Micro Talk: She Broke Up With Him

She broke up with him.

This is a random,

Make-believe case study about a random breakup.

I chose this because it's so common in our everyday lives.

Sam was confused.

He was on a temporary break with his girlfriend.

She was called Sally.

And so Sam was spending some time with his best friend and telling him all about it.

He had always been faithful,

But Sally had wanted to spend more and more time on her own.

She said she wanted some me-time to get back into doing just one or two things on her own.

She had actually started to feel a little trapped in their relationship.

And she'd been neglecting things that were important to her.

Sam felt that he was in love with her.

He craved to have her attention.

He'd wanted more and more of her time,

But it got to the point that it became more than she was comfortable with.

As it goes,

Sally was being completely genuine about wanting more time alone to do things that fulfilled her.

It wasn't an excuse,

But Sam had taken this as a sign of her rejecting him.

He'd taken it the wrong way.

And so as a result of this,

Sam felt a combination of frustration,

Jealousy,

Anger and fear.

He didn't know what he was feeling,

As it was a mixture of all of these things.

He would go over and over the same patterns of thought about why she would do this to him.

He was totally absorbed in one perspective,

His own.

He wasn't able to see that she simply wanted to have more of her own freedom.

He began to say things to her to make her feel bad and insecure.

Sometimes he didn't even have to say anything.

It would be in his actions which sometimes didn't need any words.

When this happened,

She felt drained,

Guilty and would sometimes give in to his indirect requests.

But Sally didn't want to end the relationship permanently.

She just desperately wanted to spend a little more time with her own interests and things that she valued.

Taking some time to herself,

To walk alone,

Go shopping,

Maybe even learning to play the ukulele.

Changing Sally's mind made sense to Sam's mind.

If he did this,

She would stop taking this free time to herself and he would feel secure again.

Everything would be okay because she would feel obliged to spend most of her time with him again.

Then everything would be okay.

Or would it?

Let's break down what was happening here.

Sam and Sally had been together for a few months now.

After a while,

Sally realised that she had been neglecting things,

Friends,

Hobbies,

Time on her own.

Having reflected on this,

She then chose to spend a little free time on her own again.

When Sam became absorbed in thoughts about all the ways he could stop her from doing this,

He would then try to change Sally's mind with his actions and words.

The bottom line is,

He just wanted to control her.

So,

Behind the actions,

What was going on here?

Let's unpack this.

Sally's decision for choosing to spend a little more time on her own evoked strong feelings of fear and insecurity within Sam.

And as a result of this,

Sam was unwilling to be with these feelings each time Sally began to make these choices for herself.

Sam didn't want to experience these feelings.

And so naturally,

When we don't want to experience feelings,

We have a tendency to struggle with them.

And what I need to emphasise here is that it's not that it's Sam's fault.

This is how society and the way we are brought up teaches us to be.

We are taught to feel sad is bad,

To feel low is bad,

To feel guilty is bad.

No wonder we sometimes struggle to get away from these feelings.

So for Sam,

Just like millions of others,

Feeling the way he felt seemed not normal.

As a result of this,

Sam tried to get rid of these feelings.

He tried to control how he was feeling by trying to control Sally.

The only way he knew how to do this was by trying to change her.

When Sam first started doing this,

He used to successfully get reassurance from Sally that everything was okay.

So when he felt a bit insecure,

Sally would recognise this and give him some reassurance.

But it was never enough for poor Sally,

And so he struggled even more to try and convince her to try and control her.

But it was never enough for poor Sally,

So he struggled even more to try and convince her to try and change her mind to try and control her.

He thought that the more he struggled for her,

The more she would come back.

When Sam started to do even more with his actions and words,

He'd say hurtful things that gave her confidence a knock,

And then act like he was the one that was being really hurt.

It would work sometimes because Sally would feel guilty and then cancel her plans that she'd made for herself that afternoon.

When she cancelled her plans,

This would then get rid of the feelings of fear and insecurity within Sam.

It worked.

But the important point here is that it was just a quick fix.

Sam wasn't able to notice and make space for his feelings when Sally said she wanted to spend time alone,

And so he continued to struggle and be unkind.

But this pushed her away even more.

This naturally brought him into a greater pit of despair and desperation until one day Sally decided to empower herself.

She finally called for the temporary break up.

She did this to get some much needed headspace.

Sam was unable to recognise that his thoughts and his actions about trying to change Sally were merely a short term fix to how he was feeling.

In the longer term,

This was having the opposite effect of what he really wanted because Sally began to withdraw from him.

But quick fixes are what addictions are all about.

And so it became an addiction.

Sam became addicted to doing all sorts of things to try and change her mind.

Argue with her,

Blame her,

Try and make her think that her friends were not worth it,

That her hobbies were not worth it,

Say that he was deeply hurt and that she was selfish,

Etc etc.

Just like every human mind,

In lots of situations when a sense of fear is evoked,

Sam's mind doesn't care about the long term.

It's set on fixing things in the short term.

Like most minds do when they are presented with feelings of discomfort,

They look for a way to solve the problem of how we feel.

But solving the problem of how we feel is only a quick fix.

And it only makes things worse in the long term.

Indeed,

Sam continued to struggle and try and control Sally more and more.

And so eventually,

Sally ended the relationship permanently.

To live a life that didn't feel restricting.

She was free to be herself.

For this,

She was confused and thought it was her fault.

Now she recognises those behavioural patterns and has vowed to never let them restrict her in any way by anybody.

Here's a final thought.

If Sam had opened up to his feelings of fear,

Jealousy,

Insecurity,

Etc.

When Sally chose to spend some time on her own,

He may well have become more able to be with his feelings.

If so,

He would have strengthened a neural template within his brain that meant he was getting better and better at doing this.

Being more flexible with his emotions,

Even though they felt uncomfortable.

And in doing so,

Acting in a way that was best for both of them.

He would have been making a change on the inside.

This is an example of what it means to be part of the change.

And maybe,

If Sam had done this,

He would still be with Sally today.