Speaker 1: I know what you've been doing. You've been going back
Speaker 1: through the photos, not all of them, just the good ones,
Speaker 1: the one from that trip, the one where they're laughing
Speaker 1: at something and the light is hitting them exactly right.
Speaker 1: You've looked at it more times than you would ever
Speaker 1: admit to anyone. You've been listening to songs that you
Speaker 1: have no business listening to. Right now you know which ones,
Speaker 1: the ones that you basically turned into a soundtrack for
Speaker 1: a movie about the two of you, your relationship, a
Speaker 1: movie that's much better than the relationship actually was. You've
Speaker 1: been checking their Instagram. Maybe not their main feed, you're
Speaker 1: smarter than that, but their stories for sure at one
Speaker 1: am trying to figure out who that person in the
Speaker 1: background of the photo is. You've been having conversations with
Speaker 1: them in your head, long, articular, emotionally devastating conversations where
Speaker 1: you finally say everything you should have said, and they
Speaker 1: finally understand and something resolves, and then you come back
Speaker 1: to reality and they haven't texted, and somehow that hurts
Speaker 1: more the imaginary conversation. You've been doing, the math how
Speaker 1: many days since you last spoke, whether they're thinking about you,
Speaker 1: what they're doing, right now, whether the thing you said
Speaker 1: in that argument three months before the end was the
Speaker 1: thing that actually ended it. And in your most honest moments,
Speaker 1: the three am ones or the Tuesday afternoon ones when
Speaker 1: you're supposed to be working, you've been telling yourself a story.
Speaker 1: Story goes something like this. It was so good. I've
Speaker 1: never felt that way before. I don't know if I'll
Speaker 1: ever feel that way ever again. Maybe we gave up
Speaker 1: too soon. Maybe they were the one. I'm going to
Speaker 1: need you to sit with me for thirty minutes today
Speaker 1: because I need to tell you something about that story,
Speaker 1: about your brain, about what's actually happening when you romanticize
Speaker 1: your ex, when you romanticize someone you've lost, and about
Speaker 1: what's waiting for you on the other side of this spiral,
Speaker 1: if you're willing to walk through it rather than loop
Speaker 1: it around forever. It's not a You'll be fine peptal.
Speaker 1: This is not toxic positivity wearing a therapy speak costume.
Speaker 1: This is the real thing, the neuroscience, the psychology, the
Speaker 1: ancient wisdom, and the practical tools. Because you deserve the
Speaker 1: actual truth more than you deserve to feel temporarily soothed. Ready,
Speaker 1: let's go. This is the harsh truth your brain is
Speaker 1: lying to you, and I want to share with you
Speaker 1: the neuroscience of why they seem perfect now that they're gone.
Speaker 1: Let's start with the most important thing. The person you
Speaker 1: are missing does not exist, doesn't exist anymore, not exists,
Speaker 1: but is different now, not exists, but is with someone else.
Speaker 1: The specific person you're currently grieving, the one who appears
Speaker 1: in the photos you keep returning to, the one who
Speaker 1: stars in the mental highlight reel. You keep playing the
Speaker 1: one who felt irreplaceable and perfect and like coming home.
Speaker 1: That person is a construction, a story brain is telling you,
Speaker 1: and your brain right now is a profoundly unreliable narrator.
Speaker 1: Here's why. When we experience loss, the brain does something
Speaker 1: that is genuinely astonishing from a neuroscience perspective and genuinely
Speaker 1: cruel from a human one. It edits memory is not
Speaker 1: a recording. We have known this in psychology for decades,
Speaker 1: but it runs counter to how memory feels. We experience
Speaker 1: our memories as faithful replications of what happened. They'renot. Every
Speaker 1: time you retrieve a memory, you're not playing it back,
Speaker 1: You're reconstructing it. And every reconstruction is influenced by your
Speaker 1: current emotional state, your current needs, and your current narrative
Speaker 1: about who you are and what your life means. This
Speaker 1: was established definitively by the cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, one
Speaker 1: of the most important and most underappreciated scientists of the
Speaker 1: twentieth century. Her research on memory distortion showed that human
Speaker 1: memory is extraordinarily malleable. We had details that weren't there,
Speaker 1: We removed details that were there. We unconsciously rewrite what
Speaker 1: happened to fit what we believe, what we feel, and
Speaker 1: what we need to be true. Now apply that to
Speaker 1: a relationship you've just lost. Your brain is in a
Speaker 1: state of loss, and in a state of loss, the
Speaker 1: brain is a very specific and predictable bias. It amplifies
Speaker 1: the positive and suppresses the negative in memories of what
Speaker 1: was lost. This is not a quirk, This is not weakness.
