So much of the advice we give each other after a heartbreak is, frankly, hollow and trite.

It’s designed to minimise our feelings, treating our pain as if it’s invalid or exaggerated – to make us feel we don’t deserve to be this hurt.

And then there’s the other end of the scale: the friend that tells you to go out, get wasted, make all the mistakes you want because, hey, you’ve been through a lot. You’re single now. You get a free pass to be as self-destructive as you want, because look at what you’ve just been through. 

Or the friend that loves to come over for a good bitch about your ex. The friend that just ‘drops in’ information about some shitty thing they did, without you asking. The friend that acts like they’re on your side, but clearly revels in the drama – and wants you to go on feeling this angry, miserable and victimized, to squeeze as much entertainment out of the situation as they can.

They sound different, but these approaches all have the same effect. None of them encourage you to focus on how to recover. You aren’t looking for ways to work through the feelings. You’re simply told whether or not they should be allowed to exist in the first place – and then whether it’s better to mask them by pretending they aren’t there, to distract yourself from them as much as possible, or to keep feeding them because you’re within your rights to do so.

The most damaging thing is that all these forms of advice make you feel powerless. 

When you come through an emotional trauma like divorce, you need to give yourself permission to cry and scream and just – feel. But you also need to know that you are the keeper of these emotions. You don’t have to let them control you and your future.

Why Do I Feel So Lost?

The pain of divorce isn’t just sadness that you fell out of love, that someone you trusted betrayed you, or whatever the cause of the breakup was. You aren’t just grieving for your relationship, you’re grieving for an entire life that you had, with all the familiar structures, habits and assumptions that made you feel safe.

You may have lost your home. You may have lost friends. You may have had to dramatically change your daily routine to facilitate extra childcare or overtime to do to make ends meet. At the same time, your default partner for everything from going to the cinema to your plus one at weddings has disappeared. The shock of the change can be bewildering and traumatic.

It’s not enough to try and get by with these old pieces of your life missing: you have to actively make a plan to restructure your life (and your mindset) completely to deal with this new reality.

What Happens if I Don’t?

You know the old saying that time heals all wounds? Well, It’s nonsense.

Time does not heal all wounds. Without proper care and intervention, physical wounds fester, or scar horribly, leaving permanent damage.

… Emotional wounds are exactly the same. 

If you don’t take proactive steps to plan and organize your life post-divorce, you will stay stuck in the same state you were in when the trauma hit. You will continue to feel lost and hurt, and you will make no progress either on repairing the emotional damage or addressing any underlying problems and dysfunctions that fuelled the breakdown of the relationship in the first place.

That means you’re dooming yourself to keep repeating the same destructive mistakes.

Why Structure Is Good

Enough with the doom and gloom: let’s look at the positives.

There are “best practices” for everything in life, and that includes divorce. Having a clear idea of what to do and how to behave in order to protect yourself and your kids from further emotional harm, and to create the conditions for healing, is genuinely empowering. You can take charge of your situation and your feelings, and start to rebuild.

The Basics

There are 10 essential ways to make sure you’re on your best behaviour after a divorce:

• Handle Friends and Family with Good Grace

Your mum’s anxious, tone-deaf advice might be about as much use as a chocolate teapot, but try not to get annoyed or frustrated. Recognise that most people in your life genuinely want to help or support you – they just don’t know how. Be thankful to them for caring enough to try, even if you’re secretly disregarding everything they say… and if you get the feeling that some people are stirring things up deliberately, politely refuse to engage.

• Minimise Contact with Your Ex

You might not be able to cut them off completely – especially if you have kids – but you do need to create distance. For as long as they’re hanging around, part of you will try to cling on to the role you played in each other’s lives before your divorce, and you won’t truly start restructuring your life without them.

Perhaps you can be friends later, but not now… and don’t kid yourself that you can’t keep sleeping together and walk away unscathed.

