1. YOU’RE STRONGER THAN YOU THINK
You have survived every single tough day of your life. Everytime you’ve told yourself ‘I can’t do this’ you have in fact done it. You have powered through. All the heartache, all the pain – you didn’t let it break you, you carried on, otherwise, you wouldn’t be here today.
So trust me, I know you have all the strength you need to keep surviving. You’re so much stronger than you think you are. A mantra I like to use when I’m having a tough day emotionally is:
“I am strong. I am powerful. I handle uncomfortable feelings with ease.”
2. THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A MISTAKE, ONLY LESSONS TO BE LEARNT
After a break-up, it’s normal to replay the relationship in your head and start analyzing scenarios and asking yourself things such as ‘Should I have done it differently?’ But looking back and regretting your behaviour or your reaction to their behaviour won’t change the past.
However, looking forward with positive change can most certainly alter your future. Maybe you felt completely disrespected in your last relationship – looking back and regretting things won’t change it, but taking it as a lesson to understand how you should be treated in future relationships, well that’s a win.
We are all on our own individual journeys, even if we make so-called ‘mistakes’, they’re not mistakes, just little hitchhikers we pick up on our journey, hopping on board to teach us a lesson that we need to be taught in order to take us to our next destination.
3. MAYBE THIS ISN’T THE END, MAYBE THIS IS THE BEGINNING
When something ends, especially a meaningful relationship, it’s completely normal to feel like you’ve lost a part of yourself. You’re essentially in mourning. When my ex and I broke up for the final time after eight years of being in each other’s lives, my body refused to let me eat or sleep. It was like I couldn’t function as a human-being without having him around and for me, it really felt like ‘The End’.
I smile now when I think back to that. That relationship ending was NOT my ending, it was my beginning. That’s why I always associate my transformation with the life of a Butterfly. The caterpillar goes through a great deal of pain and change, but emerges as a beautiful much stronger creature with the world at her wings.
That painful ‘ending’ was actually a new journey, a new chapter, in fact, a whole new life beginning for me! It’s good to remind yourself that your relationship ended for a reason and maybe that reason is that its time for a brand new beginning for you. Are you ready to transform?
4. NOT GETTING WHAT YOU WANT CAN BE A BLESSING
Break-ups are even tougher when you don’t necessarily want to break up. Unrequited love is the most painful (I’ve been there my friend!) But have you ever been left devastated when something didn’t work out? Maybe a job you didn’t get? Only to find yourself a year down the line feeling so relieved you didn’t get the job because you got an even better one, or maybe you went down a different route altogether? That’s how this break-up is going to work.
More often than not disappointment or failure is simply a change of course in your destiny. Remind yourself of that during the break-up. It may not make sense now, but one day you will look back and understand that the sadness you feel now is just an unfortunate repercussion to your internal satnav updating and reprogramming your life’s journey, taking you to the people and places you really deserve in your life.
5. THERE IS ALWAYS SOMETHING TO BE GRATEFUL FOR
It’s a tricky one, but there is ALWAYS something to be grateful for at the end of a relationship. It needn’t be all horror and hatred; you can walk away from a relationship, even a toxic one, being grateful for the time you had together, the beautiful memories and especially for all the lessons learned.