[Applause] i want you all to know that you are loved because today we can be surrounded by so many people but feel profoundly alone 68 of gen z feels like nobody knows them the average american only has one close friend and one and four feels like they have no one loneliness is on par if not worse than our health than obesity it strips years from our life but we brush off this need for human connection especially after a breakup right we say i just want to be alone i can't take this heartache but we can
and we must because these connections are the keys to our happiness and the ultimate disconnection a breakup that can trigger violence substance use and depression so how do we stay connected and not let breakups break us i'm a psychotherapist and i'm proud mom of two there they are so cutie pies i am an hsp which is called a highly sensitive person i'm a category four dyslexic that's not a professional term that's my own term things get jumbled up with my dyslexia in my head and coming out of my mouth so despite my star trek outfit
i do not am my britney spears thing i do not feel comfortable up here but i feel calling because we are in the middle of a loneliness epidemic with my work i've come to know loneliness on a first name basis and hear people what feels like eternity for them sync with heartbreak and i take my work extremely seriously but today as we go down this journey i want to have a little fun make this a little bit more digestible so how do we currently handle breakups well you may feel like hiding and hibernating underneath your
sheets you may feel like a semi truck came and ran right over you and reversed and ran right back over you you may feel body parts you didn't even know existed in your body my clients have found meaning with a symbolic symbolic meaning with their physical pain say their stomach hurts at the core they can't digest what's happening their eye twitches i don't want to see what's going on and whether this symbolism resonates with you or not know that trauma can be held on a cellular level but maybe you're not thinking that far ahead maybe
you're just swiping away on your screen or screens and feelings of inadequacy hit your own mental feed like the universal fear that you're not enough you're never gonna find love you can't commit and your eggs are gonna rot and your friends try they tell you all your ex socks and whatever gender they were that whole gender sucks and they tell you that you could do better because that one always feels good and take you out for an obligatory drink or four and because you made that great post you'll get a barrage of emotional support through
a bunch of memes for one day cause nothing feels like you're gonna find love again and vulnerability like this your friends really do try but the problem is our culture has no rituals around mourning love heartbreak you're kind of on your own but your own brain isn't helping you either you're used to being intoxicated by this love hormone called oxytocin that made you feel like a goddess and now you're going through withdrawals you're jonesing for it your logic's all over the place second you're probably having some stress hormones like cortisol flooding your brain and it's
making you feel like you're having an out-of-body experience similar to how i am on the stage right now three your brain is really trying to help you it's searching for dopamine hits here and there online shopping whole pint of ice cream wine wine and more wine i don't recommend this our minds are like a chia pet for fear you drop it one little fear and it wants to grow up into a beanstalk of terror this fear-based thinking served us really well when we were hunters and gatherers and we needed to avoid the buffalo stampedes or
the locust invasions but we haven't evolved we are stuck with a mind that is more receptive to fear than how sexy we look in a loincloth [Laughter] so what are we supposed to do first control what you can control which is often with your body eat sleep drink deep breathe the best you can right now get present by using all five of your senses now high intensity cookie eating is not exercise sorry try to create healthy rituals for yourself like a morning walk with music find your inner diva your inner thrash metal head or whatever
it's called get your broken heart pumping oh come on now when i was younger i was asked to be part of a tv pilot for a show that talked about social issues in a hot tub now if this sounds bad it was really bad especially being a hot tub for so long and for your pleasure and my embarrassment here you go you get sound you can like not put the pure second no no tons will heal the fastest you don't notice how much you use your tongue until you've got it so that i'm different but
the tongue's roll is far underestimated okay food this side sat me down and said you're you can go into the bathroom and masturbate i just don't show you this just to embarrass myself but my clients feel guilty for having a pity party aft in a hot tub after a breakup but don't feel bad for feeling sorry for yourself loss is painful so validate that pain tears literally have have stress hormones in them so cry them out let yourself be human but at some point and on some level you need to start functioning again so think
of it like a hot tub get in get out just don't do bad tv pilots now morning love is such a strange state isn't it one minute you're telling each other your deepest secrets and then next you're strangers and that is brutal you can swing with feelings of sadness and numb and anger and strange relief all vacillating at warp speeds you may mourn the relationship before it's over you may mourn the relationship that you thought it was or who you thought they were or the shared history you may mourn the future that you'd hope to
have with them or how this may affect other people and part of letting go can be seen if there's anything worth grabbing onto but i warn you of nostalgia nostalgia is two-faced and it's shtick is to paint forgeries of the past and whitewash your memories like a propaganda movie and then you hear it whisper was it so bad and then you got your hand over the panic button going what if i changed and he changed maybe if we tried a little bit harder we could make it work know that you are doing all the messy
feelings of morning love to get to the place of acceptance and it's not that you approve it or like it it's just coming to terms with what is and i say all this and morning is individual there's no recipe there's no timeline and just when you think you've gone so far you are back to square one again but please don't let it stop you from feeling all these feelings because if you stuff this all these feelings down like a thanksgiving dinner that dry tasting bird that i swear nobody likes on any other day is gonna
come manifesting itself up and destructive actions or lashing at the people that you love or maybe you'll be 65 in some crummy bar on a tuesday with smoke in your face so you need to create a counter attack to nostalgia write down all the reasons the relationship's not working give it to your friends review it often play out the whole unfulfilling movie not just the highlights now you're going to want to build and have a fortress you're going to want to have some firm boundaries with your ex whether you like them or they understand because
