heart break

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Minor set backs (we’re all good though)

A while ago I decided to write a post about relationship break up levels, how one person will start at level 10 and the other will be clawing themselves up from the lowest of lows and it’s all a process?

Well. Recently I’ve been thinking about how much easier life would be if that process was linear. But it turns out it isn’t.

You want to know why you cried over them today but yesterday you were excited to find someone new? Because falling out of love isn’t linear and as much as we’re taught how to love, we’re never taught how to stop.

We’re raised around the idea of once you fall in love it sticks, there’s no need to learn how to unlove someone. You never get taught to prepare yourself for someone walking out of your life when they were the ones who chose to be in it in the first place.

Why aren’t we taught how to walk away when we feel unappreciated, or how to stop loving someone who tells us they don’t want us? It isn’t an easy process. Your heart will always hold onto hope.

That’s why sometimes you don’t talk to them for weeks and then fall into a drunk slip up. But it’s ok, it happens. Own your s**t and move on.

You keep going back because your heart hasn’t yet caught up with your head and in most cases your head is the sensible bit, it’s the part of you that knows you’re better off without them. So when your heart does catch up you’ll be fine, but it’s a slow mother f***er. So please bear with it.

There’s a song I keep thinking of recently because there’s a line in it that goes like this “if you’re going to break my heart, do it right, don’t leave me holding on like the last time” I listen to it and I’m like, yeah you know what, if someone tells you they don’t want you, but they only partly mean it so basically, they’re saying it to push you away while they try to figure it out, how is that fair? You’re in or you’re out dumb ass. Because it isn’t helping the whole linear break up situation if you’re not sure that they’re sure, you know?

But it’s true and it’s another reason why our hearts hold onto people, because if someone hasn’t broken it properly then it just sits itself in limbo. Which is super annoying.

I don’t even know what classes as proper heartbreak either, is it being cheated on by the one person who was your whole world? Is it seeming them move on with someone you considered a friend? Or is it when you’re sat in front of the man you love and having to listen to him tell you that he doesn’t feel anything for you? All these possible heartbreak situations are pretty f***ed but is one more legit than the other? Like on a scale of having your heart broken, does one of these ending versions make the most sense when we think of what proper heartbreak is?

Because personally, I think all versions of a break up will hurt just the same. It doesn’t matter what scale of trauma they fall on, to you, it’s horrific.

So next time you pick your phone up and you’re about to message them, try to think what the outcome will be. Are you doing it just because you’re drunk, or because you want them back in some way, maybe it’s just because you like knowing you have access to them still? Whatever you want the outcome to be, just have it clear in your mind.

But whatever the way. Healing will never be linear, you’re allowed to be sad some days and happy the next. You’re allowed to cry because you miss them one minute and pick yourself up and go out on a date the next.

THERE ARE NO RULES. STOP BEATING YOURSELF UP!

P.S the song I mentioned can be found here for whoever wants to listen to it. Enjoy!

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Confirmation Bias and a serious case of regression

Did you know our brains are there to protect us from things that we register as dangerous? Like it will literally send chemicals around our body when it senses danger.

And you know what we register and scary and dangerous? – the unknown. And what gives us the biggest sense of “the unknown”? Well … a break up.

When a relationship ends we enter into the biggest unknown phase that we’ve been in for a while, so we tend to go into flight or fight mode.

We start going over things in our minds like, what will I do without them, how will I fill my time, what will my future look like. Etc. Etc. But all of these questions open us up to the big scary “unknown”

To our brains …. regression is the biggest form of self protection because it’s taking us back into a sense of known behaviour and our brains associate that with being safe. Our brains will literally play neurological tricks on us to make us feel like the sun shines out of someone’s back side and they can do no wrong, just because dating someone new seems too scary.

So wether you’ve just been dumped or you’ve just dumped someone, keeping a good check on your brains need to regress to your former person because they represent safety is something I would definitely recommend.

Before going back to someone you need to ask yourself these questions because another neurological issue we can be facing is falling into a state of confirmation bias.

What is confirmation bias I hear you asking?Well … you know that saying about rose tinted glasses? It’s kind of like that. It’s when our brain goes looking for memories to back up our own views and in the case of a break up, our beliefs are that the person we aren’t with anymore was the best person in the whole entire world because our desired outcome is to believe that we won’t ever find anyone that compares to them.

