Breakup Bootcamp Page 3

  We need to clear our emotional debt and start living a life where we can actively process our feelings, so we don’t end up in emotional insolvency. There are many dysfunctional ways we deal with emotions, including avoiding them, inflating them, or morphing them into something socially acceptable.

  THE ONLY WAY OUT IS THROUGH—FEEL YOUR FEELINGS

  We live in a society where we are taught to distract ourselves from, numb, and hide our pain. In a “just get over it” culture, we often do not honor that emotions have a life cycle, and they need the chance to be felt and processed. But when we avoid our emotions, they eventually creep up on us. It just takes one disappointment, criticism, or rejection, and the emotional time bomb goes off. Suddenly you’re overwhelmed with not only the feelings of abandonment from the last guy but from the guy before that and the one from high school too. It’s like a domino effect of compounding trauma. Without knowing the true source of your intense hurt, it’s easiest to point the finger at the person or situation at hand. But it always comes from something deeper.

  Healing starts when we can face our emotions as they arise, and the first step is to pause when we feel that uncomfortable feeling. We habitually act quickly to get out of feeling uncomfortable because that’s how we are culturally programmed. We label feelings as “good” or “bad” and judge ourselves for feeling, instead of accepting that we are humans having a human experience.

  There’s another way we avoid dealing with our emotions, and it’s a behavior I’ve witnessed in a majority of women who attend Renew. That behavior is being the caretaker of everyone but ourselves.

  Forty-one-year-old Tracy was a single mom. Two years after her divorce, she met someone new, fell madly in love, and got engaged. Her fiancé was wealthy and charming, and he courted her with romantic intensity. Along with her self-given title of supermom, after dating her new Prince Charming, Tracy fell into a role she knew how to embrace, the super-wife-to-be. She accommodated her fiancé’s schedule and where he wanted to live (even when that meant uprooting her life in the town where she had lived for a decade) and tended to his needs as a busy entrepreneur. When she wasn’t serving her man, she was devoting every minute to giving her daughter a perfect life. Even in times of distress when her tank was near empty, she would give her last ounce of energy to the people she loved.

  “It’s all I know how to do,” she cried during a group session.

  Tracy, just like so many women, had been conditioned to be nurturing and to tend to the needs of others since girlhood. We grow up socialized to think that giving nonstop is what makes us a great girlfriend, wife, or mother. Even when we’re gasping for our last breath, we put the oxygen mask on others first. But while we’re out trying to win the martyr badge of honor, we don’t realize that we’re just avoiding dealing with our own stuff.

  You see, when you’re constantly taking care of the emotions of others, you don’t have to face your own. How convenient!

  This is not a healthy type of giving or nurturing. It’s coming from an unhealthy intention (whether you’re conscious of it or not), which is to avoid sitting in the discomfort of your feelings. Taking care of others as a way of avoidance can be just as addictive as reaching for alcohol or some other substance.

  You’ve got to feel the emotions in order to process them. It’s in this process of feeling, accepting, and reflecting that you learn critical lessons that are necessary for your growth and letting go.

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  EXERCISE: Identify Your Emotional Reaction Go-To

  The moment you feel an uncomfortable emotion—whether that be sadness, anger, longing, and so on—what do you do? How do you react to the urge? Do you self-medicate by reaching for alcohol, drugs, food, or validation from others? Do you suppress your feelings and distract yourself with work? Or perhaps you inflate the emotion with catastrophic thinking, exaggerating the negatives and minimizing the positives? List how you might currently avoid/distract yourself from feeling and processing your emotions:

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  DO NOT FEED YOUR EMOTIONAL MONSTER

  There is a difference between feeling emotions and feeding them. The former means being present with what you’re feeling, accepting it, and letting it pass. The latter requires delivering more of what the emotion wants so that it can grow bigger. The emotion wants to grow in intensity, size, and frequency. Its food of choice is your thoughts, body language, and actions. It’s not your sensible self that is playing Coldplay’s “Fix You” on repeat while you sob in a fetal position. Nope, that’s your hungry emotional monster!

  The physiological life span of an emotion in the body and brain is ninety seconds, according to research by neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor.10 That’s right, the adrenaline rush, the heat in the face, the tightness in the chest, the rapid heartbeat—all those sensations will naturally rise, peak, and dissipate within a minute and a half. So, what causes emotions to linger?

  The story you attach.

  Instead of having awareness that the sensations of emotion will naturally flush out within minutes, we identify with the feeling and get stuck on how a person or a situation that caused it is wrong and how that person or situation should be, rather than accepting what is. Humans have a tendency to attach stories to emotions, because from an evolutionary perspective, the stories served as alerts to dangerous threats, which helped keep our ancestors alive. On top of that, when we’re predisposed to feeling negative emotions (sad, anxious, ashamed, guilty, or angry), the corresponding neural pathways become stronger, and thus it becomes easier to trigger those emotions and the correlating stories.

