You are listening to The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo episode 404.
Welcome to The Life Coach School Podcast, where it’s all about real clients, real problems and real coaching. And now your host, Master Coach Instructor, Brooke Castillo.
Brooke: Hello my friends. Welcome to the podcast today. Today, we’re talking about thriving after a breakup. I invited Dorothy Johnson on. That’s all she does. That’s her jam is helping people going through breakups.
And a lot of y’all need some help because I coach you and I feel like some breakups just last too long. So we’re going to talk to Dorothy and see what her advice is. So grab any of your friends that are going through a breakup and get some great advice. Welcome to the podcast, Dorothy.
Dorothy: Thank you. I’m so excited to be here. It’s a full circle moment for me so I’m so pumped.
Brooke: That’s awesome. So let’s start with you just telling us a little bit about yourself and how you got into doing what you do.
Dorothy: Love it. So back in 2016 I went through a breakup with my significant other of seven years. He had just finished dental school and I finished grad school and I got my big girl job and we moved back to Florida, and I was so excited.
I was like, our lives are starting, I’m doing this, we’re about to get married and have babies, and I was going back and forth to Chicago at the time for work. And he broke up with me on the phone when I was at a business trip in Chicago.
And I was super upset, devastated, all of the things. I had pictured my whole life with him. I ended up coming back to Florida to get my things about a month after the breakup and he had moved all of my stuff into the front room and then there was a woman already staying at our house that we had just been together with and got every night since I had left.
So I was beside myself. So not only was I going through the breakup and I can’t believe this is my best friend and I don’t have that person anymore, I was then going through a lot of anger and resentment towards this new person, who seemed to just in my mind come through and pick up everything I had worked so hard for.
So I spent about a year Googling how do you get over your ex, how do you forgive and let go, how do you move on. And I did all of it. When I tell you I did all of it, I genuinely feel like I did everything the internet could provide me.
I traveled, I meditated, I got in the best shape of my life. I did all the things, yet a year later, I was still feeling super angry and resentful. And then that’s when I found The Life Coach School podcast. How fun is that, right?
I figured out that my anger and resentment was coming from my thinking, realizing that the anger and the resentment wasn’t actually serving me, and I thought it was serving a purpose. I thought by holding onto the anger and resentment, it was actually harming him in some way, or he would be upset about it.
But of course he was out living his life, having a grand old time with his new girlfriend. It was one of those things, all these epiphany moments about breakups happened for me in that moment. And that’s when I realized breakups have to be done differently.
Heartbreak has to be handled differently. And we’re doing it wrong. A lot of what I heard was it takes time to heal, and that was clearly not true at all. Time had passed, my feelings didn’t change, my actions didn’t change, all of that.
And then I also realized that a lot of what the internet was solving for in breakups, they were just in breakup symptoms. Do I stay in contact? Do I not stay in contact? Do I go to this party? Do I not go to this party? Maybe I distract myself. That’s what I was doing through travel.
I traveled a lot and I found out it was a way to distract myself and buffer from addressing the real things. Meaning, what are the stories that I’m making this mean? What am I making the breakup mean about myself?
And ultimately, I think it was 2017, the end of 2017, I joined Scholars. So got into everything with Scholars, loved it, and signed up to be a Life Coach School coach in 2018. Went through life coach certification, so fun, and I knew immediately going into that that I wanted to be the breakup coach.
I wanted to be a breakup coach, I wanted to show the world how to use the tools that I had learned through you and The Life Coach School into breakups. And as I’ve done that, I’ve done this for three years now. I’ve really realized that it comes down to desire and attachment, which has been super fun to look at.
So you know how you teach your students about desire in food? It’s very related to humans. So the example that I give is ice cream. I have a strong desire for ice cream, or I used to have a strong desire for ice cream, and I would say it’s my favorite food, it’s ooey-gooey, it melts in my mouth, it’s great.
I had this great desirable story about ice cream. But when I changed my thoughts to it’s simply sugar and milk, the desire reduces. And it’s the same thing with human beings in relationships. We create a strong desire for a person and we create attachment to that person for our future.
