Healing Journey To Authentic Relationships: Episode 2

Get cozy and grab your favorite drink, because today, I'm sharing my deeply personal love story—my "Shero's Journey." This is my path of self-discovery, healing, and finding the love I had been searching for my entire life. In this episode of Stop Chasing Unavailable Guys Podcast, I am going to talk about the moment I decided that had to do things differently if I wanted a different result, what led up to that, and what happened when I got the support I needed to make lasting change and fins authentic love. If you’re feeling like it’s too late for you to find love, or that you’ll never break out of your patterns, I want you to know that it’s never too late. You can create your own love story, and it doesn’t have to look like mine. You deserve the kind of love that makes you feel seen, heard, and valued, and you *can* attract it by connecting to your authentic self. I hope my story brings you inspiration, hope, and the belief that love is closer than you think.

Transcript

Welcome to the Stop Chasing Unavailable Guys podcast where I teach single women over 40 the fastest path to find Mr.

Right,

So you can stop wasting time on emotionally unavailable guys.

I'm your host,

Truly Eleanor,

And I'm here to give you the tools to find the love you desire.

After years of coaching women worldwide and breaking my own patterns to find Mr.

Right in my 40s,

I know love is closer than you think.

Let's get started.

Welcome and get cozy.

Today I'm going to tell you my love story,

What I call the Shuro's Journey that I went on to find love,

The kind of love I had been desiring and looking for my whole entire life and yet somehow I had chosen these unavailable guys time and time again and I really wanted to break that pattern.

It started as a child and I grew up in a volatile household where I didn't have a healthy role model in my parents.

They did not have a healthy marriage and they were not happy and so I internalized that kind of a role model and began to chase after any kind of attention,

Feeling invisible and feeling like I wasn't worthy of love.

I continued on this pattern in the guys that I was looking for and so through my teen years,

My 20s and 30s,

It was just a constant chase for that validation to have someone tell me,

Yes,

You are worthy of love and constantly focusing on the guy and saying,

What do you need from me and what can I do for you and being really in that codependent people pleaser kind of role my whole life and through my relationships.

Fast forward to my 40s and I'm in Toronto and I've been living there for a decade and going through these relationships and feeling more and more hopeless the older I became.

So after 40,

I went on this downward spiral of thinking,

This is never going to happen for me.

I cannot find love.

I can't break out of this pattern no matter what I do and just feeling like I was going around in circles like a merry-go-round.

And that year I decided to go back home to Vancouver in Canada and my hometown.

I just felt a very strong pull to go back there.

So in my typically impulsive kind of way,

My spontaneous kind of way as an Aquarius,

I was like,

Okay,

I'm going to sell all my stuff,

Put some stuff in storage,

Whatever it is,

Grab my cat and head over to Vancouver.

So I moved over there,

Landed on my mom's couch and she said,

Okay,

Well you can stay here and that's fine.

And so I was living on her couch and not feeling great about myself.

I'm 42 years old.

I have a cat and nothing else except my lived experience,

Which is worth a lot,

But at the time it didn't feel like anything.

So I decided I'm going to start dating again or maybe I'll just see who's out there.

Lo and behold,

I become connected or come across my ex-boyfriend of 16 years old,

My first love,

And we reunited and there was this hugely big attraction and I was like,

This is it.

He's my star-crossed lover and this was meant to be and all of these things.

And I completely jumped in headfirst thinking,

Okay,

This is a sign.

This must be a sign.

And of course I ignored all the red flags.

I ignored the fact that he was going through a very messy divorce,

That there was a huge amount of drama around him,

Swirling around him,

And that I was in a very unstable position in my life.

I really had nothing to hang on to in my own life and I was very ungrounded,

So to speak,

And he was very volatile.

And so of course it made for a terrible combination.

I didn't see it coming or I'd say that now,

But of course I did.

I knew deep down what I was doing and that it would crash and burn.

He started looking for condos and he said,

Hey,

Do you want to move in with me?

Of course I was like,

Yeah,

That sounds like a great idea.

