It’s time for a Why Did We Break Up? episode of The Baggage Reclaim Sessions.

This is a replacement episode for ‘Moving Goalposts’ which went live last week and so due to all of the shuffling about, I decided that this was the perfect time to share some universal lessons that apply to breakups that have been picked up through the themes in the shows so far. Here are the key lessons I talk about:

• If we’re carrying deep pain, it will be revealed by our relationship choices.
• Superficial choices lead to superficial relationships and reveal the inadequacy that we carry about something. We are not seeing that person or being seen. We have an agenda to ‘get’ something and to also hide something.
• No decent, lasting relationship can be built or sustained on inferiority and superiority. If you’ve been in relationships that are based on this premise, someone has to feel elevated and someone has to feel diminished. This isn’t workable.
• A partner’s sole or primary job isn’t to make you happy. If you try to build a relationship in this way, you will veer between under and over-functioning. The relationship will be a breeding ground for resentment, frustration, sadness and codependency.
• There doesn’t have to be a villain or a f*ck-up in the relationship. If more of us would recognise our humanness, we would move on to the relationship that’s far more befitting of us much sooner.
• Affairs are about escapism and hiding out for both parties. If you become the Other Woman or Other Man, you are inviting pain, guilt and delay into your life.
• If you don’t take time out to heal from a previous relationship and instead opt to move into something else very quickly, whatever you’re trying to avoid is going to track you down. The more you run is the likelier it is that one day it will all pile up. Stop running and deal.
• Don’t try to be a fixer/healer/helper because you won’t be rewarded for your efforts. You are guaranteed to invite past pain into your life and will end up sacrificing you in an effort to prop up the other person. If you can’t stay in your own lane in the relationship, you cannot honour the separateness and choose partners for authentic, healthy reasons.
• If you overcompensate in your relationships, it’s because on some level you know that the other party isn’t showing up or you on some level feel unworthy and so feel that you have to match their efforts and then raise them. You will try to create a tipping point. When the relationship ends, you will blame you and you won’t know why you broke up because you’ve effectively focused on your fears, feelings etc in relation to the other person. You’ve worried to much about what you have to do or not do in order to try to make them be or do something. You can’t worry about and blame other people’s feelings and behaviour on you and expect to have a clue about what’s yours and what’s theirs.
• No matter what speed you move at at the start of a relationship, it needs to be in a boundaried way. Sometimes we mistake simulated intimacy for the actual intimacy that comes from a progressing, balanced, consistent, intimate and committing relationship over time.  Chatting a lot, hanging out, being a good listener, great! But is it intimacy? This takes time and experience and the showing out and showing up of your true selves. The honeymoon period is too soon to call it!

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