This is here after, and I'm your host, Megan Divine. Each week we tackle big questions from nurses, therapists, and other helpful folks that let us explore how to show up after life goes horribly wrong. This week, getting ghosted by your therapist, and whether you should smile or scream when someone tells you your dead sister is your Christmas angel? Your holiday horror stories, and my hopefully helpful advice coming right up after this first break. Before we get started, one quick note, well, I hope you find a lot of useful information in our time here together. This show is not a substitute for skilled support with a licensed mental health provider or for professional supervision related to your work. Hey friends, we made it through the holidays. Hopefully you all survived. I also hope you had at least a tiny bit of joy or warmth from the season and best the holiday season could have given you. On this show, though, we tell the truth, and I gotta say the word in our inbox is that the holiday season was a tough one. So we wanted to do a holiday debrief show here for this first show of the new year, both to check in and to figure out a way forward. We got a lot to talk about, so let's dive right into the inbox this week. I am so excited everybody because Kim, our producer, is going to read the questions for us, So let's get right to it. A new therapist stood me up after I drove an hour to see her. When confronted about it, she said I needed to be patient with her, saying, and I quote, your husband's death set off unresolved feelings I have, and now I can't get into the Christmas spirit. Okay, So when we first saw this question, the entire team started cracking up laughing. And I'm watching Kim here as she's trying to read this question clearly, so y'all can hear it, And we had to do it a few times because she was laughing. Here's the thing. As funny as this story sounds, this is an actual, real thing that happened to a real, live person during what was supposed to be an experience of feeling supported and helped by a professional. So yes, on one hand, it is really funny. I mean, who says that your husband's death set off unresolved feelings I have and now I can't get into the Christmas spirit, like who says that? And it really is hard to be a human being with feelings and good boundaries when it is your job to deal with other human beings with real feelings and real boundaries. So let's take this apart a little bit, because there are so many things wrong with this one little story. I think there's also a question implied in here, right, Some of this is a listener sending in sort of an outrage story, like can you believe has happened to me? But there's also a question that I hear in that. The question that I hear in that is why should I bother going to get help? Why should I bother working so hard to find someone to help me when this is the kind of support I get. There's almost a futility or a frustration that I hear in this question. So one, yes, it can be really really hard to find a good therapist. This is why I really like to have an initial call with a therapist or a doctor or anybody you're sort of leaning on in a professional capacity to help you through a hard time. Give them a call, find out how they're going to respond to what you're living through, so that you can save yourself that outurd drive, or that filing on your insurance, any of those things, like a good preemptive call can sort of weed out a lot of unfortunate situations. The second thing, I kind of want to talk to the therapist here for a minute. Remember, just a second ago, I said that it is hard to be a human being with feelings and boundaries when your job is to deal with other human beings and their feelings. I think what we can talk about is, what's a better way to say I can't work with you, rather than shaming the person who's coming to you because their grief harsh your holiday mellow. That's the other thing that I hear in this story, right, is that the therapist used some language there that maybe they shouldn't have used. The effect is that they shamed the person going to look for help, as though it was this grieving person's fault that the therapist couldn't get her holiday spirit on, Like that's just very very bad boundaries. What's a better way to say I can't work with you, not just for a therapist, but for a doctor or really anybody. What's a better way to say I can't do this with you? If you'd rather avoid shaming the person who's coming to you for help. So ap blow things. This therapist might have said one, don't ghost people right, Send a text, send an email, leave a voicemail saying something like I really appreciate how much it took to call and ask for help. I need to let you know that for personal reasons, it's best that if we don't work together, I'm happy to help you look for someone else if that would feel helpful. Otherwise, I wish you the best in finding support you deserve. You hear what I did there. It's okay to have boundaries as a professional. It is okay to have feelings as a professional. It is not okay to use your feelings and your experience to shame or ghost somebody else. Yeah, okay, we have more strange and interesting holiday reports read to you by Kim right after this break, So come on back for more. Her friends, welcome back. So, maybe you are listening to this show on your way to work. Maybe you're listening to it while you are talked inside a blanket for it with a cup of something warm and soothing, whatever you're doing. This next question about the odd human quirk of using religion to erase uncomfortable. Reality is a doozy, so settle in. Okay, This listener says, my family member keeps referring to my sister who