LET GO, MOVE ON, and HEAL After a Toxic Relationship

sometimes in life a dangerous person comes along a person that ends up doing far more damage to us our self-esteem our sense of selves and our life than we ever thought possible now when someone like this comes along and when we meet them at a time in our life where maybe there are wounds we haven't healed there's childhood patterns that we're repeating where we're doubting ourselves where we find ourselves at a vulnerable moment or we just find ourselves without the awareness of the kind of damage a person like this can do we let them in and upon finding that this relationship is difficult or this person has patterns that we don't understand we invest more in trying to make the relationship work in trying to bring about peace with this person in trying to make this person happy or give them what they say they want all the while hoping that one day the dynamic will change that this person will change that the behaviors that are causing you pain right now will cease but they don't and when we keep investing in a person like this when we keep giving and giving and giving they begin to take up more and more space in our world until eventually they are our world they monopolize our time our energy our attention and the emotional toll that the relationship takes the stress the anxiety the fear take up so much space that we no longer have the bandwidth to think about anything else when someone becomes our world it can actually start to rewire our brain the way we think it can create new trauma or activate old trauma it can make it so that we no longer distinguish between this person and the rest of the world in our mind and our emotions they become the same thing it's no longer what this person is like and what people are like logically we may understand that our ex is not everybody but emotionally it feels like that's not true whatever pain this person caused us becomes the potential danger of everybody else in life and so when a relationship like this ends there is this after math that continues they're now no longer present in your life but they have left an emotional footprint so now when we find ourselves trying to form a new relationship especially romantically but it can even take place in new friendships we find ourselves distrusting other people we find ourselves thinking that situations represent Danger that don't necessarily represent danger we put up the walls we box ourselves into a smaller and smaller and smaller corner of our own life and we get afraid to let anyone in the way that we did before ever again understanding this is crucial to Healing from a toxic relationship because we begin to realize that there is a kind of deprogramming that needs to happen where we no longer see the rest of the world as being associated with the danger of the person we just left and we begin to rewrite ourselves as a strong character in our new narrative going forward and I have three mindsets that I want to share with you today to help you do just that number one this deprogramming begins with rewriting The Narrative of that relationship sometimes we leave a relationship like this and the narrative we have is that people can't be trusted if that could happen to me from this person it could happen to me from anybody when I open myself up there's danger that stops us from ever fully investing again when we take that lesson from it but we have to rewrite the story the story is not that people cannot be trusted the story is one of ignoring evidence so when we're in a relationship like that we see evidence that this person hasn't got our best interests at heart or that this is doing damage to us or that our needs aren't getting met or that we can't trust this person and instead of leaving we stay and we either hope for it to get better or we try harder but we try appeasing this person or we try a different strategy all the while thinking that one day we're going to get the peace and it never comes so I want you to think about the story that you created about a relationship like this what did you decide did you decide that because of what this person did to you that relationships mean Danger did you decide that people mean Danger did you decide that you should never lower your guard because that's what happens that you should never love that intensely because that's what happens and if you did know that those are all decisions those are all meanings that will rob you of the joy the opportunity and the passion you can experience in your future [Music] rewrite the story this is not a story about how people cannot be trusted this is a story about what happens if you continue to ignore the evidence about one person number two celebrate the small but Brave steps you take one of the things that can be hard for people to understand is that what might represent a truly ordinary action for them is an extraordinary step for you when you've been in a situation like this it's almost like you're training yourself to walk again making yourself vulnerable to somebody else that gives you such a visceral response I'm gonna get her this is danger I've left myself wide open of course the instinct is just to close up so what we have to do is almost run these mini experiments in our life instead of being defeated by that and saying I'm so hopeless we have to run these little experiments where we say well what would happen if I did give this person a little trust not all of my trust but what would happen if I actually became a little vulnerable with this person what would happen if I reached out if I was kind first instead of expecting someone to be kind to me because I'm afraid that if I'm kind first I'll get rejected or this person will take advantage of me or what if I put a little boundary in place that's a boundary I'm not usually good at putting in place I said no to someone I always say yes to it doesn't have to be I'm not talking romantically I'm talking friends family I spoke up about something I needed I voiced something that I was worried if I say that it's going to scare someone away because my needs aren't valid my needs aren't important that's what I learned in the last relationship is that nothing that's important to me matters my needs do not matter well what if you voiced them in some of your relationships in small ways what if someone asks you to do something for them and you said I I I can't do that today I have way too much on I can't do that this week I'm so sorry and you just got used to these baby steps these things are a really big deal I'll tell you right now I grew up struggling to trust people and in my 20s despite the work that I was doing with people I found it hard to trust people in my own life I had this feeling that I was going to be taken advantage of or that if you give someone an inch they take a mile and so despite having an intensely Generous Heart I always have had I love people I always want to help I always want to support I always want to when it comes to the to the people that I know and love I'm always there for them and yet I had this this fear this distrust and I didn't realize that until later on because my experience of life was just I would just keep people at arm's length I would just keep people out and the first time they showed me something that married up with this idea that people couldn't be trusted I'd internally I'd have this moment of ah there it is and there was that confirmation bias and I started to realize that you know what the little steps that I take to trust people to let people in to share more of myself with someone or to do something generous for someone without fearing that I'll be taken advantage of those little steps they matter they make a difference but recognize that that might your little steps may be easy for somebody else somebody else may look at them and be like really that's your that's the big battle you're fighting