Have The Relationship You Want

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I asked my friend Lisa Steadman, who’s an expert on breakup recovery, to write a post for us, and here it is:

Lately, I’ve become singularly focused. I want to help as many women as possible heal their hearts by the upcoming holiday season.

Why is this so important to me?

Because I know how energy-depleting life can be when you’re suffering from an extended case of the breakup blues.

And I also know how uplifted, energized, and empowered you can feel when you step out of the pain of the past and into your hopeful future.

Five years ago, I was in the extended throes of my Big Breakup, a misery so intense and addicting that I chose to stay stuck for a good year. During that time, I woke up to the painful truth that I hated my job, where I lived, the man I was involved with, and, in general, my life.

Not only that, but my body started breaking down. I developed tendinitis in both forearms, the kiss of death for a professional writer.

Between the emotional pain of my breakup, the physical pain of tendinitis, and the bondage of my impossible boss, I wanted to give up. I wanted to shut down.

If there had been a reboot button on my brain, I would have pushed it. Repeatedly.

But there wasn’t.

People often ask me how I found the strength to go from grieving the loss of my dysfunctionally addictive relationship, living in a condo I hated, working at my once dream job turned nightmare, in daily physical pain to the life I now lead…

Happily married, living in my dream home, with a fulfilling career as a relationship coach and best-selling author.

Here’s my simple, honest answer…

The day came when staying stuck became more painful than the idea of changing and moving on.

I can’t tell you the exact day when it happened. But it did. And within months of awakening to my truth (that staying stuck was worse than letting go and moving on), I quit my job, went cold turkey with my ex, rented out my condo, and moved to my dream neighborhood. Within a year, I met the wonderful man who is now my husband. I got my first book deal. And I started coaching women on how they, too could walk away from the pain of the past and into their beautiful future. Woohoo!

So back to my singular mission. As I look at the calendar and see that there are just four months left in 2009, I realize that anyone suffering from a broken heart has two choices right now:

- Buckle down, face the pain, and walk step by step through their healing journey
- Or hold onto their ex for dear life, stay stuck, and feel completely lost, miserable, and alone until New Year’s Eve (and into 2010)

It’s as simple as that.

And my mission is equally simple.

If you’re ready to walk away from a life that no longer works for you…

If you’re tired of heartbreak being your best friend, and instead want to step into hope, healing, and happiness…

If you want 2010 to be the incredibly blissful year you deserve, not yet another year you suffer through, because there’s no reboot button on your brain…

Then I urge you to join my mission. Heal your heart by the holidays by following these simple steps:

1. Exorcise your ex from your online and off-line life (completely!)
2. Recruit your Boohoo Crew to support you through 2009 and into 2010
3. Practice self forgiveness daily
4. Create new rituals for yourself so that you’re NOT constantly thinking I wish what’s his name was here…
5. Take your focus off of what’s next for your ex and instead put it on your own hopeful, happy, fantastic future

Lisa has a great free newsletter, and has an 8 Week Heal Your Heart TeleClass coming up. If you’d like to find out what Lisa can do for you…just go here: http://www.lisasteadman.com/breakup-bootcamp. Her promise is that by New Year’s Eve, you will have gone from Boohoo to Woohoo! I’ll be interviewing Lisa for January in my Relationship Expert Series (January is pretty much National Breakup Month…), and I know she’ll be able to help you.

Love, Rori

I love letters with what you and I might call “extreme” situations — where we all gasp and swear we’d never let that happen to us — but we KNOW, deep down, that it COULD happen to us, that we have, and may still be, tolerating things we don’t like and playing “small” when we are, in fact, HUGE goddesses — all of us.

Let’s see how we can use this to help you:

“Dear Rori,
.
I wanted to share with you the wall I’m up against.

Brief intro:

17 years of Bliss, 3 children, were very happy, we moved and all went pear shaped.

He broke up over email and its been texting and emailing and fighting for 3 years. He comes back, he leaves. He spends more time with us than away.

Recently he has said he loves me and ‘ maybe’ wants to come back. He wants total freedom to come and go as he pleases. Me to ask no questions, For starters we stay in separate houses, and take it slow, he can still flirt and go out with other woman, and if I get upset the that goes against me and him getting back together.

He doesn’t want a jealous wife. I am not to question his behavior or where he goes, if I have a complaint I should tell a girlfriend not him. that will go against me. Over the next few weeks, he will judge me and my behavior and attitude toward him as to whether he thinks he wants to come back to me and his kids…

So I will be on trial - and I will be judged on behavior, attitude. etc. There is no problem with physical attraction, for my age and 3 kids I look great…

He will be flirty and being smutty on facebook etc with other woman and if I complain that will go against me.

