Complete Relationships

Welcome to This Daring Adventure podcast, where we work on bridging the gap between where we are and where we want to be in order to live a bigger and bolder life.

In this podcast, we will provide inspiration, tips, and skills you need to make your life the adventure you want it to be. Here's your host, mindset mentor and life coach Trista Guertin.

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to This Daring Adventure thank you so much for joining me today. I am your host, Trista Guertin.

This is episode 79 on Relationships Can Be Complete.

I wanted to talk about relationships because I was working with a client this past week and she was, she's going through a divorce. And it's painful, of course, any relationship that's ending will usually involve some sort of pain and particularly a marriage can be a very painful process. And we will experience a range of emotions, including grief and sadness and disappointment and frustration. And this is all normal. It's all a part of our human experience. And it doesn't mean that anything has gone wrong.

It is something that we will have to go through and we can't rush it and we can't resist it and we can't numb it and buffer it away. We just have to go through it. We have to allow it and we have to process it just like any other emotion.

And I know for myself, I've often spent time arguing with reality. Trying to figure out why the relationship ended, if there was something that could have been done differently, if I had made different choices and somehow just not believing that it should be over, and that something really has gone wrong, and there's this remorse and this confusion.

It's something that plays on your mind from time to time you, you land up ruminating about it. of course what happened particularly with the marriage is that you go into it and you have this vision of how we think the relationship should be. and how they will be, the other person will be.

Particularly with marriage, we have this fantasy.

We have this idea of the romance and that it, it lasts a lifetime. And maybe if you have kids, you have an idea of how they're going to be as adults and how that relationship should be.

But in actual fact, it rarely works out that way and it doesn't live up to our vision and what we imagined it to be. And then when it doesn't, we believe that something has gone wrong. sometimes the story happens quite differently in reality than we thought it would and it ends as it did for my client.

And what I suggested to her was that her relationship with her husband was complete. I think this is a really useful idea to try on because it gives you a completely different perspective.

When it's over, if you can look at it as something that was meant to happen and did happen, Like it ended and the ending was meant to happen and that it did happen, so you're not arguing with reality. And that the way it ended, the story ending, the story of you and this other person ending has happened perfectly. And now it's over as opposed to looking at it as something that has gone terribly wrong. And shouldn't have happened in the first place, which is often how we look at things in our past and which serves us in no way. It doesn't serve us at all. It's painful. And it increases our suffering. It just adds suffering on top of our pain, but this suffering is not necessary.

If you can think about the relationship in a way that it was always going to be What it was for everyone involved and that nothing went wrong. It all just was what it was because that's our human experience and now it's complete. And what it gives us when we think about it that way is a little bit of space. a little bit of breathing room, a little bit of release, and you're not beating yourself up and you're not beating the other person up.

Otherwise you're spending time going back, looking backwards, ruminating, and trying to rewrite What happened in the past either the entire relationship beginning the relationship the end of the relationship. It doesn't matter. You should have had this shoulda woulda coulda but it doesn't work because it doesn't change anything and again, it's just adding that extra layer of suffering.

Instead if you can look back at it and think what if it was perfect?

What if I didn't need to have done anything differently than I did? What if the other person didn't have to do anything differently than he or she did?

What if what happened is just the relationship that you've had, that you were supposed to have? And then you can define it in any way.

And if you define it now as complete, as whole, not something that you're striving to, to change in the past or to get to in the future, you can take some of the pressure off yourself.

Give yourself a little bit of ease. when somebody dies, when someone's life is over, we don't spend time second guessing about how they live their lives. the decisions that they made, we're not talking about how they could have done it better or differently.

It's complete. Their life is complete.

But for some reason when we experience something as a relationship ending or we make a choice to end it. We tend to second guess ourselves. We think we could have done it better, we could have done it differently. We spend a lot of time arguing with reality. We argue with the past.

And when we do that, the arguing never ends. And it just lands up causing more and more unnecessary suffering. You're spending a lot of time, a lot of energy, spinning your wheels stuck in a hopeless cycle. How do we know what is a marriage or any relationship for that matter supposed to be like? How long is it supposed to last? Who really knows?

We get a lot of messaging. We have a lot of expectations.

We've been programmed by a variety of different sources that, marriages are supposed to last forever. But is that really true? Is that real?

For some people, that might be. But for a lot of people, it's not. what if you decide that your relationship was supposed to be exactly the way it was and that it was supposed to last exactly how long it lasted and now it's complete. And anything that argues with that involves beating yourself up or beating the other person up is unnecessary and thinking about it in this way that it was exactly the way it was supposed to be, that it lasted exactly as long as it should have.

That it's now complete, will bring you ease it might bring you some release There will still be pain. You will still experience pain from the loss But that's okay because that is a part of your human experience. You can allow it you can process it. You carry it with you through the days until you don't, and that's how you get through it.

That's how we live our day to day. That's how we experience pain in the cleanest way. And we can't be in a hurry to get through it and for it, the pain to end. When we try to hurry it and replace it or fix it, we just prolong it. We just make it bigger. We just compound the suffering.

So try on the thought that your relationship is now complete. It's exactly the way it was supposed to be. It lasted exactly as long as it was supposed to. And now it's complete. And this will work for a marriage, this will work with friendships, it will work with any relationship. And it will bring you some peace. sometimes you won't know exactly why a relationship's ended. And sometimes you will have to end it, and sometimes the other person will end it. And I think there just has to be that trust. That it's okay, and that it's okay to experience the pain, loss, the grief, the sadness, the disappointment.

But it's not about blame, and it's not about arguing with reality. It's letting go. try that on. If you caught my episode last week on negative emotion is not a problem that you have to solve. I talk a little bit about allowing emotion and processing it. It's one of the most effective ways that you can Help yourself in these situations and help yourself get through it and just experience the pain without causing additional and unnecessary suffering. but just remember that if you're experiencing the pain of loss from a relationship ending, it's okay.

Nothing has gone wrong. You may not have had a choice about the relationship ending, but you have a choice of how much suffering you want to endure in the aftermath.

All right, that's what I have for you today.

Thank you for joining me. If you have a moment to rate, review, share, or subscribe the podcast, I would greatly appreciate it.

If you're interested in learning more about coaching and working with me, you can access my calendar in the show notes. I would love to speak to you and tell you more about my coaching programs.

Coaching is an amazing way to change your perspective, to learn tools and skills that help you to show up differently in your life and show and help you to approach issues and problems differently and to help you go after your goals and create the life that you really want. I have my new six week jumpstart to building a better relationship with yourself and I'm super proud of that and I would love to tell you more about that too. So get on the calendar and my show notes and hopefully I'll see you soon. Take care everybody. Bye bye.

Thank you for listening to This Daring Adventure podcast with your host Trista Guertin.

We hope you enjoyed the tips and conversations on how to get excited about life again.

As always, you can head to tristaguertin.com for additional resources and to book a one on one coaching session.

You can also follow Trista on Instagram at tristavguertin.

Don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. Thanks again for tuning in and we'll see you next time.