Minor set backs (we’re all good though)

A while ago I decided to write a post about relationship break up levels, how one person will start at level 10 and the other will be clawing themselves up from the lowest of lows and it’s all a process?

Well. Recently I’ve been thinking about how much easier life would be if that process was linear. But it turns out it isn’t.

You want to know why you cried over them today but yesterday you were excited to find someone new? Because falling out of love isn’t linear and as much as we’re taught how to love, we’re never taught how to stop.

We’re raised around the idea of once you fall in love it sticks, there’s no need to learn how to unlove someone. You never get taught to prepare yourself for someone walking out of your life when they were the ones who chose to be in it in the first place.

Why aren’t we taught how to walk away when we feel unappreciated, or how to stop loving someone who tells us they don’t want us? It isn’t an easy process. Your heart will always hold onto hope.

That’s why sometimes you don’t talk to them for weeks and then fall into a drunk slip up. But it’s ok, it happens. Own your s**t and move on.

You keep going back because your heart hasn’t yet caught up with your head and in most cases your head is the sensible bit, it’s the part of you that knows you’re better off without them. So when your heart does catch up you’ll be fine, but it’s a slow mother f***er. So please bear with it.

There’s a song I keep thinking of recently because there’s a line in it that goes like this “if you’re going to break my heart, do it right, don’t leave me holding on like the last time” I listen to it and I’m like, yeah you know what, if someone tells you they don’t want you, but they only partly mean it so basically, they’re saying it to push you away while they try to figure it out, how is that fair? You’re in or you’re out dumb ass. Because it isn’t helping the whole linear break up situation if you’re not sure that they’re sure, you know?

But it’s true and it’s another reason why our hearts hold onto people, because if someone hasn’t broken it properly then it just sits itself in limbo. Which is super annoying.

I don’t even know what classes as proper heartbreak either, is it being cheated on by the one person who was your whole world? Is it seeming them move on with someone you considered a friend? Or is it when you’re sat in front of the man you love and having to listen to him tell you that he doesn’t feel anything for you? All these possible heartbreak situations are pretty f***ed but is one more legit than the other? Like on a scale of having your heart broken, does one of these ending versions make the most sense when we think of what proper heartbreak is?

Because personally, I think all versions of a break up will hurt just the same. It doesn’t matter what scale of trauma they fall on, to you, it’s horrific.

So next time you pick your phone up and you’re about to message them, try to think what the outcome will be. Are you doing it just because you’re drunk, or because you want them back in some way, maybe it’s just because you like knowing you have access to them still? Whatever you want the outcome to be, just have it clear in your mind.

But whatever the way. Healing will never be linear, you’re allowed to be sad some days and happy the next. You’re allowed to cry because you miss them one minute and pick yourself up and go out on a date the next.

THERE ARE NO RULES. STOP BEATING YOURSELF UP!

P.S the song I mentioned can be found here for whoever wants to listen to it. Enjoy!

Confirmation Bias and a serious case of regression

Did you know our brains are there to protect us from things that we register as dangerous? Like it will literally send chemicals around our body when it senses danger.

And you know what we register as scary and dangerous? – the unknown. And what gives us the biggest sense of “the unknown”? Well … a break up, because we don’t know what’s next.

When a relationship ends we enter into the biggest unknown phase that we’ve been in for a while, so we tend to go into flight or fight mode.

We start going over things in our minds like, what will I do without them, how will I fill my time, what will my future look like. Etc. Etc. But all of these questions open us up to the big scary “unknown”

To our brains …. regression is the biggest form of self protection because it’s taking us back into a sense of known behaviour and our brains associate that with being safe. Our brains will literally play neurological tricks on us to make us feel like the sun shines out of someone’s back side and they can do no wrong, just because dating someone new seems too scary.

So wether you’ve just been dumped or you’ve just dumped someone, keeping a good check on your brains need to regress to your former person because they represent safety is something I would definitely recommend.

Before going back to someone you need to ask yourself these questions because another neurological issue we can be facing is falling into a state of confirmation bias.

