Understanding PTSD:

My PTSD symptoms

The first step in coping with PTSD is to understand how it affects you. Look at the symptoms below, and tick any that have affected you at least twice in the last week.

• Upsetting thoughts or memories about the event that have come into your mind against your will [  ]
• Upsetting dreams about the event [  ]
• Acting or feeling as though the event were happening again [  ]
• Feeling upset by reminders of the event [  ]
• Bodily reactions (such as fast heartbeat, stomach churning, sweatiness, dizziness) when reminded of the event [  ]
• Difficulty falling or staying asleep [  ]
• Irritability or outbursts of anger [  ]
• Difficulty concentrating [  ]
• Heightened awareness of potential dangers to yourself and others [  ]
• Being jumpy or being startled at something unexpected [  ]

My thoughts and beliefs

Trauma affects how we think about ourselves, other people, and the world around us. These thoughts and beliefs can powerfully affect how we live our lives. It is helpful to reflect on how trauma has affected us.

Write down your answers to the following questions.

• Things I thought as I was experiencing trauma
• How my trauma has affected the way I think about myself
• How my trauma affected the way I think about other people
• How my trauma affected the way I think about the world
• Calming the threat system: Relaxed Breathing

Controlling your breathing sends a signal to your threat system that everything is ok. Calm breathing is slow, relaxed, and from the diaphragm (‘belly breathing’), whereas anxious breathing is quick, tense, and high up in the chest.

1. Begin by sitting somewhere comfortable but supported
2. If you feel comfortable to do so close your eyes, otherwise stare off into the middle distance
3. Breathe in slowly and steadily for a count of 3
4. Breathe out slowly and steadily for a count of 5. Our bodies relax most on the out-breath
5. Repeat for a few minutes. It’s normal for your attention to wander off. If it does, just gently bring it back to focus on your breathing.

Calming the threat system:

Colored Breathing

Another technique for slowing your breathing and calming your mind is to use imagery while you breathe. Some people find it helpful to imagine breathing colored air. You can memorize these instructions, you could ask someone to read then slowly for you, or you could record yourself speaking them and then listen to the recording.

1. Imagine a color representing tension, or tense feelings
2. As you breathe, calmly and steadily, imagine breathing out air tinged with that tense color
3. See the colored air in your mind’s eye, and watch as you breathe it out and it floats away
4. Allow the tense colored air to become paler and paler, as you breathe out all of the tension
5. Now bring to mind a color representing calming, soothing feelings
6. Imagine breathing in this relaxed colored air
7. Just notice what happens in your body as you imagine breathing in the relaxed air
8. Continue breathing this way for a few minutes

Swing Breathing

Swing breathing is another imagery technique for slowing your breathing and calming your mind. You can memorize these instructions, you could ask someone to read then slowly for you, or you could record yourself speaking them and then listen to the recording.

Allow your breathing to become slower … and more regular. Just focusing your attention on your breath … on the air flowing in … and out … of your mouth and nose.

Your breathing finding a steady rhythm. Breathing gently from low down in the belly. Taking slow steady breaths. Breathing in gently … and slowly and smoothly exhaling … Breathing in gently … and slowly and smoothly exhaling.

And as you continue to breathe slowly and gently … in a rhythm that’s comfortable to you … I’d like you to imagine … and then begin to feel … that you’re on a swing. Gently swinging backwards … and forwards … backwards … and forwards … finding that you’re swinging in rhythm with your breathing … just gently swinging … relaxed and peaceful. Pay attention to how it feels to swing gently forwards … and backwards … peaceful … relaxed … at ease. Just swinging gently … and smoothly … smoothly .. and gently.

And you can carry on breathing calmly and gently for as long as you like. Relaxing into this gentle rhythm more and more as time goes by.

Muscle relaxation

When we feel under threat our muscles tense up – ready to fight or take flight. Keeping the muscles tense is one of the body’s ways of trying to keep you safe. One way of letting your body know that you are safe is to deliberately relax all of your muscles.

Progressive muscle relaxation involves tensing, then relaxing, all of the muscle groups in turn. Find a comfortable spot, sitting or lying down. Then, for each of the muscle groups in turn, follow this pattern:

1. Tense the muscles
2. Notice the tension for a few moments
3. Release
4. Notice the sensation of relaxation as the tension drains away

Relax each of the muscle groups in turn:

• Fists
• Upper arms
• Shoulders (lift up slightly)
• Upper back (shoulders back slightly)
• Stomach
• Buttocks
• Thighs
• Lower legs / calves
• Feet
• Neck (gently move neck back)
• Forehead
• Muscles around eyes (scrunch face up)
• Jaw

Creating a safe place

A safe place is somewhere that you create using your mind and imagination. It is a place that you can go anytime, wherever you are.

For some people, it is a place that they remember from their past as being particularly safe and calm. For others, they cannot easily remember a time like this from their past and so they work on creating one for themselves now. Either way, the same process applies. You can have more than one safe place and it can change over time as you wish. It is your creation and your own personal ideal.

It is useful for your safe place to have certain qualities though: it needs to be a place you feel calm, not judged, warm, free and above all safe.

How to create a safe place:

1. If you feel comfortable enough, close your eyes and take a deep breath in and count to three. Then breathe out slowly to the count of five. Do this several times. As before, spend some time slowing down and controlling your breathing until you reach a calm and soothing rhythm. As you breathe in, imagine you are breathing in a sense of safeness and relaxation. As you breathe out, imagine you are breathing out all of the tension in your body.
2. Begin to imagine a place where you feel calm – where are you?
3. Focus on what you can see, take a minute to look all around you in your mind. You may perhaps even turn around to see what’s behind. Concentrate on any objects that you can see, the colors around you and areas of lightness and darkness.
4. Focus on what you can hear, take your time to notice the noises, even the subtle ones. What noises can you hear close by? What noises can you hear in the distance?
5. Focus on what you can smell. Again, take a minute to really notice the smells around you.
6. What can you feel? Is it hot or cold? Are there textures under your feet?
7. Focus on any taste in the image and notice this for a minute or two.
8. Now focus on how you feel in your body, feelings of calm and safety in this image. Focus on the release of tension. Where do you feel this feeling in your body?
9. Keep imagining your safe place in as much detail as possible and revisit that feeling of calm and safeness over and over, noticing where you feel it in your body.
10. Is there a word that might remind you of your safe place? If so, what is it? If you have a word, repeat it in your mind over and over as you keep your safe place in your mind.
11. When you are ready, take some deep breaths in again and slowly open your eyes, trying to hold onto that calm feeling.

Remember, you can come back to it whenever you want to. The easiest way to do this is to start by slowing down and controlling your body and to repeat the word that you picked that reminded you of your safe place. In doing so, it will be easier to return to your safe place whenever you would like.

Safe place:

Write a description of your safe place in as much detail as you can. Remember to include information from all your senses. What word have you chosen to remind you of your safe place?

Coping with memories:

Use all of your senses

When we are having a flashback, or as we wake up from a nightmare, our awareness of the things around us in the here-and-now can be diminished. Just as we can re-experience traumatic memories in all of our five senses, we can use those five senses to try and ‘ground’ us back in the present.

