Susan J. Elliott > Quotes

“My therapist would later explain to me that “water seeks its own level” and that your partner’s flaws and issues usually go hand in hand with your own. A person chooses a partner with a similar degree of “brokenness” and does a dance of dysfunction where they both know the steps. Therefore, one person cannot be so much healthier than the other. Healthy people do not dance with unhealthy people.”
― Susan J. Elliott, Getting Past Your Breakup: How to Turn a Devastating Loss into the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You

“The truth of relationship healthiness is that water seeks its own level. If you want to know what is missing in you, what unfinished business you have, what your inner struggles are, you need not look further than your partner. If you listen carefully and look closely, usually your choice of mates will tell you what you need to know about yourself. As you grow and change, your choice of mate continues to reflect what you still need to work on.”
― Susan J. Elliott, Getting Past Your Breakup: How to Turn a Devastating Loss into the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You

“Only consistent, unconditional love is good enough. I”
― Susan J. Elliott, Getting Past Your Breakup: How to Turn a Devastating Loss into the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You

“After a breakup, you may also feel physically and mentally incapacitated in some way. You have trouble sleeping, or you sleep too much. You become accident-prone. You have trouble putting a sentence together. You feel scattered and overwhelmed by feelings. You may doubt your ability to function, and maybe your sanity. The emotions seem so big and so unmanageable that you may be afraid that expressing your feelings will result in complete loss of function. This is normal. Grieving causes confusion and disorganization, as well as disturbance in appetite and sleep patterns. It may disrupt even the most benign daily activities. Grief continually calls attention to itself, and being in disarray is one of those attention-getting devices. It is also a result of your mind’s attempt to reorder the world, because the one it knew, the one it was structured around, is now gone.”
― Susan J. Elliott, Getting Past Your Breakup: How to Turn a Devastating Loss into the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You

“Time does not heal all wounds. If it did, there would be no unresolved grief and no hurt from long ago that still upsets you from time to time. Pain that is not faced does not go away, it stays inside and festers. If each time you have a loss you deny it, you will end up with a pile of unresolved grief, making each loss harder and harder to cope with. When people are afraid of being hurt, often because they have not dealt with their unresolved grief, their life becomes narrower, their fear becomes greater, and choices become more difficult to make. With unresolved grief running the show, it is difficult to get close to people and hard to trust anyone.”
― Susan J. Elliott, Getting Past Your Breakup: How to Turn a Devastating Loss into the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You

“All my life I had hated uncertainty and looked for someone to bring me security. All my life I had looked for someone to love me into being normal. Now I was learning that I had to make my own certainty, and discover and develop my own normalcy.”
― Susan J Elliott, Getting Past Your Breakup

“All my life I had looked for someone to love me into being normal.”
― Susan J. Elliott, Getting Past Your Breakup: How to Turn a Devastating Loss into the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You

“To grow and change, you must acknowledge and express your feelings of hurt, anger, confusion, anxiety, and frustration. You must affirm yourself and think about you in a positive way. You must put your goals on paper. You must review your relationship and your role in it. You must get out and meet new people as well as spend productive time alone. This back-and-forth must be done every single day. All along the way, Getting Past Your Breakup will remind you to keep the balance.”
― Susan J. Elliott, Getting Past Your Breakup: How to Turn a Devastating Loss into the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You

“The bottom line is that if your ex sees things in a cockeyed way now, he or she is going to continue to see things the same way whenever you're not around to correct this twisted perspective.”
― Susan J Elliott, Getting Past Your Breakup

“After my last relationship ended, I realized that I was only in a relationship because I thought people would think I was a loser if I wasn’t. Now that I’m doing what I want and building my own life, I realize I would like to spend some time—years, maybe—getting to know me. And it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks about that.”
― Susan J. Elliott, Getting Past Your Breakup: How to Turn a Devastating Loss into the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You

“Relationships weren’t easy for me, and for the first few years my abandonment issues were in full force, but with each one I learned. When I started to see my relationships as learning experiences, and inventoried them when they were over, they helped me to understand what still needed attention in my life. Along the way I decided what would have once been unthinkable: that I would rather be alone than accept the unacceptable from anyone. Never again would I give up all that I am for a relationship . I was not willing to be ignored, called names, or remain low on the priority list. I was not willing to accept unacceptable behavior just to keep someone around. For years I had been afraid that no one would love me. Now I was sure that I would get what I settled for, so I would not settle for less than I deserved. I was slowly coming to believe that I deserved the best.”
― Susan J. Elliott, Getting Past Your Breakup: How to Turn a Devastating Loss into the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You

