Speaker A
hey guys I'm Heidi prabe welcome back to my Channel or welcome if this is your first time here today we are talking about how to let go of or move on from past relationships and before we get too
Heidi Priebe explains why ending insecure relationships is harder than secure ones: stories we tell ourselves keep us from facing the truth and our real feelings, so moving on requires honesty.
Key Takeaways
- Stuck feelings after a breakup often come from the stories we tell about the relationship, not the relationship itself.
- Insecure attachment makes intimacy harder, leading people to self-regulate with stories that delay healthy grieving.
- Moving on requires facing the concrete truth of what happened and feeling the body's real emotional responses.
- Naming and feeling the pain, then giving yourself comfort, is necessary before healing can occur.
What the video covers
- Relationships consist of the literal interaction with another person and the internal stories we tell ourselves about that relationship and what it means about us.
- Securely attached people co-regulate authentically, sharing both vulnerabilities and strengths, which allows genuine intimacy and makes the pain of a secure relationship ending clean and direct, easing predictably over time.
- Insecurely attached people often withhold parts of themselves (avoidants resist vulnerability, anxious people struggle with independence), so true intimacy rarely develops consistently.
- Without intimacy, insecurely attached people self-regulate through stories about the relationship or the partner's thoughts, which often aren't grounded in actual connection.
- When insecure relationships end, the pain is muddled by these stories, making it harder to grieve than when the truth alone is faced.
- The 'truth' is what concretely happened and the body's felt response to it; stories are endless distortions that can be bitter (narcissist, manipulative ex) or self-righteous.
- Rumination on stories keeps people dissociated from their real, more vulnerable feelings, delaying grief and healing.
- The process to move on involves identifying what was painful, examining how you felt about it, and aligning with reality rather than the narrative.
- Hurt cannot be undone; the goal is to acknowledge it, bandage it, and protect the inner child, giving yourself the comfort needed to feel the pain.
- Recognizing incompatibility without dramatic stories can allow a relationship to end cleanly, or transform into a healthier form such as friendship.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Purpose of the Video
- 01:35Two Components of Relationships: Literal Connection and Inner Stories
- 03:35Secure vs. Insecure Attachment When Relationships End
- 06:20Why Insecure Relationships Lack True Intimacy
- 08:20Truth vs. Stories: Why Stories Are Harder to Let Go Of
- 11:20Narratives That Keep Us Stuck: Bitterness, Self-Righteousness, and Blame
- 15:00Accepting Hurt and Protecting the Inner Child
- 17:00Steps to Move On: Identifying Pain and Examining Your Response
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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deep into this topic I first want to spend some time unpacking what it means when we say that we can't move on or what it means to be kind of stuck in our feelings about something that is already
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over so to kind of lay the groundwork for some of the language I'm going to use for the rest of this video I want to talk about how relationships have a couple of components one is the actual literal relationship we have with people
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so if you are in a partnership with someone you have the time you spend together the things you do together the conversations you have with each other but then also there is the relationship that you have with yourself around that
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relationship and a big part of that includes the stories we tell ourselves about what it means about us to be in a particular relationship and I think that a lot of the time when we find ourselves struggling to let go of or move on from
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relationships what we're actually getting stuck on is the story or whatever other kind of meaning we're making out of the relationship itself so on this channel we talk a lot about attachment and how our attachment Styles and strategies impact our relationships
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and when it comes to moving on from relationships I think that there is a very Salient difference between the way that secure people process things ending and the way that insecurely attached people process things ending and there's a very specific reason why that is when
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you are securely attached the co-regulating that you do inside of a relationship tends to be very honest very authentic and so you are making a true genuine connection with the other person you are sharing both your true vulnerabilities and your true strengths
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you're exhibiting your Independence and you are showing where your boundaries lie and all of those things together give a relationship the opportunity to be truly intimate and for two people to experience really deep connection so when a secure relationship ends or
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when a connection that has those secure elements to it ends there tends to be a lot of pain but it's kind of a very clean direct pain because the things that you're missing about the relationship are actually the things
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that you're missing you're really missing going to that other person and telling them about your day or about what's been on your mind and hearing their feedback or you're missing certain activities that you do together or certain routines you may have developed
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together but with time that clean pain starts to lessen because you eventually find new people new situations that you can co-regulate with as your authentic self and so the pain of missing this particular person subsides in a more or
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less steady and predictable way over time why is it different in insecure relationships in insecure relationships because two people are very rarely showing the whole of themselves to each other so those who lean a little bit more avoidant are going to really
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struggle to get in touch with their more vulnerable side and share that and those who lean more anxious are going to struggle to get in touch with their independence and so it gets really hard for True intimacy to actually develop in
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these relationships at least on a consistent basis and when we don't have true Intimacy in our relationships what we tend to do is we start to self-regulate with stories about the relationship or about the other person instead of getting that direct human to
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human connection so if I'm in a partnership where I don't really have deep true intimacy with my partner what I might do to kind of fill in the void in that relationship is tell myself a story in my own mind about what I'm
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imagining my partner to be thinking or feeling and what I think that means about me if this person thinks and feels in this way and they love me and they think I'm amazing what does that mean about me and we can tell ourselves these
