If you have surpassed the stage of acceptance and are aware of the unhelpful thoughts that are holding you back, it is time now to start looking at the present situation. If you are not there yet, do not get frustrated. Give yourself some more time, continue to be cognizant of the points mentioned above and you will get there.
THE PRESENT
5. Count your Blessings
Look at your present without giving the past any thought and see yourself in an objective light. Force yourself (if you have to) to think about the various gifts, blessings, people, support, assets, and abilities that you do have.
Keep a gratitude journal to remind yourself of these, especially on the days you catch yourself beginning to slide towards negative thoughts. Do this for a few weeks to assure yourself (and rightly so) that your life has not ended just because a relationship has ended. A gratitude journal can make you come alive to the many things that are still extremely positive in your life.
6. Make Changes in Your Life
With this more confident self, you can now begin to make some significant changes in your life. This will mean removing things and people from your life that are toxic and holding you back from moving forward. Review your social media friends and decide how you want to deal with it.
It is not always necessary that you block all common friends or even those who seem to take sides and fuel your anger. With acceptance and self-confidence, comments made by other people should not bother you anymore. However, if you do feel that you get too agitated with some remarks, you may want to block them, at least for a while, till you claim yourself back.
THE FUTURE
7. Visualize your Future
Once you are in a better place, it is time to focus on yourself and allow yourself to grow from this new awareness and perspective. Make sure that you do not start this phase unless you are completely at peace. Visualizing your future from a place of resentment and anger can lead you into a different kind of wormhole. Those are not likely to be your real dreams but dreams that emanate from a place of rebellion.
Take time to dream about your future. Think about the things you would like to do. If you had been holding back and keeping your own dreams on a backburner because of the relationship, now is a good time to think what you would truly like to do. You are footloose and fancy-free now.
(If you find yourself being scared to dream, you can attribute that fear to something associated with your own self rather than the relationship. You may have been using the relationship as an excuse to get out of something you found terrifying.)
Write in to me if you want a free tool that helps you visualize into the future.
8. Create your Goals and Detail out Action Steps
Once you see yourself in the future, define your goal specifically. This is an important step so that you can give direction to your energies and your actions. The goal you create for yourself ideally should be specific enough for you to assess your progress. It should be realistic, practical, and achievable. If you are not ready to put a timeline to the goal, allow yourself to stay in an undefined space as long as you are moving ahead. As you come closer to your goal, you will yourself want to create some deadlines for yourself.
Do not forget to create positive affirmations about your goal and put those energies out there. While you have to keep doing your bit, creating positive vibes around your goal helps your motivation and helps you believe in yourself and your goals.
9. Detail your Action Steps
Based on the goals, create action steps that will guide you towards your future. Do not worry about creating a full business plan or a year-long time table for yourself. Start slow and small and make a broad list of things that you will need to accomplish your goal.
After that, prioritize them and create short-term weekly to-do lists that helps you move towards your visualized future.
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The best way of overcoming pain is not to dig into it. See the pain but do not react to it. One needs to live with it and at the same time avoid getting overwhelmed by it. Feel like crying? Cry and forget. Learn from your pain and move forward. Make your tears a reason for future happiness.
What do you say?
Love your comment about ‘seeing the pain and not reacting to it’ Seeing makes you a witness to your emotions, thoughts, and actions and that is an important and inescapable step towards consciousness.
I do feel that reaching that state for some (the state of being a witness) requires you to ‘dig in’ to it and understand the futility of enhancing pain by over-thinking it.
I don’t quite understand what you mean by ‘Make your tears a reason for future happiness’, though.
I have used “tears” here as an analogy of pain. It is normal to cry while in pain or when one is hurt or grieving a loss. The moot point I mention in the previous sentence “Learn from your pain and move forward.”
Derive lessons from pain and tears and use that to evolve, so that you are better prepared to manage your pain, hurt or grief.
I look at pain and sorrow from a different perspective. Sorrow that survives as an emotion is still controlling you – sorrow that survives as a memory is healthy.
I believe that sorrow is great teacher. Sorrow strengthens the spirit. Each one of us experiences sorrow at some point in life. On its own it may not have the ability to liberate, It teaches those whom it affects to liberate others.
Sorrow has the potential of binding humanity in one thread. Our innumerable moments of happiness may not help us climb even one-step of the ladder of humaneness but a single tear does not fall without making life sweeter and fertile.
When sorrow survives only as a memory, it is no longer sorrow. It becomes am incident.
Happiness also has the ability to connect. It is exuberant, it wants to jump, it wants to embrace. True happiness is able to enjoy and partake in the happiness of others too (and not get enraptured by jealousy and envy).
Sorrow has the potential, no doubt, but without awareness, it becomes an adopted egoistic (aka Freud) identity.