If you can, take a complete break for a few weeks right after the split, and then continue to keep contact to a polite minimum.

• Keep Your Kids In the Loop – But Out of the Fights

Your children are savvier than you think. They know you’re breaking up, they know their lives are changing, so don’t lie to them or give them false hope that things could go back to how they were before. Focus on showing them how much you love them and making it clear this is between you and your ex.

At the same time, never, ever drag them into your feuds. Try not to talk about your ex in negative terms in front of them, and don’t give in to any urge to use their feelings (or custody) as a weapon against your ex. If you do, you will sour their relationship with one or both of you, and make the experience even more traumatic for them in the process.

• Take a Step Back from Work (And Then Dive Back In) 

You need time to catch your breath, and stepping up your workload to distract yourself will only delay the start of your healing process. If you can, take some holiday, or at least postpone / manage certain projects to the ease the burden. When you’ve figured out your new structure you can jump back in and seize your career with both hands, but you need the next few weeks to focus on healing.

• Don’t Avoid Your Emotions

Your pain is going anywhere because you ignore it and numbing yourself just postpones the inevitable: at some point, you will have to deal with these emotions and start to focus on getting better. But, while you can’t – and shouldn’t – banish them completely, there are strategies you can use that will help you to listen to these feelings, negotiate with them, and lessen their hold over your behaviour and your state of mind.

• Don’t Look for Someone to Rescue You

Rebound relationships are almost always a disaster. The impulse to let someone else jump in and save you from your shitty situation, or make you feel better about your damaged confidence, is understandable, but all you’re doing is dragging your baggage into a new situation and putting tremendous pressure on the other person to make it work. Focus on getting yourself in a good place before bringing someone new into the mix.

• Take Care of Yourself

It sounds minor, but you must look after yourself physically, as well as emotionally, after a trauma. That means trying to eat nourishing food, getting some sleep, avoiding too much caffeine or sugar, and not relying on alcohol, cigarettes or other drugs to get you through. These things wreak havoc on your mood and energy levels and will make you feel even more out of control.

• Beware “False Healing”

Teaching yourself to bear the pain is not the same as getting better. If you squash all that trauma down deep inside you, you will get sick. You will be miserable. You will lash out. You will repeat the same mistakes. The goal is to find functional, productive ways to deal with your problems and your relationships that make you happier, not to get through the day without crying.

• Be Honest

When you’re hurting or you’ve been wronged, it’s natural to want to rally people to your side. The trouble is, like that friend that loves the drama and wants you to keep on serving it up, being emotionally rewarded for victimhood can get addictive.

Reach out for whatever help you need, but if part of you is wallowing in this because it gives you a free pass to do, or demand, whatever you want, or you’re secretly enjoying the sense of righteous anger… admit that to yourself. You’ll need that self-awareness when you come to structuring a plan to heal.

• Be Proactive

Don’t sink into a stupor and wait for it to pass. It won’t. You have to decide to start healing. You have to be willing to take those steps. You have to be prepared to make a plan.

What Do I Do Now?

Now it’s time to regain control of your life. Start with the practical things: how are you going to organise your finances? Your workload? Your social life? Childcare? Build new structures that work for your independent life.

Next, ask yourself: what sets me off? What factors send me into a downward spiral? When do my emotions start spinning out of control? When do I feel powerless or vulnerable?

As you identify the stuff that really scares you, you can start to plan out a daily routine that strips out some of the ways you torture yourself – the self-destructive behaviours, obsessions and thought processes that impact on your ability to heal.

Restructuring your life after a divorce is a BIG task. If you feel you’d benefit from expert guidance, click here to learn more about the Naked Divorce video series, and how it can help you put all this advice into action to kick-start the healing process post-breakup.

So do women really feel the damage of a divorce more than their male counterparts?

Historically, women earned less than male partners and took a far greater role in raising children, meaning that a breakup left them poorer, more vulnerable and isolated, and less able to move on.

