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Transcript provided by YouTube. Slightly edited with AI.
What’s up, everybody? I did this live, it was a spontaneous thing. I was just shooting from the hip, but a lot of people listened to this. We had thousands of people there live, and they said, “Please, please, please record this somewhere. Put this somewhere so that I can listen to it again. It was incredibly healing and valuable for me.” So we actually took the original footage and we are re-releasing it here for you and for so many of you who were like, “Please don’t let this go away.” So here it is. If you didn’t see it first time around, here is your chance to see it.
By the way, while you’re here, this is your PSA that I did my best master class I have ever done on heartbreak on the 25th of February. If you weren’t there live, or if you were and you know how great that was and you want to share it with other people, this is your chance to see it before it goes away. The replay is available at llifreplay.com. This could easily have been a program that we charged for, we didn’t. We just put some of my best heartbreak content inside this session for you, and it disappears this Friday the 28th at midnight Pacific time. So make time in your diary today to go and watch that, and watch it today because once you watch it, you’re going to have 10 friends that you want to share it with as well, and you want them to watch it before it disappears. So go check it out before it disappears, llifreplay.com, and enjoy this video.
The Theme of Heartbreak
Today I’m really excited to spend some time with you today. I’m spending time today talking about something that is very close to my heart, which is the theme of heartbreak. And I want to make this an opportunity for you to comment and talk about what you’re going through right now, because I know that many of you are currently going through heartbreak. I think there are even statistics around Valentine’s Day being one of the peak moments of the year for breakups and for people to decide they no longer want to be in a relationship. So some of you may be experiencing the timing of this being very apt for your life.
Welcome to Instagram as well, who have just joined. We’re going to go live today on Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok, and YouTube. But Valentine’s Day is typically a time, this week is a time when a lot of breakups happen, and even if we’re not going through a breakup that’s fresh this week, for many people, this will be a time that calls to their mind a breakup. It exacerbates a heartbreak that you feel already because you know you’re seeing Valentine’s posts everywhere. I mean, even my God, the newsletters that I’m getting today from companies that really have nothing to do with love whatsoever but are still talking about products that somehow relate to Valentine’s Day, I don’t know how. But it’s bombarding us from every direction, and for those of you who are experiencing a heartbreak today or this week, this will be very raw for you. For those of you for whom heartbreak reminds, Valentine’s Day reminds you that you know have lost someone recently, then this will be a hard time for you.
And if you’re someone who is single and has been single for some time and deeply, deeply wants to find love, Valentine’s Day is a stark reminder of the heartbreak that we feel in not having found love yet. So there are different kinds of heartbreak, aren’t there? There’s acute heartbreak from having been freshly broken up with, or having to break up with someone who we know wasn’t right for us but we still love. There’s chronic heartbreak that comes from either not being able to get over someone from the past, or perhaps never having found someone in the first place and getting to an age in our lives where we really thought that or hoped that we would have found love by now and we still haven’t, and so we’re chronically heartbroken. We have, we live with this sense of heartbreak that our life has not panned out in this area the way that we had hoped.
I want to talk about these various forms of heartbreak today. And if you want to continue the session that I’m doing today with me on Tuesday of next, well, no, on the 25th of February, I should say, it’s going to be on a Tuesday. I’m going to be doing a live session with all of you to work through heartbreak and to help and to give you the best of what I know. We’re going to start that today. If you want to continue with me, comment the word heal if you are on Instagram or Facebook, and I’ll send you a link so that you can join that. It’s completely free. And if you’re on YouTube or Tik Tok, you can go to lovetraining.com.
Experiencing Heartbreak
I want to stop by saying the obvious, but I think the thing worth mentioning, which is that in times of heartbreak, there are plenty of well-meaning people who give us lots and lots of advice and tell us the best ways to cope, tell us the best ways to move on, tell us the best ways to um not think about it or to reframe it into something positive. And a lot of the well-meaning advice we get when we’re heartbroken can really fall on deaf ears because we, we are in a very specific place and it’s so visceral.
