When you live with your romantic partner and their relatives, and your partner doesn’t seem to want that to change, what do you do?

I received a message from someone struggling with a challenging living situation. He lives with his wife, his mother-in-law, and another family member – and they’re having issues. I know what you’re thinking: “Living with multiple family members under one roof? How could that possibly create problems?”

Living with family can work sometimes, like when everyone gets along. When that happens, life can flow smoothly, and the arrangement may benefit everyone involved. But for this arrangement to work, I believe there needs to be some contribution from each family member (unless someone is unable to contribute due to health issues or other circumstances).

Here’s where it gets complicated, though. What if your partner is perfectly content living in a situation like this? The person who wrote to me has a partner who doesn’t want to work full-time or make other changes to live independently. They are perfectly happy with the status quo, which brings me to something I’ve learned to do over the years:

Accept people exactly as they are and assume they’ll never change.

What that means is that if someone is happy with circumstances as they are, assume they will never want things to change. And while that assumption might not be true, it saves you a lot of time and energy worrying and waiting for something that may never happen. It also redirects your attention back to yourself so that you can make the next right decision for you.

For example, if you are in a relationship and you want your partner to think differently about something, ask yourself, “If I accepted that they would never, ever change, what decision would I make for myself then?”

If you were living with them and their family, and you didn’t like that arrangement, would you choose to stay because you love them, knowing you’d work things out together eventually? Or would you feel stifled and unhappy, always thinking about how terrible the circumstances are and even complaining and arguing with your partner all the time?

If your answer is, “I’ll try to accept it, but I’ll never be as happy as I could be,” then you need to understand something important – and this might sound harsh:

Once you accept someone and their circumstances, even if you disagree with them, you lose the right to complain about it to that person.

Why? Because you’ve chosen to be with someone, knowing full well the decisions they’re making. And they expect you to either accept their decisions or not. You may not, but if you don’t, you should probably consider what you need to do for yourself instead of trying to get them to agree with your solution. In other words, if they aren’t interested in your ideas to make things better, your next step is to return to what you need to do for yourself.

The Hard Conversations We Sometimes Need To Have

You might be wondering if I am recommending divorce or separation. Not at all. What I do suggest, however, is having an honest, deep conversation with your partner about your unhappiness. Tell them how the situation affects you, how it impacts your relationship and intimacy, and put everything on the table.

The thing about equal, supportive, loving partnerships is that when one person expresses unhappiness, the other should want to work with them to find a solution. That’s exactly how it should be – two people supporting each other’s happiness.

Let’s say you’re unhappy in your relationship, if you’re in one, and you know this feeling isn’t going away on its own. You also know your unhappiness affects more than just you. It’s like a weight that gets heavier over time, pulling both you and your partner down. Not because you’re trying to make them unhappy, but because it’s almost impossible for one person to stay happy when their partner is suffering.

Think about it: When one person in a relationship is consistently unhappy, it creates a ripple effect. Your partner feels it, even if you try to hide it. They sense something is wrong, and over time, your emotional state becomes their emotional state too.

This isn’t about blaming one person or the other. It’s just the natural consequence of two people being emotionally connected. When you let unhappiness fester, you’re not just hurting yourself, you’re affecting the entire dynamic of your relationship.

I believe an equal partnership should be perceived that way: When your partner is unhappy, you aren’t happy because they aren’t happy, and vice versa.

And when your partner is unhappy, you should want them to be happy. That should be “Relationships 101,” where we support each other’s happiness. I never want to see my wife unhappy. It makes me sad to see her sad!

To the person who wrote to me telling me of their living arrangement, can you have a conversation with her, sharing how the current situation is affecting you? Can you express yourself in a way that isn’t pointing the finger at her but just sharing where you are inside?

In your message to me, you said she doesn’t want to work full-time (who does!?). And you also said that if she did work full-time, it would help fund your exit from this situation. And having the funds, you’d both be able to move out of the place you’re currently in with her relatives.

But maybe she loves living with them, which tells you family is something she values deeply. And if that is the case, it doesn’t sound like she’s itching to get out of there. So I would suggest a serious conversation with her to let her know how you think and feel.

What would that conversation look like? It could go something like this:

“I know you want to live with your family, but I want to let you know that I don’t. I want to live with you. I want to spend my time with you. I want to be able to walk around in my underwear in my own house without having to worry that somebody’s going to open their bedroom door or whatever and see me. I don’t want to have to think about that stuff. I want to be comfortable in our own house.”

She may or may not be receptive to that. But it’s important she knows how you feel and where you are inside so that she understands that you are not happy. After all, our partners should want our happiness!

The problem might be that she doesn’t want to move, and being without family makes her unhappy. If that’s the case, you’ve got some serious considerations to make. And again, I’m not saying to separate or get divorced or anything like that. That step is way down the road, if at all.

I think the first step is to have a serious conversation like I suggested above, and come to a place where ‘This is what would make me happy. This is what I want for us. This is where I hope we can be in X number of months or a year or whatever. Are you with me? Are you willing to do this with me?’

And if she says no to what you want, then, as I said earlier, the next decision you make is for you and about you.

If she’s truly happy with the way things are and doesn’t seem very interested in your thoughts and feelings about the current living situation, it comes right back to acceptance: Accepting that she will never, ever change, and this is how it will be going forward.

I’m not saying she won’t ever change her mind. She may just be valuing her time with family at the moment, but may eventually want to move. But in this moment, right now, if you’ve shared how you feel and what you’re going through, and she doesn’t want things to change, accepting things will be this way indefinitely causes you to focus on what you need to do for yourself from this point on.  

When you’re unhappy in a relationship, it affects everything. Your unhappiness seeps into every aspect of your life, and, eventually, your partner will feel it too. Not because you’re deliberately bringing them down, but because your emotional state impacts the relationship as a whole. This is how an equal partnership works – when one person isn’t happy, it should matter to both people.

If you find yourself in this situation, you have some serious thinking to do. This means considering all your options, then having an honest conversation about what would make you happy, what you want for your future together, and where you hope to be in the coming months or years.

When you’ve had a conversation like the one I suggested above, you’ll want to know if they are with you on this and if they’re willing to work on this together.

If they say no, here’s the tough part to swallow: the ball comes back into your court. Your partner might be perfectly content where they are, seemingly uninterested in your emotional needs. That might sound unfair. And I’m not suggesting that’s definitely what they’re thinking. As I said before, they may just value family connections and living with relatives more than having their own space with you (as much as that may sting to think about). But if that’s where they are, that’s their choice. But when they are steadfast in what they want, you have a decision to make.

If you’ve had a deep, honest conversation about your unhappiness, and if your partner seems more invested in their happiness regardless of how you feel, you’re facing a difficult situation.

To the person who wrote to me, I want to be careful here because I don’t know the full story, but if your partner seems more committed to keeping things exactly as they are, knowing you’re unhappy, then staying in that environment will be challenging.

Sure, you might find ways to cope and be happy, but will you be okay if things never change?

Maybe the financial benefits of living with family are significant – saving money can be a powerful motivator. But if deep down you know you’ll never be truly happy there, that unhappiness will eventually surface in different ways.

Regarding this person’s work situation. I’m sure many people really don’t want to work full-time! Who wouldn’t want more time to do whatever they want? But sometimes it’s necessary to live the life we want. And if your partner refuses to work full-time or find other ways to make more money, you have to ask yourself: Is this arrangement conducive to a happy marriage? Can you achieve your goals of independent living this way?

I can totally relate to the person who wrote to me. Living with family members means I can’t just wake up at 3 AM and watch TV, or make noise when I want to. There’s always someone else to consider. And when you don’t have your own space, you feel restricted in many ways.

To the person in this situation, there’s no magic solution. I wish I could give you a magic pill answer. What it really comes down to is being clear about what you want. i.e., “I want us to have our own space. I want privacy. I feel stifled here. I want better for us.”

If I were in this situation (and I’m not saying this is what you should do, I’m just putting myself in your shoes), I would say something like, “I don’t know if I can handle living like this long-term. I want us to have our own place. I want our privacy. I want to be able to live freely in my own home.”

But a conversation like this can only happen after you’ve already expressed your desires clearly and laid out what you need for a happier life together.

Remember, this isn’t about ultimatums – it’s about being honest about what you need to be happy in your relationship and your life. Sometimes that means making tough decisions or having uncomfortable conversations.

If this person has been in this living arrangement for years and these feelings are just now surfacing strongly, it could mean they’ve reached their breaking point.

Sometimes we try to make things work for so long that resentment builds up until we can’t take it anymore. That’s not wrong – it’s just what happens when we suppress our true feelings about a situation.

Here’s the hard truth:

You can’t make someone want what you want.

I learned that the hard way in my previous relationships. I always thought if I just explained things differently or tried harder, they would finally understand and change. But that’s not how it works. When you try to convince someone to change who doesn’t want to, you’re just setting yourself up for more disappointment.

Let me give you an example from my own life. If my wife, Asha, had her family move in with us, and she was completely content with that arrangement, but I was miserable, I would have to be honest with her. I’d have to say something like, “I can’t do this anymore. I want us to have our own place. I love you and want to share my life with you – just you, not your whole family.”

If her response was “I don’t care about what you want,” that would tell me everything I need to know about how much she values my happiness.

When someone shows such little interest in your emotional well-being, it might be time to question whether you made a mistake about the relationship. That would be a difficult thought to have. It’s not easy to admit you made a mistake in your choice of partner, especially after you’ve invested a lot of time and energy into the relationship.

But staying in a situation where your partner doesn’t care about your happiness isn’t going to get better on its own.

The only person you can change is yourself. That doesn’t mean becoming a different person to please others – it means making choices that align with what you need, even when those choices are difficult. Sometimes when you make those changes, your partner comes along for the ride. But if they don’t, at least you’re being true to yourself.

And again, that’s unfair for me to say, because it implies that your partner doesn’t want to see you happy. And that may not be true at all. But my mind would go there if I were in the situation described above, where my partner didn’t seem to care about my thoughts and feelings about our living situation.

I would think, wouldn’t she want me to be happy in this relationship? If I asked her that, she might reply, “What about me? Don’t you want me to be happy? Why don’t you support me and what I want?”

That’s why it always comes back to my philosophy about persistent challenges in relationships:

The person who wants to see change may have to make the change.

With that perspective in mind, if my partner asked the following about our living arrangement, “What about my happiness? Why can’t you support my desire to live with family?” I’d probably think, ‘She’s right! Why don’t I support her happiness? After all, that’s how I define love: When you support somebody else’s happiness. So why don’t I support her choice to live with me and her family?

Can I support that? Should I? And if it all comes back to me and the decision I need to make, I might agree, yes, I can support her decision because it makes her happy.

But here’s where I would diverge: ‘I support the choices that make you happy, but I don’t want to be in this situation. I support you wanting to be in this relationship with your family, absolutely. I support you wanting to live here with everyone you love, but I don’t want to live like this.’

I know it’s so easy for me to say these words, but I also know it would be very difficult to follow through with my true thoughts and feelings. Maybe it would be impossible to follow through. But I would need to get serious about how I would feel if nothing changed.

In this situation, the key for me in making the next decision for our relationship and my life would be to answer the following question:

If nothing changes, will I be okay with the way things are now?

I would have to look at my marriage and ask myself, ‘Is this what I want in a marriage? Is this what I want for a wife? What if she checks all the boxes? Would I leave someone who fits almost all of my criteria?

I would have a lot of inner dialogue: ‘Yes, but she does this right, and this part of our relationship is great, and so on.’ But I might end up where I started, ‘I just can’t live in this place with all these people.’

Would that override all my other thoughts? I would probably have to assess that. I would have to figure out if everything else about the relationship is good enough. And if it is, I would have to come to that place of acceptance I keep bringing up.

I would also need to answer the following question honestly: Can I accept her the way she is, accept the decisions she makes, and never, ever give her crap about it again?

To the person who wrote to me, I recommend you listen to my episode The judgments you have about others that keep you unhappy (you can search for it on my Podcast page). That episode talks about decisions like this. You might find it very helpful.

Communication is key. You hear people say that about relationships all the time. Without honest, sometimes difficult communication, you may never get to the heart of what bothers you. And if you’re not getting to the heart of things, you may be prolonging something that continues to build resentment, sometimes from both sides.

Do you share with your partner what makes you unhappy?
Do you ask how you can work together to make each other happy?
Do you talk about compromise on each side?

That last one may be the place you need to go: The balance that is created by each person compromising something.

Thinking about the person who wrote to me, maybe his partner doesn’t want to compromise at all. Maybe she is perfectly happy with the way things are. If that’s the case, she probably feels like she has everything she wants. And the author of that message might need to make the choice to stay or leave, at least if he knows he is going to be unhappy if he stays. But if he knows he’ll be unhappy, hopefully, he conveys that to her.

A lot of people wouldn’t want to say, “I’m going to leave for a while. We need to separate.” A lot of people won’t go there. They just think once you’re married, you have to accept everything as-is.

The good news is that you don’t have to choose between complete sacrifice and walking away. Real compromise means both people give a little to get a little, and both people feel heard and respected in the process. When I finally learned this lesson, it transformed how I approached difficult conversations with Asha.

Sometimes the hardest part is just starting that conversation. But I’ve found that most relationship problems get worse in silence and better with honest communication. Even if the discussion is uncomfortable, even if it leads to some conflict, it’s always better than letting resentment build up inside you until it explodes.

Yes, there’s risk involved in speaking your truth. But there’s an even bigger risk in staying quiet and hoping things will magically get better.

Whether the outcome is finding middle ground or realizing you need to go your separate ways, at least you’ll know you honored yourself and gave the relationship your best shot.