  The emotional spiral worsens when we repeat that story over and over, walking, if not sprinting, on a vicious loop going nowhere. This is the mental trap of rumination, the story becoming a blur with no start or end.

  For example, after my breakup, I often felt out of sorts after restless nights of insomnia. My body was not in a healthy state, nor was my mind, making me prone to a good emotional hijacking. One day I was feeling particularly lonely and started to look at my ex’s social media. I saw a photo where my ex was at a party, smiling with his friends, drink in hand. He looked like he was having a grand ol’ time. I felt a surge of anger. Suddenly my mind started racing . . .

  Did he meet someone else?

  How dare he be having a good time, like nothing happened! He’s not feeling any pain, while here I am, alone, depressed, and suffering!

  I hate him!

  I then painted him as a terrible person, crafting story after story confirming how unjust my situation was. I curled my body into a ball, dropped my head down, and put my hands over my face. But I kept going, looking at more photos, the photos of his friends. I worked myself into a rage. My anxiety surged. Soon, I was experiencing shortness of breath and burst into tears. Quickly, I was in a full-blown panic attack. Instead of letting that spark of anger pass, I kept adding stories, layer upon layer, retriggering the stress response. I not only kept my mind in a negative space, but my body experienced the anger over and over. This cascade of emotional turmoil was sparked from one picture. Once the emotional monster was fed, it hijacked my entire being, and off I went on the rumination roller coaster!

  The Rumination Roller Coaster

  First of all, rumination is a natural human tendency, especially after breakups. So, give yourself some slack if you take a ride or two. But learning how to redirect your thoughts so you don’t overdo it is an art form.

  Clinical psychologist Dr. Elaina Zendegui, who specializes in cognitive behavioral therapy and dialectical behavior therapy, teaches the women at Renew that the first step of changing our ruminative thinking patterns is to identify the cycle when it’s happening. You want to catch the first signs, just like feeling the first drop of rain before a thunderstorm.

  According to Dr. Zendegui, “Distressing emotions (e.g., shame, sadness, anxiety) or the bodily sensations assoc
iated with them may be clues that you’re ruminating. Once you catch yourself ruminating, gently pull your attention back to the present moment. Gently refocus your attention to your sensory experiences or your breath. When the cycle restarts (and it probably will), notice this and bring your attention back again. If you need more practice, as many of us do, you can begin a daily mindfulness meditation practice to build skills around awareness of ruminative patterns and drawing your attention to the present moment.”

  In the following sections, we will go over tried-and-true methods that can help you stop rumination in its tracks and move the emotions through and out of the body. But first, let’s look at how your ruminating thoughts and stories could be retraumatizing yourself.

  Are You Retraumatizing Yourself?

  How many times have you told your story about the awful breakup? As you recounted the story in vivid detail, your friends and family may have tried to show their support by echoing your sentiments: What a loser. Such a narcissist! I can’t believe this happened to you!

  Your well-intentioned friends think it’s empathetic to use pain as a way to connect. But the bash-the-ex rabbit hole only fuels the emotional charge. The story also begins to morph, taking a slightly different form each time it’s told. Like the messages in a game of telephone, our memories are not facts and are changed ever so slightly each time they’re recalled.

  Research into the molecular mechanism of memory and learning reveals that whenever we recall a scene—or retrieve a memory to our conscious mind—we disrupt it, and by doing so, we alter it forever.

  Amir Levine and Rachel S. F. Heller11

  When you apply a filter of victimization, and add interpretations and assumptions to the mix, your story distorts into something much more painful. No longer is your story about your breakup, but now it’s about how you gave him the best years of your life, how there’s no good men out there and that you’ll be alone forever. You merge fact and fiction, creating dramatic stories that haunt your present and future.

  And by recounting that story over and over again, you retraumatize yourself.

  Our body cannot tell the difference between events in the past, the present, and the future.12 When we relive our story over and over again, recounting the memories in painstaking detail, our body is creating a stress response. Ever burst into tears while you’re talking about something traumatic that happened years ago? That’s because your body thinks the scene you’re recalling is happening in real time.

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  EXERCISE 1: What’s Your Version of the Story?

  When we vilify someone, we automatically assume the role of the victim. That does not help you heal or move forward. Throughout this book, we are going to actively reframe your story. To start, grab your journal and a pen. In ten points, write your story about what happened between you and your ex. You can start anywhere you’d like, just keep it to ten points. You get to cheat on this one—you can make each point as long as you’d like. Elaborate as if you were telling the story to a friend. We will be using this ten-point story for the next exercise.

  Caught in a Thinking Trap?

  Your brain can be one tricky son of a bitch. After all, it was designed over two hundred thousand years ago. It was designed to make you survive the harsh conditions of the environment, and the hunter-gatherers who were the most sensitive to any risks or cues of danger had the best chance of survival. Also, social exclusion from the tribe was a matter of life or death. Even though today we don’t face the same threats, our brains have yet to adapt. Our brains are still survival machines, have an innate negativity bias, and are extremely sensitive to social rejection. The reason you can get into rumination spirals of negative thinking isn’t because you’re crazy; it’s because your brain is doing its job—trying to keep you safe.