What is confirmation bias I hear you asking?Well … you know that saying about rose tinted glasses? It’s kind of like that. It’s when our brain goes looking for memories to back up our own views and in the case of a break up, our beliefs are that the person we aren’t with anymore was the best person in the whole entire world because our desired outcome is to believe that we won’t ever find anyone that compares to them.

When we feel ourselves missing someone our brains will literally search for reasons as to why this is true, so suddenly all we can think about are the positives in an ex just so our brains can back itself up for missing them.

So when the need to regress tricks your neurological systems into a state of confirmation bias, remember that everyone has a flaw. Seriously … everyone does and I can guarantee that for every one thing you miss about someone, there will be two things that make you better off without them.

So here are the questions I like to ask myself to make sure I’m not being tricked by my own love confused brain post break up.

1. What did they bring to me that I can’t bring to myself?

2. What was a deal breaker I was happy to overlook while I was with them but not now?

3. Were effort levels mutual and reciprocated?

4. What traits that you admired in them are actually irreplaceable?

Dig deep when you think about answering these, because I can guarantee that when you really think about it, you’ll see that your brain has probably tricked you into a right f***ed up confirmation bias situation!

Sounds like you’ve got a lot of baggage

Imagine that. Imagine someone who used to claim to love you telling you that no one after them will love you because you now sound like you’ve got ‘baggage’

Maybe that should come on the warning label when you date someone with a narcissist personality. Not only will the tear you down when you guys are together, but they will continue to do so once they aren’t even in your life.

Funny thing is, that so called ‘baggage’ they’re claiming makes you unlovable is only from all their unneeded extras they’ve left you with. You know when you get to the airport and realise you need to get rid of a few things you don’t actually want because your suitcase is too heavy, yeah well that’s the crap they left you with.

You were just fine, in fact your suitcase was way under the weight limit, but the stuff they left you with weighed 10x the amount of anything you actually owned yourself.

But it’s ok, because a heavier suitcase just means you need to develop a more keen sense of awareness for what muscles are working to carry this heavier weight.

If we’re speaking metaphorically, the muscle they’ll have left you needing to work on is actually your brain. But god damn will that muscle be toned af for the next person who wants to try and join you at this made up airport (kind of like a terming to jet off to a perfect healthy relationship).

Here’s the part when you can thank your narcissistic piece of s**t ex for leaving you with the weight of your relationship and where it went wrong because all they’ve done is provide you with the ability to sense someone with negative intentions a mile off.

Typically speaking, this kind of ex will normally be the second person you fall in love with. And this is based off of the findings of anthropologist Helen Fisher and according to her we only fall in love three times in our life but our second love, well that’s the hardest one.

It’s the one that teaches us lessons about who we are and how we often want or need to be loved.

Our second love will typically become a cycle, often one we keep repeating because we think that somehow the ending will be different than before. Yet, each time we try, it somehow ends worse than before and we focus so much on making it work that we will tend to lose sight of if we actually should be trying to make it work at all.

More often than not, our second love is unhealthy, unbalanced or narcissistic. Most likely there will be high levels of drama. This is exactly what keeps us addicted to this storyline, because it’s the emotional roller coaster of extreme highs and lows and like a junkie trying to get a fix, we stick through the lows with the expectation of the high.

So it’s no surprise really that this love has just us with some ‘baggage’.

However …. what it has done is shown us exactly what we don’t want from a love that we will have forever. It’s also taught us lessons that we would never have learnt if it wasn’t for going through this experience.

So thank your second love, for leaving you with their baggage (and then kindly reminding you of it years later just to make sure you don’t move on from them) because without them, you wouldn’t know what a healthy long lasting relationship is and how to cherish the man/woman that makes you feel safe and respected.

That Narcissistic Lover Broke Her

When she fell in love with a narcissist she sadly lost a part of herself that will never come back. And while you’ll never meet the old her, the one that fell in love without caution and wasn’t afraid of being hurt, the version of her that stands in front of you now is wiser and more well rounded when it comes to life, but you need to understand why she does things in ways that maybe you won’t always understand.