Remember, a healthy relationship should lift both people up, not require one person to shrink themselves down. When you find that balance – that sweet spot where both people feel seen, heard, and respected – that’s when compromise stops feeling like sacrifice and starts feeling like love.

The post The partner who likes things as they are when you’re just miserable appeared first on The Overwhelmed Brain.

The pain of loss shouldn’t be stuffed down and avoided, it should be felt at the deepest level, but only when you’re ready and only at the pace you can handle. Everyone experiences loss differently so what works for one person may not work for you.

In this episode, I help you connect with the deeper layers underneath the loss so that perhaps there can be some small release or relief. This isn’t about healing, it’s about connecting. And sometimes that’s all that’s needed to start healing.

The post The Pain of Loss appeared first on The Overwhelmed Brain.

When you’re needy and fearful of someone leaving you, or something ending, you tend to miss all the best moments of life.

Fear of abandonment can dominate your thoughts causing you to miss out on happiness and fulfillment. When you grow beyond that fear, you might actually start enjoying life again.

I received an email from someone struggling with insecurities in his current marriage. He told me about his ex-wife leaving him years ago, and how that experience left him with a deep fear of abandonment that he’s carrying into his new relationship.

The author described himself as needy and fearful, constantly questioning whether his wife still loves him, constantly checking in to make sure she’s not going to leave. He knows this behavior is problematic, but he can’t seem to stop himself.

This resonated with me because I’ve been there. I know what it’s like to carry emotional baggage from one relationship into the next. I know what it’s like to let fear dictate your behavior, to constantly seek reassurance, to weaken your position in a relationship because you’re operating from a place of insecurity rather than confidence.

The Problem with Constant Reassurance-Seeking

When you’re constantly asking your partner if they still love you, if they’re going to leave, if everything’s okay between you, you’re not actually getting the reassurance you think you’re getting. You might hear “yes, I love you” or “no, I’m not going to leave,” but those words don’t sink in because your fear is louder than their reassurance.

What you’re actually doing is weakening your position in the relationship. You’re showing up as insecure, as needy, as someone who doesn’t trust their partner’s commitment. And here’s the thing: that constant questioning can actually create the very thing you’re afraid of. It can push your partner away because nobody wants to constantly prove their love and commitment over and over again.

The person who wrote to me mentioned that his wife is a fighter, that she doesn’t back down easily. He said this in a way that suggested he appreciates that quality in her. But then he also mentioned using a “whatever” attitude when she gets upset about things, essentially dismissing her feelings. That’s a dangerous pattern because even though she might not show it immediately, resentment builds. When you dismiss someone’s feelings repeatedly, when you minimize what matters to them, you’re creating distance in the relationship.

I’ve done this myself. I’ve been the person who said “whatever” or brushed off my partner’s concerns because I didn’t want to deal with conflict or I thought the issue was minor. But what I learned is that “whatever” is one of the most relationship-damaging words you can use. It tells the other person that what they care about doesn’t matter to you. It tells them you’re not willing to engage, to listen, to take them seriously.

Ask Questions Instead of Making Assumptions

One of the biggest mistakes we make in relationships is assuming we know what our partner is thinking or feeling. We create entire narratives in our heads about what they meant by a certain comment, why they acted a certain way, whether they’re upset with us. And then we respond to those assumptions as if they’re facts.

The person who wrote to me is doing this. He’s assuming his wife might leave him, assuming she might stop loving him, assuming that because his ex-wife left, this wife will too. But he’s not actually asking her direct questions about what she needs, what she wants, how she’s feeling about the relationship.

When you ask questions instead of making assumptions, you get clarity. You get actual information instead of the stories your fear creates. If you’re worried about something in your relationship, ask about it. If you’re confused about your partner’s behavior, ask them to explain it. If you want to know what they need from you, ask them directly.

I learned this the hard way in my own relationships. I used to create entire scenarios in my head about what my partner was thinking or feeling, and then I’d react to those scenarios. I’d get defensive or withdrawn or needy based on something I completely made up. When I finally started asking direct questions and actually listening to the answers, my relationships improved dramatically.

The Masculine and Feminine Dynamic

This might sound old-fashioned or controversial, but it’s what I’ve observed in successful relationships (and on my own experience): There’s a dynamic between masculine and feminine energy that, when balanced, creates a really strong foundation.

I’m not talking about gender roles or saying men have to be one way and women have to be another. I’m talking about energy. Masculine energy is about direction, decisiveness, taking action, providing stability. Feminine energy is about flow, emotion, creativity, receptivity. We all have both energies within us, but in relationships, there’s often a natural dynamic where one person tends to lead more with masculine energy and the other with feminine energy.

When I was being needy and insecure in my past relationships, I was operating from a weak masculine position. I was looking to my partner to provide the stability and direction that I should have been providing. I was constantly seeking reassurance, constantly checking in, constantly questioning. That’s not masculine energy. That’s fearful energy.

What I learned is that when I showed up with strength, with confidence, with the ability to make decisions and provide direction, my partner felt safer. She could relax into her feminine energy because she trusted that I had things handled. And that doesn’t mean I controlled everything or made all the decisions. It means I was solid. I was reliable. I didn’t need constant reassurance because I was confident in myself and in the relationship.

I remember a pivotal moment in my last relationship where my partner said something that really stuck with me. She told me that when I’m confident and decisive, when I take charge of situations without being controlling, she feels more attracted to me and more secure in the relationship. But when I’m wishy-washy or constantly seeking her approval, it makes her feel like she has to be the strong one, and that’s exhausting for her.

That was a wake-up call. I realized that my insecurity wasn’t just affecting me. It was affecting her and the entire dynamic of our relationship. When I started showing up with more strength, not aggressive strength but calm, confident strength, everything shifted. She became softer. She was more affectionate. She trusted me more. And ironically, when I stopped seeking reassurance, I got more of it naturally.

Destressing Your Partner Destresses the Relationship as a Whole

One of the most powerful things you can do in a relationship is identify what stresses your partner out and take action to alleviate those stressors. This isn’t about fixing all their problems or rescuing them. It’s about being proactive and showing that you’re paying attention to what makes their life harder.

I’ll give you an example from my own life. My partner had been dealing with a frustrating tech support issue for weeks. Every time she had to call them, she’d come away angry and stressed because they weren’t solving the problem. I could see how much it was affecting her mood, how much mental energy it was taking up.

So one day, I told her I’d handle it. I called the tech support line myself, dealt with the runaround, stayed on the phone for however long it took, and got the issue resolved. When I told her it was done, the relief on her face was immediate. She didn’t have to think about it anymore. She didn’t have to psych herself up for another frustrating phone call. I had taken that burden off her plate.

That’s what I’m talking about. It’s identifying the things that drain your partner’s energy and taking initiative to handle them when you can. Maybe it’s dealing with a difficult customer service call, maybe it’s taking care of a household task they’ve been dreading, maybe it’s researching solutions to a problem they’re facing. Whatever it is, when you take action without being asked, when you show that you’re thinking about their well-being and actively working to make their life easier, you build trust and appreciation.

The person who wrote to me mentioned that his wife gets aggressive sometimes, that she’s a fighter. I’d be willing to bet that some of that aggression comes from feeling overwhelmed or stressed about things he could help with. When someone feels like they have to fight for everything, when they feel like they’re carrying too much on their own, they can become defensive and combative. But when they feel supported, when they see their partner taking initiative to lighten their load, that aggression often softens.

Living in the Present Instead of the Feared Future

The biggest issue with fear of abandonment is that it keeps you from being present in your relationship. You’re so worried about what might happen in the future, so focused on the possibility of loss, that you can’t enjoy what you have right now.

The person who wrote to me is doing this. He’s so afraid his wife will leave that he can’t fully experience the relationship he’s in. He’s constantly checking, constantly questioning, constantly looking for signs that she’s pulling away. But what he’s missing is that she’s still there. She married him. She chose him. She’s in the relationship right now.

I’ve been in that space where I was so afraid of losing someone that I couldn’t be present with them. I’d be sitting next to my partner, but in my head, I’d be playing out scenarios of her leaving, imagining how devastated I’d be, trying to prepare myself for the pain. And you know what that did? It robbed me of the actual moments I had with her. It created distance because I wasn’t fully there. I was protecting myself from a future that hadn’t happened and might never happen.

When I finally learned to be present, when I stopped projecting into the future and started focusing on what was actually happening in the moment, my relationships became so much richer. I could connect more deeply. I could be more authentic. I could actually enjoy the person I was with instead of constantly bracing for loss.

If you’re constantly worried about your partner leaving, you’re already experiencing the loss you’re afraid of. You’re already creating distance. You’re already not fully in the relationship. So you might as well take the risk of being present, of being vulnerable, of trusting that what you have is real and solid right now.

And if it doesn’t work out, if the relationship does end, you’ll deal with it then. But at least you’ll know you showed up fully. You’ll know you experienced the relationship for what it was instead of what you feared it might become. You’ll have no regrets about holding back or protecting yourself at the expense of real connection.

Inner Strength Makes for a Solid Foundation in Both You and the Relationship

The person who wrote to me needs to work on his inner strength. He needs to address his fear of abandonment not by seeking constant reassurance from his wife, but by building confidence in himself. He needs to know that even if the worst happened, even if she did leave, he would be okay. Not happy about it, not unaffected by it, but okay. He would survive. He would rebuild. He would move forward.

When you have that foundation of inner strength, when you know you can handle whatever life throws at you, you stop operating from fear. You stop being needy. You stop weakening your position in the relationship by constantly seeking proof that your partner won’t leave.

I had to do this work myself, facing my own fears of abandonment and rejection. I had to build my confidence from the inside out instead of relying on my partner to make me feel secure. And that meant doing things that scared me. It also meant being honest about my needs and boundaries even when I was afraid it might push my partner away. And finally, it especially meant risking rejection to be authentic.

I remember telling my partner early in our relationship that I needed certain things to feel secure and connected. I was terrified she’d think I was too needy or too demanding. But I said it anyway because I knew that if I didn’t, I’d end up resentful or I’d sabotage the relationship with my unspoken expectations. And you know what happened? She appreciated my honesty. She told me that knowing what I needed made it easier for her to show up for me in the ways that mattered.

That’s the paradox. When you’re strong enough to be vulnerable, when you’re confident enough to express your needs without being needy about it, you actually create more security in the relationship. Your partner knows where you stand. They know what you need. They can choose to meet those needs or not, but at least there’s clarity and honesty.

The person who wrote to me needs to start expressing what he needs from his wife in a direct, confident way instead of constantly asking if she still loves him. Instead of “Do you still love me?” he could say “I need more physical affection” or “I need us to have regular check-ins about how we’re both feeling about the relationship.” Those are specific, actionable requests that his wife can respond to. They show strength and self-awareness instead of insecurity and neediness.

The Power of Authentic Communication

I want to emphasize something that’s become a cornerstone of my own relationships: authenticity and honesty create trust and intimacy in ways that nothing else can. When you’re truthful about your feelings, your fears, your boundaries, your desires, you give your partner the opportunity to really know you. And when they really know you, when they see all of you and still choose to be with you, that’s when you can start to believe in the relationship’s stability.

But if you’re hiding parts of yourself, if you’re pretending to be okay when you’re not and if you’re agreeing to things you don’t actually want, you never get that reassurance. You never know if your partner loves the real you or just the version you’re presenting.

I used to hide my insecurities and fears from my partners because I thought showing them would make me less attractive and less desirable. But what I found is that hiding them just created more anxiety. I was constantly worried about being found out, constantly maintaining this facade of having it all together. And when my partners inevitably saw through the facade, when they saw my insecurities and fears anyway, I felt exposed and ashamed.

When I started being upfront about my struggles, when I started saying “I’m feeling insecure about this” or “I’m afraid of that,” something shifted. My partners didn’t see me as weak. They saw me as honest. They appreciated that I trusted them enough to be vulnerable. And that vulnerability created intimacy that I’d never experienced when I was trying to appear perfect.

The person who wrote to me needs to be honest with his wife about his fear of abandonment. Not in a needy way, not in a constant reassurance-seeking way, but in an authentic way. He could say something like “I’m working through some fears from my past relationship, and sometimes they affect how I show up in this relationship. I want you to know I’m aware of it and I’m working on it.”

That’s honest! That’s self-aware, and it gives his wife context for his behavior without making it her responsibility to fix.

When you’re authentic in your communication, when you’re honest about who you are and what you’re going through, you build character. You build trust. You show your partner that they can count on you to tell them the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable. And that reliability, that consistency, is what creates long-term security in relationships.

The path forward for the person who wrote to me is clear:

He needs to stop seeking constant reassurance and start building his own confidence.
He needs to ask direct questions instead of making assumptions.
He needs to show up with strength and take initiative to support his wife.
He needs to be present in the relationship instead of constantly worrying about losing it.
And he needs to be authentic and honest about his fears while working to overcome them.

These aren’t easy changes to make. They require self-awareness, courage, and consistent effort. But they’re the changes that transform relationships from anxious and unstable to secure and fulfilling. When you do this work, when you address your own insecurities and fears instead of expecting your partner to constantly soothe them, you create the foundation for a relationship that can weather anything.

The post When the fear of abandonment keeps you from happiness appeared first on The Overwhelmed Brain.

When the feelings of inadequacy overcome you, do you let them linger in the background? Do you repress them so that they come out in emotionally destructive ways later?

Inadequacy usually has a source. We’ll talk about that and a lot more in this packed episode.

The post When feelings of inadequacy prevent you from enjoying what’s right in front of you appeared first on The Overwhelmed Brain.