died last year around Christmas, as my Christmas Angel and talking about how much fun Christmas in heaven must be. I know she means well and just wants me to know that she's thinking of her, And honestly, it feels nice to have her name mentioned. But picturing my living, breathing, snarky best friend, non religious partner in crime as a weird cherub just doesn't work for me. Thankfully, I can imagine her making some hilarious joke about it, so it does make me smile, even if it's not for the reason she thinks. Well, I do hope there's an afterlife somewhere she's sipping my ties with everyone we've ever loved. I do now I'd rather her be here. How do I deal with people's need to turn my person into an angel? Why does she have to be a holiday icon? Now? So remember in our last question where we were kind of laughing at the question and the whole therapist ghosting thing, and then I brought us back to their real, live, human beings. Underneath this admittedly funny story that's not actually funny. As soon as Kim started reading this question, I got all choked up because, on the one hand, it is kind of a funny story, but it's also really heartbreaking. This happens all the time. People use their personal beliefs to dictate how other people should feel, how they should grieve, where they should find comfort, and how much fun they should be having. Right, helpers, don't do this. I'm never going to say that one belief system is corect or incorrect, or you should do this one and you should not do this one. Like, whatever you believe, if it brings you comfort, yea, I love that. What we need to understand, though, is that personal beliefs are not universal beliefs. We can actually hear it in this question from this listener, like she says, my family members are really religious. They have a very specific idea of where my sister is now that she's died and not using her physical body anymore. That is not a sentiment that I share, and it's not one that my sister shared. So this dissonance between belief systems is a big point of friction for grieving people and for helpers. So the thing number one here I want everybody to remember is that personal beliefs are not universal. The second thing, though, is even if this listener shared that belief that their sister is existing in some other Christmas Angel form, it doesn't erase grief. It doesn't erase the pain attached to this sister not being in the room, being the snarky, living, breathing partner in crime rolling their eyes at Christmas angel ideas? Do you hear I'm going? Even if you believe that there is a life after this one that we don't know about yet and sidebar here, nobody knows exactly what happens. Even if you believe that, your belief doesn't cancel out the pain of missing the person. So that's another important thing that I want to take with us. Even if you believe, or other people believe that something exists after death and that your person is all around you, they still aren't here and we want them to be here. So what can you say instead? If you're a helper, you can say something like, you know, in my belief, I really believe that your sister is all around us right now, and I take a lot of comfort from that. Make it about you. That's awesome. I love that keep your beliefs about you and how they impact you, and try not to use them to dictate what somebody else might be feeling. If you're on the receiving end of this kind of statement and it's not working for you, it's okay to say something like I'm so glad that you find comfort in your faith. That's not a belief system that works for me, but I'm really happy to hear it's helping you. That's a really kind and inclusive, non shaming way to set a boundary. Yeah, so I can talk about this religion belief stuff forever, but I gotta keep us rolling around to the next question, the New Year's breakup. So remember how many times I've said in earlier shows that this show isn't just about death and death related grief. Grief is everywhere. We can use those same kinds of communication skills like that that I just mentioned about setting kind but clear boundaries with people around you. You can use these same foundational principles to everything from the mundane and ordinary to the things that forever alter your life, same relational approach to everything. Now, something that fits in that vast in between. Stuff in between the mundane and ordinary and the possibly forever life altering is the New Year's breakup story, Kim. This listener says, Megan, I really appreciated your tips from a few weeks ago. I felt very prepared for the holidays with my family. I even put boundaries around talking about my job and my personal life. What I wasn't prepared for was finding out that my boyfriend of seven years had been planning to break up for a while and used New Year's Eve as the excuse to do it. I gotta say I'm truly thrown. I'm sad, but I'm also really angry. I don't want is direct my year. But I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do. Should I get right back out there? Should I take time for myself? Any advice is great. I feel like there are probably a lot of people who could have asked this question this time of year. What is it about New Year's Eve that makes people decide now is a good time to break up? I mean, I guess I already know the answer to that question, right. It's related to what we were talking about in the last couple of shows with New Year's Resolutions. And how do you want to feel? I think sometimes the mark on the calendar gives people just that one extra push that they needed to get out of something that isn't working for them. That can be kind of harsh, especially for this listener, when they're like, wait a