So when we address desire and attachment, we’re addressing the root cause in a breakup or a heartbreak, instead of all these other breakup symptoms. And that’s when all the breakup symptoms fall away. Because if you don’t desire your ex at all, if you don’t have any desire to be with that person anymore, talking to that person…
Brooke: Then you don’t act crazy. Some of y’all acting crazy out there with your exes. Can we just talk about that? Let’s talk about some of those symptoms. And I hear what you’re saying. You’re basically saying, listen, you could treat symptoms all day long. It’s kind of like when I talk about food.
You can treat the symptoms of the food but the question is why are you pining after somebody that doesn’t want you? Do you want to be with someone that doesn’t want to be with you? And so many of you are acting crazy around this.
And I do think it’s very similar, the urges, it feels like an addiction, you feel like you’re completely out of control, you do crazy stuff, you send crazy texts. I’ve been on the receiving end of some of that crazy, that does not make me want to get back together with y’all. That shit is not working.
Dorothy: Yes. I talk about building a life that’s bigger and better than the one that you had with your ex. And when you’re out doing that, that’s attractive. That’s magnetic.
Brooke: Totally. So I mean, let’s talk a little bit about the craziness. What do you think that’s about? Because it’s almost like they can’t help themselves. And I do think - I had a breakup recently. I hadn’t even been dating the guy that long and I could feel that crazy inside of me. It was really fascinating to watch.
But because I have the Model and because I have urge management and because I have an understanding that logically, this makes no sense, this is not someone I want to be with, but all the feels are so intense. So what is that about?
Dorothy: I think it comes down to a lot of it I think is trying to get attention. You want that person to recognize what you’re going through, to validate what you’re going through. It can be different based off of what side you’re on, whether you were the person being dumped or you were the person that was dumped.
And I think it depends on that. But at least I help a lot of people who are going through a breakup who were broken up with, they want the other person to see them. They want to feel seen and they want to feel validated and they want to recognize - it’s almost like it’s not fair syndrome.
What you did was not fair, what you did was not okay, and if you can recognize that, maybe it will make it better, which in reality we know is not true. But we think that if they can see that, then maybe it will make the situation better.
Brooke: I think too I watched someone kind of implode on me and what I recognize is that he was making this mean something it didn’t mean. He was so far off base about what he was making this mean about himself. And so he needed to kind of reconcile with me to try to make this belief system change.
I wanted to send him a memo, be like, yo, you don’t need to get back together with me in order for you to feel good about yourself. You just need to go and feel good about yourself, and the act that you’re acting, of course, is perpetuating this idea. Like hell no, I don’t want to be with this person.
Dorothy: Yes. We make it mean all kinds of things about ourselves when I reality, a lot of times when someone breaks up with you, it’s more about them than it is about you. About what they want in their life, their future, all of that.
But we make it mean I wasn’t enough, I wasn’t worthy, I wasn’t - and then especially, at least for myself, I found thought work after the relationship had ended. So in the relationship, I can recognize now that I acted also kind of crazy in the relationship.
I was feeling jealous or insecure, and I would do crazy things. And so when the breakup happened, I was like, oh my gosh, I can’t believe I showed up like this crazy person, and maybe if I would have shown up differently, then the breakup wouldn’t have happened.
Brooke: It’s like we’re bargaining. It’s like the whole process of grief. We’re like, what can I do to make this pain go away? What can I do to stop feeling this way? Not recognizing we’re the one creating the pain. But we give all the power to that other person as if them leaving us is going to leave us somehow depleted.
And I do think there is so much power in grieving and letting it be painful. I think that is one of the things I see people making the biggest mistake with is they’re trying to solve for the pain so quickly, trying to get that other person back, doing crazy stuff like stalking them, chasing them down, putting crap on their social media, all that stuff, trying to make the pain go away.
So when you stop trying to make the pain go away and you just allow yourself to be in pain, I think that helps with acting crazy. What do you think?
