How to get your mojo back after heartbreak

It was 2am. I was at Stansted Airport, sitting on my suitcase. My phone had died. I didn't have any cash. No trains were running and there were no cabs available. The next bus was in two hours and would get me home to central London at 6am. I was 23 years old and I had never felt more alone.

Part of me was in complete denial about what was happening. I kept reviewing the events that had led me here to make more sense of my predicament. I did a mental checklist. My partner and I had been on a holiday with his friends in Italy. He was annoyed that I had been a little quiet. I had felt that I didn't know anybody on the holiday well and that he had been distant so I had felt extremely uncomfortable. In summary, we were both annoyed with each other. I took longer than him to get through immigration and by the time I got out, he had taken an Uber and left.

What had I done to make him annoyed enough to leave me here? What was wrong with me that I had caused this? Maybe if I had just kept my feelings to myself I wouldn't be in this situation. Why was I such a drama queen?

The fact that my first response was to blame myself after I had been left alone late at night made me realise that something was going very wrong with my thinking. Post this incident, I did a deep dive into myself and my patterns of how I was relating to people. What I discovered was that there was a science to relationships and who you are attracted to. Once I understood what was driving me I was able to find freedom and recover from this break-up a lot faster.

Here's what I learned that moved the dial on my recovery.

We like what is familiar and reject what is unfamiliar 

That instant recognition we feel around some people is a sign that they remind us of something we have already experienced, particularly in childhood. This is especially dangerous for people who grew up around some sort of dysfunction. Such people may find that they are drawn to people who are bad for them. Often, people stay in toxic relationships because they convince themselves that this is 'true love' - when what it actually is, is your mind keeping you in a familiar situation.

In my case, through Rapid Transformational Therapy I realised that when I was three years old my parents moved to the US and left me with my aunt for a month while they were looking for a home. During this time, I developed an incredibly strong fear of being abandoned and realised that I would do almost anything to avoid this. Even tolerate terrible behaviour. 

Human beings are loss averse

The psychological pain of losing something is twice the pleasure of gaining something. When we frame the end of our relationship as a loss - our mind rebels against that idea and will continue to find ways to keep us where we are to avoid this perceived 'loss'.

At the end of a relationship, it is important to be very clear on what you are gaining - whether that is the ability to travel, focus on yourself or freedom to put your needs first. If we think about the break-up as a beginning of a new chapter rather than the end of one our healing is accelerated multi-fold.

If you practise you can make healthier things familiar to you

It takes the mind 21 days to form a new habit of thought. If you find that you are stuck in a pattern of dysfunctional relationships, you can slowly work on yourself to make these unhealthy behaviours unfamiliar. Remind yourself daily that you are magnificent. Choose to be around friends who make you feel energised versus those who drain you. Practising saying no to things that you know you don't want to do and only saying yes when you feel you can commit. These tiny regular actions will create new neural pathways in your mind so that you will start to automatically reject dysfunction more and more. 

If you are struggling to make these changes on your own, Rapid Transformational Therapy is so much more effective than regular talking therapies because it works with the subconscious mind. In our session we will go back in your mind to the events that caused your dysfunctional relationship patterns and allow you to release all the repressed pain, freeing you to make better decisions going forward. 

To quote Shakespeare, the "fault doesn't lie in our stars but ourselves". Our experiences might have led us to subconsciously create unhealthy relationship dynamics, however, once we become aware of this we can change our patterns in love quickly - all we need to do is take consistent action towards treating ourselves better so that we no longer feel attracted to people who treat us badly.