Men, on the other hand, were thought to have it easy: off they scuttled into a life of freedom and fecklessness, with fewer responsibilities, more cash and plenty of time to pick up a new model between weekends with the kids they’d left behind.

While that might be true for some guys, it’s certainly not the norm.

A bunch of studies in recent years show that, on the whole – provided they don’t already have someone else lined up – men find it harder to recover from divorce than their ex-wives do.

Often, this boils down to an inability to talk about emotions.

Women generally have a circle of friends to pour their hearts out to. They seek out the support and reassurance they need to make the pain more bearable.

Crucially, if a woman initiates divorce (or at least saw it coming) she’s probably been confiding about her experiences for a while. She may have reached the conclusion long ago that she’s too miserable in the marriage to continue.

Men, on the other hand, are much less likely to have had those conversations out loud. Dealing with the sudden tidal wave of despair can be more than they can handle.

That’s why women are more likely to report feeling relieved or even liberated after divorce, while men are more likely to report feeling devastated, betrayed, confused or even suicidal.

It’s also why men more often become embittered and fixated on finances and injustices, real or perceived. As Jim Patton of Families Need Fathers puts it:

“It’s easier for men to battle over hard cash than on an emotional level. Men don’t do emotions. It’s too psychobabble for us, so money becomes the catch-all for everything men feel and all the anger they have at how badly they feel they have been treated by their ex-wives, the courts etc.”

In other words, it’s easier for men to wallow in rage and hatred, obsessing over the wrongs they feel they’ve been dealt, than to face the weight of their pain, fear and loss.

This isn’t just terrible for your mental and physical health, it also wrecks your chance of future happiness.

Giving in to fury might feel great in the moment, but it hardly lays the groundwork for a loving relationship with your kids, or helps to navigate the practical stresses of divorce.

In fact, preoccupation with shame and anger over a marriage failure, and panic at the thought that their kids will see their weakness, leads some men to essentially abandon their children, causing irreversible damage to the most important relationships in their lives.

To give themselves a chance to recover, men desperately need to stop bottling everything up, allow themselves to grieve, process their feelings and take practical steps towards the healing process.

Without this, you risk carrying all the nastiness and dysfunction into your next relationship, too… and you have to ask yourself: is this trauma something you can face experiencing again?

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Guess what? International Pillow Fight Day takes place this month (yes, there really is a day for everything, folks!).

And, while it might sound daft, there’s nothing like a light hearted playfight with your other half to let off steam, behave like big kids and descend into giggles together, whether that’s fighting with pillows, chasing each other with dishcloths or racing each other down the street.

In fact, in the early stages of a relationship, when the physical stuff is just getting going and you’re giddy and nervous around each other’s bodies, something as silly and harmless as a pillow fight often helps channel sexual tension and build intimacy.

But while teasing each other and laughing about it will bring you closer together, not all fighting is good for your budding relationship. In fact, if you don’t figure out how to fight right early on, things can turn toxic.

That’s partly because, as research by psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg suggests, the neurobiological and psychological processes we go through when we experience love are worryingly close to those that spur on aggression.

To have a healthy relationship, you must learn to navigate between the two – to work out when your combative impulses are valid, and when they’re caused by fear or the strain of becoming emotionally vulnerable around someone new.

Because it’s okay to feel flushes of attraction, neediness, jealousy, possessiveness or the fear that someone could wound us – all of which very often come with falling in love.

But if you don’t handle these feelings properly, interrogating them fully and recognising when you’re repeating self-destructive behaviour from past relationship battles, you could wind up hurting your new love and yourself.

How not to fight

Ever found yourself in this situation? You’re on a date, things are going well, when you start talking about something a little more serious, or personal, maybe even political. Your date says something you don’t agree with and you question it, or express a different opinion. Immediately the atmosphere sours. They get angry or sink into a sulk. You struggle to pull the conversation back. Everything seems ruined.

