Breaking Your Dating Patterns
You’ve been here too many times before.
You meet a guy and everything starts out amazingly. You talk every day, dream up future plans and “whisper” sweet nothings to each other over text. But all along, you’ve been biting your nails, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Which of course, it inevitably does.
You my dear, are (temporarily) stuck in a pattern that isn’t serving you - and it’s time to get you out.
To break it down, a pattern is a reality you’ve created (that you keep repeating over and over) which is based on a deeply held belief.
The belief sets off the obsessive thinking, the thoughts create these icky, anxious feelings of not being good enough, the feelings cause you to act (or not act) in a specific way, which leads to an outcome (not getting the guy/meeting yet another a**hole/being cheated on etc.) that then proves your initial belief to be true. And so continues the pattern that you can’t seem to break free from.
But you can. And it requires you trying something totally new and create a whole new pattern that you love being apart of.
Creating a new pattern is simple, and yet not easy to do. But if you commit to these 5 steps, you will get there:
Write out your old love story. All the ways dating used to be hard for you (even if that s**t literally JUST happened). Grieve those relationships. Grieve your “seemingly” lost dignity. Grieve for all that you’ve endured. Once you’re done writing and feeling all the disappointments, burn that story or quite literally, flush it down a toilet. Word of caution, if you truy dive into this it is going to be painful - then freeing - then life changing.
Do the forgiveness work - and I’m not just talking about forgiving your exes. In fact, I’m mostly talking about forgiving yourself. How did you contribute to the pain? What are you sorry for (both to yourself and the guy)? What old beliefs contributed to this relationship? What are you thankful for? What did you learn? Cry it out, send them love and forgive yourself for all past “mistakes”. This exercise will need to be repeated more than once.
Write out your new beliefs about love and your new love story. What is the highest vision for your love life? What kind of qualities does he need to have? What kind of qualities do YOU need to have? Where are the gaps in how you’re currently showing up today...and how will you fill them?
Write out the vision daily. If writing about your love life feels too narrow for you, write about your highest life vision and include your supportive partner in it. And more important than writing this, you need to feel it. This is especially important if you’ve never experienced this kind of relationship before!
Get support! Breaking patterns that we’ve not only experienced but embodied over years (sometimes decades) requires investing in yourself - and quite a bit. You need to invest time in practicing mindfulness, energy in dreaming up your new relationship reality, and money in working with someone to help support you along the way.
Women are resistant to getting the support they need to break their patterns and achieve their goals, and it lies in imposed feelings of selfishness.
Like a client I recently spoke with who deeply wanted to work with me, but felt like she couldn’t for financial reasons.
The circumstances of her life made her feel as though investing in this work simply wasn’t a choice she could make.
What she was ultimately saying, was that it would be selfish for her to receive this support when she could use that money on her kids.
Which of course, I understand.
But here’s the thing.
Refusing support and putting herself last, is her pattern in relationships. And the pattern was playing itself out right there again on our call!
The partnership she’s wanting from a man is equal parts giving and receiving. But she is oh so familiar with the giving - and not so familiar with the receiving.
And a man actually wants to give to a woman who is ready to receive.
So the questions you need to ask yourself if you’re ready to break your dating patterns are:
What are you willing to do, change and believe to start breaking the patterns that have been holding you hostage?
Are you willing to make decisions based on where you’re going - and not where you’re currently standing today?
Are you willing to invest in yourself?
The moment this woman accepted the help of working with me, is the moment her pattern started to unravel. It was the catalyst, the first step to her standing in her power.
Maybe for you, throwing money at the problem comes easy but then you don’t actually “do the work” of showing up for yourself.
So I ask you to consider, what pattern is holding you back from the love you so desire and deserve? And what is one bold decision you can make to reverse the sh*t out of it today?
With love,
Diana X