hey guys I'm Heidi Priebe welcome back to my Channel or welcome if this is your first time here on this channel we talk a lot about how to get more of what we want out of our lives and less of what we don't want and in this video I want to talk about a particular phenomenon which is the feeling of being unable to let go of a relationship that in reality has probably already ended so this question comes in a lot of different forms how do I let go how do I move on how do I get over my ex or someone else who's been significant to me and the way that I tend to translate this question in a lot of those cases is into the sentence how do I let go of my attachment to somebody because in a lot of cases when this question is getting asked it's getting asked by somebody who is already in reality effectively ended their relationship with the person in question or who's pretty clear on the fact that that is the move they want or that they think would be the best to make so in this video we're going to talk about how it feels to be securely attached and to move on from relationships and why it's so different for those who are more insecure or who have some sort of developmental or relational wounding that comes online that might cause feelings of attachment to persist even in situations where what you really want is to move on from that attachment and find yourself in a new phase so the fundamental question here for me is how are some people so able to move past relationships While others are not so how do people who are securely attached let's say manage to stay friends with ex-partners even after attachment wounds have happened how do people stop ruminating and holding on to what was once good while other people stay really stuck in these patterns of anger and sadness and blame when a relationship ends and the first step of kind of understanding this is that when a secure person moves on from let's say a romantic relationship or some other form of attachment relationship what they're moving on from is the attachment itself so that idea of who that person is going to be in their life and what role they're going to play in their lives and when they're able to kind of take people out of that category in their minds out of the category of attachment figure it's pretty easy and natural to let the relationship transition into whatever makes the most sense so for secure people if something didn't work out romantically maybe after some time there's still room in your life for a friend and that person could fill that role or an acquaintance or whatever it is attachment figures are people who we go to for co-regulation so for consistent mirroring as well as to an extent to have our needs for Comfort safety and support met when someone is secure if they notice that those needs are no longer getting met through an attachment relationship provided they're an adult at this point generally those feelings of attachment start to naturally fade of course this might happen after they have first tried to revive the relationship a few times and it might be a process that involves a lot of pain and brief but their feelings change as a reflection of the reality that they are being faced with now in contrast to this if you have an insecure attachment system often what happens if your needs are not getting met in reality you might start naturally without even noticing this is happening slip into a fantasy world where your needs are getting met through your relationship if not at this point in time maybe some point in the future so you're imagining a year down the road or five years down the road when things are going to be different and you start co-regulating with that fantasy instead of with reality and this is often how we end up in these sticky situations where the relationship we have in reality is a mess but we still feel deeply attached to it because what's actually happening is that we've gotten really attached to the fantasy we have about things turning around or about our partner changing and becoming different or maybe about ourselves changing and becoming different and winning back a perfect relationship which usually never existed in reality because even the most secure relationships are very far from perfect but in order to happily co-regulate with that fantasy we need the other person to be in our lives or else the fantasy starts feeling really unrealistic so in this video most of what we're going to talk about is how to re-center into reality notice what's actually happening in your life and in your relationships and how to make sure that you are staying in that place of reality rather than slipping away into a fantasy where the internal representation of someone that you have in your mind is in fact quite different from the reality of the relationship that you have with them because that's the only real answer when it comes to how to get over someone or how to move on from them or how to let go of your attachment to them you need to engage with reality and notice what is actually there between you versus what is already gone or maybe what was never actually there in the first place so because I am myself you know that I had to make this a five-step process step number one in the process is separating out your attachment to this person in reality from the story that you have about your attachment to this person that you use to regulate yourself chances are if you have this conscious drive and intention to become less attached to this person it's because some part of you knows that in reality things are not working out but maybe you have this story in your head of how you could turn things around or how the relationship is going to get a lot better in the next two to five years or about how if you leave you are never going to be able to get over them or you're never going to be able to find someone else whatever it is you might have all of these stories swirling around you that convince you to just stay where you are even though where you are might be somewhere where you're really unhappy and things are not working out for you and so step one is to as much as humanly possible notice when you're in a story notice what you're feeling when you're actually sitting across from this person when you're actually spending time with them versus how you feel when you're alone panicking at the thought of losing them whatever you're picturing when you picture losing them is a story you don't know what it's going to feel like or what's going to be happening in your life when you lose them until you get there you also couldn't