Speaker 1: This is a documented neurological phenomenon. The moments of warmth, connection, laughter,
Speaker 1: and intimacy get vivid. The chronic pattern of dismissal, the
Speaker 1: way they made you feel small in front of their friends,
Speaker 1: the way they went cold when you needed the most,
Speaker 1: The Sunday arguments that always circled the same drain, those
Speaker 1: get fuzzy, dimmed, explain away. You end up remembering a
Speaker 1: relationship that was approximately forty percent better than the one
Speaker 1: you actually had. And here's the other thing happening in
Speaker 1: your brain. Simultaneously. When you were in the relationship, your
Speaker 1: brain's reward system, the dopamine circuits, adapted to the presence
Speaker 1: of your partner. They became a predicted reward, something your
Speaker 1: brain had learned to anticipate and plan around. When the
Speaker 1: relationship ends, that reward prediction is suddenly violently disrupted. And
Speaker 1: the disruption of a predicted reward is neurologically identical to withdrawal.
Speaker 1: This is not metaphor. Researchers at Rutgers University Helen Fisher
Speaker 1: and her colleagues put people who had recently been rejected
Speaker 1: in romantic relationships into an fMRI scanner and showed them
Speaker 1: photos of their ex This will shock you. The brain
Speaker 1: regions that activated were the same ones that activate in
Speaker 1: cocaine addiction. The ventral tegmental area, the obsessive thinking, the
Speaker 1: physical ache, the craving, the compulsive checking behavior. These are
Speaker 1: not signs of how deep your love was. They are
Speaker 1: signs of withdrawal. You're not pining for a person, you're
Speaker 1: detoxing from a neurochemical And here's where it gets even
Speaker 1: more interesting and more uncomfortable. The brain doesn't just romanticize
Speaker 1: by boosting the positive memories. It also uses a mechanism
Speaker 1: called deprivation amplification. Things we cannot have become more desirable,
Speaker 1: not despite their unavailability, but because of it. The psychological
Speaker 1: literature calls this reactance. When something is taken away, we
Speaker 1: instinctively want it more, independent of how much we actually
Speaker 1: wanted it before. Think about that for a second. You
Speaker 1: might be partially in love with the unavailability itself. You
Speaker 1: might be confusing the ache of deprivation, the biological screaming
Speaker 1: of a reward system that's been cut off, with evidence
Speaker 1: of exceptional, irreplaceable love. Not because you're foolish, but because
Speaker 1: you're human. There's a line I think about all the
Speaker 1: time from Victor Frankel between stimulus and response. There is space.
Speaker 1: In that space is our power to choose our response.
Speaker 1: Understanding what's happening in your brain right now is that space.
Speaker 1: It is the difference between being controlled by that neurological
Speaker 1: process and being able to look at it, name it,
Speaker 1: and make a different choice. So let's look at the
Speaker 1: other thing your brain is doing. Let's look at the story.
Speaker 1: The story you're telling is fiction. There's a difference between
Speaker 1: your highlight reel and the full picture. There's a concept
Speaker 1: in cognitive behavioral therapy called selective abstraction, the tendency to
Speaker 1: focus on one element of a situation while ignoring the
Speaker 1: broader context. To take a fragment and let it represent
Speaker 1: the whole. We do this all the time, right you
Speaker 1: judge someone based on your first interaction in plain language,
Speaker 1: you're watching the trailer for your relationship, not the film.
Speaker 1: The trailer trailers, as you know, are masterpieces of selective editing.
Speaker 1: Have you ever been to the theaters and you watch
Speaker 1: a trailer before the movie that you're going for, and
Speaker 1: then you think, well, I can't wait to watch that movie.
