Transcription
When it comes to a breakup, whether it's a divorce or just a girlfriend breaking up with you, we men are usually the last to find out.
Now, publicly, most men express emotion through some kind of anger. Like, there's a filter that we have to use publicly. And so we will be pissed off. We will complain. We will express, you know, some pretty negative, vile thoughts about our ex. That's typical. That's the public facing version of this grief that we go through. The truth of the matter is it blows a hole in your heart and it's a tough one to recover from. A lot of the guys I've spoken to online over the last year, couple years have gone through that having their heart blown out. And it's a real thing and it can take an extremely long time for guys to get through that.
I had the same experience. I remember after my wife left, the initial reason for her leaving was to take a break. It was a long break, but uh she was going to come back in a month or so. And one of her big mistakes is that she told me and my daughter, my daughters, that that was the plan. So, I remember checking my phone many times a day after she left, looking for that text message that says, "Yeah, this was all a bad mistake. Sorry about that. I'm coming home. Let's work on our relationship." That's what I was expecting.
About a month after she left, my oldest daughter, who is she is something, she gets into stuff. She started stalking my my ex-wife on uh on Facebook and she found a link or some image of her ex-boyfriend there with her. And then she went to the ex-boyfriend's Facebook page, which was not private, and found all these terms of endearment he was expressing about my wife at the time. She brought that to me and told me about it. And that's when I realized she was not coming back. The sense of despair, sadness that happened in that moment is hard to put into words because it transcends almost any other level of despair I have experienced in my life.
The irony is prior to that whole thing, I mean, I was so focused on just getting our lives together after leaving my job and starting a new business that I thought things were going better, you You know, I thought it was like it's like the sunshine before the storm. You know, I thought things were going a lot better. Anyway, so today I want to talk to you guys about getting through that despair following a breakup. What you got to do because you got to take action. You can't just let it happen. This is life 2.0. Let's talk about it.
There are four phases that I've noticed guys kind of go through following a breakup or divorce. Most guys experience the sucker punch like I described where you're just like, "What the [ __ ] just happened to me? How is this a thing?" Like, "Where did that even come from? Where am I living in the same reality as you?" You know, we we really start to get to that place where it's just stunned. You're just stunned. And I say that in the most um prolific kind of way to be stunned where you're just like not really sure what exactly happened here and you have a tough time even just dealing with reality as it occurs. So that is stage one.
Stage two, men bargain. It's sort of like the five stages of grief. I had this guy that I talked to once and uh he told me that he had created a PowerPoint presentation. I shouldn't laugh. It's so funny, but I I shouldn't laugh. He created a PowerPoint presentation to explain to his wife why they should stay together. About halfway through, she looked at him and said, "That's why I'm leaving you."
The next phase is rage. This is just pure anger. And um it's inevitable because you start to reflect on all this happened, how you tried to beg her to come back, how you bargained, how you were stunned, how you didn't realize this was even happening, how you gave so much, how you expected so little and she delivered less than what you expected. And yet you hung in there with her. Even after you thought the relationship was in trouble, you didn't pull the plug on it. You were willing to stay and work things out. You thought that you had what it took to have a healthy, meaningful relationship and you were willing to put in the time and she wasn't and she decided to go. Truth of the matter is she had made the decision long, long ago and you're just getting the word now. But this decision was probably made three years ago and that's what most guys don't understand that these things don't happen, you know, in the time frame that we think they're happening. The decision is made. It's just a matter of when to execute on that decision.
Stage four, which is where a lot of guys get stuck, is what I like to call the zombie phase. This is where the anger has subsided. You're no longer bargaining. The effect of the stunning has gone away and you're just existing. You no longer have a need or a desire to have a relationship. In fact, you are trying to avoid any signs of romantic life in your in your life. You want to um avoid the pain. That's really what it is. The zombie phase is really about pain avoidance. And um you're sort of stuck somewhere between the feeling of what did I do wrong? Where did I miss it? To questioning your own quality, your own worth, your own masculinity. Um and it's very very difficult to to break free of that.
If you do break free, ah, break free. If you do break free, what lies for you at the end of that is the awakening. And this is really kind of where I'm at now, where you have this awareness that there is still life out there, that you can move on from this, that there is a way to have relationships. It does require in that zombie phase that you do a lot of introspection, reflecting back on the relationship and um trying to figure yourself out, figure out how it happened, where things went wrong. In a way, this video channel um has helped me kind of air out a lot of my own thoughts. And as I am editing them and watching these videos over and over again, I can almost see how this happened. You know, how the relationship broke down and how I made mistakes along the way.