possibly know what the future could hold with this person until you get there the only real information you have about your connection to another person is the way that you feel when you are around them and Associated to reality in their presence in real time so Step One is becoming increasingly aware of that how do I feel around this person when I am with them and there can be kind of tricky things that come up here right maybe you feel phenomenal around this person half of the time but the other half of the time you feel really neglected and you feel kind of put down or rejected by this person that's also information right I feel inconsistently good around this person is a very different sentence than I feel good around them because when a very high level of inconsistency is present it usually means that even the good times come along with an undercurrent of anxiety or even intense relief which again is just worth noting now when we grow up insecurely attached we can't really just tell our brains to stop making stories about things our brains have learned to regulate with stories about hopes for the future for as long as we have been alive but what we can do is become as conscious as possible about when we are in Story versus when we are actually sitting in front of the person and noticing the difference between those two things if most of the time that I feel happy in my relationship is actually when the person isn't around me and when I'm fantasizing about how different things could be later or how good things were at the beginning that's a really key indication that something might be a miss with the relationship we have in reality versus if most of the time I feel really good around this person in reality and I don't find it difficult to stay Associated and on the same page as them when we're together that's probably a pretty good sign that the attachment is reasonably healthy but I'm guessing if that's the case you probably didn't click on this video so let's move on to step number two step number two to letting go of your attachment to someone is to stop trying to control the outcome instead start telling the truth in a self-responsible way inside of your relationship and just notice what happens in your relationship as a natural consequence of that so this is the art of letting your life auto correct around the truth so I want to be clear here the truth is not a story that you have around the other person it's not you are manipulative and a liar right the truth is something like oh I felt a bit of anxiety coming up in my body when you made that promise to me I have these memories coming up of times you made similar promises in the past and how it felt when they weren't followed through on and so I'm noticing in this moment I'm having a sense of anxiety and kind of discontent like I don't know where to put my feelings down in a place where I can trust that they'll be safe maybe telling the truth is I don't feel close to you and I don't know why and I really want to and I feel some sadness about the kind of distance that it feels like is present for me in our connection or I felt a lot of anger over the way that you spoke to me the last time we were together and I noticed that standing here in front of you now that anger's still pretty active and alive in me and it's making it difficult for me to feel connected to you when we start telling the truth in our connections which is not easy work right this is a high level secure attachment skill but the more we can do it the more we naturally start to bump into the limitations and boundaries of our connections if we are never testing to see what the other person would do in response to us sharing what's true for us it's really easy to just dissociate into a fantasy where they always say and do the right thing but if we start actually reality testing that and showing up as the people we actually are with the feelings and thoughts that we actually have inside of our relationships then we start to very quickly get the picture of what happens when we bring those things in maybe we share a difficult feeling and the other person instinctively kind of dissociates or zones out maybe we share something about our anger or our vulnerability and they come back immediately with the defensive insult to our character maybe we show something very raw and very vulnerable about ourselves to someone else and we get rejected and the natural kind of protests that a lot of us have at this point thinking about behaving this way in our relationships is wait but I'm gonna get hurt right that's going to be so painful if I'm showing people my honest feelings not knowing how they're going to respond to them especially in a relationship that already feels like it's falling apart and unfortunately the authentic response to that is yes it is highly likely that it's going to hurt immensely to start showing up honestly inside of a relationship that that has already fallen ill in some capacity hitting the realistic limits of a relationship that we have already formed in attachment to is extraordinarily painful breaking and attachment is extraordinarily painful so I'm not here to tell you how to go through this process without experiencing pain because it's not possible to do that the pain of a broken attachment is the very thing that allows you to recognize on an emotional level that it's not working and allows you to finally move on from it so I think that a good 90 plus percent of the time when people are really stuck on how do I move on how do I let go how do I let an attachment become a part of my past the question they are actually asking is how do I do that without experiencing deep pain and the answer is you cannot do that without experiencing deep pain to show up to our lives as they actually are in reality at a point in time where what's happening in reality is that some sort of loving attachment relationship we have created is ending is if our emotional systems are working anywhere close to the way that they should be one of the most painful experiences we can go through so again this video is about how to go through it it's not about how to bypass it and get to a point where our lives are different without us having to have felt the pain if you are noticing what is happening rather than running away with your stories about how you can change things or about how this doesn't matter and you don't have to feel sad because you're so much better than them and you're only just realizing it now if you can stay in reality and notice the loss as it's happening you are