Dorothy: Yes, absolutely. It allows you to look at what’s actually going on, what am I actually making this mean about me or my future. I think there’s a lot of disempowering stories that we have tied to breakups as well, around oh my gosh, I’m never going to find someone like that again, I wanted to create this in my life and now that’s not possible without him or her. That sort of thing.
And the panic around the crazy I think also comes from stories around disempowering stories you have about your future. So you then can look at that. It’s the same thing with the food. Once you allow yourself to feel the feelings, you can look at what you’re actually desiring, versus I don’t actually want this ice cream, this is what I want.
Brooke: So I just coached someone, this is what actually kind of gave me the idea for this podcast. I coached a woman who was devastated. Her husband had left her in a text message I think. A week later, she saw him with another woman.
And she was devastated, wanting him back. And from my perspective, I’m like, we don’t want this guy back, sister. This guy is - bye. We do not want this guy back. But in her mind, this guy who had treated her this way and then done this in such a callous - the way that he had acted, from my perspective, this man is not good enough for you.
This man doesn’t want to be with you, this is not a man you want to be with. But in our minds, we just keep telling ourselves if I could just get him back, then everything would be better. But it wouldn’t, right?
So what is your suggestion when that story is going on in your head where you’re like, I want this person, but logically, you know that you don’t, but you can’t stop feeling that desire?
Dorothy: You have to start looking at the whole picture. You have to be honest with yourself, looking at the entire picture. It’s easy to zoom in on the good parts, looking back at the good parts of the relationship. But it wasn’t all good, or else I don’t think you would be in the situation that you’re in.
So zooming out and looking at the big picture of, wow, I think he’s so amazing - I hear deep connection comes up a lot. Like I had such a deep connection with him. And it’s like, really? Did we have a deep connection at the very end?
A lot of times we think about the honeymoon phase and we forget about the ending part. Was it really that good? And do I really believe that I can’t create deep connection with anyone? And I was the one who created deep connection in the first place.
Brooke: So I can do it again, yes.
Dorothy: So zooming out, looking at the big picture, and I talk a lot about focusing on your future, building this epic, beautiful sundae so that the partner that you have is just the cherry on top. It’s all about building a life that no one can take away from you.
And when you start thinking about that and you start thinking about bigger picture, you recognize, oh my gosh, he’s just this small player in this chapter of my life that wasn’t exactly everything that I wanted. He might have been close, we had some good times, but that was just a small portion of the bigger book.
Brooke: I think that one of the mistakes I see a lot of people make, and this really applies to my marriage to Chris. I was married for 22 years. And there’s so much beauty in that man and so much beauty in that relationship and we had these two beautiful children, and we love each other still so much.
And so I think people think that that means that you should be together, even if one person has broken up with the other. And for me, I’m able to see that that relationship in that way is complete and let it go. And even when I feel like I’ve broken up with people since then, there was such a beauty in the relationship, there was so much I learned and we grew together and we had this amazing time, and now it’s complete.
And that doesn’t take away from that, and it doesn’t mean that because we loved each other and had these beautiful times together that we should still be together. Any kind of warm feeling you have towards that person doesn’t necessarily mean that that is the person for you.
Especially, my friends, if they don’t want to be with you. That is your first clue. And listen, I want to hear what you have to say about this. I’m always telling my girlfriends this, I’m like, don’t listen to what they’re saying to you. I don’t care that he calls you baby, I don’t care that he tells you how beautiful you are.
The man is not showing up when he says he’s going to show up. The man is not sending you the love that you want to be experiencing consistently. He’s coming in, rattling your world, and then leaving. I will chase these people down.
So it’s not just what they say. It’s what are they actually doing on a consistent basis? And what is it that you really want and deserve? And if you start thinking I don’t deserve that, I just have to put up with this, what are your thoughts on that? Because I see that happen with my girlfriends a lot.
Dorothy: Yes, it reminds me all about your want matches. What do you want and is it actually that today? And that goes back to, again, looking at are you missing and wanting your ex’s potential? Or do you actually like who he is in this moment? When you look at who he is being right now in this moment, does it align with who you want and does it align with your life?