minute, we're supposed to be talking about good things for me and not having compassion for the jerk who broke up with me on New Year's Eve. But I do think that you've got a lot of company around this time of year. I hear about a lot of heartbreak like this, There are other people dealing with a surprise breakup right alongside you. Doesn't fix how crappy it is, but it does seem to be something that happens to a lot of people. So let's get into some answers to this question, what do you do now? First of all, I also want to validate. I love that you said here like I'm also really angry. I think that we are so like anger bad must have some greater perspective, like no anger is good. Anger is a normal, natural human response to a feeling of injustice, and it sounds like this breakup doesn't feel very fair, So of course you're angry. What should you do about it? Should you get yourself right back out there? Should you take time for yourself? And my answer to that is, I don't know. I think you get to experiment. Going back to something that Kate Bowler and I talked about in the last couple of episodes towards the end of the year about New Year's resolutions. Remember we talked about you don't want to make a resolution about what life looks like, but you can make some resolutions about how you want to feel in the days and weeks and months that are to come. We can apply that to this New Year's you've break up situation. How do you want to feel? Maybe you do want to get right back out there, as you said, right and dive right back into the dating pool. What I would suggest, though, is that you do that with some real intention. What are you hoping for when you go back out there and you start dating, mostly so that you can do the how what do we call that? Like? So you can do the debrief for yourself when you come home from a date. You can say, here's what I was aiming for. Did I get what I was looking for? I was looking for a distraction, I was looking to feel loved and wanted and attractive again, did I get what I was looking for? My point here is that there's no right or wrong thing to do after you've had a heartbreak. What I do encourage you to do is ask yourself what you need on some experiments to see can I get what I'm looking for? And then check back in with yourself after the fact. Did I get what I was looking for when I went back out, when I went for a run, when I went dancing in a public health conscious, socially distanced sort of way, How do you want to feel? Try out some things that you think might be helpful, and then check in with yourself. There's one tiny thing that I want to make sure that we talk about, because there was one more question here from this listener, should I take time out for myself? Where I go with that is like you know that thing that we tend to say to ourselves and to other people, like you have to be okay with being alone before you can really be with another person. That is chunk. I will say that as a therapist. That's sort of a standard therapist line, Like you have to be okay with yourself before you can be with somebody else. Okay, if we follow that logic through, that would mean that every single person in a relationship, in a long term relationship, had themselves figured out before they got into it, or else they wouldn't still be there. You see how that all falls apart really fast. It is a lie that you need to be perfect before you can be in a good relationship. So should you take time for yourself when you've been dealt a big blow like this, any kind of heartbreak or loss? I don't know. Do you want to do? You want to take some time to just be alone with yourself and listen to yourself and think about what you need and what you learned and what you might want for yourself going forward. Sure, I love that stuff, but don't do that because you think that you are inherently flawed and broken and that you are a self improvement project that needs to be completed and wrapped up before you're deserving of love again. Yeah, take time for yourself if you want to do whatever you need. I think we can also go back to that piece about how do you want to feel and apply it to everything we've talked about today. Every single one of the questions that you sent in I think, how do you want to feel as you negotiate these things or navigate these things? How do you want to feel the next time rather unskillful support lands in your lap because it's going to how do you want to feel? What do you want to do when you look back at those interactions, those events, those breakups, those blips in the emotional screen of your life. We don't have control over how much skill somebody comes to us with. We don't have control over the timing of terrible news or terrible events. We really have control over very little. One of my least favorite memes, I feel like the show could very easily be memes Meg and Hates. One of my other least favorite memes is like, um, the only thing you have control over in a situation is your response to it. We'll get into that one on a different show, but I think the underlying message in that is like, if only you thought about this terrible thing better, it wouldn't bug you so much. That's definitely not what I'm talking about. What I'm going for here is really like, when you look back at an interaction, what I want for you is that you feel like you advocated for yourself. You were clear and direct about your needs. It doesn't change the crappy support, or the poorly time to break up, or the terrible thing that happened. But what is under your control is the effort you make to care for yourself and to get yourself out of situations that are uncomfortable and not serving what you need in that