I can remember a heartbreak in my life just driving to the gym. It was all I could do to try to just get myself somewhere where I might do something useful. And I was driving to the gym and I remember driving along a road near my house and crying in the car, just on my own, just crying, driving to the gym. And I remember getting there, and there was someone who was my trainer at the time. And the first thing I did, I remember this so vividly, the first thing we did was jump on a rowing machine for five minutes and I couldn’t say a word the whole time, and he knew something was deeply, deeply wrong. And I just was rowing and like a zombie, unable to speak. And then I tried to gather myself five minutes later and he looked at me and he, he almost didn’t even ask what was wrong because he knew something was really wrong. And he, you could tell he didn’t really know what to say. He just was saying, “I’m sorry.” And I found myself start to well up in the gym as I was trying to lift a weight and I said to him, “I’m sorry, I have to go. I can’t be here. I have to go. I can’t be here.” And I couldn’t even bring myself to do this thing that you know, in theory, you know, what do people say? Go do the things that are good for you. Go do the things that will make you feel good. Go work out. Go, you know, hang out with friends. But we’ve most of us all have had that, that moment where we are simultaneously a zombie in the world, who it feels kind of deadened and numb to life, numb to the outside world. But internally, we’re anything but numb. Internally, we are breaking. It feels as though we are, we are breaking to pieces and we have no idea how to handle the amount of pain that we’re in. That’s, you know, what genuine heartbreak feels like.
Finding Sympathy for Yourself
And one of the things that was a fascinating experience for me, and you tell me in the comments if you’ve experienced something like this, one of the fascinating things to me was that being in that feeling, I, I firstly, I didn’t do what I had done in the past. In breakups in the past, in breakups, I had tried to just distract myself. I tried to go meet other people, go on dates, hook up, do something that would just take, I was running from that pain and doing anything I could to numb myself from it or to it. And this time, I didn’t do that. It was, I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this before, but I, I felt so ill with the heartbreak that the idea of even being with another person made me feel ill. Have you had that where it’s like you’re too heartbroken to even rebound? You feel so sick with it that you can’t even imagine the idea of being with another person.
And it was through this almost complete incapacitation, it was through this complete devastation, through this complete inability to do anything but be in that pain, that I started to be with myself in a different way. I have spent a lot of my life, and I’ve worked on this, one of the reasons I talk so much in my work about core confidence, the relationship we build with ourselves, is because I have had in my life many struggles with the relationship with myself. For some people, I know there is, there are those people in the world that seem to just naturally have a wonderful relationship with themselves. I wasn’t one of them. And it took me a long time to figure out what it meant to be kinder to myself. It’s taken me a long time to get to a point of realizing what meant to be compassionate to myself, to have a good relationship with myself. And there was this interesting thing that happened to me during the, the worst heartbreak of my life, which was that I was so battered and so, so sad, so deeply sad, so inconsolable, that I actually began to feel a sympathy for myself. It was a sympathy that I don’t think I had allowed myself at other times in my life. You know, my usually in my life, when something bad happened, usually when I failed at something, normally when I got hurt, I would go to a place of self-blame. I would go to a place of self-loathing. But I was in such a terrible place and I felt so wounded that maybe for one of the first times in my life, I actually felt genuine sympathy for myself. Does anyone relate to that in the comments right now? I’m, I’m just curious. I, Sylvia, it sounds like maybe you relate. Does anyone else relate to that feeling of feeling so bad that finally you’re actually able to access a kind of sympathy for yourself?
