Some of the most challenging changes we make involve saying good-bye to relationships.  If you are going through a break up or a divorce, or leaving a job, or moving somewhere new, it involves saying good bye to a person or people or who have been significant to you.  Endings are hard and you’re usually filled with complex emotions at the time they happen.  But often the way we end a relationship colors the way we feel about that person for a very long time, as well as how the person thinks about us.  Putting energy into creating a thoughtful  ending can help you move forward and sustain positive feelings about yourself and your relationships well into the future.

Endings involve ambivalent feelings.  We once were dedicated to someone or something, and now we have to let go.  If we dwell on all the great things we will be losing, we would be stuck and never move on.  But sometimes we go to an extreme.  In order to make the separation, we get angry, seeing only the bad experiences in order to motivate us to let go.  Ever hear someone talk about their “Ex” with such disdain, it’s hard to imagine they were ever in love?  It’s easy to jump on the negativity bandwagon.  It frees you up from taking a deeper look at a complex dynamic and owning your part of what can feel like a failure.  Just as teenagers often need to judge their parents harshly in order to separate, we all have a tendency to become a bit superior as a defense against the pain of loss.

But be careful.  Leaving a job or a relationship in such a negative state can have consequences for you.  Research shows we tend to remember the things that happen most recently (aptly called the recency effect”).  So even if you have loved your job and the people you worked with for a long time, if things end badly, that is what you and your co-workers will remember.  Years of cooperation and mutual respect can be washed away with a bad taste of “they never appreciated me,” or “she always thought she was better than us” types of feelings that linger.

Especially when we feel a lack of control in a situation, it is tempting to end things with a bang.  But relationships don’t truly ever end.  Even if we never encounter the person again, the relationship lives on in our mind.  If we are careful and open to the process of ending, we can preserve good memories and people who are dear to us.  Rather than forming a reserve of bitterness we operate from, it helps to think of creating a treasure chest, where we store the valued aspects of our relationships, both good and challenging.  These relationships are part of our history and our identity.  They represent who we were and how we have grown.  Rather than burning bridges, by working through the painful emotions of endings, we can hold onto the love that was once created.

You are trying to make a change that feels easy and obvious, yet you just can’t do it.  You become frustrated and blame yourself for being weak or lazy.  “It doesn’t make any sense,” I frequently hear, “What is wrong with me?”  It’s easy to get caught up in diagnosing yourself with all kinds of problems, everything from just not being smart enough to having a multi-syllabic mental health disorder.

When feeling stuck in a pattern it’s often helpful to take a step back.  A broader perspective may reveal a hidden answer to your dilemma.  When working with people in therapy I usually assume that people have very good reasons for why they do what they do, but these reasons may not be obvious to the circumstances at hand.  Frequently these reasons stem from the past and represent a pattern of coping that was necessary and helpful at one time that our unconscious minds are reluctant to let go of.

We learn early on what is necessary for survival.  While most of us, fortunately, were never in real danger, children are perceptive to what is needed to fit into the environment in which they are being raised and to preserve their esteem or “emotional survival.”  They learn to adapt to their environment and develop ways of coping with stressors without ever realizing what they are doing.  For example, a young woman I worked with had been avoiding talking to her boss about an idea she had that she thought would help her company.  She hated speaking up in meetings, even though her co-workers were kind, and despite promising herself before each staff meeting that she was going to do it, she just “couldn’t.”  She was sure she had a social phobia and was doomed to forever be relegated to secondary roles.  In shifting her focus from how her behavior was problematic, to how it might have served her, at least at one time, her behavior began to make sense.  She was the sixth child of her busy family.  Her parents and siblings always had advice for her and being younger, whenever she gave an opinion, she was lectured by someone about how she didn’t really understand or how her opinion was wrong.  She learned early on that expressing her opinion was not “safe.”

“But that was so long ago,” people say.  That may be true, but our early experiences are foundations for our development and have years of reinforcement behind them.  The good news is that once you can acknowledge how your behavior served you, you can accept it as a pattern that was learned and had a positive role for you.  Once you do this, you can separate the child you were, who had few resources or choices, from the adult you are now.  The adult woman can take care of the little girl inside of her who was criticized so that she can handle the risk of presenting her idea to her boss.

When making a change, it’s normal to have anxiety and worry about all the “what ifs…”  Anxiety, in small proportions, can actually help you perform well in a new situation by giving you a bit of extra energy and the motivation to prepare.  Sometimes, however, anxiety can run amok.  You can paralyze yourself with the anticipation of situations that may well never happen but get in the way of your feeling good enough:  “What if I embarrass myself,” What if I’m not smart enough,” “What if she doesn’t like me,” or the most common concern, “What if I fail?”