When someone we love passes, it leaves a hole in our heart and sometimes a lack of closure. It’s that lack of closure that keeps us in feelings of guilt, regret, and other emotions that we just can’t shake.

If you’d like to heal and move past those feelings and start living life again, this episode may help you achieve that.

(The following podcast transcript has been modified for easier readability and to benefit the Deaf and hard of hearing)

Today I want to address something that is probably very timely. That is the death of people in our lives. When they pass on, how do we deal with it especially when we don’t have closure and haven’t reconciled, and we have feelings about it?

I’ve had people die in my life that I was very fortunate to be able to connect with before they died. My dad for example. I was estranged from my dad for about 10 years. I never spoke to him all that time. I didn’t call him, he didn’t call me. It’s not like we were angry with each other, we just never connected.

There was a reason we never connected of course. There was a time that my dad was pulling some stuff that I didn’t like, and I didn’t want to be associated with him. So I distanced myself. But, after 10 years, I thought I’ve had enough personal growth and development, so maybe I should go out there and handle myself and keep and honor my boundaries with him so that he doesn’t affect me like he used to.

I thought about doing it, and I continued to think about doing it, but I never reached out. Then one day, my brother calls, and he says, “Dad has cancer. I’m thinking, okay, that’s sad. I was affected, but what does that mean? He just got cancer, is he going to die?

And he says, “No, he’s in the hospital and it’s probably not going to be a good result.”

So now, this was it. This was the time I had to take it seriously, I had to decide that I need to reconcile, and at least patch things up. Whatever is going on between us, we have to fix it and at least connect again, and I’ll show up to my dad as my new and improved self that wouldn’t necessarily have the same fears, like a fear of confrontation, the fear of expressing myself. I wouldn’t have the same worries, and I could show up to him and just be honest with him.

Then if he started to get out of line, I could say, “Dad, you need to back off.” Because after you work on yourself, and you work on your personal development, and you work on telling people what your boundaries are, or at least expressing to them what’s acceptable and what’s not, then you should be able to show up in their life and honor yourself in this way so that they don’t break down your new and improved self.

You should be able to. You don’t always succeed, but you should be able to.

I look at family as the final frontier of personal growth and development because they’ve known you longer than almost anyone, pretty much all your life (most of them). They’ve known you since you were born, and that means they know a version of you that they are comfortable knowing, even if they don’t like you, and they don’t want to know a different version of you. And a lot of them will continue to treat you as if you are that same version of you that you were when you were younger.

Because of that, a lot of families might not get along because someone who goes out into the world and tries to improve themselves, tries to heal from old traumas, tries to get rid of their PTSD from either family or just old stuff, they run into family again and now family is, like I said, that final frontier: The biggest challenge for you. Because they’re probably going to show up in the same way they used to. And if you didn’t get along before, it’s going to be harder for you to keep this new and improved self at the forefront and running the show.

What tends to happen in a lot of cases is that the fearful, maybe “inner child” kicks in and says, “Oh, crap, it’s better just to be who I was around them, because at least we didn’t get into an argument, or at least there’s no confrontation, or at least it’s keeping the peace.”

So this inner child stuff comes up, the stuff that we really haven’t let go of yet, and it’s kind of our fallback just in case the toxicity gets too great and we don’t want to deal with it or we’re afraid to deal with it, and then our old behavior kicks in.

I’ve heard this from many people. You’ve probably dealt with this yourself, where you had to face someone, and now your old behavior kicks in instead of the new behavior that you felt good about and you’ve done a lot of work on, yet, where is it now? When we’re in front of someone that we could use this behavior, but where is it? It tends to go away.

Coming back to what I was saying, my dad developed bone cancer many years ago, and my brother called and said, “Dad’s in the hospital, so you might want to come and visit.” I thought this is it. This is the time I need to come and visit and make peace and just get to know my dad from a new “me”, from my new and improved self.

So I did. I bought a plane ticket, went to visit him and yes, he was in the hospital and I got along with my dad better than ever. I used to get along with my dad fine, but like I said he was pulling some shenanigans I didn’t like, but I got along with him better than ever because I felt good about myself and no one was going to take me down a notch.

I felt good in myself. I was proud of myself. I felt good honoring myself. The first time I saw him again I told myself, “If he starts to pull something, I will stand up for myself. I will say, “Dad, you need to back off because that’s inappropriate,” or “that’s disrespectful.”

I was ready to say almost anything to show my self compassion, to show myself respect, to keep my integrity, to keep my dignity, and I was willing to stand up for myself in those moments, so I felt really good going into the conversation, knowing it could go south, but deciding it wasn’t going to. And that’s a big decision! Because when you make it, you honor it.

I mean, there’s no question you just honor it because you are that new person. You aren’t that old person. You don’t let the scared inner child come out and then take over. You just don’t do it because you are that new person. You just have to set that in stone.

That’s what I did. It was still challenging, not saying it was easy, but I did that. I set it in stone and then we met and we talked and we laughed, and we had a great time, and he never crossed the line. He never did his old behaviors and I got to know him again from a new place. And I got to see him differently. I got to see him a lot differently because I was different. So these new eyes were seeing this person and realizing many things. One of them was that I didn’t know he was so grumpy. I’m not trying to put him down but he was just a grumpy guy! He gave the nurses a hard time and I was listening to him thinking “Wow, this is really who he always was.” But I never saw it and I never heard it before, because he’s just been my dad this whole time so I never thought about it.

But there he was just being grumpy with all these people and I thought, I guess this is how he’s always been. Not that he’s only been grumpy, but this is something I remember him doing and being, but I never thought it was a bad thing. I never thought it was a grumpy thing until I saw it with a fresh pair of eyes.

So that was interesting. And at the same time, he was in the hospital, of course people are going to be grumpy, but he was in good spirits, otherwise. So I get to see sides of him that I didn’t necessarily recognize before and that was great. To be able to recognize that, even if I didn’t really like some of the sides I saw of him, it was still neat because I felt good in myself. And I felt more like unconditionally loving toward him. I really felt like I could love him in a way that was more unconditional and not so stuck on old criteria.

I didn’t want to hold him up to standards that I used to have. I wanted to approach him as if he were a new person to me, which he was. When you show up as a new person, and you see someone from this new perspective, they are essentially a new person. It’s helpful to do this because you get to assess how you’re going to show up and how you’re going to respond to their behaviors, and you get to figure out what you need to work on in yourself if you are affected by their behaviors. Or you can figure out what you need to do, and how you need to respond or react to them if they start doing bad behaviors. It can be very helpful to be confident in what you’ve learned and how you have grown, and being willing to go through the final frontier of family as your personal growth challenge, because it can show you a lot

You’ll learn so much. And sometimes you’ll fail. That’s probably a strong way to put it, but sometimes you’ll fail. Sometimes you’ll show up as this new and improved version and then suddenly you’re whittled down to that scared inner child again, and you just want to get through the family gathering, or whatever it is.

Coming back to my story, I saw my dad and I got to spend a few days with him and rekindle the relationship. We really connected and I love the feeling of being able to tell myself, “It’s been 10 years, this is the time to do it. I probably shouldn’t have waited this long.”

Correct. Yes. I did tell myself that because here he is almost on his deathbed. He wasn’t at the time, but it felt like he was. It felt like this is the last I was going to see him. So it was very sad in that way. At the same time, I felt so good being able to rekindle and reconnect with him from this new place, from the new person I became.

And him seeing me, he loved seeing me. He was really happy that I showed up and of course, reconnecting with him was an amazing experience. But after a few days, I left. I didn’t know what else I could do. He was alive. He was kicking, and he was being let out of the hospital very soon.

I went home. And one day, I think I was in a Panera Bread, I got a phone call from him and he sounded better than ever. He sounded so happy. He said, “I feel so good. I think I have beaten this. I think everything is going to be great, and I can’t wait to connect with you again. And I want to show you this car that I’ve been looking at…” He was just sharing all this stuff, and we had the greatest conversation on the phone, a better conversation than I’ve ever had with him on any phone call that I’ve ever had.

Even while we were having this great conversation, for some reason I just knew in the back of my mind this would be the very last conversation with my dad that I’d ever have.

That really hit me but not because it was sad. It was, but it was because I got a chance to talk to him. I had this opportunity to talk to him. So I took advantage of it and I stayed on the phone as long as he wanted to and I just kept talking about the subjects that he brought up, and I was acting as if we were absolutely going to reconnect again. But I just knew inside this was it. Something told me this was the last time. I just decided that I was going to not think about that and talk to him for as long as I could. Then we said goodbye.

That was the last time I talked with him.

A few days later, my brother called and said, “They’re taking into hospice.” At the time I didn’t even know what hospice was, I thought it was another hospital facility. But now I know what Hospice is and if I had known, I think I might have flown back down so there might be some regret there.

If you don’t know, Hospice is a place they take you to take care of you before you die. It is basically the last stop, at least in the US. I don’t know how it is for other places, but it is the last stop before you die. And they’re very kind people that take care of you, and also make your death as painless as possible.

My brother said they took them into hospice, and again, I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I kind of knew that it was not good. Then a few days later I got that phone call that he died. So I got a chance.

I look back at the events that occurred and I’m so grateful I got that chance. Anything could have happened. He could have died before I ever got a chance to talk to him or reconnect. But for some reason, the universe lined this stuff up. My brother called me out of the blue and said what was happening, so I took that as an opportunity to reconnect with my dad. I had the money to fly down there and say my goodbyes. Or at least say, Hello, again. And also say my goodbyes in the sense that I knew that this would probably be the last time we connected.

We spent time together, reconnected, then after I left, I got a chance to talk to him on the phone before he died. I got to experience all of that, then reflect on it a bit so I could process it. What’s interesting about all of this is that I had an opportunity that not many people have. That’s one thing that’s interesting. Another interesting thing is that during those 10 years, I actually decided to accept that he already died.

That doesn’t mean I was eliminating him from my life. That didn’t mean I was going to never try to see him again. I just wanted to try on what it would be like, and what I would feel if he died. I visualized that happening. I visualized myself going to his funeral. And it was painful. It was hard. But I went through that process in my mind as hard as it was, just to feel what it would be like for when he did die.

It’s almost a preparation. I was getting a feel for what it would be like when he did die. I went through that process and after the process, I imagined myself grieving for days or weeks and just missing him. After a few weeks of doing this, just thinking that he was still dead, I came to an acceptance that he passed.

It might be a little morbid, but this is the exercise I did. I went through all of that. And when I did that, something released in me. The attachment to his life released. And I felt okay with it after that. The acceptance of the death, even though it was imagined, helped me release my attachment to his life.

I’m not sure how to explain it any better than that, but I realized what the impact of that visualization had on me only after he really died. Because when I found out the news that he was gone, I wasn’t sad.

It was sad. I did feel things. But I didn’t go into the normal grieving that somebody might do if they found out that someone they love just died. I found it strange. I thought am I a bad son? Did I not love him as much as I thought? Or am I just cold and heartless?

I had to go through that. It was more beating myself up than grieving. I eventually came to peace knowing that I had already grieved. I had already gone through his death. So I didn’t have to do that now. This is actually a good thing. Because of that, I was able to celebrate the love I had for him and his life.

I really feel because I had already gone through that grieving process, many years back, that when he died I was able to handle it well, and celebrate, and be thankful for the time I did have with him, and also be grateful for what he brought into my life and of course, for bringing me into this life.

There’s a lot I was grateful for, and I still am grateful for, with my dad. I had that visualization that brought me into the grieving and the acceptance, and it really felt like it prepared me for when it really happened.

I’m not giving you this advice. I’m not saying that you should do this. It’s a hard process. It’s probably not even recommended that you do this. I don’t know, maybe it is, but I did it and it worked. It’s hard because it’s like going to the hospital and getting an operation with your loved ones, and then signing the paper that says you could die.

That’s a hard paper to sign. The next paper might be “Who’s your next of kin?” And “Do you have a will?” and all of this paperwork that you might have to sign that really outlines what to do in the case of your death. It makes you face reality. It makes you face that death is real. It makes you realize you will have to go through this one day. If not your death, the death of someone else. How we handle it is going to affect our quality of life from that point on.

Again, I’m not saying that you should do what I did. If you want, you can, you can try it out. It helped me. It probably changed my life altogether. Because I was able to grieve beforehand, and then handle it well when it happened. Some people might not like this idea. I’m not saying it’s a good idea, but it helped me. One of the things it helped me with, and this was probably one of the bigger benefits of doing this exercise, is that my mom who was married to him for a number of years and has been divorced from him for a lot more years than she was married to him, and hadn’t seen him for a long time, when I told her my dad died. She said, “What? He died?” And I said, “Yeah.”

When I told her that, I felt Okay. I didn’t think she was going to be that effected because they had they’d been divorced for so long. And she’d been married to somebody else that she didn’t like, my stepfather, but she never talked to my dad. She never talked about my dad. She never thought about him at all.

So I told her, my dad, her ex-husband died. She was silent for a moment. Then when she could talk, she couldn’t get her words out through her tears. She was really affected and I did not expect that. And maybe it was dumb with me for not expecting that because they were married, they had a connection and I just didn’t think about it. I just didn’t think she thought about him that way or that she had any affinity for him at all

But apparently she did. She held on to it. They had a connection for a number of years. They created three kids, I’m one of them, and to have this person leave her life, it must have been a shock to her. So I feel like I was prepared even though I probably approached it wrong. I didn’t approach it carefully, like “Hey, I have some news for you, you’re not going to like it.” I just said, “My dad died” and it came as a shock to her. I didn’t soften the blow at all.

When I said it, she started to cry. She couldn’t handle it. She was really having a hard time with it. And I’m really grateful that I already went through the grieving so that I could be a support system for her in that moment.

