How To Deal With A TRIGGERING Breakup (& Heal)

Has your breakup got you spiraling, you feel out of control, you're obsessing about them, stalking them on social media and just generally thinking about them too much all the time? By the end of this video, you'll know how to ride the triggers and extreme emotions of a breakup in a healthy way so you don't feed the shame spiral that comes with obsessive behavior like this. And if rollercoaster breakups and relationships are a pattern of yours, I'm going to show you today how you can heal so you feel emotionally regulated and stable in the body and are no longer drawn to these kinds of relationships. Now I rode this rollercoaster for years and I would always experience breakups as extreme abandonment, until I learned these internal tools that allowed me to develop a strong relationship to myself, that allowed me to heal more easily when my breakups ended and not be so triggered by relationships ending. If you want to develop a secure relationship to yourself, this is the work that I do. As someone who's walked this path directly, I guide my clients to having a secure, healthy regulated relationship to themselves so they always act in their own best interest. I'd like to help you do this for yourself. There is a link where you can book a call and speak with me directly so I can best guide you on that journey. Now, no breakups are easy, but certain breakups are extremely triggering. There are often relationships where we are playing out a familiar pattern that we've been playing out with other relationships time and time again, where there's an intense bond at the beginning, we rush in, we kind of over-idle a sense of judgment and go in really fast, and then all of a sudden, one person pulls away. They're not ready for a relationship or they're emotionally unavailable, but they kind of keep you on the hook, right? They keep you believing that they love you, that they still want to see you, but their actions aren't showing and following their words. And you're left hanging for them, right? You're left waiting, and I call this limbo land. And you get to this crisis point where either they or you finally end it because it's just a completely impossible situation to be in. And when this breakup occurs, regardless of how the breakup happens, there's this feeling of huge loss, of abandonment by that person, right? You never felt good enough, and you feel extreme anger and sadness and shame at yourself for not doing it better, for not showing up in a different way, for not loving him more, right? We kind of regress into a younger version of ourself that experiences perceived abandonment and makes it about us, and we blame ourselves for the relationship ending. Then we get into the spiral of being really obsessive about them and stalking them on social media, and we can't stop thinking about them, and we feel completely out of control. This is the kind of extreme breakup I'm talking about, and it's really important for you to know that extreme triggers are abandonment issues. And interestingly, these types of triggers are less about the breakup of the relationship you've just experienced, and more about the underlying abandonment pain that you've been carrying your whole life, throughout all of your relationships, any time you perceived abandonment, that pain was triggered again and again. And this actual abandonment pain starts in our earliest relationships, in childhood to our primary caregivers, where there might have been a significant trauma of abandonment. But more often than not, there's no actual real abandonment that happens necessarily, but it's more in the form of a complex kind of feeling of neglect. So if you come from a childhood where you had a loving family home, where your parents were there for you, but your parents were emotionally unavailable, or they were distracted a lot of the time, you might have perceived abandonment even though there was no kind of physical absence. So regardless of the type of abandonment pain that you experienced when you were young, if you're a sensitive, empath person, then you are highly likely to perceive that as abandonment, and it's very important to recognize that that is abandonment for you, even though that that was your perception. We need to really honor this part. So each relationship that you then have, and each breakup that follows the same pattern, replicates this dynamic that you had with a caregiver or both caregivers, where perhaps you know, if your parent was emotionally unavailable, it doesn't matter whether it's mother or father, whoever it is, you might find yourself always attracted to emotionally unavailable types, because you kind of feel attracted to them, because that's what your parents modeled to you as love. But because of course, you're attracted to the very thing that caused the abandonment pain in the first place, when you inevitably break up with them or they break up with you, which is more likely what happens, you will feel and experience that same abandonment pain just as if you're a child being abandoned and effectively rejected by the one person or the people that are supposed to be there for you and provide for all of your emotional and physical and safety needs. So I just want to instill this in you that if you're experiencing these kinds of extreme triggers, you're not crazy, you're just actually being triggered at a very, very deep developmentally young age in your body. And this is why you tend to then regress into a version of yourself at that age. You might be turning into this kind of crazy, obsessive kind of childlike version of yourself where you feel uncontrollable, even primal, because that is the version of yourself that first experienced perceived abandonment, perceived loss. You