All those times when you’ve found her difficult to read or confusing to deal with, just remember at one point she had her own self worth shattered into a million pieces by the one person she thought loved her more than anything.

When she hears you call her beautiful there’s always going to be a small part of her that thinks you’re only saying it because you know it’s what she wants to hear. I know you’re wondering why your compliments always partly fall on deaf ears, or when she does acknowledge them they’re greeted with more of a shrug and a laugh, but it’s because she’s used to compliments always being followed with a ‘but‘ things that should have made her feel like a princess were always tinted by comparing her to others and making her feel like she could be better, prettier and smarter ‘Your hair looks so beautiful when you have it straight‘ he would whisper in her ear ‘but don’t you think it would look better how that woman over there has hers, when women have a slight wave in their hair it looks so effortless‘ so from that point on, she maybe straighten her hair once or twice a year.

He changed her, he convinced her that she never looked as good with light hair and that the only colour she should have on her nails was red. He picked out what was and wasn’t appropriate for her to wear, so if you see her pulling at her skirt when you’re together it’s probably because she’s worried you think its too short or ‘not appropriate‘. In the back of her mind her appearance and how she comes across to others is always going to play on her mind. She knows she needs to look elegant and well put together to qualify as ‘girlfriend material’.

She needs that physical closeness, she needs lots of contact with you to feel wanted, her heightened sexual appetite is partly fuelled by her past, a past that taught her that sex was how you create a connection with someone. She learned that you didn’t need endless conversations and to really get to know the good and bad in someone. As long as he wanted her body it meant that she was wanted. She isn’t used to someone wanting to hear about her passions and what makes her tick, what she’s used to is someone telling her that her ambitions are ‘ridiculous‘ and she should aim for something more ‘realistic‘. She’s not used to being around someone who sees life in technicolour like she does, someone who embraces imagination and creativity and encourages her to go after the shit she wants because of course she can achieve it if she sets her mind to it.

She knows it’s annoying how badly she deals with confrontation, if something annoys her she’ll spend days trying to figure out a way to bring it up to you without sounding ‘crazy‘ a word she’s heard so many times before when she’s bought up things that made her uncomfortable, so now …. she stresses about it instead of talking about it, she’s used to bottling her feelings because expressing them was never met by calmness and understanding. But she hates how scared she gets to talk to you about things you wouldn’t even stress about.

You won’t understand why she pushed you away so hard at the start, but her fear of letting someone in as much as she’d done before triggered her avoidant dismissive attachment style and she needed to show that she didn’t need anyone.

She’s used to being chased relentlessly, but she’s also used to being told that she isn’t enough once the chase is over.

When she fell in love with a narcissist she never knew how much long term damage it would do, and if she did …. she would never have let the years of turbulence play out until she became so dependant on one person that she totally lost her own identity.

When you encourage her to go away and do her own things, it scares her, she won’t ever admit that to you because she’s so fiercely independent, but it triggers a deep set anxious side of her that only comes out when she’s dating. When you encourage her to not need you, she thinks it’s because you’re getting ready to leave her.

While she never wants to need you, if she falls for you, she will need you and thats because of past experiences.

She’s not as fierce and scary as you may think, but the shield she’s put up to protect herself from people like the ones in her past, makes her seem like she’s made from steel.

Her past broke her, but she’s spent a very long time rebuilding her own little castle. It’s important you understand that after she’s fallen in love with a narcissist, she’s always going to be a bit trickier to understand. But if she loves you, you’ll never experience a love like it again, because after that kind of trauma …. she will forever go to the end of the earth for the right person she finds to be deserving of her and her heart.

This is what heartbreak looks like

Who knew this is what heartbreak looks like.

Heartbreak has the most beautiful brown eyes and hair so soft you want to run your hands through it every day for the rest of your life. But you can’t keep him, he’s going to break your heart.

