Have you felt the heartbreak of losing the “love of your life,” and now you want them back? Or perhaps you feel trapped in sadness after a breakup and don’t know how to move on. 

Either way, this is the first aid you need right now.

In today’s video, I explain the #1 thing that defines our reality during a breakup, and show how the obsession we might feel during a breakup can have its roots in the early days of dating someone. And if you’re on the fence about getting back with your ex, the 3 steps I share today can help you make that decision.

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MATTHEW HUSSEY

If you’re in pain right now because the love of your life ended things with you, and you want them back, this video is for you. Because in this video, I am going to talk about what it might take to get someone back and how we can use this advice to also move on from a person.

For those of you that don’t know, I am Matthew Hussey, a coach specializing in confidence and relational intelligence. And for the last 17 years of my life, I have been helping people find love.

So, welcome back to the channel, friends. Don’t forget to like this video, subscribe to this channel if you haven’t already, and hit the notification bell, so that the next time I release a video, you get notified.

Now, I don’t normally talk about this subject for obvious reasons. It’s an extremely sticky subject and questionable as to whether we should ever want someone back especially if that person didn’t treat us right. But there are relationships where someone didn’t treat us badly and the relationship ended for reasons that perhaps could shift. But the beautiful thing about it is everything I’m going to tell you is also going to be the thing that actually helps you get over them.

I have divided this video into three separate parts. Before I get into these three parts, allow me to tell you a quick story. A person that I coached, a man, had someone that he broke up with, that he had been with for many years, but no longer felt was right for him. He had a couple of big issues with the relationship that weren’t anything to do with this person’s character. But just things that he was really struggling with. And he got to the point where he felt like he needed to make a clean break and go back out into the world to see what else was out there.

In the wake of this break-up, both of them suffered. She suffered from feeling like she lost the love of her life. He suffered from losing someone that he had broken up with and was feeling the pain of missing constantly. But despite them missing each other and despite him being in pain, he never went back to re-initiate the relationship.

That is, until one day, ten months later, when the two of them met up, and he saw something that made him reconsider everything.

Part 1, what happens in a break-up?

Okay. So, someone breaks up with us. It is devastating when we loved that person. It feels like we have lost the one thing in the world that we need for our happiness. It feels like we can’t breathe, we can’t eat, we can’t sleep. Our world is falling apart. And in that state of obsession, which in some ways is not entirely unlike the obsession that we can feel in early dating when we like someone, that obsession that we feel when we go on a few dates with someone and we’ve decided, “Oh, my god. I think this is it. I think this is my person. I see the potential. I see where this can go. I see everything that this could be.” And then they don’t call us back. That obsession that we feel in a break-up is actually very connected to that early dating obsession because it has its roots in the same thing.

“This person holds the keys to my happiness and my future.”

When someone breaks up with us, we had pictured a future with that person. We had pictured a life with them, a reality where both of us existed together. And now, that reality is shattered. The only difference in early dating is that we have a lot less evidence for that reality. There’s far more projection involved than is involved in a multi-month or multi-year relationship where we’ve had a lot more evidence for the fact that this is going to be a big part of my life or this is going to be my whole life.

So, there’s a kind of obsession that takes over. And that’s what turns into that obsessive rumination that we feel in a break-up. For many of you, you’re there right now in that obsessive rumination. And for those of you that are there, I am sorry. It is the absolute worst. It is a terrible place to be. And it does feel when you’re in that place like nothing is going to make us feel better. And part of the reason that it feels like nothing is going to make us feel better, part of the reason that it feels like this is catastrophic for us, is to do with our focus and what we are connected to right now.

In a breakup, we become connected to one thing and one thing only—the loss that we have experienced.

Imagine that you have this giant spotlight and where you shine this spotlight determines your reality, the story you’re telling yourself, and how you feel.

And so, this giant spotlight that you have, which is the most powerful thing, imagine that this spotlight is the bringer of all emotions. It’s the most powerful thing you have. And you take this, the most powerful thing you have, and you shine it on this area of your life where you have experienced this loss, this person who no longer wants to be with you. And as long as you’re shining the spotlight on that loss, which isn’t just a present-day loss, it’s also you’re shining it on what feels like the loss of your entire future. So, there’s the story there. The reality is I’ve lost this person. The story is I’ve lost my whole future. And all the emotions that come with that are the pain, the desperation, the obsession, the grief. All of that is coming from shining a spotlight on this break-up.