Speaker 1: Then you watch that movie and every joke was in
Speaker 1: the trailer, every action moment was in the trailer, every
Speaker 1: beautiful romantic moment was in the trailer, and the movie
Speaker 1: was average. Every great line, every beautiful image, every moment
Speaker 1: of connection and tenderness and electricity cut together to make
Speaker 1: you want to see the movie. The trailer for a
Speaker 1: mediocre film can make it look like the most important
Speaker 1: cinematic experience of your lifetime. If you've just gone through
Speaker 1: a breakup, this is what your brain is doing. It
Speaker 1: has cut a three minute trailer for a two year relationship,
Speaker 1: and you have watched that trailer so many times that
Speaker 1: you've started to believe the trailer is the relationship. So
Speaker 1: I want to do something with you that's going to
Speaker 1: be uncomfortable, and I want you to do it honestly.
Speaker 1: I want you to watch the full film, not to
Speaker 1: be cruel, not to demonize them or to erase what
Speaker 1: was really good, but because you cannot make clear eye
Speaker 1: decisions about your own recovery, about whether you should reach out,
Speaker 1: about whether this deserves to be mourned or released, about
Speaker 1: what you actually want. If you're working from a distorted source,
Speaker 1: think about the thing that ended it, Not the surface event,
Speaker 1: the argument, the moment, the conversation, the actual underlying pattern,
Speaker 1: the pattern that kept reasserting itself, that you kept hoping
Speaker 1: would change that never quite did. What was it was
Speaker 1: it that they made you feel like an afterthought, that
Speaker 1: your needs were inconvenient that they were emotionally unavailable in
Speaker 1: a way that made you work constantly for reassurance. You
Speaker 1: should have just been given that there was always something
Speaker 1: more important than you, the job, the friends, the general
Speaker 1: principle of their independence, or was it something in you,
Speaker 1: a pattern of your own that this relationship was surfacing
Speaker 1: and anxious attachment style that turned you into someone you
Speaker 1: didn't like, a habit of losing yourself in someone else
Speaker 1: until you couldn't find the edges of where you ended
Speaker 1: and they began. Whatever the pat was, it was real,
Speaker 1: It was consistent, and it did not go away, and
Speaker 1: if you got back together tomorrow, it would still be there,
Speaker 1: still consistent, still real, with the added weight of everything
Speaker 1: that's happened since. One of my favorite Buddhist teachings is this,
Speaker 1: you cannot step in the same river twice. The river
Speaker 1: changes and you change as well. What you're trying to
Speaker 1: return to doesn't exist anymore. The relationship of the highlight
Speaker 1: reel is not a place you can go back to.
Speaker 1: It was barely even a place you were actually at.
Speaker 1: Psychologist John Gottman, who has spent forty years studying couples,
Speaker 1: identified what he calls the full horsemen of relationship failure, contempt, criticism, defensiveness,
Speaker 1: and Stonewall and his research found that by the time
Speaker 1: relationships end, these patterns have usually been present and consistent
Speaker 1: for an average of six years before the breakup. Six years,
Speaker 1: which means you probably have evidence, memories, feelings, moments that
Speaker 1: the relationships had these patterns for a long time, but
Speaker 1: those memories are now fuzzy, explained away, rewritten as misunderstandings
Speaker 1: or your fault, or understandable given their circumstances, because your
Speaker 1: editing brain has decided the relationship was better than it was.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying it wasn't real. I'm not saying it
Speaker 1: didn't matter. I'm not saying there wasn't love or beauty
Speaker 1: or genuine connection. There probably was. And that's what makes
Speaker 1: it harder, not easier, because you're not mourning a lie.
Speaker 1: You're mourning something that had real value and real limitations simultaneously,
Speaker 1: and the human brain finds that complexity almost impossible to hold.
Speaker 1: Here's the questions I want you to ask yourself after
Speaker 1: a breakup. Who were you when you were in that relationship?
Speaker 1: Were you more yourself or less yourself? Were you growing
Speaker 1: toward who you want to be or were you just tolerating, accommodating,
Speaker 1: shrinking or performing. Were you genuinely seen or were you
Speaker 1: constantly trying to be seen and often failing. Because your
Speaker 1: answer to that question tells you something far more important
Speaker 1: than whether they were wonderful. It tells you whether the
Speaker 1: relationship was actually good for you. Now here's what you're
Speaker 1: actually grieving, and surprisingly, it's not them, it's something much older.
