Breakup Bootcamp

by Amy Chan

  Medium-Safety Relationship (35–65)

  If most of the people you spend time with are in this category, you may find yourself feeling apathetic about your relationships. Relationships may not feel rewarding or stimulating. You may want to try to grow the relationship by changing the current dynamic, setting limits, and/or communicating what you need in order for the relationship to be a positive value exchange.

  High-Safety Relationship (65–100)

  If most of your relationships are in the high-safety category, that’s great news! This means your life is filled with relationships that foster growth. Since you’re spending a significant portion of time with these people, not only are you getting a healthy dose of dopamine, but you’re also feeling connected, trusting, and safe.

  IT’S A TALL ORDER TO suddenly remove unsafe relationships from your life, especially if you coparent, live, or work with these people. Start off by gradually reducing your exposure to these people and increasing your exposure to safe relationships. Also, you can change the existing dynamic of these unsafe relationships by setting new terms.

  Set New Terms of Engagement

  For the “unsafe” people who are still in your life, you can start to change the dynamic by communicating boundaries and providing constructive feedback to express what you need in order for the relationship to feel mutually positive. If they engage in behavior that makes you feel emotionally or physically threatened, end the interaction altogether. If someone is not honoring your needs and boundaries after you’ve clearly communicated them, they are not respecting you. If disrespect is a pattern regardless of your attempts to shift the dynamic, you need to decide if you take space from the relationship or ultimately get out of it.

  For example, I had to change the terms of relating when I spoke on the phone with my mom, who would typically launch into complaints and insults about my father. Because I now recognize this as classic enmeshment (where instead of treating me like a daughter, she uses me as her therapist), I kindly but firmly told her that I no longer want to hear complaints about my dad. I told her that at the end of the day, he’s still my father and it hurts me to hear such negative things said about him. I offered that I’d be glad to hear about how she was feeling and brainstorm solutions, but if she launched into any more hate-fests about my dad, I would get off the phone. It took my telling this to her many times for her to finally get it, and she eventually stopped insulting him to me. I still need to remind her occasionally, but over time, we’ve shifted the dynamic.

  It is perfectly normal and okay to reassess your relationships from time to time and evaluate if they’re nourishing you or harming you. We change, other people change, and just because you have a history with someone doesn’t automatically give them a spot in your present and future. This doesn’t mean you need to stop caring for them. You can love and care for these people all you want, but that doesn’t mean they need to be a part of your immediate peer group. And if you really want to keep spending time with someone but find that the interactions are negative or one-sided, you can communicate in a loving way that the dynamic needs to change along with your new terms. Note that people who have known you the longest may have trouble with this in the beginning. They may be used to a relationship with you where you are the brunt of the jokes, the pushover, or the one who constantly nurtures and gives more—but keep standing your ground. Keep communicating your new terms of engagement with both your words and your actions, and as you hold your integrity, you’ll find that people start to respect your standards. Here’s a template you can use as a starting point and customize to your situation.

  Lead with something positive and create connection: “I love you and value you in my life.”

  Communicate what isn’t working and how it makes you feel: “When I share my experiences and feelings and I’m met with criticism and anger, I feel unsafe to open up and sad that we can’t connect.”

  Set a tone of compassion that you understand they’re not ill-intentioned and may not realize how you’re affected, and then state your preference: “I know you love me and also value constructive and positive communication. Would you be open to listening to what I have to say without interruption, and afterward, sharing what you’re feeling and asking me questions to better understand my perspective? I’ll do the same for you.”

  Practice! It’s possible you’ll be met with resistance, but if you can, try to redirect the conversation and set the new tone, right then and there: “Let’s start over. Can I share what happened at work today? I’d love your feedback on this new manager.”

  You train people how to treat you. Each time you lower your standards, justify abusive behavior, or allow someone to breach your boundaries, you set a precedent for how much disrespect you’ll tolerate.

  Becoming more securely attached is a process that is influenced by your environment, family, community, and partner choices. Your attachment style won’t change overnight, but you now have a deeper understanding of how and why you react to intimacy the way you do, and how to become more secure.

  Your relationship outcomes are the result of your patterns, which are the result of your beliefs. Do you know what beliefs are ruling your love life? In the next chapter, we’ll find out.

  3

  Change Your Beliefs, Change Your Life

  Whatever you hold in your mind on a consistent basis is exactly what you will experience in your life.

  Tony Robbins

  To get a clear picture of how beliefs shape our behavior, let’s examine elephants in India. Let’s say you are an elephant keeper. How would you keep a ten-thousand-pound elephant from running away? Perhaps with a massive steel cage? Or electric fences with barbed wire?

  What if I told you the secret to keeping a ten-thousand-pound elephant from escaping is a piece of rope and a small wooden peg?

  This might not make sense, because a rope is no match for the strength of an elephant. But the rope does not serve a physical purpose but a psychological one.