Now, that may not even be a new thing. It might be that you’ve been shining that spotlight on the relationship for the entire time you were in the relationship, saying, “My reality is this relationship. And that the story is that this relationship is the best, maybe the only really good thing in my life, but it’s certainly the best thing in my life.” And all of your emotions are coming from that relationship which, by the way, might have been good at times. “I’m elated. I’m excited. I feel fulfilled. I feel loved.” But it also might have been the reason why in the relationship, you felt terrible a lot of the time because any time that relationship wasn’t perfect, any time you didn’t get a text back, any time you didn’t feel loved, you felt desperate with anxiety. You couldn’t get through the day. You felt like you couldn’t focus on anything else until you had resolved that argument with that person, until you had got their confirmation for the third time that day or that week that they really love you.

That spotlight was on the relationship then. So, it might be that now, this is just a graduation of where the spotlight already was.

Why am I saying all of this? Why such emphasis on this spotlight?

Well, because where that spotlight goes determines our reality, our story, our emotions. So, what happens in a break-up is the spotlight gets shone on one place when, in fact, our life is much bigger than that. Our life is made up of many things, many components. We have our friends. We have our family. We have ourselves and our inner world and our inner growth that is just ours. It doesn’t belong to anyone else or isn’t in relation to anyone else’s. It’s just ours. And it’s very common to become disconnected from everything else in our world. And the key to starting to feel better is to get connected to other things in our world, to really lose ourselves in the friendships we have, in the family that we hold dear, in something we’re learning about right now that we’re curious about that we have a powerful curiosity about.

Every single one of these things is a universe of its own. There is so much depth to all of them. You could lose yourself in all of them. And all of them tell their own story and have their own emotions attached.

We can take that spotlight and shine it on any other part of our world we want at any time. And it feels like the most unnatural thing to do when we are obsessively ruminating over this one area that we have lit up right now. But it’s actually the answer. We have to get connected to everything else in our world.

And I say this to people not just in a break-up, but in the beginning of dating. In the beginning of dating, it’s really important when we like someone that we get connected to everything else in our world that’s important to us, and that we stay connected to it. Because what happens is, we’re experiencing a lot of joy from different parts of our life and things that gave us meaning. And then we meet someone that knocks us over with their charisma, the way they light up a room or how big their life is. And we suddenly forget everything that’s important to us in our lives, everything that makes our lives special, everything we love, everything that gives us a deep sense of meaning. We lose connection with those things. And this person becomes the only thing that matters.

The moment we decide we like someone is the most dangerous moment in attraction because we lose focus on all those other things. Whether it’s in a break-up or in early dating, never ever let anyone make you feel like your world is small without them. That your world doesn’t matter. Stay connected to what’s rich in your world.

And by the way, if someone comes along in your life, and it feels like, “Oh, they’re big, and they’re exciting, and they’re shiny, and they have such an amazing life, and they’re so impressive,” don’t ever let that person distract you from what’s magical and what’s important in your world. You might be a nurse who works with five dementia patients. And outside of that very difficult and long days, you go and see your friends who you love. And you have a hobby on the side that you really enjoy and that gives you a lot of meaning. And between those three things, you have a big life. Just because someone comes along and it looks like they have a bigger life or somewhat something that’s outwardly splashier and more impressive. Don’t ever let that distract you from the rich meaning that is in your own life. But you have to connect to how big and rich your life is. Okay?

And that’s something that we often lose in a break-up. It’s often something we lose while we’re in a relationship especially when we’re spending so much of our time pleasing someone else, trying to be what we think they want us to be, trying to show up for them and their needs, and never tending to our own garden, never looking at our own life and the richness in it and connecting to it. So, we can be forgiven in a break-up for forgetting just how big and rich and important our own life is.