giving yourself the best chance possible at actually starting to move on from that thing in a healthy way which brings us to step number three step three is feel the pain of disconnection and loss without savioring yourself from that pain so there are a lot of things that most of us do when we start to realize oh this relationship or this thing that I want in my life is slipping through my fingers we might create an angry story about how we don't care right we might decide that that person was never any good and that actually we're so much better than them and we're so much better off without them and we don't need them anyway and what does that angry story allow us to do it allows us to temporarily disconnect but it's not entirely based in reality if you loved this person enough to form a connection with them in real life it's highly likely that they are not all bad and the moment you remember the moment that kind of anger leaves your system just enough for those memories of the good parts to creep back in it's going to be really easy to go immediately back because usually what we're doing when we're telling ourselves an angry story about someone is just keeping ourselves connected to them in a different way savioring ourselves from the pain might look like going immediately into a different relationship and telling ourselves this person is nothing like the last person they're way better and so now I'm completely happy and once again the moment that starts to crumble and we start to see the ways in which this new person is actually far inferior to co-regulating with us in certain ways that our ex-partner was once again it's going to start looking really attractive to go back into that old connection either in reality or inside of our own minds anything we are doing whether that means moving on with another person whether that means turning to drugs and alcohol and partying for six months after a relationship ends whether that means throwing ourselves into work and trying to forget about it whether that means telling ourselves angry victimized stories about the other person whether that means getting obsessed with some sort of Revenge plot to get back at them anything we are doing to disconnect from the direct experience of emotional pain that we feel at an attachment ending is a way of keeping our fake attachment going and what we're trying to do here is sync up our real and our internal representation of our attachment so if it's over in reality we want to find a way to sit and be present with the pain of it being over in reality the moments when we miss them we want to stay present for and really notice that feeling of them being absent from our lives notice what it feels like in your body when you hit one of those moments sometimes I just say out loud the physical Sensations that are present for me to make them feel more real for myself sadness almost feels like this sense of water rushing downwards and out through my body like all of the energy in me is suddenly subject to an extreme gravitational pull downwards but for everyone it's different if you can stay curious inside of those moments when they arise for you when you're feeling that sense of loss of pain of grief of disconnection what you're doing in those moments is now syncing up your real relationship and your fantasy relationship if the real relationship is ending if your ability to truly make each other happy and co-regulate and protect each other throughout life and build a future together is no longer present it going to feel painful and you're going to need to notice and give credit to those moments of pain when they arise and they will arise frequently and what the mind and the body is going to want to do is to jump to anything to get rid of those feelings and this can include a sad tragic victimized story that makes the pain worse so you have to watch out for that as well because if you can convince yourself that the pain is so big and so humongous and so overwhelming that you need them to come back because you couldn't possibly deal with this pain now you're right back in that fantasy attachment world my favorite Mantra to do in really emotionally difficult moments is I'm feeling X Y or Z here's what I notice is happening in my body and I'm surviving it and that part is really important I'm experiencing a moment of grief I feel like the life is getting drained out of my body and there's not enough energy left in me to lift a single finger and I'm surviving this is how as adults we slowly train ourselves to deal with the existential pains that we weren't able to cope with as children and that we didn't have adequate Comfort or protection around so instead we developed insecure attachment patterns and or elaborate distraction techniques and fantasy worlds so this is the process of getting back in touch with our direct real-time experience of being alive noticing and welcoming in the pain because the pain is the thing that is aligning us to reality and that alignment with reality is going to be the thing that eventually allows us to properly let go of a relationship that's no longer working and move on it's kind of like how food goes sour right it's a good thing to be able to smell the foul odor coming out of your food when it's gone bad because it protects you from continuing to eat it so if you're plugging your nose every time you go to eat a meal you might not notice when the food that you have is is spoiled and then you're going to be continuously making yourself sick without understanding why and the same is true when we cover up reality with a fantasy we might end up continuously engaging in the same situations that are making us sick without having an awareness of why emotional pain is like the foul scent rising up from the cheese that you've left in the fridge for too long it's not pleasant to experience it but it's there to tell you something about how to stop accidentally poisoning yourself one of the simplest but most profound sentences you can learn to repeat to yourself when you find yourself moving through this process is I am in pain and the reason I'm in pain is because this relationship is not working it centers you in the reality of what is happening it acknowledges the truth of your experience and it prevents you from going into this fantasy world I am in pain and I'm in pain because I am losing something I care about and that I once loved deeply whatever it is that resonates for you find that sentence that aligns you to reality in those moments of pain and don't allow your mind to savior you from that