Healing the Hurt

Dealing with the pain of rejection and failure can be hard.

Especially in situations were you had a large amount of emotional investment (ie. Relationships) and things fell apart.

I remember sitting in my car, crying for hours, when my first girlfriend told me “It’s not going to work…”

I was devastated. This was the woman I was sure I was going to have kids with and that we were going to grow old together.

It turned out I was very wrong.

But one thing I’ve learned is that it’s possible to heal that hurt and grow powerfully through the experience, if you’re willing to take a step back from the situation and try and understand what really went wrong.

The first step in that is working out what really caused the pain.

In the last article ‘Can’t vs. Don’t’, I gave you a three step exercise for discovering what’s really preventing you from taking action and creating the kind of life you’ve always dreamed of.

You can apply this exercise to many different areas of your life – including using it to discover who was really responsible for the pain you experience.

Try it out now: Think back to a situation where you experienced significant emotional pain and answer the three questions below.

 

1. Write a list of everything that the woman contributed to the situation.

This list might include:

– Responding negatively to your advances
– Lying to you
– Using you
– Being rude to you
– Getting you to buy her things
– Playing with your emotions
– Physically abusing you
– Denying you sex
– Breaking promises
– Cheating on you

 

2. Write a list of everything that you contributed to the situation.

This list might include:

– Approaching her when she’s not in the mood to meet new people
– Being needy
– Being emotionally dependent
– Not leaving when you knew things were going bad
– Not standing up for yourself
– Allowing her to push you around
– Not voicing your concerns over the direction of the relationship when the trouble first began
– Not seeking help
– Not building and maintaining a stronger support network

 

3. And now for the kicker: If you didn’t contribute the things you contributed, would her contributions have caused you this much pain?

If you didn’t approach her when she clearly wasn’t interested in meeting new people, would she have responded in the way she did?

If you weren’t emotionally dependent on her to feel happy, strong, and like a Man, would it have mattered how she treated you?

If you’d sat down and talked with her when things started to turn bad and addressed the issues rather than letting them go, would she have had a chance to use you?

If you were the kind of Man who made her feel excited, alive, passionate, challenged, beautiful, loved, and appreciated, do you think she would have cheated on you?

If you’d had the balls to stand up for yourself rather than letting her walk all over you, would it have mattered what she asked you to do for her?

If you’d left her when you realised that things weren’t the way you wanted them to be, would it have mattered how she acted?

 

This is going to be hard for you to hear and might cause you even more pain, but you need to hear it:

She didn’t cause you pain, you caused you pain.

Yes, she acted in a specific way and that hurt, but she only had the chance act that way and that it only caused you the amount of pain it did because you allowed her to.

She didn’t cause you pain, you caused you pain.

Yes, she wasn’t the perfect woman but that only resulted in pain because of the kind of Man you were being.

She didn’t cause you pain, you caused you pain.

This might seem like a horrible lesson to have to learn but it’s actually the single most empowering and powerful lesson you can ever learn.

Ever.

Anywhere.

At any time.

If you think women / work colleagues / family / friends cause you pain, then all you can ever hope to do is manage the pain they cause you.

You have to be aware of the possibilities for pain, come up with solutions, and then try to manage the amount of pain you experience when it happens.

If you recognise that you’re actually the cause of emotional pain and that it doesn’t happen to you, you create it through the way you live your life…

…then the power is in your hands to change the way you live your life so that it doesn’t happen any more.

You can learn to become internally fulfilled so that you don’t have to rely on women’s responses to feel good any more.

You can learn to confront challenging situations before they become real issues.

You can learn to walk away from problems as soon as they appear irreconcilable.

You can build a strong and robust support network so you’re not dependent on one person.

You can learn to recognise when someone isn’t in a mood to talk to new people.

You can become powerful, independent, directed, purposeful, and free and people will loose their ability to cause the kind of emotional pain you’ve been dealing with.

But only once you recognise the real cause of your pain – you.

So, if you’re still holding on to pain from your past, think back through those situations and work through this exercise with every one of them.

Go through and identify exactly how you were responsible for the pain you experienced and what you need to change about your life so this doesn’t happen again.

And take the first step in becoming the strong, powerful, confident Man you were born to be.

 

6 thoughts on “Healing the Hurt”

  1. Brillant!

    But…

    There are so many puzzles and with each new article you show us how they can be put together in different dimensions.

    With time, I am wondering if it is easier or harder for me to connect all this together.

    Reply
    • Glad to hear you enjoyed it mate. It’s a simple concept but it’s the foundation that you need if you’re going to make serious change.

      And don’t stress about getting confused. It happens to everyone when they start to explore different ways of looking at the world. Endgame does a really solid job of joining all these pieces together. Have you had a chance to read through it yet?

      Reply
  2. Hey mate this is an awesome article. I’ve actually been contemplating the last few days a relationship with a girl a couple of years ago that ended badly – and then I find your article,.

    It struck me in my thinking that for all the things she did, if I had not behaved as I did, her behavior would have been mostly a non-issue. There is so much to us guys creating our own pain. With this line of thinking about this past GF, it frees me up to remember the good stuff about her, while somewhat painlessly taking responsibility for myselfand committing to living on the doing and creating pathways. .

    -Greg

    Reply
    • Awesome to hear mate. It’s such a simple concept but so incredibly powerful.

      It’s been great to see your journey so far and I’m excited to see what you can achieve going forward.

      Reply
  3. Hey Leigh,
    This is an absolute gem of an article. I have slowly been coming round to accepting responsibility for the break up. But having you frame it as you have has shifted my blame grantee from a pussy insecure guilt to a more man up cause and effect of my own insecurities. it has allowed me to take the break up, own it.and move on. The proverbial nail.
    Cheers

    Reply

Leave a Comment