There is a wonderful quote in the movie, A Man for All Seasons, that I included in my book, Love Life, for anyone who doesn’t know. It’s a moment where Sir Thomas More is giving advice to an ambitious Richard Rich who feels that he won’t be worth anything unless he achieves his grand ambitions. More wants him to know that there are more profound ways to achieve a sense of significance than the kind of superficial goals that Richard Rich is trying to attain.

More says to him, “Why not be a teacher? You’d be a fine teacher. Perhaps a great one.” Richard Rich, “If I was, who would know it?” Thomas More, “You, your pupils, your friends, God. Not a bad public that.”

That is a beautiful exchange that shows one person who thinks that the richness of his life is going to come from this big thing, this big achievement, or in some cases, in our love lives, we think it’s going to come from this person that we date and what they add to our lives. And another person who sees that the richness of this man’s life could come in far more subtle ways if he really connected to it.

Now, in the story I told you about, the danger for the woman in that scenario is that she would now spend months and months, maybe even years, shining the spotlight on him and how he was her world, and she had lost her world.

Did she do that? We’ll find out.

Part 2, the Matrix.

Those of you who have read my book know that there is a chapter called The Identity Matrix. And in this chapter, I described a certain kind of confidence that comes from having multiple sources of validation and significance in your life. I draw a square, and inside that square, I draw smaller squares that represent these different sources of significance, and validation, and identity in your life.

Now, for some of us, our matrix, I call it the identity matrix, is dominated by one very large square that makes up the majority of our sense of significance and our identity where we get our validation. And for a lot of people, that’s their relationship. Not for everyone, for some people who don’t have a relationship, it’s their career. For other people, it’s their kids. For other people, it’s their looks.

People can have a very dominant square in their matrix and the danger of a very dominant square in your matrix is that it’s responsible for too much of our identity, our significance, what we think makes us attractive, or worthy. That means that when that square goes away, we don’t just feel like we lost that thing—that career, that relationship, our looks as we age. We feel like we have lost our entire identity and sense of worth.

And in a way, what I’m talking about with the spotlight is that over time, when we spotlight one area of our matrix, that thing can grow and grow and grow. But it often grows to the detriment of the other parts of our life.

So, if our relationship ends up being how we identify ourselves, we put so much pressure on that relationship working and never going away, that we start to suffocate that relationship or we start to become too anxious in that relationship or we start to contort ourselves to whatever we think someone else wants us to be in order to keep that relationship going, and we lose ourselves in the process, maybe we even lose the respect of the person we’re with.

Ironically, in our identity matrix, the key to keeping a square strong is knowing that we have other squares that can support us if that square were to ever go away.

I think about this matrix like a tabletop. And the tabletop is our confidence. And underneath it are the legs that support that tabletop. Well, if you only have one leg supporting your confidence, and that’s in the case of this particular video, your relationship, the relationship you’ve just lost, then when that relationship goes away, it feels like your entire confidence is shattered.

But if we build up other squares in our matrix, we’re putting other sturdy legs under the table. So now, that one thing is no longer a crutch supporting the table. It’s just one of several strong and sturdy legs. That means that when we lose it, it can still hurt. We can still grieve. It can still be a tremendous loss and a tremendous disappointment. But it’s no longer catastrophic to our confidence or our sense of self.

So, what we need to do with this matrix is have a very honest look at how much of our pain right now is coming from simply the grief of losing someone important to us and how much of it is not just that grief but a whole other level of suffering that is coming from the fact that our entire identity and worth was built around this relationship, their desire for us, and our ability to retain it.

So, the important takeaway for all of this is that our identity matrix is a huge part of what is making us so unhappy in a break-up and what prolongs heartbreak for so long. But that we, actually, have full control over our identity matrix. It is malleable. We can change it.

And the woman in the story I’ve been telling you about changed her identity matrix in crucial ways that made a huge impact.

What’s up, everybody? Sorry to interrupt my own video. I just wanted to let you know that we only have 35 spaces left for my Live Retreat in Florida this September from the 9th to the 15th. If you want to spend six days with me, getting to know more about your story, helping you through some of the deepest things that you want to work on, this is the place we do it. It’s only happening once this year and this is your chance to get on board.

So go to MHRetreat.com, grab one of those 35 places before they’re gone, and I hope I will get to see you there. Back to the video.

Part 3, My Challenge to You.

