One day I woke up to a humbling realization. I wasted so much precious time by being in a painful broken relationship that had reached a point where I felt it couldn’t be fixed.

For an entire year I felt anger and anxiousness for the duration of the time we spent and lived together. What I failed to realize is the precious life – energy I was losing by choosing to remain in an uncomfortable situation.

I had gotten to the point where the dominant thoughts and emotions I was feeling were full of anger, worry, and anxiousness.

What I didn’t realize is how those negative thoughts dominated the space of happy thoughts. Negative and positive thoughts can’t co-exist, because one of them is always fighting for dominance.

At that time I didn’t have the mental intellect or emotional capacity to understand such things.

My mind was too absorbed with negative thoughts and, what I failed to realize is when our mind focuses on something whether negative or positive, it amplifies it.

On the other hand, when the mind lets go of something, it reduces in importance. As humans, we tend to accumulate a lot of baggage. That baggage will tend to cloud our judgment and can weigh us down.

We tend to accumulate that excess baggage in our minds and have a hard time letting go of what is no longer beneficial to us. Surely we all get hurt in life, it’s part of our growth cycle and some of our biggest pains and lessons can come from our relationships.

It can be frustrating and painful when we feel disconnected and can’t get our needs met, or when we feel our loved one rejects us, or ignores us. It’s in these times we are forced to become someone we are not.

For some of us our natural instinct is to shut down or ignore the pain. We withdraw into our shell, close ourselves off emotionally and build a wall. We withhold affection from the person who caused us pain.

If we refuse to talk about this, eventually these emotions turn into resentment, which then causes us to really distance ourselves from the other person.

We become emotionally numb even though we are physically present. We avoid intimacy all together. We tap into our thoughts, forget we have a body and stop listening to what our emotions are telling us.

Instead we get seduced by our own words – I am alone, I am not good enough, I failed another relationship, etc… We become endorsements of those thoughts and words.

During that time, my life was filled with sadness, confusion, and a deep sense of loss. I had lost myself because I stayed far too long trying to hang on to something that eventually made me physically and emotionally ill.

So how did I deal with the pain? I left and I acknowledged that it hurt, I accepted that it hurt, I allowed the pain to be as it is, eventually it dissipated.

There were many days when I felt closed off, but I knew this is not the space I wanted to be in. I continuously made the effort to open up again and again no matter how uncomfortable I felt.

I opened up to myself and to others to keep the connection alive. Socrates once said: “The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.”

I made peace and forgave him for any pain that I felt.

One of the hardest things you will ever go through is being hurt. It takes a lot of courage, patience and determination to live with an open heart, to stay with the pain, to reconnect after you have been hurt.

But when you do, the rewards are unimaginable. One day you will meet someone who is the perfect match for you and you experience more intimacy, more peace, more joy, more growth, more meaning, and a deeper connection. More of everything you truly wanted.

I realized that people often act from good intentions, ignorance, or in reaction to their own pain. They are human; they are imperfect, like you and me.

If we really want to make changes in our life, we will find a way. If we don’t we will find an excuse.