right now or that's the program that's progress to you is doing that but you can't compare your significant steps to the everyday actions of people whose wiring never got disrupted or corrupted in the way that yours did so when you make these little steps when you get the small wins celebrate them because those are a big deal on your healing Journey number three stumbles are okay one of the saddest things that happens when we're trying to heal when we're trying to rewrite our story is that as we're taking those small steps we'll sometimes get it wrong and when we get it wrong and it confirms this suspicion that people are dangerous that they cannot be trusted we use that as the evidence we needed to retreat back into our cave and it's it's so sad when it happens because you wanna it's like that moment in the movie where you see the character is like struggled to trust and they come out of their shell finally at a point in the movie where they have a breakthrough and you're like oh my god look they're on their way to a better life this is truth they've accessed truth they're gonna get better that life is going to get better this is so beautiful and you just want the best for that character and then someone in the movie in some small way does something that inflames that character's trust issues and you see them just Retreat and you wanna you screams you want to go no you had it right you were doing the right thing you just maybe you did the right thing with the wrong person or maybe even you did the right thing with the right person but people are complicated so this person did one little thing that doesn't represent huge danger it's just represents that people are complicated and that's okay they have a good and a bad side you want to will them forward but they Retreat people are like that in life you have to see that your journey of trusting healing opening up your heart becoming someone who can connect again is is a long-term recalibration when our brain has become wired in a way that's not productive for us or hurts us or keeps us away from love it takes time to recalibrate first we have to make the decision that okay this isn't working for me me retreating in this way is not bringing me any Joy or happiness my life is just wasting away while I'm hiding from opportunity and possibility I don't want this for myself it's not working I need to do something about it that's when you start taking small Brave steps to get outside whatever that means for you what we then have to do is say this is a process that happens over time the rewiring does not take place overnight it takes time I have to push the boundaries of what is comfortable for me until I've pushed them so many times that it's like an elastic band that you stretch it once it snaps back you stretch it once it snaps back you stretch it again it snaps back and then you stretch it another time and it breaks and all of a sudden it changes form that's what our confidence is like that's what our courage is like that's what our wiring is like you need to keep stretching it and stretching it and stretching it until it recalibrates but when you are in that process there will be times where you get it wrong where you trust too much where you trust the wrong person when that happens you have to say my progress is not that I have become a person of perfect judgment because that person doesn't exist and if you made mistakes with people again guess what we all do I know people that are unbelievably trusting and generous in business and they're confident and strong and they have standards and they still get it wrong sometimes they still get betrayed they still have someone who who took advantage of them and that's okay they don't chalk that up to some great meaning of oh look I keep getting it wrong people can't be trusted I can't be trusted with people because I always get it wrong they don't do that they just go oh okay I'm not gonna do business with that person again and the same is true in love don't make yours what you think of as progress you now being this being of perfect judgment you're not going to be there none of us are but what you can be is the person who exits quicker you can be the person who knows how to lean in and also how to lean back again when you see something that isn't working for you and that's the progress The Arc of your hero's journey is that there was a time in your life where you saw the wrong things and you stayed and part of that staying might originally been a generosity of spirit that you are gonna see if this person could improve but then you stayed and you tried harder and they didn't improve and then you stayed and you tried harder and they didn't improve that was your character back then but know this you are already the character who left because otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation right now you wouldn't be watching this video as the person going how do I recover you left that's progress there was a version of you that hadn't left so you're already further than they are but now that you're here you can improve that again by being the person who when they sees the red flags leaves quicker I'm not saying that you bolt every time you get a hint of something you don't like that's going straight back to our fear I'm saying that when you see something you don't like you're able to test that and when the test confirms that this behavior is the wrong Behavior you're able to exit far quicker than the older you ever could that is your hero's journey that is your Arc not bad judgment to perfect judgment but staying to leaving to honoring your standards immediately when you get there you'll realize that you don't need to go through life trusting everybody not everyone can be trusted there's always going to be bad people and even good people can't be trusted sometimes right there's people are complicated but when you can trust yourself to uphold your boundaries your standards to take care of yourself you no longer need to have perfect judgment and you no longer need to go through life trusting that no one will hurt you all you need to do is trust that you'll take care of yourself and that even if someone does hurt you you'll be able to get through it just like you are now if you want to go on a bigger Journey with me in rewiring your brain in the ways that I'm talking about if you're realizing that this is about deeper work for you at this stage I have a place where you can do that deeper work it's called my virtual Retreat it is happening from the second to the 4th of June this year and I promise you that if you spend these three days with me it will move you forward in extraordinary ways in your own programming your own internal resistance because we can change things about our lifestyle we can change things on the outside but the things that really hold us back are the things that cause us resistance on the inside it's the ways we get in our own way there is no greater investment you can make than your investment in your mind because that is controlling how happy you are that is controlling how many opportunities are coming your way that is controlling your every experience of this life so come and get control of it with me on the virtual Retreat the link is mhvirtualretreat.com I look forward to seeing you over there and thanks for watching I'll see you soon

Channel: Matthew Hussey

Views: 490,567

Keywords: Matthew Hussey, Matt Hussey, Get The Guy, How to Get the Guy, Dating Advice for Women, attract men, keep your man, dating coach, relationship coach, relationship tips, what men want, make him like you, make him love you, how to talk to men, how to attract men, meet men, get the guy, tips for women, flirting tips, texting, calling, love advice, relationships, matt hussey, matthew hussy, mathew hussey, how to flirt

Id: 3STj2rYQv-o

Length: 17min 50sec (1070 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 26 2023