Love Life with Matthew Hussey - 40: Did you lose the "RIGHT" Relationship?

Episode Date: July 23, 2020

Ever sat ruminating obsessively over something you could have or should have done differently in your relationship? Something you said, something you did, or something you wish you’d have done more? It’s a dreadful, sickening feeling. I know because I’ve felt it. It leads to regret, anxiety, self-loathing… not to mention a lack of appetite and insomnia. We turn over every memory, imagining where we could have been with that person had we just behaved differently. And this feeling isn’t limited to situations that have ended. Sometimes we are still seeing someone but we have this crippling anxiety over having irreversibly damaged the relationship. We feel we’ve created a perception of ourselves in that person’s eyes that we can’t now undo. If for any of these reasons you are currently torturing yourself, this episode will be life-saving for you today. Trust me when I say it is essential. I break down for you why you don’t need to be wallowing in pain, and why, despite everything that destructive voice inside is saying, you actually have reason to feel good today. Please also share this with someone you know who may be beating herself up right now. Life’s too short for any of us to suffer needlessly. I’m with you, friend. You’re loved.  *** (Start transforming your confidence from wherever you are TODAY! Get the At-Home Retreat program at MHRetreatAtHome.com)

Hello there listeners and welcome to the love life podcast i am stephen hussey and today we are following up from last episode where we talked about regret the feeling that you've made a huge mistake that you can't piece it back together again and the feeling of loss and pain that comes with an irreversible error and this time we're gonna look specifically more on relationships and particularly when you feel like you've let the right relationship slip through your fingers and you think i'm never going to get that back again I've screwed up irrevocably and now I feel lost and I don't know how I'm going to make it right and this of course is reinforced when all of your loved ones go oh my god what happened and you think I built up this relationship as being

the one this was the perfect person society loves to reinforce this idea and now you think I built up this relationship as being the one this was the perfect person society loves to reinforce this idea and now you think well if I've lost the perfect person how the hell am I going to get back and make it right again luckily I have the right man for the job his name is Matthew Hussey of course and I'm going to pass over to Matt in just a sec just before I do he mentions at the end a link to our at-home retreat program where you can get the whole magic of our six-day retreat from the comfort of your own home wherever you are right now and go through that from start to finish transform your confidence change your mindset your your goals, your purpose, where you're going, and make some real decisions, get clarity, and start taking action moving forward with your confidence today. You can

get that at mhretreatathome.com. That's mhretreatathome.com. And I'll put a link in the show notes description as well, so you can click it there. All right, that is it from me. Over to Maddie boy. One of the most fearful thoughts that people have in their lives is, will I ever meet the love of my life? Perhaps one of the most painful thoughts that people experience is,

did I just lose the love of my life? We meet someone, we fall in love, we want it to work, we'd give anything for it to work, and then we lose that person, or that person threatens to leave. And our entire body and mind is screaming that we're losing the thing that was meant for us. I have a phrase in my mind that I believe is extremely important in creating the lens that you look at your relationships through. The right relationship isn't brittle. I look at the situation right now in the last few months and the pandemic has precipitated what we hear in the news, an extraordinary number of divorces in different countries. And I think to myself, yes, this situation may have brought people to the edge. It has certainly

created an extreme scenario. And there's no doubt in my mind that even in the best relationships, there are times where it will have raised the temperature of an argument, of a conflict. But I don't believe that coronavirus created divorces. I believe it revealed difficulties in relationships. I believe that even if those things were unconscious until two people were forced to be together for that amount of time, three months in a room together does not end the right relationship. So when someone tells us they want to leave, that they're considering leaving, or that they've made their mind up. There are two things to consider. Number one, they're leaving because they're not

good at dealing with tough times in a relationship. Maybe you are having an argument, maybe you are having a difference of opinion, but that doesn't have to be relationship ending. If someone is leaving over something that could be saved it may be a reflection of the fact that they're not the type to go through difficult times with you and that's important to know now. I think it's a good thing for someone to leave now if they don't have staying power because that's many years it could have saved you. You don't want someone five years from now leaving because that's the first time you had a difficult situation or conversation.

In that sense, this year has been a blessing for many relationships because it's created a pressure that has revealed relationships that shouldn't be far earlier than it would have been revealed otherwise. There are couples that should have broken up and did break up this year that could have taken another five years to break up. The second reason someone may be leaving

is because they feel that fundamentally, you are not meeting what they perceive to be their needs. Now, this may not be communicated to you. In fact, the argument you just had may have been blown up into something so big and so severe that that's the reason they're leaving. But many, many people break up where the argument that preceded that moment becomes the ammunition that someone needed to end something that they were thinking about ending for some time. You may feel that when I say that, that is just a tragic, horrible, heartbreaking thought. The question you have to ask yourself is, was I doing my best? Have I been doing my best?

If the answer is yes, why would you want to be with someone whose needs you can't meet even on your best day? Or someone who you have to struggle so hard to meet the needs of? See, a relationship isn't the gymnastics at the Olympics where someone does a flawless three-minute routine on the mat and then beats themselves up because they didn't stick the landing perfectly at the end of the routine, giving them an 8 out of 10 instead of a 9. A relationship is real human stuff. Yes, it shouldn't be easy. I don't think that the right relationship is easy any more than being fit and healthy is easy. It requires conscious effort to make something great and to keep it great over time. But that doesn't mean that you should be fighting every day to win a

gold medal just so that the relationship survives. Being with someone whose needs you don't feel you can meet or you don't feel you can meet consistently is a slow form of torture that will erode your confidence over time until you forget who you were. And by the way, even as I'm saying this, there may be this creeping part of you that says, but I didn't do my best. I messed up. You know, there were a bunch

of times where I acted badly, where I was too jealous, where I was too needy, where I was too desperate, where I asked too much, where I was high maintenance, where I didn't make that person's life easy. This may be a complex philosophical point to convey in what I'm trying to make a short video, but failing. But I think that we're even too hard on ourselves when we recall how much better we could have done. I think there's an imagined idea of how much better we could have done. That we think, well, I could have been doing this and I could have been doing that and I could have said this like that. We have all these imagined ideas, a fantasy version of ourselves that would have kept that person. But maybe what you were

doing, even if it wasn't objectively the best you could do, maybe it was the best you could do at the time with your resources, with your current wounds, with the things that you're dealing with internally, with the knowledge that you had in the moment. Maybe that was your best at the time. Maybe it's not your best a year from now or five years from now, ten years from now But maybe it really was you doing your best even though you feel your best fell short That's normal So remember that when you're torturing yourself over something you should have done differently or said differently That that idea you have in your head of what you could have been in that moment is theoretical. It's true that we can evolve in each relationship. It's true that the previous relationship you had will allow you to bring a

wiser you to the table in the next one. But just remember this, when you find your brain laser focused on something you think you did wrong, the right relationship is not brittle. Before you leave today, please understand that the deep work that we do in a video like this is so, so important. I love the videos where I get to give a fun, practical thing that you can say to someone or text someone, a technique that works. But this kind of deep work is absolutely crucial to making our love lives work.

It's crucial to making any of our relationships in life work. If you want to invest more in the deeper side of the conflicts you face internally, the ways you beat yourself up, the ways you don't allow yourself to feel good about yourself or move on or feel confident, my retreat program is where I do the deepest work with people on what's going on inside. If you want to come and check that out for yourself, we have the at-home version now that you can do so you don't have to make it to a live retreat you can do it from home where

you are right now. I'll leave a link here check it out and thank you for watching.