can even feel like you're dying if this is a very young part of you. When a child is very, very young and they perceive abandonment, connection is absolutely primary to survival of you as a child. And if there's not connection there, it can actually feel like you're dying. So even parental techniques like controlled crying can cause this kind of trauma inside a child body. And this is the kind of physiological response that you might have then when you break up with someone and you're being triggered in this way with this attachment wound. And this is why as an adult, when you are attached to someone, they're your primary attachment figure, you love them deeply and they leave, you can actually feel like you won't survive without them because there is a young part within you that actually truly believes that. So how do we healthily manage these triggers? It's important to know that when you are triggered in this way, and trigger is an interesting word, it's just kind of a convenient word to use here, but when there is this really strong physiological and emotional response within you that you effectively have no control over, you're going unconscious, right? This is a reflex, just like you're underwater and you're holding your breath and you've got to come up for air. This is the same kind of reflex that's going on in your body when you're experiencing abandonment or perceived abandonment again, and you're resorting to this instinctual behavior like an animal, right? Because the lower part of your brain is taking over, you're flipping your lid easily and you're in an unconscious state. So in order to actually process once this trigger has occurred, we need to get back into our conscious higher order brain. This is where you're actually coming into a conscious awareness of what's going on in yourself and your body so that you can ride the wave of the trigger in a conscious, healthy way. This allows us to make healthier choices and not resort to instinctual behaviors that make us feel worse. Like I said, sending us down the rabbit hole of obsessing about what they're doing, stalking them on social media, thinking about them all the time. All those kinds of ruminating anxiety, obsessive kind of things are the way that the body tries to make sense of in an unconscious way of what's going on in our body. We can actually hijack that response and bring ourselves into a more conscious response so that we can stay more present to our experience of what's going on. If we don't, and I'm speaking from direct experience here, what can happen is we go down a shame spiral. Now, I've been through this a couple of times and it's just one of the worst things we can do to ourselves. It's like kicking yourself when you're down and you actually do it yourself and Buddhists call it the second arrow, right? The first arrow is the actual trigger that's occurred, the actual wound that's being kind of stepped on, but then the second arrow is the response that we have within ourself and our pattern is to make it seem about ourselves and shame ourselves that we didn't do enough to keep the relationship together or we weren't enough or we didn't love them enough. All those kinds of thoughts and that brings us into this kind of shame spiral and things get worse and worse. We want to break out of that because that can cause a lot of internal damage and harm. I'm speaking from experience that built up in me over years actually. I would always respond to a sense of abandonment with shame towards myself and it contributed to incredibly low self-esteem, low self-worth, completely no self-love or boundaries at all because I was constantly putting myself lower than the other person, putting them on a pedestal and believing that I should have done whatever I could have in order to stay connected to them, which wasn't the case. They weren't a healthy match for me, but in that shame spiral, I couldn't see that. It's one thing to say, just get conscious when you're in the middle of a massive internal trigger, but of course, it's easier said than done. I'm going to give you some actual strategies to help do this and these strategies are going to allow you to develop and strengthen a relationship to yourself, like I said in the introduction, so that you don't fall into these same relationships that create and replicate patterns of dynamics you had with your caregivers where your emotional needs weren't met and you weren't being fully seen, loved and heard and understood in those relationships. The way to get conscious and the way to connect to yourself is to do something I call creating bedrock. If we think of the triggers as these waves that are going to pass through us and when we break up with someone, we are going through grief, we cannot control the waves, we cannot control the triggers, but what we can control is building a structure within us that allows us to anchor to who we are, what we already know about ourselves to be true, to keep us grounded, to the people around us that are part of our identity and our community aside from and away from the relationship that we're just exiting. Think of this bedrock as a structure beneath the waves of grief internal to you and the waves of grief are completely natural to a breakup, as I said, and when you get triggered or when you have this physiological response, when an abandonment issue comes up, the stronger the bedrock we have, the more grounded and secure we'll feel in the body when we need to ride these waves, right? Now when I say grounded and secure, you're not going to actually feel grounded and secure when you're in the middle of a wave of emotion passing through you, but it's literally the difference between a wave of emotion passing through you and you get completely untethered and go into a shame