This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - 204 / How To Let Go Of Your Ex with Dr. Cortney Warren

Episode Date: April 3, 2024

This topic is about 10-20 years too late for me, but this is the episode I wish I could have heard when I needed it most. And I hope it will find some of you at just the right time, or at the very least will be an episode you can forward to someone you love. Because letting go is an important lesson for all of us, I’ve invited Dr. Cortney Warren to be our guest. She’s an award-winning Board-Certified Clinical Psychologist, author, and Adjunct Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health at UNLV. She is an expert on self-deception, romantic relationships and love addiction. Known for her ability to distill complex psychological concepts into easily applicable advice, Dr. Cortney’s latest book, Letting Go of Your Ex: CBT Skills to Heal the Pain of a Breakup and Overcome Love Addiction explores breakups and how to heal from them.  Let’s not waste any more time pining away and holding on to relationships and people that aren’t meant for us.  If the choice is letting go of them, or letting go of yourself… if it costs you them or it costs you you – choose you over everything. And everyone. Every single time. Connect with Cortney: Website: https://drcortney.com/ Book: https://drcortney.com/published-books-publications/  IG: https://www.instagram.com/drcortneywarren/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@drcortneywarren X: https://twitter.com/DrCortneyWarren LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drcortney/  FB: https://www.facebook.com/CortneySWarren  TEDx Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpEeSa6zBTE Like what you heard? Please rate and review  Thanks to our This Is Woman’s Work Sponsor: Bamboo fabric that is perfectly soft, temperature regulating, machine washable and committed to ethical production, Cozy Earth checks all the boxes, and is now on every bed in my house. Get your sheets (and more) by visiting cozyearth.com and use my code NICOLEKALIL to get 40% off!

As you know, I have a tendency to become excited, possibly obsessed, when I find something that I love. From cheese to hotels, women that I admire to my favorite topic of confidence, I kind of can't shut up about it. And one of those things I also love is sleep. My favorite place in the whole world is my bed. So when I tell you that I found the best sheets ever, you need to know that I've tested an abundant amount. I've spent top dollar. I've tested thread counts and various materials, and my search has ended with Cozy Earth. Bamboo fabric that's perfectly soft, temperature regulating, machine washable, and committed to ethical production. Cozy Earth checks all the boxes and is now on every bed in my house. And if you use my promo code, Nicole Khalil, you can get 40% off. That's right. 40% off when you

use the code NicoleKhalil at CozyEarth.com. Enjoy a long, deep sleep. Be great in bed because as we've been told, that is woman's work. I am Nicole Kalil, your host of the This Is Woman's Work podcast. And as your host, I get to learn and grow, think and rethink, uncover and discover, just like I hope you do when you listen in to each episode. I love that we cover many different topics with many exceptional guests, and I'm always amazed at how often a topic or a message seems to come at just the right time. But our topic today is about 10 to 20 years too late for me, so this is the episode I wish I would have heard when I needed it most.

And I hope that it will find some of you at just the right time or will give you an opportunity to give yourself a little grace or forgive your younger self or give you a tool that you can use in some area of your life. Or at the very least will be an episode that you can forward to someone you love. Our topic today is letting go of your ex. And when I tell you that this is a skill that I did not have in my younger years, that is the understatement of the century.

In fact, I'd say that my unwillingness or inability to let go of my exes in my 20s and early 30s is probably the top contributor to me losing my confidence in that stage of my life. I've done the not giving up on my first love for many, many years after we'd broken up, hoping one day he'd realize that we were in fact meant to be. I've had a hard time moving past a relationship

once it was over, and the ironic part is I didn't actually want to be in the relationship when I was in it. I've even held on to pseudo relationships that had never actually officially started. Friend, I'm telling you, I was terrible at letting go of my exes, like painfully, embarrassingly, and shamefully bad at it. And now with the benefit of hindsight, the worst part of all of it was how not letting go changed how I saw myself. My greatest heartbreak wasn't losing them. It was losing me in the process of holding on to them. I broke my own heart and my spirit because I didn't know that I didn't need them to choose me. I needed to choose myself. I let those relationships and

how those men saw me or didn't see me dictate how I saw myself. I let them become the deciders of my value, of my worth. And so I held on hoping they'd eventually validate me. And in the process, it wasn't them that I lost, because trust me, none of them were great losses to begin with. But the loss of pride, of trust, of personal power, the loss of my own identity, the loss of myself, that hurt so deeply, I wasn't totally sure I'd ever recover. I had to heal the toxic relationship I'd built with myself in order to find and build healthy relationships in the future. I had to finally realize that staying with them was the equivalent of abandoning me.

