The Truth About Healing From Past Relationships

It’s obvious that time isn’t a healer and we’ve all heard the toxic advice, like in order to get over someone you need to get under someone… so what’s the actual truth about healing?

If you haven't healed, you won’t feel safe, secure, and at peace with anyone. You won't be able to feel loved, even if you are. And you won't be able to love others in a healthy way. You need them to love you, rather than wanting to love them. 

So yes, healing is your priority before you try to move on.

What do you really need in order to heal so you can experience a happy life filled with love, connection, and ease? Let’s explore this topic in this post.

The Basic Truth about Healing

There are plenty of self-help resources out there, from books to videos, podcasts to courses. Despite that, there aren't many that support healthy and effective healing. This is so sad because healing affects our future self and what we bring into our lives.

Whether you're healing from a past relationship, your childhood, or narcissistic abuse, it's all going to influence you.

But here’s what a lot of the resources don’t tell you.

Healing is actually repairing the trust in ourselves.

Hear me out on this one. It’s because we take the blame for how things went because we feel we didn't see something ‘obvious’, or that our judgment must be off. We just accept that we must be in the wrong. 

The problem is, if you don't heal fully, you'll shut people out. That’s because you shut yourself out first. 

How do you know if you’ve done this? The first sign is that you keep yourself really busy. You’re too afraid to sit down and feel what you're feeling. We become very disconnected when we become afraid of our own feelings. 

It's easier to put the focus on helping other people and healing them, rather than working on ourselves. This can lead to people taking advantage and crossing our boundaries. Healing actually refers to the relationship with ourselves. 
 

You Need to Forgive Yourself First

Much of this best healing relates to forgiveness. We don’t forgive ourselves for things we think we did wrong.

It’s not our fault, either.

Society has evolved in such a way that we're taught to do things in a certain way. From a young age, we're indoctrinated into believing we need to grow up, go to university, get a job, get married, have a couple of kids, retire, and then we can do what we want with our lives. 

These social codes dictate what it is we're 'supposed' to do. The trouble is, this forgets the human element. You're allowed to be human. Breakups, divorces, bad decision-making, and hard events are all part of the process. But we consider them failures and we don’t forgive ourselves for them.

But here’s the thing you need to understand.

When we go through these things, as horrible as they are, they help us grow. 

Pain Can Be Your Best Teacher

No one wants to have any level of pain in their life. But without it, you have little motivation to change. Why would you? If there’s nothing wrong, there’s no reason to do anything differently.

Doing things differently is what leads to growth. 

Here’s the trick in turning these painful experiences into something useful. See them these awful things as an opportunity to grow. 

This helps you to flip the negativity and pain into something you can use for a positive outcome. For example, if I hadn't gone through a narcissistic relationship, I probably wouldn't have taken the steps to get to know myself. This business wouldn't exist. And the people I've helped to find love may not have found the ideal partners that they have. All of those positive ripples came from that terrible relationship.

While yes, I wouldn’t actively have chosen that relationship if I’d known better. But being grateful for the challenges we've gone through helps us to make peace with these painful things we didn't ask for.

And yes, people can go through some disastrous times. Just look at the news recently. No one wants to go through what we see people endure daily. But we rarely get a choice about what happens to us. So we can either look for the opportunity to overcome it or wallow in the pain. 

Look at the people who lose a child to a disease like cancer. They often dedicate their lives to providing resources that weren't available to them or their families. Other families don't have to go through the same pain. It doesn’t bring back their child, but it spares other families the same heartache.

What are you doing to contribute to your own healing?

I know it's easy to play the blame game with yourself when things go wrong. You might come out of a toxic relationship and see yourself as being too weak or not confident enough. 

Instead of blaming yourself for whatever your ex said or did, here's a trick you can use to help flip things around. Ask yourself, "What kind of person would you have to be to say or do the things my ex said or did?" Use that energy to examine their failings and shortcomings—not yours.

It’s also important to get to the truth of what really happened. There is always a difference in perception between what happened and what we think happened. Every time we revisit a memory, we're not revisiting the memory. No, we're revisiting our memory of that memory. It alters and distorts the memory every time. Think of it like making a photocopy of a photocopy. The quality will only ever get worse. This means that by simply going back and rehashing old memories, you're getting further away from anything helpful.

Instead, look at what happened from an objective point of view. If it helps, imagine the situation had happened to one of your friends, or a colleague. How would you view it from the outside looking in? Could you see that the couple just weren't compatible? Was one partner incapable of committing to the other? How about emotional availability? 

Once you see the relationship for what it was, you stop seeing a breakup as being a rejection of you as a person. It becomes an ending of a relationship that wasn't working for both partners. After all, you wouldn't want a relationship with someone who was emotionally unavailable, or with someone who mistreated you. This makes it easier for you to walk away from the relationship because you realise it wasn't what you wanted.

Turn it into the most beautiful experience that you can

Life will always have its ups and downs. But instead of bemoaning the downs, ask how has this worked for you, instead of happening to you? How can you get a benefit from this experience? 

Let me give you another example. Imagine you've just come out of a narcissistic relationship. Worse, you have two children with the narcissist. You could spend your energy beating yourself up that they've had to witness the toxic behaviour. Or you might worry that they have to be parented by a narcissistic parent. Perhaps you worry about the effect it'll have on them.

That’s all one way to deal with it. Or you could also recognise that they get to see you heal and repair yourself after the relationship—so they can see what healing looks like. They’ve learned from you it’s okay to leave a relationship that’s painful or causing harm. That is a lesson well worth learning! Thanks to that experience, they’ve also learned what a toxic relationship looks like, so they know what to avoid in the future. 