And when you think about yourself and the kind of person you want to be, is that the kind of person you surround yourself with? Someone who’s showing up haphazardly?
Brooke: Yeah. And that’s really important. So what is your advice to people who are right in the middle of it? You think you’re going to literally die; you don’t think you’re good enough for anyone, you can’t even imagine this person is with someone else. It’s like ripping your heart out.
I’ve had situations where people couldn’t get out of bed, they couldn’t eat, they were really, really suffering. What is your advice or any coaching for that?
Dorothy: I think my biggest thing there is you’ve got to allow yourself to feel and you’ve got to allow yourself to validate your own emotions and recognize that, again, going back to your 50/50 concept, this is the 50% suck in it.
And you’ve got to allow yourself to be there, and I think remembering that the hurt is so deep because you cared, because you showed up in that relationship with everything you had. And that’s a beautiful thing to be celebrated.
And you’re going to grieve it, and you’re going to mourn it, but you will come out of it completely different. And it’s only breaking you open. I think that’s one of the things that’s pretty cool about a broken heart is it means you’re breaking open to something newer and something bigger and better. We’re only ever going up from here.
At the beginning of the year, I sat down - and I call my clients bravehearts because they’re brave and they’re healing heartbreak in a new way. And if I could give 10 messages to my bravehearts who are going through the thick of it, what would they be?
And one of those is we’re only going up. Choose to be here today with all the emotion that you have, recognizing that it’s only going to get better. We’re only going up from here. And if you found a partner so great that you’re mourning so badly, that means you’re going to find an even better partner the next time.
And a lot of times, your track record will even show that. If you’ve dated multiple people, it normally only gets better, and that’s why you’re so sad and devastated about the ending of this relationship or the completion of this relationship is because it was so good. So now you can look forward to something even better.
Brooke: And I also think, and I’ve noticed this to be true for me, I think the relationships that were the most triggering and addictive and unhealthy for me are the ones that are the hardest to leave because it’s like an addiction. Whereas when it’s true love and you love them and you’ve had a beautiful relationship, it feels sad but pure.
Dorothy: It feels peaceful, like a release almost. I totally agree with that because last year around October of 2020 I left a relationship and it felt so complete and full and whole. I loved him so dearly and I chose to leave and it felt very easeful, even though I had the deep emotions of heartbreak and grief, but it felt peaceful.
And they don’t have to be either or. I think it just comes to this either or world where we think we either have to hate this person to be able to move on, or I have to not love this person to be able to get over them. And it’s like, it can be and.
Brooke: If you’re feeling crazy and acting out of control, I think for me, when that happens to me, I’m like, uh-oh, what we got, sister? What’s coming up? What unhealed trauma or what addiction is here? What desire do I need to allow? What is this triggering?
And I do feel like recently, a person that I dated triggered old trauma for me, an old neurosis for me that made me feel insane. And instead of me being like, this is about him, I knew it had nothing to do with him. I’m like, this is being brought up so I can prepare myself for the next version of myself.
And no matter how excruciating it is or feels addictive or whatever, I wanted to look at it inside of myself and understand it so I could process it. And I feel so much stronger now because of that. And what’s weird, and I talked to my friend Kara about this is like, this was some stuff that happened to me in relationships before I got married.
And it was completely dormant the whole time I was married. I was married to Chris, amazing, secure, attentive man. And then got into another relationship where what was interesting is the guy had ADHD. And so it just triggered all sorts of craziness for me, which was beautiful because now I understand it and I can handle it and I can manage my urges around it. So I do think that breakups are one of the best growth opportunities.
Dorothy: It gets me giddy thinking about it. Like chills. I’m just like, sometimes it’s just exciting to watch someone go through it because I’m like, your life is about to change. You’re about to become more of yourself than you’ve ever even realized and this is a time to embrace it. And there’s going to be parts of it that are hard and painful, but it’s so exciting to find yourself on this completely new level and create a life that no one else can take away from you. It’s so amazing.
Brooke: Yeah, and I don’t think the answer is to get into a relationship where your toxicity or unhealthiness goes dormant. I think bringing it up and healing it is what makes you feel more complete and more available in your relationships. I know that’s what it’s done for me.
