Over the past few months, I’ve found myself increasingly referring to a situation or person as having ‘activated’ certain issues. It’s that meeting someone or experiencing something that makes an up until that point unknown issue, or a dormant or lingering issue, active. I’ve come across so many people who had certain values, thoughts and behaviour and then met someone and they all promptly went out the window. For a time, it’s as if they were under the influence of overwhelming ‘chemistry’, feelings and thoughts that dictated their every move.
Life keeps serving us up the same lessons in various sizes until we heed them. They might start out as hints and bitesize lessons and the less we listen and learn, the bigger the lesson gets each time.
When I see how personal experiences can force us to address what we may have believed to be ‘old’ or unrelated issues, it becomes clear that some of what we go through as adults is about helping us to unlearn unproductive thinking and behaviour while adopting healthier habits, as well as putting to rest issues that are informing our identity and having far too much influence when they really don’t need to.
Adulthood is definitely another phase of growing up that helps us to transcend who we thought we were based on what may be a childhood perspective, so that we can grow into being our true selves. We have to find our feet and work out our values and live them, not parrot the past and other people’s agendas.
The 18-month affair that pretty much broke me, activated and brought to the fore issues that I was either unaware of or too scared to face.
Affairs in particular are like exorcisms – they will bring out every ugly thought and feeling you’ve ever had. It brought out my internal torment that had been bubbling away under a veneer of pseudo happiness and a series of losses and hurts combined with circumstances at the time and where my head was at, all made for the perfect storm. It took me a while to recognise that it was just like being a little girl – waiting, hoping, willing, excited, left, disappointed, self-blame and lather, rinse, repeat.
Relationships are in their own way, stepping stones to one another.
What we take away from each one influences where we’re going to step to next. Different relationships activated different issues while at the same time, teaching me some lessons along the way. Unfortunately due to much of my lesson summary being, ‘I’m not good enough’ instead of, ‘Natalie – you’ve been going out with your feckin parents again! What the chuff is that all about?’, I had to step from unhealthy relationship to unhealthy relationship to finally ‘get it’. In the end, I’d activated so much stuff that I emotionally and physically shut down and hit rock bottom.
It’s understandable to feel very perplexed when somebody says one thing and does another. It’s all the more confusing when they literally told you something only hours or days before and then did something that ran so counter to what they originally said, that you wonder if you blacked out for a period of time and dreamt the whole thing. You simply won’t be able to fathom how somebody can do a complete one-eighty.
They don’t really feel all of their feelings and think all of their thoughts and connect them with their actions and words. They say something but they don’t think about what that means beyond that moment so they forget that what they said has some actions that need to go with it, along with some implications, or that it might totally contradict certain beliefs.
In an excerpt from The No Contact Rule (2nd edition) which has just come out (Kindle available tomorrow 11th June and print on 17th June), I tackle one of my most frequently asked questions: How long is it going to take to get over him/her?
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They say that time heals all wounds and while yes it does take time, it’s actually what you do and think during that time that affects the healing process. Trust me, if you think that you can break up now and that by default in a year’s time this will be a distant memory without you having to put some concerted effort into the initial cutting contact and then the grief work, you will only set yourself up for pain. There’s no hard and fast rule and grief in itself isn’t linear, so your grieving isn’t an identikit version of someone else’s. Plus you’re going to take steps forwards and then go back a little or even a lot and then make gains again. The biggest influencers of how long it’s going to take are as follows:
Grief isn’t linear
Your self-esteem. Have an honest conversation with yourself about whether you’re neglecting or nurturing yourself. If you have low self-esteem at the start of NC, it’s going to take time especially if you don’t take on board that you’re going to have to nurture yourself during this time by treating yourself with love, care, trust and respect while talking and supporting yourself through some of the difficult decisions you make along the way. Remember that it takes more than going through the motions of life to take care of yourself – if your head is polluted with negative thoughts, this directly affects your recovery time.
Your resilience for disappointment and rejection. Take it badly, keep revisiting it, judge yourself harshly, persecute yourself, or do things to counter the sense of rejection and disappointment that only end up causing you even more pain, and this is going to take you longer than it would have done.
We were reading one of the kids favourite fairy tales a couple of nights ago, The Three Little Pigs, and it occurred to me that the way that the three pigs built their houses – having straw and stick ones blown down first before wising up to bricks – is the way that some of us are with boundaries and our self-esteem.
We might start out doing just enough to eek by (and possibly cutting corners by trying to take shortcuts) and then as we become increasingly aware of our need to treat ourselves with more love, care, trust and respect (probably due to one too many soul sucking experiences), we step it up but might try to hold onto some old habits out of fear of not people pleasing and the perennial fear that, “Hmm, maybe I’m being a bit too tough by having boundaries or not doing what the other person wants, even if it really doesn’t feel good to me?”
