Hey yo welcome to episode 64 of let’s talk dirty. If you get anxious about what other people are doing and obsess a little about what other people chose to do with their time and their lives, you’re going to want to listen up. I am recording this episode based on a specific client that came to me asking for help getting over her ex and one of her most devastating thoughts was he chose another woman over me. So today I really am holding my client Kendall in my heart as I record this. I asked her if it was okay to share her name here and she said of course, now that she’s over this thought and isn’t quite so torn up about her ex haha, but as I’m talking today I want you to notice what version of this thought has been alive in your mind, and with whom. Maybe it’s also an ex, but maybe it’s a husband or a close friend who chose something, seemingly over you.
So any flavor of “another person should have picked me and they picked something else instead”
He chose THEM over me.
He chose to stay home over coming with me.
He chose to drink over me.
He chose his friends over me.
“I can’t believe she chose her over me.”
Let’s explore what happens when you believe that they chose her over you.
The reality is the person is dating someone named sally. Let’s just say that’s Kendall’s ex’s girlfriends name.
Ex is dating Sally,
That is the circumstance. The neutral, I might add, circumstance.
And here comes your stories about what that must mean. There’s some identity stuff wrapped up in this story right like I’m second best, I’m unworthy, I’m always left out, something is wrong with me. But the thought that came out for Kendall and the one we’re looking at today is
He chose her over me.
Kendall shared with me that when she thinks that her guts get all twisted up and she feels like she might vomit and her chest aches and she just sinks.
She feels like shit, despairing, and then from there goes down a rabbit hole of like thinking about him and her, imagining what they are doing, trying to find them on social media from someone else’s incognito account, comparing yourself to her and obsessing about who she is and what she does that you don’t do…
And guess what we realized the result is of all that?
YOU are choosing her over you.
Thinking he chose her over me makes you choose her over you.
What are you choosing to put all your energy into by believing that something or someone was chosen over you?
Ugh what a fucking moment it was when Kendall realized that. I believe her exact words were “well what in the actual fuck Hanna?” Haha.
And we laughed and she was like ugh I feel insane, why did you have to show me that!?
And I was like well,
You want me to tell you when you have food in your teeth right?
Ok this is me telling you have a honkin piece of broccoli stuck in your front tooth…
Your unmanaged mind is making you insane. It’s showing.
And I’m not using the word insane like “you look insane,” but more of like I see the insanity it’s causing for you. It’s making you feel insane. And spun out. And overthinking and obsess and question everything about her compared to you. It’s literally building into the identity of anxious attached.
You’ve got broccoli in your teeth, it’s no big deal, I’m just telling you now so you can go ahead and floss it out.
Ok so let’s floss this thought OUT.
Every time I ask why do you want to think that way? I want you to imagine me asking why do you want broccoli in your teeth?
Why do you want to believe that he chose her over you? Why do you want to believe that that’s true?
Why do you want broccoli in your teeth?
There was an OG legit reason for eating broccoli. It was because you were like I’m hungry, my body craves some green stuff, eating this way feels healthy. Like good reasons for the initial broccoli in the mouth…but now it’s stuck in your teeth and someone is telling you hey sister you’ve got a little something somethin,
It would be like saying oh yeah I like it there.
Instead of omg how silly no big deal that it’s there I’ll just go to the bathroom and take care of it.
That’s what it’s like with these dirty unhelpful thoughts,
Hey sister, you’ve got a little something something that’s stuck right there.
And you can be like haha omg how silly, duh of course it’s there, I have these types of thoughts a lot for good reason, my anxious brain really wants to protect me from harm and distance me from this person, it wants me to get more anxiety about being left out so that I will find ways to survive and fit in and be chosen but also, that parts done now, just like the broccoli.
I ate the broccoli and that’s all good and done, I don’t need to keep the remnants in my teeth, I don’t need to keep on thinking this thought that’s making me feel crazy.
Because I’m not crazy.
I’m not left behind.
I’m not unwanted.
So why am I keeping this thought stuck in there now when I could just excuse myself to the bathroom real quick and pick it out?
That’s where Kendall and I went together, to the bathroom mirror to pick out the broccoli and what happened when that thought got flossed out was a whole bunch of new truths that felt a lot more aligned with who SHE actually is. How she actually believes.
He didn’t “choose her over you” as if there’s only those two choices in the world.
He chose himself and his desires over everything else which frankly is what we’re all supposed to do. Kendall’s new story about ex dating sally became “I believe that everyone is supposed to chose themselves first, including my ex.”