Getting Closer to Yourself
So there was something special that happened when I began to, I, I, I actually was able to access that sympathy for myself. Something really special happened. I, I started to get closer to myself in a way that I hadn’t before. I certainly got closer to myself than I was in the relationship because when I was in the relationship, I absolutely was not close to myself. When I was in the relationship, I, I, in, in a way, I couldn’t have been farther from myself. I spent my whole time making someone else happy. I spent my whole time worrying about whether I was enough or whether I was doing enough or whether I was being impressive enough. It was all about, you know, essentially, it was a way of me telling myself constantly, “I, you know, you better show you’re good enough. You better show you’re enough here. You better not fail. You better not mess this up.” And Claire, you said the right phrase there. I see you, Claire, on YouTube, you abandoned yourself. And that’s exactly what I did. I abandoned myself. So I could have been less close to myself. I, the me that needed me to show up, the me that needed love and compassion, that me was somewhere in the background. It’s almost like, has anyone seen the film *Get Out*? There’s a moment in that film where the protagonist is, he, he goes, I forget what they call it, but it’s like he’s in this sunken place, deep, deep, deep inside his own mind, looking up at his eyes, looking out. And I felt like I was in that sunken place. I was somewhere so small, so reduced, looking up at the me that was trying to impress and trying to be enough, and trying to somehow, you know, fit in or or or not lose someone.
And it, when I went through the, the breakup and when I, when I had my heart broken, I suddenly felt like this return to that version of me. This return to that part of me that actually really needed me to show up, and I was finally able to stop trying to impress somebody else and instead feel sympathy for myself. And that, that allowed me to get closer to myself. And so I want to offer this before I go into answering a few questions here. I want to say that if you are in the depths of heartbreak right now, one of the great healing forces is when we are able to get closer to ourselves through that pain. And heartbreak offers this very unique and special opportunity to get closer to ourselves than maybe we’ve ever been. And that is something that it can be one of the great treasures that we discover in our heartbreak. It certainly was for me.
No Contact and Ego
Let’s see. I want to find some heartbreak questions here. PS Angelique, okay, great. PS Angelique says, “Talk about how hard no contact is, especially when it seems so easy for the other person.” Well, this is a, this is a key thing that we do in a heartbreak is we try to imagine what the other person might be feeling. And we hope, some part of us hopes that they are hurting as much as we are, that they are finding it as, as hard as we are. We hope that they’re going to realize what a mistake they are making and that they’re going to come running back. And I think many of us have had that situation where we, you know, our friends, in an effort to be kind to us, to support us, to rally around us, told us that, you know, they’ll be back. Don’t worry about that. Oh, they’re going to realize how stupid they’ve been and they’re going to be back. And our ego fed on that. You know, we fed on this idea that yes, they will be back, won’t they? They are going to realize what a huge mistake they’ve made, only to find that they never did come back. Has anyone had that experience? You were you were waiting and waiting, your ego was waiting and surviving on this idea that this person would come back to you and that they’re, you know, the karma would come around and they just never did, or certainly they never did in the way that you had hoped.
And really, the kind of the hope that during the no contact period, someone is going to come back and text you is not just a hope from our heart that really wants this to happen again. It’s also a hope from our ego that wants to, you know, feel like it can survive this. Because the way the ego survives is by someone coming back and telling you they’ve made an awful mistake and begging for forgiveness. That’s the way our ego survives. The way our ego survives is that this person didn’t, turns out they weren’t rejecting us after all. They were just, you know, they, they were just making a silly decision.
Our ego getting involved in that way, in a sense, that feel, that thing I said at the beginning of this live, where I said that during my worst breakup, it was a chance to get close to myself and it was a chance, I, I developed genuine affection for myself. The ego gets in the way of that. You know, because ego says, “I want to come out on top,” instead of, “I want to support myself. I want to show up for myself. I want to be there for myself. I want to use this opportunity to get closer to myself.” Ego says, “I want to win,” or, “I, I want to have not been rejected. I want to feel enough.”