I went with him condo shopping and started the wedding in my head,

Visualizing the wedding and how amazing it would be and how I would tell everybody that I knew,

Look what happened.

We got reunited and I'm marrying my first boyfriend.

That's so romantic.

A couple of weeks later,

As you can probably see from a mile away,

He texted me at around five 30 in the morning to tell me that he was not in a great place,

That he needed to be single and that he hoped I would understand.

Of course I was completely devastated.

I crashed and burned and I couldn't get out of bed.

Actually I didn't even have a bed.

I couldn't get off the couch.

I was depressed.

I just collapsed inside myself and completely gave up hope.

The interesting thing is over the next couple of weeks or even the first few days,

I felt this huge amount of building energy within me,

This conviction inside of me and the voice was saying enough is enough.

This will never happen ever again.

And it kept repeating over and over again until I decided,

Okay,

This is the moment in my life where I take the new path,

I stop the pattern and what do I need to do?

What do I need to do differently?

Because everything I've been doing up until this point has been a complete and total failure.

So I said,

Okay,

I'm going to have to look for people who are going to help me.

I'm going to have to do the uncomfortable things.

I faced some trauma that I was avoiding like the elephant in the room.

I connected with my inner child.

I got the support that I needed.

I talked to someone in a vulnerable way who could actually help me through this.

Whereas before I had said,

Oh,

I can do this by myself.

I'll just do all the self study things and I'll do the things that don't require me to tell anyone about it.

It's just me between me and the universe,

Which is great.

There's an amazing amount of growth that you can get from that,

But I had gone the length of that journey and the next part of my Shiro's journey was to open up to other people and tell them my struggles and to have them hold me in that space and to witness me and to help me to transform out of that.

Essentially I did all the things I didn't want to do.

I faced all the things I had previously been scared to face and I began to change and connect to my true self in an authentic way that I had never felt before,

Even though I'd been doing my personal development journey for many years and decades.

This felt different because I had the line in the sand.

I was like,

This is enough.

I'm not going through this again and I will do what it takes no matter what.

One year later,

I go onto the dating apps and I'm ready to create a new story and build a new life.

Ten days into being on the dating app,

The very first person I meet is my husband.

We both had been on a dating app for 10 days exactly.

We were both each other's first person to meet during that time on that dating app.

We met for the first time at a restaurant and we closed the place down.

We just talked for three hours,

We connected,

We laughed.

I felt safe with him.

I remember the first time I hugged him,

It was like I felt like I was home in his arms.

It just continued from there and we were inseparable.

We married a couple of years later.

Before that,

Even before that,

Three months into it,

We moved in together.

Everything went very quickly,

But it felt safe.

It wasn't a sort of dysfunctional jump into it and see what happens.

It wasn't a chaotic kind of feeling.

It was a very strong feeling of this is right.

When you know,

You know.

I remember someone saying that at a party that we went to.

When I introduced him to my friends,

Someone said,

Hey,

When you know,

You know.

I have the kind of relationship with my husband where I can be myself.

I can feel safe to express my vulnerability,

To tell him things I haven't told other people before,

To share the things that I feel might be not so great about me,

And to voice when I'm upset,

To voice when I don't feel heard,

And to share with him how I'm feeling.

Being his support and having him support me and help me to open my heart more and to trust more and more,

Knowing that we're both a work in progress.

We're both growing and sharing together and we're testing and feeling things out and how do I feel getting safer and more and more open as the years go by is the kind of relationship that we have.

I'm not saying we're perfect and I'm not saying I've arrived and I'm suddenly this perfect person and I'm in this wonderful fairy tale kind of relationship.

It's a real and grounded relationship where we're building a life together that we both desire,

That we both have envisioned.

That's the kind of love we have and that was the pattern that I broke instead of fitting myself like an emotional pretzel into someone else's life or trying to become what I thought someone else wanted.

To say all the things I thought someone wanted to hear,

Instead I was doing the uncomfortable things and saying,

I don't like that or I don't agree with that or let me tell you how I feel about that.