the next minute you're creeping online looking at your ex i mean you are curious and you happen to accidentally see a photo of him with a woman and maybe analyze it for a few minutes i mean all day and you're right back in your recovery cocoon and it was only his cousin experiment with rituals that signify change if you ask me take a playbook from burning man gather all the things that they left at your place and didn't pick up and you couldn't sell on bernie or craigslist gather your friends have a bonfire and burn
it i realize most of us are not into pyromania but i want you to not discount the power of a collective emotional experience sort of like what we're having right now or take my friend's mantra new relationship new bed sheets and i i know it's not the sheet's fault it's symbolism but whatever you do do not let fear light your path fear is a horrible advisor our brain acts like a conspiracy theorist to anything positive it starts to come in you're a see some hope and it wants to poke holes in that theory but don't
you let it run it through your senses visualize it feel it smell it i mean just try to give it a sense try to give it a chance to stick now i've always loved this lyric and i believe dolly parton said it first the best way to get over a lover is to get under another now that feels good but is there any science behind this actually yes thank you journal of social and personal relationships for showing us that a rebound relation relationship can help us improve our overall health quicker fantastic but be careful of
their heart and your heart as you may not be ready to be ghosted after a one night stand or any relationship for that matter but who knows when cupid will strike again right resist going into that hibernation cocoon duct tape that little voice inside that says being social is too much effort if you feel like you're a burden to your friends ask them don't assume and rob them of this gift to be close to you it could be the silver lining to all of this you may want your ex to understand what's going on for
you right now but i want you to remember that you may not be together because you didn't understand each other so find somebody who can because this could be an opportunity for deeper healing many psychotherapists believe that we enter a relationship to heal for things in our past and a breakup alone can trigger loss abandonment trust issues so maybe not go to the person who broke your heart to try to mend it guilt and regret can eat us alive but my guess is somebody with the same history as you put in the same situation probably
would have done the same thing and we cannot predict how we will feel with accumulation of time so please practice self-compassion and it's not just a magic pill you take once it's a lifetime practice and at the end of the day we're all just evolving apparently even the royal family so many of us judge the success of a relationship by its length if it doesn't go to the grave another failed relationship not necessarily what if we redefined or reframed failed as completed we have this idea that all endings are so negative but if we peel
this back a little bit more we are pretty darn thankful for some expiration dates puberty pimples period hell yeah so what if we thought of heartbreak as just part of the flow of life just part of being alive that's an x well let's talk about him i had a relationship that probably should have never lasted past the first date probably all of us have i had just moved to san francisco and i was lonely and i'm a total sucker for creative smart men with silky black manes okay focus fast forward five years and i was
a fragment of my old self i was so insecure i couldn't make the simplest decisions i was once this funky free bohemian woman and i was a paler version of my former self to him i wasn't thin enough i wasn't quite enough and i sure hell was not normal enough and his constant judgment of me started to seep into how i viewed myself so i threw myself into therapy and there i started to see a pattern of being silence silence excuse me whether it be my dyslexia or growing up with a closeted mother lesbian mother
in the more homophobic era of the 80s and 90s or being an objectified female or my face mattered but not my words but i had to find that voice in order to leave that relationship and eventually i saw my role as a passive accomplice and i didn't want to be anybody's idea of normal if normal existed and hallelujah it doesn't right i thankfully ended that relationship but afterwards i wanted to sucker punch myself for ever wasting any time and especially my responsibility free 20s with him so i keep reminding myself and i reminded myself then
that i gained a lot of gifts because i was in the relationship and one of them was he helped me find that i had some brain cells to work with i had developed this concept with my severe undiagnosed dyslexia that i wasn't very smart he was extremely bright and only treated me as such so it healed a deep wound inside me and that had a domino effect in my life i read a small library worth of books i got my passport stamped around the world and i decided to face academia again and have the courage
to go to graduate school and fulfill a lifelong dream of mine to be a counselor so things weren't all that bad and he was a bit more rigid and i was a wild child wearing wigs and going to birdie man and watching the sun rise after hitting the clubs all night long sorry mom now the news is out so we both left oh sorry and i i don't know if i loosened him up that's one thought i had but i do know i introduced him to his life's passion photography so we both left with partying
gifts and by far this was the most unhealthy relationship i've ever had but the one i learned the most from in that darkness i continue to evolve into the person i'm meant to be so and i'm still developing during this preparing for this speech i felt really guilty for taking somebody else's spot i thought the committee that made a huge mistake i was like did someone bribe them but i know that this is a place i go to when i'm insecure because a blind spot was illuminated because i was in a relationship so when you
feel broken and you question if love is worth the pain look at your growth try to find the metaphorical gifts that make your soul rich appease me for a moment and dream dream with me dream with me of a world where none of us have any doubt that we are loved and sorry let me get my and that we know that heartbreak is just part of life and that we'll go out and crash and burn and we'll get our hearts recharged and we'll go back out there again and maybe someday a place where we will
not break from breakups but we will be held together by our friends our rituals and encouraged to be the ever evolving souls we are meant to be thank you so much
