THIS is one of the top reasons why a breakup can feel so raw . . .
You may have only recently let your guard down and shown your real feelings, only to have the other person end things. This can feel especially painful because it’s like they’ve rejected you for who you truly are at your core.
But it doesn’t have to feel that way, because it’s not actually true. And in today’s new video, I explore 5 different mindsets that can ease heartbreak and restore confidence so you can find the right person faster.
Matthew Hussey
I think one of the most painful things about breakups is that they often happen at the very time that we feel we were letting our guard down and being more of ourselves, revealing more of who we are, or revealing more of our life. And when we get broken up with in those moments, it is a particular kind of painful, because it feels like we are being rejected at our core.
A lot of us, when we date in the first few weeks and sometimes even months, it can feel like we’re sending out our representative on our behalf, to look as good as possible, sound as good as possible, be as easy as possible to be around, not bring any of the complications of our lives, our personalities, to the table. And of course, all of this is a time when we feel quite insecure because deep down, we know there’s more of me you don’t know, there’s more of my life and the reality of my life that you’re not experiencing. And we’re terrified that when they get to know all of that, that’s going to be the point where they decide that we’re not for them. So, in that moment where we finally reveal more, where we finally get comfortable enough, relaxed enough, feel safe enough to say, “This is me. This is my life.” And that person says, “Hmm, I don’t— I suddenly don’t want this.” It is like our worst fear coming true.
So, I wanted to talk about this idea, and if you’ve experienced anything like this, give you five things that I think can make a huge difference, that can not only ease your heartbreak, but restore a sense of confidence that might feel like it was taken from you by someone leaving.
If you don’t know me, I’m Matthew Hussey. I have been coaching people in their love lives for 17 years, helping them with both confidence and relational intelligence. While you’re here, I would really appreciate you liking this video, subscribing to this channel and hitting the notification bell so that the next time I release a video, you are among the first to find out.
Okay, on to the video. I have five things that I want to say about this situation that I think are both going to alleviate some of the heartache you may feel and also help restore some of the confidence that you feel you may have lost.
The first thing I want to say is that it’s all data. When someone sees a part of your life or a part of your personality and decides that based on that they don’t want to be around anymore, that’s data, and it’s data that this person either doesn’t really see you or sees you, but doesn’t accept you. And the ultimate that all of us should be aspiring to in a healthy relationship is that someone gets us, someone sees us in our life and says, “I want that.” Not that we have to constantly hide things from someone for them to continue wanting us.
So, rather than thinking “This person was the right person, and I blew it that weekend, you know, when I took them home to my family, or where we spent time together, and I actually let them in on the way that my disability makes me tired or the way my chronic pain affects me, or I finally let them stay over for the weekend, and they saw me caring for a sick relative that is the reality of my life,” whatever it may be. If someone at that point says, “I can’t do this,” then that’s data that they are not the right person for you.
I think that we spend so much of our dating lives worrying about the parts of us that are going to scare someone away, instead of realizing that all of these different parts of us that get revealed over time are really an opportunity for us to gather data about how right for us someone is. If we show a part of our lives, if we invite someone home for the weekend and they meet the family and they go, “I can’t do this. I’m out,” then that’s a crucial piece of data, especially if your family is really, really important to you. If they can’t even stick around for that or at least respect that relationship and say, “You know what, God, you have a crazy family, but we’ll figure it out,” if they can’t deal with that part of you—and it doesn’t have to just be something external, it could be something internal, you revealing more about yourself—then that’s a great data point that this person doesn’t really see you and doesn’t really accept you. That’s really, really important to know.
So many of us look at these moments that feel like it all went wrong after that moment, after I revealed that thing, after I spoke that insecurity, after I introduced them to this part of my life. My reality of the fact that I am a single parent, the reality of the fact that I have a disability that can make life difficult for me sometimes and that I have to manage, or the reality that I’m looking after a sick relative. When we introduced people to a part of our lives like that, and then, as a result, it looks like they bolted—that was the moment they broke up with us—we pinpoint that as the exact moment where somehow we screwed up, where, if I’d have just not introduced them to that, if I hadn’t said that thing, then they would still be with me. I screwed up, or my situation is bad. Instead, we have to start flipping it and saying “That was a chance for me to see if this person really accepted me in my life.” And if the answer is they didn’t, then this isn’t the right person for us. You didn’t screw it up by introducing them to your life. You got the piece of data you needed to discover they weren’t right for you.
Number two. In order to get that data on whether someone is right for us, we have to actually introduce someone to our real life. We should ask ourselves the question, “Why is it sometimes it’s so long before I realize that someone doesn’t actually want to sign up for my real life or my real personality?” and the answer much of the time is because we took so long to close the gap between what I think of as our dating life and our real life.