spiral and you totally break down as opposed to just allowing that wave of emotion pass through you and you're aware that you're in a very uncomfortable state and this is not feeling good at all, but it doesn't actually pull you away from yourself. You don't kind of have a freak out moment. You're able to talk to someone through it or work with a therapist or a coach or whoever, and we can strengthen our bedrock and we can control and contribute to it during this time in your breakup and also over your life and that is going to allow you to show up for yourself better in the decisions that you make and in the natural changes and ebbs and flows of what life is, right? Like when you go through difficult times in your life, even when it's not to do with relationships, when it's just work or friends or family, this bedrock is going to be there for you time and time again. So this kind of technique is really larger than just simply riding through a breakup, but I'm speaking to you from that place now, so I'm sticking with that sort of analogy. But I want you to know in the past when I had no bedrock, I would deal with an extreme breakup and perceived abandonment by effectively not dealing with it and just finding someone else and going into the next relationship and just distracting myself from the pain, pushing it down and I'd kind of morph that pain into other dysfunctional behaviors where I might overeat or I might obsess about a new project or a new relationship or obsess about fitness or something or other and I would actually alchemize that emotion into somewhere else rather than release it or metabolize it, so it would still be contained in my body and it would actually kind of build up. I'd of course never be able to show up authentically and healthily for the next person and I'm certain that I pushed many a healthy partner away because I hadn't been dealing with what my internal emotional experience was, I just kept on running from it and because I wasn't metabolizing my internal emotional experience and I didn't have that bedrock, I was unconscious in everything that I did. I was still bitter at myself, I had a hugely loud inner critic, I felt a lot of self-shame, I had little to no relationship with myself and I had no self-esteem, I just kept on continuing the same pattern again and again, I felt out of control and I ironically kept attracting the same kinds of unhealthy relationships with similar results but I was the common denominator and I ended up in these rollercoaster relationships of high highs and low lows but learning this bedrock allowed me to break that lifelong pattern which is why I'm extremely passionate about it and want to teach you how to go through that step by step now. So how do we go about creating bedrock? There are four pillars that make up bedrock, so if we divide them out into those four pillars, they are your sense of self, your sense of safety, your compassion for yourself and permission for the ways or triggers or permission for that internal experience that you're having. So the most important pillar to start with is your sense of self because this is literally the anchor that's going to pull you back into the parts of you that are consistent, away from the rollercoaster of the breakup and the relationships, the little bits and pieces that make up you and who you are, who you were away from all those experiences and the version of you that's you when you're not triggered because you are not your triggers, you are not the emotions that kind of come through, you are the person, I like the saying you are the blue sky behind the clouds that are the emotions that pass by, right? We tend to kind of identify with the clouds, we identify with the emotions and think that we are those things but we are the constant behind it, we need to connect to that. So this part of you is who you are, what makes you up, what you love, what you're good at, what you're excelling, what your hobbies are, what lights you up, right? Your sense of self is something that you need to consistently and consciously nurture and ironically, it's the first thing we kind of give up when we're in a relationship, right? We want to form and bond with someone else which is a very healthy thing to do if they're a healthy match for us, if they're not a healthy match for us and we find ourselves attached to an unhealthy person, often that unhealthy dynamic requires us to give up very big chunks of who we are and so we lose our sense of self in an unhealthy relationship because to stay in an unhealthy relationship requires a level of self-abandonment, of giving up too much in our life and if that person has narcissistic tendencies or whatever they might be, they will be asking us to, you know, stop seeing our friends, stop talking to them about what's going on, right? They actually, they do tend to isolate us as well so there is also that dynamic coming into it. In order to stay attached to someone who's unhealthy, we do need to ignore our intuition, we probably have to give up our preferences because their ego is requiring you to do what they want you to do and our needs are certainly not being met so we kind of learn how to push our needs down and ignore them or think that we are being too needy for having needs. So if that's been your experience, the way to reclaim your sense of self is to literally reach out to other people who know you, people in your past, people in your present, ask them to remind you what makes you, you, right? Reach back into a past time where you really felt yourself or when you felt like you knew yourself better or you were in a happier time. Having that memory, that anchor can be really useful. Now it doesn't matter how far back you feel you need to go to get back to joy and happiness and it