I know there are benefits of grieving together. There definitely are. I’m not knocking that at all, but I think the way this turned out where my mom was feeling the shock and sadness, and where I was inside of me, I think really helped. Because I was there for her, I listened to her, and I gave her that safe space to shed her tears and express her grief. And it felt good to be there for her, even though I was sad for her now, because now she’s sad, and I didn’t know it would affect her that much, but I felt more prepared in that sense.

So now I look at my past and realize, “Okay, that process I went through, it was beneficial in so many ways.” It’s not something I would say you should do or you need to do, but I look at today, being in the middle of a pandemic, and people are dying, and there are people that my girlfriend and I know that are very close to us that have just died. What do we do about this? How do we handle this? And especially, and this is kind of the subject of today’s show, when there’s no closure? How do we handle when someone dies and we haven’t reached closure?

I think that’s hard. If you didn’t get a chance to connect with somebody before they died, especially if you’re not even allowed to connect with them because you’re not allowed in their room or in the hospital or wherever they are, and you can’t reach them, and then they pass on, what do you do with this unfinished feeling? This “leftover” that’s inside of you when you just want to reconnect and want to say all the things that you want to say but you can’t because they’re gone?

That’s very hard. And I know some people are hearing this right now and probably feeling some pain. I get that. My step-uncle, my stepfather’s brother, died and I never got to know him as an adult. I just never thought about him. My stepfather has a lot of brothers and I never thought of my step uncles as true family. They were just my stepfather’s brothers. But when this particular step-uncle died, he left all of his brother’s kids an inheritance. So I got part of an inheritance from someone I never thought about. It really helped too. It was shortly after my wife and I had no jobs and we were going to the soup kitchen.

We received this money out of nowhere and was like, “Whoa, this is very helpful.” It is one of the things that really helped us get out of the hole and I was so grateful to receive money out of nowhere from someone that I never thought about that I never considered connecting with. And he thought of me! He thought of his brother’s kids because he didn’t have kids. So he wanted to leave his estate and his money to all of his brother’s kids.

I got this letter in the mail and I’m thinking “Is this real?” I barely knew this guy. When I was younger, I really liked him. He was a great guy. But when I grew older, I never thought once about him. Then to find out that he died and left me this money, talk about not having closure! How do you thank someone that’s not there anymore? How do you reconcile it in yourself that you never reached out?

Lots of feelings of regret can come up, wishing you could have done something else, and maybe thinking you should have done something else. How often does that happen in our lives, where we regret all the things we didn’t do.

I’m not saying there’s an easy answer to all of this. I do have a process that you may have heard me talk about before. I think it’s an important process because anytime you have that leftover feeling that there’s something else, a lack of closure inside of you and you can’t get past it, where perhaps you wish you had reconnected with someone and made peace, or said something that you wanted to say, it feels like it will never go away.

I don’t like that feeling. I don’t know about you, but I want that feeling to go away. Not that we can just push it out (I’m not saying that’s what we do), I’m saying that we need to do something with it. We need to take this pressure, this energy inside of us and do something with it. Something meaningful, something that can actually make us whole again. Because we don’t feel ourselves. When someone dies in our life and we don’t have closure regarding their death because we didn’t connect or we were upset at each other, and then they died and we never got a chance to make peace, whatever it is, we don’t want this feeling of lack of closure, because there’s probably regret and guilt and maybe some other feelings that we don’t want to feel.

There’s no reason to carry that with you. There’s no reason to carry any of that with you. In most cases, we can’t prevent death. We can’t stop it from happening, and sometimes there are things that are just lined up that create it. Sometimes it just happens. And sometimes we feel responsible for it. And sometimes we don’t need to.

Even if we do feel responsible for it, we still have to get past it so that we can live the best life we possibly can. My perspective on death is that when someone dies, they want us to live. I would think that if someone had some sort of afterlife or reincarnation, or whatever it is, they would want us to live! I would think that the person dying would want us to live and be happy.

And if there’s any chance they didn’t want that before they died, if there’s an afterlife, they probably want it now because maybe they left their ego behind. I won’t get into the spiritual aspect of that, but there’s a lot of different beliefs there and some people don’t believe in any of that. Some people believe we just wink out. Maybe we do, who knows?

I look at it this way: If you are carrying around the residue of someone’s death inside of you, then we need to address it. I’m not saying I have the answer. I’m just saying I have a path that might help you and I hope it does. I’ll share my process next.

***

I never got a chance to talk to my step-uncle. I never pursued a conversation or connection with him my entire life. I knew him from childhood, but when he died and he left money to me, someone that never called him once, I had to deal with some feelings. Maybe some guilt.

One of the processes I like to use when it comes to not having closure around someone’s passing is to actually visualize that you are speaking with them now.

Some people might think this is a little far fetched or a little “woowoo”, but here’s why this can work, and can work powerfully sometimes. It’s because your brain processes it in a way that helps you heal. And you can do this with people that are alive right now. But what I mean is you visualize someone in front of you. You close your eyes and you imagine they’re there.

Then you either tell them what you wanted to say before they passed, or just talk to them like normal, like “How you doing?” Or even ask them questions. Or even be angry with them. Or whatever is left over inside of you is what you want to express.

I believe I did this process with my step-uncle after he passed. I pictured him in front of me (I remembered what he looked like from when I was a kid), and I said, “I am so grateful for this. And I feel so guilty that you did this for me, and I never once contacted you.”

I can picture him in my head right now as I do that. I’m just standing in front of him and he’s right there looking at me and he’s giving me the biggest smile. Right now, he’s giving me the biggest smile.

If somebody has passed in your life and you don’t have closure, this process is one way to help you get to it. Yes, I know it’s not real. It’s not like you’re really talking to them. Or maybe who knows? Some people believe it is. I’m not here to say that it is or isn’t. I’m here to say that how your brain processes it is the most important. Because my bigger picture is the dead want us to live.

That’s probably not a great way to say it, but they want us to live they want us to be happy. They want us to continue on and live the best life we can. I use that as a philosophy so when someone passes on, I make the best of the time that I have left.

My process is to picture the person who has passed and talk with them.

I had a client once, that when she was a very young girl, her brother committed suicide. I don’t know if she found his body or she saw it happen, but she was still traumatized from that event decades later. And during one of our calls, I asked her, “Have you ever spoken to him since that day?”

I don’t recall her answer, but when I ask many clients this question, they’re either confused or they say, “Oh, yeah, yeah, I speak to him all the time.” They know what I mean. I ask, “Have you spoken to them since then?”

If the answer’s No, and you still don’t have closure, I think it’s a good idea to speak to the person that you don’t have closure with. They don’t even have to have passed on yet! You can do this while they are alive too because it doesn’t really matter whether you believe you’re speaking to them or not. When you visualize it, you’re going to have a real experience. It’s going to affect the way you think about them. It’s going to affect your emotions. You’re going to have a connection with it that is deep and probably profound.

I know some people are listening now and they’re saying, “Yeah, I speak to this person all the time. And I still don’t have closure.”

So here’s the important part: When it comes to closure, you have to say what’s on your mind even if it sounds like you’re selfish, or upset, or you’re calling them out, or you’re angry at them for dying… No matter what you’re thinking or feeling, it has to come out because you have to think about these thoughts and feelings that you have as pressure inside your body. And as long as you don’t express them, the pressure stays.

You know the pressure I’m talking about. It’s that unfinished feeling. It’s that thing you never said that you wish you’d said. Or it’s the upset that you never got to convey and now they’re gone. It can be upset that you had before they left or it could be upset because they left, because they passed on. I’ve known people that were angry that someone died on them.

Whether that sounds right or wrong, doesn’t matter. If your brain says, “I can’t say that to this person, it wasn’t their fault that they died.” If you have a thought like that, but you’re still upset that they died or you’re angry with them that they died, you need to express it.

What that might look like or sound like is, “I’m really angry that you left me. I’m really angry that you did that. I’m angry at you. I can’t believe you did this to me. You did this to us. How could you do this?”

This isn’t blaming the person, it’s getting it out of you. It’s pulling it out. If we can come to an agreement that the ego dies along with the body, then you’re going to get a response from this image that you see in your head that isn’t tied to old upsets, or hurt or old, unfinished conversations or arguments.

It’s not tied to those things at all. When you talk to the person who has passed, you’re going to create a conversation that leads to healing. What this means is you’re going to hear their responses, you’re going to see their facial expressions, you’re going to have an experience. Bt you have to play full-on. You can’t just stop and say, “I can’t say that to them.”

If you feel it, you say it to them. Because these are the things that you need to say, to get the pressure, those thoughts and feelings that you’re holding on to, out of your system. These things need to be expressed.

They’re not going to say, “You’re wrong and too bad.” They’re not going to do that! And even if they did, you can have a conversation with them about it. But most of the time, I’ve not heard of that happening. I’ve heard other things. Because the mind processes this in a way that’s healing.

If you have no spiritual bone in your body, perhaps you’re complete atheist and you don’t believe any of this afterlife stuff at all, it’s still a brain thing. It’s still a mind thing. It’s still a process that you go through. Everyone has an imagination. Just imagine it happening. Just imagine they’re standing right there in front of you or sitting, and you’re outside or inside wherever it is, and have the conversation with them. See where it goes.

This is what I had to do with my dad. This is what I had to do with my step-uncle. And this is what I know I’ll have to do with other people in my life. Hopefully, no one else will pass before I have a chance to talk with them, but I’m sure it’s going to happen. It does happen. This is what happens in life. But we can’t go through life holding on to old regrets and old pain, because that’s not living. At least not living in a way that we know that people that love us want to live.

This is kind of a deeper episode today about how to heal from some old wounds, or new ones that have developed, because people have passed and we don’t have closure because of that. I really want this to work for you. If you are holding on to anything. I really want you to even pretend. If you can’t go along with this at all, just pretend! Just say “I’m going to do it because Paul told me to do it. I don’t believe any of this crap but I’m just going to do it anyway.”

I have a feeling most people that listen to this show probably won’t say that, but I know there are some people that will. This is the show for critical thinkers after all. I believe that everyone should question everything, but you can’t question it until you try it. You can’t say, “That’s not going to work. I’m going to question that, and I’m not going to try it.”

You really don’t know if it works or not until you try it. And then you can question it later. This is why I like to “try things on” and see what works. This can and does work. It’s worked for many people that I’ve worked with and the woman that I talked with whose brother killed himself, healed after decades of this traumatic memory.

She healed because I asked her to talk to her brother. And I asked her to say whatever is on her mind, and she did. She’d never felt better about that situation until then. Of course, the sadness might still be there. You might still miss the person, but we need to resolve the lack of closure. We need to get to that point so that we can get to the emotions that might be underneath that might be stuck.

Sometimes we have sadness that’s stuck and we can’t actually feel it but we need to. We need to feel the sadness. We need to feel the grieving. We need to allow it to come up and out of us. It doesn’t mean it goes away forever because every time you think of that person, there’s going to be a missing part of your life.

But you can get past this. You can move forward. My belief is that the people that love us want us to be happy, whether they’re here or not. And the best gift we can give them is to live our lives to the fullest. This is the gift that we give those who have passed and the gift we give ourselves. I believe they want us to gift ourselves.

Again, this episode is a bit spiritual, and a little bit deep. I don’t mean to take you there if you’re not ready to go there, or if you don’t really believe any of this stuff, but I do know that the process that I’m suggesting here today can have a profound effect if you’re willing to give it a shot.

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The post The regrets and leftover emotions after someone dies appeared first on The Overwhelmed Brain.

Emotional abuse is the ultimate brainwashing technique. It often hides in the form of feigned helplessness, generosity, compassion, and love. The perpetrator knows how to appear kind and caring while intertwining abusive behavior, causing the person on the receiving end to become powerless.

Emotional abuse is a method of controlling, manipulating, belittling, and invalidating a person over time. It is often hard to spot in the moment as it can be seen as benign or even “normal” to most observers.

But as this behavior is repeated time and time again, the insidious compound effect of this form of hidden abuse causes its victims to lose confidence in themselves, stop trusting in their own decisions, feel devalued and unimportant, and blame themselves for being the cause of, and sometimes even deserving, of the abusive behavior.

Important: If you are hurting someone you care about and want to change that about yourself while also giving your relationship the best chance at healing, click here to start your free lessons right away with the Healed Being course.

The purpose of emotional abuse is to control and change the victim so that the abuser doesn’t have to change, work on, or improve themselves (this article uses the terms “victim” and “abuser” for brevity and is not meant to label people as such).

In fact, many abusive people don’t even believe they have a problem. By keeping the victim busy trying to fix themselves, it takes the focus off the abuser. If the abuser never looks at themselves and they always get what they want from their victim, they will never change.  

Since the perpetrator of abusive behavior is so good at keeping their victims focused on themselves, there is often no accountability for their behavior. The abuser doesn’t usually want to be vulnerable enough to look inward and do the personal growth work involved in healing.

But as you’ll soon learn in this article, it is absolutely possible that an emotionally abusive person can heal and grow out of that bad behavior. But certain criteria need to be in place in order for it to happen. 

Emotional abuse is really an umbrella term for labels such as psychological abuse, verbal abuse, narcissistic abuse, and more. There are also offshoots like religious abuse and financial abuse as well. Regardless of the label, they all work at disintegrating one’s emotional state. The victims of emotional abuse often report that they feel like they’re going crazy.

That’s not surprising since emotional abuse usually exists in the form of drip-fed emotional “poking” or “jabbing” meant to make the victim believe that the small, individual pokes aren’t harmful. But when someone pokes or jabs you in the same spot for months or years, and you aren’t even sure they’re doing it, you will slowly go crazy.  