Pain by disconnecting from it and going into some fantasy or story stay as present as you possibly can it's terrible in the short term and in the long term it pays off immensely which leads us to step number four if you've gotten to this point in the process where you're looking at reality and recognizing what isn't working and maybe you've even let this relationship go already in reality now your job is to just allow your life to have a void in it for a while you cannot move on from anything that you have once loved and considered a part of yourself without moving through the void of that thing's absence otherwise all you're going to be doing is trying to recreate the past in the present and some people do spend their entire lives doing this right a relationship ends and you go that's fine I can just go immediately into the next one and get everything that I need from that one and then one day six months from now you wake up and look at your partner and inside of your mind hate them for all of the ways in which they're not your past partner yeah they're not the point of the Void was to absorb and help you integrate all of the parts of the person you once loved that you want to carry forward with you as a part of yourself and in order to get to that place where you're able to integrate that you have to first let the void alert you to the ways in which you really miss that person and the ways in which their absence has a really strong impact on your life it hurts in the void it's not fun to be there so don't expect this to feel good right just expect it to be deeply useful and growing in the long term so I remember there was a point in my life where there is someone who is deeply important to me who had recently left my life and a big part of the way in which that person had been important to me was that they had served as a very strong feminine force in my life they were very nurturing and they sat with me in a lot of my sadness and they helped me see kind of the softer more beautiful side of the world when I was coming at it from a harsher place and they helped me nurture a lot of the feminine qualities in myself that I neglected for the majority of my life and I remember one day after they'd left my life walking past a department store and getting hit with this intense scent of perfume and I got so viscerally sad in like an instant and I remember later that week talking to my therapist about it and telling him I just feel like any time I see something kind of beautiful and feminine and soft I just miss this person and that presence that they had in my life so badly and he went okay so you haven't yet integrated the thing that they were giving you because what that person gave you wasn't just the direct influence that they had they showed you something about what you could allow into your life so in my case for a long time I had been shutting out my relationship to the feminine and The Feminine qualities that existed inside of me and around this person I gave myself permission for those things to matter and be valuable and I could still give myself that same permission now that they were gone I was just going to have to learn to integrate their impact and start embodying it instead of seeing that experience as intrinsically connected to that person and when it comes down to it that's a lot of what love is right it's the feeling of learning things through another person of being exposed to new ways of understanding the world and ourselves and other people and in a lot of ways our identities do kind of merge with other people now this can happen to a wildly unhealthy extent of course but insecure relationships that is somewhat normal there is this process of I take on elements of you and you take on elements of me and we construct this kind of shared identity of the way that we understand the world through each other's eyes and when our attachment to a person ends when their literal role in our life comes to a close then it's up to us to figure out what parts of that shared reality that existed between us do I want to reintegrate and allow to become a pervasive part of my identity without always having to think of it as a direct reflection of that other of course there's always going to be highly specific things that remind us of other people but for the most part when we have integrated a loss what it means is that we have picked up all the pieces of what that person brought into our life and we've chosen which ones we want to leave behind versus which ones we want to allow to become a permanent part of us and so spending time in that void with our eyes open means conceding to the fact that for a while we are going to be painfully aware of this person's absence and our life can go on in the process we can go to work feeling a little bit sad and noticing the points when we'd like to be able to reach shout and text them or tell them a joke that only they would understand we can go to social engagements and feel a little bit sad and resigned and like we don't really want to get to know anyone else we can cook meals for ourselves feeling sad we can fall asleep at night hugging a body pillow that we wish were someone else and we can trust in the process that this experience of moving through that void of someone's absence and noticing and staying Associated to it can and will absorb the loss you get to decide inside of the Void what you keep with you as you move forward in life and what you leave behind and that is an incredibly powerful position for you to be in but the only way to get there is for us to actually stay present with the pain if we dissociate from it if we try to save ourselves from it if we try to fall in love with someone else to get it to go away we are robbing ourselves of this immense incredible growth opportunity moving through the void changes you on a fun fundamental level and you will know that you are on the other side of the Void when you feel changed when you don't feel like you need to go back to that other person or that past connection either in reality or inside of your own mind in order to get the wonderful benefit of having had it if you met that person at a point in your life when you were extremely depressed and they made you feel really happy you will know that you have moved through the void of their absence when you have felt the pain of that loss and integrated the fact that you need a life full of joy and laughter so you've gone out and found it in other places and now thinking back on that person you don't need them back in your life in order to feel