moment. Yeah, using these tools to help yourself navigate anything that comes at you. Those are tools of self advocacy, communication, and relationship building. Really, all of this work is about relationship building friends, the good stuff, the hard stuff, everything in between. I think that's a great note to close on today. Stay tuned after this commercial break for the questions to carry with you and some scripting because I know you all love that. We'll be right back each week. I leave you with some questions to carry with you until we meet again. It's part of the whole. This stuff gets easier with practice thing. You know, I love it when you practice. This week? What's your thanks but no thanks? Plan? Look, we all mess up the whole being supportive thing. I do this for a living and I still stick my foot in my mouth all the time. It's embarrassing. You are absolutely going to encounter support from people therapists, doctors, friends, colleagues. You're going to encounter support that doesn't work for you. One option for a response is just the whole like smile and nod thanks for thinking of me, aren't you? Nice response, which is totally valid and a tool you should have in your toolbox. But what about for those times when you want to say more advanced planning for this is a great idea In the moment, it's like, you know how you always think, like, ah, I would have said this, this is the comeback. I would have said, like, advanced planning is your best defense against that man. I wish I had said this. Come up with a few stock phrases that you can use in these kinds of situations, just a couple of them. You do not need an entire dictionary to flip through to find which one of your collection you want to use. That that's not time efficient. Come up with just a couple of stock phrases that you will reuse over and over. Your stock phrases might be something like this. It sounds like your faith brings a lot of comfort to you, and that's not a faith I share or I know. It seems helpful to tell me that I need to be okay with myself before I date again. But I don't need to be perfect to be loved. One deflective statement I used this very morning was those sound like really interesting ideas for your living room. I'm going to take a different approach with my own house. You see what I did there. I used the same skills that we've been talking about in really sticky, griefy, heartbreak weird support situations and applied them to something really mundane and ordinary, in this case, somebody telling me what I should do with my own living room weird. These same skills can be applied to a lot of situations. So whatever situations are really bugging you or that you seem to run into, often come up with your stock phrases. Use them to redirect the situation. Use them so that you feel like you advocated for yourself and didn't sit there listening to things that made you just furious. This week, whatever prescriptive support comes at you, remember that it's going to be easier to set a boundary if you have mapped it out ahead of time, So go on and give it a go. Do some advanced planning your future self will thank you. And if you need a little more information on this whole stock phrases to deflect supportive pressure thing, check out the show notes. We're gonna link to some other episodes where we talk about this very thing. I want to submit your question for me to possibly address on air. This show is nothing without your questions. It's literally a Q and a show. And if you don't send in your questions, I have to make them up HM. So you can ask me anything you'd like. Bring me your relationship questions, your frustrations about support, the things that scare you and you're not really sure how to handle them, and you really want to script for it. Let's talk it out. You can call us at three to three six four three three seven six eight and leave a voicemail. If you miss that number, you can find it in the show notes or visit Megan Divine dot c O to find it. You can actually call right from the website. It's really cool. If you would rather send an email, you can do that too. Write on the website Megan Divine dot c O. We want to hear from your friends. It's not just this show that needs your questions. The whole world means your questions. We got to talk about this stuff together. We can make things better even when we can't make them right. You know how most people are going to scan through the show description of this show and think, I don't want to talk about that stuff. This is where you come in your reviews. Let people know it really isn't all that bad. In here. We talk about heavy stuff, but it's in the service of making things better for everyone. So everybody needs to listen. Spread the word in your workplace, in your so shal world on social media and click through to leave a review. Subscribe to the show, download episodes, send in your questions, get your neighbor to send in their questions. Want more here after. Grief education doesn't just belong to end of life issues. Life is full of losses, from everyday disappointments to events that clearly divide life into before and after. Learning how to talk about that without cliches or platitudes or simplistic think positive workplace posters is an important skill for everybody. Find trainings, workshops, books and resources for every human trying to make their way in the world. After something goes horribly wrong at Megan Divine dot c o here after with Megan. Divine is written and produced by me Megan Divine. Executive producer is Amy Brown. Co produced by Kimberly Cowen, Tanya Ujas, and Elizabeth Fosio. Edited by Houston Tilly Studio, support by Chris Urine and music provided by Way Crash wol