Sight

Look around you and use those sights to remind yourself that you’re in the present and that you are safe.

Touch

It can be helpful to carry an object with us that remind us that we are safe, such as a stress ball, a pebble, or a flower.

Hearing

Focus on all of the noises around you in the present moment. Use them to remind you of where you are.

Smell

Smell can be one of the most powerful ways of learning to soothe and comfort yourself Try using essential oils, your favorite plants, or any comforting aroma.

Taste

Strong tastes such as chewing gum can be helpful. For people who re-experience ‘taste memories’ it can be helpful to focus on the absence of taste in the present moment.

Coping with memories: 5-4-3-2-1

When our minds and bodies feel as if they are fully immersed in the past, using all of our senses at once can be a very effective way of bringing ourselves back into the present. Focus on:

5 things you can see

1:

2:

3:

4:

5:

4 things you can feel / touch

1:

2:

3:

4:

3 things you can hear

1:

2:

3:

2 things you can smell

1:

2:

1 thing you can taste

1:

Reminding yourself it was in the past

When a memory is triggered it can feel as if the traumatic event is happening all over again. Our minds and bodies can feel like we are back in the moment the trauma took place, rather than recognizing that we are revisiting a memory.

During a flashback, we often describe what we can see or sense in the present tense. For example, Alex said “he’s standing right in front of me and I can see him” whilst he was having a flashback.

To help put the memory in the past, it is useful to practice rephrasing your common thoughts about the event in the past tense, particularly whenever you have a flashback memory or after having a nightmare. This technique is most helpful while we are in the midst of a flashback. It may seem simple but it can be a powerful technique to help your brain, in the heat of the moment, remember that it is not happening all over again. Here are some examples

Write your most common thoughts when you’re having a flashback and then rephrase them so they are in the past. Practice saying them to yourself often.

Current thinking:

Remembering the past:

It’s just a memory

Remember, our brains (particularly our amygdala) don’t care whether something is happening in real life or whether it is a memory – our minds and bodies react in the same way by activating the threat system.

A simple yet effective technique is reminding yourself that you are responding to a memory rather than the actual event. This can be helpful in reminding your brain that you are not, in fact, back in danger. Try writing a statement down on a card to carry round with you.

For example, Alex would write down and look at the phrase:

When I was attacked the man stood right in front of me, he is not in front of me now. I am just remembering the memory of when I was attacked. THIS IS MY MIND AND BODY REACHING TO A MEMORY. IT IS NOT HAPPENING AGAIN.

If you feel comfortable with it, you may also consider asking your partner or a friend to gently remind you that you are responding to a memory, that the trauma is not happening again, and that you are safe.

Fast forward to safety

When we are bothered by flashbacks we often forget that we can have control over the memories and that we can control our own minds. It is very important to remind ourselves that we are safe, and that the events are over. One way to do this is to think of our memories as being like a video tape, and to remember that we can fast forward it.

Here are some steps in helping you train your mind to ‘fast forward to safety’

1) Think of your traumatic event

2) Think about the first time you felt safe afterwards – really picture this scene as clearly as you can in your mind. Where were you? What were you doing? Who were you with? How did you know that you were safe? Don’t forget to think of all five of your senses.

3) Write down a description of this moment of safety.

4) When you have a flashback, practice ‘fast forwarding’ to this safe time. Quickly see everything that happened after the moment in the flashback, and then focus on the feeling of safety telling yourself that it is in the past. Try and focus on how this safety feels in your body. Try and stay with that feeling of safety for as long as possible.

The more you practice this, the better your brain will get at putting these memories in the past.

The differences between then and now

Remind yourself of things that have changed since the time of the trauma. For example, if you have had your birthday you can remind yourself “I am 45 now and was 44 when I was in a car accident”. You may have changed your physical appearance and remind yourself “I have long hair now but it was short when I witnessed the robbery”

What has changed for you since you experienced the traumatic event?

Grounding the date

Remind yourself the current date, where you are, the time of day etc. For example, “today is Thursday 5th May 2017. I am at work. It is 10:55am. It is spring and it is sunny outside. I am safe. I survived”. You may take this further by writing down and reminding yourself that the traumatic event took place at another time. For example, it took place on a winter afternoon in December.

When did the traumatic event take place? What is the current date? Can you describe the here-and-now?

Noticing triggers for flash backs

Flashbacks and intrusive memories can be triggered by reminders that are linked to the traumatic event: someone who has been in a car accident might be triggered by the sight of certain cars, the sound or traffic, or sirens.

Like trauma memories, the mind and body doesn’t seem to be able to recognize that these things (i.e. sights, sounds, smells etc.) are no longer signs of danger. Instead, the mind and body react as if they are under threat.

It is important, therefore, to try to train the brain to break the link between then and now and to help the brain recognize that these things are no longer signs of danger.

The first part is to first identify what might trigger your flashbacks and intrusive memories.

Some of Alex’s triggers were:

• Knives
• People standing behind me
• Dark streets

Some of my triggers are:

Flashback triggers – breaking the link

Next, systematically think about the differences between what you experienced during the trauma and how different things are now.

Helping with self-harm

People self-harm for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it is to cope with powerful emotions, to distract from something overwhelming, or to feel something instead of feeling numb.

Unfortunately, it can come with severe unintended consequences, such as causing lasting physical damage to our bodies. This can be a dangerous way of trying to cope.

Self-harm often serves a purpose, so just trying “nor to do it” can feel impossible. It can be helpful to find out more about the reasons why you self-harm and then try a different behavior instead of harming yourself.

Working out why I self-harm

• To express pain and strong emotion [  ]
• To deal with anger [  ]
• To feel something when I feel numb and disconnected [  ]
• To calm down [  ]
• To see blood [  ]

Any other reasons:

What are my triggers?

What could I substitute instead of self-harm?

If you self-harm to… express pain and intense emotion, try writing down your feelings, drawing or painting how you feel, writing down difficult feelings then ripping them up, or listening to music which expresses how you’re feeling.

If you self-injure to… deal with anger that you cannot express openly, try working through those feelings by doing something different – running, dancing fast, screaming, punching a pillow, throwing something, ripping something apart.

If you hurt yourself in order to… feel something when you feel numb inside, hold ice cubes in one hand and try to crush them, hold a package of frozen food, take a very cold shower, chew something with a very strong taste (like chili peppers, raw ginger, or a grapefruit peel), wear an elastic rubber band around your wrist and snap it (in moderation to avoid bruising).

If you inflict physical pain to… calm yourself, try taking a bubble bath, doing deep breathing, writing in a journal, drawing, or doing some yoga.

If you self-harm to… see blood, try drawing a red ink line where you would usually cut yourself, in combination with any of the other suggestions above.

Remember, understanding and knowledge are key. Try to make a note of every time you feel the urge to harm yourself. Write down what was happening at that time and what was going through your mind. Also, make a note of what you did to cope, taking care to write down which behaviors you found helpful and which ones were less helpful to channel and soothe your feelings of distress.