“The more I worked on myself and became healthier, the healthier the people in my life became. The better I treated myself, the better I was treated. As my self-confidence grew, I met people who were loving and there for me when they said they would be.”
― Susan J. Elliott, Getting Past Your Breakup: How to Turn a Devastating Loss into the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You

“When you are not afraid of grief, you will make better choices.”
― Susan J Elliott, Getting Past Your Breakup

“When I started to see my relationships as learning experiences, and inventoried them when they were over, they helped me to understand what still needed attention in my life.”
― Susan J. Elliott, Getting Past Your Breakup: How to Turn a Devastating Loss into the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You

“The pain of heartache often comes in unpredictable episodes of intense pain that come and go. These episodes are called grief “spasms”—you feel overwhelmed by your sense of sorrow. You may hurt physically and feel like you have the flu. Consumed by your own pain and situation,you feel disconnected to everyone else and life takes on a surreal, hazy quality. Stumbling through each day, you feel taxed by the most mundane tasks. All you can think about is how much you hurt. The intensity of your feelings may frighten you, but this is normal. You’re not losing control; you’re not going crazy. You are grieving.”
― Susan J. Elliott, Getting Past Your Breakup: How to Turn a Devastating Loss into the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You

“The first month was the darkest time in my life, and I didn't think I was going to make it. Once the lid popped off, I realized I had opened an excruciatingly painful Pandora's box of loss and grief. It was hard to think that any good could come from such an agonizing task.”
― Susan J Elliott

“After a breakup, anger is an appropriate reaction. When something has been taken away, people feel angry. While feeling the anger is okay, acting on the anger is not. You can and should acknowledge your anger, own your anger, write about your anger, and talk about your anger. Eventually it will dissipate. What you should not do is act out or lash out in anger. That is not okay. If you try to repress your anger because you think that it is “unacceptable” or “bad” or “wrong,” it will manifest itself in other ways. Some people refuse to acknowledge anger, so they go through life taking it out on other people, irritated all the time, prone to bad moods, and generally being foul and bitter. These are all variations of unexpressed anger. If you have been going through life in an unexplained sour mood, you may have anger issues.”
― Susan J. Elliott, Getting Past Your Breakup: How to Turn a Devastating Loss into the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You

“I had to look at my entire life, figure out what had gone wrong, and fix it. To do that, I had to go down into the abyss and face the pain.”
― Susan J. Elliott, Getting Past Your Breakup: How to Turn a Devastating Loss into the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You

“They say that when you are ready to learn, the teacher will appear. . . . Susan, you are the real deal. Thank you for being my teacher and my friend.”
― Susan J. Elliott, Getting Past Your Breakup: How to Turn a Devastating Loss into the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You

“The fact is, you need to accept that you have been with someone whose approach to life is simply incompatible with yours. Perhaps it was always evident that you thought in different ways, saw the world differently, and operated on irreconcilable levels, but you chose to ignore it or worked hard to correct it. You can’t ignore the dissimilar viewpoints any longer. Accept the fact that you think differently and let it go so you can find someone whose way of thinking is compatible with yours.”
― Susan J. Elliott, Getting Past Your Breakup: How to Turn a Devastating Loss into the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You

“Time does not heal all wounds. - Pain that is not faced does not go away.”
― Susan J. Elliott, Getting Past Your Breakup: How to Turn a Devastating Loss into the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You

“It becomes your impassioned belief that you can have a conversation and turn this wrongheadedness around.”
― Susan J Elliott, Getting Past Your Breakup

“One of the reasons I became a grief therapist was that my own grief work healed me. I had been an emotional cripple all of my life. I was afraid of being hurt and afraid of being close—all because of my unresolved loss. Thinking back on the losses was akin to putting my hand on a hot stove. I would recoil every single time. But when the pile got to be too big, I had to give in and work through it. I had to look at all of my losses, feel them, heal them, and then move on. Each time I did that, I became a more confident person, a more alive person. I started to heal and experience true happiness for the first time. I became a grief therapist to help others heal their broken places and experience the joy that is life once you heal your unresolved loss. Almost every client I have ever worked with resisted acknowledging his or her grief and working through the loss after a breakup. At first the process seems very difficult, because you have to face your true feelings head on. For a time it seems easier to ignore it, but when you ignore loss after loss, it takes an emotional toll that exacts a very high price.”
― Susan J. Elliott, Getting Past Your Breakup: How to Turn a Devastating Loss into the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You