When we feel ourselves missing someone our brains will literally search for reasons as to why this is true, so suddenly all we can think about are the positives in an ex just so our brains can back itself up for missing them.

So when the need to regress tricks your neurological systems into a state of confirmation bias, remember that everyone has a flaw. Seriously … everyone does and I can guarantee that for every one thing you miss about someone, there will be two things that make you better off without them.

So here are the questions I like to ask myself to make sure I’m not being tricked by my own love confused brain post break up.

1. What did they bring to me that I can’t bring to myself?

2. What was a deal breaker I was happy to overlook while I was with them but not now?

3. Did they do as much for me as I done for them?

4. What traits that they have are actually irreplaceable?

Dig deep when you think about answering these, because I can guarantee that when you really think about it, you’ll see that your brain has probably tricked you into a right f***ed up confirmation bias situation!

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Sounds like you’ve got a lot of baggage

Imagine that. Imagine someone who used to claim to love you telling you that no one after them will love you because you now sound like you’ve got ‘baggage’

Maybe that should come on the warning label when you date someone with a narcissist personality. Not only will the tear you down when you guys are together, but they will continue to do so once they aren’t even in your life.

Funny thing is, that so called ‘baggage’ they’re claiming makes you unlovable is only from all their unneeded extras they’ve left you with. You know when you get to the airport and realise you need to get rid of a few things you don’t actually want because your suitcase is too heavy, yeah well that’s the crap they left you with.

You were just fine, in fact your suitcase was way under the weight limit, but the stuff they left you with weighed 10x the amount of anything you actually owned yourself.

But it’s ok, because a heavier suitcase just means you need to develop a more keen sense of awareness for what muscles are working to carry this heavier weight.

If we’re speaking metaphorically, the muscle they’ll have left you needing to work on is actually your brain. But god damn will that muscle be toned af for the next person who wants to try and join you at this made up airport (kind of like a terming to jet off to a perfect healthy relationship).

Here’s the part when you can thank your narcissistic piece of s**t ex for leaving you with the weight of your relationship and where it went wrong because all they’ve done is provide you with the ability to sense someone with negative intentions a mile off.

Typically speaking, this kind of ex will normally be the second person you fall in love with. And this is based off of the findings of anthropologist Helen Fisher and according to her we only fall in love three times in our life but our second love, well that’s the hardest one.

It’s the one that teaches us lessons about who we are and how we often want or need to be loved.

Our second love will typically become a cycle, often one we keep repeating because we think that somehow the ending will be different than before. Yet, each time we try, it somehow ends worse than before and we focus so much on making it work that we will tend to lose sight of if we actually should be trying to make it work at all.

More often than not, our second love is unhealthy, unbalanced or narcissistic. Most likely there will be high levels of drama. This is exactly what keeps us addicted to this storyline, because it’s the emotional roller coaster of extreme highs and lows and like a junkie trying to get a fix, we stick through the lows with the expectation of the high.

So it’s no surprise really that this love has just us with some ‘baggage’.

However …. what it has done is shown us exactly what we don’t want from a love that we will have forever. It’s also taught us lessons that we would never have learnt if it wasn’t for going through this experience.

So thank your second love, for leaving you with their baggage (and then kindly reminding you of it years later just to make sure you don’t move on from them) because without them, you wouldn’t know what a healthy long lasting relationship is and how to cherish the man/woman that makes you feel safe and respected.

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THAT feeling

Do you know that feeling, the one where someone else suddenly tears your life apart, destroys your self-worth and although you don’t know it yet, they’ll also be responsible for keeping you up at night for the next good few years wondering why you just weren’t enough (yay bedtime anxiety).

It’s a feeling you get in your chest, like you can actually feel your heart breaking but worse, it feels like there’s suddenly so much pressure on your lungs that you can’t breathe, everything you thought you knew and trusted is gone, just like that. The air feels like its been taken from your body by the same person who told you they’d die for you and yet ironically here you are feeling like your dying AND IT’S BECAUSE OF THEM.