I had to learn to let go. I had to learn to choose me. And because that is the most important lesson for all of us, I've invited Dr. Courtney Warren to the show. She's an award-winning board-certified clinical psychologist, author, and adjunct clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health at UNLV. She is an expert on self-deception, romantic relationships, and love addiction, among others. Known for her ability to distill complex psychological concepts

into easily applicable advice, Dr. Courtney's latest book, Letting Go of Your Ex, CBT Skills to Heal the Pain of a Breakup and Overcome Love Addiction, explores breakups and how to heal the pain of a breakup and overcome love addiction, explores breakups and how to heal from them. So let's dive in so we don't waste any more time pining away or holding onto relationships or people that aren't meant for us. Dr. Courtney, thank you for being on our show. And I'm going to kick off with a basic but I think important question. Have you ever met anyone who hasn't experienced a breakup

that has been hard to get over? This is a pretty common experience, yes? Absolutely common. And I would say probably I have never met an adult who has not had their heart broken. The reality is that almost 100% of us are going to have our hearts crushed, utterly crushed at some point in our lives. We are also almost 100% likely to crush someone else's heart. And so this is actually a very natural human phenomenon. Okay. I wanted to create that baseline because it can't just be me, right?

Oh my gosh, it's not you. It is not. I have certainly been there and probably everyone listening on this Women's Work podcast can relate to having this romantic love connection with someone in a serious relationship, with someone you saw down the street, with whomever where you were fixated and you were obsessive and you were thinking about them. And then you were fixated and you were obsessive and you were thinking about them. And then you were thinking, what is going on with me? Why do I care? Why am I losing myself? As you beautifully articulated in your introduction. So yes. Okay. So because

this is a common experience, and I obviously went through this many, many times, but also many years back, I'd love to just start by asking what's different and the same today versus many years ago? So I think about social media and easy access to information. I feel like that would make things harder to get over somebody today than when I had to do it 10, 15, 20 years ago. Things were just different. The accessibility of information about people and the lack of privacy that the internet and social media has created really makes moving on after a bad breakup more difficult for most people because one of the first things I would recommend to anyone who's going through a rough

divorce or lost the first person they've ever fallen in love with is to cut off contact, to limit as much exposure as you have to this person because what happens is this person we fall madly in love with becomes a stimulus. And they essentially become a stimulus that makes us feel really good because when you fall in love, it activates all these euphoric areas of your brain and neurotransmitters and dopamine that make you feel magically happy, excited, obsessive, cuddly, connected. And so if you have that experience with someone and then you break up, essentially you're going through withdrawal. You're having a moment where all of this good feelings that you've associated with one particular person are ripped away from your life.

And if you keep going back, you're going to keep getting those little reinforced moments of dopamine and of your psychological, emotional neediness that are going to keep getting those little reinforced moments of dopamine and of your psychological emotional neediness that are going to make it very hard for you to move on. And given that cutting off contact is really an important part of the moving on, letting go process for most humans, the accessibility that we have to information nowadays is very different than it probably was when you were in your teens or when I was in my teens. We didn't even have email yet. And so that makes it exponentially harder to take space to not get the reinforcement

from them and figure out who you are and what you need in order to heal. I mean, everything you said, I can completely relate to. It is like a withdrawal and it is those dopamine hits. And what was so strange is how often I would trade one good feeling or one good moment for many awful ones. I can completely understand the cutoff as much contact as possible. Now, I'm hearing my old voice in my head that says, but what if we're meant to be? I'm putting in air quotes like, shouldn't I be around so he realizes what he's missing and losing? I find a lot of women want to stay in the picture because they're holding on to some belief or hope of a future reconciliation.

I don't know. Do you have any data or information or research about that? Self-deception or our inability to acknowledge reality as it objectively exists based on data is a part of human nature. It's something that all of us do. We lie to ourselves in very characteristic ways. We deny that the relationship is over or we bargain with ourselves and say, well, if I hang around a little bit more, then they'll come back. Then they'll realize that this was meant to be, quote unquote. We internalize cultural norms, like the idea that two people come together and become one, or that you have to have another romantic partner in your life in order to be a valued,

whole, healed human. All of these are highly suspect and flawed conclusions, actually. And so when you think of your old self who's saying, well, I have to stay here so that they realize that they should really come back to me because I'm really this amazing human. And if I vacate the premises and they don't see me, they're going to forget about me. And then I'm actually going to be lost. I am actually not going to have an identity anymore. What I would say to you is this, all of those deceptive thoughts are keeping you attached to something that no longer exists in the way that you want it to.