Sleeping better:

Sleep hygiene

PTSD often affects our ability to sleep. We may have difficulty getting to sleep if we lie in bed thinking about how our life has changed and wondering if things will get better. We may avoid going to sleep for fear that we might have more nightmares. If we do manage to get to sleep we may then wake up after experiencing nightmares. It is normal to have difficulty getting back to sleep.

The tips and ideas below have been selected to try and help you increase the chance of getting better sleep.

1. Bed is for sleeping and sleeping happens at night-time

• Try and keep your bedroom and bed for sleeping only
• Avoid sleeping in the day
• Develop a routine before bed time such as having a relaxing bath or listening to some relaxing music and go to bed at around the same time each night. Try and wake up around the same time each morning. Small children find habits and routines comforting, and the same things work for adults too. As adults, we forget that these things apply to us as well
• If you cannot sleep after 30 minutes, get up and try an activity such as listening to some music. Do this for about 15 minutes then return to bed and try and sleep. Repeat this as often as is necessary until you go to sleep
• Make your bedroom a nice place to sleep – try smells or flowers (or some new bed sheets!)

2. Be kind to your body

• Do not go to bed hungry
• Try and avoid spicy food late in the day as this can act as a stimulant in our bodies
• Reduce caffeine but definitely avoid caffeine after 4pm- remember caffeine is also found in tea and fizzy drinks like pop. You can buy de-caffeinated versions of these drinks if needed
• Although alcohol can initially make us feel sleepy, it stops us from experiencing restful sleep and is not great for PTSD or Adrenal Fatigue. It can also make it harder to fall asleep again, if you wake up in the middle of the night

Coping with nightmares

Practice calming yourself down after a nightmare by using any of the previous techniques.

Having a card with the information from the tips previously tried may help ground you back in the moment. For example, you may have a card with the phrase ‘I am safe, it is May 2011 and I am in my bedroom’ by your bedside to read after you wake from a nightmare.

Having a picture that reminds you of the present can also be useful to have by your bedside if waking from a nightmare as it will help your brain focus on the present and calm your threat system quicker.

Taking a smell to bed and having it ready can, again, be a useful way to help your brain remember where you are following a nightmare. A calm and soothing smell can also help you get off back off to sleep after a nightmare.

Try: Any of the other grounding strategies that you have developed can be helpful if you wake from a nightmare

Re-scripting nightmares

If you experience frequent nightmares, especially the same or similar dream over and over, then research has shown that you can ‘rescript’ the nightmare to make it much less powerful. For example, someone who had nightmares about being in a road traffic accident imagined that the road was made of marshmallows and was soft and bouncy.

Method 1

Spend time in the day thinking of the nightmare but practicing a different ending: an ending you would prefer and that makes you feel safe. Practice the repeat ending over and over in your imagination. The more you can rehearse new ending the better chance your brain has of remembering it. It might also be helpful to talk through your nightmares with someone else. It doesn’t matter how odd the new ending might be, or that it didn’t really happen.

Method 2

Think about your nightmare from the perspective of a Hollywood script writer:

1. Write down your nightmare as though it were a story
2. Think about how you would want to feel different if you could change the nightmare
3. Change some of the events in the nightmare that would lead to the new feeling
4. Write the new ‘script’ for the nightmare. Rehearse it to yourself.

Hey, this is Adele from Naked Recovery…

So, I want to thank everybody who gave us so many awesome comments about my first tips video in advance of the webinar, thank you.

Thank you for watching the tips video, and here’s the third one. We wanted to make sure that we really covered some good content prior to the actual webinar itself. So in the previous video, we were looking at all the kind of blockages to achieving a victor mindset, and in today’s video, we’re going to look at what it actually takes to adopt a victor mindset when you’re going through any kind of life turmoil.

Cool stuff

So I’m going to cover some cool stuff that we’ve developed in many of our retreats, I’m going to be referring to some notes, hope you don’t mind I’m going to kind of look down at my notes, come back to you, and so and so forth. But, I wanted to make sure I don’t skip any of the really cool stuff that you need to know. All right, so without further ado let’s look at that.

Victor mindset

In the last tips video, we covered some of the blockages to actually adopting a victor mindset. We looked at the concept of resiliency and what blocks resiliency is a kind of learning resistance and the learning defiance. In this video, we’re going to be looking at this mentality of being a victor.

Now, as I kind of covered a little bit in the last video, when you have a bad thing that has happened to you were you’re just cruising along in your life, something really shocking has happened, the first experience is very normally to have that kind of shock. You’re in a shock experience where maybe you’re in a bit of denial about the thing that has just happened, and you feel like this thing has happened to you.

Healing Journey

Now anytime you feel like something’s happening to you and you’re in that place of being victimised this is such a normal response for people to be there. I was just cruising in my life, this thing happened, and now I feel at the effect of it and therefore victimised. Being victimised is a very normal part of the healing journey, it’s actually the first stage is the victim stage, is that feeling of being victimised.

So, if you find yourself in that stage don’t be hard on yourself about it. It’s not a problem. The problem though is when that stage lasts a really long time, and you can kind of get stuck there, and a little bit bitter. So what we want to do is look at what are some of the techniques and mindset you need to have to move on from the victim stage through the various other stages of healing. So, if you’re in that kind of victim mentality you’re going to be feeling not good enough, this thing has occurred and happened to you.

Poor me

You might be saying things like, “Poor me, how could this have happened?” You’re feeling reluctant, you’re feeling maybe a bit of outrage, you’re sympathy seeking, you’re feeling quite righteous in feeling hurt, entitled to your hurt. Maybe there’s a blame of shame game that you’re having your fault-finding, very, very normal to be in that in the first kind of stage after turmoil.

To move from the victim stage to the next stage of the journey, which is the stage of feeling like the survivor, what you need to focus on is shifting your perspective where you’re kind of in this victim place to the next part where you’re beginning to cope with what has happened.

Analogy

Now an analogy that we sometimes use is if you’re driving along in a vehicle, and you’re driving along in that vehicle and the driver of the vehicle is actually the person that has created the trauma in your life. If you’re feeling like the victim you’re actually the person that has been hit by whatever it is that they’re doing. You’re actually the pedestrian that has been hit by this vehicle and you’re in a place where you’re feeling victimised by the driver of that vehicle.

Now whoever the driver is, maybe it’s a corporation that has fired you, or maybe it’s someone who’s cheated on you, or somebody who is divorcing you, or someone that has created an accident in your life. You’re in that place of feeling like the pedestrian at the effect of what they’re doing.

What we want to do is move you from the place of being the pedestrian to being the passenger within the vehicle. So this is the place where you’re actually witnessing what is occurring and you’re beginning to cope with what has happened rather than feeling at the effect of what has happened. So, you’ve gotta shift your attention from blame seeking to focus on what you can take ownership for, and accountability for. And to have a plan in place for managing all the triggers that are occurring off the back of this thing that has occurred in your life.

Survivor

Now, when you’re in that space of being the survivor the mindset of the survivor is you’re beginning to cope with what has happened, so you’ve got some systems in place to survive this event. So you’re starting to take control of various things. You’re tolerating the pain, you’re taking control, you’re starting to get up in the morning wash the dishes, you’re starting to actually do things, and you’re stopping the incessant feeling of being victimised. You’re actually like, “Okay, I need to get on with this. I need to do what I need to do.”

