I am specifically referring to when a couple goes through a separation where they are taking time apart from each other, living separately, in a period of limbo where there is an equal possibility of either a divorce or a reconciliation. This period can be especially difficult when there are children involved. Learn about The Hierarchy of Dating and Relationships in the Coaching Workbooks: I'm A Man, That's My Job and I'm A Woman, It's My Time Separation and Dating By Frank Kermit One of the most damaging actions an individual can take is to start dating someone new when going through a separation with their serious long-term partner (spouse, common-law partner or a defacto-union). When I use the term separation here, it is not to be confused with a Legal Separation, which is a legal status, and an alternative to divorce for couples that have moral or religious objections to legal divorce. I am specifically referring to when a couple goes through a separation where they are taking time apart from each other, living separately, in a period of limbo where there is an equal possibility of either a divorce or a reconciliation. This period can be especially difficult when there are children involved. Some therapists recommend that individuals date other people. I completely disagree with this stance. Involving anyone new into a dynamic that is already in a vulnerable shape that turns it into an emotional triangle can wreak havoc on both partners, cause incredible distress on any children who rely on the partners who are separated, as well as cause confusion for the people you date. The point of such a separation is not to experience it as a trial divorce, as many couples unfortunately assume it to be. In fact, the whole reason that separations occur is to work at every possible solution to give the relationship every chance it can have to survive. You do not need to separate first in order to file for divorce (except in the rarest of cases where you must be separated for a specific period of time for a court ordered divorce when one of the partners refuses to agree to it). If you want a divorce, get a divorce. Do not sugarcoat a divorce with a separation if you have no intention of working on your current relationship while separated. What to do during a separation: Work on yourself and whatever issues you may have that contributed to the separation. Get tested for depression. Seek out therapy and coaching. Sober up and deal with your demons. Learn about how to address emotional needs and how to have your own emotional needs addressed. Spend your time alone doing self-reflection and bettering your understanding of love and relationships. Ask yourself why you would have made the choices you made that got you into this situation to begin with. Ask yourself what you have to change to build a future life plan where you will not end up here again. If you invest in a couple of years of this kind of time into healing, then so be it. What is a couple of years compared to the lifetime you can have when reconciled with your partner, and other parent, of your children? It is worth it. What not to do during a separation: It is not a time to form a close bond with new people that would threaten your relationship. Do not hang out with friends and family that have always encouraged you to break it off. It is not a time to be hanging out in bars playing the pickup game. It is not a time to be part of any unplanned pregnancy. It is not a time to be isolating your children from your partner as revenge on your partner. It is not a time to live out all those things you always wanted to do, but were prohibited by your relationship. It is not a time to make significant asset purchases like a new home. It is not a time to make any life altering plans given the lack of emotional stability in your life. It is not a time to uproot your kids from the remaining stability in their lives. Separation does not automatically lead to divorce unless you let it. It is up to you and your partner to put in the work so that it does not happen. In the event you are the only one trying to work on yourself and your partner is not, the exercise is NOT in vain. Do it anyways. At worst, you may influence your partner into participating. At best, you will reach a level of emotional health and be able to teach your children from a broken home what it is to be able to manage an emotionally healthy relationship by serving as an example. If you do not make the efforts to heal, you will likely find yourself in a similar situation again in the future. If you do heal, but do not get the co-operation you need to save your relationship, you can take comfort in the fact you will be able to form better relationships for yourself in the future, which will benefit you, and any children who will be touched by your new relationships. People are their repeating behavior patterns, and it is likely that whatever the issues that broke up your first serious relationship, are likely going to break up the second one as well, unless you work on yourself to correct those behavior patterns. Changing your partner will not solve the issues you carry inside. When the second serious relationship ends, is when most people realize they likely would have had an easier and possibly happier life (for their children as well) if they had just worked out the issues with their first serious relationship. At the very least, be ethical if you are enacting a separation with your partner. You are dealing with another human being, and giving any false hope when you have already decided that this is the beginning of the end, is a horrible thing to do. It is not just your partner you need to consider here. Even if you are too angry and resentful at your partner, and