And so a much healthier framework for all of us to work from is to say, today we are broken up. I actually don't know if we're ever going to be back together or if they even want to be with me or if I'm even going to want to be with them. And so instead of investing my energy outward, I am going to look in the mirror and start to challenge the conclusions that I am making about myself, my value, my identity, and emerge as a stronger, healthier individual who can say, I might have really that this would work out. But what I know today is that my relationship with myself and building myself into a grounded, strong, authentic human is my number one priority. I am worth it. And so that's what I'm choosing to do. Okay.

I feel like people should take that and hit rewind and just listen over and over and over again. That's the voice I needed in my head in all of those moments. Okay. So what you just said, as well as the tip of cutting off contact are excellent tips. Any others? Because let's face it, this sucks, right? It's painful.

It's awful. You feel like you just want to die in moments, right? And so what else can we be doing, should we be doing to help us let go and move forward? going through one of those brutal breakups or even has children or friends or family members and you're seeing it, is to say falling in love is a biologically driven evolutionary process. It is our body's way of getting us in a sea of options of people to date to say, ooh, that's one. That's one person. I like them. I'm thinking about them. I want to touch

them. I want to be around them. I want to have sex with them. And in this way, your body is actually driving you to become hyper-focused on one individual lover. That is the experience of falling in love. For any of you who've ever had it, it's euphoric. It's magical. You feel high. You feel obsessed. It's this kind of crazy making process. And when it ends, it can throw you into this withdrawal set of loss, confusion, identity shift, such that you forget who you are as an individual. One of the first things people will say to me when they come in for therapy is, I don't even know who I am anymore. I don't even know how I got here. Before we started dating, I was this strong person who was pretty confident,

and I had a career, and I have a brain, and I have a pretty confident and I had a career and I have a brain and I have a family and I have friends and I feel completely lost. In fact, maybe I don't even like this person. Like I know we should break up. I want a divorce. Ration So know this. You are experiencing a very human phenomenon and there is nothing wrong with you and you are not going crazy and you are not broken beyond repair. Number one, you are not broken. You can get through this. And there are so many things you can learn to do to help yourself. But first, let's normalize this. Any teenager who first falls in love and then breaks up will be probably a puddle sobbing on the floor at some point in your life. And they will not think that there is any reason to continue living and they have completely lost the will because their life is over.

Normal, not helpful. So the second thing I would say is once you recognize that you actually are struggling, that you're having a whole bunch of symptoms that are actually really normal, albeit incredibly miserable to go through. Now pause. We need to start understanding the thinking patterns that you have in your own mind about yourself, about your ex, and about romantic love. Because in those deceptive belief and thought patterns, we will uncover the lies that you're actually telling yourself that are keeping you emotionally stuck on your ex. And that's really where I would encourage people to start learning some cognitive and behavioral techniques that they really can practice to help themselves not only understand their symptoms and understand how they're contributing to their symptoms, but emerge with a stronger sense of who they are

and what they care about and what their fundamental values are so that they will be more particular in who they date over time. As you're talking, the thought keeps going through my head as it's like, take all the time and energy we're spending fighting for this relationship that no longer is and redirect it inward, fight for the relationship with ourself, reestablish, rebuild. Because you're right. I mean, even before you said it, when you said the most common thing I hear, it's exactly what I thought is I don't know who I am anymore.

It's like we redefine ourselves as part of this relationship or this couple and reconnecting with who we are individually is the next biggest priority. Yes? Absolutely. Okay. Because your relationship with yourself is fundamentally the most important relationship in your life. Absolutely. Period. Period. And so the reality is that whether you are with your ex, single or married, in love or not in love, attractive to someone else or not attractive, has absolutely zero influence on your value as a human being. Zero influence on your value as a human being. Zero influence on your value as a human being. And that is something that people who are going through really tough divorces and breakups very commonly forget. Whether your ex loves you, wants you, thinks you're hot, is cheating on you with somebody younger, is already moved on in a new relationship matters zero to who you are. And it's one of the most

important things that I will tell people who enter into my office is we need to reestablish your self-esteem as a human being. And I am going to be the first one here to remind you that you define your value, not the outside world. You define your value. And that is something that people lose sight of when they're going through a bad breakup. Again, words I would have absolutely needed to hear and are still beneficial to hear today. So one of the tactics I often use when I'm unsure is what would I want for somebody I love if they were in this situation? I sort of remove myself from it. So right now I do it a lot with my daughter. What would I want JJ to do if she

were faced with the same situation or needed to make this decision. I didn't have that pre my husband because I didn't have a daughter, but I could have done it with my best friend or my sister. Any thoughts on thinking about it from the lens of someone you love? It's a wonderful tactic. Psychologists use it often, particularly when people are so mired in their own symptoms that they're convinced they're right. They're convinced that the emotions and thoughts that they're having in the present moment accurately reflect a much larger life reality that we know is not accurate. And so I agree that getting a person to say, would you talk to your best friend like this? Would you talk to your daughter like this?

