Your Ex's Inner Thoughts (Why They Pushed You Away)

Today we're going to be talking about why they pushed us away. You know, a lot of times we're in a relationship and we're happy and we think things are going well. And the next thing you know, your ex has pushed you away, or your partner at the time is pushing you away. There's sabotaging things, there's things going on and he can't figure out why, what is going on with this person?

Margaret (01:08):

You loved me last week and this week you don't.

Craig (01:11):

So Margaret has some great research today that she wants to share on what causes this. Cause it's good to understand what your ex has gone through or your partners are going through within them internally that we don't understand.

Margaret (01:25):

So I'm going to share with you, this particular article was written by one of the Firestones. Now let me clarify the Firestones, I've presented several times work by Lisa Firestone, who talks about your inner inner critic. That mean voice that you have inside that puts you down and encourages you to put yourself down and tells you what's wrong with you. So I finally figured out who they all are. There's Robert Firestone, a psychologist who's quite famous and he married his wife named Tamsen. So she's, Tamsen Firestone. And then there's their daughter, Lisa Firestone. So at least I've got that much straight.

Craig (02:04):

And don't forget about Lenny.

Margaret (02:06):

Get out of here.

Craig (02:07):

Lenny Firestone. He's the one that runs the tires, right?

Margaret (02:10):

Yeah. Don't tread on me. Oh, that was a terrible pun. Anyway, I have finally figured out who these people are, but they all specialize in talking about internal processes and our inner critics and how they can be very destructive to us if we don't know they're there. Okay. And we often hear people after a breakup listing what's wrong with them beating themselves up and doing all sorts of things. Yeah. So fortunately the Firestones are trying to help us not do that. And the particular book I just read recently was called dare to love, meaning, and reminding us that love can be very scary. And for several reasons, which I'm going to talk about one at a time we can run into pushing love away. Not that we meant to, but somehow we get.

Craig (03:00):

You want to think about this long and hard because this is exactly what may have happened with your partner.

Margaret (03:04):

Absolutely. When you're talking about a breakup and so how to deal with your critical inner voice, first of all, you have to figure out that it's there and to do that, what you do is you go back and you think about it. Are you beating yourself up after the breakup? And most people, men and women, are beating themselves up after the breakup. I think men, men fare a little bit better than women do on that, but women are brutal to themselves. Okay. I'm not attractive enough. I wasn't exciting enough. There were all these things I didn't do. So first of all, you want to find out what...

Craig (03:43):

I think men probably focusing on how they were neglectful

Margaret (03:49):

Yeah. "I Spent too much time out of the house. I spent too much time on my computer. I played video games when she would try to talk to me."

Craig (03:57):

'I wasn't attentive enough." Right

Margaret (04:00):

Right. I wasn't. And that's oftentimes the deal. Yep. Okay. so what, what this gentleman suggests is sit down and think about the bad things you say to yourself. And one of the ways that you commonly asked the question is to say, "how are you hard on yourself?" Okay. "How Much blame do you take when things go wrong?" And everybody can answer that question. And most people will. So if your inner voice is saying to you and, and they give you a particular example, and this is a woman named Gloria and Gloria has been married for a few years to a guy named Nick and they have a couple of kids. So she is staying home and taking care of the children. And her inner voice says to her I'm not interesting anymore. I'm not the same person I was when I was working.

Margaret (04:51):

I'm not fun to be with anymore. I'm not attractive. Who am I kidding? I'm fat. I'm not attractive anymore. I'm past my prime. I'm just a chubby matronly mom and Nick doesn't care about me anyway, if it weren't for me, Nick would be happy to just this, let this relationship die out. But that's just kind of how it is with relationships. Talk about negative. Right? Now you notice she hasn't talked to Nick about this. So what the author suggests is you rewrite this in the second person, you rewrite it as if some outside force is saying this to you. Okay. "You are not attractive. You are not interesting anymore." That puts a little bit outside you and invites you to get angry about something being that destructive to you.

Craig (05:45):

Like "who do you think you are?"

Margaret (05:48):

That's exactly right. And that's the goal. All right. So you write it down in the steps with a "you". I'm not interesting anymore becomes "you are not interesting anymore." "You're not fun to be with anymore. You are not the same person you were when you were working", you get the idea, and you verbalize your statements. Even if they feel hurtful and make you sad or angry. Cause once you start understanding that you're saying this to yourself, it's very upsetting. Yeah. Okay.

Craig (06:18):

And you have to realize that many of you were with partners that were doing this to themselves and that they were saying things like this to themselves. And that's, you know, some of the reasons that they broke up with you is because they were doing this to themself and you probably didn't pick up on it, or weren't really aware of that internal struggle.