This is here after, and I'm your host, Megan Divine. Each week we tackle big questions from nurses, therapists, and other helpful folks that let us explore how to show up after life goes horribly wrong. This week, getting ghosted by your therapist, and whether you should smile or scream when someone tells you your dead sister is your Christmas angel? Your holiday horror stories, and my hopefully helpful advice coming right up after this first break. Before we get started, one quick note, well, I hope you find a lot of useful information in our time here together. This show is not a substitute for skilled support with a licensed mental health provider or for professional supervision related to your work. Hey friends, we made it through the holidays. Hopefully you all survived. I also hope you had at least a tiny bit of joy or warmth from the season and best the holiday season could have given you. On this show, though, we tell the truth, and I gotta say the word in our inbox is that the holiday season was a tough one. So we wanted to do a holiday debrief show here for this first show of the new year, both to check in and to figure out a way forward. We got a lot to talk about, so let's dive right into the inbox this week. I am so excited everybody because Kim, our producer, is going to read the questions for us, So let's get right to it. A new therapist stood me up after I drove an hour to see her. When confronted about it, she said I needed to be patient with her, saying, and I quote, your husband's death set off unresolved feelings I have, and now I can't get into the Christmas spirit. Okay, So when we first saw this question, the entire team started cracking up laughing. And I'm watching Kim here as she's trying to read this question clearly, so y'all can hear it, And we had to do it a few times because she was laughing. Here's the thing. As funny as this story sounds, this is an actual, real thing that happened to a real, live person during what was supposed to be an experience of feeling supported and helped by a professional. So yes, on one hand, it is really funny. I mean, who says that your husband's death set off unresolved feelings I have and now I can't get into the Christmas spirit, like who says that? And it really is hard to be a human being with feelings and good boundaries when it is your job to deal with other human beings with real feelings and real boundaries. So let's take this apart a little bit, because there are so many things wrong with this one little story. I think there's also a question implied in here, right, Some of this is a listener sending in sort of an outrage story, like can you believe has happened to me? But there's also a question that I hear in that. The question that I hear in that is why should I bother going to get help? Why should I bother working so hard to find someone to help me when this is the kind of support I get. There's almost a futility or a frustration that I hear in this question. So one, yes, it can be really really hard to find a good therapist. This is why I really like to have an initial call with a therapist or a doctor or anybody you're sort of leaning on in a professional capacity to help you through a hard time. Give them a call, find out how they're going to respond to what you're living through, so that you can save yourself that outurd drive, or that filing on your insurance, any of those things, like a good preemptive call can sort of weed out a lot of unfortunate situations. The second thing, I kind of want to talk to the therapist here for a minute. Remember, just a second ago, I said that it is hard to be a human being with feelings and boundaries when your job is to deal with other human beings and their feelings. I think what we can talk about is, what's a better way to say I can't work with you, rather than shaming the person who's coming to you because their grief harsh your holiday mellow. That's the other thing that I hear in this story, right, is that the therapist used some language there that maybe they shouldn't have used. The effect is that they shamed the person going to look for help, as though it was this grieving person's fault that the therapist couldn't get her holiday spirit on, Like that's just very very bad boundaries. What's a better way to say I can't work with you, not just for a therapist, but for a doctor or really anybody. What's a better way to say I can't do this with you? If you'd rather avoid shaming the person who's coming to you for help. So ap blow things. This therapist might have said one, don't ghost people right, Send a text, send an email, leave a voicemail saying something like I really appreciate how much it took to call and ask for help. I need to let you know that for personal reasons, it's best that if we don't work together, I'm happy to help you look for someone else if that would feel helpful. Otherwise, I wish you the best in finding support you deserve. You hear what I did there. It's okay to have boundaries as a professional. It is okay to have feelings as a professional. It is not okay to use your feelings and your experience to shame or ghost somebody else. Yeah, okay, we have more strange and interesting holiday reports read to you by Kim right after this break, So come on back for more. Her friends, welcome back. So, maybe you are listening to this show on your way to work. Maybe you're listening to it while you are talked inside a blanket for it with a cup of something warm and soothing, whatever you're doing. This next question about the odd human quirk of using religion to erase uncomfortable. Reality is a doozy, so settle in. Okay, This listener says, my family member keeps referring to my sister who