To get from the place of being a victim to the place where you’re starting to survive the situation you must commit to the survival. You must tell yourself, “Okay, I’ve had enough. I need to get over this now. I need to begin to move on.” And you’ve gotta commit to actually moving on and developing those coping mechanisms. So, that’s the next stage and that’s the mindset you need to have to get to that next stage.

Now that’s not the end, right? To move beyond survivor, ’cause survivor’s also a disempowering place. It’s disempowering because you’re alive but you’re not living. You’re surviving but you’re not thriving, right? You’re not actually loving life, you’re just kind of surviving life. So to move on from survivor the next stage is to be in the learning stage, and that’s where you really decide that there’s gotta be a better way.

Learning

We’ve gotta start learning from what has happened to us so that we can actually begin to incorporate moving forward from what has occurred and what has happened. This is where you’re starting to kind of attend some workshops, attend some seminars, take on your personal development, read some books, experiment, practise, workshop. You’re accepting help, you’re starting to go to therapy, you’re doing counselling. And this is where you’re taking on the concepts that, I need to learn from what has happened, and I need to actually start being proactive in my learning.

Now whenever you want to heal, the first stage of healings is committing to learning from what has happened. And that’s hard when you’re in the victim stage. When you’re in the victim stage the first thing you’ve gotta do is just survive. You’ve gotta start coping with what has happened. But if you want to kind of be more than just coping you’ve gotta commit to learning, that’s the next stage.

So if you commit to learning, you’re starting to kind of learn and integrate things that you’re learning, you’re in that learning stage and that’s the first stage of the next part, which is healing. So you’ve got victim stage, survivor stage, learning stage. If you want to get into the healing stage this is where you need to start actually processing and integrating some of those learnings.

So in the learning stage, you’re just learning as an intellectual concept, it’s a cognitive experience. When you’re in the learning stage you’re kind of just passively interacting with some of the learnings. When you’re in the healing stage you’re actively interacting with those learnings, you’re actually wanting to kind of really integrate those learnings into your lives. This is where you’re starting to have some breakdown and breakthrough moments.

Let go

You’re actually ready to let go of this pain and the punishment, you want to move on. And you’re starting to practise what you’re learning. When you take learning from a cognitive understanding perspective and you start practising what you’re learning that’s when the healing starts to occur.

Now that’s not the end either, because the final stage, the way you really want to get to is the victor stage.

Now the victor stage is not just where you’re learning, it’s not just where you’re healing. It’s where you’ve had a massive breakthrough in your life, and you feel like the experience that you have it becomes a testimonial, an inspiration for your life. You want to share the victory that you’ve had.

You feel like none of the suffering that you’ve been through has been in vain. And you realise that whatever’s happened to you hasn’t made you less, it’s made you more. And you see that what’s happened is an actual blessing for your life, and it was a necessary turning point for you to go through to have this new life. So the victor stage is really what we focus on producing in all of our retreats and programmes, but it’s really for yourself if you want to move from being the victim to the survivor, to the learning, to the healing, to the victor stage, you’ve gotta really focus on integrating all the things that you’ve learned to produce the breakthroughs, to eventually have a place where you feel grateful for what has happened.

When you feel grateful then you’re in the space of being the victor.

So, to develop the mindset just to recap, what you need to do shifting from victim you’ve gotta move into the place where you commit to survive what has happened. You’re like, “I’m done. I’m done with winging about it. I want to survive what has happened.” From that survivor place, you need to then move to the learning phase, and that’s where you commit to learning from what has happened.

Experience

When you actually integrate those learnings into your life and have those breakdown and breakthrough moments then you’re in the healing phase. And when you start having an experience that you can share the victory, and you’re grateful for everything that has happened because you feel like your life is better for the trauma that you’ve been through, that’s when you’re in the victor stage.

So, I hope that’s kind of helped you in terms of what are all the stages you need to go through to develop the victor mentality, but you’ve gotta take it one day at a time. You can’t leapfrog from victim to victor overnight. You’ve gotta really go through the stages of development. So, some other principles to look at is, at the end of the day you’ve gotta take responsibility and ownership for your own healing journey, your own recovery.

Guilt

Don’t take on any kind of unearned guilt or shame from the event. Focus on having compassion for yourself and just moving forward every single day. Don’t compare yourself to other people. Be nice to yourself. Just give up all those destructive emotions, and the parts in the victim stage that keep people stuck, just keep committing and moving forward, and developing all of those steps as you go.

All right, so that’s what I wanted to cover in this tips video. I hope that was useful.

Come and join us on the Overcome Any Life Event online seminar, we’re going to be covering in a lot more detail a very special technique that you can use to really overcome any trauma in your life.

So we look forward to welcoming you on the webinar, till then.

Pain is a great motivator…

When you put your hand on a hot stove, what makes you pull it away? Pain. Physical pain is your body’s way of telling you that you need to take action and change the situation before you do yourself serious harm. 

When it comes to your emotional wellbeing, we feel emotional pain for the same reason it’s our body’s way of telling us we need to take action, we need to change the situation to avoid further harm.

Been through a traumatic life event such as divorce, bereavement, physical trauma, bankruptcy, redundancy, miscarriage, family dispute or something else?

In the early stages, it’s that acute, unbearable mental pain that makes you say: I can’t go on like this. I have to find a way to make this stop. That’s good.

… But what happens when the worst of the pain subsides? When you get to the point where it still hurts, but you can live with it?

This is the danger zone. You haven’t fully healed, but you aren’t driven to get better by a pain you can’t bear. This is the point where many people stall in their recovery – and that’s why, if this is where you are in your healing, it’s crucial that you find another way to keep up the momentum and keep pushing yourself to get back to peak performance.

The good news is, this motivator is no longer pain. Instead of running away from something, you’ve reached the point where you’re running too something: a positive goal that you can work towards, rather than a negative to escape from.

The unfortunate reality is that most people never complete their healing process fully because as soon as the pain disappears they think their healing is complete. It isn’t.

Adele Theron

Fake It ‘til You Make It

The important thing here is to focus on a positive goal that’s within your power to achieve. 

If you’re healing from a horrible life event such as a breakup for example, it’s not helpful to set yourself a goal like, “I want to be married by the time I’m 35” or “I’m going to have a new girlfriend by this time next month”. These are things that depend on other people and their desires, putting them outside of your control. Instead, you need to focus on your own behaviour.

Imagine the kind of person you want to be, and set that ideal as your role model. How would this ideal version of yourself relate to others? Manage their relationships? Handle stressful situations? Communicate with others? Set boundaries? Show kindness?

Once you’ve visualised this behaviour, and pictured yourself doing it, emulate it in real life – and keep doing this until you’ve made it second nature. 

 Separate “I Did…” from “I Am…”

In order to truly heal, you have to like yourself. You have to believe that, whatever mistakes you’ve made, you are a worthwhile human being with the potential to do things better. 

The very worst thing you can do in this situation is to say to yourself: “I am this way, so I’ll never be able to be a better person, or have a loving relationship”. Or: “I’m a horrible or unlovable etc person because I did XYZ”. 

