The Break-Up Diet - STOP Ignoring The Pattern Because You Like Him. ft Yasmine Gould

Episode Date: May 13, 2026

This week I’m joined by Yasmine Gould and girls… this episode is going to trigger A LOT of people.We get into relationship patterns, emotional triggers, intuition, attachment styles, cheating, anxiety in relationships, and why so many women ignore the biggest red flags simply because they really like someone.Like tell me WHY women can literally feel sick, anxious, overwhelmed, lose sleep, cry constantly, overthink everything, and STILL convince themselves the relationship is “fine”.Your body will literally be screaming at you whilst your mind is there making excuses for a man. INSANE.We also talk about repeating the same patterns in different people, why some relationships leave you constantly dysregulated, why certain people feel addictive, and the difference between real love and a triggered attachment.And honestly… some of the things said in this episode??? GIRLS.Because if you constantly feel anxious around him…if your intuition keeps speaking up…if you keep needing reassurance…if your nervous system never fully relaxes around him…PLEASE start paying attention to the pattern.We also get into why people stay in relationships they know are wrong, why women talk themselves out of their intuition, coping mechanisms after heartbreak, and how your triggers can actually reveal what needs healing.This episode honestly feels like one massive unfiltered girls therapy session and I already know so many of you are going to see yourselves in this conversation.So babe… if the same pattern keeps showing up in different people?Maybe it’s time to stop ignoring it. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Yasmin is back again because I've actually filmed another episode with her, which we're very fortunate about, to dive into patterns and like triggers for people. Because who you are when you're saying, when all your needs are met, it's easy to be a great person. It's easy. But who are you when you are struggling? Buckle up, bitches. It's going to get bumpy. This is the breakup diet. Hi, everyone. Before we get into this episode,

could you please subscribe, follow the breakup diet. It really means the world and it means I get to keep making these episodes. So if you could please do that, I would be forever grateful and I hope you enjoy it. If you want to have healthy relationships in your life, you need to understand at the very least your own triggers. And then if you can start to understand other peoples, you're open up a whole new realm of relationship. Does everybody have a trigger? Absolutely. Everybody has multiple. Do they all have to be like you have a massive response to it or can some of them be?

Okay. And they don't necessarily have to be bad responses or do they? No. A trigger, if we were to really put into layman's terms, is feeling emotionally dysregulated. So you know how sometimes you can tell that someone is emotionally dysregulated by something that's happened. Maybe you know two people that are dating and somebody else that you know really liked one of those two people and is triggered, but they're not saying anything about it, but you can just tell.

You can feel it from them, right? They're triggered. They're not reactive, but they're triggered. So it means that your nervous system is activated, it's dysregulated. So you're experiencing an intense emotion. One could even say that, you know, feeling extremely ecstatic about something could also be a trigger. It's triggered a sense of happiness inside you. That experience has triggered an extreme emotional feeling.

But most of the time when people talk about triggers or activation, yeah, they're talking about a negative, I don't like to use that terminology, but an uncomfortable emotion, shall we say? I don't like to use positive or negative. I like to use comfortable and uncomfortable. All emotions are data, the information. They're not bad. There's no bad emotion.

That's just the story people tell themselves because it doesn't feel good. But you can't spend your whole life feeling good all the time. It's not realistic desire. Do your triggers have to be necessarily the same or they could be like something that maybe you're triggered in that response for a certain amount of time, but then not again? Yeah, yeah, for sure. So that's how you know that you've healed. If you think about something that maybe used to trigger you when you were much younger and then, you know, some time goes by and maybe you've done some work on it consciously, maybe unconsciously, maybe other things have happened in your life that have caused you to grow and evolve and then

something happens and you're like oh once used to really upset me and now it feels just like a slight minor irritation fantastic you've evolved the version of you that exists in that moment is more evolved and more healed than the version of you that used to be triggered by that I was trying to think of my trigger from like I can think of one though it was more recent because of my breakup but before I went through a break in my breakup my most recent one I obviously had the feeling of it wasn't right for a long time from if I'm being completely honest without being like hurtful towards him from the beginning like I just didn't think that it was really it didn't not it was yeah even though he's he was great and all this or something had

amazing times it didn't I didn't fully like feel what I thought I should be feeling you know but I didn't listen obviously and then you go through times where you have like really nice time so you kind of forget about it or you push it back or you're like no I'm asking too much or oh no, this is how it is or, oh, it's because of this. And then I think my response and like the universe must have been at the end. The last like six months, I was so anxious, like all the time. And I didn't necessarily know why. It wasn't like he was ever nasty or anything like this at that point.