died last year around Christmas, as my Christmas Angel and talking about how much fun Christmas in heaven must be. I know she means well and just wants me to know that she's thinking of her, And honestly, it feels nice to have her name mentioned. But picturing my living, breathing, snarky best friend, non religious partner in crime as a weird cherub just doesn't work for me. Thankfully, I can imagine her making some hilarious joke about it, so it does make me smile, even if it's not for the reason she thinks. Well, I do hope there's an afterlife somewhere she's sipping my ties with everyone we've ever loved. I do now I'd rather her be here. How do I deal with people's need to turn my person into an angel? Why does she have to be a holiday icon? Now? So remember in our last question where we were kind of laughing at the question and the whole therapist ghosting thing, and then I brought us back to their real, live, human beings. Underneath this admittedly funny story that's not actually funny. As soon as Kim started reading this question, I got all choked up because, on the one hand, it is kind of a funny story, but it's also really heartbreaking. This happens all the time. People use their personal beliefs to dictate how other people should feel, how they should grieve, where they should find comfort, and how much fun they should be having. Right, helpers, don't do this. I'm never going to say that one belief system is corect or incorrect, or you should do this one and you should not do this one. Like, whatever you believe, if it brings you comfort, yea, I love that. What we need to understand, though, is that personal beliefs are not universal beliefs. We can actually hear it in this question from this listener, like she says, my family members are really religious. They have a very specific idea of where my sister is now that she's died and not using her physical body anymore. That is not a sentiment that I share, and it's not one that my sister shared. So this dissonance between belief systems is a big point of friction for grieving people and for helpers. So the thing number one here I want everybody to remember is that personal beliefs are not universal. The second thing, though, is even if this listener shared that belief that their sister is existing in some other Christmas Angel form, it doesn't erase grief. It doesn't erase the pain attached to this sister not being in the room, being the snarky, living, breathing partner in crime rolling their eyes at Christmas angel ideas? Do you hear I'm going? Even if you believe that there is a life after this one that we don't know about yet and sidebar here, nobody knows exactly what happens. Even if you believe that, your belief doesn't cancel out the pain of missing the person. So that's another important thing that I want to take with us. Even if you believe, or other people believe that something exists after death and that your person is all around you, they still aren't here and we want them to be here. So what can you say instead? If you're a helper, you can say something like, you know, in my belief, I really believe that your sister is all around us right now, and I take a lot of comfort from that. Make it about you. That's awesome. I love that keep your beliefs about you and how they impact you, and try not to use them to dictate what somebody else might be feeling. If you're on the receiving end of this kind of statement and it's not working for you, it's okay to say something like I'm so glad that you find comfort in your faith. That's not a belief system that works for me, but I'm really happy to hear it's helping you. That's a really kind and inclusive, non shaming way to set a boundary. Yeah, so I can talk about this religion belief stuff forever, but I gotta keep us rolling around to the next question, the New Year's breakup. So remember how many times I've said in earlier shows that this show isn't just about death and death related grief. Grief is everywhere. We can use those same kinds of communication skills like that that I just mentioned about setting kind but clear boundaries with people around you. You can use these same foundational principles to everything from the mundane and ordinary to the things that forever alter your life, same relational approach to everything. Now, something that fits in that vast in between. Stuff in between the mundane and ordinary and the possibly forever life altering is the New Year's breakup story, Kim. This listener says, Megan, I really appreciated your tips from a few weeks ago. I felt very prepared for the holidays with my family. I even put boundaries around talking about my job and my personal life. What I wasn't prepared for was finding out that my boyfriend of seven years had been planning to break up for a while and used New Year's Eve as the excuse to do it. I gotta say I'm truly thrown. I'm sad, but I'm also really angry. I don't want is direct my year. But I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do. Should I get right back out there? Should I take time for myself? Any advice is great. I feel like there are probably a lot of people who could have asked this question this time of year. What is it about New Year's Eve that makes people decide now is a good time to break up? I mean, I guess I already know the answer to that question, right. It's related to what we were talking about in the last couple of shows with New Year's Resolutions. And how do you want to feel? I think sometimes the mark on the calendar gives people just that one extra push that they needed to get out of something that isn't working for them. That can be kind of harsh, especially for this listener, when they're like, wait a