Heartbreak tells you the most convincing lies, it’s love he tells you. Everything he does is because he loves you. Poisonous words dressed up as something you need, something you want to keep listening to for the rest of your life. You’ll be able to listen to him for the rest of your life he tells you, but heartbreak is the best liar you’ll ever meet. So convincing, you even start to question if in fact you’re the bad and he’s the good.

Heartbreak needs your attention to make him feel validated. But he doesn’t just need your attention, he needs attention from anyone who will give it and this is why he will end up breaking your heart.

Heartbreak will take your hand and show you off to his friends and family, he likes people knowing that you’re with him. He’ll treat you like the best thing in the world until you’re not anymore.

Heartbreak is handsome and dominant, he loves knowing he makes you feel safe, until he decides he doesn’t want to anymore.

True heartbreak will generate electricity when he touches your skin, and you’ll forever be looking for that spark in a place where your heart is safe. But nothing can awaken your body like heartbreak does.

They teach you to look out for heartbreak but I guess we never expect him to be wrapped in such a charming package, one that you look for on every street, every train and in every passing car.

We can move on from heartbreak, but we can never forget him.

He’s an exemption not the rule

So you know when you’re laid awake at night, not being able to stop thinking about that one guy who you keep running back to?

Please stop, because I can assure you he is not thinking about you, in fact you probably haven’t crossed his mind for a good few days. The mental energy that he’s stealing from you is wasted, you could be using it to do something positive, like meditation or researching a conspiracy theory, or literally ANYTHING that stops you thinking about the person you’re wasting your life on!

If you’ve got a guy who keeps running back to you as and when you want him even though you’re treating him like a convenience, then he’s the exemption to this kind of situation, not the rule.

While most of us girls lay heartbroken, wondering if we’ll ever get over the guy we know deserves none of our time and yet we would give him every second of it … he’ll be out shagging his way through Tinder, so let that sink in for a second. HE DOESN’T CARE.

Ironically, while us girls are getting over the guy we keep going back to, we normally manage to accidentally string someone along ourselves. This is where the 33% of guys come from who say they’d keep going back to a girl they know they shouldn’t, because the girls they’d go back to were emotionally unavailable and only wanted them 40% of the time, it’s like a half read chapter of a book, you go back to see if you can get to the end of it, it’s kept you curious.

We don’t mean to turn into the girls who could summon back a certain guy as and when we please, but we do also know when we have the ability to do it to certain guys in our contact lists (sorry not sorry) we’re aware that they want us because we’ve managed to remain a mystery to them, we gave enough to keep their interest but not enough for them to feel like they’ve had enough.

So if we’re aware of when we do this, don’t you think guys will be too? The one you keep running back to knows he can text you when he needs you (which is rarely) and you’ll always go to him, even though you wish you could say no. But seeing him on his terms is better than never seeing him at all, at least to you it is anyway.

So before the next time you run back to the guy you’re not over for the 10000th time, just take a second to remember that he knows what he’s doing, he knows he can draw you back in when he wants you and he’ll push you away again as soon as someone else new and interesting comes into the picture.

Any guy who says he’d run back to the same girl over and over even though he knows it will never go the way he wants, is a rarity and it’s because that girl has never totally been his, he’ll keep going back because she keeps spiking his interest even when he doesn’t want her to.

The resurrection of the Ex’s

 

Do you ever look at one of your ex’s and think …. I don’t even recognise you?

If you feel like since you’ve left them (or they’ve left you) they’ve been reborn into some new person that you don’t even recognise, then you’re not alone. People change and sometimes that’s shitty, especially when they turn into a version of themselves they promised they never could be.

And now you’re just left standing there looking at your ex thinking “did you die?! Did you die and a new spirit has taken over your body, because this is not who I remember, this is not who I was dating“

Let’s just pause for a moment of reflection here though *sits starring into space for a brief moment contemplating life*, do you think you come across as the same person to your friends, family, work colleagues, people you meet in one off social situations etc? Answer to that is probably not …. so is it our ex’s fault if they now look like a version of themselves you’ve never seen before?