So, we have talked about the fact that during a break-up, losing someone that was really important to us, one of the things that makes it so hard is we take this powerful spotlight we have and we shine it only on that, and we lose connection with all of the other sources of richness and beauty and confidence and meaning in our world. And the identity matrix is a very visual illustration of how we may have done that over time both inside the relationship and now, in losing it.

So, if we want to start to feel better, it stands to reason that we should find a way to diversify our identity matrix away from that one square, so that there are other areas of our life that can bring us a new reality, a different story, and better emotions when we shine the spotlight on them.

My challenge to you is to do this in one of three ways, if not all three. The first way is to take a square that already exists in your matrix but has started to shrivel and atrophy over time because this other giant square that perhaps was the relationship got so much of your focus. What in your life has withered that if you started to invest more time and energy into it would start to grow and blossom and flourish again into a deep source of meaning and richness in your life?

We value what we invest in. So, if you’re thinking right now, “I don’t want to do that. I don’t really value that part of my life,” know that there’s a very strong chance that’s because you haven’t been investing in it. When we start investing in something again, we start to value it more. And when we value it more, we can find that, magically, this other thing that held so much value for us starts to feel a little less important because other areas become more important.

So, one part of this challenge is to diversify your squares in your identity matrix by focusing more time, energy, and investment in one that already exists but has atrophied over time.

The second way is to create a brand-new square in your matrix, one that never existed before. As a thought experiment, just think of something that you’ve always said you wanted to do, maybe it’s dancing and taking a dance class, maybe it’s a new skillset or qualification that you wanted to get, something that you wanted to go back to school for, or it could be something that you wanted to do for the first time.

It doesn’t matter what it is. What matters is that this didn’t exist before in your matrix but could begin to exist as a new source of validation, significance, meaning, identity.

By the way, it doesn’t make sense for all of your self-worth to come from any of these things. But it can help us to add something that starts to allow there to be more sources of confidence in our life because having too few makes us vulnerable. So, adding a new square. What could that be for you? Maybe leave a comment and let me know. What’s a new square that you would like to add to your matrix? Something that you think could be a new source of confidence for you if you actually started to do it.

And by the way, that doesn’t mean you have to get good at that thing. It doesn’t need to be something you get good at to become a source of confidence. It just has to be a new interest, something that you derive richness from, something that you derive meaning from, something you enjoy that takes focus away from certain other things that you thought were your world.

The third part of this challenge is to take something that is already something you have in your life that you could be grateful for if you shone that spotlight on it but maybe until now or for a very long time, you have taken for granted. Because our identity matrix is only made up of things that we actually put focus on. That doesn’t mean it’s made up of everything that exists in our life.

So, I’m going to give you an example from my life. For a long time, I have been speaking, focusing on my ability to public speak, to make videos, and I’ve also been writing. I wrote my first book over ten years ago. I’ve written many articles. I just wrote a new book. But my writing and my speaking were things that for a long time, I kind of took for granted. These days, I don’t do that. I remind myself that if I lost everything, if I no longer had a cent to my name, if for whatever reason, my whole life imploded, what I would still have is my ability to speak well, to have a facility with language, and to write well, hopefully. 

My ability in those two areas is something I am now intensely grateful for. I appreciate it. I’m shining the spotlight on it. And in doing that, even though I’ve been doing them for a long time, they weren’t necessarily part of my matrix. But now, they are because I am shining a spotlight on those things.

So now, they are powerful sources of confidence and security for me. I know that everything else in my matrix could go away, and I’d still have those skills, and those skills would give me a sense of courage and security in knowing that I’ll be okay because I’ve got these skills.

What could those things be for you? It doesn’t have to be skills. It could be the love of certain people in your life whether they’re family or friends. Maybe you’ve taken for granted the love that you have around you and actually, that’s one of the greatest forms of security there is.

George Bailey, at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life, he gets called the richest man in town not because he has the most money but because he has the most friends and support, the most people who are willing to show up for him. Are you already the richest man or woman in town because of the love you have? Have you taken that for granted? If you started to actually shine a spotlight on that, could that become a whole new giant square in your identity matrix? That doesn’t even need more effort, just more recognition. And that by recognizing it, you’d realize that this story you’re telling yourself that everything in your life is bad, that your life is over because you lost this one square, is actually not true at all.