What would you say if you heard them regurgitating your experience? Would you say, oh, you're right. Your life is over. They're definitely too good for you. Of course not. So that is a really good tactic. I also often focus on trying to get symptom reduction in the present moment. So when people come into therapy or probably when they come to you for coaching, usually there's some kind of distress that they're targeting, some kind of acute situation that they're like, this sucks. I feel terrible. I need some skills to get through this.

And as you tackle some of the symptoms in the moment, we get to help them enlarge their life picture such that we can look at this from a year's perspective instead of a moment-to-moment perspective. That we want to remind people, you know, you had a life before your ex. You had a life actually before dating. And you have a life without them now and you will have a life without them in the future. They actually aren't the entirety of your life. And oftentimes when people fall in love and then break up, it feels like the entirety of their life is that short period of time in the grand scheme of things. And so enlarging the view to remind them that actually their life is a much larger journey

that is not anywhere close to being over, hopefully. And allow that perspective to sink in, that there is a life without this person. They're just a person. They're not a god. They're not the ideal. They certainly aren't the perfect human, and they weren't the perfect human for you. And I can safely say that to you because you are currently broken up. So something about your relationship wasn't working for them or for you

or for both of you. And remembering that you have a much larger life to live with other people who you may have kind of left by the wayside in ways that hurt you, perhaps have neglected some of your friendships, some of your family relationships, your relationship with yourself that now desperately needs some TLC and some attention. To remind yourself that your life picture is much bigger than this one individual. And it always will be. It's completely aligned with how I think of coaching. Big picture, small tactics. That's what I always think is like, let's think about the big picture here and then break it down to small tactics or action steps that you can get into action about immediately. So big picture, this person isn't the perfect person for you based on evidence. Small tactics, delete their phone number from your phone.

Unfriend them on social media, right? Okay, let's talk a little bit about letting go of an ex who still has to stay in the picture. Typically, I think of people where you have children together, or maybe you started a business together, or you have shared friends or family you're going to stay in touch with. What are some tips there? It really is a more difficult journey in many ways. And probably your listeners are laughing right now because when you get married or are in a relationship and have children, you are now going to have this human in your life in some way for probably the rest of your life. And that can be a very angry experience. That can be a

depressing experience if you have decided that you want to move on or that they wanted to move on. What I would say is your first step in this journey is to set very clear boundaries. Boundaries are relationship expectations. They articulate who you are, what you are going to do in relationship to your ex, and what you are not going to do in relationship to your ex. I think that in mainstream language and culture, people think, mistakenly think, that boundaries are about telling your ex what they can and can't do. That you have absolutely no control over.

So think of boundaries as you saying, this is who I am. This is what I'm willing to talk to you about. This is what I'm not willing to talk to you about. And this is how I'm going to respond if you do something that violates my boundary. And I would recommend very specifically if you're early in a divorce or early in a breakup and you have children together to communicate in a written email way. And I know that may sound very strange, but oftentimes when people are emotionally labile, when we're angry, when we're snarky, when it's just really tense and our emotion flares, we don't think very clearly.

And it's really easy to get stuck and hooked in these very difficult dynamics over the phone or in person. And so in line with the, I need some space to recreate my life without you, I find it very helpful for people to send emails. I would start by saying, we're going through a bad breakup. This is really hard for me, speaking from your experience. What I want to do is communicate with you about the necessary aspects of our interactions together. Who's going to pick up the kids? Who has a date where we need to pay for something or show up to a sporting event or navigate a holiday? These are things that we actually need to talk about together. What I'm not willing to talk about is who you're dating,

why we should get back together, how we feel about each other, because I'm not in a position to handle that very well right now. So if in the future you call me and want to talk about something that involves our relationship dynamic, I want you to know right now that I'm going to hang up the phone or I'm going to say, as I said to you, this is a boundary that I'm not willing to break. And so given that you're bringing this up, I'm going to have to get off the phone. When you're ready to talk about the details of our schedule or anything that's going on with the kids and their needs, I will be available. And so part of the reason boundaries are so important if you're still in this relationship