It also feels quite difficult initially because as is the case with any change of habits, due to having spent a lot of time on the old habit, it’s a tad unrealistic to expect instant results and so we have to consistently work at the new habit and respond differently to old cues and triggers, and that requires a lot of willpower initially until it becomes more natural.
We secretly question whether ‘all this’ is necessary and still have a secret hope that our happiness lies in someone having to make us the exception to their rule of behaviour, even if that rule is pretty shady or just incompatible with our own core values. We’re afraid of being ourselves because even though it would mean that we’d be living our lives authentically, we still worry that little (or lot) too much about what ‘everyone’ thinks and even compare ourselves unfairly.
Regardless of the experiences you may have with somebody, nostalgia may be catching you off guard. It’s that sentimental longing or wistful affection for a past that you have happy associations with… even if what you long for represents a small part of your overall experiences or is proving to be more about being nostalgic for the illusions and/or hope you had when you were together.
Lots of readers share stories with me about their struggles with nostalgia and while missing someone or feeling nostalgic is normal to a degree, where it becomes problematic is if you override negative associations or reality to the detriment of your self-esteem.
The slot machine of good times versus bad times is why some people can find themselves in very toxic relationships waiting for that ‘high’ to come around or put their hand in the fire of going for a re-run with a Returning Childhood Not-Such-A-Sweetheart.
Until you’re in a safe place where your feelings and thoughts pop up but they don’t derail you and you’re able to respond to them with some self-care and a gentle (and possibly sometimes sharp) tug back to reality, it’s best to treat nostalgia like that guest that likes to drop by whenever they feel like it and will overstay their welcome if you’re not mindful. Rejection is also another guest that needs to be told to push off before it takes over your home [head].
Don’t let nostalgia overstay its welcome.
When you feel nostalgic, you’ve almost got to say, “Hello old friend. Fancy seeing you here… again. It’s a shame that you’ve popped around unexpectedly but you can only stay for 15 minutes and then I’ve got to head off as I already have a previous engagement with real life.” You can do the same with feelings of rejection and then you’ve got to kick out your guest because they won’t leave until you very firmly ask them to / chuck them out or you replace them with happier house guests.
Do compare the perceived reward and nostalgia with the fallout.
It’s easy to get sidetracked by the perceived reward of reconnecting with nostalgia whether it’s torturing you with daydreams and then engaging in blame, shame, and rumination, or attempting to go back and recreate those feelings with your ex. This is how you get hurt by chasing a short-term high so you need to compare the pain you have previously felt versus any perceived joy.
Which one outweighed the other?
Would you be willing to put your hand back in the fire to experience those positive associations if it meant experiencing what you’ve already experienced in terms of the negative associations?
Also consider the impact on you when you take these detours.
Is it worth giving you a hard time just so that you can have the fantasy for what may be a few minutes or hours?
If you’re going to daydream for half an hour and then spend the rest of the day beating you up, it suggests that nostalgia isn’t something that you can afford right now and that you need to nip it in the bud before it derails your day.
- Remember what has been said.
- Remember what has been done and not done.
- Remember how you’ve felt before – Is this really what you want to feel all over again? Do you remember the pain?
Don’t combine nostalgia with being reactive because you will act first and then think later when the nostalgia has passed. I’ve heard from so many people who’ve been impulsive and then got into awful situations.
It can be a quick slide down a slippery slope if you try to make a bad decision become a good decision by hanging around.
If you feel really overwhelmed by nostalgia, do everything you can to refocus your efforts in your own life. Don’t just sit there – move around, go out, immerse yourself in a project, go to a support group, walk, jog, go to the gym, journal, knit, garden, something. Whatever your typical response time has been in the past, supercharge your efforts, especially if it’s taken as little as minutes for you to react to the nostalgia.
Do make sure you identify if there are any triggers for the nostalgia – keep a Feelings Diary – and do use what you discover to help you identify where and how you can meet these needs in your life. Just because this relationship is over, it doesn’t mean that you couldn’t enjoy the things you miss with someone else, even if it might not feel like it right now.
The thoughts are natural but feeding them with illusions isn’t necessary and is the dangerous part of the daydreaming. It’s where you can be most vulnerable because when you feed it with the fantasy, you end up setting you up to give you a hard time. You can have the thoughts, you just don’t have to chase after them. You can also have the thought and then force yourself to move on to something else or respond with something that supports you instead of undermining you. The better you get at intervening is the less impacted you are by nostalgia – you can feel it, smile even and then return to your day.
It is easy to fall into the nostalgia trap if you’re not doing very much in your life right now – make new memories!
Your thoughts?
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