Over Labor Day Weekend, as I was going through my life, my relationships, working with a great client, I realized something. From time to time, we all pick shitty people in our lives.
If I look back at all of my relationships, I’ve done pretty well. I’ve had a couple of bad ones in there, but I’ve done really well.
We’ve all picked men or women who are totally wrong for us, and we’ve all got battle scars from past relationships.
I call it PTDD, Post-Traumatic Dating Disorder.
Or PTRD, Post-Traumatic Relationship Disorder.
We all have it.
The question is: what are we going to do about it?
How are we going to stop history from repeating itself?
Eventually, you’re going to meet somebody who’s pretty damn amazing.
Somebody who’s different than anybody you’ve ever met before.
Somebody who actually loves you the way you’re looking to be loved.
And if your last few relationships were the bad and wrong ones, you’re going to look for things that are wrong in them.
You’re literally going to look for things to go wrong and create issues that aren’t even there.
You’re going to create these issues because of the stress, the PTRD that you had from your last relationship.
You’re going to question things that they do.
You’re going to find things to go wrong.
You’re literally going to self-sabotage the entire relationship.
Why would you do this, you ask?
Because you haven’t figured out all of the things that are still triggering you from your last relationship.
You most likely haven’t gone through therapy, or enough of it.
You haven’t talked to enough people. And I’m not talking about your friends. I’m talking about people who are actually non-biased people.
If you find yourself in a new relationship and you’re not believing the person, ask yourself this: Is it that person or is it you?
Is it you?
Is it what you’ve experienced in the past, not allowing you to move forward in the present with this new person?
Because it’s not the job of a new person to make you feel better. That can actually be quite exhausting.
It’s exhausting having to validate somebody over and over again, and tell them how you feel and have them not believe it on a deeper level.
It’s really hard to tell somebody how beautiful you think they are, how amazing you think they are, and have them actually tell you that they don’t believe you.
It’s exhausting, and it’s not my job or your job as a human being to heal somebody.
It’s their job to heal themselves.
If words are not getting through to somebody, no matter what you say, and someone’s not believing you, then it’s really up to that person to look in the mirror and go, “I need to really do some serious work right now before I lose this wonderful person that I’ve called into my life.”
Because I truly believe we call wonderful people into our lives. If I look back in my life, I’ve definitely called some wonderful people into my life. If I was the least bit still broken, the relationship tended to set and disintegrate.
My coach and therapist, Josh, says it over and over again: If I allow anything coming in from my past and I allow it to affect my present, I will have no future with the person that I’m with.
None at all.
As a matter of fact, there will be no present, there will be no relationship, because I’ll be in mode of comparing or literally processing things that are still leftover from somebody else.
As a matter of fact, writing this right now makes me really sad.
If I was able to cry, I probably would because to me, this reminds me of a lot of things in my life, people I’ve probably pushed away because I was angry or still not trusting.
I believe that, as we get older, there are less and less great people that come into your life because most people are so broken and so battered down because they haven’t done the work that they need to do.
So, here is a plea to all of you.
Please do the work.
Please get some coaching and/or therapy so the next gift that comes your way doesn’t disintegrate like the wrapping paper in the recycling bin on Christmas Day.