And on the way to “Crazy,” you’ll unknowingly let go of your self-worth, self-esteem, confidence, and any beliefs you had in your intelligence or abilities. Who you are will slowly dissolve, and you will become a slave to your own feelings of worthlessness, uselessness, and the consistent guilt that you can’t do anything right. Ultimately, you will actually start to believe what the abuser is saying about you.

Whatever form emotional abuse comes in, the outcome is almost always the same:

The victim loses their power and becomes a shell of their former self.

I received a message from a victim of emotional abuse who told me she was tired of being blamed by ignorant people for getting herself into those types of relationships. She said she’d heard enough speakers and “gurus” tell her and other emotional abuse survivors that they chose to be victims, whether it was because they let their abusers get away with the behavior or simply because they “attracted” the emotionally abusive person into their life.

She was angry. And she had a right to be.

Seemingly supportive and thoughtful people who wanted the best for her thought they were empowering her. In actuality, they were invalidating her experience. She’s heard more than once that it was something she was doing wrong and that she was responsible for allowing the emotionally abusive behavior into her life. She felt like the gurus were trying to convince her that she was broken in some way.

I’m sure she’s had to address many comments from people who weren’t fully informed of the depth and complexity of emotionally abusive behavior. Imagine trying to explain to others how someone is hurting you, but the person you’re talking to doesn’t believe you because they can’t see the bad behavior, even when you point it out. Or if they do see it, they might say, “Yeah, but that’s not so bad.”

It can be a very isolating and frustrating experience. Not only are you a victim of hurtful behavior from one person, but the people who are supposed to be your support system can’t justify your experiences in their minds, so they start to suspect you’re nuts.

I wrote back a lengthy, supportive reply to that very frustrated woman, letting her know that I completely understand where she’s coming from. She hadn’t yet listened to my podcast, Love and Abuse, so she may have thought I was also one of those ignorant people blaming the victim for their abuse.

Ten years ago, she would have been right. 

Many people in abusive relationships will have supportive friends and family who don’t see the bad behavior of the abusive person. They will be entranced by the abuser’s charm, generosity, kindness, and charisma. These are all the external faces of an abusive person. To the outside world, they look like a saint.

I know this to be true because I used to be an emotional abuser.

It’s not something I proudly admit. In fact, I feel really bad about my behavior during that time of my life. But I remember being the person who used to charm my partner’s friends and family while being emotionally harmful at home. 

Quite frankly, all of my partner’s friends and family loved me. They never witnessed the person she described to them. They only saw my generous nature, my sense of humor, my acceptance and open-mindedness, and my willingness to help out wherever and whenever they needed me.

Looking back at who I was, it’s easy to see why her friends were ignorant of who I really was at home. They couldn’t see in me what my partner saw. Because of that, I could do no wrong in their eyes.

Even though I didn’t exhibit the entire spectrum of abusive patterns, the behaviors I did in my relationships over the years were still very harmful to each of my partners. 

After many years of healing and also working with couples and individuals going through emotional abuse themselves, learning just how much psychological damage takes place in this type of dynamic, I hope you’ll agree with me that emotional abuse has to stop.

The destruction that happens to a person being exposed to emotional abuse so often goes unseen and un-believed because the victims have no visible scars. But the clues are there if you know what to look for. They’re in a person’s words and behaviors. And noticing the differences between who they used to be and who they are now is often a good place to start.

The first clue that someone is experiencing emotional abuse is usually a comment the abuse victim makes about how their partner got upset at something they said or did. You may first write this off as nothing but a typical relationship issue. However, upon closer inspection, if you sense a hint of guilt where none should be or spot a glimmer of them taking the blame when there is no reason to do so, it may be a prompt for you to pay closer attention to any other signs that have been present such as: 

• They used to feel good about themselves 
• They spend a lot of time trying to make the other person happy
• They’re never sure where they stand in the relationship
• They analyze almost everything in the relationship
• They constantly look for approval from the other person
• They’ve lost their spark or passion for life
• They talk about their relationship constantly

The list goes on. In fact, I list two hundred signs of emotionally abusive behavior in a healing resource I created called The M.E.A.N Workbook on manipulation and emotional abuse. It helps the victim and abuser learn which specific behaviors are causing the difficulties in their relationship.

An emotionally abused person often cannot pinpoint the exact causes their partner (or friend or family member – fill in the blank with the appropriate person) is upset with them, but they will feel like they need to do whatever they can to make up for it.

The victim is usually convinced that they must have done something wrong because the abuser will play the victim well. The perpetrator of emotional abuse will trick a compassionate person into feeling sorry for them so that they (the compassionate person) believe they hurt the abuser in some way and not the other way around.

Over time, the perception the victim takes on that they are to blame becomes amplified. As the weeks and months go by, the victim starts to doubt their own decisions and begins to walk on eggshells, wondering how to be a better person. They will soon lose trust in their own instincts and will need to rely on the abuser more and more as their sense of self starts to erode. 

The water gets hotter, and the victim can’t feel the boil because they become convinced that they are solely responsible for turning up the heat, so they continue to focus on themselves, trying to figure out exactly what they need to do to prove their love to the abuser. The victim seeks validation, wanting to be seen as worthy and wonderful in their partner’s eyes.

What’s really happening though isn’t that the victim is doing anything wrong, it’s that they are being manipulated into thinking they are.  The emotional abuser learns with precision how to manipulate and control the other person so that they can’t figure out which way is up. It doesn’t happen overnight, though; it happens over time.

One single act of control or manipulation isn’t seen as such. It is seen as “something we all do.”

At least, that’s how friends and family will put it. The victim of abuse will have one of those well-meaning friends say something like, “He got upset at you because you spent too much time with your mom? Aww, he sounds like he misses you! I could see me doing that to my partner, too.”

A single moment such as this isn’t the problem. It is the repeated behaviors and patterns that compound over time, slowly disintegrating one’s self-worth and self-esteem, making the victim of such behavior have a hard time trying to figure out what’s happening, and making it very difficult to convince anyone else what’s going on in the relationship because they can’t figure it out themselves.

Emotional abuse is elusive and comes in many forms. But the worst, most insidious kind gets played out as tiny, seemingly innocent behaviors that, to the casual observer, appear to be “normal relationship issues.” The reality is that these behaviors are actually erosive psychological “stabs” cleverly crafted to look benign and make the victim feel as if they are doing it to themselves.

Emotional abusers persuade their victim (and everyone else outside the relationship) that the victim is the cause of all their own suffering and is also the reason the relationship is failing.

The abuser makes the victim look like the perpetrator of the problems.

The abuser will even go as far as to act completely calm and rational while their partner gets upset, making it look like their partner is the irrational one to outside observers (and to themselves). And as the victim wears down from repeated abusive behavior, so do their defenses and logic. This is why so many victims can’t tell if they’re actually in an abusive relationship. Once logic is broken down and eradicated, it’s difficult to make sense of what’s happening. 

If you’re curious if you or someone you care about is experiencing emotional abuse, just watch for personality changes over time. If you’re not trained to see the red flags of abusive behavior already, at least be observant of behavior that you can see.

For example, when someone you know goes from confident and sure of themselves to doubtful and hesitant about making decisions (usually in just a few weeks or months, but it can happen over longer periods of time as well), it’s possible someone in their life is manipulating or trying to control them.

If they are always sharing how terrible of a person they are to their partner or that they keep messing up in the relationship, it may not be them at all. It could be the person behind the scenes filling their brain with false information.

The hardest part about learning to spot emotional abuse is that, often, the abusers will appear to be kind, caring, and generous. Because of that, it’s easy to be tricked by them. They show one face to the world and another at home. They seem authentic and genuine but become another person when they know no one is watching.

Like I said earlier, I used to be this way with my partners, too. My bad behavior consisted of being highly judgmental toward them whenever they did something I didn’t agree with. I would withdraw my emotions if I didn’t get what I wanted. I would craft my language in a way that made them feel guilty about themselves (causing them to withdraw, making them feel unloved and unworthy – like they didn’t matter).

And I did all of this in a way that made each partner believe she was doing something wrong. They blamed themselves for not being good enough instead of directing their anger or upset toward me. Unfortunately, I knew how to plant those deceptions in their head.

I regret all of my previous behavior, but I share this with you not only for complete transparency of my past but also to give you a unique perspective to help you understand the possible motives and behaviors of an emotionally abusive person.

I was controlling and manipulative with every woman in my life until my divorce. The end of my marriage is when I finally woke up and realized I needed to start focusing on healing myself instead of trying to change others. 

When my wife wanted to split up, it hit me like a ton of bricks. It would hit most people that way, of course, but this was especially painful because, in that moment, I realized my entire life was a series of failed relationships that each ended with my partner leaving me. Every relationship I got into started off great, but over time, my partners would become distant and eventually break it off with me.

During the separation from my wife, I made the conscious choice to figure out what was causing my partners to leave me all the time. I decided to focus on myself for the first time in my life and accept that I was the common denominator for all my relationship failures.

I believed marriage was supposed to last “forever,” so when my wife wanted to leave the relationship, it made me realize if I didn’t reflect on how I kept causing this, I’d never have a successful relationship. I had to figure out what I was doing wrong. 

My wife left, but we stayed in touch with the idea that perhaps we needed a little break. This thought did ease the pain a bit, but I was still scared. I needed to resolve this issue so it never happened again in this relationship or any other.

While she was gone, I had all the alone time I needed to search for answers. Surprisingly, it didn’t take long to find them because I finally changed where I was looking. After so many years of pointing at other people as the cause of all my problems, I made the choice to search someplace I never had before: Inside myself.

At any other time of my life, I’d look at the people in my world and figure out what they were doing wrong and what they needed to do to change for me. I was convinced the cause of all my relationship challenges was in them, not me. I believed if they were upset at me about something I said or did, it was just their inability to acknowledge the flaws I saw in them. I “knew” I was right and that they needed to fix themselves. 

It was so much easier to look outside myself for the answers to my relationship problems all those years. But when I decided to take responsibility and look inward instead, I discovered something I didn’t know was there:

A lack of personal boundaries.

That may not seem like an obvious connection to my bad behavior. After all, what do personal boundaries have to do with being emotionally abusive toward someone else?

The answer is that I was living in a world where I was afraid to ask for what I wanted. I carried around the fear of expressing myself or letting people know what behavior was acceptable and what wasn’t. I hated confrontation and didn’t want to be truthful with others because of my fear of the consequences.

Again, it might seem odd to connect a lack of boundaries with acting badly toward those you claim to love, but when you don’t have boundaries, you may choose to manipulate those around you instead. After all, if you’re good at making others do what you want, you don’t even need boundaries!

And that was exactly what I did. Without the need for boundaries, I manipulated the people I loved to satisfy my wants and needs. 

There is no point in knowing and enforcing your boundaries if you can just manipulate people to do anything you want. When you succeed at manipulation, everyone’s behavior is acceptable because you made them behave the way you wanted. You don’t need boundaries if you coerce others into compliance with your standards.

I’m not saying that those who don’t know and enforce their boundaries will become manipulative, but they are more likely to because of a fear of the consequences of honoring themselves.

If you don’t have boundaries, you develop other ways to get your needs met. And you may meet those needs by being manipulative and controlling, the primary components that make up emotionally abusive behavior.

A lack of personal boundaries was my downfall and the cause of the demise of every relationship I’ve ever been in.

I remember the day I made the connection between personal boundaries and emotional abuse. I was sitting in my bedroom one day, a few days after my wife moved out, and I was wondering how I kept messing up all of my relationships.

Then, a thought came to me that changed everything. It was a realization that made my current and past relationship mistakes crystal clear and started my journey of healing. That realization was this:

If I’m so upset by the way my partner behaves, then why don’t I just honor myself and leave?

That may not sound so profound when you read it here, but in that moment, it was a revelation.

I saw the light! In the split second after I had that thought, I realized that during my marriage, every time I judged my wife and made her feel bad, it was really just an excuse and a distraction for me not to have to do something for myself. I knew making the effort to change myself would be too much for me to handle. 

In other words, I was committed to this relationship no matter what. Even if that meant I had to control her behavior.

I needed to control behavior I couldn’t accept because that was all I knew how to do. And since the primary goal for every relationship I’ve ever been in was to keep the relationship at any cost, I did everything in my power to make sure they didn’t leave me.

I did that through deception, manipulation, and control. I wasn’t always awful, of course. I had a lot of great qualities as a partner, too. For instance, I was supportive and emotionally connected, liked to laugh, and encouraged my partners to follow their path in life. However, if they did something I didn’t want or accept for my life or what I wanted in a relationship, that’s when my alter ego showed its ugly face.

If she wanted to eat junk food or get a tattoo, and I had a problem with those things (which I did back then), I would make her feel bad so that she would conform to the way I wanted her to be. That way, I didn’t have to leave the relationship. I still wanted to be with her, but I wanted to control her too.

Whatever she did that I didn’t like, I made it my responsibility, my duty, to change her so that she did the “right” thing. Her changing would serve me and only me. I knew if I could mold her into exactly what I wanted, I wouldn’t have to change myself. It was the epitome of selfish, narcissistic behavior.

Since I had no personal boundaries, I never asked for what I wanted, nor did what I felt was right for me. I just manipulated and controlled my partners over the years so that I didn’t have to enforce boundaries that I never developed. It was the easy way out for me.

When I uttered those words, “If I’m so upset by my wife’s behavior, why don’t I just leave?” my heart sank. I didn’t actually want to leave. I didn’t want to have to face the reality that I would have to end things and that I would be alone.