I cannot believe how much I have grown in this past year just by looking at myself and being willing to look at my own pain, my own neuroses, my own urges, and to really understand what’s going on for me just creates so much more confidence. And now, I can see a relationship that won’t be good for me a mile away. I’m like, “That is a no. I don’t care how cute you are.”
Dorothy: Yeah, it makes it so much cleaner and so much clearer. If you know yourself so well, it makes it so much easier to find and understand and unravel and realize what you want in a partnership.
Brooke: That’s so true. My girlfriend Jenna sent me the funniest thing. I have to find it and read it to you guys. Because I do think what you said earlier that’s really important is, like, your breakup will reveal what was going on in your relationship. So, if your breakup’s a hot mess, you had probably a hot mess in there. Either if you’re a hot mess or they’re a hot mess in the end, it’s because there was some craziness probably going on in there.
And you don’t want to hide from it. You want to look at it. So, she sent me this. It says, “Today, my therapist was like, if someone lies to you, you need to just remember that that person is a liar, plain and simple. Believe that they are who they are showing you that they are.” And I’m like, “Okay, but what if they’re hot?”
Dorothy: And it’s different, right…
Brooke: It doesn’t matter how hot they are. Do not do that to yourself. Oh my god, so funny…
Dorothy: Or how good they look on paper. I hear that a lot, like, “They look so good on paper. They have all of these things, except they don’t want to be with me.”
Brooke: They don’t want you… That’s a problem, my friends. That is a problem.
Dorothy: Also, can we just acknowledge how much more enjoyable relationships are when they want to be in a relationship with you? It sucks to be in a relationship with someone who is like kind of in, kind of not, or if they’re blatantly stating, “I don’t want to be in a relationship with you.” So much more fun.
Brooke: That’s true. And the other part that we haven’t talked about that I think is important to remember is also when you decide you don’t want to be in a relationship and you make a decision to break up with that person, you will immediately forget why.
Dorothy: Yes.
Brooke: You will go into pain because you will miss them, and your body will go through physical, chemical dopamine withdrawal because you’re no longer having that person, especially if it’s a shorter relationship, that you will forget all the reasons. So, before you break up with someone, write them down and remind yourself. I am watching a girlfriend go through this right now. You know who you are, sister. She listens to the podcast, she’s like, “Oh, talking about me again…”
And she was so adamant, wanted to break up with him, and now completely forgets all of it and is like, “I miss him. He’s so great.”
Dorothy: yes, you’ve got to write that down. Write it down and put it in your phone.
Brooke: And remember, I think getting back together, breaking up and getting back together, and breaking up is seriously the worst unnecessary suffering to do to yourself and the other person.
Dorothy: And it’s so time-consuming. You have so many years on the Earth; let’s spend them doing something different than that.
Brooke: Yeah, and you had mentioned this earlier, but I think this is really important to bring up is, like, be very mindful of your own buffering. Like, when you’re trying to overdrink or overeat or overtravel or over-socialize, or over-apps, dating apps, dating other people or whatever – this is true for me in my whole life. I loved to buffer, and so watching, “What am I buffering against here? What is it I don’t want to feel?” And if you are going to do that, just do it consciously.
Dorothy: Yes. And I think you can tell that difference because if you’re doing it because you want to feel better – my biggest thing in that whole experience for myself was recognizing that the goal at the end of the day, when it came to getting over my ex, wasn’t just to feel better. It was to have a life that was bigger and better than the one I had with my ex, and a life that was epic and grand and this beautiful sundae, and then that person that could join me is just the cherry on top.
And that was the ultimate goal. So it was like, travel fits into that, but I was traveling so that I would feel better. I was working out so that I’d look good so that I would feel better about myself, versus doing that from a place of, “Oh, I’m building this epic, beautiful life.” Does that make sense?
Brooke: Yeah. And there’s nothing wrong with trying to feel better. Of course, we want you to try and do that. But you want to understand why you don’t feel – you have to be willing to feel your pain too.