Like the end of the relationship, and I've said this in other videos, the end of the relationship was fortold at the beginning. And I made so many mistakes early on in the relationship that it was almost an an a um foregone conclusion that it would end like this. And in fact, I even remember having the sensation of recognizing that this relationship was not going to last forever when I first met her. But on paper, everything looked good. She was pretty. She had all the things I was looking for. I mean, she filled out the form, checked all the boxes really, really well. But there was one thing that was missing and I have recognized it just recently. And there's an intangible thing that is um like a I hate to get all gooey on it on you guys here. I'm going to do it anyway. there's like some kind of a soul connection where you I don't want to say soulmate but there's like this deep profound connection that you have with somebody um that was not there with her, you know, and I remember having that with girlfriends when I was a lot younger. Maybe it's cuz I was more in touch with my emotions back then. Um I don't know. But yeah, there's an awakening at the end of this thing. And when you get there, you're going to discover that there's more to this relationship business than what you have been led to believe or what you think is true at this point.
So, let's talk about recovery. In the beginning, maybe even for the whole first year or two, you're going to have to take a minimal contact approach. If you can eliminate contact, remove all um her photographs, you know, um take them, delete them from your phone if you have to or put them on a server. There will come a day when maybe you guys can be friends, but today is not that day. You're going to need to um eliminate her presence from your presence to the best of your ability. You do not want to be constantly reminded of her. You do not want to put yourself in a place where you're ruminating about her. That is the worst possible thing. Um because the sadness is there anyway. But if you allow it to take over your consciousness and you just start ruminating on her and thinking about her all the time, h it's just like it's like making the wound worse. It's like getting stabbed and then just keep opening it up. You stitch it up, then you crank it open again. You stitch it up, then you crank it open again. And you never stop bleeding. It's just always there. And the pain doesn't go away. And you wear it all the time. You don't realize it, but people see it on you. It's the way you carry yourself. It's the way you talk. It's the way you think. Everything about you is caught in this place of I'm not good enough. That [ __ ] left me. That you know I am deeply sad. I have um experienced the worst kind of loss. I am a victim. All these negative qualities suddenly start to sink in and you start to identify with them and you start to become that. And although it feels natural to allow that, you can't let it take over your life. And so deleting her to the best of your ability from your presence, from your physical presence, and then trying to remove her from your psychological presence is very, very important.
If you've got kids, you're going to have to text her from time to time about picking up kids and dropping off kids and [ __ ] like that. I would um do it by text. That way, you're not talking to her on the phone. If like my ex, your ex is now with a new guy. Yeah, you got to get that thought out of your head. You know that that whole thought of her being with him is not doing you any favors. That's not your business anymore. She is not your wife anymore. She left. You've got to get that true to yourself because at some point you're going to want to have some level of self-respect. And the wonderful thing about the whole cheating thing, if you're experiencing that, is that you then have an excuse to not bargain, to not want to try to get her back. If she just left, you know, like mine did initially, saying, "Oh, I'm going to be back in a month or two or whatever." It's so easy to fall into that trap of, you know, trying to get her to come back, you know, trying to see what she needs, trying to, and the minute you start doing that, you start sacrificing aspects of yourself that um you may never get back, you know? So, even if she does come back, what's the dynamic of that relationship going to be now? you know, so you do all the bargaining, you do the PowerPoint presentation, you know, you you give her the the bells and whistles, you know, the animations, you give it all to her, and she's like, "Oh, Joe, you're so right. That's exactly you are exactly the right guy for me. I can't believe that I was going to leave you." Except here's the deal. Here's the new terms of the agreement from here on out. She's going to be calling all the shots. You now are going to be submissive to her from now on because she's got the upper hand. She's always going to have the ability to pull the plug on the relationship and she's going to have you living in fear of that. So, you can't allow yourself to go down that path of bargaining. And getting her out of your head and getting that rumination thing out of your life is critically important.