These thoughts will not allow you to heal. Instead, you need to separate action from essence. 

Sometimes you’ll do shitty or self-destructive things. We all do! That doesn’t mean you let these things slide or shrug them off as inevitable; rather, you should address these things, admitting that you’re in the wrong, apologise for what you’ve done (whether to others or to yourself), and endeavour not to repeat the same mistake again. In other words, you need to recognise the thing was bad, take responsibility for it, and try your best to learn from the situation to avoid repeating it.

What you absolutely should not do is take this as proof that you’re a bad person, as opposed to a person who did a bad thing. I can’t state enough how important this is for your healing. If you let yourself believe that you are just “the kind of person who does things like that”, not only will you hate yourself, but you’ll never change your behaviour, either.

Recognise That This Is a Journey

Healing doesn’t happen overnight. 

In all areas of life, expecting results too quickly is a serious motivation-killer. 

Instead, to keep up the momentum, you need to keep in mind that you’re working towards getting healthy, re-learning the way you manage relationships, and putting an end to self-destructive spirals of behaviour. It’s a process, not an either/or situation – and having the odd bad day doesn’t mean that you’ve failed.

When you find yourself starting to question your progress, take the time to reflect on how far you’ve come and remind yourself what your goals are, visualising your role-model-self again for inspiration.  

I can’t state strongly enough that setbacks don’t spell the end, nor are they a good reason to throw your hands up in the air and stop trying. The key is to keep heading in the right direction overall, even if you take a few detours or wrong turns along the way.

Be Grateful 

It sounds cheesy, but keeping track of the good things that happen to you seriously helps to challenge your perceptions when things seem bleak. 

If you feel yourself losing momentum or getting sucked into a black hole, force yourself to step back and take stock of the positives. For example, note down all the things you have to be grateful for that day, and be specific. 

It could be a small, random act of kindness from a stranger. It could be the phone call you got from your best friend checking in to see how you are. 

The point is, when you’re feeling down, it’s very easy to overlook ways in which others are looking out for you, trying to be supportive, or just making an effort to brighten up your day. Being more conscious of these things can really change your perspective and give you the strength you need to push ahead with your healing.

Get the Support You Need

No matter how strong you are, there will always be times when you need other people to lean on, confide in, talk to about how you’re doing. 

But remember: not all friendships however strong are a source of wise advice despite their best intentions. It’s tempting to rely on that drama-loving friend who sympathises and eggs you on with your anger, vengeful thoughts but they may not serve you.

The thing is, these friends don’t have the wisdom, experience or position to advise and guide you properly.

It’s much better to seek out people who are motivated to see you succeed in overcoming your trauma whatever it takes, rather than someone that may sympathise and join you wallowing in the pain of it all. 

If you really want to keep up momentum, look for support from people who understand and care what you are trying to do – and reach out to them regularly for motivation.

Heal from emotional pain – The Summary:

1. Pain creates the initial motivation for change

2. But that energy does not last forever 

3. To complete healing shift to ‘towards’ motivation

4. Motivational and visualisation goals will help

5. Support is essential to complete the healing journey

6. If healing isn’t totally complete symptoms will reoccur

7. Download your Free PDF: 5 Tips to Complete Emotional Healing

Struggling to keep up the momentum in your healing journey?

No problem, we have a solution…

Existing clients can enrol in the MOMENTUM coaching package.
Or you can contact us for a Free CLARITY CALL for more guidance.

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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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!

Ever been told “Oh my god, you guys are just SO GOOD together?” even as the doubts are starting to set in?

Or had friends roll their eyes when you mention issues that are starting to bother you because hey, your relationship is great – what are you whining about?

Or worse: broken up with your partner after much painful soul-searching, only to have your parents say: “Are you crazy? They were perfect for you!”

Perfect

The problem with being the “perfect couple” is that you’re never allowed to break the illusion. The daily problems and struggles that every marriage experiences are glossed over, ignored, denied.

Sanitised for other people.

This puts insane, unrealistic pressure on your relationship. It makes you feel like every imperfection or tension is a personal failure. It prevents you approaching problems head on and working through them rationally. It speeds up the demise of your marriage when the cracks start to form.

And eventually, it deprives you of the support you desperately need right when you need it most: after your divorce.

Brangelina

Let’s take a look at the Brangelina breakup for a moment. These are two of the most beautiful, successful people in the world.

Two people that, on the face of it, seem to have the most picture perfect marriage.

They’re wealthy. They’re both top of their profession. They’ve worked together on a ton of successful projects, as well as pursuing independent goals. They’ve raised a beautiful family. They travel all over the world and own houses in far flung, exotic locations.

“It doesn’t matter how rich or beautiful you are, presenting a sanitised version of your relationship is exhausting.”

Performing

But you know what else?

They’re two people who spent their entire ten-year relationship in the public eye. Who have had to perform being happy in love for a press mob that picks apart every word and gesture for a decade.

They’ve had to put a flawless face forward even as they’ve negotiated some of the most stressful and emotionally exhausting events a couple can possibly experience together: the serious health problems and multiple, invasive surgeries, the death of parents, the high profile criticism of professional and personal choices, adopting and raising children, running their own businesses and managing their own creative projects.

Who had to cultivate a façade even for those people they see and speak to and confide in every day, in case their words are sold to a newspaper by a “source close to them”.

Exhausting

It doesn’t matter how rich or beautiful you are, presenting a sanitised version of your relationship is exhausting. There’s only so long you can pretend that difficult, hurtful, stressful things aren’t taking their toll on your relationship. And when it falls apart, you absolutely need people who love you to step in, give you a hug, listen to you talk about what you’re going through and really listen.

Now, hopefully no one reading this will ever be in a position where the dirty laundry of their divorce is publicly strung up in the tabloid press, but I’m sure many can relate to the feeling that you’ve been horribly misrepresented by your partner, by your friends and family, by your social circle, or even (if, for example, you’re battling for custody) in a court of law.

If you’ve gone out of your way to present the happiest, shiniest, most perfect version of your marriage until now, it can be particularly hard to counter or handle this. Especially if everyone adores your ex and you’ve never attempted to disabuse them of the notion that this person is just as perfect as you’d always let them believe.

How do you backtrack?

How do you persuade them, after all this time, that actually things weren’t as wonderful as they seemed, behind the scenes? How do you trust someone to really listen and be supportive when you feel that they’re judging you harshly for “throwing it all away”?

Here’s the thing: you’re not going to be able to change a bunch of people’s minds when they’re dead set on siding with your ex. And do you really need to, anyway? What will you gain by it? Is it going to help you to move on?

Of course, if you’ve spent years putting on a show of being the perfect couple, it will most likely cut you deep that you’ve lost control of your “public image” now. You might panic that people no longer see in in the positive way they’ve always seen you in – or even as the cause of your relationship’s breakdown. At this point, it’s tempting to go on the offensive, painting yourself as the victim and telling everyone who will listen about your ex’s every fault.

Won’t help

But this will not help you heal and move on. In fact, it will do exactly the opposite.