And I will tell you – you’ve all heard me say this but hear it again. When you are willing to experience pain, you will have the most epic life. Because if you aren’t willing to experience the breakup you’re going through, you’re not going to be willing to experience the next one, or even put yourself in harm’s way. This is why so many people get hooked on their exes, because they don’t process the pain and move onto their next heartbreak.
Dorothy: I’m so glad you brought that up because that was one of the coolest things that I noticed when clients came to me is we were healing multiple breakups. It was never just about the most recent one. They’re like, “I never actually healed from the one before that or the one before that. I just hopped into new relationships. And so, now I want to do this differently,” and they’re healing all this past trauma and this past work that they hadn’t worked through because they were just diving into the next relationship. So, absolutely.
Brooke: You’re in pain, so you’re like, “I either need to get back with this one or get a new one.” And listen, that does work, temporarily…
Dorothy: I was just going to say, temporarily, yes.
Brooke: It’s just like any other buffering thing. And getting attention from a new guy when the old guy isn’t giving you attention or whatever – but if you think about, where do you want to be in three years? You will notice that somebody that you pick to date right after a breakup to solve your pain is probably not the one that you would choose if you weren’t in pain. And that is a very important thing for you to know because, girls and boys and men and everyone, I have done all of it.
Dorothy: Yes, I’m so glad you said that too because that’s exactly – and oftentimes you’ll notice, you’ll go for the person that’s a complete opposite end of the spectrum from the person you were just with in the breakup.
Brooke: Yes, that’s so true. So, okay, tell us how your story ended. Where are you at now? First of all you kind of left us at the breakup, where you were a mess. And then you became certified. So, did all the work you do at the Life Coach School help you finally get over him?
Dorothy: Yes, I mean, I was over him before I signed up for the Life Coach School certification. And I think that was the beauty too, is I realized that I got over my ex in a moment. It did not take time. It took the mental shift of recognizing that what I was making the breakup and how he did it, I was making all of that mean he never loved me.
I was like, “Clearly if you move on that quickly, you never loved me in the first place.” Which was absolutely not true and I came to all kinds of realizations around, like, he could probably still love me while he was in this new relationship with someone else. And because he loved me, he wanted to let me go, or whatever I wanted to decide on for that
And all those realizations made me come to this conclusion that that happened in a moment and was just so amazing and so freeing. I think that’s the number one word I’d have to describe. Being over your ex feels free. You’re free of the mental space and the mental drama that it takes up because I was constantly thinking about him. I was making decisions to try get his attention. I started to see reoccurring patterns in my new relationship, because I had already gotten into another relationship because of everything we just talked about.
So, it just became so clear that heartbreak needed to be done differently, and that’s when I was like, “This is my mission. This is what I’m doing for the rest of my life,” is figuring out how to do this differently.
And so, now I am absolutely over my ex. I’ve been through multiple relationships since and learned how to leave relationships, which was a whole thing for me because I was never really the person that would leave previous relationships. I was always the one that was left. And so, I think that too was also a very important moment that I went through is learning how to break up with someone in a way that I felt proud of and felt secure about and all of that. And so, yeah, that’s where I’m at now.
Brooke: Yeah, and every relationship that you go through – and I mean through. Like you go all the way through to the end where you’re then desire-free from that person and feeling good about yourself – has something amazing to teach you. And you can see, like for me, I feel like they’re the weak neural pathways in my brain that aren’t serving me. And I want those to be revealed.
I want to see, like, why was I attracted to this person when they had all the signs, all the red flags? And I’m like, “That one, that’s a great idea…” And then you look back and you’re like, “What in the actual…” But I can see the patterning.
It’s like the recognition of your wounds and all the familiarity around that. And so, I’m glad that I went through all that, to learn from it. But I don’t think you have to go in, to get in a mess about it, you can understand it, like, “What is this about?”
And I think the main thing – and you’ve touched on this a lot – is understanding that if you don't enjoy yourself alone, if you are not happy with your own company, you will attach yourself to someone and hold onto them as the source of your happiness or your completeness or your life in a way that will not serve either one of you.
