Mouring the Dream

It’s not magic, it’s Psychology with Terri Cole

Your questions - answered.

This week, we begin a video series with renowned Psychologist and Relationship Expert,Terri Cole. We asked her 7 of your most pressing dating and relationship questions. We will share Terri’s insight-FULL answers over the next few weeks. Terri’s answers are full of wisdom and nuggets of gold. We hope you walk away with a few gems to create positive change in your life.

Here we go.

Question:

Post-divorce, one of the most difficult things in dating has been envisioning a successful marriage with someone else. How do I date and begin to view the relationship as long term, rather than as a momentary experience from fear that it won’t work out?

Terri’s Answer:

The most important thing to do after a break-up is give yourself time and space to process the breakup - any relationship, long or short term, because it’s all about the way we feel about it. It doesn’t have to be a 30-year marriage to be devastating when it ends. I call this, mourning the dream. Mourning the dream – what does that mean? It basically means we need to mourn the dream of what we hoped the relationship would become; the dream we had for what would happen in the relationship. So much of the time we are not necessarily mourning exactly what happened or the relationship we experienced. It’s so much about…we had these high hopes. We want so desperately to have this long lasting, vibrant, durable, exciting love. A lot of times that’s not what we’re mourning, right, because that isn’t what we had.

We need to mourn the dream of what we hoped the relationship would become.

There are things that you can do to ensure you do not have the same exact experience that you just had. Which is to learn. So, in every crap stew, I like to say, there is a gem of wisdom for you - but you have to be willing to roll up your sleeves, dig in and get your hands dirty to find that gem. It’s not about, “I want to figure out what I did wrong.” No. It is, “I want to understand what happened in that relationship. What was my 50% of that relationship?” which also means now – we can’t be all victim-y about it. You can’t be like, “Well, my partner cheated on me so it’s all him (or her) and zero me!” No. It’s always 50% you and 50% the other person.

Terri’s Tools:

There is a process I am going to walk you through right now.

You are going to write down:

What you will really miss about the person or the relationship

What was unique about it

What was amazing about it

There’s a tendency to be super black and white. “It’s over now and he’s a jerk.” or “She’s a jerk.” That’s it, they’re just @$%holes! They’re not, actually. And you would not have been with them or spent time with them (if they were).

So, mourning means you actually write down, “Hey, I’m going to miss this, this and this. These things were great. Those were fun times.”

The second list is: What are you super psyched you’re never doing again? What is the baggage that you get to get away from because this relationship has ended? And clearly you hit some tipping point in this relationship (or somebody did) that made you pivot towards end. So, why this is what we do – why we make a list of what we’ll miss and the list of what we will not miss is because there is this tendency in our mind to want to just be very one dimensional/two dimensional, like just, “They’re bad. That’s what happened.” And it’s not. Or, “I’m bad.” Maybe you cheated and then you’re like, “I ruined it all…The one that got away.” No, no. You’re going to continue doing this exact thing if you don’t give yourself the space to understand why it went down the way that it did.

If in the relationship you did not get a chance to say what you wanted to say - I’m going to ask you to write a letter. You don’t have to send it. You can choose to send it or not, but you’re going to write a letter where you get to be fully self-expressed. It would be great if a compassionate other could witness it. What does that mean? It means that you have a friend you read the letter to; you tell the experience to. They’re not giving you any input; they’re not saying what a jerk they are or you are or anyone is. They are simply witnessing you with compassion. And then you can burn the letter ritualistically and consciously with intention to release that experience with all your gems intact, right?

So, you’ve taken your wisdom gems from that experience and then release it. That prepares you to be in another relationship.