You fall in love with a version of someone that you view as perfect and flawless … and maybe to get you to love them they only showed parts of their personality that they knew you’d love, like a showreel of the best parts of themselves, but no one can hide their true selves forever and I think in part, it would be unreasonable to expect that.

When you break up with someone (or when they break up with you) they will change, that’s a given. They no longer have to be the version of them that was focused on making you happy/the version you loved.

I think sometimes a lot of people get back together after breaking up because each of you go back to being yourselves again and suddenly you see the version of that other person coming back that you fell for in the first place, not the adapted version they became to make you happy.

This is why I think it’s super important to be friends with someone before you start dating, because you’ve seen them in an unfiltered way prior to loving them.

However, as an alternative approach, some of us just wish our ex’s would get hit by a car when we break up, but it still leaves the question, what version of themselves will they resurrect as?

So maybe it’s best to leave our pasts dead and buried, but if they do come back, just keep an eye out for the red flags, because people are constantly showing us who they really are through their actions, but we just tend to pick and choose what we want to pay attention to, especially when we really like them.

A Backwards Step Isn’t Always Bad

Sometimes, we have to take a backwards step to realise just how far we’ve come and recently (annoyingly) that’s what I’ve done. It’s made me realise that something thats been left in my past, isn’t what I want in my future and if figuring that out while staring it straight in the face isn’t growth, then I don’t know what is.

Growing as a person establishes itself in many different ways and normally after a particularly difficult break up, we push ourselves to move on and grow at a faster pace than we’re necessarily ready for. When we’re so focused on pushing ourselves forward, we can become distracted from what we were moving on from in the first place, but when we go back to the root of the problem … sometimes it can really show us that the ‘convincing’ ourselves we no longer want it wasn’t actually necessary at all. When we’re face to face with our past, we can really see that it just isn’t for us anymore, without any fake convincing at all.

If you look back on the version of yourself from five years or so ago, you realise that back then you thought you were so established as a human being, that your views and thoughts on things were set in stone and that was it. Shall we all laugh at that together?

I can say with the utmost certainty, that what I wanted at the age of 21, would most definitely not tick my boxes now. Sometimes we can’t move on from the sensation of familiarity and I’ve realised now that for the last few years, that’s whats been happening to me. I got caught up in the idea that all I ever wanted from life had walked away from me and I would never find anything to compare to what I used to have, but god was I wrong!

The fact that I decided to drive myself all the way back to what I thought was square one of a situation, was honestly the best thing I could have ever done . It helped me to realise how far I’ve come and how much I’ve grown but above all else, it really showed me how much the things I want from life have changed.

My square one didn’t make me feel how I remembered, in fact, it made me think more of my future than my past, I was concerned that going back would resurface all the feelings I had years ago, but actually it didn’t, instead it made me open up more to the person I’ve been keeping at arms length, because I didn’t think they could compare to what I used to have and ultimately what I thought I wanted.

However, what I thought I wanted, was wrong. I partly craved familiarity, to be close to someone who at one time, was everything I ever wanted. But being close to them three years on, didn’t bring back the feeling that I thought it would. It didn’t hurt to leave, in fact, when I walked away I felt like I could finally breathe. It had given me closure, something that I’d been searching for in others for years.

It took this action, to finally realise I was better off where I am right now than where I was when was 21, when I thought I’d found everything I ever wanted. I no longer want the same things and to be honest, I’m bloody relieved. It was also a great feeling knowing how much I’d changed but my past had remained exactly the same.

It made me realise that I’ve let go and that I don’t need to keep making comparisons between something I had and no longer want and something I want but haven’t given myself the opportunity to fully have yet.

As cryptic as that sounds, ultimately, going back to square one was the best thing I could have done for myself.

So after going against the advice of all my friends, who told me going backwards was the biggest mistake I could ever make, I can say that although my friends are normally right, in this case my stubbornness to go after what I want, paid off.

Thank you square one, for being everything I no longer want.