Now, the sadness is going to come. There is no question about it. The way I dealt with the sadness in the beginning is I didn't want to show sadness around the house. I didn't want to be crying. I want my kids to see that. It was just all I didn't want to be I didn't want that. So I came out here into the forest and I would scream not on weekends on weekdays when everybody else is at work. I'd come out here where I was completely alone and if necessary I'd put sunglasses on, you know, and I would just have my cry. I would scream. I would yell. I'd talk to the trees. I would talk to myself out loud about the whole thing, you know. and um that gave me the space to get through it. I would recommend that you set some time aside initially, maybe an hour a day, and then over time back it off to every other day and then eventually to just once a week where you allow yourself to experience the grief where you just go deep into it. If if you have to cry, do what you have to do to just get through it and then don't come back to it and don't allow yourself to think about it until the next scheduled opportunity to have this experience. You will find that shortly. It won't even take a week or two. You'll get to the place where you're like, "Okay, I'm I'm I can feel it getting out. I can feel that I no longer am carrying that same heaviness with me as I did in the beginning." It becomes lighter and lighter and lighter. And after six months or so, um, not only are you not even thinking about crying, the feeling of heaviness from the grief is almost completely gone. I mean, you feel so much better.
At some point, you got to come to terms with what it is you're actually grieving. Are you grieving her, or are you grieving the loss of the relationship? Are you grieving the loss of the role of being a husband? Are you grieving the uh shared future that you guys had? Are you grieving some perception you had of yourself as a man with her on your arm? Are you grieving um your sense of identity? There's so many different aspects to it. And you got to look at it from all of these different angles and be honest with yourself and ask yourself, what am I really sad about here? because you may be surprised to learn that it really isn't her specifically. It's more what she represented to you. And if you can identify that aspect of it, it's much easier to piece it apart and to figure out exactly how to move forward. But if you're just sort of sad in this general way, it's easy to get lost in that sadness and turn into that zombie that never never moves on.
The next piece of this puzzle is you've got to start reclaiming your identity. You got to go back to before you met her and you got to try to remember who you were at that time. You got to remember what were your motivations before you even met her. Um what did you see for yourself? And if you're like a lot of guys, and I was certainly like this, like I I did not have a good vision of the future. I was a single father when I met my my ex-wife. And um I think part of my desire to get married at that time in my life was to fill that role of mother to my son, you know, and um and for sex, you know, and companionship and all that stuff. But yeah, I wanted to kind of create the picture of mom, dad, kid, you know, and then kid and kid. So we got three kids all together eventually. But um I didn't have a clear vision for my future though like before I hadn't got my son like the vision of my future was you know where am I going on Friday night and who am I going to go with you know that was the future it was just till the next weekend and then um when my son came along then it was um really staying at home a lot you know it was uh how much money do I need for diapers and for formula and for all that stuff, you know, and uh what can I do with him, you know, where can we go? I remember I got a a bike and I got a bike seat and I would take him up and down the U Washington and Old Dominion Trail which runs for like I don't know 30 miles and uh ride that bike up and down there and and he and I we had a good time. We we enjoyed it. He actually sat back there, got a little helmet on and he was a good little passenger and we would ride that bike up and down there for hours. Um, but yeah, I didn't have a vision for the future. So, if you didn't have a vision like I didn't, then now's your chance to start thinking about it because go back, become the person that you were before you met her, and now imagine what that guy would have wanted for himself, what that guy would have seen for you now and into its future. and see if you can incorporate some of his beliefs into your beliefs so that you can reclaim your identity and you can start being the guy that you were.
In addition, if you've got some old friends around, you need to make contact with them. If you have some old hobbies that you used to be involved with, you've got to start doing them again. If there are some things, you know, that you enjoy, like walking out in the woods or camping, I used to go camping all the time before I met my ex-wife. I even took my son camping with me when he was little, you know. I would do all kinds of [ __ ] We went to Hawaii, just the two of us. Um, I rented beach houses, just the two of us, just so that we could get away. Um, yeah. So, there were aspects of my life that I still honored after my son was born, but kind of got lost in the mix after my wife came along. So, reclaiming that stuff and kind of this woods thing is a big part of it. This walking in the woods, this is what me and my best friend used to do back when we were teenagers. We'd get some beer and we'd walk around the woods. We'd often times light a little bonfire and just sit and talk [ __ ] about women. So, this is what I'm doing with you guys. This is exactly what it is.