minute, we're supposed to be talking about good things for me and not having compassion for the jerk who broke up with me on New Year's Eve. But I do think that you've got a lot of company around this time of year. I hear about a lot of heartbreak like this, There are other people dealing with a surprise breakup right alongside you. Doesn't fix how crappy it is, but it does seem to be something that happens to a lot of people. So let's get into some answers to this question, what do you do now? First of all, I also want to validate. I love that you said here like I'm also really angry. I think that we are so like anger bad must have some greater perspective, like no anger is good. Anger is a normal, natural human response to a feeling of injustice, and it sounds like this breakup doesn't feel very fair, So of course you're angry. What should you do about it? Should you get yourself right back out there? Should you take time for yourself? And my answer to that is, I don't know. I think you get to experiment. Going back to something that Kate Bowler and I talked about in the last couple of episodes towards the end of the year about New Year's resolutions. Remember we talked about you don't want to make a resolution about what life looks like, but you can make some resolutions about how you want to feel in the days and weeks and months that are to come. We can apply that to this New Year's you've break up situation. How do you want to feel? Maybe you do want to get right back out there, as you said, right and dive right back into the dating pool. What I would suggest, though, is that you do that with some real intention. What are you hoping for when you go back out there and you start dating, mostly so that you can do the how what do we call that? Like? So you can do the debrief for yourself when you come home from a date. You can say, here's what I was aiming for. Did I get what I was looking for? I was looking for a distraction, I was looking to feel loved and wanted and attractive again, did I get what I was looking for? My point here is that there's no right or wrong thing to do after you've had a heartbreak. What I do encourage you to do is ask yourself what you need on some experiments to see can I get what I'm looking for? And then check back in with yourself after the fact. Did I get what I was looking for when I went back out, when I went for a run, when I went dancing in a public health conscious, socially distanced sort of way, How do you want to feel? Try out some things that you think might be helpful, and then check in with yourself. There's one tiny thing that I want to make sure that we talk about, because there was one more question here from this listener, should I take time out for myself? Where I go with that is like you know that thing that we tend to say to ourselves and to other people, like you have to be okay with being alone before you can really be with another person. That is chunk. I will say that as a therapist. That's sort of a standard therapist line, Like you have to be okay with yourself before you can be with somebody else. Okay, if we follow that logic through, that would mean that every single person in a relationship, in a long term relationship, had themselves figured out before they got into it, or else they wouldn't still be there. You see how that all falls apart really fast. It is a lie that you need to be perfect before you can be in a good relationship. So should you take time for yourself when you've been dealt a big blow like this, any kind of heartbreak or loss? I don't know. Do you want to do? You want to take some time to just be alone with yourself and listen to yourself and think about what you need and what you learned and what you might want for yourself going forward. Sure, I love that stuff, but don't do that because you think that you are inherently flawed and broken and that you are a self improvement project that needs to be completed and wrapped up before you're deserving of love again. Yeah, take time for yourself if you want to do whatever you need. I think we can also go back to that piece about how do you want to feel and apply it to everything we've talked about today. Every single one of the questions that you sent in I think, how do you want to feel as you negotiate these things or navigate these things? How do you want to feel the next time rather unskillful support lands in your lap because it's going to how do you want to feel? What do you want to do when you look back at those interactions, those events, those breakups, those blips in the emotional screen of your life. We don't have control over how much skill somebody comes to us with. We don't have control over the timing of terrible news or terrible events. We really have control over very little. One of my least favorite memes, I feel like the show could very easily be memes Meg and Hates. One of my other least favorite memes is like, um, the only thing you have control over in a situation is your response to it. We'll get into that one on a different show, but I think the underlying message in that is like, if only you thought about this terrible thing better, it wouldn't bug you so much. That's definitely not what I'm talking about. What I'm going for here is really like, when you look back at an interaction, what I want for you is that you feel like you advocated for yourself. You were clear and direct about your needs. It doesn't change the crappy support, or the poorly time to break up, or the terrible thing that happened. But what is under your control is the effort you make to care for yourself and to get yourself out of situations that are uncomfortable and not serving what you need in that