So I just say that Angelique, I think that was your name, Angelique, because there, there’s a part of you that is secretly probably hoping this person is going to reach out during the no contact period. And I want you to start to quieten that part of yourself and tell yourself, “That is ego. That’s, it’s not going to bring me closer to myself or help me become everything I can be to sit here and wait for this person to come back to me.” And you frankly don’t know what’s going on in the other person’s mind. You have no idea. You have no idea whether that person is struggling to make themselves happy right now. You don’t know if they’re missing you. You don’t know if they are distracting themselves with work or trying to move on too quickly or anything else. You, you don’t know what’s happening with that person. And frankly, you don’t know. It might seem easy for them today, you don’t know how hard it’s going to be for them a year from now, or five years from now, or 10 years from now, when they realize that they’ve never really known how to make themselves happy or that they’ve been confused for much of their life. I mean, how, how many people are there in the world that just go through life steamrolling people and breaking their hearts only to find that in middle age, they have a crisis because they can’t seem to find what they’re looking for and they don’t know how to make themselves happy. This is extremely common. So you are, what you’re looking at is a very zoomed-in portion of a story that has not actually been fully written yet. How many people leave someone to go and be with someone else only to find that the someone else they left someone for wasn’t the right person after all, or that the, the problem lied, the challenge lied within them, that they don’t know how to be happy. So they keep trying to find happiness in changing their partners or making, you know, trying to find little improvements in a partner in different ways that they think is going to make them happy. People, you don’t know the, the vast complexity of another person’s mind. So please, Angelique, don’t sit there and and assume what is going on with this other person now, and don’t even assume that what’s going on with them now is a reflection of what will be going on for them in the future. You just don’t know.
The hard part about no contact for you is that you’re trying to find solace and of, you’re trying to to make yourself feel better emotionally outside of the context in which you have been trying to make yourself feel better emotionally for a long time. In other words, if you were in a relationship for a long time, you found your emotional support within that relationship. And even if you weren’t very successful, because that person didn’t provide a lot of emotional support or constantly was the source of your anxiety, that was where you attempted to find your emotional support. That was where you attempted to feel better. Which is why what you know, in a relationship, what happens if we have someone that makes us feel anxious? We crave their attention. We crave their love. We crave a feeling of safety that they can give us by finally showing us love or support or telling us how much they care about us or making, making us feel safe. We don’t get it often enough in those kinds of relationships, but it’s still where we seek it. And so when you’re in that habit of seeking love, seeking safety, seeking support in the relationship, and all of a sudden the relationship is no longer there, you’re in the no contact period. Initially, you’re, that reflex doesn’t know where to go. That muscle memory of anytime I need love or support or anytime I need to feel good enough, anytime I need to feel like I’m going to survive this life and not going to die, I’ve gone to that person. And now that’s the very person I’m not supposed to text anymore. I’m not supposed to call anymore. Your mind doesn’t know where to go with that. Your nervous system doesn’t know where to go with that. And so there is this kind of existential breaking apart of the norms, going, “What do I do? What do I, where do I go?” It’s like suffocating, I can’t get the air that I need. And we don’t know how to get it in other ways, not yet, anyway.
The Heartbreak Masterclass
So it, these are the, these are the struggles, and these, by the way, these are the things I’m going to be talking about in detail on the 25th of February. We’re going to go into this more and and really break it down. I’m going to give you a road map for for working on all of this and for working through all of this, and even a road map for get enclosure. I really, I’m excited about this. We’ve been working so very hard on this over the last couple of weeks and we’re going to continue to work really hard on it for the next week. That right now, I’m shooting from the hip in a live, but when we’re together on the 25th of February, you’re going to be part of something that I’ve worked many hours on with my wife, Audrey, who’s sat over there right now. And we work on these things together. We will have worked many, many hours on putting together something that’s going to help you. And I’m only doing it once, by the way. I’m, I’m going live, I’ve not done anything like this on heartbreak in years, years. Especially going live to such a big audience. We’re going to be doing it with people all over the world and you could do it from anywhere. You could do it from work, from your car, from home, wherever you are, you can sit and and watch and listen to this session. But please be there because it is happening this once live and it’s happening on the 25th of February. If you are heartbroken, this will be the most important hour you can spend this year. So please don’t miss it. If you are on Instagram or Facebook, comment the word heal, H E A L, heal. Comment that now. And if you are on YouTube or Tik Tok, right, just open a new browser because that won’t work. If you, if you’re on Instagram or Facebook and you comment the word heal right now, you’ll get a message from me giving you the details for how to sign up. Take 10 seconds, it’s free, anyone can come. But if you’re on YouTube or Tik Tok, that won’t work, you have to go to loveifetraining.com.