Or maybe you’ve been chatting away quite comfortably – perhaps about something you’re a little raw about – and they say something insensitive or challenge you, out of the blue. You feel hurt, under attack, or insulted. Perhaps YOU get angry or upset. Perhaps YOU sulk.

The other person is bewildered. They don’t know what they’ve done. But you’re seething. Clearly, this wasn’t meant to be, right?

Take a deep breath

In either these situations, can you be sure either of you really did or said anything wrong?

Or did one of you just express yourself the wrong way?

Equally likely, is one of you still hurting, still stuck in the rut of your old relationship – ready to fly off the handle at a perceived slight because you can’t help but hear their words in your ex’s voice?

No one ever leaves a relationship unscathed. It takes work to heal and, until you have, you carry the scars. Perhaps you’ve ignored them so long you can’t even see or feel them anymore, but as soon as someone else says something that reminds you of the wound – even by accident – you can’t help picking at the scabs.

And suddenly, there you are, bleeding all over again. And you blame them for making the pain rush to the surface, even if they have no idea what they’ve done

Listen to your feelings –

But listen to where they’re coming from, too

Okay, you feel stung. Perhaps the other person really did step out of line, but perhaps they touched a nerve without meaning to.

Step away for a breather. Say you need to pop to the bathroom. Take a moment to pinpoint exactly what they said that hurt you. Ask yourself, reasonably, whether they could have known that it would have this effect.

Then, if you still feel unsettled, go back and calmly explain, rationally and without blame, what upset you and why.

Be gentle with each other

Its fine to explain things from your point of view, or to use personal anecdotes, to explain why you think the way you do. But don’t launch a personal attack on the other person’s character, personality, anxieties or perceived weaknesses to score a few points.

When you’re having a conversation about something like, say, politics, it’s essential to clarify that you aren’t criticizing the other person, you’re discussing something separate to both of you and that you care about understanding their point of view, even if you don’t agree with it.

Even if you ARE challenging someone’s behaviour, stay on track. Emphasize that you are uncomfortable with a certain thing they did or said, and explain why. Don’t exaggerate or emotionally blackmail them, just calmly state your point of view. If they respect you, they should hear you and be willing to talk it through.

And if you can see someone getting upset and emotional, ask yourself whether you need to win this battle, right now, and whether you really want to injure them and potentially destroy your relationship in the process. What do you gain by tearing them to shreds?

Yes, this could be an issue that’s so important to you that you need to come back to the conversation another time. If so, wait until you’re both calm.

But perhaps you don’t need to push them so hard. Perhaps there’s a reason this subject has such a profound effect on them – one that you need to tease out in time, as trust develops.

Avoid escalation – and stay-on-track

As relationship counsellor Zach Brittle says:

“Conflict discussion can go one of two directions. Generally when the discussion escalates, it ends badly and neither partner has gained any ground. When the conversation de-escalates, it creates room for dialogue. In order to prevent escalation, don’t find fault, don’t bring up the past and don’t keep going once the conversation is off the rails. Master couples have an ability to repair a conflict discussion early and often in order to keep it from escalating and becoming unproductive.”

In other words, when an argument starts to get nasty, don’t fuel the fire. Recognise that, when thing get heated, it no longer matters who is wrong or right, because once you’re both angry, all you’ll care about is standing your ground.

Instead, take steps to diffuse it. Try to find the parts of what they’re saying that you DO agree with, and build from there, explaining where you feel slightly differently, and why.

And whatever you do, don’t let the argument shift into being about something else. If they try to move to goalposts, say something like: “Ok, I’m happy to talk about that too, but right now can we just stay on this one topic,” or even: “I’m not sure what we’re arguing about anymore. Shall we come back to this another time when we’re less het up?”

Be prepared to say sorry

Never underestimate the power of an apology.