Speaker 1: This is the part of the episode where I need
Speaker 1: you to stay with me, because this is the hardest
Speaker 1: part and also the most important. When someone comes to
Speaker 1: me or a trusted friend and says, I can't stop
Speaker 1: thinking about my ex. I think I made a mistake.
Speaker 1: I think they were the one. There is almost always
Speaker 1: something underneath the grief about the specific person that doesn't
Speaker 1: get examined, because grief is not simple, and romantic grief
Speaker 1: is almost never just about the person in front of you.
Speaker 1: The psychologist and attachment researcher Sue Johnson has spent her
Speaker 1: career studying what happens in the nervous system when intimate
Speaker 1: connection is threatened or lost, and what she found is
Speaker 1: that adult romantic attachment doesn't operate in isolation. It operates
Speaker 1: on the top of the entire architecture of attachment you've
Speaker 1: been building since you were an infant. When your earliest
Speaker 1: caregivers were consistent and responsive, you developed what's called a
Speaker 1: secure attachment style. You learned at the level of the
Speaker 1: nervous system, programming before language even existed, that people are safe,
Speaker 1: that you're worthy of love, and that separation is temporary.
Speaker 1: That you can let people go and they will come back,
Speaker 1: or if they don't, you will survive and find connection again.
Speaker 1: When your earliest caregivers were inconsistent or absent, or overwhelming
Speaker 1: or emotionally unavailable, you developed a different program. You might
Speaker 1: have anxious attachment, the constant background hum that love is precarious,
Speaker 1: that you have to work to maintain it, that the
Speaker 1: other person's withdrawal is evidence that you've done something wrong.
Speaker 1: Or avoidant attachment, the learned belief that needing people is dangerous,
Speaker 1: that you're better off not needing, that closeness is a trap.
Speaker 1: Most people reading this, most people doing the three A
Speaker 1: M spiral, are not just grieving a relationship. They are
Speaker 1: re experiencing a very old wound. The grief about this
Speaker 1: person is a portal into a grief that has been
Speaker 1: sitting in the body for much longer. The anxious attached
Speaker 1: person isn't just missing their ex. They are re experiencing
Speaker 1: every moment in childhood when love felt conditional, when approval
Speaker 1: could be earned, and then suddenly withdrawn, when they tried
Speaker 1: their very hardest and it still wasn't enough. The avoidant
Speaker 1: person who is pretending to be fine and yet finds
Speaker 1: themselves inexplicably devastated isn't just managing a breakup. They are
Speaker 1: brushing against the thing They have spent their whole life,
Speaker 1: running from, the terrifying evidence that they needed someone and
Speaker 1: then lost them. I'm not saying this to psycho analyze you,
Speaker 1: but to offer something critical compassion for the scale of
Speaker 1: what you're actually carrying. Stop hating yourself for not getting
Speaker 1: over your ex. You're not weak because this is so hard.
Speaker 1: You're not pathetic because you can't stop thinking about them.
Speaker 1: You're a person who formed a deep attachment that is
Speaker 1: connected to something much larger and older and more foundational
Speaker 1: than this one relationship, and when that attachment is disrupted,
Speaker 1: the pain reaches all the way down into that original wound.
Speaker 1: A shocking is this sounds this is actually good news
Speaker 1: because it means the healing you do right now, if
Speaker 1: you can do it properly, if you do it honestly,
Speaker 1: is not just about getting over this person. It is
Speaker 1: about attending to something that is needed attention for a
Speaker 1: very long time. This breakup, as terrible as it feels,
Speaker 1: is also an invitation. The zen teacher Pay My Children
Speaker 1: writes about something she calls groundlessness, the terrifying experience of
Speaker 1: having the floor fall away from under you, of being
Speaker 1: in free fall with nothing solid to grab, and she
Speaker 1: argues counterintuitively provocatively that groundlessness is not a problem to
Speaker 1: be solved. It is the most spiritual condition available to
Speaker 1: a human being, because when the ground falls away, you
Speaker 1: discover whether you are standing on solid ground at all,
Speaker 1: or whether you are standing on the illusion of someone
Speaker 1: else holding you up. The spiral of romanticizing your ex
Speaker 1: is at its core, the desperate attempt to find the
Speaker 1: floor again, to go back to the thing that felt
Speaker 1: like solid ground. But the floor was never solid. It
Speaker 1: was a person, which means it was always going to move.