There’s a big difference between the representative of ourselves and our life that we often send out on the first few dates or weeks, or even sometimes months of dating, whose job it is to show us at our best all the time, to be as low maintenance as possible, to not bring any of the dramas of our life into the picture with a person, to keep them away from every crazy aunt and uncle and difficult challenge we have in our life, and just keep them in this bubble of romance where they can keep seeing us as this wonderful person to be around. But at a certain point, someone—if we’re to determine whether they’re really right for us—has to be brought into our real life and our real selves.
I think of this as being epitomized by the difference between what we want and what we need. When we’re only acting out of what we want—which is a shiny, charismatic, exciting, sexy person with lots of great stuff going on in their lives—we try to be what we think we need to be to attract that person. But when we’re coming from what we need, we do something very different, because what we need is to feel loved and accepted, and you can only feel loved and accepted if you show who you really are. So in order to follow what we need, we actually need to show people our real life.
So, in summary so far, when someone breaks up with us because they learned something about us and they decided that wasn’t for them, that’s crucial data, that they’re the wrong person for us. And if we want that data six months in, not three years in, then we need to start exposing more of our real life to someone earlier in the process.
Okay, but what if you revealed more about yourself, and as a result, it ended the relationship, or so you think, and you’re still blaming yourself for that? You’re saying, “I got the data, and I’m heartbroken. I hate the data.” Well, firstly, let me say, if you felt safe enough to reveal more about yourself, to show more of your life to somebody. That is a beautiful thing. There’s something lovely about that. And you should celebrate that moment in yourself that I felt, I felt safe enough, I felt relaxed enough in that moment to really be myself, or to invite someone into my world, that it backfired in this instance, doesn’t change the fact that that’s a very beautiful thing.
But the other thing I want to say about this leads on to point number three, which is that when we diagnose this moment where we caused the breakup as being the reason why we broke up, we are often not viewing the relationship in a large enough context. Imagine that if they were ever going to have a problem with that part of your life or that part of your personality, or just you being you, that was always the case. Since day one. You might be finding out about it now, but that was always the case. It may even be that along the way, they felt this on some level before, but they never communicated it to you. I’ve dealt with that with many, many people that I’ve coached through breakups who, on the day of the breakup are like, “I just discovered this thing that, you know, they said they can’t do. They can’t do it. They met my kids, and they hung out or whatever, and all of a sudden they’re like, ‘I can’t do this. It’s too much.’” But that may not be the first time they’ve been feeling that, they may have felt it before, and in many of these cases, they’re just not communicating that they felt that before.
So, often, what we blame on ourselves at the time of breakup, we could just as easily blame, perhaps even more so, on their inability to communicate those feelings that they were having way earlier in the process. So the result, by the way, is that it feels at the time of breakup like we’re just learning this information that they can’t handle us or our life, and they’re not even really giving us a say in the matter. They’re just saying, “I can’t do this,” and then they leave and we’re like, “But I didn’t even get a chance to do anything about that again. I didn’t get a chance to improve on it. I didn’t get a chance to show up differently or to alleviate your concerns.” And that can feel like a really awful lack of closure. I could have supported this person differently through this if I’d have known, but they didn’t even give me the benefit of knowing. They didn’t give me the benefit of supporting them.
So, how do you view the breakup in a wider context than the moment it seemed to occur in? You ask yourself, “What am I blaming on myself that is really about someone else’s inability to communicate their fears or their concerns at an earlier stage, a stage where maybe I could have been a genuine teammate in helping alleviate those fears and concerns?” And the second is to stop seeing it like we were wrong for that person on the day that they broke up with us because of something we did, but that they have been wrong for us all along. We’re just learning about it now.
Hey guys, I’m interrupting my own video. How annoying. Except what I’m interrupting it with is really, really good for you. If you have a question for me that you want to ask me right now, go to AskMH.com and you could either speak your question to me and hear me answering your question in my voice with my content, or text the question and get a text response. It is called Matthew AI. It is brand new, it is revolutionary, and it is blowing people’s minds. So go check it out. AskMH.com is the link. Go ask your exact question right now, instead of waiting for me to make a video about your specific situation, which might not happen for another seven years. All right, back to the video.
Now, the fourth thing I want to say is a little bit more of a an idea for you to play with for the future, as opposed to something to do right now. We may be asking at this stage, “Well, what can I do about it if someone isn’t communicating with me along the way? How do I account for the fact that someone might never speak about the things that they have a problem with or are not sure about, and then on the day that they break up with me is the first time I’m hearing about it?”