Firstly, you will probably end up fighting a proxy war of he-did-this-she-did-this with your ex via your friendship group. That’s bound to get ugly, souring your relationship with your ex even more and leading to stuff coming out about you that you really didn’t want shared.

Secondly, you’ll find yourself becoming a person that you just don’t like. After all these years of fierce loyalty to your partner, striving to show both of you in your best light, here you are bad mouthing or exaggerating their faults to score points. That has to feel a bit grubby. It has to detract from whatever was actually beautiful about the time you shared together.

Betray

If you go as far as betraying the trust of that person, unnecessarily disclosing intimate secrets or things that will really hurt or embarrass them, that’s even worse. Mutual friends will most likely think less of you for being so vindictive, your ex will (rightly) be appalled and you will have lost the moral high ground forever. From there, you can only keep clinging your ex’s wrongdoings and your victimhood in an attempt to justify yourself, admit guilt and grovel to your ex / your social circle for forgiveness, or continue along a path of petty revenge. None of these is exactly going to make you feel great about yourself.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you should lie, cover up your feelings or sugar coat anything your ex has done that led to this breakup. You’ve done enough of that already, and it probably contributed to your marriage’s demise.

“It’s tempting to go on the offensive, painting yourself as the victim and telling everyone who will listen about your ex’s every fault. But this will not help you to heal and move on. In fact, it will do exactly the opposite.”

Honest

Instead, it’s a case of being honest with a small circle of people you really trust, and being painfully diplomatic with everyone else.

Again, let’s go back to Brangelina. If, like them, you’re splitting up under the media glare, you have to be incredibly careful about what you say and who you tell. After all, they have six kids to protect as well as each other’s feelings, and they certainly don’t want to go feeding the sharks.

Instead, they decline to comment, or release carefully worded statements like this one, from Brad Pitt:

“I am very saddened by this, but what matters most now is the wellbeing of our kids… I kindly ask the press to give them the space they deserve during this challenging time.”

“I am very saddened by this, but what matters most now is the wellbeing of our kids… I kindly ask the press to give them the space they deserve during this challenging time.” 

Okay, you might not have to worry about hacks quoting you out of context, but you can take a valuable lesson from this. People are people and they will gossip and twist your words. This is even more the case if your relationship always looked perfect from the outside and your breakup came as a shock.

Open and honest

Make sure you sit down the people closest to you and tell them, frankly, that while things weren’t as rosy as you perhaps made them out to be, you are trying hard to keep things civil. Be strong: don’t minimise the things that hurt you or allow them to make you feel these were nothing, but don’t exaggerate them either. Emphasise that you’ve already made your decision and now you need their support, not their judgement.

Ask them to keep what you tell them to yourself. Be open about what you need from them in terms of emotional support. Tell them you’re hurting. Tell them you’re scared.

“If you want to heal, you’ll have to focus on dealing with your own pain and the proactive steps you’re going to take to move on and get your life on track – on your own.”

Trash talk…

But apart from the specific concerns and frustrations you need to get off your chest, don’t make it all about trash talking your ex. This will become exhausting very, very fast and will prevent you from moving on.

The same goes for people who will inevitably pry or try to goad you into saying things about your ex you wish you hadn’t. Be gracious about this. Say that you don’t want to speak ill of them or go into detail about what went wrong, but ultimately it didn’t work out and you wish them well. Then change the subject and don’t get drawn in: you will feel better about it, and you will come out looking like the better person.

You have to let them go

Ultimately, the important thing is that you don’t fixate on your ex. After all, you’ve broken up now. They should absolutely not be the central focus of your life. You have to let them go.

If you want to heal, you’ll have to focus on dealing with your own pain and the proactive steps you’re going to move on and get your life on track – on your own. You need to work on treating the wound, not keeping it visibly open to win the support of your friends.

If you’re lucky enough to avoid a divorce as public as Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s, embrace the privacy that this gives you to heal. Don’t turn it into a min media circus of your own creation. At the end of the day, it’s you that will get hurt.

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Well… tell them to get stuffed.

Time is not a healer

Time doesn’t do anything, in fact. It’s passive. It just passes by. Everyone’s seen the elderly person that’s still bitter and angry about something that happened decades ago – clearly time didn’t heal for them. I’m sure you know yourself that old rejections and cruelties and breakups still smart years on, whereas the fights you strive to make peace over straight away are barely remembered a week later.

That’s because healing is an active decision, not a passive one.

Be proactive about tackling the problem head-on

If you want to get over an injury, you have to be proactive about tackling the problem head-on. You clean it, dress it, fix it and make sure it heals properly, so that it doesn’t keep giving you trouble for the rest of your life. We know this about physical ailments. Why pretend it’s any different for psychological ones?

Do you have emotional scare tissue?

If you don’t come to terms with your trauma, it just sits there, like a festering wound. Eventually scar tissue might grow over the top, covering over the cut, but it’s still the same old untreated wound.

Worse, this emotional scar tissue is incredibly damaging, because it acts as a kind of “false healing” that prevents you from ever getting to the root of the problem. If you keep telling yourself that you’re fine when you aren’t, if you keep waiting in hope that the anger or pain or dysfunction you’re experiencing will simply diminish over time, you not only deny yourself the healing you so desperately need – you will also keep repeating the same self-destructive behaviours and mistakes that caused the trauma in the first place.

The chances of divorce increases each time they get married

Did you know that the chances of divorce increases each time they get married? As in, you were to marry a second, third or fourth time, there’s less hope of it working out every time you do? You might think that someone whose first two marriages had gone tits-up, who had lived through the awful trauma of divorce twice already, would learn from their mistakes, get better at choosing the right partner and become more adept at navigating the issues that damage or weaken a relationship. But statistically speaking, they don’t.

Why? Because they trample from relationship to relationship with the same baggage, the same hang-ups, the same issues in tow. The more you repeat an action or way of responding to something, the deeper it becomes ingrained as a habit. The more instinctive that behaviour feels to you. Ironically, it makes you feel safer to repeat a behaviour or a decision you’ve made in the past, purely because you recognise it – and even though it hurts you.

Feels safer to repeat a behaviour or a decision you’ve made in the past – even though it hurts you

False healing doesn’t address these problems. Waiting around until the ache isn’t as sharp as it used to be won’t stop you doing the things that caused the ache in the first place. It doesn’t help you to walk into your new life or your next relationship with the skills, self-awareness and confidence to do things better. It might give you a brief feeling of reassurance that your past misery is behind you, but it doesn’t place happiness firmly on the horizon.

Brighter future

If you want your future to be brighter than your traumatic past, false healing just won’t cut it. Don’t wait for “time” to fix things. Take control. Decide it’s your time to heal, right now. And commit yourself to doing the proactive, practical things you have to do to make it true.

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In my last post, I talked about one kind of eternally single friend that we all seem to have: the type who we know is awesome, isn’t shy about meeting people and always seems to have the next hot date lined up – but somehow, never ends up in a “proper” relationship.

In this second part, I want to talk about the “other” type of eternally single friend. The friend who is just as lovely and amazing, but never seems to meet anyone at all.

I know someone just like this. Let’s call her Jennifer.