That’s not love. And now here you are, convincing yourself that you’re the reason it all went wrong. It’s your fault they chose to give someone else the same affection they we’re giving you. You pushed them into the arms of someone else, someone who isn’t even better than you.

Maybe amongst all of this, that’s the part that is hurting the most, the fact you know you’re better than the person they risked losing you for.

Oh, did you know that scientists have proven that heart break can invoke physical pain? Yeah so next time, before you do something shitty to the person who’s fallen in love with you, just remember that not only are you mentally scarring them, but you’re actually causing them physical pain by shattering their heart with your selfish immature behaviour.

You know what sucks even more; you’ll never forget a feeling like this. Once someone has crushed you in the worst way possible, you’ll never really forget that, yet somehow, you’ll eventually find it in yourself to fall in love again. Scary right, how being human means, we have so much emotional vulnerability, heartbreak I guess mimics getting a tattoo or having a baby, at the time it hurts like hell but you’d do it all over again just as soon as you’re ready, as if your brain kind of forces you to forget quite how bad it was because the intoxicating feeling of falling in love is worth risking getting your heart broken for.

I know what the worst part of all of this is, it’s the fact they’ve walked away from this unscathed, unbothered and with the whole thing not really causing any knock of effect to their own future. They’ll carry on as if nothing ever happened, while you’re here in pieces trying desperately to find something to hold together mixed bag of broken fragments that make up your trust, self-worth and heart.

The next time they do this maybe they’ll use a different excuse for their behaviour, maybe the next person won’t have to hear them say ‘in my head we broke up a long time ago’ or maybe, they’ll be as narcissistic as ever and blame anything but themselves for their own shitty behaviour.

Just know that you’ll heal, it will take time and you’ll have to be selfish if you want to try and forget that feeling of having your heart broken.

But you’ll get there, because a good heart will always heal.

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This is what heartbreak looks like

Who knew this is what heartbreak looks like.

Heartbreak has the most beautiful brown eyes and hair so soft you want to run your hands through it every day for the rest of your life. But you can’t keep him, he’s going to break your heart.

Heartbreak tells you the most convincing lies, it’s love he tells you. Everything he does is because he loves you. Poisonous words dressed up as something you need, something you want to keep listening to for the rest of your life. You’ll be able to listen to him for the rest of your life he tells you, but heartbreak is the best liar you’ll ever meet. So convincing, you even start to question if in fact you’re the bad and he’s the good.

Heartbreak needs your attention to make him feel validated. But he doesn’t just need your attention, he needs attention from anyone who will give it and this is why he will end up breaking your heart.

Heartbreak will take your hand and show you off to his friends and family, he likes people knowing that you’re with him. He’ll treat you like the best thing in the world until you’re not anymore.

Heartbreak is handsome and dominant, he loves knowing he makes you feel safe, until he decides he doesn’t want to anymore.

True heartbreak will generate electricity when he touches your skin, and you’ll forever be looking for that spark in a place where your heart is safe. But nothing can awaken your body like heartbreak does.

They teach you to look out for heartbreak but I guess we never expect him to be wrapped in such a charming package, one that you look for on every street, every train and in every passing car.

We can move on from heartbreak, but we can never forget him.

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Swings and roundabouts

Just like the story of Romeo and Juliet, but the edited version … where Romeo is a complete twat and Juliet is a needy bitch.

Oh and the fact that hopefully no one will die, except apparently it is possible to die of a broken heart and maybe just maybe that’s how this will end.

This story that’s going round and round, this stupid modern day romance story, where a happy ending is looking less and less likely because we have countless options of our fairy tale ending right at our finger tips.

Neither of you want the other at the right time and when one of you is falling hard the other one is shutting off faster than a fat man at a juice detox retreat. Because what’s more gross than when one person has feelings and the other one doesn’t (ew, cringe)

Remember as children we’re always told ‘oh you just want that because you can’t have it‘ well guess what … adults get that as well! Except it’s less likely to be with material objects and tends to be more with wanting attention from people we can’t get it from.

And that’s where we get back to “our story” because you’ll only want me when I’m pulling away from you and, to be fair this is where we’re the same and it is what I would class as our downfall.

