Is Your Negative Self Talk Killing Your Love Life?

It’s another new year. I am not a big believer in new year’s resolutions. Are you? For me, they induce guilt and remorse when I don’t keep them.

But I am a huge believer in new beginnings and do-overs.

There is no time or age limit when it comes to new beginnings of love. Gloria Steinem got married for the first time when she was 66.

We have spent decades accumulating crud that has stuck to us…and has kept us stuck.

Zsa Zsa’s ninth and last husband held birthday parties for her every year in her final years. They were married 30 years and he was with her until the end. It’s a good thing she believed in new beginnings or she would have missed 30 years of being loved.

When it comes to love, we have unlimited do-overs! It is never, EVER, too late. As long as we are aware and open, wonderful new beginnings can come anytime.

Focusing on your own joy is not selfish – it’s smart and necessary.

So, no holiday resolutions for me. Instead, I pay attention to what I’m thinking and how I’m feeling throughout the year. And when I’m not feeling happy, I give myself the gift of trying to fix it.

I learned to give myself permission to consciously nurture my own happiness when I was in my early-40s. Have you given yourself that permission yet? Have you decided that it’s okay – even necessary – to focus on YOU and whether you are feeling the same joy for your life that you wish for others?

I was taught that this kind of thinking was self-centered and completely unacceptable. I needed the help of a coach to understand what bull that was!

Soon after I understood this, I uncovered that for years – decades even – I’d been feeling a deep sadness. It was (almost) always beneath the surface, no matter how great everything else was in my life.

And then came the Big Ah-Ha of my life: not having a loving, committed relationship with a man was making me Really Unhappy. I wanted that love wayyy more than I wanted more clients, more friends, more travel or more stuff.

That’s what led me to a conscious decision – a commitment to myself – to give my love life a huge do-over. If I wanted to Feel True Joy…that’s what I needed.

And as much as I blamed my age, my weight, men being idiots, etc., I felt deep inside that there had to be other reasons I was still single. After all, equally “imperfect” women all around me were finding love, happiness and commitment with good men. But not me.

Our greatest saboteur is the junk in our head.

So…I pulled out a mirror and looked at myself. It was hard to do, and no way could I have done it without support! We started uncovering what was going on inside my head. Here are a just a few of the things that were rolling around in there:

* I’m not the kind of person that could be someone’s #1. (Apparently one learns that early on when raised by a narcissist parent.)

* I need to protect myself from men. They will hurt and reject me and I can’t handle that anymore.

* I’m too old and too fat to be desirable to men.

* I’ll just keep making the same mistakes and never get this right.

For decades, every time I went to a singles event or walked out the door to yet another first date, I was holding on to these thoughts as truth. I believed that it probably wouldn’t work out. I was wasting my time. No man I wanted was going to pick me.

And lo’ and behold…I was right!

Happily Forever After wasn’t anywhere in sight for me. (Oh how I loved being right!)

Our past does NOT have to determine our future.

Just because we haven’t been able to accomplish something doesn’t mean we never will. Life is full of small steps that lead to big changes, right?

My coach helped me see that I was already pretty good at do-overs. I had accomplished several major scary career changes; I had overcome cigarette and drug addiction; I had recovered from hurt and failures galore and I had resolved some painful family dramas.

(I bet you have a list of these too.)

Then my coach led me to these two more gigantic life-changing ah-ha’s:

  #1. The common denominator in all my experiences with men was ME.

  #2.  If I was responsible for my crappy love life…that meant I could Fix It!  

Excellent!

Fixing it meant Learning. It meant changing decades of how I was being with men. That obviously wasn’t working.

So, I decided to tackle this the way I tackled all those other do-overs: with smarts, determination, a big heart and – most of all – trust in myself. (I rocked, damnit!)

Owning our junk means freedom…and love!

Look, I fought these new realizations for some time. I freaking hate being wrong and I hate bad things being my fault!

I wallowed for a while in feeling stupid for not figuring this out sooner. I was pissed at myself for wasting so much precious time believing I was right and men were wrong.

But I finally had to call bullshit on myself.

Think about it. How could I be showing up with the confidence and vulnerability needed to attract the kind of man I wanted when I had all those thoughts? And how could I honestly give men a chance if I thought that they were such superficial jerks?

And how could a good man even wiggle his way in through all my internal negative yammering?

I was the one sabotaging myself.

THAT understanding, though a little painful, was my holy grail!

All the confusion I had over the years…all the self-doubt, the anger, the insecurity as a woman…

all the rejection and feeling like there was something wrong with me…

accepting that my internal beliefs were leading me to my endless romantic failures was a spectacular, and positive turning point in my life.   

Once you understand it’s junk, it’s easy to dump.

We have spent decades accumulating crud that has stuck to us…and has kept us stuck.

Now I know that just because I have a THOUGHT, it doesn’t mean it’s TRUE! And what we perceive as true can screw us up big time.

At our age we have had so much junk piled on that it can be like slogging through quicksand to get to our truth. Or for that matter, to get to our thoughts.

Our parents, our siblings, our exes, our girlfriends, magazines, movies, media, the crap we read on the internet…all telling us what we should BE, THINK and FEEL as a woman. They’ve also been telling us who men are.

But, hey…do they know?

I finally learned that if we want to blaze our own path to true joy in our lives, we must allow ourselves to Pay Attention to our feelings and our needs. Only then can we start creating our own happy life.

What we perceive as true can screw us up big time. We are responsible for digging that junk up, looking at it and dumping it if it doesn’t serve us.

Okay…this didn’t happen overnight for me. But geez, I had accomplished so much in my life – so many new beginnings – that I figured I could do this too. And I did.

Want to know my new truths?

* I am my own kind of special and beautiful, with a loving open heart the right man will treasure. (My mother was just incapable; it was no reflection on my being worthy of love.)

* I only need to love and trust myself, and I’ll be able to handle anything with men. My walls were so high all those years, those men never even knew me, so how could they reject me?

*I’m my own kind of gorgeous. Besides, grownup men aren’t the doofuses I used to date.

* I have learned to take great care of myself and I make good choices.

THOSE truths led me right to love.

Okay…so what’s your junk?

Which limiting beliefs are keeping you single? Do you see the possibility that you could be wrong on this?

Do you show up with men holding in your fears, but put on a smiling face anyway?

Or you are just feeling stuck and don’t know why?

Does it seem easier to just stay single?

Have you convinced yourself that having committed love in your life – being a man’s #1 – isn’t that important?

I have talked to thousands of women who felt or still feel like I did…like you might. They have all this JUNK that is getting in the way of love.

So I’ve created a short, doable, hugely affordable program that will start shifting your self-sabotaging beliefs like I shifted mine. It will set you free from what is keeping you single.

I call this new program Dump Your Love Junk: Start Anew Feeling Refreshed, Optimistic and Ready for Love.

To hell with resolutions. Instead, simply say “yes” and give yourself permission to get help with your love do-over. Use your smarts and your courage to uncover and challenge your beliefs.

This is a must-do first step, sister. Every journey, just like mine, begins with acknowledging what you want and need to be happy…and believing — truly believing — that that wonderful, forever love IS in your future.

I hope you’ll let me guide you there. Because that love IS your future. And, hey, if this isn’t for you, or isn’t your time…I understand. I’ll be here for you when you need me.

 

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