that sense of joy and vitality you've found a way to integrate that need and get it filled in another way maybe there is a structure that that person added to your life or a sense of responsibility that you find it difficult to hold on your own you'll know that you've moved through that void when you get to the other side of it and recognize that actually you've gotten pretty good at managing your own life and staying responsible so thinking back to that past person you might have fond memories of them but you no longer need them to come in and help you organize yourself you've integrated that maybe there is something really comforting and soothing about this person and you'll know that you're on the other side of that void when you finally learned how to comfort and soothe yourself or how to design a life where your grief and your pain is more readily absorbed through community and through self-care so you don't need any one person to be the only one who sees your pain and helps you work through it you'll know that you have arrived on the other side of the Void when you look at your life and know without a shadow of a doubt that you are a different person than you were when you met that person who you got so attached to that while you may still value them immensely as a human being and hope for the best for them you no longer need them to fill the attachment role in your life life because you've integrated the parts of that relationship that were once invaluable to you and you're now able to show up for yourself in that way so there's no risk of backsliding but this period where the loss feels so raw and so clear and so confronting in a lot of ways is a necessary component of recognizing what needs to get integrated in order for you to move on this is the period of just living inside of the reality of loss which can include really beautiful moments I would say some of the most profound and exquisite moments of my entire life have happened inside of periods of deep loss because if you let it loss really wakes you up to the present moment it makes you hyper aware of what you have that you usually take for granted so living in the void is this experience of deep pain but it's also potentially this experience of deep gratitude and deep growth and deep connection with other people trying to speed our way out of the Void means to Rob ourselves of some of the most human moments of Our Lives because again this is our chance to prove to ourselves I am now old enough and wise enough and capable enough to cope with the losses that my childhood self could not cope with and if you can truly teach yourself to do this well you will gain in a measurable amount of self trust which leads us to the fifth and final step which we've already kind of covered in Step number four integrate the love and the care and the connection that you had with this other until you become this kind of beautiful Mosaic of yourself and your past relationships and let that be the new version of you going forward so I remember reading the book I believe it was upheaval by Jared Diamond who is a very brilliant geographer and historian and he was talking about why certain Nations recover from crisis points and others do not and he was using the nation of Japan as an example of a culture that had at one point in history done a really beautiful job of assimilating its traditional cultural values with new ones that had come into play during a crisis point and he describes Japan as this beautiful Mosaic of what has been as well as what is and that struck me as such a beautiful metaphor for moving through any period of personal loss or change it's not how do I get rid of the old completely and it's also not how do I hold desperately onto it without letting anything change it's how do I use what I took from the past and weave it through the present in order to arrive at a period of my life where the past and the present are now this beautiful new tapestry that looks and will always look different than what it was and this wove so beautifully in for me to this lecture that I remember attending when I was doing my master's degree in attachment Theory where we were watching this video of Patricia Crittenden who was the founder of the dynamic maturational model of attachment talking about how it takes an average of three years to really move on from someone who's been a deep significant attachment figure to us so this might be apparent to someone we were married to or had a very intertwined long-term relationship with but what I really loved about what she was saying was that she defined what it means to move on from someone she said three years is approximately and this doesn't mean it's this way for everyone but this is the average the period of time that it takes to move from a place where our identity and the way that we think about ourselves is significantly intertwined with this other to a place where our identity feels like it is all ours again and regardless of what period of time this takes for a given person I think that it's beautiful to have that as a reference point for what it means to move on and let go of an attachment to somebody how much of me do I feel like still belongs to this other and for some of us we can stay stuck for the entirety of our lives in that place right we can be 75 years old thinking about someone we knew in our 20s and still feeling like a part of ourselves was left behind in that relationship but it's never too late to reclaim those things decide that if they've stuck with us for that long there must be something that we need from that and learn to embody and integrate it into our personal identity so it no longer feels tied to that other and when we have hit that point when we have let go of our fantasy relationship with this other people being the place where we go to have all of these needs met our needs for love care self-esteem sexual attraction nurturing whatever it is it could truly be anything and we learn to be present enough with the loss to figure out which parts of that loss we want to take with us and integrate into our understanding of ourselves to create that new tapestry that's how we know that we are finally doing that work of deeply moving on and healing from a past attachment all right that's all I have to say for today on this topic as always let me know what's coming up for you guys in the comments as you go through this video I love you guys I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other and your inner children and I will see you back here again really soon foreign [Music]