with your ex is that they keep you safe. You set boundaries to keep your emotional and physical self feeling safe. And until you are able to do that, it can feel like your ex has too much power. They can trigger you. They can make you upset. They can show up in areas of your life that you don't want them to be in anymore because you're not romantic partners. And so in a very concrete way, I would recommend to anyone out there to literally try to write these down and then send them in an email and then hold yourself accountable. You're going to mess up. You're not going to be perfect. There are going to be times where they are going to trigger you or you're going to say something you regret or you're going to make some snarky comment about the new person they're dating or whatever it is. Pause. Be gentle with yourself. Remind yourself that you're setting boundaries to keep yourself safe and to establish a workable,

helpful connection with an ex who, if you didn't have children or didn't work together or didn't have to interact, you might choose to not have on your life anymore, but that is not an option. So you're doing the best you can with the situation that you're in. I would imagine there are some people who are furiously typing while you were talking verbatim to get an email. I mean, that was the languaging, the phrasing, the tone, I think all incredible. And to your point, the communication and the ownership of what we can control, which is our boundaries, what's okay for us, who we are, what's not okay for us, that type of thing. Okay. My last question, I feel like in my past and with some people I know, sometimes there's the fear of having to let go of an ex

that prevents you from even making them an ex. Any tips for anybody who is maybe using the fear of having to get over somebody to keep them in a relationship that isn't serving them. This is probably entering into the harder aspects of getting over an ex. And it's actually kind of in the midsection of my book, which is this. You picked your ex probably for some reasons that you couldn't see at the time. And it probably has something to do with what you learned in early childhood from your parents, from your culture, from your peers about who you are, your value as a human being and what you can expect out of romantic relationships. I say that because once you recognize some of your own patterns that might be really unhealthy for you, like

I'm hanging on to this person because of fear, that is really not a good reason to hang on to a person. In fact, the only reason I really want you to hold on to a romantic partner is because you rationally believe that they're a really good partner for you and you emotionally care about them enough that you're willing to get through the tough times together. When your motivation for staying with someone is coming from insecurity, fear, anxiety, sadness, that is not a good reason to stay. And I would encourage you to start to dive deeper into how you got here in the first place. Where are your insecurities in your relationships?

What did you learn about romantic love as a child? Was it safe? Do you come from a divorced household where your parents absolutely hated each other or were physically or emotionally aggressive? Did you learn culturally that your role as a woman is to be beautiful and to be the person standing by a man's side. And if you have the right man and you look the right way, then your life will somehow fall into place and everything will be wonderful and easy. Whatever you learned as a child that led you to feel less than, insecure, unsafe, will emerge in your romantic relationships through adolescence and as an adult. And so the next phase of our journey in letting go of an ex that really feels hard to let go of is to examine those early learnings and emerge from them by challenging

them in a way that is empowering and healing for you. What I feel so much as you're talking is this is really ultimately an exercise in self-discovery and self-value and confidence and appreciation and self-love. So if you're listening, whether or not you need to let go of your ex, I would encourage you to get your hands on Letting Go of Your Ex, the book available on Amazon. Read it, pass it to your friends. I know we all know somebody who could benefit. You can also find Dr. Courtney at her website, drcourtney.com. We'll put that and all the other ways you can find and follow her in show notes. Thank you so much for this incredible conversation that I so wish I could have heard a decade ago. Absolutely. My pleasure, Nicole. I thoroughly enjoyed talking with you. And I truly hope that everyone listening

knows that it is a very natural human experience to love and lose a romantic partner. And the more we can support each other and ourselves in recognizing that our romantic lives do not define us as human beings, pass that message along to any teens you know in your life because I guarantee you that first heartbreak for young girls, boys as well, but particularly young girls given our gender role in mainstream Western cultures is rough. And building a sense of self-esteem through the course of experimenting in dating, I strongly encourage people to think of dating as a big experiment for you to learn about yourself. Oh, I love that. Is really the journey. I love that. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And I'm going to close out by saying,

I'm sure you've heard this before, but it is worth repeating. You can't change or fix or heal anyone other than yourself, no matter how much you care or love or want to. And walking away from people and situations that no longer serve you is an act of courage. It's a confidence builder and the ultimate act of love. Self-love, sure. But is there a love that's more important? I think not. Let go of what belongs in the past to make room, to make space for what's possible in the future. What I wish I could go back and tell my younger self is that staying or letting go will both hurt. There will be pain either way.

But in only one of those options could I create the opportunity to finally heal. If the choice is letting go of them or letting go of yourself, if it costs you them or it costs you you, choose you over everything and everyone, every fucking time. Let go of your ex. Stay with yourself because that is woman's work.