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hey guys I'm Heidi PRI welcome back to my Channel or welcome if this is your first time here this month on this channel we're going to be talking about heartbreak and when I say heartbreak I don't just mean the pain of a romantic
Heidi Priebe explains how to leave a romantic relationship when you know you should but feel too attached, using a 127 Hours amputation metaphor and a three-step process.
Key Takeaways
- Substantial relationship change generally requires both partners to be committed to it.
- Feeling too attached to leave is often rooted in unconscious attachment patterns and self-concept tied to the relationship.
- Before leaving, build independent sources of purpose, support, identity and self-regulation to avoid destabilization.
- Expect emotional pain during the transition and treat it with curiosity and self-compassion rather than judgment.
What the video covers
- The video addresses viewers who want to leave a relationship but feel too attached to do so.
- It responds to a common comment: how to build a healthier relationship when a partner refuses to take part in change.
- Heidi argues that substantial relational change requires both partners, so staying in a one-sided dynamic can drain one's life force.
- She uses the film 127 Hours as a metaphor: leaving may require a painful 'amputation' of dependency to save the inner child.
- The video frames attachment wounds and insecure attachment styles as reasons people stay in damaging relationships.
- Heidi notes that patterns learned about love can lead people to consistently choose incompatible partners, even with good intentions.
- The first step is contextualizing the situation properly rather than applying standard breakup advice.
- Attachment-based dynamics, such as anxious partners, make shared reality about a breakup harder to reach.
- Relating through unconscious strategy, rather than honesty about needs, keeps people attached.
- Strengthening areas like purpose, social networks, self-connection and emotional regulation before leaving reduces self-abandonment.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction: Heartbreak and staying in a relationship you want to leave
- 03:25Why partners' lack of commitment makes change hard
- 06:44The 127 Hours amputation metaphor
- 06:53Step one: Contextualizing the situation
- 10:45Insecure attachment and shared reality in breakups
- 16:40Relating through strategy versus honesty
- 26:40Strengthening purpose, support and self-connection
- 35:00Allowing ambivalence and emotional curiosity after leaving
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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relationship ending Hearts can break in all sorts of different ways for all sorts of different reasons but today we actually are going to be talking about the pain of a romantic relationship ending now the reason I wanted to make
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this video a video about what to do when you find yourself in the place of knowing that you should or want to leave the Romantic relationship that you're in but you can't seem to take that leap because you feel too attached is kind of
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twofold so one this is a video that I desperately wish that I had at various points in my attachment healing Journey but also in part this is a response to a very specific type of comment that I frequently see getting left on both my
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videos or kind of similar videos in the space of relationship healing which is anything along the lines of what do I do if I want to internalize this stuff and I want to work to have a healthier or
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more communicative relationship or whatever it is but my partner has absolutely no interest in joining me on that essentially how do I get someone else to care about me to take my needs seriously and to work with me on
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changing our relationship Dynamic and I think the kind of go-to response that people tend to get in that situation is well maybe that's a person that it's not going to be possible for you to have a healthy relationship with maybe that's a
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relationship that you should leave because these types of skills and tools and practices only really work if both people are committed to making a change and well that might be the truth and in fact I believe it usually is you can't
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make any sort of substantial relational change if only one person is bought into it it still does not mean that that's an easy thing to do so to me it always feels a little bit dismissive when someone is coming in and going hey I'm
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so motivated to work on all of this stuff but the other person in the relationship is not to just tell that person well get out of that relationship because I know firsthand that there are situations we can get into in life in
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relationships where someone's saying just leave the relationship feels kind of like them saying just saw your own leg off right it's not an easy thing to do because so many other parts of our lives and our self-concepts can get
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baked into really unhealthy relationship Dynamics and then it feels like we're going to be losing an unbearable amount of ourselves or our resource if we're to leave that person and of course that's not what we want right we don't want to
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be in the position where our relationships are providing us with so much of our sense of self or so much of our connection to the world or to other people that leaving them feels like sawing our own legs off but sometimes
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that's a situation we find ourselves in so what we're going to do with this video is do a really deep breakdown get really granular about all of the things that tend to get tied up in relationships that make it feel hard to
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leave them and then we're going to talk about how we can start to strengthen or work slowly on each of those areas to bring ourselves to a place where if what we have already decided in our minds and
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our hearts is that we want to leave the relationship it feels relatively easy to do that now of course leaving any relationship especially a romantic relationship especially a long-term romantic relationship is never going to feel painless but what we're trying to
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do here is get the pain to a level where it feels manageable so we're going to look not at should I stay or should I go but at the question of if I know in my gut I should or I want to go but I just
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cannot bring myself to do it why can I not bring myself to do it what's unconsciously operating for me that's keeping me in this and what would I have to do in order to get to a place where
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leaving feels bearable this is about to be a bit of a graphic metaphor but there's a movie that came out several years ago called called 127 Hours that's the true story of a guy who got stuck in I believe it was a canyon when he was
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doing some sort of outdoor Sport and his arm was trapped under this Boulder and he stayed there for 127 Hours waiting to see if he was going to get rescued and eventually he realized the only way to free himself was to amputate his arm and