Anxiety takes you out of the moment and is a projection of your fear into the future.  Unfortunately, it can sometimes become so powerful, the “what if” scenario you create in your mind feels like reality.  As in the blog post last week about coping with tempting “just” thoughts, when coping with anxiety, it’s important to recognize your inner “what if” voice is also just a thought.  In this way, you can distance yourself from the thought and keep it in check.  Some people find the mnemonic of “STOP” helpful:

Stop what you are doing and label your anxiety

Take a few deep breaths

Observe what is going on in your mind and body

Pull back perspective as an outside compassionate observer using your more rational mind

The technique of STOP is a way to break the cycle of anxiety as it builds.  “What if” statements become perceived threats and trigger your fight/flight reaction –heart racing, muscles tensing, sweating, and stomach aches.  By actively using your mind to take control of your thoughts, you can slow down your central nervous system responding and stay in the present.

Another similar technique came to me one day when I was driving, not only my car, but myself crazy.  I was worrying about a class I was asked to teach.  It was a new class for me, and while I was excited to expand my knowledge and experience, I began to obsess about it.  “What if the material is boring to people,” or “what If they ask me something I don’t know.”  The worries began to expand from the class to my job, thinking that if I didn’t teach the class well, they wouldn’t want me to teach other classes, and then it expanded to other areas of my life, and how if I messed up, everything would fall apart.  Finally, in my frenzy of “What if” thinking, I suddenly had the insight about what I was doing to myself.  I heard the echoes of all the “what ifs” and realized how I was working myself up for the benefit of my anxiety, not myself.  Then, literally I said aloud, “What if, instead of everything being doomed, what if everything is okay?”  I sat there with that thought in mind:  “What if…everything is okay?”  It was a new thought for me.  It made me laugh.  It was actually amusing to realize how novel an idea it was for me to acknowledge the fact that most of the time, everything was okay.

It’s important not to think of anxiety as your enemy, however.   It’s actually a sign of your caring and your sense of responsibility and desire to be successful.  Those are all wonderful things that give your life passion and meaning.  It’s when anxiety takes over that we need to take care.  Whatever technique you find helpful, the point is to help you manage your anxiety and use its energy to excite you rather than torture you.  Next time you hear a trail of “What ifs”, try to S-T-O-P, and then get going!

While doing your best to make a lifestyle change, beware of the word “just.”  It usually comes right before an impulsive act of giving in to temptation, such as “just tonight,” “just one,” or “just for now.”  It’s not that I’m advocating that you should never indulge yourself or bend your rules a little bit, it’s “just” that by making a decision to engage in the desired behavior in a more mindful way, you will help yourself both enjoy the behavior and have a greater chance of staying on track for long term change.

It’s normal to have days or evenings when you want to throw caution to the wind and break free from restrictions you’ve put on yourself.  Too often, however, it’s followed by a spell of remorse.  You wake up the next day upset and even angry at yourselves for “being weak” or “screwing up.”  After it’s too late you regret your impulsive behavior and wish you had done things differently.  That’s why it’s so important when making lasting change to watch out for “just” statements and recognize them for what they are, rationalizations.   Temptation rationalizations are a normal part of the change process, but often come at times we’re vulnerable to their pull.  That’s why it’s good to identify them when they happen and recognize them for what they are, “just” thoughts.

Temptation thoughts represent our old way of being and come most often when we’re tired, lonely, upset, or feeling less centered in some way.  They can also be a result of unintended or unexpected peer pressure, wanting to be a part of the group and do what everyone around you is doing.  An important way to deal with “just thoughts” when they happen is first to identify it.  By labeling your “just thought” as a “temptation thought,” you immediately put some distance between you and the potential behavior.  For example, you’re having a bad day and feel very lonely.  You run into your ex-boyfriend who was not a very thoughtful partner.  He shows interest in you and you are flattered.  A little voice inside your head says, “Wouldn’t it feel good to be together with him, just for tonight.”  But then you remind yourself that you have just uttered a “just statement.”  You recognize this as a way of fooling yourself into thinking that it would be fine to spend the evening with this man, forgetting the pain he caused you and the disappointment you would feel in yourself tomorrow.  Instead, you decide since you’ve had a tough day and need some company, you’d be better off calling a friend who makes you laugh or even renting a movie that inspires you.

Sometimes you will decide that you want to go ahead and have the piece of cake or skip the workout, or even smoke the cigarette or have the drink.  Change is not a straight line forward.  But by making a conscious choice, you are being more honest with yourself about your behavior.  In doing so, you give yourself a much better chance to recommit to your goal and truly keep it to the “ just one” you’ve decided on.