Margaret (06:40):

Okay. The next step. So you're going to, you're going to figure out what, what you say to yourself. You're going to write it down as a "you," and then you're going to reflect on this. And in this step, people usually recognize that the critical inner voice represents some way in which they were treated during childhood, by a particular parent, another family member, a significant person outside the family, like a coach or a teacher. Okay. We don't get these ideas from nowhere. So the next step is you confront the inner voice. So finally Gloria said to her critical voice, "you're always criticizing me and saying I'm boring and unattractive, exclamation point. You're always telling me that nobody could love me. That's the message that you're getting across to me. Well, it isn't true. I'm the same person I was when Nick met me. And I'm the same person he married. I'm still interesting and fun and attractive. There is nothing wrong with me. The real truth is that all you ever care about is tearing me down and that's all you've ever cared about. Shut up. I'm done listening to you." All right, Gloria. Okay. And that's exactly what you do.

Craig (07:53):

No, maybe don't say this while you're walking through Walmart.

Margaret (07:56):

Probably not a good idea. You might bump into somebody. Um but anyway, that's, that's step one. That's my first message. First. Think about how you do it to you.

Craig (08:08):

Yeah. And many of you are doing this, but also understand that, you know, your partners are going to do this to themselves too. And if you think back, you may have heard them saying things to themselves about themselves that were really critical. Right.

Margaret (08:23):

Just pick up on it. Yeah. "I'm so dumb. I'm so clumsy. I'm so stupid." But anyway, this poor Nick I guess he works hard and he's out of the house quite a bit, but he's trying to set them up for a future and he has no idea she's thinking these things. Yeah.

Craig (08:38):

And so it's helpful to understand that, you know, you look so much at the ex making the decision or your partner making decision to end it, but they were going through an internal struggle

Margaret (08:52):

You don't know what they were being told. She was being told that your husband really isn't that into you anymore. And it was absolutely not true. Yeah. He was out trying to make a living and trying to better them.

Craig (09:04):

Next thing you know, they've left you and you're like, "what did I do wrong?"

Margaret (09:08):

And poor Nick. He didn't do anything wrong.

Craig (09:11):

Yeah. So it's helpful to understand, you know, some of the internal processes that we have in our mind, the internal critic, right. You said is very hard to ignore,

Margaret (09:23):

Very hard to ignore. If you're having those thoughts and beating yourself up and beating yourself up as a, is a common way to say it it's never helpful and it could be distorted. Yeah. All right. So all sorts of things can be going on inside your partner that you don't even know about. All right. And it's not always about you.

Craig (09:44):

Absolutely. Right. Helpful stuff.

Why They Left a Great Relationship

Today we're going to be talking about: He left a great relationship. Why did he do that? Well, we think we know, don't we. So a lot of times you're dating somebody and it's going really well. And you just can't understand what is going on. They want to break up out of nowhere. You didn't see it coming. You were happy. You thought they were happy and you're just devastated. Right? And we have seen that a lot where you are in a relationship with somebody and it's going so good that you didn't even realize there was a problem going on. But what you have to understand is that everybody has issues with relationships and attachment and those struggles that we have don't show up right away, unless you're really extreme.

Craig (01:46):

Like you may have heard me talk about the girl that loved me, or she told me she loved me four times on the second date that screams to me, massive amounts of trauma. Yeah, of course. Yeah. That she would tell me something like that on a second date that, you know, she just doesn't really know me. So you're going to see issues come out, but it takes time.

Margaret (02:10):

And remember we're blinded in the beginning by those happy hormones.

Craig (02:14):

But our ability to attach is going to be directly related to our ability to stay in a relationship. And in the beginning you don't know what they're capable of for a longterm commitment or what their attachment style might end up to be. A lot of times you'll find yourself dating somebody who has an avoidant attachment style that can't do a longterm commitment. Okay. what happens is things are good, they're happy and they're really enjoying things, but all of a sudden they feel overwhelmed, right? You want to talk about that overwhelming feeling?

Margaret (02:58):

If you have an avoidant attachment style, then being clearly close with someone can get very frightening. People are afraid of being sort of engulfed of losing their identity or of being controlled. And oftentimes you hear avoidant people say, well, I really value my independence. And if they feel like that's threatened, they will oftentimes in the relationship, and we then get a call from someone who has no idea what was wrong and what was wrong was things were going too well. And it felt a little too close

Craig (03:36):

And that just scares the heck out of them. Right. Yeah. It really does. They have that over. It's just like an overwhelming feeling of, Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. But they don't put it into words

Margaret (03:51):

Feeling smothered here. Yeah. I feel like I have to do things for her now and it might interfere with my independence. Oh my God, I gotta run.

Craig (03:58):

Yeah, absolutely. But you know, depending upon the situation you have somebody that is like that. If you allow them some time and some space, there's a good chance. They're going to take another look at it and think, you know, this person was really great. Right. But when it happens so often is when, you know, all of a sudden they tell us they can't do it anymore. Out of nowhere, we're devastated and that's it. We're shocked. Yeah. Things were going well. And that's when we start to try and, you know, trap them or lock them down or lose emotional self control. But I have a really good success story from somebody that I did a Skype coaching with last year. And I remember exactly who she was because she had a great personality. And she told me she was going to share a story. And this is funny cause she starts it off with dear babe-alicious, babe,

Margaret (04:57):

To which you responded very happily, I notice. He says smiles when he says that.