And from there the beliefs started to roll in even faster:
It’s not my job to control other peoples experiences, only my own. This has literally nothing to do with me. And one of my favorite ones: “I appreciate him setting an example for me of how to choose myself.”
Her own self worth had to be so potent, she had to really consciously TRY to tap in to that, using alot of ENERGY, right, rerouting that energy she was expending thinking about sally all day, to be able to go from feeling despairing and shitty and activated, and psycho to appreciative of her ex for seeing an example for her of how to choose herself.
These beliefs came after flossing out the unhelpful thought that he chose her over me. Noticing that that isn’t actually true. Making space for what is true to come in.
Right we were like what does this mean? And why does it feel like it matters? One of the things that felt like a good reason to believe he chose his new girlfriend over kendall was she said I feel like I need to control what he’s doing and if I could just slow down his progression into a new relationship I could feel better, take breath and like take the time to get ready to date again, right that was her story. Her ability feel better and take a breath and get ready to start dating was being wrapped up in her ex’s experience. But we decided it’s not our responsibility to try to control someone else’s experience and life choices, when we could just eliminate the time and evegy it would take to try to do that and just manage our own experience and life choices. Like how much less time and stress is involved when you’re not taking on the responsibility to trying to troubleshoot what someone else is doing and just focus on doing that for yourself. Like that’s enough work as it is haha.
So I want to know how you are doing with creating new stories about who you are with or without someone choosing you in every moment.
Being intentional with your thinking in the face of these stories of what it must mean when someone chooses to be with someone else or to go out with friends or to play video games. Like our conditioning might want us to believe that every choice someone makes that is not to be with is INSTEAD of you. Can you notice that choices people make are never either or. Never. There is never me or her. Me or drinking. Me or the dog. No. You are not an either or. People choose themselves. Or they don’t. Like those are the options. In my opinion. I either choose me or I choose what someone else wants for me or shoulds me to do in that moment.
I always want to stay behind people choosing themselves.
Let’s think about it:
What have I been told about other people’s choices? What do I think other peoples choices mean about me? Am I in competition with all the world in order that I be the chosen one?
What have I been told about what to think about other people living their lives the way they want to? How is that reflected in what I think about how I can live my own life?
You know maybe you have stories about relationships that come from having parents who didn’t get along or had examples of codependency where people needed and used other people to make themselves happy.
I want you to look at those stories and understand that they are just that, they are just stories.
One of my clients put it so brilliantly the other day in one of our seasons she was reflecting on how simply coming to terms with the fact that we don’t really know what truth is, that truth is variable and the jury’s still out of what is truth, that that has changed so much about how she sees herself and the worth and she said you know, just like memory isn’t a perfect archive of what happened, our thoughts are not a perfect archive of who we are… and what I’m going to add here is our thoughts are not a perfect archive of all the stories we continue to tell.
I think that when it comes to stories about how we should think about what people do and what it means like when your boyfriend breaks up and dates someone new or when your husband decides to go out with the guys and party…like the stories we have about what that all means for us…those stories are ultimately coming from our unconscious mind, the part of our brain that’s on autopilot, regurgitating thoughts that have been on playback for a long time, and we give those stories a lot of virtue and strength. But why? Why do we do that? When essentially, as one of my favorite coaches Kara lowenthiel says, you brain is just a bowl of jello with electricity flowing through it, and THATS what we’re giving all this power over us to? Why does a story that came first hold more weight for us than a story we come up with now in service of who we are becoming?
I want you to think about that as you’re consciously creating new stories about who and how you are with respect to other peoples choices. That in fact, the truth that aligns you with what your body, soul, spirit, prefrontal cortex wants for you now IS who you are, it is truth, with much more weight than whatever you’ve been letting the bowl of jello command.
Because Coaching work isn’t here to change who you are, it’s actually here to help you to sink deeper into who you are.
Coaching yourself away from this thought that he chose her over me isn’t like giving people permission to hurt you to reject you, it’s giving yourself permission to be free of your own mind’s antics so that you can see yourself, choose yourself, and decide what you want to do from a clean place.
Challenging your core stories about how you need to be chosen and instead noticing that you already are… that would actually give you permission to be exactly who you are without performing or trying to calculate the best ways to get chosen by others or to fit in bc or obsess over what other people are doing and you could actually be free and unburdened by the madness of all the trying…and just be yourself.
To get to meet your truest self you might have to question whether your stories and beliefs about your identity being tied into someone else choosing you are really there to perpetuate something that BLOCKS what’s truest.
You can’t see the broccoli until you start looking in the mirror. So I’m holding up a mirror for you to see yourself, see where you’ve got a stuck story about what you need to be fulfilled, happy, good, at peace, and floss that shit out.