have reached a point where you just do not care, any children you have with your partner will surely be affected by the negative emotions. Your children are half you, and half your partner, and will internalize your negative feelings towards your partner, no matter how much you try to shield them from it. If you do date someone while in the middle of a separation, the worst thing you can do is throw it in your partner's face for your own satisfaction, or as a means of getting a reaction out of your partner. In fact, this is creating a divide, not just with your partner (which you may be too drunk on negative emotions to care about); it has the incredible potential to also turn your own children against you, through no encouragement from your partner. This type of violation of security in your children is more difficult to heal than the problems you have with your adult partner. If you want to end it and leave, then file for divorce and be done with it. Telling your partner that you are separating to think about things and that you intend to make the effort to work things out, when in actuality you are just making it easier to manage your secret affair that you plan to leave your partner for, is a mistake. The odds are high that you will surely end up alone, or in a worse situation than you are in now. Statistically, new relationships that start out as affairs rarely last any significant amount of time, but the damage done to the children who learn of the affair is longer lasting. Separation is no time to start dating new people. Frank Kermit Learn about The Hierarchy of Dating and Relationships in the Coaching Workbooks:
I'm A Man, That's My Job and I'm A Woman, It's My Time
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This article is based on my coaching workbooks: I'm A Man, That's My Job and I'm a Woman, It's My Time Rejection: The Best Worst Thing That Can Ever Happen To You By Frank Kermit Rejection is the worst best thing that can ever happen to you. Managing rejection is a necessary part in managing your love life. Over the course of your life, chances are you are going to experience rejection before you find your soul mate, and you may have to reject others in that process as well. Trying to seek out love while trying to avoid rejection is like trying to walk in the rainstorm and not get even a little wet. The sooner you accept the reality that rejection is a normal part of life (albeit an unpleasant one at times) and learn to handle the negative emotions associated, the sooner you will find peace with your desires of seeking out an emotionally fulfilling love life. Whether you put yourself out there, or are on the receiving end of someone's affections, you are going to have to deal with rejection. In fact, the more you make efforts to connect with others, then more you will surely deal with rejection. For example, if you are on a spree of approaching new people, on the numbers alone, you will deal with more rejection than you previously did when not approaching new people. If you end up going on a date with someone, but do not end up in a long-term relationship with that person, it means at some point there was a rejection of sorts. In cases where you are casually dating, and someone that you were dating has ended up in a more serious relationship with someone else, even though that person never broke up with you directly (as there was no serious commitment in place) by virtue of that person choosing someone else, it is a rejection by default. Rejection is a Message When trying to understand rejection, rejection is at its core a message. The question is not why rejection exists; the question is actually, what is the message that a particular rejection is trying to communicate to you. Understanding how to interpret the correct message in each rejection is the key to mastering managing rejection. Before getting into understanding rejection, it is important to understand that unless you are under a particular stage of personal development or are constantly getting rejection to the point where you have not had a date in over a year, keep in mind not to read too much into a rejection. More often that not, rejection has less to do with you as a person, and more to do with what is going on in another person's life. I hear it in my practice all the time how the reasons that someone rejected another had little to with the person they rejected and more to do with that person's own issues. For example, people with a fear of intimacy will go out of their way to find reasons to reject others, blaming the other person, when in fact, they are simply running scared from potentially emotionally healthy relationships or even just sex. Other times, the person is so hooked on waiting for a particular person, that they refuse to take a chance on someone new and will reject all advances. Sometimes, the person is in a "complicated relationship" (which is really a politically correct way of saying they are too scared to make a clean and final break up and move on) and they do not know if they are even single enough to date someone else. It could generally be that the other person rejects you based on the way you approached. Most rejections are not anything to read into, as most people rejecting you likely know nothing about you. Now with that said... When trying to change your behaviors and developing yourself, for the purposes of attracting a soul mate, rejection becomes a great learning tool. Whether your goal is to get a major commitment, sex with the person you are seeing, or even just managing to get someone to date you at all, a rejection from achieving your goals can be a good message about what you are doing wrong, and what you should try next. I often find that asking the