So there's something I thought of recently. I don't know where I was talking about this to someone. I don't know if it was in therapy or there was somewhere that I was talking about this. But there's a dynamic that isn't discussed that much that goes on in divorce.
Now.
We had a podcast called Divorce. It exploded. It was millions of Yews crazy. It just was a little bit flying too close to the sun for me having gone through an excruciating time and then talking about it, and then my mother passed away and I was going through a breakup. It was just like a lot to.
Unload.
But there are concepts of divorce that I think should be discussed because it was such a topic that people were devouring. And one topic is if there's a contentious divorce or break up, and let's say one person jilted the other, or the other person hasn't gotten over one person, or they've been hurt either during their relationship or during the divorce, and there's a child involved the parent. This
happened with me. Oh I was doing an interview the other day for this podcast, and someone asked me about my relationship with my real father and there was a resentment towards me that was completely unwarranted and irrational because it started at a time when I was like five years old, I was living with my real father. Because the story goes, and I always say the story goes
because people tell their kids things. And I said to this guy that I grew up in a house of liars, So don't I never know what exactly is true and what's not true, but what the story went that my mother, And not until you're an age where you're going through real life things like divorce, et cetera, do you start to understand the messages that were being sent to you as a kid. So the story went that, and it tracks that my mother and father broke up and that
she wanted to be in New York. He moved to California. I was with him in California because he said he wouldn't support me or pay for me unless I was living with him. Now, I don't know what money she did or didn't have to pay for divorce lawyers. I don't know what the system was like back then. It certainly wasn't like it is now. And I do know that for years, I don't think he really paid child support.
I do know that.
So I was living with him and I missed her. I didn't want to be there with him. It was a very wild sort of drugs and the seventies and young women and just like a racetrack lifestyle. And her lifestyle was horrendous too, But I wanted. A kid wants to be with their mother often for whatever reason. I I missed her and wanted to be with her, and I did go back to her, I think at like five.
So I then didn't really have anything to do with him, and saw him once when I was thirteen, and he the resentment of me had already started, like he's sort of I remember him saying he was throwing his hands up with the situation. There was a time where he reached out when I was thirteen, wanted to see each other, and then I was supposed to go visit him.
Actually no, this was seven. When I was seven, I was supposed to go visit him.
And because he was so successful and he didn't, I had I had a high fever. My mother wouldn't let me get on the plane because he didn't get me a first class ticket. It was almost like she was looking for an excuse so she wouldn't let me get
on the plane. And he then later said he was washing his hands with the whole situation, which I remember, and it meant to me with me and for years, even when I reconnected with him later in college, when he tried to sort of pursue me once I needed him or wanted for him to be my father, try to like in stuff like she a pet father at water and like I'm gonna have a father At eighteen or twenty or whatever old I was, he was kind of resentful of me, and I used to try to
get something from him, and like he would withhold emotions and like be sort of manipulative with me until till
he died. He was just he just he didn't care for me, and he would he just was mean to me, to be honest, And it really always felt like I was my mother to him, even though I'm not like my mother in many ways, but I think I was my mother to him, and I think many in many divorces, and it's not discussed enough, a parent resents the child because they remind them of the ex Let's say that, like you get divorced from a woman and she and the daughter are very very close, and.
You know, you.
Can't stand the mother. If the mother and the daughter do a lot of things together and the daughter really looks up to and loves the mother, and let's say, you in subtle ways, you know, try to allude to the mother not being great or said bad things to the kid about the mother, but it didn't work. You know, there's like some resentment that lies there. And I just
think it's a dynamic that needs to be watched. And I also think it's a dynamic that's extremely toxic and that should be mitigated or eliminated.
At all costs.
And I just think the kids are put in the middle in ways that aren't always discussed. So I think there's just a dynamic where parents resent the child or a son, like a mother with the son if the son is really into sports and wants to do everything the father wants to do, and the mother feels left out and she can't stand the father and she starts to see that her son is reminding her or acting
more like the father. That's going to be challenging. So and it doesn't mean that someone can't remind you of someone that you hate and still be a good person. It just means that it probably would be triggering. You know you just even if someone looks like someone that would be hard. What if you can't stand someone they cheated on you, whatever they did, they fucked you over, and then your kid looks exactly like them. I just don't hear anyone talk about that enough, so I thought
of it during this interview. So, if you're dating and you're going through a breakup, okay, if you're going through any sort of breakup.
A lot of people are asking me about breakups. It's a new year.
People stayed with people through the holidays, which is a big thing. You don't want to deal with it around Thanksgiving, but then oh it's Christmas. Then you don't want to be alone on New Year's Eve. Now it's fucking New Year. The world's been coming to an end. January is forty two months long. It's insane. It's like January ninety ninth. And now people are like, wait, I am still in the same relationship and I'm going through a breakup.
Okay.
People talk all the time about dating. I talk about it. We don't talk about breaking up and juice fast. For example, getting into a juice fast, you should ease into a gew fast. Then you go hard and when you come off of it, you're not supposed to just drink a martini and have a cheeseburger, otherwise you end up in the hospital. So you have to have a mode, a
modus operandi for breaking up. One thing is if you ultimately really know that you're not going to be with this person, which is impossible because you could intellectually know you're not going to be with someone but emotionally miss them and want the fix. So what you ultimately really have to do is detox from them. And there are many different ways. Some people get off the drug going cold turkey, some people need to take a little hit or do the methadone clinic. Okay, so you have to
be honest with yourself. But in neither of those situations is it ever good to go back and binge on the drug and take the drug. So we can go through a whole thing about this, because we're always talking about dating. But what I would say is there's a discipline to it, just in the way that there's a discipline to being healthy. So if a relationship wasn't working for you, whether somebody breaks up with you or you break up with them, and you can break up with
someone and also have a goal in mind. You can break up with someone you can know they're not right with you for you, but you need to get off the sauce somehow, and you're not ready to fully go cold turkey, so you can somehow maintain some connection. Let's say they reach out to You can smile, you can put a thumbs up, you can put a heart on it. You're kind of like taking the smallest hit. It's like micro dosing the person. But you're not giving them anything.