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stories about our partnership ships that are not necessarily evidenced by true intimacy or connection which also doesn't mean that something that neither person wants often it's just something that if you have an insecure attachment style you really struggle to access
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within yourself and anything you struggle to access within yourself you struggle to bring into a relationship I make that point just to be clear that it's often not malicious intent that keeps insecurely attached Couples from having that sense of intimacy and
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authenticity with each other it is truly just a product of early wounding but when you don't have that you learn to regulate using these stories and you learn to make specific meanings out of ambiguous situations that allow you to
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keep yourself feeling okay now when an insecurely attached relationship ends what you often don't have is that very clean direct pain that you have when a secure connection ends because your connection to that person and their connection to you if you were both
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insecurely attached is like likely muddled by all of these stories you were both telling yourselves positive or negative about each other and about what your connection means as well as the way that you like to think of yourself
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Through The Eyes of the other and it is always always always always always harder to get over stories or meanings that we make up about things in our mind than it is to get over realities why because when it comes to the truth and
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when I say the truth I mean what actually happened and what responses we had in our body about what happened there is only ever one truth but there are millions truly endless endless stories that we could make up to distort
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the truth in order to give ourselves that kind of hit in lieu of true genuine connection and for those of us who got really used to at a very young age regulating through Stories We Tell ourselves we can have a tendency to get
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really caught up on those stories even when the relationship itself has ended so in order to let go of and finally move on from a relationship that has ended in reality we have to be willing to let go of the stories we were telling
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ourselves about the relationship and actually face the truth sounds easy probably easy if you're securely attached not so easy if you are insecurely attached and you really struggle to understand what the truth versus a story or a fantasy is so let's
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go over that briefly what is the truth the truth is what concretely happened in reality so something that a camera could have picked up on happening you and your ex-partner for a period of however many years live together cooked meals
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together had conversations together had regular sex spent time with each other's family spend time with each other's friends had conversations in which one or both people may have raised their voices cried displayed strong emotions all of these things concretely happened
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and in each case when those things happened something happened in your body as a response to them the thing that happened in your body as a response to those things while they were happening is your emotion or your feelings about
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everything that happened now when we dissociate from our present moment emotions and instead go into our minds and start telling ourselves stories about what's happening even in the moment that it's happening what we are doing is keeping ourselves dissociated
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from our real often more vulnerable feelings and once the relationship has ended that story might turn into a very bitter one my ex was a narcissist my ex was manipulative my ex had all of these negative characteristics and you can
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spend a lot of time ruminating on all of those and what is that rumination doing it is keeping you away from the actual felt experience of pain over things ending or you might err on the other side of
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this right you might tell yourself angry stories you might tell yourself self-deprecating stories I was the problem I did everything wrong if I can just take complete and full responsibility and beg them to come back maybe then I will fix things and again
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what is that story doing it is keeping you distracted from the actual pain that you are feeling in the present moment same with stories that are derogatory towards the other person oh they were so pathetic they could never have handled
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me I was always too good for them what is that story doing keeping you away from the pain our minds particularly when we are insecurely attached love to make a whole bunch of meaning out of things in order to keep
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us feeling invulnerable as long as we are telling a story that is about the other person and not about ourselves and how we feel we are approaching things from a place of invulnerability if we are leaving our own feelings out of this
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story about all the things that the other person did wrong or about all of these fantasies that we have about wanting to get them back if in no version of those stories are we acknowledging the way that we just feel
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about things ending or the way that we feel about what happened at different points within the relationship we are coming at it from a place of invulnerability and nothing heals from a place of invulnerability okay we heal when we sit with our inner children we
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listen to their hurt feelings we listen to their anger we listen to their sadness we listen to their pain and we give them Comfort around those emotions so what I see a lot of people doing when a relationship ends and they start
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wading through those millions of available stories about what if I had tried this what if they had done this whose fault was it why did this end one day maybe you're feeling rejected and really vulnerable and so your mind
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starts concocting a story about how everything was actually your fault and if you can just change then everything is going to get better and you're never going to have to feel like this ever again right the next day you might be
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feeling self-righteous and so that day you decide this all happened because my partner is the one who is unhealed who did everything wrong I don't need to change I just need to learn to pick better people and that's the only lesson
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I need to take away from this and you can flip-flop through hundreds of thousands of different stories with different themes and none of them will ever help you move on because the wound that happened in the meantime is
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emotionally festering inside of you so I want you to think of this as though it is a literal wound if someone comes up to you one day and stabs you the first order of business is not figuring out