If for whatever reason you don't have any close friends around right now, then you've got to start building these relationships again. And you may have to, you know, um go deep into your rolodex. there maybe some people that you like that you hang that you know from work or whatever and just make the extra effort to hang out with them. Especially some single guys um or if a divorced guy is in your neighborhood or someone you know then you got to hang out with that guy. You got to start um finding things to do to get yourself um busy. Keep yourself busy. It helps you if you have one or two really close friends that you can call at any time just to get [ __ ] off your chest. It's good also to have a second circle of friends that's a little bit broader where you have people that you can go do stuff with, you know, that aren't necessarily deep in on the on your situation, but they're people you can just kind of get out and do stuff with to keep your your mind occupied. Very very important that you build these social networks in real life, not on Facebook or anything like that, but like a real life social network where you've got guys that you can depend on to have your back to, you know, bring you back to reality. if you start ruminating, you know, shake you up. Um, get you talking [ __ ] about women, you know, it's so much helpful. It really is. If you can, um, just talk to guys about crazy women and get yourself laughing because that really does make a big difference. It really does. That's why I try to involve some humor in a lot of what my context, my content is on, because you got to laugh at this stuff. It hurts so bad that if you don't laugh, it'll make you crazy. And I promise you, you know, turn on the TV and start watching some standup comedy or if you prefer, you know, um, you know, watch some silly comedy movies on TV. Just do something to get yourself laughing. You just got to get those endorphins flowing and break the cycle of uh, of sadness.
Very, very important. This next step is critically important because it brings everything together and turns it into something healthy. You got to get out. You got to walk. You got to run. You got to go to the gym. You've got to make your body strong again. You got to start eating healthy food. Don't be, you know, slamming down pizzas and beers late at night. You're going to regret that. The last thing you want to be is that single, divorced, middle-aged, fat, ugly guy, you know, who hates his life. You do not want to be that guy. You know, I don't care how good-looking you are, relatively speaking. If you're healthy and fit, I'm telling you, man, women dig that. You will be much better looking as a man if you're healthy and fit. Not only that, but you're going to feel better about yourself. And the best revenge, quite honestly, like if you want to get revenge on your ex, is to be so much better looking now than you were when she left. You know what I mean? To make her regret leaving or make her think, "Oh my gosh, he's so much happier and healthier now that I'm gone. It must have been me." You know, you want to give her that message. That's the message you want to deliver. Like, you were the one that was holding me back, [ __ ] You were the one that was making my life miserable. That's the problem. Now I'm doing much better. Thank you very much. Thanks for leaving. Yeah. Turn your uh anger, your sadness, all that energy into something positive. Work your ass off. You know, get disciplined on your meals. Sleep well at night. Go to bed, get seven, eight, nine hours of sleep. Do not allow yourself to fall into that trap of um self-loathing and then fill your your days with uh bad food, laziness, and staying up too late at night watching god knows what that you know you shouldn't be watching. So, and if you can, I mean, I know there's going to be a certain amount of porn because you just have to get some kind of release. Don't make it a dayto-day thing. You know, do not let yourself fall into that habit because it just turns into rumination again. You know, it eventually turns into ah, there was one good thing about my ex. She had all the equipment. She had it all. She had the spot where I put my thing and she had the things on top. She had all the good stuff. There was stuff I liked about her. Yeah, you don't want to go down that path. So, yeah, just get some sleep. Turn that damn thing off. Get some sleep.
The thing that a lot of guys miss when their ex leaves, when they find themselves single, is that really what's happened here is someone has completely cleared the whiteboard. It's completely clean. Now you are free to create whatever you want on that board. Whatever you can imagine, whatever you wish for yourself, you can start creating it. I would suggest use your imagination and create a 5-year vision for your life. and create a description of that to your best of ability. Now, this is not like a contract, you know, don't don't worry about it. There's no one witnessing this. This is just you writing maybe in a journal or something about how your life is going to look in the future. What kind of man are you going to be? What kinds of things are you going to do? What are your hobbies going to be? Are there going to be other people in your life? And if so, what kind of people are you going to have? What are you looking for? What do you want? Think about that and really start um creating the vision for how your life is going to be. And then think of all the values that you have that maybe got lost along the way and the values that you would like to have that maybe you have not implemented in your life but you may admire in someone else's life and incorporate that into your vision as well. And then over the next three months, dedicate yourself to say taking two or three of these things and making as much progress on them as you can. Do like a sprint where you're just going to dedicate all your time and energy and money if necessary to making progress on getting you closer and closer to that 5-year vision. You'll be surprised at how invigorating that is, how that um helps you get over the loss and helps you get focused on something new really, really quickly. When you combine that with your physical fitness and creating new social networks, the whole recovery process gets so much better. It really does.