  You see, when a baby elephant is born, the keeper ties its leg with a rope to a peg. At that point, the rope is strong enough to keep the elephant from roaming away. At first, the baby elephant will try to use all its strength to break free from the rope. But after multiple failed attempts, it learns that trying to escape the rope is futile. As the elephant grows and becomes stronger, the rope becomes too weak to retain the animal. However, the elephant no longer tries to escape. After so many failed attempts when it was a baby, it’s accepted that it has no choice but to stay in place. Once the elephant is fully grown, a peg doesn’t even need to be used anymore; just having the rope on the elephant’s leg keeps the animal in check. The elephant’s belief that it is impossible to escape the rope has become ingrained, and for the rest of its life, it will never again try to escape.1

  Learned helplessness. It affects humans just as much as it affects elephants.

  We often form beliefs that are relevant to a situation or time of life, but even when that situation no longer applies, the belief becomes so ingrained that we never challenge it. Beliefs that were developed long ago that might have been useful once may hold us back later in life as we accept those beliefs as the complete truth.2

  The good news is humans have a much greater rationalizing capability than animals, and we can choose to change our predisposed beliefs. We do not need to be prisoners of imaginary confines; we can choose to challenge old beliefs that hold us down. In this chapter, we are going to learn how to untie the ropes of the false beliefs and limitations of our past.

  THE LEVELS OF CHANGE

  How many times have you tried to diet, stop eating sugar, or minimize your addiction to social media, only to give up in defeat? Join the club. It can feel frustrating when you desire change in your life, but things seem to stay the same no matter how hard you try. Don’t despair, it’s not because you don’t have the capability or the strength; it’s just that you haven’t learned the right approach. Often, we think that willpower is the w
ay to enforce new behavior, but then fall back into old ways after a period of time. Relying on willpower alone is not an efficient way to create lasting change. In order to stick, change must come in levels and it starts at the nucleus.

  If we change at the outermost level—our environment—little else changes. For example, perhaps you think dating sucks in your city, so you decide to move to another city. But soon you fall into the same patterns and face the same intimacy issues as in the original city. Or, if one dating app isn’t providing enough quality leads, you add more dating apps to the mix to broaden your “environment.”

  Or we try to change our behavior. For example, you want to appear all cool about your latest crush, so you strategize time delays before replying to texts (even if inside you’re counting the minutes to responding). You manipulate your behavior to appear a certain way, instead of reflecting on the reason you feel the need to play games in the first place. You can fake behaviors for only so long, and while it’s possible to effect some change this way, it’s often unsustainable.

  A more effective way of creating change is to get to the core—your beliefs. Once you shift your beliefs, there’s an automatic ripple effect to the outer rings of behavior and environment.

  We need to first get at the subconscious beliefs that are ruling our behavior and outcomes. Then, by intentionally working on shifting the beliefs and practicing new habits, dramatic changes will occur. The results might not be palpable in a week or a month, but consistent practice over time can lead to significant transformation.

  YOU ARE THE SUM OF YOUR BELIEFS

  You are the sum of the beliefs that you’ve collected throughout your life. Beliefs are stored in the subconscious, often beyond our conscious recollection. This is why, most of the time, people are perplexed and frustrated that they cannot change an unwanted behavior. That is because it’s run by underlying programs, old beliefs.3

  Most beliefs start early in life, because between the ages of one and seven, we are like sponges, soaking up everything others tell us, accepting much of what is said. Our brains are not fully developed yet and lack the cognitive ability to reason or think critically and logically.4

  Medical hypnotist Susan Spiegel Solovay, who provides one-on-one sessions with Renew participants, says, “Once you understand that life is not about what happens to us—instead, it’s about the beliefs we have about what happened—then you can go to the deeper mind to find and change unhelpful beliefs.”

  She explains that a belief such as “I am not good enough” can be deeply implanted from a childhood experience of being harshly criticized by a teacher, a peer, a sibling, or a parent. Even if the event was seemingly harmless, it’s made an imprint. It will run like a river underneath many thoughts and cause a person to continue to prove “I am not good enough” because that is that person’s inner belief. Eventually the incident during which that belief was implanted is forgotten in the conscious mind, but it remains the underlying programming of one’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior.

  Many studies have been conducted showing that children who believed they were not smart, not good at math or bad at spelling, would subconsciously make poor grades to live up to that idea. By working with the children to adjust their limiting beliefs, researchers concluded that in almost every case, poor grades were a result of their beliefs, not aptitude.5

  We act like the person who we perceive ourselves to be. We literally can’t behave otherwise, regardless of our willpower and efforts. From the student who thinks she’s dumb to the woman who perceives herself as unlovable, we will invariably create circumstances that confirm our ideas about ourselves and find evidence that continues to prove these ideas to be true.6 Our beliefs are the foundation upon which our personality, behavior, and circumstances are built. Ideas that are inconsistent with our inherent beliefs will be rejected and not acted upon.