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so this movie which is based on a real story that happened kind of moves us through this mental process that this man goes through where he eventually realizes I have to get rid of this thing that I once thought was absolutely vital
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and I would never consider getting rid of in order to save myself how do I find a way to do this and I apologize for the kind of mental image that that occr but what I want to track this with is the
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idea that when we end up in these relationships that are deadening our Spirits there's something about the way we're showing up in the relationship that feels like a deep self abandonment it's kind of like your inner child has
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their arm stuck under a boulder and that inner child is losing energy they're losing their livelihood their creativity their Jah de vivra they're losing their hope and their optimism the longer we stay trapped under that Boulder and so
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this video is essentially about how to safely do that amputation to cut off that part of your inner child's dependency on someone else in order to save their their life and this is going to hurt immensely in the short run right
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when that guy was amputating his own arm it was not a pleasant experience and I will bet you any money the recovery was also not a pleasant experience but he lived and he's still here today to tell that tale and this is the same principle
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we need to apply in situations where our inner children so the parts of ourselves that are young and emotional get ATT attached to a situation or a person or a relationship that is in part draining their life force we as our adult selves
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have to make the decision do I cause this child immense pain in the short term in order for them to eventually make a recovery and get that healthy Emotional Self back online or do I leave them stuck under this Boulder and let
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them die there what it means when we let our inner children die is often a deep sense of depression a feeling of Our Lives ceasing to matter or of the decisions that we make in our lives ceasing to have importance to ourselves
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or to the world or to other people and this is not saying that it's the other person's fault if this is happening very often with insecurely attached relationships in particular both people are coming in with a set of norms and
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beliefs around relationships that are actually quite damaging to themselves but it's just what they learned about what love looks like so this is not to say that it's the other person's fault fault necessarily if you're feeling like this it could be that your patterning
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and the things that you've internalized about relationships are causing you to consistently choose Partners you are not compatible with or who you don't have shared values with or whatever it is and that alone even if the other person and
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yourself are completely well-meaning is enough to slowly drain your life force over time so what we're talking about today is how to safely do that emotional amputation if you have already decided that it needs to be done and we're going
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to talk about this in Three Steps step one in this process is contextualizing the situation properly for yourself so I think that a lot of people particularly those who have insecure attachment Styles or early relational wounds that may have grown into something like
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complex PTSD stay in relationships that they know they ought to or want to be out of because they're expecting the regular relationship adages and the regular breakup advice that they see out in the world to apply to their situation
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so if I have this story in my head because I am basing my idea of what a breakup looks like on a secure relationship that I should feel totally confident that I should be in a shared reality with my partner by the time we
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part ways and that I should feel kind of happy and good about my decision when I'm leaving I'm probably never going to reach that point if my relationship is not a secure one insecurely attached relationships and secure relationships function in
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fundamentally different ways okay and if we are expecting the breakup of an insecure relationship to look and feel like the breakup of a secure relationship we are probably going to end up staying in our situation forever because it might never get to the point
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where we feel calm clearheaded and good about moving on from it so the two kind of Main reasons why insecure breakups are different than secure breakups is because one if you are insecurely attached it's highly likely that you are
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lacking a lot of invisible resource that helps secure people through their breakups and when I say invisible resource I mean things like self-esteem so a sense of I am still a good worthwhile lovable person when I step out of this relationship or mental and
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emotional stability there are all of these things that people who air more secure kind of take for granted when they get out of a relationship that help them to process it in a clean way that are not necessarily available to those
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who air more insecurely attached and the second reason it tends to be harder for people in insecurely attach relationships to leave them are because it's highly likely that if you are not secure you are also dating another person who is not secure and if that
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other person is not secure it means that you're going to be dealing with extra Che challenge around getting in a shared reality about a breakup so let's say you're dating someone who's super anxious and you might feel like to me
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it's very clear that this relationship is not working or it's dysfunctional or whatever it is but they don't want to look at that and they're going to keep insisting no this is true love right true love means just persisting through
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all of this so they might have a kind of warped idea of what a relationship looks like same goes if you have a more dismissing partner so let's say you're struggling with really not getting the support that you need out of the
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relationship or the emotional intimacy but your partner is continuously insisting no this is a perfectly normal relationship you're just wanting too much connection or too much intimacy because their model of a healthy relationship is very different from your
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model but both of these things are going to make it extra challenging to decide when to end the relationship because in a secure relationship people tend to have more similar values and expectations for the relationship and there's usually a much higher degree of
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agreement on whether or not the relationship is working and whether or not each person's needs are getting properly met so if things feel weird and off for one person in the relationship there's a very high chance in a secure
