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For what happens at the end of love will define life moving forward, either leaving your life dismally contracted and diminished, or beautifully expanded and enhanced.
in the midst of love’s meltdown, we are evicted from our emotional home, which can leave us feeling deeply unsafe, vulnerable, lost, and afraid.
Absolutely what it felt like.
Ineffective grieving happens when you allow your pain to calcify your heart closed and fixate your identity as someone who is alone, unwanted, or abused.
Effective grieving, however, turns the love you’ve been giving another toward yourself. You can begin tending to the soft spots of your own tender heart, causing a bittersweet breakthrough in your ability to love yourself even when someone else refuses to.
We human beings live so much in the shelter of one another that the loss of a relationship can be an eviction into exile.
If nothing else, the depression you may feel at love’s end is a tribute to the value of love, admonishing you to hold your exchange as sacred and not easily toss it aside.
what differentiates depression from the earlier stages of grief is that it’s about coming to terms with the reality of your losses now, in present time, as opposed to denial, anger, and bargaining, which are all concerned with sorting through, integrating, or holding on to the past.
grief’s final resting place: acceptance.
This simple gesture of giving yourself your full attention when sorrow is shaking you to the bone promises to carve depth and kindness into the core of who you are
ASK YOURSELF: “What commitments do I wish my former partner had made to me that I can now make to myself?”
Fear is a breeding ground for mistaken meaning, and many of your big feelings have at their core erroneous assumptions. Let’s get something clear: Just because you feel all alone in the world, does not mean that you actually are.
"Feelings aren't facts"
You’re okay, sweetheart. This is just what a breakup feels like. This pain will soon be gone yet the wisdom gained will long remain. I love you.”
self-care in concrete ways. Stick to a routine, spend time with people who love you, eat fresh and healthy foods, find a good coach or therapist, take walks in nature, and read a great novel with characters you love. At the end of this chapter are some suggestions for self-care. Take them seriously. This is no time to neglect yourself.
“Resilience is when you get punched, stagger, and then jump right back up. Post-traumatic growth is different—when you stand back up, you are transformed.”
Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
As Winston Churchill once said, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” When struggling through the dark and snaking tunnel of lost love, you want to fiercely determine you’re going to make it to the light, and then do everything in your power to make sure you do.
Interesting what that light might be. For me, perhaps just a better approachvtoward life, friends, not necessarily another relationship.
you’ll start to see how you have been a source of your own suffering in a way that liberates you from ever repeating this dynamic again, and empowers you to evolve beyond disappointing patterns in love.
Hope so.
Release unconscious and habitual patterns of people pleasing, self-abandoning, overgiving, or tolerating less than you deserve, and begin showing up in ways that are reflective of your true value.
When you complain, you make yourself into a victim…So change the situation…leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness. ECKHART TOLLE
looking to discover all of the covert and toxic ways that you are responsible for the mess you’re in. Even if the monster was 97 percent at fault, unless you take ownership of your 3 percent, and figure out how to change your ways of being in a relationship that make you vulnerable to being disempowered, disappointed, or abused in love, you will never be able to trust yourself to fully open up your heart again to another human being.
for every self-centered, narcissistic man, there’s a woman who chronically self-abandons and disappears herself to try to win his favor; and for every judgmental and critical woman, there is an insecure man desperately giving himself away to try to gain her approval.
That can only happen when you start asking yourself questions that inspire you to be ruthlessly honest about all the ways you’ve been giving your power away, self-sabotaging, turning away from truth, and/or showing up as less than who you are.
“How did I give my power away in this relationship, and what can I do to reclaim it?” “How do I let myself down in ways that are similar to how I feel let down by my former partner?” “Where was I pulling on my former partner to take care of me in ways I was refusing to take care of myself? What has this cost us both?” “What were the lies I was telling myself in order to stay in the relationship?” “How does it work for me to have chosen someone so clearly unavailable?” “What disappointing story from my past is being repeated here, and how have I behaved in way(s) that covertly re-created it?”
Freedom is the willingness to be responsible for ourselves. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any. ALICE WALKER
choices you made and what was motivating you. It’s important we learn to look at our mistakes straight on, and let the consequences of those mistakes touch our hearts.