Speaker 1: Stop romanticizing your ex. Missing them, You're missing the version
Speaker 1: they showed you before you saw the full picture. You're
Speaker 1: not missing them, You're missing the future you're already planned
Speaker 1: in your head. You're not missing them, you're missing feeling chosen.
Speaker 1: You're not missing them. You're just not ready to let
Speaker 1: go of the story yet. But you will be. If
Speaker 1: you've gone through a breakup. The work, the real work,
Speaker 1: is not to find new ground to stand on. It's
Speaker 1: to find yourself standing without anything to lean on in
Speaker 1: the groundlessness for long enough to realize you were always
Speaker 1: capable of standing alone. There's a Japanese concept called mono
Speaker 1: no aware, often translated as the pathos of things, the
Speaker 1: bitter sweetness of impermanence, the particular beauty and sadness that
Speaker 1: comes from knowing that nothing lasts. The Japanese don't treat
Speaker 1: impermanence as a problem. They treat it as the very
Speaker 1: thing that gives experience its beauty. Cherry blossoms are the
Speaker 1: most revered symbol in Japanese culture, not despite the fact
Speaker 1: that they fall in a week, because of it. What
Speaker 1: you had was real, what you had could have been
Speaker 1: beautiful in parts, and it is gone. And all three
Speaker 1: of those things are true simultaneously, and sitting with that truth,
Speaker 1: all of it without rewriting the ending, without fantasy editing
Speaker 1: it into something it wasn't, without bargaining with the past
Speaker 1: or that person. Is not resignation, is not giving up.
Speaker 1: It is the most courageous thing you can do, the
Speaker 1: willingness to feel the full beauty of something that is over. Now,
Speaker 1: let me tell you how to actually do that, How
Speaker 1: to interrupt the spiral, how to work with your brain
Speaker 1: instead of being controlled by it. Because knowing the science
Speaker 1: doesn't make it stop hurting, but it does change what
Speaker 1: you do with the hurt. Let me be really honest
Speaker 1: with you about breakups. There is no version of getting
Speaker 1: over someone that doesn't involve feeling it. There's no cognitive
Speaker 1: hack that bypasses grief. There is no framework that makes
Speaker 1: this painless. There are two types of pain. The first
Speaker 1: is the pain that moves you, that transforms you, that
Speaker 1: carries you somewhere new. And then there's the pain that loops,
Speaker 1: the pain that keeps you exactly where you are, circling
Speaker 1: the same drain for months or years, pretending to be
Speaker 1: the depth of feeling when it's actually just a broken record.
Speaker 1: Here's how you get to the pain that moves you.
Speaker 1: Tool number one, the no contact rule, and I want
Speaker 1: to talk to you about why it's actually biology. You've
Speaker 1: heard about no contact, but you may not know the
Speaker 1: real reason it works. And the real reason is not
Speaker 1: about playing games or winning the breakup or making them
Speaker 1: miss you. The real reason is neurological. Every time you
Speaker 1: check their social media, you are feeding the addiction. You
Speaker 1: are reactivating the dopamine circuit. You're telling your neural pathways
Speaker 1: this is still relevant. Keep tracking it. Your brain cannot
Speaker 1: begin to withdraw, cannot begin to heal while you keep
Speaker 1: administering microdoses of the drug. No contact is not punishment.
Speaker 1: No contact is detox. And it includes the things you're
Speaker 1: pretending don't count. The casual social media check that you
Speaker 1: tell yourself is harmless, the friendly text you're composing in
Speaker 1: your head, the driving past where they live. Every one
Speaker 1: of these is a hit. Every one of these restarts
Speaker 1: the clock on withdrawal. You're not cutting them off because
Speaker 1: you're cold. You're cutting off the supply because you're trying
Speaker 1: to heal. Those are complete different things. Stop checking their feed.
Speaker 1: They're not coming back because you watch their story. They're
Speaker 1: not coming back because you like something from forty seven
Speaker 1: weeks ago at two am. They're not coming back because
Speaker 1: you figured out who that person in their photo is.
Speaker 1: They're not coming back because you've refreshed their profile eleven
Speaker 1: times today. They're not coming back, but your pieces the
Speaker 1: second you stop looking. Tune number two, the full picture exercise.
Speaker 1: I want you to do something tonight, if you're brave enough.