  But the same MO also can keep us in negative thinking traps! Behavioral scientist and positive change strategist Dr. Naomi Arbit explains:

  “Neuroscientists have pinpointed an area of the left cerebral hemisphere, often referred to as ‘the interpreter.’ This part of our brain is constantly weaving narratives in order to try and help us maintain our sense of self, our personal narrative. This interpreter filters incoming information and experiences and puts its own spin on it. But the narratives fabricated by this part of the brain do not necessarily correspond with the truth. This is worsened by our tendency to believe these narratives and accept them as fact.”

  Our brain weaves its own narratives and that can cause us to create cognitive distortions. Also referred to as thinking traps, these are irrational ways of thinking that reinforce negative thinking, often perpetuating psychological states like depression and anxiety.13

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  EXERCISE 2: Separate Fact from Fiction

  Review your ten-point story and separate fact from fiction. Start by identifying and circling any of the common thinking traps. Notice if there are any thinking traps you are more prone to. Once you’ve done this, write your story again, but this time use only five points and stick to the facts.

  Filtering: Focusing on only the negative, filtering out any positives. Also referred to as negativity bias (e.g., The whole relationship was a lie).

  Catastrophizing: Thinking in extremes and imagining the worst-case scenario (e.g., I’ll be alone forever).

  Overestimating: Exaggerating and amplifying the chance that something bad will happen (e.g., If I run into him I’ll have a mental breakdown).

  Fortune-Telling: Predicting the future as if it’s 100 precent factual (e.g., I’ll never find love at this age).

  Overgeneralizing: Making sweeping conclusions and broad assumptions based on one or a few experiences (e.g., I was cheated on, so all men are liars).14

  Mind Reading: Misconstruing facts and data and assuming that you know what others are thinking or feeling (e.g., He looked at me and then said something to his friend with a chuckle, he must be making fun of me).

  Should Statements: Imposing expectations on yourself or others of how things should be, which is often rooted in criticism, judgment, and arbitrary rule-making (e.g., I should have been married by this age, I’m so stupid for wasting my best years on that guy).15

  Blaming: Refusing to take accountability for emotions, thoughts, and actions (e.g., It’s his fault I’m so broken).

  Personalizing: Making situations about you even when there’s no evidence or logical reason to do so (e.g., I must be unworthy of love because he ghosted me).

  Change Fallacy: Expecting people to change in order for you to feel a certain way. Often rooted in a belief that others are responsible for your happiness (e.g., If he put a ring on my finger, then I’d be happy and feel safe).

  All-or-Nothing Thinking: Perceiving situations or people in black and white, often using words such as “always,” “never,” “everybody,” and “nobody” (e.g., Men never want to commit to me. This always happens to me).

  Once you’ve finished your five points, notice if the updated story feels a little less emotionally charged. Does it seem more neutral, lighter? We will be referring back to this updated story in the last chapter.

  IF YOU WANT TO HEAL, EXPRESS YOUR ANGER

  After a breakup, you’re in survival mode. Emotions are at an all-time high, and not having them overwhelm you is a challenge, to say the least. This time is also a training ground for you to learn emotional regulation, a skill that, once acquired, you can apply for the rest of your life during trying moments. As you move from one stage of separation to another and back again, you’ll need different tools, depending on what emotion is popping up. It’s like a game of emotional whack-a-mole!

  LET YOUR FREAK(-OUT) FLAG “FLOW”

  Angry people live in angry bodies.

  Bessel van der Kolk

  Studies show that bereaved people who avoid grief and make an effort to suppress emotion take the longest to recover from loss.16 When you try to repress your anger, stress skyrockets.

  Anger can be broken down into two main compo
nents: the emotional component (how it feels in the body) and the behavioral component (how the anger is expressed).17 Our goal is to express anger in a healthy way, without aggression (hurtful or harmful actions) or suppression.

  The opposite of suppression is expression. We’ve got to process the emotional energy that is stuck in your body. Remember, the way forward is through.

  Seeing Red

  To help Renew participants work through anger from an energetic approach, naturopathic doctor and holistic coach Erica Matluck leads one of the first physical sessions on the first day of bootcamp. She explains how anger is rooted in the solar plexus chakra, which correlates anatomically with the abdomen. Chakras are energy centers that, when blocked, can trigger physical, emotional, and mental imbalances. Instead of letting the energy of anger build up and result in a volcanic explosion, she teaches the women to use a combination of intention and imagination to defuse it. Here’s how.

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  EXERCISE 1: Transmute Your Anger

  Stand up tall with your feet firmly on the ground, shoulder-width apart. Close your eyes.

  Assign your anger the color red.

  Bring your attention to your solar plexus (the area around your belly button).

  Visualize the red color in this area and really feel it. Pay attention to the sensations. Notice the temperature and how the sensations move with your breath.