moment. Yeah, using these tools to help yourself navigate anything that comes at you. Those are tools of self advocacy, communication, and relationship building. Really, all of this work is about relationship building friends, the good stuff, the hard stuff, everything in between. I think that's a great note to close on today. Stay tuned after this commercial break for the questions to carry with you and some scripting because I know you all love that. We'll be right back each week. I leave you with some questions to carry with you until we meet again. It's part of the whole. This stuff gets easier with practice thing. You know, I love it when you practice. This week? What's your thanks but no thanks? Plan? Look, we all mess up the whole being supportive thing. I do this for a living and I still stick my foot in my mouth all the time. It's embarrassing. You are absolutely going to encounter support from people therapists, doctors, friends, colleagues. You're going to encounter support that doesn't work for you. One option for a response is just the whole like smile and nod thanks for thinking of me, aren't you? Nice response, which is totally valid and a tool you should have in your toolbox. But what about for those times when you want to say more advanced planning for this is a great idea In the moment, it's like, you know how you always think, like, ah, I would have said this, this is the comeback. I would have said, like, advanced planning is your best defense against that man. I wish I had said this. Come up with a few stock phrases that you can use in these kinds of situations, just a couple of them. You do not need an entire dictionary to flip through to find which one of your collection you want to use. That that's not time efficient. Come up with just a couple of stock phrases that you will reuse over and over. Your stock phrases might be something like this. It sounds like your faith brings a lot of comfort to you, and that's not a faith I share or I know. It seems helpful to tell me that I need to be okay with myself before I date again. But I don't need to be perfect to be loved. One deflective statement I used this very morning was those sound like really interesting ideas for your living room. I'm going to take a different approach with my own house. You see what I did there. I used the same skills that we've been talking about in really sticky, griefy, heartbreak weird support situations and applied them to something really mundane and ordinary, in this case, somebody telling me what I should do with my own living room weird. These same skills can be applied to a lot of situations. So whatever situations are really bugging you or that you seem to run into, often come up with your stock phrases. Use them to redirect the situation. Use them so that you feel like you advocated for yourself and didn't sit there listening to things that made you just furious. This week, whatever prescriptive support comes at you, remember that it's going to be easier to set a boundary if you have mapped it out ahead of time, So go on and give it a go. Do some advanced planning your future self will thank you. And if you need a little more information on this whole stock phrases to deflect supportive pressure thing, check out the show notes. We're gonna link to some other episodes where we talk about this very thing. I want to submit your question for me to possibly address on air. This show is nothing without your questions. It's literally a Q and a show. And if you don't send in your questions, I have to make them up HM. So you can ask me anything you'd like. Bring me your relationship questions, your frustrations about support, the things that scare you and you're not really sure how to handle them, and you really want to script for it. Let's talk it out. You can call us at three to three six four three three seven six eight and leave a voicemail. If you miss that number, you can find it in the show notes or visit Megan Divine dot c O to find it. You can actually call right from the website. It's really cool. If you would rather send an email, you can do that too. Write on the website Megan Divine dot c O. We want to hear from your friends. It's not just this show that needs your questions. The whole world means your questions. We got to talk about this stuff together. We can make things better even when we can't make them right. You know how most people are going to scan through the show description of this show and think, I don't want to talk about that stuff. This is where you come in your reviews. Let people know it really isn't all that bad. In here. We talk about heavy stuff, but it's in the service of making things better for everyone. So everybody needs to listen. Spread the word in your workplace, in your so shal world on social media and click through to leave a review. Subscribe to the show, download episodes, send in your questions, get your neighbor to send in their questions. Want more here after. Grief education doesn't just belong to end of life issues. Life is full of losses, from everyday disappointments to events that clearly divide life into before and after. Learning how to talk about that without cliches or platitudes or simplistic think positive workplace posters is an important skill for everybody. Find trainings, workshops, books and resources for every human trying to make their way in the world. After something goes horribly wrong at Megan Divine dot c o here after with Megan. Divine is written and produced by me Megan Divine. Executive producer is Amy Brown. Co produced by Kimberly Cowen, Tanya Ujas, and Elizabeth Fosio. Edited by Houston Tilly Studio, support by Chris Urine and music provided by Way Crash wol