The equation of you and me:

You + wanting me = me not wanting you + you getting bored = you giving less attention

(You – your undivided attention = me wanting you) = Me + wanting you = you not wanting me

I could be driving myself crazy being head over heels in love with you (and trust me I know because I have been) but because I feel like that we both know you’ll be pulling away at a rate of knots! It’s all so tragic and romantic (not).

Oh modern love! Aren’t you awful and disgusting! I wish we could go back to the era of our grandparents where you married your childhood sweetheart and stayed together forever, but nope. That’s not how life really works anymore.

So how does this compare to Romeo and Juliet? Well, it’s tragic isn’t it? Paired with the swings and roundabout leading to continuous heart break and external forces keeping two people apart.

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Try Not To Need Them

 

 

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Once you feel like you need them you’ve already lost a little part of you.

Remember that confident independent young woman who used to stare back at you in the mirror, the one who would put red lipstick on before a night out and didn’t have to fake a brave face? You would head out, ready to pull the strings of the numerous men you had dangling from your fingertips, the ones who would do anything for you in the blink of an eye.

But now it’s different, because as soon as you felt like you needed someone other than yourself. You lost that part of you that felt indestructible.

He spent years making you feel like you could get anything you ever wanted from him, he wanted to be your everything and you were reluctant because you had your own life and you very much had your shit together. You didn’t want to need him the way he wanted you to.

But without you even realising, suddenly it happened, you didn’t want to be around anyone other than him. All of a sudden he had turned into your lover, your best friend, your family and everything in between. You pushed everyone else away because you believed him when he said he was going to be your whole world.

But being the whole world is a heavy job and he didn’t realise how much pressure that would put on him, so maybe he didn’t mean it, maybe getting you to push everyone away except him wasn’t intentional. Maybe when he walked away and left you with nothing, he didn’t mean it.

Needing him in the way you did, meant that when he finally walked away from everything he had promised you, you didn’t even know who you were anymore. You would look in the mirror and not even recognise yourself  because he wasn’t there and without him, what were you? Having someone there who has given you everything, means that when they decide to walk away they leave you with nothing.

After an experience like that, it’s no wonder you find it so hard to trust people. It’s no wonder you have to fake that brave face when it comes to love and trust.

When someone walks into your life when you least expect it and promises you that they’ll never leave because they are there to be your everything, why wouldn’t you believe them? When it takes them what seems like forever to win you round and make you feel like theres no one else in the world who can give you what they do, why would you even waste a second thinking they could be lying?

Having someone walk out on you after promising you all that, leaves you feeling empty and constantly questioning what you did wrong. How did you push away the person who wanted to be everything for you?

But the reality is, it was never your fault. They were always going to leave once you needed them in the way they wanted you to, because they never stopped to consider the pressure that’s created by someone relying on one person for every ounce of happiness they need in life. Convincing someone that they don’t need a life outside of the relationship you’ve created is a dangerous game, but some people enjoy playing with fire.

They wouldn’t have considered how reliant on them you would become once you believed you couldn’t be happy unless you were experiencing everything with them. Being someone’s everything seems ideal, until you actually are.

Two people wanting to be wanted by each other so much at different times only results in confusion and undeniable pressure. A strain that no one can withstand.

So the two of you break.

But you break more because you’re the one that’s lost everything. Who are you now without him? And that’s the problem …. you don’t even know who you are by yourself anymore. So to you, it feels more than just a break up, it feels like your whole life has shattered and disappeared.

You’ll spend years trying to figure out how to be you again once they leave, but you’ll never go back to who you were before. Because that version of you was too quick to believe that people stay forever.

You never stopped to consider the person you pictured yourself marrying would leave and destroy everything behind them that you built together.

He promised he was never going anywhere, even when you argued, he said he was never going to leave. Why would he, when he told you over and over again that the only person you’ll ever need is him. Even when you’re mad at your family, even when your friends let you down, he would be there.

And although the whole experience of needing someone has left you with scars, its taught you an invaluable lesson: love is about being two separate people. Love doesn’t mean turning into one person that’s a morphed version of the two of you. The more you need them, the less you are of yourself and thats who they fell in love with in the first place, they never wanted a mirror image of themselves to love. They want you.