might be a memory that's also tinged with some pain as well but we're going to focus on the happy memory here. These are real moments where you felt like you and more often than not for my clients, these are moments in their childhood where they were experiencing, you know, fun things that they did, hobbies and, you know, riding horses and things like those real childhood moments of pure joy can be very, very useful memories to connect back to and start to get closer to when you rebuild your sense of self. Now if you are feeling right now that you can't remember at all a time when you felt happy at all, I hear you, I understand you, I've been there. What I want you to do is act as if, as if you had a happy memory in your past. What would that have looked like? Don't shame yourself for not having it because actually you will have had it but you don't have access to the memory at the moment because of what's going on inside internally for you but acting as if and, you know, seeing if you can kind of recall a childhood memory that might have happened that would might have been happy can help to maybe trigger some more memories. So I want you to go along with it and come up with something that you feel might be somewhat true or you can pretend and make believe that it is true. Once you've kind of got that memory and you're starting to kind of get a sense of who you are in the moment, I want you to just to start a diary, start cataloging the things that make up you, the things you do, the things you say, the things that when you do them you feel like yourself or you feel reminded of this happier version of you even though that might not be the version of you that's here now. Little windows of joy in the day or in the month or in the year. This can also include music that you play and films that you watch and books that you read, like they can be incredibly powerful threads back into parts of ourselves that we've lost. So go back in time, listen to some of that old music and see if you can rummage around and find some happy memories in there and hold on to that piece of music, that song as an anchor to allow yourself to access a happier part inside of you. Now this sense of self involves cataloging those previous past memories and also paying attention to your present experience. So like I said, really pay attention to your day-to-day now. What do you do that makes you you, that allows you to have the sense of self and sense of identity away from the breakup, away from the relationship. The second pillar is a sense of safety. This is just as important as the sense of self because safety is something that we inherently won't have if we're going through a breakup and these waves of grief are kind of coming over and pulling us off our center and if we've been in a traumatic relationship, we are inherently feeling unsafe in our body, with people and in the world. Now sense of safety is something we can cultivate within ourselves consciously as long as you are in no contact with the person that's triggering you. So if you are in those behaviors where you're kind of obsessing about them and you're, you know, stalking them on social media and doing all those things, this is the time for you to have self-discipline and understand that those things you're doing are causing you to trigger yourself. It's the second arrow time and time again. You're actually doing that to yourself now and you need to stop. You need the self-discipline to stop doing that. You can keep doing it but what will happen is the work that you do will effectively be lost because, you know, you can get yourself to a place of safety. I'm about to teach you how to do that but then you go out and you reach out to them or you look at their post on Facebook or whatever it might be and you're just going to erase the work that you've done. So the whole healing process is just going to take more and more time. So the way that we actually get and cultivate a sense of safety in the body is through self-soothing and there are lots of ways that we naturally self-soothe that might not be healthy for the body, right? Like eating food and feeling good in that way, like a comforting kind of a thing, right? Dopamine, bringing dopamine into the body, that kind of feel-good chemical but there are healthier ways of self-soothing that actually allow you to access and down-regulate the nervous system so you feel more safe in the body. So those healthy ways are getting in touch with the breath and practicing slowing down the breathing because when we're in a state of anxiety, fight or flight, our breathing is often shallow and fast. We can access and slow down the breathing so that the nervous system and the whole body feels safer. You can do breath work but breath work is often an active practice and just simply slowing down the breath is just enough you need at the moment to relax the body in the nervous system. There are other things you can do, you can do a self-hug, you can do a head hold, you can work on orienting yourself in the room so that you feel safe so that that part of you that thinks there might be a tiger in the bushes which is the trigger and the wave knows that you're actually physically safe and there's no need to feel dysregulated. So spend time and work with your nervous system and get to notice how and what you need to do to bring yourself back into regulation and to relax and feel safe, whatever those techniques work. Now the other thing you can do to cultivate a sense of safety in the body is to make sure you have good boundaries in your life which I've already kind of touched on in terms of the no contact piece but knowing what is and isn't safe for you at this time in your life and this season going through this kind of grief is really important to do. So