But I was so teary, so anxious. Couldn't even like got overwhelmed to even leave the house almost. So when your nervous system is in that state, we call it like an activated state. you're in a sense of like fight or flight pretty much all the time. Nobody is naturally in that state. You're in that state as a result of usually living a life that's completely out of alignment. And there are many people living like that, unfortunately, but living in that state where you've got high cortisol in the body and high levels of adrenaline, you're lining up for ill health.

So one of the things that I think a lot of people don't realize is that there are many people in situations, like what you just described. Some of them could be abusive, some of them are not abusive, some of them are just not outlined like say the guy's a nice guy's not a bad person there's nothing untoward happening but your body just knows that it doesn't feel safe around this person in the long term right and as a woman i mean we all have it we should all be listening to our intuition but women in particular your body knows your body always knows just like if a man's cheating on you your body knows the weirdest thing like i also had this whenever i'm really stressed i get a serious pain in my

right side, like right there every single time, even if I don't realize or something bad is about happen. It's only one time where something bad hasn't happened and I've had that pain and I've been like, hmm. But like now it's a warning and at the end of that relationship too, I was in so much pain one night, couldn't sleep, nothing, which I hadn't had and I always did get it the night before I went up there because we were long distance. And then when I was, one night I remember couldn't sleep at all. I took serious painkillers and made him driving. to the doctor, the doctor was like, there's nothing wrong, like, all this. And I was like, in so much pain that I was like thinking my body was obviously trying to tell me something too.

Yeah, 100%. But if you don't understand how to interpret the language that your body's using to tell you things, like for example, the left side of the body is feminine, the right side of the body's masculine. Well, if someone gets breast cancer in their left breast, that's quite often do with nurturing your daughter. If you get cancer in the right breast, it's quite often to do with nurturing your son. But to go back to what you were saying about how you were living in this state where you kind of just knew it wasn't right. I think a lot of people find themselves in relationships where maybe something rears its head in the relationship and you're dysregulated about it.

Maybe you're arguing about the same thing. Maybe it's that your husband always goes out and gets crazy drunk and you really don't like it when he's crazy drunk. And this just keeps rearing its head and rearing its head and rear and its head and rear and its head and then there'll be times in between that where it's okay. I'm not here to say whether it's right or wrong to go and get crazy drunk or not. that's entirely between the people that have their boundaries and what they're willing to part with.

But it's like if somebody has got a pattern of behaviour, patterns of behaviour don't lie. So if you're on a relationship where somebody's had the same pattern for the last eight, nine, ten years of their life, chances are that pattern's not going to change unless that person recognises they also do not want that pattern of behaviour in their life and they are actively taking steps to change it. Then you are likely to see changes in that pattern of behaviour, but it will not be overnight. One of the things that I notice can happen in relationships is, let's say a couple have a conversation and they recognize where something is going wrong.

And one person says, I'm going to do all the things I can in my power to change that thing that I'm doing that's upsetting for you. And it's also maybe not good for me. Let's run with the drinking analogy. It's probably not a bad one, right? And they're like, I'm going to try and not going out and getting so drunk and I'm going to have less alcohol. And that's maybe the thing that upsets their spouse, right?

and they come home and they're drunk, maybe they make a mess or they throw up or whatever it may be, right? Well, if that person's had that pattern since they were like 15 and this person's 35, they've had that pattern for 20 years, chances that they're going to change it because you've had one conversation, they've agreed to change it. That's not how human brains and human behaviour works, unfortunately. So, you know, then sometimes I'll have somebody say,

but we've had this conversation six times. They always say it and nothing's changed. That's because humans are like, they're like computers, they're programmed, right? So that person's probably got a dependency on that habit. For whatever reason, that habit probably brings that person something. Maybe they feel like they forget all their problems. Maybe it brings them elation when they're with their friends, and that's how they bond with their friends or whatever it may be.

How long do you think it takes somebody to get to know somebody? A long time. Right. But I always said this. Like, I always said this. I was like, I don't feel like you really even know me. I don't feel like I really, really, really know you. Even though we'd have deep conversations and stuff.