If you know you said things that were harsh and cruel, you became aggressive, the other person was visibly upset, or there was anything about the way you behaved that now, in the cold light of day, seems unnecessary: SAY SORRY.

You don’t have to tell them they were right. You don’t have to back down from your stance or opinion. But DO apologise for the way you made them feel.

Be kind when you’re not fighting

Usually when disagreements explode into full-blown war, it’s because one or both of you already resentments or relationship anxieties bubbling away.

Going out of your way to show your partner that you see them, hear them, and support them during “peacetime” helps make them feel safer emotionally.

That means listening – really listening – to each other, celebrating each other’s successes, remembering to drop them a note or give them a call to check in when you know they’re worried, in need of a pep talk or outlet (for instance, before and after an interview, exam, presentation or dreaded doctor’s appointment). It also means simple, thoughtful things, like bringing them a cup of tea in the morning or running them a bath when they’re exhausted.

The point is, the more “cared for” someone feels, the less likely they are to let the claws ping out the second they feel threatened by a disagreement.

Oh, and when you start to annoy each other… maybe just have a pillow fight to ease the tension instead.

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Fun fact: These days, slavishly working out and starving yourself until you’ve forced your body to look vaguely like a heavily photoshopped version of Khloe Kardashian is actually “empowering”! Who’d have thought it?!

Ditto the Pussycat Dolls song “Don’t Cha”.  It might look and sound like the meanest girls from school have grown up and are now viciously putting down other women in front of their boyfriends for ten seconds of attention, but actually, it was meant to EMPOWER US LADIES, all along!

Yep, the word term “empowerment” has really been dragged through the dirt these past few years.

Cynical marketers have seized on the idea to do exactly the opposite of what female empowerment actually means, i.e. giving women the power, authority and confidence to take control of who they are and how they run their lives.

What is Empowerment?

Here’s what empowerment is not: It’s not feeling compelled or pressured to act or look a certain way. It’s not working overtime to chase an unattainable ideal, or putting other people down to make yourself feel stronger, or surrounding yourself with things to make other people jealous.

In fact, these things weaken you by putting all the power in other people’s hands. What if they aren’t impressed or jealous? What if that guy doesn’t fancy you despite your best efforts? What if the person you’re putting down laughs in your face?

What happens when you don’t have these props around you to make yourself look good?

So today, in honour of International Women’s Day, we’re going to talk about REAL empowerment: the power to manage your emotions, control your behaviour and improve your mental wellbeing.

Let’s get started…

Don’t Beat Yourself Up

Ok, the first thing to bear in mind is that you can’t actually control your emotions. Your emotions are involuntary. They’re automatic. You can’t stop yourself from experiencing a wave of fear, or anger, or hurt, or anything else.

In fact, if you try, you’ll quickly get frustrated, exhausted or feel like a failure. It’s unrealistic and unhelpful to judge yourself based on pangs you can’t control.

What you can control are:

1. The conditions that produce these emotions, and
2. How you decide to respond to them.

But we’ll get to that in a second. Before we do, here’s something else to bear in mind…

Blame Is Disempowering

Yes, just as it’s pointless to blame yourself for emotions you can’t control, it’s also pointless to blame someone else for your response.

That’s because they aren’t in control of your emotions, either.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t hold another person responsible for the actions they choose. Of course you should. If your partner lets you down, or your mother says something cruel, or your colleague is being unreasonable, you’re totally within your rights to call them on it.

But when you do, you need to focus on the bit that they control: their behaviour, and why you object to it. Not your emotional response. Not how you behaved because of those emotions. They can’t control those things – only you can.

For example, imagine you’re at a party with your husband and you feel that he’s getting a little bit too flirty with an attractive stranger.

You might feel jealous. You might feel upset. You might even have a flash of blind rage.

Yes, he might have been out of line. But it’s not your emotional reaction that makes him so – it’s his actions.