And learning the art of negotiating,

Learning the art of authentic expression and feeling safe in that and knowing that we're there for each other no matter what through this process.

That's the number one thing I hear from people is there's this underlying belief,

Oh,

You have it perfect and you're married and you're a love coach and everything is wonderful.

And it's like,

Of course we fight and of course I had a lot of insecurities and things in the beginning because I wasn't used to this kind of love.

I wasn't used to the kind of relationship where I had to show up as myself,

Where I was showing up completely and fully.

And previously I had hidden so many parts of myself from someone else.

That's a very scary thing to all of a sudden be expressing and showing myself.

It hasn't been easy.

It's 100% worthwhile.

It's an amazing journey I'm on and I wouldn't change it for the world,

But it is uncomfortable.

It is different.

And looking back on the relationship patterns that I had come from,

It was all about the other person.

It was all about the guy and how much I could almost put myself in their shoes to the point where I would disappear.

There would only be one person in the relationship.

I would be the guy because I had morphed myself into becoming like them or being so much in their experience that I didn't even have an experience.

It wasn't about me.

So it's almost like I had to construct myself or just build on my own self and become visible.

And so I want you to know that this is possible and no matter how you're feeling,

Even if you feel like,

Oh,

It's too late,

I'm in my forties or I'm in my fifties and I just,

It's just too late.

I just can't seem to figure this out.

I want you to go one step further and say,

I can't figure this out,

But someone else can help me figure this out.

Help me to connect to the part of myself that has all the answers.

Help me to see the possibilities.

Help me to connect into that different experience of how to create a different experience,

How to bring in a different way of being.

So if you're thinking to yourself,

I can't figure this out,

Take it to the point where you can say,

But someone else can.

I can benefit from Eleanor's story.

I can benefit from somebody who has been through this and I can benefit from her experience and her intuition and to help me to connect into my own intuition.

I can lean on that.

That's really what I want you to take from my story is A,

Yes,

It did work out for me.

Absolutely.

And B,

You can work out your own story.

It doesn't have to look like mine.

It doesn't have to be,

You can follow the framework and the technique that I have developed and create a totally different story for yourself,

A totally different love story with a different lifestyle or something different that you can envision.

I'm not going to give you this cookie cutter thing where you've got to live this kind of life or this way or whatever it is.

You get to create and imagine your own love story the way that you want it to be.

How do you want to live your daily life with this person?

How do you want to spend your weekends?

How do you want to wake up?

How do you want to go to bed?

What do you want to experience during the day with them or at work?

How do you want to have your lifestyle with them?

How do you want to feel when you're with them?

These are all the questions that I ask you and of course,

It's going to be your own answers.

There is no right or wrong answer.

This is about connecting into a deep part of you where you actually bring forward those desires maybe that have been long hidden or that you have suppressed and the needs that you have put aside to finally bring them forward and say I'm going to give them a voice.

The more you can express and connect into your authentic self and to put it out into the world,

The more you're going to obviously attract what you desire and who you desire from doing that.

It's not going to come from contracting and hiding yourself and protecting yourself and saying I've been hurt in the past so I have to protect myself.

I understand that from a point of view where I did that for so many years but I also know that the more you contract and go within yourself in terms of hiding,

The less you're going to be,

The harder it's going to be and the less you'll be able to actually connect with someone who's going to be on the same wavelength as you.

You're going to be constantly connecting to someone else's vision,

Someone else's desires,

Someone else's needs and then try to pigeonhole yourself into that which take it from me is the hard way.

It is like also fruitless because eventually you get to the point where you're like none of my needs are being met and I feel alone and even though I'm in a relationship,

I don't feel loved and I don't feel connected and I don't feel like this is something I want to be experiencing.

I hope this has been helpful and I really want you to take that inspiration,

Possibilities and hold it close to your heart because my intention was to help uplift you and to give you an example of a story of someone who has gone through this and come out the other side and helped other people come out the other side and so you come away with a feeling of hope and excitement of possibilities and remember love is closer than you think.