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who stabbed you and why and where they're going now and whether or not they're going to stab the next person your first order of business is tending to the wound so that it does not get worse you cannot fix a situation or
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figure out how to solve a complex problem while you are bleeding out if you leave that wound unattended to it will become infected and it will get much worse inside of your entire system and the same is true when we leave
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emotional wounds unattended while we are out here trying to Wade through all these stories analyze the relationship and what happened and how it ended through ten thousand different contradictory lenses that wound that pain that we feel is getting worse and
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worse because we are not giving it the attention that it needs is there a benefit to figuring out eventually some of the things that went wrong and why absolutely of course however figuring that out still is not going to make the
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wound unhappen if you have been hurt in a relationship even if the other person meant well even if it turns out it was all a big misunderstanding it still hurts you can't make the hurt unhappen you can bandage it up well and figure
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out how to avoid similar situations in the future that is the protective self-parenting piece that we all need to do but first you need to do emotional First Aid on yourself nothing is going to change until that happens so what
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does emotional first aid look like it looks like getting really honest with yourself and admitting what you feel in response to what happened so I had a relationship at one point in my life where there was a betrayal that happened
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there's a specific instance in which my partner crossed a boundary that we had explicitly agreed upon in our relationship and for years both while I was still with this person and after we broke up I told myself constant non-stop
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stories about my partner I told myself hundreds of angry stories about what that person needed to change I told myself self-righteous stories about how I was such a perfect partner and they didn't deserve me I told myself self-defeating stories about how it was
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my flaws and deficits that led to this betrayal of trust and if only I could find a way to fix those and make sure that I'm not that kind of partner again in the future this will never happen
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again and I never found a way to actually move on and get over that relationship until I admitted to myself about half a decade later that betrayal hurt just hurt doesn't matter if it was justified doesn't matter if I understand
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it it hurt there is a child inside of me who didn't know that someone who loved you could betray you or could cross a boundary in a significant way and when I learned that it was really painful and
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through actually sitting with that pain and bringing it into my body and letting myself feel it and be depressed about it for a little while and move through it slowly I was finally able to move on from that relationship for the first
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time because I wasn't preoccupying myself with all of these stories about it I was just admitting that something happened and it hurt and then I had the true information that I needed the pain told me something bad happened my brain
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told me I understand what led up to that bad thing happening and so in the future I can work to make sure that my Dynamics do not get to that place where it becomes very easy for betrayal to take
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place but until I could really feel and integrate that pain there was nothing I could learn from it right all I could do was continuously emotionally respond to these stories that I was telling myself so step one in this process is getting
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really Associated to what exactly happened what is the thing that concretely happened that a video camera could have picked up on that is completely unambiguous and how did you feel about that thing what happened in you as a direct response to that thing
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so a video camera cannot pick up on someone being a sociopath a video camera cannot pick up on someone manipulating or disrespecting you a video camera can only pick up on specific things that were done or said what happened that was
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done or said in your relationship that was painful or that you're stuck on and struggling to move on from and how exactly did you feel about it the second step in this process and it's only really a two or three step process is
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one that's not going to be the right choice for everybody and it's not going to be the right choice for every dynamic or situation so use your own judgment here be protective of yourself and your own emotions but if you can I think that one of the
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best things you can do to move on from someone is to tell them the truth about what happened so a lot of the time what we're doing when we're trying to resolve relationship conflicts is not expressing what happened and how we felt it is
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trying to get the other person to agree to the story that we have started telling ourselves about them and their intentions I will save you the Ted Talk and just tell you that does not end well about 99.999999 of the time what does tend to
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be a lot more productive is being direct with people about what happened and how we felt and then the response you get in return to the truth gives you some of the most important information you could ever have about how to treat that
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relationship going forward so there are two times in my life that come to mind where I've gone back to a past relationship of some nature that I was struggling with not having closure around not being able to move on from
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and told the other other person in very direct I statements how I felt about certain things that had happened and in particular how I had felt about the ways that those relationships ended and the responses I got could not have been more
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different one of the responses I experienced a lot of hurt and a sense of rejection in relation to and the other response opened up this door for a very beautiful honest healthy relationship of a new form to start getting built
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between me and the person I'd spoken to but both of those cases were equally effective in allowing me to move on from the past because when we tell someone the truth and the response that we get in return we find very hurtful now I can
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stop asking myself the question what if I had dropped all the stories and told the truth and been completely honest with this person what would have happened I never have to ask myself that question ever again I know what would