person who rejected you why they rejected you, is in fact, NOT the best way to figure out what you did wrong. In many cases, the person who rejects you cannot properly articulate why you got rejected. Most people THINK they know why they rejected someone, only to have that particular reason not matter, when they do not reject somebody else that had the similar trait. That is part of what makes the learning process in relationships so challenging. You can only really ascertain why pervious partners rejected you when you succeed in not being rejected by future partners. In other words, you will know the true reasons you constantly got rejected only after you change your behaviors and no longer get rejected. Prior to my own personal development I was often told that I was being rejected for being overweight. During my personal development phase, I experimented with countless new behaviors to discover how to make myself more seductively attractive. In time, the weight no longer mattered for the majority of people (there will always be a minority that care too much), because I changed the REAL REASONS that I was originally getting rejected; my overall behaviors that were unattractive, for example: being too nice instead of asserting my boundaries. In certain areas of life, relationships being one of them, it is like first being given the test, and then being taught the lesson afterwards. When you are romantically interested in a friend that you has gotten to know you well enough, and decide to chance taking it to the next level and your friend rejects your advances, it should be interpreted as an insult. A stranger does not know you enough for a rejection to be insulting. A friend however knows you enough to know that you make a good friend, which is a key component to making a long-term relationship work. When your friend would rather keep you as a friend, rather that even try, just for one first date, to explore what more the two of you can be, that is an insult. Basically, the message is that you are good, but not good enough to even make the effort to check out if there could be something more undiscovered which could develop into a meaningful relationship. For that reason, when a friend rejects your romantic intentions, it is best to distance yourself from that friend, or end the close friendship altogether. Staying friends with a friend who consistently rejects you (assuming that you keep hoping the friendship will blossom into more) does an emotional damage to the one that keeps hoping for change. The biggest error that people make when trying to interpret rejection is they do not distinguish the difference between being rejected for incompatibility (a particular person does not see a realistic future for this coupling) and being rejected because a person that is unlovable. When I lost my ex-fiancé to my then best friend, there were a few different ways I could have interpreted that rejection. On the one hand I could have understood that she felt he was better suited to addressing her emotional needs than I. On the other hand, I could have understood that there were behaviors that I needed to improve on so that I would not have acted in a way that made me less desirable as a partner. Even more, I could have assumed that they were meant to be, and it was wrong of me to stand in their way. I could have also tried to understand that maybe her and I would simply not have worked out anyway because we really were that different and that if it wasn't my then best friend, it would have been someone else that got in the middle of it. At the time, I was so overwhelmed with negative emotions that the only interpretation I could come up with was that I was not worthy of love. I felt that I was too unlovable to ever really deserve a relationship. It took me years to deal with that demon and slay it. How different my life would have been had I learned to better interpret rejection. Then again, I would not be the very relatable relationship coach I am today without those horrible years of self-actualization. Time has given me another great interpretation of rejection: Dodging a bullet. There are times that rejection is actually a blessing, although it does not seem like that in the moment. There are times when the only worse thing than not getting the date, is actually getting the date. When I look back over the course of my life, and happen to follow up on past interests that have rejected me, I sometimes find myself grateful that I got rejected, seeing how their lives unfolded. I do not wish malice on anyone from my past, however, to see how some of their lives turned out does make me realize that not having gotten involved with them may have turned out to be a great blessing that I simply could not appreciate at the time. Think back to every time you ended up dating someone that you wished you hadn't. Chances are that someone that rejected you could have given you a worse relationship experience...and the fact you dodged that bullet is something you can be thankful for. To use a career-related analogy, if the workplace environment is a toxic one, then the only worse thing than not getting the job, is actually getting it. So the next time you get rejected, be mindful that what you don't know, isn't necessarily better than what you could have found out too late. The mark of true unshakable confidence is when you know, and trust in, your own value and recognize what you bring in to the relationship table. When "the feast" rejections your dish, it will be the dish with unshakeable confidence that will state that the feast doesn't realize the value of the dish it just turned away. Now, anyone with false bravado can say it, but so few people really believe in themselves enough to see