When You Feel Alone After Heartbreak (3 Secrets To Moving On)... (Matthew Hussey, Get The Guy)

Each week on Instagram and Facebook, I put out a question of the week to try and really get a temperature for what people are feeling and going through. One week I said, what's the number one thing that has made it hardest for you to move on from a past relationship? 2,500 comments came in. Of the top 10 most liked comments, here were a few, and you'll notice the theme, holding on to hope. Hope that the person they were before will show up again. Letting go of the dreams we had together that would never see the light of day. It's really hard not to reflect on what was and imagine what could have been. We are at a time of year where it can be particularly painful to be alone and it can be really painful to be alone when we've lost someone that somewhere in our mind we had as the person we were supposed to be with. That pain can be made even worse if we think that the reason the relationship didn't work was because of something we did. Maybe we were too anxious, maybe we were too insecure, too controlling, too jealous, too stressed. When you feel like that it's dangerous because now you can torture yourself with guilt, shame, constant self-judgment, self-blame, self-loathing, and that puts you on a loop. And the loop is, if I had only done it this way, I still would have that person. If I'd only been this way, if I'd only stopped doing that thing, that person would still be in my life. And I am to blame for the fact that I am now alone and missing the person I was supposed to be with. It's a circle. It doesn't go anywhere. It doesn't take you anywhere practical or productive. It doesn't get someone back. It doesn't help you do the work to move on, to be better, to eradicate some of our negative behaviors, to become stronger, more empowered, more confident. It just keeps you exactly where you are going crazy inside your own mind. I have three things that I want to say to you today. that I'm hoping can be a pressure valve for those horrible toxic feelings that keep you in that place. The first thing I want to say is don't assume that if you had only done things differently, that relationship would have been perfect and would have lasted forever. Because that's an assumption. You don't always know the real reasons why someone has decided to break up with you. They give you their reasons, but we can't always take those at face value. They often give us the most convenient reasons, the reasons that are easy for them to say. Meanwhile, we go away thinking that was 100% of why they broke up with us, and we think for the rest of our lives that's the thing we have to focus on and change. But they don't give us the whole picture. So very often we're basing all of our assumptions around a convenient truth for them. We also have to remember that if we had been better in the relationship, if we had been stronger, that would have changed the dynamic of the relationship. And sometimes when you get stronger, when you get more confident, when you bring more to the relationship, it reveals more weaknesses in the other person. Maybe they become intimidated. Maybe they become afraid of your personal power. Maybe you start demanding more because you feel more confident and you feel entitled to more in the relationship. And that exposes how little they're really willing to give. So we have to be very careful in thinking that had I been different, everything would have been wonderful. That's not necessarily true. Number two, what if that relationship needed to go wrong for you to fulfill your full potential? Because we do not change when we're comfortable. We change when we feel genuine stakes, genuine consequences. this relationship, this pain that you're feeling as difficult as it may be to hear, could be one of the greatest gifts you've ever received, not just for yourself, but for your future relationship. Because the person you ultimately end up with is going to benefit from this suffering that you're going through now, because you're gonna bring a kinder, more compassionate, more confident you to the table next time. if this pain gets you to do the work. And look, before that makes you feel too much like you had to sacrifice this incredible thing in your life in order to get the change that you want, let me make point number three. There isn't one person who is solely capable of fulfilling the role of the one in your life. There are 7 billion people on this planet. You were fortunate to have met one of the people that you created a deep bond with and a relationship that was good enough that you can grieve over it in this way. But that doesn't mean there aren't many more of them out there. They are waiting for you. And the only way to guarantee that you never experience any of those other lifetimes available to you is to stay in that loop of self-blame and judgment and shame and guilt. Look, there are two skills that I see over and over again in people that lead happy and successful lives. And that is not that they avoid pain. It's they could because everyone goes through pain, everyone goes through suffering. It's that they have this ability to forgive themselves for things that they've done wrong, for weaknesses, for mistakes they've made, and the ability to reframe any situation and turn it into a gift, turn it into something positive. I hope, especially in this Holiday season that you will find time to look back on this year and forgive yourself for the ways that you screwed up this year, the weak moments, the mistakes, and that even if you fucked up this year in a whole bunch of ways, even if you fucked the whole year up, you're able to look back on it and say, you know what? Even that's a good thing. That's reframing. Even that's a good thing because me screwing that up, me making all those mistakes, that's the foundation of what I'm about to do next. That's the motivation for what I'm about to do next. Forgive and reframe to valuable, valuable skills and they are an art form and the more we practice it the better we get. So I hope you're having a tremendous time over the holidays and by the way if you want to learn these two things with me come come join me on my retreat. I specialize in doing these things with people and I take them through a transformative process where I show them how to do this. And once they do it, it's like the weight of the world is lifted off their shoulders because we carry this stuff through our lives and we don't need to. Click the link and check it out for yourself. I know that this is a time where we're buying lots of gifts for everyone else, but this will be the greatest gift that you give yourself because it will transform your life, your confidence, your self-worth and in the process it becomes a gift for everyone you know as well. Because when you transform yourself, you have more to give, more to love, more kindness, more empathy, more generosity and more power for everyone else in your life. So check it out, click the link and have an incredible time over the holidays. I love you guys. I'll see you next week.