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Dynamic that things also feel weird and off for the other person whereas in insecure Dynamics you can have the total opposite you can have one person who feels completely satisfied and wants to argue that there's nothing wrong with
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the relationship while the other person is absolutely suffering chronically so this leads us to the first point about what's different from a secure or what I'm going to call a simple breakup from an insecure or a more complex breakup
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when a relationship is comprised of two secure people generally by the time you're approaching a breakup it's coming from a relatively conscious and integrated place again because secure people are making relatively few distortions there's generally going to be pretty clear clear and pretty
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explicit conversations throughout the relationship about what each person's expectations are and so if they get to a place where a breakup is looming it's often because they've had these conversations over and over again where they're coming towards this shared
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awareness that there's just some big value that one of us holds that the other one doesn't or there's just different things that we want out of our relationship with each other or there's different ways we want to live our lives
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or raise children or whatever it is and so it's going to be pretty clear why the breakup is happening to both people that does not mean it will not be incredibly painful because they might miss each other terribly but it does
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mean that they can rest easy knowing that they made the right choice because they truly and honestly explored various options and were honest with each other about what was and was not going to work so it might be really sad to learn that
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they want different things or that they're not compatible in certain ways but it's going to be easy to understand now contrast this with an insecure attachment relationship in which case relationships often end based on an unintegrated decision to be insecurely
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attached means to be relating to other people through unconscious strategy and when we are relating to other people through strategy it means we are necessarily whether we mean to be doing this or not not being completely honest about what all of our needs and values
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and expectations are and that might be because not all of those things are even conscious to us so we might not know why it is that we feel so chronically frustrated with our partner or why it is that we can't seem
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to leave even though we think that we should there are parts of ourselves that we have hidden from ourselves which means we can't really integrate them clearly into our decision-making and if our partner is insecurely attached and also operating from a different strategy
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it means they too have needs wants values whatever it is that they have hidden from themselves that might come out unconsciously in their behaviors but that they're not able to be clear and direct with us about so often it feels
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really confusing trying to figure out if you should stay or go in a relationship where both people are insecurely attached because what you'll often have is one or in most cases both Partners acting in ways that differ wildly from
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what their stated wants needs and value values are you might have someone telling you yeah I really want let's say a long-term commitment I want to start a family whatever it is but their actions do not match that at all and that can be
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really challenging to integrate because you have to go do I stick with this part of me that wants those things and the part of them that is telling me they want it or do I really look at the
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behavior that's happening here which points me towards the opposite thing being true or you might have an anxious leaning partner who just tells you over and over again that you are their favorite person in the world that they
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can't imagine life without you but it also feels like they're chronically kind of angry at you or actually really displeased with your priorities and values that they're claiming they like so it can be really confusing trying to figure out whether to stay or go in a
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relationship where both your actions and the other person's actions do not align with their stated values needs expectations for the relationship this can make it really challenging to reach an integrated decision which leads us to our next problem when secure people or
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people having what I call a simple breakup exit the relationship they have a very clear and coherent narrative about why it happened so it's also not particularly difficult for them to go to friends and family members explain the
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entire spectrum of what happened so I really love this person I really wanted to be with them but it turned out we just weren't compatible in these ways or it turned out we just didn't want the same things or I wasn't happy in X Y or
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Z ways I never really felt fully seen and fully understood by the other person whatever it is there's usually a very balanced view of it that they're able to give their friends and family members which leads to really deep accurate
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mirroring and that co-regulation that ability to go to other people and have our pain be seen accurately is incredibly important in the healing process CU it kind of reminds us okay I'm all right there are other people in
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the world who understand me and commere me back to myself and so it takes a little bit of that anxiety away from the experience of leaving someone else who we felt knew us really deeply in that scenario it's very easy for our friends
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and families to understand something like I really miss this person even though I know it was best for me to them right because we've given them all the information that helps them understand both what we're sad about and why we
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decided that this was the best choice anyways now contrast this with an insecure or more complex breakup when our attachment styles are not secure by definition what we are doing is distorting our experience in some way so that often leads us with an unintegrated
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or unclear representation of the relationship itself and that makes it really challenging for us to give the right information to other people to allow them to mirror us back to ourselves clearly our attachment systems which include the distortions that they
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lead us to make are the most online when we are under distress and breakups tend to be highly distressing experiences so if you air more avoidant and you're going through a breakup what's likely to come online is the part of you that