Case study

Jennifer is a great friend and a great all-round catch. She’s clever, she’s fun, she’s cultured, she’s pretty. Professionally, she’s doing very well, with an interesting job in a highly competitive field. Despite a humble start in life, she’s carved out a great future and she has every reason to feel proud of herself. Prospective partners have every reason to be impressed.

So why is it that I can count on one hand the number of dates Jennifer has been on in the past three years?

Why is it that she hasn’t even had a whiff of a serious relationship since the last one ended years ago?

The thing with Jennifer is, we all know she’s awesome. But does she believe she’s awesome? Does she hell.

Ask Jennifer what she’s up to and she will play it down. Play it down to the point that you’d think her career was about to go off a cliff, when in reality she’s doing better than just about anyone in our friendship group. In a field she’s always dreamed of working in and that’s she’s genuinely passionate about.

Five minutes into catch-up drinks with Jennifer and she will tell you how much weight she’s put on (she hasn’t). Or how bad her skin is at the moment (it’s not). Or how boring she’s been lately (her life is one big social whirlwind). How she’s doing so badly at whatever project she set herself, or how bleak things are looking, or how she’s worried about being irresponsible and overspending (again, she’s a deeply practical and organised person who gets more done than just about anyone I know).

Jennifer’s friends can obviously see past this. We sigh and roll our eyes and tell her to stop being ridiculous. But we still love her.

Because we know that Jennifer is what I like to call a Rapunzel.

Tower of negativity

She builds a huge tower of negativity around her to protect herself against disappointment.

We know that to get to the “real” Jennifer – the fun, brilliant, witty Jennifer – we have to do the emotional equivalent of getting her to let down her long hair, so that we can climb up.

Jennifer’s exes reflect this. They were all long-term friends before they were boyfriends. People who took the time to really get to know her. Who made that long, arduous climb, even when she made it tough for them.

But that’s not how most dating works.

First date…

When you meet someone new, or head out a first date, you don’t have the luxury of five years’ friendship behind you. This person has no idea what is on the other side of the wall. All they are seeing is the wall.

And why would you go to all that trouble when you have no idea if it’s worth what’s beyond?

Sure, if you’re a Rapunzel, you can blame your date. You can dismiss the opposite sex as shallow and not recognising your worth. For failing to get to know the “real you”. But why make it so hard for them to see the “real you” in the first place?

After all, would you go to all that trouble to win around a stranger who might turn out to be totally wrong for you anyway? Would you jump through all these hoops for someone you don’t even know yet?

Because the thing is, too, that all this negativity is kinda selfish.

When we meet or go out with someone new, we tend to be nervous. We want to be put at ease, to relax, to feel comfortable chatting and opening up.

But as emphatic animals, we quickly “catch” the emotional state of the person we’re with. So, when the other person does the opposite – when they project a mood that makes it feel inappropriate to be cheerful, happy and positive – it puts us on edge.

That’s not to say that you have to spend an entire relationship pretending to be happy. You don’t necessarily even have to spend an entire date pretending to be happy.

As you get deeper into conversation and start to trust one another, it might feel perfectly fine to start touching on subjects that are a bit darker, rawer, more serious. Vulnerability is a big part of intimacy, and as a relationship blossoms, you will inevitably reveal things to one another that frighten you, are painful to you, or that paint you in a less-than-confident light. Revealed at the right time, these things will bring you closer together.

It will probably make them want to escape pretty sharpish

.. But that’s very different from making this your opening gambit. Launching into a stream of negativity in the first few minutes is exhausting, even alarming, for the other person. It makes it impossible to take any pleasure out of the situation. It will probably make them want to escape pretty sharpish.

And, worst of all, it makes you even more convinced that all this misery is justified, because It makes you even surer that you’re unlovable.

Excessive self-deprecation is largely about diminishing yourself before anyone has a chance to do it for you, so when someone seems to agree with your poor-self image, that only encourages you to keep jumping the gun.

And that makes you even more likely to keep building up your negativity wall.

But it’s the negativity wall that’s the problem – not you.

Take a recent date of Jennifer’s. She met up with a guy with similar interests. Who she’d been chatting to through a dating site for a while, and seemed really keen. He was witty and interesting and good-looking, and he clearly thought she was, too.

Jesus. Who hurt you?

They met for a drink. The conversation was flowing and Jennifer thought it was going fine. She didn’t even realise how unrelentingly negative she was being until the guy looked at her in bewilderment and said “Jesus. Who hurt you?”

Needless to say, the relationship did not progress.

If you don’t stop yourself from building up your negativity tower, pretty sure you’ll find yourself stuck Inside. You won’t remember how to actually get out of it. You might forget that you’re even in it.

Like Jennifer, you’ll stop noticing that you’re being miserable about everything. You might have stopped noticing the effect this has on other people.

And then, from a relationship perspective, you’re really in trouble.

So where do you start if you’re a Rapunzel? How do you learn to let down your long hair?

Not all about you

The easiest way to begin is to stop making everything about YOU.

If your bad feelings are dominating the conversation, stop talking about yourself so much. Ask the other person lots of questions. Get them talking about what they’re excited about and interested in. Do your best to be excited about and interested in it, too. Bounce off their enthusiasm. Notice how it feels to be talking to someone who is passionate and positive about something. Notice how it puts you at ease.

And then, when the conversation comes back around to you, work on mirroring this mood.

(As a side note – there’s loads of evidence that mirroring another person’s behaviour and body language actually builds rapport and helps people warm to you, too!).

Don’t fake passion for things you hate, but rather focus on the things you really like and why they make you tick, rather than ways in which they might be lacking. Allow yourself the pleasure of being upbeat as you talk about things that make you happy. Pay attention to how pushing yourself to focus on the positives actually changes the way you feel.

You don’t have to talk yourself up, but that doesn’t mean you have to put yourself down.

Plus, if you can’t refer to your achievements without feeling sick to your stomach (and if you’re British, you’re probably familiar with this phenomenon), talk about what you enjoy about your work instead. Talk about what you loved about that last book you read or that last film you saw. Talk about something really fascinating or exciting thing that you heard or read about today.

So Rapunzel, go ahead and let your hair down. You will enjoy yourself much, much more – and, of course, so will your date.

 
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We all have that amazing friend who’s perpetually single, and we just can’t work out why. You know the type: she’s smart, brilliant, beautiful and tons of fun. She dips her toes in the dating pool – perhaps she’s even the type who always seems to have the next date lined up. And yet, nothing seems to stick.

This wouldn’t be a problem if this was 100% her choice and she was actually very happy with the situation. But the trouble is, you’re painfully aware that she would really like to be in a serious relationship. Worse, the longer this goes on, the more she worries that there’s something fundamentally wrong with her. Something lacking. Or unlovable.

Sound familiar?

Perhaps you have a best friend like this. Or a sister. Or perhaps that perennial singleton is you.

So why on earth is this happening? What’s the great mystery?

I’m going to get to that. But first, I’d like to tell you a story.

Case study

Anna is a very good friend of mine. On paper, she’s top girlfriend material: she’s gorgeous, she’s funny, she’s warm and generous, she has a degree from a top university and a fantastic job that she excels at and which pays her very well indeed.