My List Especially For You

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I was supposed to tell you a list of things you’re good at, or things that I like you doing. But I’m a bit of a coward, I can’t tell you. So instead I’ve written this, it isn’t really a list as such, it’s more a long description of why I’m in love with you and I suppose some of these things are also the reasons for me falling in love with you, so here it goes …..

I love how I can tell what mood you’re in by the way you kiss me but not only that, the way you kiss me makes me feel like the most loved person in the world, if I could kiss you all day I would. And trust me I mean that, I find it hard to look at you and not kiss you. The way you hug me so closely when we’re in bed makes me feel like you never want to let me go, I feel safe with your arms around me. You give me butterfly’s when you look at me for too long and I find it amazing that you still give me that crazy nervous feeling, we have been together long enough now for those butterfly’s to have gone away, after all, neither of us are 16 getting flummoxed by our first loves. But that chemistry I can feel between us when we look at each other is such an amazing feeling and I hope it never goes away.
The fact that you know to go straight for my neck when you want to turn me on shows how important it was for you to find out what I like quickly.
I love when you tell me I’m beautiful, because you’re the only person I’ve ever believed who has said that to me.
I love the cheeky look you give me when you want me to know how badly you want to rip my clothes off. I’m sure you don’t know the one I’m talking about, but the way you slightly raise one of your eyebrows and give me a one sided smile .. That’s the look.
Waking up with you though, that may have to be one of my favourite things.

You always reassure me and make sure I’m not doing things to only please other people, which means a lot to me.
I have a real problem staying mad at you, as soon as I look at you I smile. It’s very annoying actually, I can try my absolute hardest to be serious with you but I can’t be. You just make me smile too much.
When I don’t want to do something it’s very easy for you to change my mind and you know it, the way you look at me when you ask me to do something just for you, I’ll fall for it every time and quite happily as well.

I always find myself falling for all the little cheeky things you do, I haven’t yet decided if this is a good thing or a bad thing.
All those worries you have that I’ll suddenly change my mind about you, Im hoping that when I eventually let you read this it will help to convince you that I won’t be going anywhere.
And I am sorry that I can’t be as open as you want me to be, I’m trying to fix that for you I promise but I get scared you’ll go away. That I’ll pour my heart out to you and then you’ll disappear.
I just don’t want you to break my heart.

Thank You For Breaking My Heart

 

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You were awful, there I said it.

Never have I been treated so badly by anyone in all my life.
But I’m not here pitying myself, I’m actually very happy.
But you … You’re still with her, in that awful poisonous relationship where you both push and test each other, with no trust. I just got thrust into the middle of it all. By complete accident, I caught feelings for you I say ‘caught’ because it seems like a neagative connotation and I’m glad it does, like someone catching an illness I caught feelings for you in a sudden and unexpected way, through all your lies and fake affection and I sadly believed every word you said to me.

While you lay in bed with me telling me how awful she was to you I believed that she really was, just as when you lay with her telling her I was a tragic cock tease she believed you too. You had us wrapped around your little finger.
You made me feel safe. The worst thing you could have ever done, especially as you knew deep down you would never stay, when you took that safety away from me I felt totally broken and vulnerable.
That’s why I hate you .. Not because of the lies and the deception, because you turned me into something I’m not, you made me feel small and weak and I can tell you that I am neither of those things.
It was this ‘illness’ you gave me. It made me feel vulnerable for a while, but now I’ve built my strength back up.
And I’m slowly opening myself up to the possibility of being hurt again.
But I feel fine about it, because it isn’t by you.

I can pity you now, because I’m happy, I’m happy with him.
He makes me laugh and smile in ways you never could. He looks at me in ways that makes me feel so beautiful and he doesn’t feel insecure about thinking I’m beautiful, not like you did.

I’m slowly trusting him, but it’s taking a while because of these new found issues I have.
But all that pain you’ve caused, that’s basically gone, It’s more like a dull ache, one that reminds me not to fall so hard and fast for someone like I did with you.
I hope I fall in love with him, because it would be an honour to feel loved by him.
Like they say, you can’t choose when you get hurt in this world, but you can choose who hurts you.

I made a mistake letting you hurt me, you shouldn’t have been able to get that privilege.