But I still think it's a time. It's more of a feeling that you can't. put your finger on. That's why I'm coming up from you. Yeah. If there's a feeling that you can't put your finger on, run. It makes it hard though when it's not, um, with that, I totally agree. Like, totally agree.

But you know what I think makes it hard is that if nothing is really bad or really like, yeah, and this is how people die. What do you mean? Because, because somebody that is manipulating you, whether they're doing it consciously or not, because some people are narcissistic, but they're not. consciously narcissistic. They're not doing it on purpose. That's how they are.

And there are some people that are pathological and they are doing it on purpose to have you where they want you. And what they are banking on is the fact that it's not bad enough for you to leave. But if you had enough self-esteem and self-respect, you would have left already. And so what people I think don't realize sometimes is how dangerous it is to stay in relationships with people that make you unhealthy. So like, for example, staying in a relationship that is okay, but it raises your cortisol on a regular basis,

you're shortening your life expectancy considerably. I mean, I feel like I knew him, but it wasn't like, I don't feel, which I said to him as well, like I didn't feel like we were really like a couple of what I would imagine a couple is. Do you get what I mean? Like, it was like weird. I feel like I knew him, but I didn't feel like I really was ever...

Together. Yeah. But I don't know if that's just because also maybe we're long distance and like this is the, this is like whatever in my head. This is the ego. This is, okay, so you know when you get an instinct in the body, that is your gut instinct. Those instincts, and then what quite often happens for women, in particular, they end up footing the bill. For so many reasons I could talk about for many hours.

So imagine you're in a lift as a woman, and the door opens and there's a man on the other side and you instinctively feel... Sorry, you're not in the lift. The man is in the lift. The door opens, you instinctively feel you don't want to be left alone in a room with him. women will quite often, because we've been trained to minimize our intuition and to not trust ourselves and to always be the sacrifice, a lot of women will not want to seem rude or upset this man so they'll ignore that fleeting feeling that comes up and get in the lift.

Do you think that it changes though? Because does it always have to be steady or not steady? Because I feel like it was steady for my own personal one. I feel like it was steady for a while and then it wasn't. And then when it was, it was louder and louder and louder and louder. Well, I think in the beginning it's really hard. We can get swept up in things, right? Quite easily.

I think that's quite common for a lot of people. And so you want to look at how long it's steady for, and you want to look at, is it really steady or did it just feel steady? Yeah. Big difference. Yeah. Because a lot of people think that things are a certain way because of how they feel, particularly women are like this.

Men are too, but it's different. but women think that things are good because it feels good for them. So, like, for example, when a man and a woman have sex, women are now, they want to feel closer. They've had all these dopamine hits and they want to feel closer. Men need space. So when a woman, if a man is like, I need space afterwards, women can take that and run with that in a triggered way of like,

oh my God, he doesn't want me, she's just using me for sex. Maybe in some cases. But in other cases, men literally have just expelled all this energy from their body and they need to like relax for a minute and recharge and rebalance their testosterone levels. They've just expelled it all probably in your direction. So they need to regain their energy. And so men and women are very different whereas women run their relationships based upon how they feel. Men it's slightly different, you know.

Men have different brainstuffs and that's something that I think a lot of women misunderstand. A lot of the time when I'm working with clients, a lot of the time what I'm doing is translating things. to a lot of people. So if I do a family mediation, for example, I'm translating what people are saying to each other. If I'm working with a guy, I'm translating what his wife is actually saying to him in her behaviour. If I'm working with women, I'm translating what her spouse is saying to her in his behaviour, because people don't understand. So what would you say then going on that whole thing? Why do you sometimes see, like, men that will, for example, I don't know if this is necessarily like a pattern but I'm going to, this is in my head like a relatable pattern that I'm thinking

about they'll cheat, they'll cheat, they'll cheat, and then suddenly they'll just not cheat on that one girl and they'll end up being married the next day and then that's it. Because of the other girls were placeholders and he didn't value them in the same way. But why is that? But what if those other girls were like? Because the woman that he committed to did something differently. She did something differently. She probably valued herself and had very high self-esteem. So, I mean, a really good example of that would be Spencer Matthews, right? Like, Spencer Matthews from Made in Chelsea.