I especially didn’t want to be the bad guy. I didn’t want to be the one responsible for ruining the relationship, even though I was practically solely responsible for doing that very thing already. I wanted what I wanted regardless of her thoughts and feelings. But I chose to make her feel bad instead of being the bad guy. In hindsight, I can see how cowardly that was. I caused her to suffer so that I didn’t have to.  

When I said, “…why don’t I just leave?” aloud to myself, I had to process those words. I had never considered leaving anyone before. It just popped into my head. Those words were a challenge to my heart and mind because it meant that if I really wanted things to change, I’d have to change myself. 

The words put me outside of my default behavior of manipulating to get what I want. It was the first time I chose to consider her emotional well-being. 

I sat there pondering and reflecting on my marriage, trying to understand my behavior over the years. I thought, “Have I really never considered her well-being?”

And beyond that, I came to an even bigger realization: My bad behavior was actually hurting my wife.

I never got this before!

I never empathized with her or any of the people I’ve hurt over the years. I only acted selfishly. It didn’t matter to me what she wanted in those moments. When I was being manipulative and controlling, the only person’s thoughts, feelings, and emotions that mattered to me were mine. 

At other times, I’d be caring and loving. My empathy was fully active, and I had a lot of great qualities that I believe most people would want in a partner. But if I didn’t like something she was doing, I turned off the empathy and pulled out my emotional daggers.

I was finally starting to understand the pain I was causing her and also realizing what I’d done to her and every partner before her as well. For the first time, I put myself in her shoes and “tried on” my own behavior against myself. I asked myself, “If she were judging me, giving me disapproving looks, commenting on what I ate or how much I exercised, or withdrawing love and attention from me, how would that make me feel?”

After a few minutes of visualizing what this would be like, I felt like throwing up. For the first time, I accessed the pain that I was inflicting on her and all my partners throughout life. I felt awful. 

‘Trying on’ being the victim of my own behavior, I felt unloved, unworthy, and unimportant to the one person who was supposed to love me the most and make me feel on top of the world. It was a horrible and lonely feeling, and I finally understood how I made the people I was supposed to love feel.

When my divorce papers arrived, making the dissolution of my marriage final, reality struck. Along with sadness, I felt like I would never meet anyone that loved me that much ever again. I believed she was my only chance at love and happiness. The end of my marriage felt like the end of the road for me. 

But the end of the road always seems to have a side street of healing if you choose to take it. I had already started working on myself and understanding my behavior before that day, but I still had a lot of healing left to do to make sure I never acted that way again, whether I got into another relationship or not.

It was vital I healed from the fears I held on to for so many years. I needed to address, process, and heal from my fear of being alone and being rejected or abandoned.

I needed to work on my boundaries, figuring out what I will and won’t accept in life. I also needed to learn that relying on another person as my sole provider of love and happiness was the fastest way to drain that person of their energy and cause the relationship to disintegrate.

And finally, and probably most importantly, I needed to learn and practice acceptance.

If wanting to change someone comes from judgment, then supporting who they are and how they show up, even if you disagree with who they are and how they show up, is acceptance.

In fact, that understanding helped shape my new definition of love: 

Love is supporting another person’s path to happiness, even if it means they are on a different path than you.

In my current relationship, my partner told one of our mutual friends that she had never heard me judge her once. When she said that, I couldn’t believe it because that was never me. Her comment floored me because after I did so much healing around the judgments and fears I carried for many years, I didn’t even realize how noticeable not judging someone actually was.

I didn’t make that connection because it hadn’t occurred to me how normal judgmental and other hurtful behavior was for me for so long. My heart grew warm when she said those words, not only because it was a sweet thing for her to say but because it reminded me of how far I’d come.

The emotionally abusive person doesn’t have to continue their bad behavior. They can change if they are willing to put in the work it takes to look inward instead of trying to find the fault in others. And it takes a lot of work because it isn’t only about stopping bad behavior. It’s about replacing bad behavior with healthy, supportive behavior that you actually want to do.

That’s why I made it imperative that I learned what boundaries were and how to enforce them. I wanted to make sure all of my decisions came from a place of honoring myself, not dishonoring someone else. I also worked on my fear of abandonment and fear of being alone. I traveled a long road of healing that I still travel today.

I’m a completely different person now than who I was, and I barely recognize that old me anymore. I am grateful for the lessons I’ve learned, but also aware that the old me may try to show up every now and then because of triggers I am unaware of.

The old me wants to judge and control the people I love. Fortunately, the new me prefers supporting other people’s happiness and allowing them to be whoever they want to be. This is the “me” I continually work on.

Whenever “old me” thoughts pop into my head, they are a reminder that there is always work to do. And just because I haven’t yet eradicated all of that toxic thinking doesn’t mean I’m that person anymore.

In fact, when an unhealthy thought comes into my mind, the first thing I say to myself is, “Wait, what is this? Where did this come from?” Then, I stop whatever I’m doing and work on it. I dig into the origin of the thought and try to determine why I’m still carrying it around.

There are some things in life we are always working on healing in ourselves. The goal is to continue on that path until the challenge is no longer present. In other words, when you no longer feel the need to do the old, unhealthy behavior, you can put more time and energy into other areas of your life. 

When you work on yourself, and you’ve done some healing, you become more aware of what still needs work. You will be triggered by different events throughout life, and because of that, you may not even know you will react to certain things until you are triggered.

In other words, twenty years could go by, and you’ve done all the healing you can do, then suddenly something happens that never happened before (or hasn’t happened in a long time), and you end up repeating behavior that you thought was gone for good.

If this happens, be gentle on yourself.

You cannot possibly predict every scenario that will ever occur, and you may never know what emotional triggers are still lingering inside you until the perfect stimulus comes along, causing you to react. But until then, you can only do the best you can do. 

The woman I mentioned at the beginning of this article conveyed a lot of anger in her message to me. She was tired of so-called smart people saying things to her that made her feel like she was to blame because they didn’t understand the breadth of emotional abuse. They didn’t get the insidious nature of the behavior and how it happens over a long period of time, which is why it’s so difficult to pinpoint any single incident as being “bad.”

She heard over and over again from friends, family members, and even professionals that perhaps she wasn’t seeing things clearly. They couldn’t see the abusive behavior behind the curtains, so they simply chalked it up to her being too sensitive or blind to the kindness that everyone else saw in her partner.

She felt alone, misunderstood, and even blamed for something that was being done to her. You want to talk about crazymaking? This was a big component of it. She had nowhere to turn, and very few people believed her.

This is why emotional abuse has to stop. The victims get blamed, and the perpetrators walk away, looking like they can do no wrong. If you are in an emotionally abusive relationship, it’s time to get very clear on the behaviors that are causing you to feel bad. Start to learn the terms of emotional abuse, such as gaslighting, triangulation, emotional and narcissistic abuse, isolation, manipulation, stonewalling, silent treatment, and more.

Get familiar with the helpful terms you may need as well, like “no contact” and “gray rock.” If you’ve talked to the person doing the bad behavior and it doesn’t stop, you need to be prepared to take steps to get away from it. 

If you are the perpetrator of emotional abuse and you’d like to stop doing this behavior, please know that none of this was meant to position you as an awful person. Good people can do awful behavior, just as good people can stop doing awful behavior.

As I said previously, I was there, so I understand what you might be going through. Just remember that I was able to heal from this, and so can you.

Both the abuser and the victim need to heal from emotional abuse. My healing took a lot of work. But it was worth it. My life changed dramatically. I’m happy now and no longer in a constantly triggered state (which was very tiring). Today, I’m in the best relationship of my life. And it is the first time I have felt peaceful and calm in a relationship. Ever.

There is healing for both the victim and the abuser as long as both are willing to do whatever it takes to get there. It’s important to understand that you may not be able to get there together either. You may have to travel the healing path without the other person in your life.

It is very humbling and vulnerable to do it together, and it can be done, but not always. So if you want to work together on this, that’s great. Just remember that sometimes the abuse has created so much hurt and fear, and one’s defensive walls are so high that there may be little healing until there’s been a break away from each other. The brain fog can lift faster when you are away from those who may have created it, helping you to think more clearly.

Sometimes, quite frankly, the victim may never want to return. If that’s the case, that is okay too. Remember that love is supporting the other person’s path to happiness, even if they are on a different path than you.

If someone’s path takes them away from you, it’s because they are honoring what’s right for them. Honoring someone honoring themselves is showing the deepest respect for that person. It is truly a loving thing to do. 

Whether you are the victim or the abuser, remember your boundaries. The abuser needs to learn what their boundaries are so they focus on themselves, figuring out what they want and don’t want in their life, just as the victim needs to know what’s acceptable behavior and what’s not, then walk the road that’s best for them.

Not all relationships can be saved, but people can. People can elevate above emotional abuse on both sides. Both the victims and the perpetrators need to stand up and do what’s right for themselves. That means taking their focus off each other and learning what their boundaries are and how to honor them so that they can bring the best version of themselves into the world. 

The victim can honor their boundaries by learning what emotionally abusive behavior is and how it works so that they can make informed decisions. The perpetrator can learn about and honor their boundaries by realizing the only person they can change is themselves.

Emotional abuse is futile behavior that only leads to hurt and sadness. Relationships never, ever improve because of emotional abuse. They only degrade and spiral into pain.   

If you are the abuser, it’s time to let go of the fantasy that you can control or manipulate anyone into conforming to who you want them to be. People don’t like being controlled. They don’t like being made to feel bad. They love when others allow them to be exactly who they want to be. And they love those who support their happiness.

No matter which side of the fence you are on, you can get through this. There is healing and a path to freedom from abuse. And you deserve to be on that path. You are amazing. 

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For more information on how to identify toxic behavior and poisonous communication, tune into the Love and Abuse podcast. 

If you would like to change your own emotionally abusive behavior, visit healedbeing.com to start your healing journey today. Life and relationships are so much more fulfilling when you stop hurting people you love.

All information in this article is for informational and educational purposes only. Always seek the guidance of a medical or psychological professional before making any changes that could affect your physical or mental well-being. 

The post My Healing Journey from Being an Emotional Abuser appeared first on The Overwhelmed Brain.

If you’ve been the victim or the perpetrator of actual or suspected infidelity, this article will help you understand several important aspects of the cheater’s behavior, the cheating partner’s perspective, and what both people need to focus on if they are planning on saving the relationship after the affair is discovered.

Whether you want to save your relationship or not, this article will be a good resource to help you understand the perspective of both partners.

A relationship can survive infidelity if both partners want to work on it, but there are some challenging steps ahead for the couple on this path.

Suspecting your partner might be cheating on you is never a thought you want to enter your mind, as it could mean a reality you don’t want to face.

If you are suspicious of your partner cheating in your relationship, or you’ve learned that your partner has cheated on you (or you’ve cheated on your partner), the following may help you understand the cheater’s mentality and why people cheat in general.

Learning the basics of cheating will give you a better understanding of a cheater’s mindset and highlight what could be going on in your relationship if you suspect cheating. You’ll also get a taste of what might be happening in the cheater’s partner’s mind as well.

If you’ve ever cheated or are cheating now, knowing what your partner has gone through or is going through now may give you the perspective you need to take the next right step for them and the relationship.

Note: I use the terms “cheater” and “victim” throughout this article. They were used to make writing the article more efficient and not meant as permanent labels or condemnation.

Cheating is bad behavior, but not necessarily indicative of a bad person

Cheating by itself doesn’t always mean that the person doing it is necessarily an awful human being. It may feel that way upon discovery by the victim, and it doesn’t necessarily mean the cheater doesn’t do other behaviors that make them awful, but cheating is not necessarily what defines a person as a whole

The only reason I would ask you to adopt this philosophy is so that if you’ve been cheated on and you want to heal your relationship after the affair, it’s important to accept that the person who cheated still has good in them.

If you instead define the person, and not their behavior, as “bad”, you may not be able to heal and rebuild the relationship as you hoped. You may find yourself calling them every name in the book for a while after you learned of the cheating, and that’s okay, but when you are ready to rebuild the relationship, knowing they still have some good in them can be very helpful during the process.

A caveat to this is the unfortunate fact that some cheaters will always be cheaters. Those are the kind of people that you don’t want to rebuild a relationship with. We’ll get into more detail about those types of people later on, but for now, understand that there are some cheaters that may not be able to (or want to) change.

Cheating is a huge symptom of a failure to communicate authentically in a relationship

If a partner is considering cheating or has cheated, it is likely due to the fact that they didn’t authentically express what they needed from their partner. This caused them to seek it elsewhere. That’s not the only reason, of course, but it’s one of the biggest.

What would your relationship be like if your partner weren’t afraid to share anything with you? Imagine that they had no fear and were able to express their wants and needs to you without worrying that you’d leave them or get upset. Do you think there would be as much of a chance they would cheat?

Cheating often happens when the cheater chooses not to share what they want or need with their partner and instead seeks those wants and needs from someone else. There are many reasons for this, but one of the main reasons originates from the fear of how the cheater’s partner will react if they were to express their true thoughts and feelings.

After all, telling your partner that you find a coworker sexy, or that you are unhappy in the bedroom, or that they are becoming less attractive to you, might lead to a conversation you don’t want to have.

But if the potential cheater were to share that they were having these thoughts, even though their partner’s reaction may be incredibly difficult to face, they may find that the ensuing and likely difficult conversation that follows will lead to more understanding and, quite possibly, positive change.

The downside to sharing such information is that it could also lead to a breakup or divorce. This is the dilemma that often manifests when one or both partners choose to hide desires or critical comments they know will create tension or stress in the relationship.