One of the funniest things is when I'm talking to guys whose wives have just left them. She just walked out the door like yesterday. No, I'm being silly here, but it's not been that long. a few weeks, a month, two or three months maybe. When I'm talking to them, they say, "John, so when should I start dating?" Oh my god, that's a that's a loaded question, man. You start dating when being alone and living on your own completely without any prospect of having a woman in your life is preferable. to having someone who's not perfect. So, don't allow yourself to accept the same kind of [ __ ] Don't allow yourself to fall down the same trap that you're fine on your own. Your life is complete without another person being in it. The only way you would add someone to this equation is if she's bringing something valuable to the table, something that you enjoy, something that um enhances your life. It's not that you need her, it's that having her there just adds a little spice, a little sunshine, a little fun to your life, then it's okay to start dating. But if you go out into the world with the idea that you're trying to replace your ex-wife or replace some role or try to be somebody in this other woman's life or to do something like that to try to psychologically fix yourself in an instant, yeah, you're just setting yourself up for another another disaster. So yeah, you got to you got to get customer. You got to get comfortable with yourself. You got to get to the place where you know who you are. When I talk about being authentic, you know what that word means because you know who you are. You are comfortable with who you are. You are comfortable in your own skin. You're not concerned what other people think. You are yourself. And um any woman that's going to come into your life is going to accept you as is. Like this is not a reclamation project. You are complete. You don't need her help. All you're looking for is someone to hang out with, have some fun with. That's it. That's it. She makes life a little more interesting. That's it. You don't need to tell me to fix you. You're not broken.
Down the road, I would suggest, obviously not immediately, but a few years from now, you're going to have to come to terms with forgiving her, no matter what she did. Even if you're just doing it in your own head, even you don't even tell her. Because the minute you get to that place where you have forgiven your ex-wife, you're free of her power. Let me help you understand that. So long as you're carrying around some anger, resentment, some negative energy about her and who she is and what she did, she is got some latent control, some power over you because your mood, your state of mind, your physical health to some degree is being dictated by those thoughts. And until you can render those thoughts mute, they're no longer valid, they no longer have any energy, um they're going to have some power over you. And I can tell you from experience and watching a lot of clients, if you're carrying around around a lot of negativity, the likelihood that that negativity is going to manifest itself in your physical body as a disease or something else is really, really high. I have not yet found anyone who has a strong level of resentment or anger or um I don't know, hatred for themselves or for the other person. um that has escaped that fate. They all have to pay the price. And so forgiveness isn't really for her. It's really for you. Because all that negativity, it's like you you're swallowing the poison and hoping she dies. And that's not the way it works, you know? So yeah, you got to let go of it. You just got to let go of it.
You will know you're there. You've gotten to that place where you're back on track. You've got a whole new life that your head is in the right place. When you reflect back on the events surrounding her leaving, you're grateful for it. It's a paradox. You're grateful for one of the worst days of your life. When you get to that place where you're grateful that she's gone and that you have the opportunity to restart your life and on your own terms, even if it isn't brilliant, it's not all, you know, unicorns and rainbows, at least it's yours. At least it's your life. You're calling the shots. You're developing yourself to be the man that you want to be, and you are living your life on your terms. I can't tell you how um gratifying it is to have that experience. And once you have it, you guard it jealously. I think as young men, we don't realize just how valuable that experience is. I think we need that contrast. And so the fact that you had that contrast and then she pulled the plug and left you high and dry and yeah, you went through all the pain and the anguish of it, but now you've gone through this whole process. You've forgiven her. You've built your life out. You're healthy. You've got friends. You've got hobbies. You've got stuff that you're doing. You have a goal. You have a vision for your life. Everything is moving in a direction that you've chosen. You do all that work. Man, you're going to feel really great. And then one day you're going to run into her at the grocery store or something, you know, just out of the blue and you're not even going to have an angry thought. You're not going to even be pissed off at her. You know, she's just like, "Hey, it's good to see you. I'm glad you're doing well." And you're on your way. You know, you don't have any negative energy at all. When you become a better man than the man she left, she is going to know it. I promise you that. She's going to know it. And there is no better revenge if that's your motivation than being a better man than the man she left.
All right, you guys. That's all I got for you today. I certainly hope you've enjoyed this video. If you have, please like and subscribe. If you know somebody who's going through this [ __ ] God bless them. Send them this video. Hopefully, it'll give them some insight, some hope, some um a way to recover. Till next time, stay healthy and if you can stay single.
Doo is chasing some ducks. And they are swimming away. He's not very subtle in his approach. Debb, come back. But you're never going to catch those ducks, man. Come on. Let's go home. Come on.