So, those are my three challenges to you. You could do one of them or you could do all of them. Put more effort and investment into a square that has atrophied to make it bigger and stronger again, create a new square out of something you’ve wanted to do for a while, and lastly, put focus, shine a spotlight on something you already have but maybe has gone underappreciated and undervalued.

Now, earlier in this video, I told you a story of a guy I coached who broke up with someone he had been in a long-term relationship with because he no longer felt it was right.

What happened the day those two met up again ten months later?

He noticed something profoundly different in what he was seeing.

Now, what I didn’t tell you earlier is that in those ten months, she had changed her identity matrix. In the relationship, he had often felt like she didn’t have her own sense of purpose outside of him. In those ten months, she went and got a job. Not just any job, but a job that made her really happy, a job that gave her meaning, a job that made her feel fulfilled, a job that allowed her to feel like she was getting better at something. And that made her proud.

What the job also did was it gave her a brand new circle of friends, an entire new community that she was starting to connect with, and get closer to, that was becoming a source of connection in her life, outside of anything she had previously.

And that just so happened to be another one of the challenges he felt back when they were in a relationship. That he was her only source of connection. That she didn’t have friendships of her own. That she didn’t have her own world socially outside of him.

When the two of them met back up again, as she began to talk about her life, the things that were going on in her life, the things she was excited about, the things she was proud of, as her phone lit up from messages, from people that were excited to see her this weekend, as she talked about what she’d been doing this week in her new job, he started to see a very different picture of the person she was and her identity matrix.

That began a brand new relationship between them. In the weeks that followed, they started talking, reconnecting, and became exclusive again, in a brand new relationship.

And new is the important word there. It wasn’t the same relationship. They didn’t restart their relationship. They began a new one on new terms, on new attraction, on a new way of looking at each other.

What’s so important about all of this is that she didn’t do these things for him. She did them for her. They were an authentic indication of her intention to move on with her life and strengthen her own identity matrix. But when he saw that new identity matrix, he found it incredibly compelling, so compelling, in fact, that it took his spotlight and shone it on her. And in doing so, he saw a new reality with her, a new story of what the two of them could be, appeared, and he experienced new and powerful emotions towards her.

And let me issue you a warning. When you do these things for yourself, there is a very good chance the side effect will be that these things that draw this person back to you will be the very same things that make you no longer need them. And when you no longer need them, if they’re wanting you back, you’ll be able to now objectively assess whether you want them. Now, instead of needing them back, you’ll no longer need them back and you’ll be able to assess whether you want them back.

And for many people that I do this work with and get to this point, they find that they no longer want the person. They needed them before because of the way that their identity matrix was set up. But now that their identity matrix is structured differently, they’re able to see that, “Now that I no longer need them, do I want them? Actually, I’m not sure I do. They’re not nearly as impressive as I was telling myself. This isn’t a good partner. This isn’t someone I want in my future.”

So, be prepared for that. If you actually take this advice in this video, six months from now, you may find yourself in a place where the thing, the person, you thought you needed to breathe, now that you’ve learned to breathe on your own, is someone you realize you don’t actually want.

And if you realize that’s true, and you want to go out and meet someone new, I have something really cool for you.

I have just created a brand-new, free guide. So many of you have been asking for this for a very long time because it’s been years since I created a new free guide in this kind of a practical, written format. I’ve just created a new free guide called Spark and Connect where I give you nine things that you can say to spark up a connection with a brand new person.

So, if you want to go out there and create more opportunities with new people, and why wouldn’t you? Why limit yourself to the possibility of someone from your past coming back to you? Even if there’s some part of you that would like that, don’t ever limit yourself to that. This is a way that you can go out and expand your options, and dare I say, find someone even better for you.

To download this guide for free, go to WhatToSayNext.com and it would take you ten seconds. And like I said, this literally spells out nine different ways that you can connect with new people in life.

Thank you so much for watching this video. I have really enjoyed making it for you. And I look forward to reading your comments. Don’t forget to go to WhatToSayNext.com and download the guide before you forget. And I will see you next week. Be well and love life.