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finds a way to write the experience off as unimportant and if that's what you're communicating to the people around you I went through this breakup but it's for the best I feel great and that might be true and authentic to what you do feel
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at the moment what's not being mirrored back to you is the pain and the sadness that you're experiencing unconsciously and the same is true in the opposite direction if you are anxious and you go through a breakup what's going to come online is the part
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of you that either idealizes or villainized of your relationship you idealize this person and let all your friends know about them in an extremely positive way when in reality there was a lot of things that weren't working inside of the relationship the people
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around you might have no idea of that so they're not able to give you true mirroring about what was actually there inside of the relationship the way that it was getting mirrored for you while you were in it and the same is true if
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you were chronically villainizing your partner inside of the relationship or after leaving your friends and family are going to kind of have this idea of your partner that's very negative and they might not understand why you miss them so much or you might have too much
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pride to admit that you do miss them immensely even though there were a lot of things that you were very angry about and again when we have a secure worldview we're able to hold conflicting feelings inside of a larger picture so
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we're able to see other people as nuanced and multifaceted so I really love this person but they really drove me crazy in this way right and we're able to give someone all of that in an integrated way when we are not securely
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attached it can be really difficult to hold conflicting ideas about one person in our mind simultaneously so you portray them to others in a very black or white way and then don't get the full spectrum of your feelings mirrored back
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to you this leads to unsatisfying co-regulation because you're unable to explain the full Nuance of the situation to other people so it can start to feel like the only other person who's capable of understanding the relationship I was
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in was this other person who was in it with me because that might literally be true if both of you are kind of defaulting to Black or White thinking about it it's going to be hard to feel seen by other people which is going to
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not give you that deep level of co-regulation that really does help when we're experiencing heartbreak to take the situation to other people and have our pain and our anger and our hope and everything in between mirrored back to
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us by the people around us when all of that does happen and we're able to see the bigger picture in our breakups it leads to a very clean sense of grief so what I mean by that is that when we are
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grieving a secure relationship breakup it often feels incred challenging emotionally but we're also very understanding of why that challenge is happening so while we're crying while we're grieving while we're raging whatever it is we also have this very
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strong sense of I know why I'm going through this right I'm aware that my feelings are hurt but I'm not internally conflicted about what to do I'm not second guessing myself over and over and over again about whether or not I should
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have left that relationship I'm not thinking what if I tried this strategy or that strategy because I wasn't operating based on strategy I laid all my cards on the table I used the truth to navigate this relationship and the
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truth was that we weren't compatible or it didn't work out so now all there is left to do is feel the feelings associated with losing somebody and with getting kind of unused to somebody right someone I was used to co-regulating with
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and going to for lots of things is no longer here and that hurts but it's the kind of grief that time actually does authentically heal when you have insecure or complex breakups what you often have is complicated grief
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grief that kind of sneaks out of nowhere grief that hits you in areas where you weren't expecting it because again if your and or the other person's attachment strategies were keeping you from having a fairly clear and uncomplicated view of the relationship
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there's probably going to be a lot of second guessing and being unclear about whether or not you made the right decision and because you're unclear on that you might feel like you almost want to leave a little Part of Yourself
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inside of the relationship emotionally just in case you actually do want to go back or you might think to yourself what if I had tried saying or doing this what if I'd kind of tried to play my cards in
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this way then what would have happened because again when we're operating from strategy there are always about 100 other strategies we could have tried out which makes it feel really hard to leave a relationship because we might think in
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our minds well what if I said this what if IID tried this what if I'd made this adjustment as opposed to when we are just laying our cards on the table and being really clear with each other about
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what's going to work and what's not we aren't left with all of this second guessing because we saw all of the cards we knew what we could or couldn't make of them and then it feels easier to move
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on now the reason we talk about all of this is not to make it feel hopeless if you are insecurely attached and wanting to leave a relationship why we talk about this is because it's going to be very difficult and in a lot of cases
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very shame inducing if you are comparing a complex breakup to a simple one and feeling like you are absolutely crazy for not being able to feel those very simple clean emotions that more secure people feel when they leave a
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relationship or if you feel like you can't seem to explain the relationship or why you left it in a way that makes sense to other people that actually is normal for an insecurely attached breakup which is just to say if you are waiting for your
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relationship to become very simple and feel clean and easy to leave it's highly likely you're going to stay in it for much much longer if not forever because it might never get to that place so at a certain point that inconsistency or that
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confusion or that sense of this person is telling me what I want to hear but they're not walking the walk those things need be taken as data points in and of themselves right in a secure relationship I want to feel like my