  OUR BRAINS ARE MEANING-MAKING MACHINES

  Your brain is constantly trying to make meaning of the events, environment, and people around you. It doesn’t like gray areas, it doesn’t like unfinished business, and it certainly doesn’t like questions left unanswered. Instead, it wants to file information into a folder and label that folder as “good” or “bad.” If it doesn’t have meaning for something that has happened, it will make meaning by accessing all the other neatly filed-away folders from the past, mixing assumptions, biases, and projections to come up with a story. It will keep looking for information or distorting information to prove that the old existing beliefs are true.

  Master neurolinguistic programming (NLP) practitioner and author of Neuropathways to Love Cinthia Dennis has spent over a decade helping hundreds of clients recognize the beliefs that are getting in the way of creating the relationships they want. She is trained in NLP, an approach that uses language and pattern identification to help create change in one’s thoughts and behavior.

  “Beliefs are our filters on the world,” she tells the participants at Renew. She holds up a pair of blue-tinted glasses and puts them on. “When I put on the glasses, I can see that you are all here, but you’re all tinted blue. That is how beliefs work. The beliefs are the blue tint. We see the world and reality based on what we already believe. Reality is not neutral for us. I’d like to think all the things happening out there are mutual, but what we make them mean is our personal spin on them. The brain is designed to be efficient but not necessarily accurate. It will generalize and distort information so that it fits into what we already believe. Our beliefs cause us to feel a certain way, which affects how we behave and ultimately what we experience.”

  Cinthia shares the example of Audrey, a Renew participant who continued to work with her after attending bootcamp a year ago. Audrey is beautiful and charismatic and has no issue getting dates. But every time she dated someone it would end up the same way. The men were always unavailable—they were either not around, married to their work, or the player types who had no intention of committing.

  “What we uncovered during our sessions was that deep down, Audrey had a core belief that she was unlovable. The only way she felt lovable was if she was useful. So she would behave in ways to earn love and eventually act in ways that would get these guys to push her away. Her brain also wouldn’t let her pick anyone else. When an available guy liked her, she thought there was something wrong with him because he was choosing her.”

  Audrey kept repeating her experience, and each time, it would strengthen the belief that she was unlovable. Cinthia helped Audrey first to identify unavailable partners before she chose to date them and second to recognize her behaviors that were reaffirming her core belief.

  Together, we are going to explore your beliefs and learn how to rewire the ones that no longer serve you.

  THE EVOLVING LADDER OF BELIEFS

  It’s Saturday morning, and Dr. Zendegui is leading a session on changing old beliefs. After an exercise where the women identify their current beliefs about love and relationships, she asks for a volunteer from the group to share. Karen, a thirty-eight-year-old divorcée from San Francisco, reads one of the beliefs from her list: “There are no good men left.”

  Dr. Zendegui asks, “Is this assumption absolutely one hundred percent true?”

  “Well, I suppose not absolutely. But if there are good guys, I sure haven’t met them,” Karen replies.

  “So, is the belief one hundred percent true one hundred percent of the time?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “You mentioned earlier that you want to fall in love again. Do you feel this belief is helpful in getting you where you want to go?”

  Karen sighs. “No, no, it isn’t. But I don’t know how to trust again.”

  Dr. Zendegui uses Karen’s example to explain to the group: “Making a new belief isn’t about having blinding, unrealistic optimism. The ideal new thought is not ‘I’ll meet someone amazing tomorrow’ or ‘Ryan Gosling will be mine.’ Creating a new thought might mean softening the old thought or making it less extreme. So
ftening thoughts is often more accurate and takes the emotional sting out of the negative narratives we often tell ourselves. For Karen’s belief, she might change ‘There are no good men left’ to ‘While I’ve been hurt by some men in the past, there are still loving men out there whom I may have not yet met.’ For those of you struggling with your separation, you might change ‘I can’t handle this breakup’ to ‘This breakup is really hard, and I know it will get easier over time.’ For many, softening an extreme or black-and-white thought will cool the emotional temperature of the thought, which opens up more space for coping. Changing a thought could also mean totally changing the script. You might change ‘I have to get pregnant by thirty-five’ to ‘If I don’t get pregnant, I can explore adopting.’”

  The way we shift our beliefs is to first identify the limiting belief and then create a more helpful belief. The approach is like climbing a ladder, one rung at a time, each rung representing a truer, more helpful belief. To see the full evolution, we’ll look at Karen’s evolving ladder of beliefs:

  Bottom of the ladder: “There are no good men left.”

  Next rung: “While I’ve been hurt by some men in the past, I’m open to believing there are still loving men out there whom I may have not yet met.”

  Final rung: “There are many different types of men out there, and I’m open to meeting someone who is the right match for me.”

  The evolving belief on each rung is a little more honest, more positive, and more helpful than the rung below. Going from the bottom of the ladder to the top instantly would be too dramatic a change for your brain, so the change in mindset has to be done gradually.