Well, we can’t take responsibility for other people’s inability to voice their fears or to express unmet needs that they have along the way, but what we can do is we can encourage conversation from our side about things that they may be living with as fears and anxieties about the relationship in their head. That might look like saying to someone, you know, I’ve worked with many, many single parents, it might be saying to someone:
“Hey, look, I know that I am not someone who comes on my own, I come as a package deal with a big life already. And I want to just say that if you ever want to talk about that, if you ever have thoughts, or you find it a bit overwhelming, or you just want to express something that’s on your mind in relation to that, please know that you always can. You’re not gonna upset me. I have broad shoulders about it. I would rather we just talk about it if any part of you has that on your mind. And, as much as I come with a life, I also respect that you come with a life, and I want you to be happy, and I want you to be able to get your needs met, always. And I want to be a teammate to you in that, but I can’t be if you keep it in and vice versa, you can’t be a great teammate to me if I keep things in. So just please know that you can always talk to me about that stuff.”
And sometimes you can be more direct about things. You can ask people along the way, “Is there anything about our relationship that you’d like to change, or is there anything that you feel you want more of? Is there any need that you feel like you don’t get met enough in our relationship?” That allows someone to come in and say, “Well, you know, in truth, I’m a bit worried that I’m not getting enough time with my friends, or I am trying to work on this big project right now, and I feel like I’m letting things slip because we’re spending so much time together,” whatever it may be. It allows someone to voice that, and that allows you to come in and say, “You know what? I respect that, and I really appreciate you telling me. I really want to support you in that. So, let’s figure that out. Let’s make sure you get enough time for that.”
It allows you to be a teammate with someone, and that allows someone else to see you as a very, very rare bird, because they’re like, “No one’s ever given me the space to say these things before. I’ve always felt like I’m just going to be hurting someone’s feelings, or it’s going to turn into an argument, but this person’s actually made space for this, and I voiced these needs, and they’re now supportive of them, and they’re trying to help me meet those needs.”
So while you can’t turn someone else into a good communicator, and that’s not your responsibility, you can encourage the kind of conversations that allow you to ward off certain issues before they turn into these demons inside someone’s head that, in some cases, make them end things because they’ve made them too big in their mind, and the result is them just saying, “I just have to go.”
It’s like the person who has the fear or the challenge in their head sees the other person in the relationship as the opposition. Like “I have this challenge, and you’re the cause of this challenge, and the only way to eliminate that challenge is to lose you.” But instead, we want to create a team with someone where it’s us and them against the challenge. Whatever the challenge may be. The challenge might be, “I can’t get enough time with my kids.” The challenge might be, “We’re spending too much time with your kids.” The challenge might be, “I’m not getting enough time on a project.” The challenge might be that, “I’m not getting enough intimacy in this relationship.” But if two people can look at the challenge together and say it’s—if we can talk about it and be a team in solving it, then the two of us are looking at the challenge problem solving together, instead of me seeing you and the challenge as being the same thing. And encouraging conversation in the way that I’ve been saying is exactly how to do this.
And the fifth and final thing I want to say is that we often see our situation as the obstacle to us finding love, but your situation is not the obstacle. It is your filter. It’s not going to prevent you from finding the right person. It’s actually going to be the thing that leads you to the right person. It’s going to reveal the right person. Because the right person, the person you need, the one that’s going to love and accept you is going to see your life and they are going to be the one that opts in for that life. If your life and where you are today is something that pushes someone away, then that person is not right for where you are today. We have to lose the insecurity about our lives and start seeing that our life and living it more authentically with someone is actually going to be the thing that reveals who the right person is.
And remember, the person who saw more of you when you started to feel safe and let your guard down and let them into your world and left has given you the data to show they are the wrong person for you. The right person for you is still coming. And when you feel the kind of love and acceptance of being who you are, and feeling someone decide that they want that, that will blow that situation out of the water, and you’ll be able to look back on it with a smile and maybe even a laugh at the idea that that thing, that person, was the real love you were looking for.
Thank you so much for watching the video, as always. If you’re finishing this video with more questions, which is often the case, you know, you may be thinking of a very specific scenario that you’re in right now that you really feel like you want me to weigh in on. I have a way that you can do that right now, literally, where you can get my answer in the next 60 seconds. Go over to AskMH.com because we have a brand new tool called Matthew AI where you can speak your question, and you can take as long as you want and give as many details and as much context as you want, and you will hear my voice answering your question.
It is extraordinary how sophisticated this is. It’s trained on 17 years of my content. So you’re not just getting any answer, you’re getting my answer to your specific challenge. If you’re in pain, especially right now, I promise you that by the end of your conversation with Matthew AI, you are going to feel a lot better than you do right now. So go to AskMH.com and you can try it out. You can try it out for free, by the way, so there’s no cost just to trying it. And let me know how you get on. I’ll see you in the next video. Be well and love life.
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