Speaker 1: Take a piece of paper, Draw a line down the middle.
Speaker 1: On the left side, write down the things you genuinely miss,
Speaker 1: the real things, not the imagined, perfect version, the actual
Speaker 1: things that were good and real and valuable. On the
Speaker 1: right side, write down the things you've been selectively forgetting,
Speaker 1: The pattern that kept repeating, the way you felt bad
Speaker 1: on days which were more frequent than your highlight reel
Speaker 1: admits the specific moments where you felt unseen or dismissed,
Speaker 1: or too much not enough, the days you cried. Write
Speaker 1: down who you were on your worst days in that relationship,
Speaker 1: right down the cost personally, professionally, to your family. This
Speaker 1: isn't bitterness, it's not revenge. It's accuracy. You're correcting your memories, editing.
Speaker 1: You're forcing your brain to hold the full picture rather
Speaker 1: than just the trailer. Two Number three interrupt the spiral, literally,
Speaker 1: the romanticizing spiral, is a thought pattern, and thought patterns
Speaker 1: are neurological pathways, neural circuits that have been strengthened through repetition.
Speaker 1: Every time you indulge the spiral, you strengthen the pathway.
Speaker 1: Every time you interrupt it, you begin to weaken it.
Speaker 1: It's not suppression forcing yourself to not think about something. Actually,
Speaker 1: this increases the frequency of the thought. It's that don't
Speaker 1: think about a pink elephant problem. The harder you try
Speaker 1: not to think about the pink elephant, you think about
Speaker 1: the pink elephant. What works instead is what neuroscientists call
Speaker 1: pattern interruption, a brief but genuine redirect of neural attention
Speaker 1: to something that requires full cognitive engagement. When the spiral starts,
Speaker 1: when you catch your hand moving toward their instagram, when
Speaker 1: the imaginary conversation begins, when the maybe we gave up
Speaker 1: too soon story starts playing, you do something that requires
Speaker 1: your genuine attention immediately. Something physical works best, a short,
Speaker 1: vigorous walk, cold water on your face, five pushups, something
Speaker 1: that activates your body and breaks the cognitive loop. Then,
Speaker 1: and this is key, you do not fight the feeling
Speaker 1: you name it. I am experiencing a craving for this person.
Speaker 1: Just that The simple act of naming an emotion, when
Speaker 1: neuroscientists call affect labeling, activates the prefront or cortex and
Speaker 1: measurably reduces activity in the amygdala. You move the feeling
Speaker 1: from the reactive part of your brain to the observing part.
Speaker 1: You become the person watching the spiral rather than the
Speaker 1: person inside it. Pol Number four red build identity, not
Speaker 1: find yourself. I know find yourself is tired. Advice. Bear
Speaker 1: with me because this is different, I promise. One of
Speaker 1: the most underappreciated effects of a significant relationship ending is
Speaker 1: what psychologists call self concept contraction. In a long or
Speaker 1: deep relationship, your identity expands. You become someone who is
Speaker 1: part of a wei. You have shared friends, shared routine,
Speaker 1: shared references, shared futures. When the relationship ends, that whole
Speaker 1: dimension of identity collapses. You don't just lose the person,
Speaker 1: you lose the version of yourself that existed in relation
Speaker 1: to them. The antidote is not to immediately seek a
Speaker 1: new relationship to fill the gap, but to actively rebuild
Speaker 1: your own independent self concept to recover your own narrative.
Speaker 1: This means what did you stop doing when you were
Speaker 1: in that relationship? What did you let atrophy? What parts
Speaker 1: of yourself did you set aside to make room for
Speaker 1: the wei friend? You let drift interest, You abandoned ambitions.
Speaker 1: You quietly shelved the parts of you that existed before
Speaker 1: them and are still there waiting go find them. Not
Speaker 1: as therapy, not as distraction, as recovery of self. Every
Speaker 1: time you do something that is purely authentically yours, something
Speaker 1: that reflects who you are, independent of any relationship, you
Speaker 1: are rebuilding the self concept that the relationship and the
Speaker 1: breakup have eroded. You are answering the question who am
Speaker 1: I without them, and discovering that the answer is more
Speaker 1: than you remembered. Please stop making excuses for them in
Speaker 1: your mind. Don't forget how small they made you feel.