Of course, we want to be attached healthily to each other. But if you’re doing it in a way to compensate for your own quote unquote inadequacy, I’m telling you from experience, that is a painful road.
Dorothy: Yes, and I’m so glad you said that because I got a question the other day on Instagram from someone that was like, “How do you reduce attachment while in a relationship?” And I found that fascinating because in the relationship that I’m in currently, it comes from a place of knowing that my life’s going to be amazing with this person and my life’s amazing without this person.
And regardless of who’s in my life, I get to feel and have the life that I want, no matter who comes in and – I see it as weaving. Whoever weaves in and out of my life, that’s not going to determine how epic and amazing my life gets to be. I think that alone reduces desire and attachment to a specific human being.
Brooke: Yeah, that’s really important, to not have that person then become the source of anything for you. And if they do, you’ll feel it in that relationship because you’re like, “You’re not texting me. Where have you been?” You start getting jealous, you start acting crazy within the relationship. And so, then you can kind of recognize that.
So, how do you know – and I love that you said you can get over it in an instant, because I really do think… there were some relationships that I didn’t have a lot of pain after I left them. And there are some that have been excruciating. And so, I think both are very valid and interesting to pay attention to and look into and find out why.
But I’ve had the same experience, where it just took one moment of work, one moment of recognition, one understanding of my own brain to just snap me out of the entire suffering that I was in. It’s just one thought. It’s so crazy.
Because as soon as you’re saying, “It’s this person’s fault because they’re not behaving the way that I want them to behave,” you’re in so much trouble because you’re not going to be able to control them. You’re not going to be able to fix what it is that you want them to fix.
And that’s true if you’re going into a relationship with someone’s potential, or if they’ve left you and they’re not behaving the way that you want them to behave. So, it all comes back to your own brain and to yourself, and being willing to be in pain.
As soon as you think, “If I were in a relationship, I wouldn’t be feeling pain, and that would be better than this,” you’re missing the point of what your human life could be.
Dorothy: Which is also such a lie because you experience so much – I mean, most people experience pain within the relationship too…
Brooke: Unless they’re using it as a distraction and a way to buffer from themselves. And so, I think that’s what I’ve seen in relationships that are unhealthy for me, the crazier the person is, the more they require my attention, the less I have to focus on myself and what’s going on for me, the better bufferer they are. It’s like, the more intense the drug is, the better the buffer it is.
So if you’re one of those people who are like, “Why am I attracted to this person who I know isn’t good for me?” It could be because you’re sing that person to buffer against your own life and calling it love.
Dorothy: Yes, exactly, 100%.
Brooke: So, do not do that. Okay, so tell us how, if we’re in the middle of a breakup, we’re anticipating a breakup, we’re contemplating a breakup and we want to work with you and get your help, what do we do?
Dorothy: Yes, you can find me at dorothyabjohnson.com/getoveryourex. I have a Get Over Your Ex in 3 Months or Less program. It is fire. You will be over your ex in three months or less and onto building a life that’s bigger and better than. How fun is that?
Brooke: “I don’t want to take three months though,” someone says…
Dorothy: Yeah, so you don’t have to take three months. It can take a lot less than three months, absolutely. And you can find me on Instagram, @breakupcoachdorothy. And if you’re into podcasts, which you probably are if you’re listening to this podcast, I have a podcast called How to Get Over Your Ex, which is super fun. So, I’d love for you to come hang out over there too.
Brooke: How to Get Over Your Ex. I know there are so many of you suffering unnecessarily and we want to help you get to the other side of that so you can fall in love with yourself and then – and only then – someone else. Thank you so much for coming on…
Dorothy: Find your cherry.
Brooke: That’s right, find your cherry for the top. Thank you so much for coming on, Dorothy. I so appreciate it. You guys can find her. You can also come to thelifecoachschool.com/404 to get the show notes and see us on video, if you’d like to see that as well.
Alright, my friends, have a beautiful week, everybody. Thanks Dorothy. Bye.
Dorothy: Thank you.
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