It was like a really big play in the way. Then he got together with his current wife and... Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. The one of the thing Chelsea first came out. Yeah. Also, there's an element of growth as well, right? Like how we behave in our 20s isn't how we behave in our 30s or 40s or 50s.

How you show up in a relationship, but, you know, how I wasn't in a relationship when I was 25, there's lots of things that are similar and lots of things that are different. And with each relationship you learn. but you have different experiences in life that help you grow and evolve your behaviour. Also, we can make assumptions about people, maybe you just got better at covering his tracks with that wife. Who knows?

You really don't know what's going on behind closed doors between two people. I stand by that all the time. So, I mean, if someone's a notorious cheat and they grew up watching their parents cheat, chances are they're going to cheat or they're a pulse by it and they go the other way. It's never in the middle.

It's never like, I'm kind of cheat. maybe on the odd occasion, but it's either this is how we live and we don't really do monogamy, which is fine. There are lots of other relationship models that work very well for people like that. I just, my whole thing when it comes to cheating is I work with a lot of people that cheat and have been cheated on. And there's a lot of patterns to it that I notice and I've been studying Esther Perel for over a decade. And what I notice is that I never meet married people that, ever want to hurt their spouse. It's always, I find myself in this predicament that I cannot leave.

A bit like what you said earlier, like sometimes we know that we're doing stuff and we just can't stop it. We can't help it. And they can't leave the spouse. They can't leave the person they're having the affair with or maybe it's the nature of cheating itself for some people. And they don't want to hurt their spouse. But they're doing the very thing that would break their spouse's heart.

But they don't want to. Being human is complex. So I think one of the things that I really move with is non-judgment and just observation and asking a lot of questions. Because you can make a judgment of, I can recognize that somebody's a drug addict right now in their life and I might not think they're a good or a bad person. I just recognize they're struggling with addiction right now.

So I'm making a judgment of recognizing what you're reckoning with. It doesn't make me think that you're any more or less of a human being. I don't value you any more or less. But I recognise that a judgment call to protect myself is not to be around somebody that's in so much distress, they're going to be regularly making negative decisions for themselves and self-sabotaging because that's probably going to result in me having to pick up the pieces for you if you're close to me. So what would you do if somebody is feeling triggered but doesn't know what to do? Don't do anything.

If you are triggered and you have the desire to send a text message to scream, to shout, to react, just don't do it. Just don't do anything. Just pause. You know what this reminds me of this? I don't think this is a trigger, but like I go through stages of wanting to buy everything. Once I buy one, that's a coping mechanism. Yeah, I want to buy everything and then I'll, and then I just go, Yasmin, you don't need to buy,

you don't need to look, stop it. And then I don't look for like a day or two days and then I don't want to, I don't care anymore. It's a moment I start. Yeah, so distraction is you're doing that to distract yourself from something that is avoid in you. So what would mind be of buying? Well, it's the same thing, but it's just in a, it's in a different modality, right? So things manifest differently. Some people avoid their discomfort by gambling, by sex, by porn, by dating apps, like all sorts of things. But essentially the reason that humanity's in chaos, I mean, in particular right now, is because they're

avoiding themselves. Like, what, you know, like when we're talking about everything that's going on on on the planet right now, this is a collective manifestation. Everyone wants to point the finger and be like, well, that person should be, you know, put on death row because they did that and that country shouldn't be doing that. And it's awful what those people are doing over there. I agree. I empathize with all of those egoic statements completely. But what's your part in it? Because the person that watches porn that they would never want anybody else to know that they watch, you're contributing to it. The person that is avoiding themselves by shopping too much, you're contributing to it. Any part of you that you would be ashamed for other people to see,

that's your shadow, that's for you to work on and that is a contribution to the collective manifestation. So it's all well and good thinking like, oh, I'm not as bad as a sociopath or I'm not as bad as whatever. But we are all in this together. We are all contributing to it. So unless all your ducks in a row 100% at the time

and you'd be happy to have your entire life lived on camera and everybody to watch it, you still got some work to do on what you're contributing to the collective manifestation is what I would say. because everyone on this planet has shadow and everyone on this planet is uncomfortable with parts themselves and until you can be comfortable sitting in your filth,