When one or both partners instead face their fears and ask for what they want, it can lead to one of the most powerful relationship-growth moments they could have. Sharing and expressing at this level can strengthen the bond and solidify the relationship even more.

But, again, the relationship may not survive such authenticity. Or, if it does survive, it could be more difficult than it was before because now there are truths on the table that your partner may not be able to handle.

When you hide your true wants and needs and instead try to fulfill them outside the relationship, you will probably end up with relationship difficulties anyway. The choice to express yourself authentically does come with some risk. The high risk of honesty can come with the massive reward of strong bonding.

When you are not honest, not only do you continue a relationship that probably feels less and less intimate every day, but your dishonesty (or lack of sharing) can cause your partner to withhold their own wants and needs too.

Some examples of authentic communication that might be difficult to bring up in a typical relationship:

• “I would really like more love and connection.”
• “I would like more sex.”
• “I feel a little sad (or angry) because I’m not getting [some want or need] met.”
• “My coworker is coming on to me, and I’m having mixed feelings.”
• “I am not fulfilled in this relationship and need more.”
• “I’m becoming less attracted to you.”
• “I am uncomfortable around you when you do that behavior.”
• “I don’t like that you get so upset with me.”

Any of the above could lead to a big, probably difficult conversation. But if you don’t bring up what bothers you, or talk about something you’d like to be different, and you instead start to look for these things outside your relationship, you are heading into dangerous territory.

Cheating isn’t always only about sex

A cheating person’s wants and needs can extend far beyond sex. Some people believe that the line of betrayal is crossed when a partner shares something personal (something they’d normally share with only their partner), with someone else that could be a potential partner for them if they were single.

In other words, betrayal can begin when you feel your partner is sharing what you hold sacred between the two of you with someone they could essentially date or marry if you weren’t in the picture.

A relationship can create what feels like a sacred bond that begins when you start to share intimate details about yourself with your partner. It can strengthen and become even more powerful when you become physical and share your body.

The fastest way to disintegrate your relationship is to start becoming more personal and intimate with someone that you would be attracted to if you were single.

If you have a personal connection with someone outside of your current relationship, ask yourself the following:

“Would I consider being in a relationship, or be intimate with this person if I were single?”

If the answer is yes, the risk of cheating is much higher. Also, your partner probably realizes this too, so you want to make sure to keep this in mind when you are in communication with this other person.

Cheating can be absolutely devastating to your partner

Because of many of the conversations I’ve had with victims of cheating, and my own introspection of how it might feel to be cheated on, I started using the term emotional murder to describe the feeling a victim of cheating gets after learning about the affair.

When you betray your partner, they may feel like you’re ripping their heart out and throwing it on the ground in front of them. To them, you are making it clear that you don’t care about your commitment to them or their thoughts and feelings. You only care about yourself and your own needs.

Not only that, your partner will have all kinds of feelings of insecurity, trust, abandonment, and other issues that often require therapy for them to sort through. The emotions they had for you and in themselves, especially the feelings of comfort and safety, have been essentially destroyed as if they were murdered. That term may sound harsh, but it is an effective metaphor to help the cheater understand just how much of an impact infidelity has on the relationship.

The cheater may not have wanted their partner to feel any of this pain, but it’s often unavoidable.

Cheating devastates.

I once asked a psychotherapist what client challenge was the most difficult to work with, and she told me cheating, hands down. She said that to some people, being cheated on is almost as bad as losing a child.

This was shocking to hear. After I heard that, I realized just how painful it was to go through such a betrayal. I never understood the impact cheating could have on someone until that moment.

The level of comfort and happiness in a relationship is directly related to the level of trust and safety you feel with your partner. If one partner betrays that trust, the victim can often feel as if their world just came crashing down on them.

It’s like finding out that your best, most trusted friend intentionally hurt your child. You would probably be shocked and be at a loss for words as you tried to sort out what just happened and what you’re supposed to do with this information. You may feel the same type of devastation from such a betrayal and clear breach of trust. You would likely lose faith in your friend and not be able to trust them around your children any longer.

This loss of faith is a loss of a part of the self. Victims of cheating feel as if a part of them is dead; hence, emotional murder.

Does the cheater love their partner?

I define love as ‘supporting someone’s happiness.’ If you support your partner’s happiness, and you know that cheating on them would devastate them, then do you really love them if you cheat on them?

Doing something that you know would harm or cause much pain to your partner is not how I define love. Let me expand upon this a bit because there are people who have reached out to me and said, “You can’t tell me I don’t love my partner. I love him/her very much. I did cheat, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love them. I felt awful after I did it.”

I’ve thought about this very heartfelt type of comment for a long time, and the only way I can reconcile that thought process is if the person telling me they love their partner defines love in a way that’s more about themselves than the other person.

In other words, if you define love as “I love the way I feel when I’m with that person” (which I might call “in love”), then you do not love the person in a way that supports them. You are only in love with the person in a way that supports you.

Again, this is my definition of love.

I believe if you truly love someone, you want them to be happy. You support their path to their happiness, which makes you observant of your own behavior in a way that supports them. In other words, loving someone means questioning yourself before doing anything that might be defined as betraying your partner’s happiness.

A good question to ask yourself is, “Would this behavior make my partner unhappy?“

I think when you ask yourself that question about someone you love, you end up doing things that reinforce your love for that person, which helps you stay in alignment with healthy relationship values.

If you absolutely cannot control yourself and really want to betray your partner’s trust and confidence in you, I recommend a course of action that shows respect for your partner by doing one of the following:

1. Express what you want, then have a discussion about it. This won’t be easy, but it will be honest.
2. Separate. If you don’t want to have a conversation about it, and you still want to betray your partner, at least tell them you’d like to separate. This way, you will be out of the promise of commitment while you figure out what you really want.

If you choose to stay in the relationship but not tell your partner that you’re going to betray them, remember this:

Cheaters are always caught. Always.

If not today, tomorrow, next year, or in five years, the cheater will get caught. And it won’t end well.

The cheater always gets caught. And I don’t mean red-handed with irrefutable proof. I mean, in the slightest, most minute way that the cheater may never consider.

Behavior changes almost always accompany cheating:

• The husband who starts treating his spouse better
• The wife who starts working out more and listening to rock instead of easy listening
• The boyfriend who keeps getting caught in lies
• The girlfriend who has to explain her texts or emails to her partner
• The partner who is suddenly happier and in a better mood all the time

There are legitimate reasons for all of these things, but behavioral changes like this can be a sign that something else might be going on, especially when there seems to be no other explanation for the changes.

In the end, however, the cheater will be caught. They think they can cover their tracks, but it just doesn’t work out that way because the behavioral changes become prevalent.

And if there’s not a behavioral change, what happens when the cheater’s new lover starts showing up more and more? Sometimes the “other woman” or “other man” wants more of the cheater’s time, and they will start appearing in more phone calls, texts, and even in person.

Even the glances between the cheater and their new lover are almost impossible to hide. If the cheater isn’t found out, their change of behavior is enough to signal something is up. The cheater’s partner will sense it and will probably follow up on it. The cheater may have to live the rest of the relationship looking over their shoulder, at least until they come clean.

Those who are caught versus those who are not

A common characteristic of a cheater that is caught is that they have cheated more than once, and sometimes with more than one person. This is often the type of cheater who got comfortable cheating and deceiving his or her partner.

This type of cheater is often much harder for a partner to forgive because there was no, or not enough, guilt or shame in them to come forward and confess. Without guilt or shame, the cheater appears not to care if they are lying to their partner or not. They only seem to care about their own happiness.

If the cheater, however, confesses out of guilt or shame, it may be less likely that they’ve cheated many times. It doesn’t necessarily mean they haven’t, but when guilt and shame motivate someone to confess, it usually indicates a stronger moral compass and stronger empathy for their partner.

These aren’t hard and fast rules, but they should be a consideration if you suspect your partner of cheating, and especially if they come clean with you.

A good rule of thumb to remember is that the cheater with a conscience, empathy, and compassion for their partner who regrets hurting their partner is much more likely to commit to the relationship and never cheat again.

In other words, a cheater can learn the hard lesson of a stupid mistake and vow to never make that mistake again. This happens often, and relationships have become stronger because of this.

If you’ve caught someone cheating, and they don’t feel guilty or awful because they hurt you, and they only seem to feel bad because they were caught, you are probably not in a loving relationship. 

If, however, they do feel awful and show genuine pain and want to rectify things with you, the relationship has a stronger chance of success. You still have to get on board with the rebuilding process, but the affair can be a thing of the past when you have two people willing to do the work.

What to Expect After the Affair If You Choose to Stay in the Relationship

After the cheating has been discovered, I believe in full disclosure so that there is no more hiding, and the healing process can begin. Put everything on the table.

In other words, once the cheating is known, the cheater must fess up to everything.

This won’t be easy for the victim who has to learn who their partner was with and where and when it happened, but when it’s all on the table, it’s tangible, and both partners can work with it.

This full disclosure process also shows that the cheater is now, from this day forward, going to be fully transparent about their activities, leaving nothing to their partner’s interpretation or imagination.

The cheater needs to show that they will no longer deceive their partner or omit any details. Their goal should be to be crystal clear and honest about everything.

This also means that the cheater must be willing to do almost anything their partner asks of them for at least 6 months. I believe 6 months is a good period of time to go through the healing process (called the “healing period” from now on).

The number of months for this healing period may vary, as it can sometimes last a year, but it should never go beyond a year. If it does, then healing isn’t taking place, and one or both partners isn’t letting go of the pain of the past.

If that means the victim wants to check the cheater’s phone, log in to their email, see every text, and listen to every voicemail, or even show up unexpectedly at the cheater’s work, then a remorseful cheater who wants to repair the damage will comply, no questions asked.

A remorseful cheater will live in a glass house where their partner can see everything going on in their life.

This is their retribution and rectification for committing “emotional murder”. The cheater must willingly and voluntarily live under the scrutinous eye of their partner until they can learn to gain trust in them again.

And, the cheater must be willing to accept their partner’s anger and upset about the cheating for the entire healing period (again, 6 months to a year).

In other words, if you’re a cheater and it’s been a month since the affair, and you think your partner should “Get over it already”, don’t be surprised when they don’t. The cheater’s partner experienced the ultimate betrayal. Their trust and feelings of safety and security have been thrown out the window by the very person they were supposed to have the most trust and feelings of safety with.

When the cheater is getting yelled at and told how much damage they’ve caused, it’s my belief that the cheater should sit there quietly and take it. If the cheater doesn’t give their partner the freedom to do that during the healing period, the relationship could bypass the healing process and make it difficult for both partners to regain any sense of happiness.

Tune into the Love and Abuse podcast to help you learn how to navigate difficult and emotionally abusive relationships

I do believe it’s okay for the cheater to be made to feel guilty for a while. The cheater may already feel guilty without their partner’s help, but if the partner wants to make them feel worse, it may be what’s needed for both the victim to get things off their chest and the cheater to experience pain (which is often what the victim wants the cheater to experience).

The cheater crushed their partner’s heart, and now the cheater has to endure some pain because of it. It sounds harsh, but the victim needs to direct their pain at the cheater in hopes the cheater gets the point. And unless you’ve ever been cheated on, you may not realize just how much pain a cheater can cause their partner.

Again, the cheater is not necessarily a bad person because they cheated, but they did engage in bad behavior.

They may be a bad person because of other things they’ve done or do in their life, but I’m only talking about the behavior of betrayal and cheating.

If you’ve ever had an affair, you are not bad or unworthy. You did the deed, and there’s nothing you can do to change the past. But going forward, if you’re committed to making things right and never cheating again, I want you to have the healthiest, happiest relationship you can have.

You do deserve to be happy and in a loving relationship. And you don’t have to hold on to guilt for the rest of your life. Former cheaters who vow to never cheat again should be allowed to get past their mistakes and experience love and happiness again. I teach about this and more in my Healed Being program.

But both partners have to realize that the residue of cheating could last for years. If you’ve been cheated on and are unable to fully get over it and heal, and your partner isn’t displaying any signs of remorse or wanting to be completely transparent with you and willing to take their punishment, healing cannot happen.

A relationship that hasn’t reached a stage of healing where the victim has less anger and fear, and the cheater has less guilt and shame, has minimal chance of survival. Anger and upset will likely permeate the relationship to be re-triggered time and time again, keeping the healing from taking place.

These emotional triggers are very much indicators that trust has not been re-established, and the victim does not feel safe enough to let their guard down. If you can’t let your guard down, you can’t let the full experience of love and happiness in. And you will never feel secure enough in the relationship to be authentically you.

The cheating partner may need to learn how to make their partner a priority above almost everything else. This could mean quitting their job because they work with the person they hooked up with. It could mean choosing different friends. It may also mean they get tracking software on their phone so their partner knows where they are at all times.

Their life doesn’t have to stay this way forever, but taking big, life-changing steps like this shows that the cheater is serious and that they are committed 100% to take full accountability and help heal the relationship.

This doesn’t mean I’m advising the one who cheated to make these massive life changes, but big steps in the direction toward the relationship and away from what influenced the cheating in the first place go a long way in the victim’s heart.

Some of these major changes may not be possible, but keep in mind a remorseful cheater who wants to repair the damage they’ve done is willing to make sacrifices in other areas of life to prove they want this above all else.

Again, this may not be the path the cheater needs to take, but it shows that when there’s that level of commitment, where the cheater is willing to do anything to save the relationship, that is a bonus to healing and regaining trust.

The last thing to expect after the affair, if you choose to stay in the relationship, is that the cheater (if they are doing almost all of the above steps) must be allowed to let go of the guilt and be released from any emotional prison they or their partner set them up in.