After all, it’s perfectly possible to feel jealous, upset or furious with someone even when, rationally, you know they haven’t done anything wrong. Screaming at someone because they’ve “made you” feel jealous doesn’t help. If you have a tantrum, storm out or slap them, that’s a choice you made. They don’t control your behaviour – you do.

So, if you wait until an opportune moment and calmly say something to your husband like: “I don’t think it’s fair or respectful to ignore me and flirt with someone so overtly,” this focusses on the action that he took. He can then defend himself, apologise, or talk it through with you to figure out exactly what made you uncomfortable.

That’s what I mean by holding someone to account for what they do, rather than blaming them for how you feel.

Even if you decide on reflection that he didn’t really do anything wrong and that maybe your jealousy was unwarranted, you’ve both had a chance to handle things maturely without losing your cool. And if your husband doesn’t react well, you know that’s his bad – not yours. Because you’re not responsible for his emotions or actions, either.

All of which means you’re much more likely to wake up in the morning feeling in control of yourself and your life, rather than ashamed or angry that you let your emotions get the better of you!

Controlling the Conditions

Okay, let’s get back to the things you can exercise control over. Firstly, the conditions around you.

We all have conditions unique to us that are practically guaranteed to trigger a negative reaction, every time. Often, these are avoidable – or, at least, manageable.

The psychologist Dr Susan Krauss Whitbourne describes this as “Selecting Your Situation”. As she puts it:

“Avoid circumstances that trigger unwanted emotions. If you know that you’re most likely to get angry when you’re in a hurry (and you become angry when others force you to wait), then don’t leave things for the last minute. Get out of the house or office 10 minutes before you need to, and you won’t be bothered so much by pedestrians, cars, or slow elevators.” 

Do you get hangry when you skip breakfast? Don’t skip breakfast! Struggle to cope with your emotions when you’ve had a few too many? Then don’t get drunk when you know you’re going to be in a stressful or emotionally charged situation, like having to socialise with your ex or spend Christmas with your jellyfish sister-in-law.

But wait! This doesn’t mean you should shy away from tricky, scary or challenging situations altogether. Selecting your situation isn’t an excuse for chickening out of things that will genuinely enrich you, like nailing a big presentation, braving that first date after your breakup, or applying for the promotion you know you deserve. Nor should you use it as a cop-out whenever the going gets tough.

The point is that you need to give your chance the best chance of success.

By all means, go to your best friend’s wedding even though the man who broke your heart will be there – just don’t turn up exhausted/hungover/late and stressed, stick around the friends there who make you feel safe and happy, resist the urge to seek him out, plan in advance how to handle it if you do have to speak to him… oh, and don’t drink three bottles of champagne to “calm your nerves”!

In other words, identify the conditions that you CAN control, and control them in a way that will limit your emotional distress.

Managing Your Responses

Here’s a great exercise that comes from Buddhist ideas about mindfulness:

Next time you feel yourself getting emotional, stop, and ask yourself, “Who am I being right now?”

And then: “Is this behaviour empowering me, or weakening me?”

And finally: “Is this who I want to be? How do I be THAT person?”

This doesn’t mean ignoring or suppressing your emotions, but it does mean interrogating them, understanding them, and managing them.

Let me explain.

Let’s say you’re irritable because your partner is on a night out with friends and you’re at home alone.

Maybe you keep checking your phone to see if they’ve texted you yet, and they haven’t. You’re starting to get upset and annoyed. Maybe you’re starting to feel jealous, imagining that they’re talking to another woman. You can feel yourself getting worked up and annoyed, and you mentally begin to invent other reasons why you’re annoyed with them. You think about sending them a guilt-trippy message about how bored you are at home. Perhaps you even go as far as hearing a noise outside and jump on the chance to text them saying you think someone’s outside and you’re feeling scared.

Be honest: does this sound a tiny bit familiar?

Okay, so then you stop for a moment, pay attention to those feelings, and say to yourself: who am I being right now?