Craig (05:02):

Well, cause I know her personality and she was really funny. So I was like, okay. Yeah, I get, I know she's having the, having some fun, she got your attention. She said, happy new year. It has been seven months since our coaching session. And I am so happy to provide you with an update. When we last Skype, I told you about my situation with my then ex-boyfriend he left our seemingly perfect relationship after a series of devastating losses. And I was desperate to win him back. When I finally reached out to you, I was feeling completely hopeless. The losses he and I went through were so very painful, including a miscarriage of what would have been our first child, that I was feeling literal physical pain from the overwhelming sadness of him leaving me. Yeah. Yup. And we're going to talk about that in another video soon with us dealing with death and breakups. Yes. Talking to you, provided me with a lot of comfort and insight. I still crack up when I remember one thing you told me that you thought my ex would eventually come back because dating is hard and most people are boring.

Margaret (06:24):

You were letting her know that she was not boring and good for her.

Craig (06:27):

It's such a great sense of humor. I'm like, there is no way this guy is going to just forget about that because she was really funny. You got to remember, I've done standup comedy for over 15 years. And when somebody stands out to me as being that funny, it just sticks with me and humor is a wonderful, healthy thing. And it's just such a great energy, right. That she had such a great energy. So I guess I picked up right on that in the session. And I told her.

Margaret (06:57):

That's a strength. I'm glad you let her know she had it.

Craig (07:00):

You and I talked a lot about attachment styles and how my ex appeared to be an avoidant attachment style with this in mind, I decided to give him an abundance of the things he seemed to need the most, space. This was incredibly difficult and painful because it required me to be patient and have faith that if it was meant to be, it was meant to be. I spent all of this time working on personal growth. I read so many books, including attached.

Margaret (07:33):

Okay, good, great

Craig (07:34):

Went to therapy sessions and did a lot of guided journaling. And there is a lot of stuff like that in the workbooks that you can work through stuff like that. There's a lot of things that are going to get you to reflect and to grow. And so that you can show changes when your ex does reach out, which hers did whenever he did pop into my life, which was quite frequently. After a period of No Contact, I would wait a while before responding with warmth while not being overeager. I played it super duper cool, which took pressure off of him and I both. After some time passed, I even started dating other people. It is so funny that you and Margaret talk about how our exes can sense it when we start moving on, here we go. Now this is going to be great. There's a great part to this story. I'm a disruption in the force. And we say, because the craziest thing happened a couple of months ago, I had met someone and I was excited about it and found my thoughts would drift to him throughout the day and not my ex early one morning, my phone vibrated and I saw I had two notifications at exactly 7:20 AM on the dot, both my ex and this new man text me good morning at the exact same moment. I love it. Okay. I have a screenshot of this. I'm going to cross out their names, but you will see both at 7:20 AM. Unbelievable. She says, you should have seen my jaw hit the floor. It's like, he knew that this other man was moving in and they both thought to message me simultaneously. She says crazy. It is crazy. Isn't it?

Margaret (09:42):

That's a really super duper airway.

Craig (09:44):

And it's such an odd time. After a lot of time apart and so much personal growth and soul searching, I am so happy to report that my ex and I are back together. Great. And our relationship is even happier and more solid than before. I cannot thank you and Margaret enough for all you do for people like me and will continue being a loyal supporter. If I could provide one piece of information for other women and people out there who were like me and are anxiously awaiting for the love to come back, it is this. Leave that man alone. She wrote that in bold, bold caps. Seriously do not wait for him. Do not put your love life on hold. Do not send him long text messages or emails all the ways about you love him. No, just don't. When you're feeling anxious, go to the gym and listen to Craig and Margaret's timeless wisdom and then dust yourself off and keep going. It was not until I started to truly move on that my ex finally came to his senses and if he hadn't come back, I have grown enough since last year that I would have been just fine regardless. Much love to you all. And looking forward to all the great videos to come this year.

Margaret (11:15):

Wonderful. What a lovely, lovely, lovely story to share. And she learned about avoidant. I think she probably gave him the space he needed after they got together. Again, I have one piece of advice for them now, and that is remember to talk about and greive the miscarriage, that was serious business.

Craig (11:32):

Yes it is. Yeah. but it sounds like, you know, she did a lot of work on herself and she got to a place where she was going to explore dating again. And look at that, they text message the exact same time. Unbelievable that we see this of stuff all the time. Although, although not particularly like this, that's why I got really wonderful. Yeah. I love that. She shared that with us. Great stuff and a great success story. And like she said, she was absolutely hopeless and convinced she had no shot with this guy. Right, and here they are.

Margaret (12:07):

It's not easy, but look what she learned. Yeah. Yup. And sometimes it can be worked out if you understand that the other person needs X amount of space and don't take it personally that they don't want to spend time with you. Yep. Right.

Craig (12:23):

Okay. So if you want to get our help personally, just go to my website askcraig.net, sign up for the coaching option that works best for you.