Everyone loves spending time with Anna. Ask her what she’s up to next week and you’ll get a packed itinerary of post-work drinks, theatre and cinema trips, weekend minibreaks, and, of course, dates. Anna’s a Tinder fiend. And she has no shortage of admirers.

But here’s the thing: Anna hasn’t been in a serious relationship since university. And even then, it wasn’t a relationship that she, or anyone she knew, could really picture ending in forever-after. Despite everything she has to offer, despite all the attention she gets, despite the fact that I know for a fact she wants to do the whole marriage-and-kids thing in the foreseeable future, she never seems to meet anyone right for her.

…Or so she says.

It’s like watching a car crash in slow motion

Because here’s the other thing. I’ve been out with Anna when guys start hitting on her. I’ve watched her scroll through potential matches on dating apps and sites. And often, it’s like watching a car crash in slow motion.

Looking for the wrong qualities

Because the things that Anna truly values – the things that she’d logically need to look for to have the kind of relationship she wants – are precisely the things she’s most dismissive about when she comes across them in real life.

And (Shock! Horror!) the traits that caused her the most pain in the men she’s dated before are precisely the things she finds most attractive.

Anna used to joke about this. She knew that the men she was attracted to were totally unsuitable. That they were arrogant. That they didn’t challenge her intellectually. That they exuded unreliability and would let her down.

So when she decided it was time to start looking for something more serious, she made a concerted effort to pick differently.

She recognised that feckless party boys with minimal ambition are probably not a great prospect the future. But instead of identifying the core personality traits that make these men so wrong for her, she superficially changed track. Now, for example, she’ll actively seek out someone with a decent job and academic record – who, on paper, looks like the polar opposite of her usual type.

It didn’t work. Why? Because these men are not any different.

No difference

Inevitably, these guys are simply the same arrogant, insensitive personalities, transplanted into a more respectable context. They might have made it out of their parents’ basement, but they’re essentially showy, self-involved types with over-inflated egos – they just have a bit more cash in the bank.

And, of course, they treat her just the same.

And these days, this scares her.

Because when Anna used to date guys she never expected to want to stay with forever, it was easier to shrug off the situation when things when wrong. Sure, she got hurt a few times, but deep down she was never really surprised.

But now that Anna is actively looking for something long-term, she’s horrified that this is still happening. She doesn’t know how to find someone who doesn’t behave like this.

Her responses to these traits have become so ingrained that she’s instinctively attracted to the kind of men who end up hurting her – even when she thinks she’s doing the opposite.

What Anna needs to do now is stage an intervention with her own instincts.

You control who you fall in love with

Many of us assume that sexual attraction is some great mystery that you have no control over. You can’t help who you fall in love with, etc. etc. That’s just not true.

Researchers at Jaunty explain attraction as a pyramid, in which different elements are weighted differently. At the base you have health and status. The next layer is emotional. At the tip is logic.

At the base you have health and status. The next layer is emotional. At the tip is logic

Here’s how it works. When you meet someone in person (or on Tinder), the first things you are aware of are the health and status factors. Health is everything from decent personal hygiene through to good skin or a buff body – the obvious things that we usually associate with whether we find someone hot or hot.

Status

Status is far more complex and affected by personal and cultural values. There are external indicators, of course, like wealth, power, a great job, etc., but it also covers things like confidence, the ability to make others laugh or to command an audience, skill sets and belief systems. And, of course, it relates to the context you’re in right now. That means that status-based attraction could include from fancying your super-smart university lecturer to being impressed by someone’s ability to fix a shelf, nail a pub quiz question or even competitively down a pint.

Both of these things are kind of frivolous or fickle. Someone who commands status in one context might easily pass under the radar in another. And obviously, someone who has a great body now might not look so hot in 15 years’ time. As indicators of a successful, long-term relationship, health and status are shaky at best. Yet research shows again and again that they are fundamental to attraction.

Emotional connection

Okay, let’s move on to the next layer, emotional connection.

There are four types of emotional connection: feeling that you trust someone, having the emotional intelligence to put someone at ease and make them feel comfortable, recognising a person’s uniqueness and spark, and a sense of uncertainty or mystery that intrigues you about this person.

Finally, at the top of the pyramid, you have logic.

This is there most of the really important questions lie. Is this person really “right” for you? Do they have the personal traits you need to feel happy and supported? Are they nuts in ways that you can cope with?

Whatever flaws this person has now are highly unlikely to change. Is this something you can live with forever? Do you want the same things? Do you share or respect each others’ beliefs and values?

This is all very interesting, you might be thinking, but how does it affect who we fall for?

Most of the time, when we meet someone in a social setting (or swipe right on a dating app), we allow ourselves to start at the base of the pyramid and work up.

If we’re attracted to someone based on health and status, we might start talking to them and search around for an emotional connection. If we have an emotional connection we go on a few dates to try and establish, logically, whether we have enough in common for this relationship to work.

The trouble is, by the time you get to the logic stage, you’re already kind of invested in this person. You fancy them for the most flimsy reasons of all – health and status – and then you’re looking for ways to make the rest fall into place.

Flip

What you need to do is to flip this on its head. To:

1. Narrow your pool based on whether there is a logical basis for a relationship
   Find out if you have an emotional connection
2. Then, when everything else seems to fall into place, decide whether or not you’re also attracted to this person on the more superficial grounds we usually begin with.
3. Okay, it’s not always the easiest task to figure out in a first conversation or limited dating profile whether someone is perfect for you. But if you’re looking out for the right signals, you can get a pretty good picture, pretty fast.

For example, do you have similar interests? Are your jobs or life goals compatible? Do you have a broadly similar outlook on life? Find ways to sound out some of the bigger questions faster and you’ll save yourself serious heartache later.

And more generally, is this person conscientious? Do they keep to the plans and obligations they make? Can they exercise self-control? Because if they don’t do these things, they will probably cheat on you, use you, or do things to hurt you, no matter how much they love you.

Conclusion

Let’s jump back to Anna for a moment. Anna used to be attracted to men who were good-looking, super-confident, a bit wild and always the life and soul of the party. In other words, it was all about health and status.

When she decided to take her dating choices more seriously, she relied on external indicators like job titles, a university background, signs they were making money – things that sound like they belong at the top of the pyramid, but are actually just external status markers.

Many of us do this. We want to make sure we don’t repeat our mistakes, so we go for someone who superficially seems very different. Last boyfriend was a bit of a waster who always needed to borrow money? This time I’m going out with a lawyer who can presumably afford to pay his way. Previous girlfriend an incredibly self-absorbed model? Next time I’ll pick someone less obviously glossy and presume that means they’re more down-to-earth.

What we’re doing here is using status markers as stand-ins for real issues.

You can’t just ask what job someone does and then try to figure out if this makes them more manipulative, more generous, more sensible, more whatever. You have to delve a little deeper. You have to ask plenty of questions. You have to pay attention to how this person actually thinks and treats you (and other people) as a predictor of future behaviour.

In other words, you have to retrain your instincts to pick up on the things that can genuinely hurt you or make you happy. The things that will get you out of your rut and into a relationship you want.

 
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This is the first in a two-part series on getting out of the singledom trap. Click here for Part 2