they weren't giving it to us, we didn't feel good. You may feel anxious constantly, you're constantly suffering, you're constantly unhappy, you're never at peace. And maybe you can't even say that to friends of yours or family of yours because it's such a personal thing and it's such a vulnerable thing to be feeling all the time. You want to say that you're in a happy relationship. You don't want to say that you're living in a constant state of anxiety or not feeling good enough. But that is where you live emotionally. Sometimes we can live at that place emotionally for such a long time that we don't even realize how bad we feel anymore. You know, our friends and family may later on notice. They may even say, I remember when you were in that relationship, you were so unhappy. But we didn't even know it was that obvious to everybody else at the time. We didn't know that we were changing. But you can't have your self worth in question for that long without it starting to affect the way you come across in life. So this is a very, very painful place to be. And we spend our lives kind of, you know, if we're always trying to slay a dragon in life, in terms of the hero's journey, Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey we're always, you know, to become the hero. We're looking to slay a certain dragon. And the whole time we were in the relationship, we were trying to slay the external dragon of love, validation, trying to feel enough Trying to feel wanted, trying to feel like we are worthy because somebody else wants us. But that dragon ate us and spat us out and left us bleeding out on the floor. And in that moment, it's an opportunity to turn to a different dragon, to turn to the dragon inside of us, which is the real dragon that has to be slain, that internal dragon. That makes us enough already that if we slay that dragon, this dragon over here, this external dragon, would never be able to do this to us in this way. In fact, the internal dragon is much bigger and much more powerful than this external one that has hurt us so badly. But this one was able to hurt us so badly because we haven't turned our attention to the internal one. And that's why we have been so desperate for this person's approval or validation in the first place. That's why we put up with a relationship where our needs weren't being met for so long, only to have someone break our hearts and meet someone else's needs. And of course, when we're bleeding out on the floor, there are many people that come along that try to distract us from our pain. They try to divert our attention to other things that could bolster our ego. You know, get the revenge body. What's that ego. Go out and have rebound relationships. What's that ego. Do this to get them back, make them jealous. Ego. It's all about taking this crushed ego and going here. We can put it on life support by you getting some attention elsewhere. But when we do that, we never get the benefit of an ego death. I know it sounds crazy, but an ego death is both the most painful thing and, but also the greatest invitation for us to become a bigger version of ourselves. And if we distract ourselves, for example, by just hopping into the next relationship and the next one and the next one. You see, people never slay that internal dragon, so they're always a victim to every external dragon. We often ignore that internal dragon, especially in the either the good times in our life, because in the good times of our life, our ego is being stroked by all of these things that are going well for us or in the times of our life where we're fighting for a relationship. It's also a time where it's very hard to do that internal work in slaying that internal dragon because we're so focused on slaying the dragon on the outside. We wake up every morning trying to get this person more attracted to us, trying to make the one is trying to do a perfect acrobatic routine. To make this person fall more in love with us or love us the way that they used to love us. And that's all consuming. That takes up all of our energy. But when we are at the end of that journey and we have had our ego crushed in that moment of annihilation, that is an opportunity to build a different kind of relationship with ourselves. That's a chance for us to show that we can get through something really difficult, that we have our backs in a really tough time. It's a kind of invitation to a gentler kind of relationship with ourselves where we know we need compassion and grace and empathy. The relationship we build with ourselves when we get through those times is very pure. We become proud of ourselves because we. We think, I'm doing something really hard right now. Forget whether I compare to this person or that person. You know what's funny is a situation like this forces your hand to focus on getting worth from a different source because you can't get it from this source anymore, right? You feel like I lost. There's no dressing it up. I just feel like I lost. I just feel like I'm a loser right now. And I don't mean a loser in the emotional sense, but I mean a loser in life. I lost something. So our worth doesn't come from that thing anymore. And when we feel forced to get our worth from a different place, we start asking, well, what will my worth be based on here in this state? And our worth starts getting based on these quieter, subtler things, like the fact that we got out of bed this morning, or the fact that we just spent an hour with a. A good friend and listen to that friend, or we're loving to that friend, or how we show up with our family. Perhaps the way that we throw ourselves into a project of passion or even just the way that we are conducting ourselves through this time, we can develop this sense of pride and esteem, self esteem, that is much, much more powerful than any external source of. You know, I always think a source of instant confidence. People always talk about confidence as something that gets built, but there's an instant access to confidence if we just take a moment to appreciate what we have already done in our lives, what we have already been through, what we've already overcome, how we've had to be strong to survive in our lives, when we really connect to that. I always. When I do that for myself, I always think it almost dissolves whatever room I go into, hoping that someone's going to like me or I'm going to impress someone. That is dissolved. When I think about all of the ways that I've already made myself proud by the way I've shown up in my life and what I've got through in my life. Because I think, God, that person has no idea what hard situations I've been through. They have no idea how many difficult things I've done in my life. I know, and I'm proud of me for having got through those things. This person doesn't. So why am I looking for their approval? My own approval is enough for me. And that becomes very attractive energy. Right? Because when someone feels they need our approval, our validation, or is in constant comparison mode between themselves and other people, we register that as unattractive energy. But when someone doesn't need any of that from us, we register that as attractive energy. But that attractive energy can't be faked. It's a deeper kind of security. And that deeper kind of security actually can arise from the hardest times in our life and how we conducted ourselves through them and how we got through them. So the great irony of you having an ego death of a breakup of, or being betrayed, cheated on, or just seeing someone who couldn't give their best to you give their best to somebody else, when you go through that, the thing that is the crushing force on your ego is actually the life force of the energy that is going to make you the most attractive version of yourself down the line. If you have suffered an ego death this year, and instead of being distracted to other sources of ego, you want to do the work that's going to make you that extraordinarily powerful version of yourself a year from now, two years from now, five years from now. I want to extend you an invitation to come and do it with me at my retreat this year in October, from the 9th to the 15th in Florida. This is an incredibly practical process once you know how to do it. I know it may sound a little abstract, but it's really not. You can do this in a methodical way. There is a roadmap, and I've spent 15 years putting it together in the form of the retreat. I hope that you'll join me. I hope that you'll ignore, ignore all of the wrong ways to heal and focus on the most beautiful ways of healing that give you that energy that makes you a very, very powerful person in this life. The details can all be found@mhretreat.com go check it out and I will see you there. Sam.