So yes, I get that you'd rather it hadn't happened at all. But if it has, so you need to reclaim your power, not waste your energy on a 'what if'.

How Is It Helping You?

We're programmed to criticise ourselves. So we often forget to look at how things have worked in our favour. It takes a lot of courage and strength to do that. It's often easier to stay in the dark and pull yourself apart. I call negativity the junk food of emotions because it's so easy to binge on it. What would happen if you reached for something healthy instead? Yes, the negativity is the obvious choice. It's seductive. But it becomes easier to turn to the positive—or even the neutral if you're not there yet—the more than you do it.

Here's a simple way to get started in doing this. Get used to saying one of these two phrases, either "it could have been worse, it could have..." or "At least X didn't happen". With these two phrases, you need to look at what would have been worse about the situation and be grateful that didn't happen.

Say you’ve just left a narcissistic boyfriend. You might say, “At least I wasn’t married to him!” Or you might say, “It could have been worse, we might have started that business together. At least we don’t have to split up a company.” Whatever applies to you. This gives you one tiny step away from beating yourself up and towards getting to neutral before you move towards the positives.

The beauty of this practice is that you can start using it right now on smaller things. Maybe you hit all the traffic lights on the way to work… but at least you still found a parking space. Or perhaps the supermarket didn’t have the things you wanted in the fresh food aisle… but at least they had a frozen alternative. The more you do it in everyday life, the more positive you’ll be able to be. The easier it will be to be positive about the terrible things.

Choose Healing

Self-help is fine, but there comes a point where it becomes known as ‘shelf help’. You know what I mean. This is when you buy the books, enrol on the courses, or bookmark all the videos. You’re going to heal, you are! Just not right now. You’ll look at them tomorrow. 

Or maybe you do read the books and watch the videos...but you don't take action. 

You can only get the benefit of self-help if you actually help yourself.

The only person who decides if you can heal is you. Other people can give you the tools or support you, but you have to choose the healing journey for yourself. This is why I only work with the people who have actively chosen to commit to their healing. 

And let's remind ourselves what healing actually is. Healing means trusting yourself again. It means having confidence. Healing leads to a better state of life.

Sometimes we can get hung up on needing to see someone be punished. I like to think of this as being like that kid at school who was always the first one to tell on someone else. You know the one, "Miss, So-and-So is being naughty!" They like to see others being punished. But if we feel as if the person to be punished isn't available, we punish ourselves instead. We can end up deciding we're a bad person and that no one is going to love us.

It's so important to remember that it's okay to be human. Making a mistake doesn't make you a bad person. It makes you human. Recognising this, and treating yourself kindly, is an important part of building our compassion muscles.

Doing this has a brilliant effect on our relationships, too. When we have a great level of compassion for ourselves, we can have that level of compassion for our partners. Let’s say your partner makes a mistake. You’ve done this work, though, so you can take that step back. You recognise that even though something backfired, their intentions were good. They weren't trying to be malicious. This helps to build a better sense of connection between you because you're not constantly policing their behaviour.

You can get a good sense of how someone feels about themselves by looking at how they talk about other people. Are they generally positive, generous about others, and talk about the great things other people do? They’re probably pretty confident in themselves and have a good self-compassion. 

But if they're judgmental, nitpick about what others say and do, and only ever see negative things? It's a good bet that person holds themselves to standards they can never meet. So pay attention to how you talk about other people over the next few days. If you catch yourself in a constant negativity spiral, stop what you’re saying and practice compassion. 

How Does Healing Affect Dating?

You need to have both a level of self-love and good standards when you start dating. Without them, you'll invite the wrong people into your life. You'll accept less than you deserve. Worse, you're more likely to focus on making people like you than making sure if you even like them. 

If you haven't healed, and you don't trust yourself, you won’t allow someone into your heart. You'll hold them at arm's length and they'll get resentful and leave. When this happens, people often get confused why they're alone again. 

"But I'm a loving person!" they cry. 

Yes, you are. But when you're hurt, you love from a different place than you do when you're healed. That place is one where it's hard to love without being needy or unhappy with everything. Would you stay with someone like that?

Healing also affects the quality of potential partners you’ll notice. You can only recognise if someone is emotionally available if you’ve done that work and you’re in that place yourself. In the same way, you can only recognise if someone else is self aware when you are.

Remember, healing is multi-faceted. It’s about learning, building self-trust, and releasing negative emotions from the body and mind. It’s not just about watching videos and reading books. You need to get hands-on with healing.

But take this to heart. The more you can see within yourself, the easier it is to heal. That makes it easier to see positivity in other people, and the easier it is to have relationships. Best of all, when you’ve healed properly, the easier it is to bring the right people into your life.

Are You Ready to Heal?

I can't tell you to go and heal. You need to go and actually do it yourself.

Most people actually avoid healing because they want to punish themselves. This will only ever break down your confidence and stop you from entering the right relationships. But the benefits hugely outweigh your fears and doubts about it. You can have the loving, nurturing, and enriching relationship you deserve. Get on with healing and it can be yours.

And yes, healing can feel like a lonely journey. But you're not the only person to go through this—and you won't be the last! That's why I created the Academy. It gives you a safe space to process your healing, support others in their healing, and get support in return! This is why so many members meet their ideal partners really quickly without using dating apps.

Are you ready to heal? Are you committed to creating the best life for you? Do you give yourself permission to experience happiness, love, and healing?

If you can answer all three, and only if you answer these, why not come and join us in the Love With Intelligence Academy?