you're not there yet. I'm not saying that you need to stop your shopping. That's not one saying. You want to shop your shop, girl. I'm like, please. What I'm talking about is the parts of us that we are not comfortable with. Yeah. So whether you're avoiding it, like that part of you that you're avoiding

through the shopping, like the shopping isn't the bad thing. The avoidance of what is there is the thing that is what we need to pay attention to. It's not even a bad thing. But it's like, for example, you know what you're saying, like some people contributing more negativity than others, 100%. But the reality is that your soul has multiple human experiences. Thousands. So there will have been lifetimes that you had where you were a sociopath,

where you were contributing negatively more than you are now. So the work is not to pass the buck. It's not about that person's contributing more or less or whatever. Your work is on you. So until you get to a place where there's no part of you that you want to avoid, that's your work. That's the work for all of us. The difference is that when you look at some sociopaths, they don't necessarily want to avoid those parts themselves. They quite like it.

That's the difference. Yeah. For example, you get really angry men in the world, right? Some really, really, you know, women like it too, but I think it's more acceptable in society for men to express their aggression, right, and their frustrations. And if you are somebody that gets enraged and then takes it out on the world, like you smash things up or you cause damage to other people, you need to work on that. That is not okay. And same like if you're a version of that in the female sense. If you are somebody that is causing damage to other people in any capacity,

whether that be verbal, mental, spiritual or otherwise, you need to be working on yourself. all of us are not 100% contributing positive things all the time. It's not possible. Even myself, when I'm triggered, you can snap at people, for sure. Like who you are on your best day when you're well fed, well slept, well taken care of, had a good time. It's easy to be a nice person. Who are you when you're triggered?

Like if we've got every single person on the planet enraged and you see how they behave when they're enraged, that's who you really are. So I would say then if you look at that, everybody's got some stuff to work on. Yeah, for sure. Right? Because who you are when you're saying, when all your needs are met,

it's easy to be a great person. It's easy. But who are you when you are struggling? Well, because being a human's really, really fucking hard. It's really fucking hard to be a human being. Like, you know, one of the reasons why we have this much intelligence and one of the reasons why we have this much consciousness, We're the most conscious being on the planet.

And the reason being is because we can experience more emotion than any other being on the planet and we can name them. So it's ironic that the thing that makes us special, that makes us more elite than anything else that we know of on this planet, is the very fact that we can feel in more detail and have the intellect to identify it. I mean, if you think about it, psychology is only 150, 10060 years old, it's technically in its infancy.

stages and yet we've learned so much about human behaviour in the human mind and how it works. And typically, if you look at a psychological discovery and implementation, the benefits of it don't reach society until three generations later. And that's because it takes so long for humans to wake up to it and start to implement it. Three generations. Right. So it's like everything that I have learned from my abusive and neglective past.

and I've identified where it comes from in my lineage. The reality is that you will see the effects of it in my children because I say that it stops now with me and but you'll really see it in my grandchildren. That's wild. And so this is what I mean about it's not about like whether we shop or don't shop. It's not about whether we kill or don't kill. Those things are important but that's like the egoic way of looking at it.

The reality is that everything we experience on the planet, it, we have our own story and then we have the collective story. And it's always that way and you are always contributing to the collective. And it's not about self-sacrifice either. It's not about I'm going to not feed myself and not have any money and give everything that I have a way to help other people less fortunate than myself. That's not favorable either. You know, like one of the best things you can do for the poor is not be one of them, you know? So it's not about like a black and white thing. It's about constantly getting into alignment with what feels good for you, because if you feel good, you'll be doing good. It's really that simple. And if you encourage everybody

around you to get into alignment with themselves and feel good in themselves, not do what you think is right. This is the thing, like when we seek advice from other people, quite often we're getting advice from people and they're giving you their projections. They're telling you what they would do based upon how they think they would feel in that experience. Very rarely are people giving you advice from a place of actual education and what would suit you. It's about what would suit them. So this is the thing when other people give you advice, quite often they're giving you their projection, right? So they're giving you advice from the point of view of how they would feel in that situation. So, you know, it's like if, if let's say somebody's in a relationship where they've

just found out their spouse has been unfaithful and the other person that they're telling is like a hard boundary, absolutely never would I stay in a relationship like that, that might be good advice, it might not be, but they're likely, most people are likely to be giving. you advice on what they think you should do based upon their moral compass, their boundaries, their needs, their standards.