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partner's words and their actions line up in a secure relationship I want to feel like when I'm honest that gives us the best chance at working through issues so again at a certain point those inconsistencies or that need to be in
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strategy for things to work out can actually be a data point that this relationship is not necessarily ever going to function under healthy principles and then the decision you're faced with is do I want a relationship that functions under healthy principles or
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not this leads us to step two step two is once again what we want to start looking at when we've already made that decision yes I want to leave but I don't know how to do it or for some reason I
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just feel like my emotional system will not allow me to detach from this relationship step two is all about unearthing what is keeping us unconsciously stuck inside of this relationship the stuff that is keeping you stuck is whatever is unconsciously
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preventing you from leaving the relationship despite you having a conscious desire to do so I remember reading this book one time called why we change and 10 reasons why we don't by Ross alen horn it is truly one of the
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best books I've ever read on decisionmaking where he talks about the fact that often when we find it really hard to make a change in our lives it's because we have not gotten super explicit with ourselves about what we
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would be giving up in order to make that change that we are currently taking for granted and if we were to make all of that stuff conscious and understand how to get those needs that we're not necessarily noticing are being met
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through a relationship or whatever it is if we could find a way to get them met in new ways then the change would become completely natural it would be easier to make it than to not make it and so
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that's what we're going to talk about with this step we're going to look at what types of invisible resources we're often getting out of relationships including relationships that we consciously believe we do not want to be in then we're going to talk about how we
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can start strengthening those areas of our lives in ways that do not rely upon the relationship so that eventually we get to a place where it feels easy to leave the relationship if that is what we want to do so I know earlier we were
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playing with the metaphor of amputating a body part in this part of the video I want to play with a different metaphor which is just imagining that this heartbreak you're going to go through if you leave this relationship is kind of
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like an injury often when we have an injury in the body it does heal with time but what we don't always do is Target the injury itself if we're let's say going to physiotherapy what we often do is try to strengthen the muscles
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around the part of the body that is injured so that we're not putting too much stress on the injured part itself and that's what I want to encourage us to start thinking about because to leave a relationship that is giving us a lot
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of what we want in terms of our romantic needs what we're doing is kind of injuring ourselves short term and that is true whether we are secure or insecure but the way that we do that without falling apart is we work on
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strengthening all of the other areas in our lives so that they are strong enough to support us through that emotional injury so we're going to look at some different parts of our lives that we might be neglecting without realizing it
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or Outsourcing to our relationship without realizing it so at the center of this graph just to make things super clear from the get-go we're going to look at connection to partner and this is the area that we are going to
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intentionally be injuring if we leave a relationship so our connection to partner is often meeting a lot of emotional intimacy needs it's often meeting a lot of sexual intimacy needs it's often meeting a lot of needs around kind of co-creating or planning a future
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with someone and it's often meeting a lot of our romantic needs however we Define that for ourselves now the kind of love addict approach to ending a relationship is to over rely on connection to partner to meet a lot of
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their other needs so all of the muscles around this one for someone who might be more love addicted are likely being quite neglected so what they're going to do is Target this muscle specifically and go well I can't leave this part of
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my life unattended because if so I'll just be weak overall so I need to find a different partner before I leave my current relationship either to already date or to have kind of lined up so that this muscle is never left weakened but
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this creates a whole host of other problems so what we want to start looking at is how do we allow this muscle to take a hit and trust that it will be absorbed by everything surrounding it the the first thing we
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want to look at is connection to self when we really love and Trust ourselves and value our own competence and our own compassion our relationship with ourselves serves as a very strong resource when we leave romantic relationships but if we are Outsourcing
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a lot of our sense of self to the relationship what happens is that we start to worry if I leave this relationship I'm going to lose a really strong connection to a part of myself that I believe can only be alive through
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this relationship the question we want to be asking ourselves here if we want to start strengthening this area is if I leave this relationship in what ways am I going to self abandon so maybe when I am in a romantic relationship I tell
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myself I'm a good worthy lovable person but as soon as I'm not in a relationship I tell myself I'm an unworthy unlovable person I'm now aband in the part of myself that I was allowing myself to keep online in that relationship which
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is the belief that I am lovable and worthwhile and a good person and I'm taking that away from myself we might need to do some strengthening in the area of self-regard before leaving the relationship so that we know even if
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this person is no longer in my life anymore I'm not going to kick myself off my own team because they're gone I'm going to keep on believing that I am worthy and lovable or whatever it is that I believed by virtue of being in a
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partnership with this person my self-concept holds true another thing we might want to look at particularly if we have any codependency online is what parts of myself am I trying to heal or stay in connection with through this