Because if you’re upfront with yourself, you might say, I’m being that kid that feels left out and doesn’t want the other kids to be allowed to have fun without me, so I’m ruining it for them.

Or maybe: I’m being the kid that plays up for attention when my mum tries to leave me at the school gates.

This isn’t something to be ashamed of. As I’ve said, you can’t help those emotional pangs. You can’t stop the little kid in you from stamping her foot. But you can choose not to pander to her

Once you’ve calmly recognised that this is what your emotions are pushing you towards, you can then say to yourself: is this behaviour empowering or weakening me?

I think the answer here is obvious. Sulking and begging for attention, or pressuring your partner into curtailing their plans for no other reason than you’re bored and don’t like being alone is hardly going to make you feel strong, empowered and in control of your own life.

Instead of moping, why not take the opportunity to catch up with your own friends and family? Maybe give them a call, or invite them round for dinner, or pop out for a drink?

Or, do something you’ve been meaning to do for ages but kind of need the house to yourself. Practise the guitar, maybe? Watch that film you’re desperate to see, but your partner would hate? Finally get started on that online course you signed up for ages ago, but haven’t had the time to work on?

[Side note: if the reason you’re upset is that your partner constantly goes out and leaves you with the kids, that’s different. But even then, choosing to play a self-pitying victim will weaken you, too. Much more empowering to take a moment to think about how (tomorrow, when he’s sober!), you’re going to sit your husband down and calmly explain why you think his behaviour is unfair and what compromises you think the pair of you should make to better share responsibility / ensure you both have a life, etc.]

Recognise, too, that this is a process. Your emotions are impetuous, sometimes violent forces that take ongoing effort to grapple with. You won’t always get it right, but as Travis Bradbury explains in this Forbes article, when that happens you have to forgive yourself and move on:

“A vicious cycle of failing to control oneself followed by feeling intense self-hatred and disgust is common in attempts at self-control. These emotions typically lead to over-indulging in the offending behaviour. When you slip up, it is critical that you forgive yourself and move on. Don’t ignore how the mistake makes you feel; just don’t wallow in it. Instead, shift your attention to what you’re going to do to improve yourself in the future.”

Regardless of the situation, recognising and acknowledging why you feel the way you do, deciding who you would rather be, and then actively striving to behave in a way that reflects that, is the single most effective way to empower yourself.

If you embrace one idea about female empowerment this International Women’s Day, make it that.

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Since then the business has grown and grown, and I’m delighted, and blessed to have been able to touch so many people’s lives as they wrestle with the chaos, despair and trauma of divorce.

The transformations that take place in our programmes are truly stunning. Sometimes I feel like I have been put on this planet to help people through their life traumas.

I really do have the best job in the world –

For example just earlier today one of my Relationship Counselling couples told me that not only was their relationship saved (they were on the brink of divorce just a few months ago), but they have just discovered to their delight that they are pregnant!

There were lot’s of tears of joy.

And when I was told that would never have happened had it not been for me helping them – well let’s just say I was in lot’s of tears too. Like I say, I really do have the best job.

Honestly though, it’s not me, it’s the process.

It just works. Sometimes my clients need me, or our Angels to assist them through the process – but ultimately it’s the process – what can I tell you, it’s the bomb-digidy!

Book Announcement

So I’m delighted to announce today for the first time, the launch of my new book for women (men you’re gonna have to wait a little longer – but it is coming).

This revised, enhanced, updated book builds on the first book I wrote which was an Amazon Best Seller.

Over the years the process has been tweaked, and refined to deliver ever more powerful results – so it was great to get that fine-tuning into this new book, and give it a make-over at the same time.

The new book is called ‘DIVORCED – and shit at it‘. Because we are. We’re taught to ‘get on with things‘, to ‘feel happy‘, to ‘get on with our lives‘, to just ‘get over him‘, that ‘time will heal‘ – well it’s all BS.

Quite frankly most of the advice out there is not only unhelpful – it actually makes things worse.