The rule of thumb: you want to be more interested in developing yourself than you are in defending yourself, more interested in being rigorously honest than being right. Seeing ourselves clearly can be a humbling experience, for sure. Yet, as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, “You can’t save your face and your ass at the same time.”
ASK YOURSELF: “When I stop pointing the finger and look below the surface to examine the actions I took and the choices I made, what can I see about how I am responsible for this situation?”
Key
she’d overgiven to try to prove her value and convince him to choose her, minimizing her own feelings, needs, and desires; withholding opinions that differed from his and rarely making waves, she desperately tried to be the woman she thought he wanted, essentially disappearing herself.
Well, there it is...
Who Do You Resent and for What? Notice
“In what ways did I give my power away to this person?” “Where might I have skipped over my own knowing, dismissed my feelings, or avoided telling the truth and/or asking for clarification?” “How was I trying to get someone to love, want, or approve of me more than I was attempting to make an authentic connection?” “Why didn’t I do what I knew I should have done that may have averted a bad experience, and what made me hesitate to do it?” “In what ways was I selfish, unkind, or even abusive that may have caused my former partner to respond in defensive and destructive ways?” “What choices did I
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I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. GILDA RADNER
After a while, you learn the subtle difference between holding a hand and chaining a soul, And you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning and company doesn’t mean security. And you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts and presents aren’t promises. And you begin to accept your defeats with your head up and your eyes open with the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child And you learn to build all your roads on today because tomorrow’s ground is too uncertain for plans and futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight. After a while you learn that even sunshine burns if you get too
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Beautifully illustrates my truth
Author Anaïs Nin once said, “We see life not as it is, but as we are.”
“I was so desperate for love that I settled for less than I deserved; constantly tolerated bad behavior, hoping that he would change. Yet by not standing up for myself, I actually gave him permission to treat me poorly.”
I encourage you, therefore, to hold your imperfections tenderly.
Value the learning of life lessons as an important part of becoming a wise and mature human being. You’ve already had one person not love you the way you need to be loved. Please don’t repeat that letdown with yourself.
You must go back to rescue the younger you from that wacky and distorted hall of mirrors. Because the meaning you made about yourself and your life—that you are bad, not wanted, not loved, too much, not enough, powerless, and/or destined to be alone in life—is simply not true.
Even when the man I love closes his heart to me, I am still deeply lovable and worthy of being loved.
Can you take back the permission you’ve given another to determine your worth, and hold strong to the truth of your value in the face of being devalued by the one who just yesterday was everything to you?
Think I just need a dog
We have to stop asking why this is happening to me and start asking why it is happening for me.
What is this teaching me. I'll keep getting this lesson until I learn it.
“Beginner’s Mind.” It’s softening into an inquiry toward all you don’t yet know, valuing uncertainty over certainty and vulnerability over the protection of looking good. You look to identify the specific skills and capacities that would set you free, and commit to learning them as if your life depended upon that, because in many ways it does.
“I can raise my expectations and begin asking for what I truly want and need in life. The capacity I’d need to cultivate is the ability to hold a bigger vision for my life, stretching my picture of what might be possible for me beyond what was possible for the women in my family.”
6. Write three lists. The first is a list of 20 things you are losing that you are happy to be losing (e.g., listening to his snoring all night long!). The second is a list of 20 things you are actually gaining by losing this relationship (e.g., I finally have time to tend to my own creative projects). And the third is a list of 20 ways you could turn this disappointment into the best thing that ever happened to you (e.g., I could finally start being an adult woman and fully in my power with men).
Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you. JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
Sometimes you have to be the leader of love by refusing to go down a lesser path, and simply hold space for the other person to follow.
Every evening I turn my worries over to God. He’s going to be up all night anyway. MARY C. CROWLEY
To do this you must become more interested in what’s possible from here on than you are in rectifying the past, and more invested in how you might midwife this transition harmoniously than in getting what you want in the short term.
Forgiveness (or the F-word, for those who prefer to be left festering in peace, thank you very much) is not so much a feeling as it is a decision you make from the strongest, soundest part of yourself.
Isn't that the truth...decision.
Or what it feels like to respond to disappointment from vision rather than react from victimization.