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have happened I know I don't like what happens and so now I can move on I don't have to tell myself all these stories anymore I did did the true thing I put my true self on the line and getting
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rejected for being your true self is kind of a great thing it hurts it sucks you have to find a way to tend to those wounds you're connecting with other people who love you and through showing yourself lots of care and love but it
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forever murders every single what if question that you could ever have in your mind and once you have murdered those what ifs it becomes really easy to move on or things could go in the other direction right you could for the first
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time show up and be vulnerable and open and honest about how you're feeling and that could be the thing that changes your relationship with someone for the better maybe you find out okay we were never gonna be the right partners for
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each other but we could be the right friends for each other we could drop all of these dramatic stories we were telling ourselves about each other and just accept that we weren't very compatible and find a way to build a new
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type of relationship on top of that solid foundation of Truth now that you have it or maybe you could go back into the same Dynamic that you had but with a better more honest and vulnerable component to it so step one locate the
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pain attend to it in yourself and two if you are able to and if it is reasonably emotionally safe for you to do so tell that truth to the other person and see what happens expose your honest authentic self to oxygen and just see
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what happens it is the most direct way to get the answers you need and move on with your life and I want to point out here that that might not be the most desirable outcome for those of us who
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are not actually interested in moving on and I say that without judgment sometimes the stories that we tell ourselves about other people being the villain or about us being a villain these stories are adaptive because we aren't yet ready to face the truth and
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so as much as I would advise us all to refrain from projecting those stories outward and trying to enroll other people in them I do think it's worth noting that sometimes when we think about just telling the truth both
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accepting what happened and where it hurt and then moving on that actually feels kind of panicky for our systems because maybe the stories we're telling ourselves are keeping us feeling tied to that other person and maybe we feel more
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comfortable feeling tied to that other person even in a negative way than we do in accepting that actually we just had some incompatibilities and needed to move on with our lives separately sometimes the reason why we create all
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these stories is because we are just too afraid to look at the truth and so if that's the place you're in that's just something to note the first step in becoming more honest is just being honest with yourself about which stories
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you are clinging to and why right that's still a small step in the direction of Truth and integrity is acknowledging to yourself when you're not ready to let go of or to reality test the stories that you have inside of your own mind and
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then I guess the third step in this process is just building a new future based on the truth that you now have access to and if if you can't do step two and you can't actually get in front
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of someone and let them know what you're thinking or feeling and I understand that there are sometimes people you literally can't talk to because they are dead or because they are incarcerated or because there is some way in which you
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don't have access to them there might be other people you choose not to talk to because you recognize that you might not be emotionally capable of dealing with certain responses from them if you were to tell the truth and I do encourage us
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all to push ourselves a little bit in that department but if there are people who when you have been honest with them in the past it has consistently led to conflict that does not get resolved it might be worth just stopping at step one
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going at least I can tell the truth to myself about this relationship and what I felt within it and that act of aligning myself with reality can be enough for me to move on so that might look like even if you feel 99 sure that
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this person had narcissistic patterning or something that was really detrimental to your relationship trajectory still the most important part is recognizing how did I feel about that when they said those things when they spoke to me in a
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way that I interpreted as them speaking down to me or disrespecting me how did I feel what blows did my inner child absorb and how can I be present with that inner child and help her to heal instead of staying preoccupied with the
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other once I do that work I can actually start to move on because I've repaired the relationship that I have with myself and now that I've felt that pain and recognized it and absorbed it now what do I know about which boundaries I need
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to have moving forward the next time I feel this pain it doesn't matter if I have the right label or diagnosis for the other person it doesn't matter what story I'm making up in my head to explain what they're
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doing what matters is I'm familiar with this sensation of pain I know I don't want to chronically feel it again so now I have to learn the next time I feel this how am I going to respond to
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protect my inner child that might mean communicating honestly to the other person about your pain and seeing if they're willing to sit with you and work through it and if that doesn't work it might mean setting boundaries the next time you feel that
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type of pain to make sure that you are protecting your inner child in the future but again until we name it and feel it and give ourselves the Comfort we need around it we are not going to get better from our pain do the secure
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thing feel the pain acknowledge that you felt it and acknowledge that it means you need to do something different all right that's all I'm going to say on this topic for today but as always let me know what's coming up for you guys as
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you were listening to this what your thoughts feelings responses are I love you guys I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other and I will see you back here again really soon [Music]
Topics:moving onpast relationshipsattachment stylesinsecure attachmentruminationbreakup healingco-regulationemotional truthinner childrelationship grief