Yes, the cheater does get a reprieve after months of accountability. However, as I mentioned earlier, the healing period can take up to a year. Hopefully, during that time, there is more leniency after each month because the cheater should now be completely open and honest about what’s going on in their life.

When the cheater is willing to do whatever is required to show that they are completely dedicated to their partner and the relationship and have learned greatly from their mistakes, the cheater should eventually be treated as a trusted, loving partner who would never want to risk their relationship ever again.

This means the partner of a cheater must get into the space of loving and trusting their partner more and more to the point where the mistakes of the past aren’t seen as omens for the future but as a reminder of the lack of communication they once had.

Continuing to express and share with each other is what keeps the relationship strong and secure because the truth is always laid out before you. You can work with the truth. You can’t work with silence or lies.

Again, during and especially after the healing period, the victim’s anger has to dissipate, and the cheater’s guilt has to wane.  I’ve seen some relationships experience years of unhappiness and upset because one or both partners could not get beyond the negativity of that time in their life.

Though there will be emotional triggers that happen from time to time after the healing period, they should become less and less prevalent to the point where they do not interfere with love and connection any longer. It could take years for old triggers to be discovered and processed, as one could pop up at any moment. But just know that triggers are a normal function of healing.

An example of an emotional trigger might be when the victim of cheating notices their partner checking their phone and putting it away quickly. Though their partner may not have had cheating on their mind, the victim might have a sudden PTSD response of fear and think that the cheating is happening all over again. This response is normal, but should be brought up and talked about in the relationship or with a friend or professional, so that nothing is left buried or repressed.

Healing from cheating isn’t easy. In fact, it could be the toughest thing both partners will ever go through. However, when the relationship survives the affair, it can be stronger and more intimate than ever. The reason is that, in the best-case scenario, the cheater has come clean and is more honest than he or she ever was before. Because of this, the relationship gets built on a new foundation of honesty, trust, and respect.

Also, guilt can be a huge motivator for change.

When the cheater feels guilt or shame for letting their partner down and especially breaking the trust between them, they can often change their life entirely to show that they are no longer that person and will never be “that” person again.

When the cheater continues to make their partner their priority instead of falling into an old pattern of selfish behavior, they are meeting the criteria to facilitate healing in the best way possible.

Healing from cheating is possible

As I’ve stated, it’s my opinion that the cheater does need to suffer for some time after they’ve betrayed their partner. But when that suffering goes on for too long, however, the cheater is allowed to forgive themselves and move into a new space of no guilt and less or no more emotional pain.

After the healing period, the former cheater needs to be released from their suffering so that both partners can rebuild the relationship from a healthy space – starting with a more honest foundation built on full transparency and integrity.

If the cheater continues to carry guilt and continues to face the wrath of their partner’s hurt and anger after a year or so, the relationship cannot rebuild and get off the ground again. The cheater needs to forgive themselves, accept that they made the mistake, and move forward, closing the past behind them but never forgetting what happened.

The punishment the cheater suffers from their partner and their own guilt can be a good reminder of what could happen if they ever consider going down that road again. And of course, the cheater needs to know that their partner will probably experience a lot of moments of upset, anger, confusion, and resentment during the healing process, and that this may happen often.

In order for a relationship to survive and even thrive after cheating, the former cheater must process and let go of the negative emotions, and the cheater’s partner must let them. If the victim cannot get past the pain and continues to bring up the past and become upset after the healing period is over, they may want to consider leaving the relationship or at least seeking professional help.

I’ve met with couples where one cheated, and the other was still angry and hurt, even though it happened many years ago. This is common and keeps the pain in a relationship alive.

I get it.

Discovering your partner has cheated is extremely painful, and it can feel nearly impossible to let go of what happened. That “emotional murder” had an impact, but the pain and anger don’t have to last forever.

After the healing period is over, the cheater needs to be able to get into the space of “I messed up, I apologized, and I’m ready to move on.”

But if their partner wants them to continue apologizing and continue feeling bad for what they did years later, the relationship is not going to go anywhere. And it will be miserable for both partners. It could even lead to another affair because no one wants to be in an unhappy relationship for that long.

When the cheater comes from that place of “I messed up, I’ll never do it again, and I’m ready to move on”, this is a good thing! After the healing period is over, they should be given the space to move on. They already know the damage they caused, so the trust has to be rebuilt.

It does take time, but that time is finite – as it should be. Again, I’m only referring to cheaters who absolutely believe they made a mistake and know they would never do anything like this again. They are the ones who are usually riddled with guilt and pain for what they did, and feel awful that they did that to the person they loved.

If you are a victim of cheating and are with a partner who is not willing to do anything it takes to keep the relationship and doesn’t seem to show remorse, and wants you to get over it quickly, I highly recommend you be very careful about continuing a relationship with this person.

For the relationship that has the right criteria for healing, healing is very possible. Though many people get stuck on the forgiveness part of healing. They think that by forgiving, they are letting go of their power and letting the other person win.

To an extent, I actually agree with this. Another angle of forgiveness, however, has to do with releasing yourself from misery, not them. My article on forgiveness explains that concept more. However, when the cheater asks for forgiveness, and you’re not in the space to forgive, it’s okay!

In the article I mentioned above, I talk about how when you apologize for something and really mean it, you only have to say it once. However, apologizing once doesn’t work for infidelity.

During the healing period, the infidel may have to apologize as needed over and over again. This is because there is a lot for the victim to process. And because the victim may actually want the cheater to be in a place of guilt, remorse, shame, and pain. They may want the cheater to get a taste of what they did to them.

After the healing period, however, the cheater should be allowed to stop apologizing so that they and the relationship can move forward. This is where you can choose to forgive the cheater or not. You don’t have to, but you have the choice to.

I look at forgiveness as for-giving yourself a break because of the choices you made back then. By giving yourself a break for being duped or conned or falling for the cheater’s lies, you will be able to move forward from the pain.

Even the cheater needs to for-give themselves a break for being the person they were back then. They may have to experience accountability, a bit of discipline, and punishment, but eventually, the forgiveness of self needs to take place.

A year of punishment and making up for their emotional crime is a good deal of time to come to a new place and become a new person who deserves a fresh start. This isn’t letting the cheater get away with their betrayal; it’s just allowing them to move forward after acknowledging and having been held accountable for their bad behavior.

Unlike real murder, emotional murder can and does allow for healing of the very heart that was damaged. It’s not easy, but it is possible.

If you are or were the cheater, know that your partner will put you to the test over and over again. You will have to pass that test, not once, not 10 times, but as many times as your partner wants to administer it. These may be your trials. Passing these trials can be very rewarding when the healing period is over.

But know there is also an end to the testing. It cannot go on indefinitely; otherwise, you are not on a path to reconciliation and healing. When the testing doesn’t go away, you are on a never-ending road of heartache and pain.

If you are or were the victim of cheating, know that you will be hit with pain and anger time and time again. You will feel confusion. You will experience resentment. You will want to retaliate. You may want your partner to feel awful just to give them a taste of what you’re going through.

You have every right to feel this way. This is part of the process of both releasing and healing.

Is there hope for the relationship that has experienced infidelity?

The most important thing to take away from this article is that when the cheater never lets go of the guilt, and the victim never lets go of the anger, there is no healing, only pain. The healing period allows for anger, pain, resentment, guilt, shame, and more. But after that, if both partners want the relationship, both partners need to put their focus on the future, not the past.

Cheating can be the end of the relationship. But when it isn’t, and the cheater is truly remorseful and really means what they say when they tell you it will never happen again, the relationship has a chance. That’s if both partners are willing to go through the trials and eventually get past the pain so they can start fresh and build something even better and stronger than ever.

I want you to have the best relationship possible without pain and with love, trust, respect, and even admiration for each other. If you are dealing with infidelity at this very moment, and you’re still in one of the stages I talk about above (and it’s been years since the affair), it’s time to start thinking of a new plan for your relationship and your life.

There can be a new beginning together or a new journey apart. Either way, don’t let the relationship stew in the pain and anger for too much longer because you will both miss out on many happy years that could be.

Only you know if you want to make the relationship work, so if you do, get really clear and get really serious about doing just that. Give each other the healing and attention you both need to move on. You may need to start over as if you were two different people meeting for the first time. This could be the new beginning you need.

When you’re able to start fresh without bringing your painful history into the mix, you can start to focus on the kind of future you want to make instead of the pain of past mistakes.

Tune into Love and Abuse, the podcast about poisonous communication and toxic behavior, for more information on working through difficult relationships. 

If you are looking for more specific steps to healing in the aftermath of an affair, be sure to read my article titled: Surviving Infidelity – An Overlooked Warning Sign and Healing After Cheating.

The post Can Your Relationship Heal After An Affair? appeared first on The Overwhelmed Brain.

Where does your self-worth come from if it isn’t instilled in you from your parents or caretakers? There is a path to a higher sense of self-worth and self-esteem. It may not be an easy path, but it does exist.

In this episode, I read a message from someone who’s father prefers his new family over his old one.

The post When your parent doesn’t make you feel worthy appeared first on The Overwhelmed Brain.

Cheating might be the end of most relationships, but many couples have survived and thrived after an affair. There are many components to infidelity so it’s important to understand it from all sides.

In this episode, I explore the basics of cheating and what will allow your relationship to survive and heal after the affair.

My most popular article on surviving and healing after infidelity is here:
https://theoverwhelmedbrain.com/infidelity/

Here’s an article I wrote based on the episode in this post:
https://theoverwhelmedbrain.com/healing-the-relationship-before-and-after-the-affair/ (based on this episode)

Tune into the Love and Abuse podcast to help you learn how to navigate difficult relationships

Tune into Love and Abuse, the podcast about poisonous communication and toxic behavior for more information on working through difficult relationships. 

The post Exploring Infidelity: Can The Relationship Survive The Affair? appeared first on The Overwhelmed Brain.

Asking yourself stupid questions can help you heal from old emotional wounds.

I use a “drill-down” technique to get to the root of fear, shame, guilt, and other emotions I don’t like feeling. When you’re drilling down into an issue you’re having, and you get to the point where you say, “Well, that’s a stupid question,” don’t stop, you’re on to something!

For example, if I asked you, “Why don’t you like being lonely?” you might respond with, “Well, that’s a stupid question. Who likes being lonely?” or something similar.

That kind of answer is where many people usually stop thinking. They never consider what’s beneath that response because they just know they don’t want to be lonely, so they believe there’s no reason to explore their thoughts or emotions beyond that.

Using loneliness as an example, let’s just say you don’t want to feel this in your life.

Why?

Why don’t you want to feel loneliness? What about loneliness is a problem?

These are the “stupid” questions we usually don’t ask ourselves. We stop there because we believe there’s nothing more that we need to know.

But what if knowing why you felt lonely actually helped you heal from something deeper going on inside of you? What if you could resolve an emotional trigger that could change your life?

If you stop digging into yourself at the first stupid question, you are giving up a chance to heal unresolved issues. Throughout life, we’ve been conditioned to believe it’s bad to be dumped or fired, or broke, or unhealthy, or any of a number of things that might make us feel down or upset.

I’m not saying these things don’t cause pain or fear, but I am saying that most people don’t drill into the “why” these things cause us pain or fear.

There’s a good reason to learn why you don’t want to feel a certain way:

Connecting with deeper pain or fear helps you to become free of it.

Learning why also makes you less fearful and more conscious of life’s challenges instead of unconsciously waiting for emotional triggers to set your mood.

Let me give you an example of a stupid question that can lead to healing, and why asking yourself “stupid” questions is smarter than you’ll ever know. Let’s use an example of being fired from work. If you have a fear of being fired, explore your fear using a drill-down process by asking yourself questions like this:

• What exactly do I fear?
• Why do I fear that?
• What’s so bad about that?
• How is that a problem?
• What could that lead to?
• What’s worse than that?
• What else could happen?

In context, this process might look something like this:

“What exactly do I fear?”
I don’t want to get fired.

“Why do I fear that?”
If I get fired, I’ll lose my paycheck. I need every single one.

“What’s so bad about that?” 
What? That’s a stupid question. If I lose my paycheck, I’ll have no money for food or my bills.

“How is that a problem?”
What? That’s another stupid question! It’s a problem because if I have no money, how am I supposed to eat? How am I supposed to pay rent?

“Why is that bad?”
What? If I don’t eat, I’ll starve or worse. If I can’t pay rent, I’ll be living on the street.

“Is living on the street bad?”
That’s ridiculous! I’d be eating out of garbage cans. I’d be begging for change on the side of the road. No one would care about me. No one would love me…

And so on. As you can see from this example, the fear we started out with (losing a job) had a deeper origin of not wanting to feel unloved or unwanted. That might sound like a stretch, but often obvious fears are deeply rooted and not conscious.

We go through life having surface-level thoughts like, “I don’t want to get fired” or “I hope they don’t dump me,” without thinking much about what’s underneath that (and underneath the next layer and the next).

Many people don’t explore the origin of their fears.

The deeper meaning of your pain and fear can be revealed by asking yourself these kinds of questions. “Stupid” questions lead to smart answers that may reveal to you something deeply ingrained, causing you to behave from that space. For instance, if you truly feared being unloved (another surface fear we could dive into) by getting fired, then every decision you make in life would be motivated by that fear.

There’s a big difference between making decisions out of a fear of getting fired and a fear of being unloved or unwanted. And realizing this difference can often change the decisions you make, changing your life.

Use these questions and questions like them to help you get to the root of your fears, pain, shame, guilt, and worries. Perhaps you’ll learn something new about yourself, and maybe, just maybe, a stupid question will lead to an insightful answer.

The post Stupid Questions to That Lead to Healing appeared first on The Overwhelmed Brain.