Ex’s and … Oh’s

 

An oh … you know that sound you make at the front of the mouth and you can use it to show a wide range of emotions, like surprise, shock, regret, disappointment, resounding happiness at the outcome of a situation … I believe that’s a good enough list to show what I mean by a rage of emotions.

But Ex’s and Oh’s … now that really can be a WIDE rage of emotions, like, ‘oh, you mean he didn’t get hit by a car like I dreamed last night, thats a shame’ or ‘oh, holy s!?t we can actually be friends, without wanting to murder each other, or sleep with each other .. WIN’

Today I am writing about the second kind of ‘oh’ because I think theres only so much I can write about wanting some of my ex’s to get hit by a car *insert serious side eye face here for dramatic effect* 

So picture this, childhood sweethearts, never thought anything would tear them apart because they were all they ever needed and thats all that mattered! … Cue university annnnd growing up annnnd realising that if you were with the same person from the age of 15 to forever that you would probably end up murdering them by the time you were in your 30’s and suddenly the childhood sweethearts were no more. Add in a few drunken post break up shags and almost getting back together and the ‘oh’s’ are starting to sound more like awkward drawn out sudden realisation kind of sounds, you know the ones I mean right? Like the kind of ‘oh’ you say when you’ve caught on to a joke way later than you should have.

Now we skip five years down the line and the childhood sweethearts actually enjoy talking to each other *shocked gasp sounds made here* but not in like a ‘we are going to get back together and it will be the most romantic story ever’ kind of way, more like a I’m genunily interested in what you are doing with your time these days type of vibe. So this ex’s oh … is more like a surprised kind of ‘oh’ as in … ‘oh, I didn’t realise we could ever genuinely be friends with each other, this is a nice turn of events’

So this leads me to a question, surely all ex’s and their oh’s are different?

If I Ever Saw You Again

 

Getting over you has not been easy. The process of moving on has consisted of countless sleepless nights lying up at night wondering what went wrong. The journey of letting go has left me late for work in the morning while I snooze my alarm time and time again in hopes that the next time I wake up, you will no longer be the first thing on my mind.

However, the easiest part about getting over you has been due to not having to see you. No accidental run ins with you have played a huge role in my healing process. Not having to try and process the countless things I would say to you has made such a difference.

If I saw you again I would tell you how badly you broke me. I would let you know how much time of my life you took away from me while I tried to put the pieces back together that you tore apart.

If I saw you again I would tell you about the hours I spent crying in my car and on my bathroom floor. I would let you know the anger I have for you being able to break me down so badly.

If I saw you again I would tell you how badly you let me down. I didn’t know it, but you that you were my best friend and so much more than just the person I was dating. You were everything to me. I saw my life with you. I believed you were my soul mate. I genuinely didn’t think I’d ever have to figure out how to tackle life without you.

If I saw you again I would tell you how much you betrayed me. I would let you know how much it killed me to be lied to and manipulated by the person that I brought down all of my walls for. I trusted you. I believed in you. And you destroyed every single bit of it.

If I saw you again I would tell you how much time I spent missing you. I would tell you how many hours I spent evaluating and trying to figure out where I could have possibly went wrong. I would let you know how badly I wanted to believe that this person wasn’t you. There was nothing I wanted more than for you to come running back telling me that all of it was a mistake and that you’d never leave again.

If I saw you again I would tell you I don’t hold those feelings inside of me anymore. I would tell you I’ve realised how much better I am without you. I would let you know that I don’t carry the burdens you left me with. I would tell you that I am a better me, without you.

If I saw you again I would tell you I am happy. I am happy on my own. I am happy being completely independent, without you. I am happy with who I am. I am happy with who I have become. I am completely happy in knowing that I will never again have to settle for someone who doesn’t know my worth.

If I saw you again I would tell you I am free. I am free of all of the pain you caused me. I am free from trying to make you love me the way I now know that I deserve to be loved. I am free from every bit of baggage and toxicity that you brought into my life.

If I saw you again I would tell you that I am better off without you.