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other person so let's say I don't really care about my own health or well-being but I'm really fixated on my partner's well-being what I'm doing in that case is just projecting the part of myself that I know needs to be tended to and
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cared for onto someone else because it's not threatening for me to see someone else as vulnerable and in need but it is threatening for me to see myself as vulnerable and in need so if I want to be able to leave that relationship
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without feeling unbelievable guilt what I'm going to need to do is re internalize that part of myself that knows that I need that same type of care and nurturance and tending to that I'm telling myself other people Des need
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from me so a lot of this process is the process of realizing what have I allowed to come alive inside of myself which energies are kind of online in me when I'm with this other person and how am I
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going to find a way to keep those energies online whether they're positive things or whether they're problems that I'm trying to solve how do I keep in connection with all of that once I leave this relationship and until we have a
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clear answer to that and we've given ourselves some proof that we are going to to nurture those things and ourselves outside of the relationship it's going to be really hard to feel like we want to leave the next thing we're going to
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look at and we're going to move pretty quickly through this because I think it's one that is generally fairly conscious for people is connection to Resource and when I say resource here I'm talking about the more overt forms
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of resource like money and shelter and practical stability these are areas particularly in long-term relationships that do get disrupted when we leave them so what we just want to be making sure of here is that we have a concrete plan
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if this is let's say someone we have combined our finances with or who we live with of how we are going to sustain ourselves on a practical level once we've left the relationship and if we don't have a clear answer for that what
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we might need to do is just spend some time getting our decks in a row and making that a really big priority for a while so that we know I'll be able to transition out of this relationship without completely destabilizing myself
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on a practical level the next thing we're going to look at is connection to social networks so do you have emotional intimacy with people outside of your partnership do you have friends you can turn to family members either blood
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family or chosen family who you know you can rely on to have your back during the kind of Messier more human moments that you're going to go through during a breakup or you need someone to talk to until the we hours of the morning or
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when you need to be checked because you're pretending the relationship and the breakup means nothing to you but the people who love you know that that's not necessarily true so this is often the type of support that we get through
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friends and Community but if those things are not available to you it might be worth looking at whether you can get a counselor for a period of time while you're preparing to leave this relationship or someone else who you can
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trust to co-regulate with you in a way that is relatively undistorted so they're getting that full picture of things and helping you make integrated decisions or if there's existing social relationships that you've been neglecting that it might be time to go
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back and strengthen and ideally we don't want to be doing this in a transactional way right like oh I'm going to be going through a breakup so it's time to reconnect to my friends so I can lean on
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them for a while until I get back into the next relationship what we want to be doing here is building a consistent social network so that this muscle always stays strong because if this muscle is strong in your next
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relationship you get into this is going to help hold you up even in short-term instances like you and your partner are in a fight or you and your partner are struggling in your relationship in some way you're not going to feel like this
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relationship is my only chance at intimacy or connection it's the only way I can have that need fulfill this is about dispersing that need in a wider way so that it doesn't feel threatening to take a step back temporarily or
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permanently L when that's the healthiest thing for us to do either for ourselves or for the relationship itself CU even in the healthiest relationship people need space people need to take time apart from their Partners they need to
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be able to go co-regulate with other people and get a more well-rounded view of themselves and their relationship reflected back to them right so this is something that as much as possible we want to keep alive all of the time but
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we particularly just want to keep an eye on it if we're feeling like leaving a relationship is going to mean losing touch with the part of ourselves that is in Intimate connection with other people period being seen and understood deeply
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is a human need and if we feel like we are only getting that met in one capacity it's going to be really really hard to let that go and this leads us to the last resource I want to look at
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today which is connection to purpose so do we feel like there is a reason why we need to stay healthy and to care about ourselves when we have a sense of purpose a sense of my life matters in a
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way that is bigger than me we end up kind of caring about our own well-being as a product of that because if I feel like the only point of life is to enjoy myself and have a good time I'm just
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going to follow whatever whims I have and leave whatever situation is no longer making me happy or I'm going to persist way too long at situations that once made me happy but are now kind of making other areas of my life
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unmanageable when we feel like we have some sort of drive or purpose or meaning in our life we have to take our own well-being and our own mental and emotional and physical health seriously because we matter to other people so
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caring for ourselves is no longer just a personal issue and I think that this is at its core the thing that is really missing most most of the time when we get stuck in these situations where we know we should leave something but we
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can't we don't have a sense that we matter in a deep way to the world or to other people and so we're not necessarily looking at caring for ourselves as an act of social responsibility when we start looking at