Dating as a Distraction
Megan says, “Should we date as a distraction from our heartbreak?” Huh, you think we’ve already answered that one? No, maybe. Well, let, let me answer it quickly. But you, Megan says, “Should we date as a distraction? It will help you get over them.” That saying, look, I think that we’re more likely, it, look, no, we shouldn’t judge ourselves for the things that we do in the moment to move forward or to try to distract ourselves or even numb ourselves because we’re doing that because we’re in pain. But there are better ways to get out of pain and there are worse ways to get out of pain. And the problem with dating someone else is it’s one of those things that often leaves us with an even bigger hangover afterwards, especially because when we’re in a vulnerable state, we’re less likely to run into the arms of someone kind and someone who helps us. We’re more likely to run into the arms of someone who is unhealthy or someone who treats us in very flippant ways or some people who discard us very easily or just unhealthy dynamics. You know, you can find someone who is kind, but you get into a very codependent dynamic because you’re not going there just, we say, “Oh, I’m, it’s just a bit of fun.” But very quickly that fun morphs into a kind of dependence. I’m now looking to this person for my validation. I’m now looking to this person to make me feel better. I might race through the initial stages of dating to get, you know, to to get intimacy. And all of a sudden I find myself in a relationship that isn’t right for me or that I don’t really want and I’m breaking someone else’s heart by having to leave it, or they’re breaking mine when you, when they leave it. We’re liable to make a lot of bad decisions from that place and it’s, it does become another emotional distraction. Because what we’re doing is we’re asking for comfort and intimacy in the arms of another person romantically, and we’re not learning to find it in other ways.
And by learning to find it in other ways, what we’re teaching ourselves is it, we’re really give, we’re teaching ourselves how to be strong in the tools that we have and the resources that we have outside of romantic relationships. What that does is it gives us the ability to say no next time around when you’re out there in dating. The worst thing you can have is an inability to say no to the wrong people. And we are unable to say no to the wrong people when we get attracted to the wrong things, when we’re feeling, when we have a scarcity mindset, when we’re worried we won’t be okay on our own, when we’re looking for comfort, then we say yes to the wrong things. In order to find the right person, we have to be able to say no to the wrong person. In order order to say yes to the right person, we have to be able to say no to the wrong person. But we can only say no to the wrong person if we’ve developed a kind of muscle and an internal strength that allows us to say no and know that we still be okay. That’s the kind of strength that you build during a heartbreak. It’s, it’s the strength that becomes available to you if you don’t take the easy path in a heartbreak. So it’s, we, we’re in a sense by distracting ourselves, we are delaying the building of a muscle that will actually be extremely necessary if we are to find the right person.
Going Back to Who You Were
So this is from Suzi Say Seui on Instagram. “How can you back, how can you go back to the person you were before that relationship?” Oh, what a beautiful question. “It has been months but still seems I am in an endless circle wishing it never ended even though I knew it wasn’t right.” Tell me if you’ve had an experience like this before. This is a very common experience. You start dating someone and maybe dating that person, that particular person scratches some kind of an itch. Maybe that person is particularly handsome or beautiful, and that kind of not only does that trigger attraction, it also triggers our own insecurity not being attractive enough. And when that triggers our insecurity, we want to prove that we can get this person in order to quiet that insecurity. So now we make it our mission to get this person regardless of how they treat us. We just think, “I just want to know that I can get a person like this.” Sometimes it’s because of their status or their popularity that we feel that way. Sometimes it’s because we perceive them as particularly successful or magnetic. Sometimes it’s just chemistry that makes us ignore all of the bad stuff and keeps us in something for too long. But there’s a, there’s something that kind of had a, this pull that pulled us into the relationship.
And what began perhaps as this attraction and this feeling of wanting to prove we could get someone, starts to, with each day of investment, with each way that we show up for the relationship and become more invested in it, it starts to turn into a feeling of love. We, we start to feel like, “Oh, I love this person.” Of course, when we invest in someone enough, we do love that person in a way. We, we, you know, we, we are acting as a loving person towards that person and we do so much for them that we actually start to believe our actions. We start to say, “Well, I must be in love, otherwise why would I be doing all of this? Why would I be going through all of this? That, you know, this is an amazing thing that I’m trying to hold on to. I love this person.”