“The first thing to know is that grief is not a straight line. It doesn’t happen in “stages,” as is commonly thought; it happens in phases. The first phase is shock or disbelief; the middle phase is one of review, relinquishment, and great emotion; and the final phase is reorganization, integration, and acceptance.”
― Susan J. Elliott, Getting Past Your Breakup: How to Turn a Devastating Loss into the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You

“At first you may feel shock or disbelief that a loss has occurred or an inability to recognize that it was really a loss. You know you’re hurt, but you want to repress it, suppress it, ignore it, or deny it. Some people can do just that, but it’s healthier to recognize that you’ve sustained a loss. Keep in mind that even if you know it was for the best, you’ve still had a loss. What have you lost? At the very least you’ve lost the time, energy, and emotion you put into the relationship. You’ve also lost the hopes and dreams that you had in the beginning. You’ve lost the identity of the couple, and you may have lost mutual friends or family members of your ex’s that you liked.”
― Susan J. Elliott, Getting Past Your Breakup: How to Turn a Devastating Loss into the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You

“You don't need answers or explanations to find closure. No matter what the loss, the closure comes from inside you.”
― Susan J Elliott, Getting Past Your Breakup

“When you finally meet someone who loves you and respects you in words and actions, relationships take on a whole new meaning. Your life becomes bigger because the things you discovered about yourself in your alone time are still being honored and cared for and you have a partner to share your life with. Love accommodates you and all your interests and obligations. You’re not being asked to give anything up for love and someone is helping to support you while you support him or her. Real love, functional love, doesn’t cause you to lose people, places, things, health, sleep, or appetite. Real love does not demand, either actively or passively, that you give up your friends, hobbies, or interests. In fact, it encourages independence and being fulfilled by other people, places, and things. When you are a healthy and functional person, your healthy and functional mate trusts and supports you. Your partner does not purposefully or unwittingly engulf you.”
― Susan J. Elliott, Getting Past Your Breakup: How to Turn a Devastating Loss into the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You

“When you finally meet someone who loves you and respects you in words and actions, relationships take on a whole new meaning. Your life becomes bigger because the things you discovered about yourself in your alone time are still being honored and cared for and you have a partner to share your life with. Love accommodates you and all your interests and obligations. You’re not being asked to give anything up for love and someone is helping to support you while you support him or her. Real love, functional love, doesn’t cause you to lose people, places, things, health, sleep, or appetite. Real love does not demand, either actively or passively, that you give up your friends, hobbies, or interests. In fact, it encourages independence and being fulfilled by other people, places, and things. When you are a healthy and functional person, your healthy and functional mate trusts and supports you. Your partner does not purposefully or unwittingly engulf you. If you’re losing your friends, your family, or your children due to a relationship you’re in, you need to think about what is going on in this relationship. Don’t automatically blame your friends, family, and children. If your partner always wants you to choose him or her over others in your life, even if it’s not an explicit demand but always turns out that way, there is something wrong. Real love does not strip you of the things you love or the people you love, and real love does not make you choose. Real love encourages quality time alone with friends, family, and children. Being nurtured and loved by others makes a person fulfilled and, in turn, adds to the primary relationship.”
― Susan J. Elliott, Getting Past Your Breakup: How to Turn a Devastating Loss into the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You

“After you’ve gone through a major breakup and a time of healing, you start to think about going back out there. Even if you haven’t thought about it, people in your life may be prompting you to start dating again. Some think that getting right back out there is essential, but that’s usually not the case. You need time to grieve, rebuild your life, and regain your self-confidence. This is done on your timetable and no one else’s.”
― Susan J. Elliott, Getting Back Out There: Secrets to Successful Dating and Finding Real Love after the Big Breakup

“Guilt stems from the inability to accept what has happened and a misguided sense that you have power over the situation and can go back and fix it.”
― Susan J Elliott, Getting Past Your Breakup