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it that way we start to naturally think about okay what resources both socially and practically and emotionally do I need to keep myself feeling okay so it becomes intuitive to start strengthening those muscles as a regular part of our
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mental health regime when we don't feel like our lives matter or have any purpose or value it's really easy to neglect all of the rest of this and so often what we need to do in these situations where we find it really hard
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to leave something that we kind of know we want to is do some soul searching and really get in touch with what is the bigger fish that I want to fry here how could I contribute to the world or my
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community or other people in a way that makes it imperative for me to care about myself and in a way that is going to cause me to deliberately choose romantic relationships where I feel supported and where I feel like the relationship is
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healthy and adding stability to my life rather than the opposite having a sense of purpose helps keep the rest of our life and our relationships in perspective and of course it's not as easy is just deciding to have meaning or
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purpose one day when you wake up right but it's worth noting that if that's an area of your life that you have neglected if you have not spent a lot of time really getting clear with yourself on who am I and in what ways do I want
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to contribute to the world it's probably going to start causing a lot of problems in a lot of other areas and so this might be the question that you want to spend the most time with how do I want
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to give back what do I want to do with my life what is going to make me feel like my time on this Earth matters in our physical bodies we have big muscles and we have smaller muscles and a sense
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of purpose in our emotional body is a really big muscle group if it's weak targeting the smaller muscles around it is not going to get you anywhere close to as far as strengthening this muscle is so as we look at all of these
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different areas I just want you to really notice and pay attention to which of these things do I kind of project onto my partnership or which of these things have gotten in meshed with my partnership and I don't want you to
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shame yourself in this process right that's the opposite of the idea here what we just want to do is really look at am I getting most of my social needs met through my partner has my sense of purpose in life become very intertwined
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with my partner and that might not be the most unhealthy thing right often if we have a family with someone or we combine our lives in major practical ways it's natural for those areas to be fairly intertwined so the reason we want
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to look at all of this is just because we want to get clear on what are we going to have to start separating out and strengthening individually as opposed to doing overall conditioning which is what we may be used to do if
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we've been in this partnership for a long time so if my social network is super intertwined with my partners how do I just start separating that out more and more if I'm financially dependent on my partner how do I work on becoming
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more financially inde dependent if my sense of purpose in life is very intertwined with my partner how do I separate that out a little bit and figure out what parts of that mission or that purpose I can keep working on
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independently and what parts I'm going to have to grieve as part of the relationship if I walk away from it and again we want to spend a lot of time on that question in what ways am I likely
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to self- abandon if I leave this relationship and how do I find ways to keep in connection with the parts of myself that currently only feel alive when I'm around this other person this leads us to step three which is much
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less technical step three is making that hard decision to hurt your own feelings so deciding now that I've done all of this work to get clear on how I can step outside of this relationship without bleeding out emotionally making the
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decision to do that and thinking about how to maintain your sense of well-being when you have done that there is no version of this where this step is painless just like that man amputating his own arm hurt like hell this is
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highly likely to hurt like hell you just need to be able to trust yourself enough to inflict what you know to be necessary short-term pain upon yourself essentially what we're looking at here is how do we make a recovery plan for
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ourselves before we leave the relationship and we want to make sure that we're targeting all of those areas that are generally invisible to us so everything that we talked about in step two to make sure that we are keeping
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those areas strong after the breakup happens so do we have a plan for how we will nurture our connection to self in the moments where we feel like we are self- abandoning do we have a strategy in place maybe someone we can call or an
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activity we can do that will reconnect us to oursel and allow us to nurture the parts of ourselves that were once being nurtured in the relationship once we have left it do we have a social network or other people in our Lives who
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we are intentionally and deliberately nurturing our relationships with even on the days when we feel like garbage and don't want to go anywhere do we have a sense of purpose and meaning in our lives do we have something that gets us
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out of bed in the morning that we are willing to get out of bed in the morning for even when we are absolutely heartbroken and in a lot of ways we're going to have to be strict with ourselves elves in this process it's
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kind of like with literal weight training once you've done it for long enough picking up certain weights feels easy but then if you stop for a long time and you go to pick up the same amount of weight it's going to feel
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incredibly heavy you might even injure yourself trying to lift it and it's really going to put into perspective just how fit you were back when that thing felt easy to do so if you have been nurturing all of these different
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areas of your life and it feels like you want to start letting some of them slide because you're in so much pain after this heartbreak well it's of course good to give yourself some leniency and some time to be in grief and pain we want to
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make sure we're not completely neglecting the regimes that have brought us to the place where we are strong enough to make this decision for ourselves in the first place so we need diligent and holistic emotional strength training practices that we stick to when