Speaker 1: Don't forget they had every chance to choose you. Don't
Speaker 1: forget the excuses you made for them. Don't forget you
Speaker 1: cried because of this person more than once. Don't forget
Speaker 1: how many times they disappointed you and you stayed anyway.
Speaker 1: Please don't forget your worth. Please don't forget you deserved
Speaker 1: more than what they gave you. Please don't forget you
Speaker 1: always gave them the benefit of the doubt. Please don't
Speaker 1: forget you always saw the good in them and receive
Speaker 1: the bad. Please don't forget you bent over backwards when
Speaker 1: they barely moved. Please don't forget. Someone who deserves you
Speaker 1: won't make you question if you're enough. Turne number five.
Speaker 1: Let the grief be grief. Don't dress it up as love.
Speaker 1: This is the hardest one and the most important. Grief
Speaker 1: is grief. It needs to be felt, not managed, not optimized,
Speaker 1: not rushed through or bypassed or processed into insight before
Speaker 1: it's ready. Grief is a biological process, the nervous system
Speaker 1: integrating a loss, and it takes the time it takes.
Speaker 1: But there is a crucial difference between grief and romanticization.
Speaker 1: Grief moves comes in waves, intense and quiet, then intense again,
Speaker 1: gradually spacing out. It doesn't ask you to do anything
Speaker 1: except feel it. It doesn't require you to figure out
Speaker 1: whether they were the one, or whether you made a mistake,
Speaker 1: or whether you should text them. It just hurts, and
Speaker 1: then hurts less, and then hurts again, and eventually, if
Speaker 1: you don't keep feeding it, it hurts differently, not as
Speaker 1: a wound, but as a scar, as evidence of something
Speaker 1: real that changed you that you remember. Romanticizing a relationship
Speaker 1: doesn't help you move forward. It loops. It keeps you
Speaker 1: in a story. It asks you to stay in the
Speaker 1: question what if, maybe perhaps if, only because the story
Speaker 1: needs you to stay in it, to stay alive. The
Speaker 1: story is not serving your grief, it's serving itself. So
Speaker 1: let yourself grief actually grief. Feel the loss, feel the sadness,
Speaker 1: feel the particular ache of missing someone who is genuinely
Speaker 1: important to you. That grief is true, grit, if is healthy,
Speaker 1: That grief is the right response to loss. Just don't
Speaker 1: let the grief become a story that keeps you from
Speaker 1: moving through it. Feel it, and then let it move.
Speaker 1: You've been telling yourself that you're holding onto them because
Speaker 1: of how much you love them. I want to offer
Speaker 1: you a different possibility. You've been holding onto the story
Speaker 1: of them because it's safer than the thing on the
Speaker 1: other side of letting go. On the other side of
Speaker 1: letting go is the open question of what comes next,
Speaker 1: the terrifying freedom of not being defined by this grief,
Speaker 1: the vulnerability of being available to yourself, to life, to
Speaker 1: whoever might come next without the protection of still being
Speaker 1: someone's ex. On the other side of letting go is
Speaker 1: the work of figuring out who you actually are, not
Speaker 1: in relation to them, not in comparison to what you had.
Speaker 1: Just you standing in your own life, making choices from
Speaker 1: your own center, building something from where you actually are
Speaker 1: rather than from where you wish you still were. But
Speaker 1: here's what I know. The love that is coming for you,
Speaker 1: the life that is waiting for you, is not located
Speaker 1: in the past. It is not in the photos you
Speaker 1: keep looking back to, or the songs you keep listening to,
Speaker 1: or the imaginary conversations where they finally understand. It is
Speaker 1: in front of you, in the version of yourself that
Speaker 1: has been through something real and survived it and learned
Speaker 1: things you couldn't have learned any other way. I really
Speaker 1: hope that this episode helps you. I hope you'll pass
Speaker 1: it on to a friend who may be going through
Speaker 1: this right now. Thank you for trusting me. Remember I'm
Speaker 1: always in your corner and I'm forever rooting for you.
Speaker 1: If you love this episode, you're going to love my
Speaker 1: conversation with Matthew Hussey on how to get over your
Speaker 1: ex and find true love in your relationships. Make a
Speaker 1: list of the things that are truly important for you
Speaker 1: to find in a partner, and then be that list