obviously the no contact but also just avoiding certain places for now, avoiding certain memories, avoiding certain books or pieces of music, songs, things that you know might trigger just don't do them for now and don't judge yourself for not being able to do it. You are more sensitive and you're more vulnerable at this moment and with time you will be able to go back to those places, you will be able to listen to that piece of music but we need to let time pass for the time being until we're able to revisit them. So just know what is and what isn't right for you and follow through with that okay. The quickest and easiest way to do this is just to draw a circle on a piece of paper, write what inside is safe for you, what people, what activities, what places, what thoughts, what memories are good and healthy and safe and loving and connecting for you and write on the outside what is a no-go for you at the moment right for the next couple of months, for the next six months while you allow yourself to go through this healing practice. Stick to that circle, add to it as you need to and make sure that you're allowing yourself you know the grace that when you accidentally do do that and you feel like you want to check in on your ex or whatever, no problem we're just slowing down the healing process because you're going to pull yourself back out of safety for a minute and you've got the tools to get back into safety. The third pillar which I've kind of already started talking about is compassion for yourself. Compassion needs to come with everything we're talking about and the part the main reason why compassion is important right now is because chances are your inner critic is super duper loud right. When we get into a vulnerable state what tends to happen is our inner critic pipes up, tries to make kind of sense of the situation by taking control which ironically just kind of causes more rigidity and more chaos because you are literally speaking to yourself in a harsh way when you've not done anything wrong, all you're doing is you're going through a breakup with someone who was not compatible for you. The breakup has happened because the breakup needed to happen but your inner critic doesn't believe that, your inner critic thinks it's your fault. So we have to change our internal dialogue from self-criticism to self-compassion and the great thing about this is that love is a stronger energy and emotion right, like just by the laws of how emotions work when you cultivate love within your body, it is a naturally more strong emotion and it will win out over bitterness, criticism, all of that internal anger and shame at yourself. So this is intentional self-talk, you know you might talk to yourself in front of a mirror every day and just noticing and just loving on you and it might feel really ridiculous and silly at the start, trust me once you get the hang of practicing how to speak kindly and lovingly to yourself, this is a practice that can be really powerful for you. So I like to suggest to pretend that you're speaking to a small, very scared, very innocent child that did nothing wrong right, literally speak to your inner child in that way because that is probably the state that she's in. You're the wise adult parent, you're soothing her, you're calming her, telling her she's loved, she's done nothing wrong, it makes complete sense that she's feeling the way she's feeling. So talk to yourself this way and be very wary and listen out for shame talk, you should have done this or you could have done that, any of that internal talk can be really sneaky at a time like this. Shaming yourself for what you did or didn't do is actually like it's kind of useless at this point because the breakup has happened, the breakup needed to happen, if it didn't then it wouldn't have happened right, like you're in this place for a reason and all of that shaming negative self-talk is actually wasted energy. So counteract shame talk with self-validation talk right, it makes complete sense that you did that, it is the right thing to walk away from this person, the breakup is the healthy thing to do right, really validate the situation, validate yourself in what that is. Now this is not to deny the mistakes that you made because we are human right, we did make mistakes that did contribute to the breakup, we're not trying to gaslight ourselves here, what we're trying to do is we're trying to counteract the extreme internal violence that's going on that's part of our shame and also then we can separate okay this is something that I didn't do so well in and I'm going to take a note of it and try and show up better in my next relationship. We've got to forgive ourselves for being human and we can acknowledge our mistakes but we don't need to berate ourselves and make ourselves feel worse because of mistakes that we made. Now the last pillar is extremely important as they all are but something that's really not very natural for us to do which is permission for the waves or permission for these strong emotions and these kind of triggers and reactions to pass through us. The reason it's not very natural for us to do this is because we're used to doing whatever we can to not feel uncomfortable okay, we like to feel comfortable in ourselves and our skin anytime an uncomfortable emotion comes up our natural response is to repress it and if we push things like this down enough what we end up is with this kind of internal messy environment that kind of got us where we are now. So we've got to allow these strong emotions to come up and to pass through us without latching onto them without identifying them with them like I said we are not our triggers, the triggers are literally these clouds that will pass and where the blue sky behind it but we've got to