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we are heartbroken and what we want to do is make sure that we are planning in our more integrated moments so the moments where it feels like we see the situation more clearly we understand that leaving this relationship is going
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to hurt but it's going to be worth it those are the places we want to make our plans from we don't want to make plans about leaving the relationship when we are in a blind rage at our partner we
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don't want to make plans about leaving the relationship when we are feeling super triggered into anxious wounding and it feels like nothing is ever going to be okay again if we leave we want to be making plans from our most resourced
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state so if you can let's say hire a coach or a therapist or someone who can sit with you and help you stay in that resourced state when you're thinking about leaving these are the places where we want to build our plans from when I
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was in the thick of my own attachment wounding was fearful avoidant it meant that I was often only really looking at either the logic of the situation or the emotion involved in a situation at a given point in time so I would let all
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of my feelings do the decision- making and then I would get into a deactivated State and see all of the things that didn't make sense and then make a different decision about the relationship and kind of Ricochet back
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and forth between those States and as I was earning my way towards secure attachment the last breakup I had where I was still pretty fairly entrenched in my fearful avoidant patterning I wrote a letter to myself on a day when I was
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feeling more secure than not that was just ackn knowledging hey you're probably going to have a day where you are feeling overwhelmed with emotion and where you are remembering all of the positive parts of the relationship and all of the ways in which you miss that
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person and I want you to know that all of those feelings are real you really did love them you really did have a deep special emotional connection with them they really were a truly wonderful person in all of these ways and I hope
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you find a way to keep treasuring that but that was not enough to make the relationship work in a long-term way and the fact that these practical things or these unaligned values were there and you loved them so much was precisely
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what made it so hard to leave but now I need you to be in your integrated self and be able to hold both all of the very real emotions that you're feeling right now and the logic of why we can't go
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back on our decision because of those emotions so whatever it is that you think you are going to potentially fall prey to after you leave the relationship whatever you think might suck you back in maybe it's going to be that person
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reaching out to you and expressing either apology or distress maybe it's going to be feeling insecure maybe it's going to be feeling guilty try to plan for what you're going to need when that arises what are you going to need to
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remember if you are feeling overwhelming guilt or overwhelming confusion and distress in your more grounded and more integrated moments plan for that write yourself letters to read in the future talk to your family and friends about the distortions that you know you start
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making in your own mind when your attachment patterning comes online ask them if they're willing to lovingly check you and help keep you in reality and if there are people you trust like a therapist or a close friend it might not
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hurt to ask them where do you think I might get stuck and how do you think I might be able to plan ahead for that and this kind of leads to the last point I want to make about all of this which is
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that at the end of the day what we want to treat all of this as is an opportunity to practice wholeness so again to be insecurely attached or to have early wounding often means that we try to put everything into black or
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white categories because that was once adaptive but feelings and relationships and experience of being human as a relationship ends is one giant gray area and so anytime a conflicting feeling comes up or something unexpected arises in your awareness maybe you feel regret
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where you thought you'd feel hope or grief in an area where two days ago you felt Joy it's just the opportunity for you to start mapping that gray area in a way that allows you to understand it better because everything that comes up
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after a heartbreak and inside of a heartbreak is an authentic part of your experience and if you can stay on the page with as much of it as possible and learn to just watch it and get to know
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it and listen to it which is what we're going to talk about in some of the videos that are coming up you're going to learn an immense amount about yourself and about your values and about your ability to be in relationship with
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other people so instead of beating yourself up every time you feel something that seemingly conflicts with what you thought you would feel or what you wanted to feel instead can you stay curious about it and can you allow that
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to be a part of your experience as a whole person who contains multitudes and who is always learning what it's like to be alive the more we're able to map out that gray area accurately even if there are things on it that we wish were not
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on it right I really wish I didn't have that feeling I really wish I didn't have that impulse it's all a practice in getting to know ourselves and when we have a more accurate map of ourselves we're able to better choose the roots
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through our own experience of life that maximize our own authenticity and aliveness but it's really hard to do that if we're denying major parts of our experience so if we allow it to be heartbreak can be an incredible
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opportunity to get to know ourselves much more deeply and being willing to treat it as such such is exactly the skill that is ultimately going to help us find much more aligned relationships that we can show up to in a much
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healthier way the next time around all right I think I'm going to leave this at that for today as always let me know what's coming up for you guys as you've gone through this video any thoughts feelings questions please
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let me know in the comments below as always I love you guys I hope you're taking care of yourselves and your inner children even when it's really hard to do that and each other and I will see you back here again really
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soon
Topics:attachment healingbreakup adviceinsecure attachmentcodependencyrelationship healingself-abandonmentemotional independenceheartbreakcomplex PTSDHeidi Priebe