So no wonder we are ‘Shit’ at getting over divorce – we’re being fed bad info. Friends and family may mean well – but they really don’t have a clue how to help. Ok – rant over.

Launch Offer

We have cunningly decided to launch the book officially on March 8 – International Womens Day!

With the help of my team we’ve put a whole bunch of Bonuses together to help celebrate both International Womens Day – and the launch of ‘DIVORCED’.

I should point-out this launch is for the digital version only – the printed version will be a little later.

For more info on the book, the Special Bonuses that will be made availalbe only on MARCH 8 – click here >>>

http://nakedrecoveryonline.com/product-book-divorced-women-2017-comingsoon/

Extract

You can download an Extract of the book for Free now >>>

Many thanks
Adele

Well stop it. It’s just a game, and here’s how to remember how to enjoy it.

Around this time of year being lonely drives some people into total anxiety about finding the one. The thing is, finding a life partner isn’t about being all anxious and desperate. It’s about being chilled, and playing the game flat out with no attachment to the outcome.

But people who hate being lonely and hating the process don’t approach the dating game as a game. Especially around silly days of organized public affection like the 14th – when everyone else seems to be madly in love.

Lonely and anxious

Feeling lonely and anxious starts a downward spiral unless you stop it. For those who hate feeling lonely, each rejection becomes a failure that they are single and they become driven anxiously to eliminate the issue.

The important thing to realize about anxiety is that we feel anxious when we make connections between unrelated events – that’s the real driver to this spreading feeling.

We had a bad date, someone didn’t call back, our boss shouted at work, our daughter is failing school, traffic was bad, the next date cancelled, you reached out to someone on Facebook and they didn’t answer you back and the TV blew up.

Interrelated

They all start to seem interrelated. People suffering from anxiety link these random events together and feel the weight of all of these issues all at once. It’s like when you throw a stone in a pool of water and the ripples go out across the whole pool – anxious people allow the stones of life to disrupt their entire pool of equilibrium.

Stop making shite up

Wake up, and stop linking things up. The root of solving anxiety is being aware that you are needlessly, illogically linking all of these events together, and seeing them as part of a massive, interconnected task that seem impossible to overcome.

The key is not to merge and bring things together and see everything as one big problem.

Things are not connected.

The stone has nothing to do with the pool of equilibrium. Your daughter failing school or your date cancelling is not personal.

It just happened.

So here’s your challenge – a powerful route to breaking this pattern and getting peace of mind once more;

The 6 steps to release your anxiety:

1. Write down everything that makes you anxious in circles on a piece of paper.
2. Draw links between the circles to illustrate how you have linked these events together in your mind.
3. Now imagine an alien from another planet is sitting next to you. Explain to the alien how these events are interlinked and how all these connected events make your life a disaster.
4. Now answer these questions:
   1. Does the alien understand what on earth you are talking about?
   2. Does the alien agree that these events are linked?
   3. What is the alien saying to you?
5. NOW in the drawing break the links between these events by drawing the break.
6. Now explain to the alien that these events are not linked:
   1. Does the alien understand what on earth you are talking about?
   2. Does the alien agree that these events are not linked?
   3. What is the alien saying to you?
7. Write down what you observed in this exercise.

Go ahead, do it now!

It’s a very effective exercise, and it might even just make you smile this Valentine’s Day…

And the last step, tell us what you think!

This is because most people will only do whatever they do to forward things for themselves so don’t expect that your good deeds and actions for others will always come back to you. Simply do your good deeds and actions for your own reasons and not to get anything back – this way you won’t be disappointed or constantly feel hard done by.

Think you can take on the challenge and become far more powerful this year? I know you can.

Let this be a wonderful, empowering 2017!

Share your thoughts below!

Bored people talk about other people. Powerful people talk about the big games, projects and exciting things they are doing in their lives.

Pick yourself up and keep moving forward.