welcome them in they are strangers they're coming in for a cup of tea sitting down and they are going to leave they're not going to stay forever. They are important to recognize and process and to actually understand right because they are giving us extremely important information about our internal state that we've been previously been ignoring so in order to really allow them to release within the body we do need to investigate and give space to what our emotions are feeling like in the body what they might be saying and this goes for our inner critic and our inner shame right like listen out for those words don't believe them but give them space give them love give them nurturing all the other pillars and the blocks that I have been talking about. If we don't do this what can happen is these emotions get stuck in the body okay without releasing emotions they get stuck and stuck emotions can cause blockages which we know can cause chronic issues chronic pain chronic illness and honestly a chronic way of speaking about ourselves in a chronic sense that we're always going to be abandoned that no one loves us that we're not worthy of love and this is this kind of chronic internal state that we probably live with if we've had attachment trauma. So the process for giving permission for the waves to come in and to leave is to firstly recognize that you're riding away to recognize that that's what's going on and the last time I went through a state of grieving I noticed tried to notice the difference between when the wave wasn't there as opposed to when the wave was there there were a lot of waves at the start and it was kind of like almost back to back then I'd get some moments of peace and some moments of little bit of serenity and a wave would come again so I'd try to notice the contrast between when there is no wave as opposed to when there is a wave and when that emotion arrives when that wave comes in it's really important to just notice how you're feeling in the body that tells you that it's there and inquire around that emotion right like what does that emotion need at that moment does it have any wisdom for you like might sound strange but again asking yourself this asking our emotion this is going to give us some interesting information that we can work with and it will hopefully most likely break that emotion and we'll be able to grieve in the moment and release that emotion so again speak to that wave as if it were a child help it assist it to pass by finding out what it needs right do so with love you know really deeply love that emotion and this isn't necessarily a process of cognition right we're not necessarily having to talk to it you can and that will help but this is more of an internal feeling of an internal acceptance an internal loving an internal permission for this stranger of this very uncomfortable kind of scary feeling thing for it to come into our sacred house for us to inquire with it what it needs and really listen in non-verbally and sense and feel what it needs and then give it that which is more often than not it's just needing to be loved it's needing to be thanked and acknowledged and heard right rather than making things worse doing this is going to actually lessen its charge now learning these skills like i said is actually going to have a profound effect on your future because you are actually learning a skill of emotional intelligence here of having a bedrock within yourself and having the skills and tools you need to process and metabolize emotions and transitionary times in your life not only breakups but changes in work changes with family it's just natural changes in life so the process of becoming conscious around this grieving period is very important because it's actually going to give you information about the type of person that you are more compatible with right all the breakups i've ever had their wisdom has been in learning who isn't right for me okay learning who isn't right for me informs me and informs what i am looking for in a future relationship what i expect for myself in that relationship the values and standards that i hold for myself and for the other person without going through this it's like walking around and taking a stab in the dark some people get lucky but a lot of people don't so this is going to allow you to really become conscious in who you attach to who you give your precious heart to as well rather than being attracted to these intense uncertain relationships that just kind of pull you off your center metabolizing these emotions in this way is also going to allow you to develop a strong internal connection with yourself to strengthen your sense of self your sense of self-trust self-esteem self-love this is all a process that's going to allow you to come into wholeness and get enough nourishment from within yourself that you are now internally focused and coming into the world from your internal secure sense of self rather than constantly needing external validation and you know dopamine from external sources you have enough of what you need from the inside and you can experience life from that this is actually what we call secure attachment so go through this process and allow yourself to come at it you know it's not going to feel instinctual at the start but it eventually will and if this is something you want guidance around this is the work that i do with my clients and i would love to help guide you through that process so there's a link in my calendar to book a call we'll speak and i'll help guide you through how that all happens how we work together i would love to meet you and here are some more videos for you to continue that process to learn more and to build a secure relationship with yourself and for now i'll see you in the next video