You're not moving it forward. You're not telling them you love them, you're not calling them, you're not telling them you miss them.
You're just sort of in their ether.
And that gives you time to get off the sauce and get like most of it out of your system. So then a, either you can get to the point where they're fully out of your system. B. Because they're fully out of your system, they're freaking out that you're not missing them and that you're able to do this because invariably they probably think you can't handle it without them, and they're running the same game that you are. They may be out having sex to medicate, they could be
partying to medicate. They could be crying, they could be doing the same thing. They could be playing a game. You don't fucking know. But you have to detox, and you can have two things going on at the same time where by way of you detoxing from the person, they are also freaking out because they can't believe you don't need the drug.
And if you go.
Take a hit off the pipe, they then know you need the drug. They've got you hooked, they know you're going to come back for more. They've got a little dim bag waiting for you. So just know that that you could be a strategist by also going you know, not not breaking the diet, not going on the sauce, but also you're being an emotional strategist where you're helping yourself because you're getting off of it. Other people would just believe in in cold turkey, some people would believe
go if the other person. If you love someone, you set them free, if it was meant to be, they'll come back to you and like it doesn't matter. You don't have to overthink everything and you don't have to be like, wait, well I didn't call them, so maybe they don't know I love them, or they don't know I miss them. You know, if someone wants to be with you, they're going to fucking show you. If someone shows you who they are or what they want or what they don't want or how they feel, bah leave them.
Okay.
The other thing is when you're in this phase, they don't get to like have you for like pen pal talks like, they don't get to be like, oh hey did you go? Oh thought of you and send a picture then you send something back, because that's a hit. That's taking a small hit. You can get by. They can get by too. They will never need to know
or feel what it's like to be without you. And so that's again something that helps you emotionally, but it's also a strategy meaning what you're gonna it's the cow and the milk, Like you're gonna give them the banter, which equals what a lot of a relationship is. A lot of times people miss each other because of the companionship, because of the best friendship. It's the cigarette you took a hit off of all day. It's like a tick. You just talk to this person, you called them, you
sent them pictures. They would just like you picked up the phone to call them, You send them emojis, you send them videos, you inside jokes, like, that's a lot, day and day out. It's not like you're just missing like the sex. Maybe on a Saturday night when you're wasted, you're missing the sex because you're horny or something, or you're lonely and you're hitting Sunday scaries. That happens, but
day and day out, it's kind of the habit. So if you give them a hit off the pipe, they're getting the cat, you know why, by the cow they have to feel like, and why would you give them just some of you. It's a rose. It has petals and thorns. They're gonna have to take the thorns with the petals because giving them the little hits all day long and the cuteness about you and you're being a friend, that's the petals without the thorns. They're taking an a
la carte menu. They're walking in and going I want this and that, but I don't want the rest, and you're just sitting there giving it to them. It's almost like an emotional booty call. It really actually is like an emotional booty call. They text you and want you just to say something back is the equivalent of like, hey want to hook up later. I want to meet up later. You get weak, you just want the hit, you want to see them, you want to get laid. You'll go, You'll feel lower the next day. So the
same thing happens emotionally. You want to take a little hit. It makes you feel worse after. It makes you feel worse after you have a scratch you on it, itch you fucking ride it through like a sugar craving, like a like like someone who needs to go to a meeting.
You talk to a therapist, you talk to a friend, you take a nap, you watch a movie, you organize your closet, you go do something, you cook something, you hug your kid, you watch, you do whatever the fuck it it is you need to do instead of sitting there. You know, and sometimes sitting there is okay. Like let's say you're laying down and you're going to bed, or you're meditating to avoid thinking about something means you're not
massaging it and working it through. If you have a calm, clear mind, you can work through and really logically be like is this what I ultimately want? Or am I wanting this? Because it's like a gamification of the system, because it's just like I miss something. Is this how I want to live? Is what it was? How I want to feel when we were together, when we were apart, Like what is it all entail? What was I in? And do I want to do that again? And do I want to do that again for the right reasons?
And if I take a hit and I go back in now I'm gonna have to go through detox all over again. So you better make sure that the other person is giving you exactly what you want to go back otherwise it's the definition of insanity. Why would you go back to the same thing that you felt bad in because you're scared, because you're scared of being alone?
Absolutely not. You got through the bad peer. You got to go all the way through because otherwise you go right back, right back, and you'll have the shakes and the sweats, and you got to go through detoks all over again. Because while people will evolve, some people don't change. And the only people that change are people that drastically want to change that come and say like I am scared straight, I fucked up. I love you. I can't
imagine life without you. How can I change. What can we do If someone isn't there, they're not worth your time, because then you're gonna be dragging them. You're gonna be pulling them. It's like pulling a sled. So I just think that I talked about my divorce a lot. I've talked about dating a lot. We can talk about breaking up. It doesn't have to be so drastic into just getting together and falling in love or getting a vicious, brutal divorce.
We can talk in the middle about what it's like to just go through a breakup and it's really, really fucking hard, and fear gets in the way of truth. Fear is literally like when people our shit, I'll be alone. I'm no one's ever gonna treat me that way. I'm never gonna find somebody again, et cetera. So that's what I have to say about that. So we're adding breakups into the talk about makeups and dating