Here’s the great bit, If I use - I feel, I felt, I am feeling with him .. that will go against me. If I try to play him with all the junk he says he reads on these web sites. .. so he’s across all of this..

How do I deal with this. i am not good at playing games, and he’s onto all these methods…

What do I do ? No Bliss”

***Here’s my answer:

Basically, No Bliss – What are you DOING???? (This is going to be tough love – don’t read if you don’t want to hear it.)

If you think that by allowing yourself to “be on trial” and wait for him — you’ll get him back, you are dead wrong.

The only way you have a chance of getting this marriage back (and I can’t imagine why you’d WANT to now –there are all kinds of great men out there who’d want you 3 kids and all…) is to put your wedding ring on your right hand, and START DATING. Break up with him. Tell him this is a separation, and so that you will be dating also. Period. If you can’t do this, then, please, get some therapy to help your self-esteem –and get my Targeting Mr. Right program – it will help you date without all the weirdness attached…

AGREE with him. Tell him that you don’t want the marriage at this point while you’re both discovering what it is you really want (this is not a game – this is TRUE for YOU, if you’ll let yourself see this…).

Good luck! You can DO THIS!!!

***Okay, now let’s see how we can use this…

For most of this letter, it sounds like No Bliss is joking, doesn’t it? Like she sees the humor in his ridiculous demands and behavior, and is almost about to wipe her hands of him…but then…you know she’s not joking at all. No Bliss is really caught up in all this.

And it’s so easy for us to say “ewwww” - but after 17 years and 3 kids and “bliss” — any one of us would feel invested and, well, caught up.

And this brings me to the hard question: “What do you do when things change? Unexpectedly. Suddenly. Seemingly without warning. What do you do when your man goes berserk all of a sudden?”

And my answer is: Unless there’s instantaneous dementia from a physical accident or a drug reaction — there’s no such thing as “all of a sudden.” There’s no such thing as a surprise that’s this huge. No way.

This kind of thing has to be growing. Gathering steam. It could be underground, where you don’t want to look. It could be right in front of your face, where you still don’t want to look.

You could be feeling your reaction to it, and not know what that reaction’s about. This is where we women can get “tunnel vision” and just look at everything and everywhere except at the exact spot where everything’s going wrong.

So much is subconscious - where we can’t see it –so let’s say we go into a temporary state of being where we’re not aware of what’s going on around us.

So — let’s say that when we get “unaware,” it’s not our fault.  BUT — if we don’t choose to LEARN from that unaware experience — then we embark on the non-stop beating up of ourselves that I FORBID you to do!

So, along with everything else we’re going to do here, I want you to EMBRACE and LOVE even your passing unaware moments. Let’s just say that the unaware moments describe not seeing what’s right in front of us just because it’s hard to see.

Now…The man just up and walks, he runs around, he blames you, he puts you in a cage of behavior with one THREAT: He will get mad, and then he will walk even FURTHER away.

And this threat is the one that decks every single one of us.

Even if we don’t want a man anymore, the moment he threatens to GO - we want him back.

It’s like LOSING is worse than being unhappy.

Well - sometimes losing is “loosing” — just opening our iron grip and letting a man do whatever he wants to do.

Because I can tell you this — if a man doesn’t want to be with you –he’s nothing to you. Period. He’s a drain on your energy, your spirit, your heart, your health, and “loosing” a man like that is the only thing that will serve you.

(Also — it’s the only way to invite him to come and get you. (After he cleans up his act, of course –because who would want a dreadful man in the state that this one is in?)

Waiting around for a man who is acting like a single man, jerking you around and daring you to “start something” is hardly worth even a moment to “contemplate.”

The answer is NO.  No, I don’t care if you get mad. No, I don’t care what you think.  No, I no longer care what you do.

The only thing you have here to say YES to is shared parenthood.  That means you stay civil, you stay calm, you refrain from arguing.  You work only for the good of your children.

You consider yourself separated, tell him so, and go about building a new life for yourself.  Should he ever regain his senses and want to come back (and the fastest ticket to that is to forget about him and get a great new life), then you’l think about it.

This letter riled me up, and No Bliss, I hope I was able to give you a bit of a push to discover your own sense of being “done” with this man for now, except as the father of your children.

And while you’re creating this new, fabulous life (right NOW, please) - you will be working with my Tools to undo whatever your part is in this.  Even if the only thing you can put your finger on is “unawareness.”

You will be discovering how you got here, and how you can have something blissful again - even if it’s not with this same man.

Love, Rori