themselves as a prize worth cherishing. The sign they do not see themselves as a prize? They stay in unfulfilling relationships. People who value themselves do not stay in unemotionally unhealthy and abusive relationships. There are people who do see themselves as a prize, but that aren't. These people come across as creepy or are simply delusional people. The difference between those peoples with unshakeable confidence from those who are delusional is that the crowds who have unshakeable confidence back up such beliefs of self worth through actions. Under their table of confidence are works that make up the legs to hold it up. They have taken stock of how they live their lives being congruent taking actions that are in line with their own belief systems. They do not take themselves for granted, and do not allow others to do it either. They have learned how to navigate the fears of abandonment in exchange for being alone rather than being with the wrong person. Managing rejection, is at the heart, of reaching a point of loving yourself, and holding out for someone to love you at that same level, keeping your expectations realistic. If you do not have faith in yourself, and appreciate what you have to offer, you run the risk of misinterpreting any rejection you encounter. At that point, you are rejecting yourself, instead of being the one person that you need most in your corner. Frank Kermit Relationship Redemption:
Finding Closure and Self-Forgiveness By Frank Kermit We all make mistakes in life. If you have ever tried to get into a relationship, are in a relationship, or are recovering from a relationship, chances are about 100% you screwed up somewhere on something. If you are lucky, you have a partner (or ex-partner) that either has a lousy memory, or a partner that chooses not to remind you too often of the times you goofed. However, with all that said some mistakes are bigger than others. Insignificant mistakes can be corrected easily. But those mistakes that can detour the journey of your entire relationship, maybe even costing you the relationship itself, are a little harder to process. Even when your ex partner either forgives you, or just does not care anymore about your error that forced about the parting of your ways, people still need to do something to achieve a sense of peace with their pasts. People need to forgive themselves. And for some people, self-forgiveness is mission impossible. In fact, those people who more easily forgive others may struggle indefinitely to forgive themselves for a number of their relationships gaffs, both great and small. There is a real danger that this particular population may very well get into the bad habit of punishing themselves with self-sabotaging behaviors, which makes their circumstances even worse, causing even more acts of unforgiveable bad judgment, and the cycle continues until a person can be overrun with a horrible shame-and-guilt complex that forbids them from the capacity to function in an emotionally healthy relationship. For people who find exceptional struggle with forgiving-thy-self I have often found that the key to the ability to forgive yourself for the relationship faux-pas of your past is reaching a point when you can trust yourself, not to commit the same mistake again. Once you prove to yourself that you have new behavior patterns that would prevent you from ever making the same mistake again, some people find a divine compassion for themselves that they previously could not tap into. People, who repeat the same negative behavior patterns in relationships, will inevitably continue to do so, until they take an active role in learning new behavior patterns, and repeating those new behavior patterns, until those behavior patterns become unconscious habits. When it comes to unconscious habits in relationships, those new habits will foster into an intuition that will give the relationship seekers a sixth sense that will keep them away from bad relationship partners, and point them within the perimeters of potential premiere partners. Sometimes mistakes can include things like infidelity, wrong priorities, superimposing unrealistic expectations, committing too soon, losing their sense of self in a relationship, becoming too needy or dependant on their partner, acting out personal issues from childhood that have nothing to do with their current partner, or simply choosing the wrong people to date. All of these errors can be understandable in their unique contexts, but they can all destroy the best relationships that come into your life. When seeking help in relationships, a person tends to want to seek out ways to fix what they keep doing wrong that lands them to lose their relationship opportunities. Even when they learn what exactly they did wrong, and intellectually know what they need to do next, it is not until they go through a real life experience to process that new knowledge into action, that a person can start to feel confident that they will stop making those same mistakes again. Until that challenge is met, the certainty of their change-work is in question. However, once a person commits to a new behavior pattern such that, they have now reach a point where he or she can trust in themselves, to never make those same mistakes again; THAT is when a person can get to the point of self-forgiveness. In that moment of a newfound respect for self, is the RELATIONSHIP REDEMPTION that allows for even the most hurtful past of any relationship wound to find ultimate closure. In closure on our pasts, through the self-forgiveness of our own personal relationship redemption, we will find the beginning of our new chapter in the book of our life. Frank Kermit |
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