When a relationship ends

Don’t let a failed relationship define you!

It’s difficult to let go of the person you love but it’s healthy to let go of something that is irreparable. Don’t hold onto the past. Don’t obsess over the failed relationship. Reflect and ponder and learn from it but don’t dwell.

Ask yourself if it was really worth keeping?

Letting go helps you to heal from the pain of the break up and helps you to start to focus on yourself and your needs.

“No one ever gets tired of loving. They just get tired of waiting, assuming, hearing lies, saying sorry and hurting.”

Spring time and new beginnings. You have to let go to move forward.

‘Dreaming Tree’ by Christian Schloe

Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward.” – C. S. Lewis..

 

I’ve been meditating about new beginnings as we start the season of Spring. Spring is a fitting time to start afresh, start an emotional, mental and spiritual “spring clean” for yourself. Ask yourself these questions…

What do you need to let go of so that you can truly move forward?

What’s holding you back?

What’s keeping you stagnant and in the same holding pattern?

Are you enacting the same destructive patterns in your relationships?

Spring is a good time to start becoming aware of these patterns and start shifting them. Transpersonal art therapy works on a deep level to shift unconscious blocks that may have started in childhood. I use psychoanalysis combined with hypnosis like techniques and art therapy to help you uncover deep blockages and patterns. Becoming aware of these unconscious blocks can be how some of my clients describe, “a light bulb switching on” so they are more able to make conscious decisions in their life and move forward in a more positive and healed way..

You can’t change what has happened in your life and relationships, but you can create a new beginning, one choice at a time. Sometimes it’s not a true ending, it’s the same thing beginning in a new way.

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Spring is  a fitting time to let go of negative and toxic relationships in your life and seek out healthy and positive connections in a “spring cleaning” of your emotional life.  It doesn’t necessarily mean you have to tell these types of people to, “get stuffed” but you can love them from a distance and lengthen the cord between you. Despite their good points, some people just dump their negativity on us and if you don’t see things ever changing releasing that person from your inner circle can be beneficial. Sometimes we continually attract similar types of people into our lives; friends or lovers that might be re-enacting a similar toxic power balance we may have learnt from a young age was ‘normal.’

I encourage you to take the first step and come and see me. It can take a lot of courage seeking help but I am open minded, non-judgemental and you will find me easy to talk to. Click on the link and send me an email. I’d love to hear from you.

https://creativesexpression.com/book-a-session/

 

 

On Heartbreak and Healing..

I just want to post this beautiful writing about healing. Sometimes the pain of a break up with a partner or lover can make us vintage-woman-free-clipart-sad-blues-blogbecome bitter and hard. We can close up and put our defenses up and this can affect relationships into the future. We can pull away and retreat from the world or throw ourselves back into it with so much gusto we can try and “fuck the pain away.”  The pain can be so overwhelming that we can self medicate ourselves with drugs and alcohol. Sometimes we have put so much pressure on ourselves to find “the one” that we feel like we can’t live without this person. Life feels strange and alien to us without them.

Depression and anxiety can result from a break up. It can be a huge challenge to cope with life after a break up. Imagine trying to hit a tennis ball with your non dominant hand and how strange that can feel. However, we can adjust.  I can help you adjust your irrational thoughts after a break up (“I will never find anyone else and walk the earth alone“) and I can help you get over someone that you might be pining away for.  Our mind is powerful and can trick us. We believe what we tell ourselves over and over again, but with my help you can start telling yourself the right things.

Research into victims of domestic violence who were still in love with their violent partners showed that they all thought about their ex in a very particular way. They glossed over the negatives and continually kept focussing on the positives of the relationship. Like a movie in our head, we tell ourselves the stories that we want to hear. I can help you change those stories. We can re-program your thinking. Imagination, memory, the unconscious and stories are powerful things to harness to move you in the right direction and heal your broken heart. 

I loved the metaphor of the tree in the writing below. It helps us to know that in dark times like this we are changing and transforming.  I do a lot of art therapy and meditation sessions with clients where we visualise a tree or a plant and how parts of their life are unfolding.

“On Healing…

callous
the strangest thing about a heartbreak is the emptiness that takes temporary residence in your body: gut, spine, taste, touch, smell, even your thoughts fall into an empty or bland blank. but what will fill them? what will slowly seep into that time and the attempt to forget where and how someone made their way into your almost everything day by day? what kind of ruin will take place? what kind of mangled growth will follow suit? will you have to wade through a post-apocalyptic jungle? will you start singing lullabies in your mother’s tongue? will you have to scrape your insides with fingers and mouths and dig and dig and dig? what exactly will you find there: bones? a dead body? a silent whisper? rot? and who and what will eventually take it’s place? will they be just as temporary, just as fleeting, yet just as stubborn and solid? will they ever get as deep and dark as that person did? will you trust them to enter into you like that, to make love and way? will opening your legs be the same as opening your heart? or does it all become shallow breath from then onwards? does it all become a small step and a terrible, cavity laden void they will never fill? can anyone ever swim there? will they know how to? will the doves come or will all that be left crows coming to feast on that which never made it out alive?

sometimes our bodies are like trees. we focus so much on what blossming and blooming looks like, we forget the most important parts of us: the root. today i begged my body back into the ground. there are always two ways to grow.

( from inbetweenlove.tumblr.com)”

  The seed cannot sprout upwards without simultaneously sending roots into the ground,” says an Egyptian proverb.

“Keep that thought in mind as you head into your next phase of growth. What part of you needs to deepen as you rise up? What growth needs to unfold in the hidden places as you gravitate toward the light? How can you go about balancing and stabilizing your ascension with a downward penetration?”  Rob Brezsny

Before you rush off into your next relationship (perhaps too fast to try to not deal with the pain-rebound is another word for this), let’s get you healed and happy on your own  first so that you will attract the right person into your life.  Too often people rush into new relationships after break ups because they don’t want to deal with the pain or examine what went wrong. It can be very beneficial spending some time on your own, sorting yourself out, learning from the lessons of the past and working out what it is you are looking for in a future partner.   Let’s work on getting you empowered and then you can invite the right person into your life from a grounded and healed place.  Starting a new relationship for all the wrong reasons can become very messy.