This is by the way, what happens to a lot of people when they start by just having a bit of fun, but you know, because of some good qualities that person has and because of some kind of magnetic attraction, what started as a bit of fun turned into a situation where we fully loved this person and couldn’t get them off our mind and they became a bit of an obsession to us. And of course, we all know those stories. We lose ourselves trying to please someone. We forget kind of what’s important to us. We lose connection with the people, the places, the things, the activities that are important to us. Everything just becomes about being there for that person and trying to keep the relationship alive. And as we separate ourselves from all of the things that are important to us, it becomes, it sort of starts to feel existential that we must keep this relationship alive because this is, this relationship is the headline of what we have in our life. You know, the more we disconnect ourselves from all those things that we had and were and and loved before the relationship, the more we start to think, “This relationship is all I have, and if I don’t have this, then what do I have?”
So when Sezi, you say, “How do I go back to the person that you, that I was before that relationship?” I want to, I want to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, that this, this relationship was a reflection of certain, um, certain parts of you or certain needs or certain desires that were there before this person ever arrived on the scene. So if someone particularly attractive comes along and all of a sudden it triggers you because you go, “Oh my God, they’re amazing. Oh my God, I’m not good enough. Oh my God, can I get them?” That speaks to an insecurity that was there prior to this. That in, in a sense, that could have been another attractive person and not the person that you fell for. So that part of you was, that existed before this person, and that part of you still wants to be seen, and that part of you still needs your compassion, and that part of you still needs you to show up and show them that they’re good enough. In fact, post-breakup is a chance to go back to that part of you and say, “You know what happened there? What happened to us? Well, someone came along and they were able to distract us with, you know, how gorgeous they were or how successful they were or how charming they were or how charismatic they were. And they kind of triggered that part of us that didn’t feel good enough and didn’t feel attractive enough, and so we just started trying to please that person. But you know, I’m, I’m that part of you, that part of that part of us that didn’t feel good enough, I’m now going to tend to that part of you now instead of looking for another person to make us feel good enough. I’m now finally going to tend to this part of you. I’m going to show up for this part of you. You, you know, I’m not going to allow that to happen to you again. And the way I’m going to do that is by getting closer to you.”
Embracing Becoming
So part of going back to the person you were before that relationship is to go back and look at what happened to a part of you that made this relationship a possibility in the first place. It’s also part of this is to go back to what were the things that I was doing prior to that relationship that felt like me? Maybe things I stopped doing? Maybe people I stopped being close to? What was going on in my life that I got divorced from in that relationship? And how might I get back to that? Or, and, and this perhaps is even more interesting, perhaps I should rather than trying to blindly go back to who I was before this relationship, maybe I should think about who I’ve become in and the ways that I’ve am starting to learn about myself after this relationship. What do there, there will be parts of me today that are drawn in new directions and there’ll be these little voices in me that have matured and grown and maybe even grown beyond my conscious understanding. I feel, you know, maybe you feel pulled in a certain direction. Maybe there’s something you feel drawn to do or discover about yourself or maybe even new kinds of friends that you feel drawn to, different kinds of people in life that you feel drawn to, different kinds of knowledge that you feel drawn to. Listen to those voices because that’s, that goes beyond just getting back to who you were before. It recognizes that you also are in a state of becoming. You’re also, there’s this new incarnation of yourself that is being born out of this experience that you’ve had, that the wisdom of which supersedes the wisdom that you had before the breakup. You know, this, this is actually a chance to get to know who you are today, not simply to return to a form that you were prior to the relationship.
Thank you so much for watching. Leave me a comment, let me know what was the concept here that spoke to you the most, what resonated for you today. And don’t forget, go watch the replay of the masterclass I just did on heartbreak. That disappears this Friday at midnight Pacific time. You can watch it at loveifereplay.com. I’ll see you over there. Thank you so much for being here and I cannot wait to see what you think of this master class.
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This post was previously published on YouTube.
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