If you’ve been through a separation, you may find yourself replaying the past, focusing on everything that went wrong. It hurt. The emotions you feel now may be hard to sit with. If you suffered abuse, betrayal, or had the rug pulled out from under you, the shock can be overwhelming. “How was I so blind?” is a question many ask themselves.
Often, people play their character so well during a relationship that their underlying motives never surface — though occasionally, they poke their head out, like thieves in the night. They don’t want to be seen. And carrying that experience can feel exhausting.
It makes sense that you might stay focused on the negatives. Sometimes it feels safer to hold on to a fixed belief about what happened. But staying locked in that mindset will keep you where you are.
Our perception of these emotional events is designed to keep us safe, not help us grow. We can hold on to the lessons, but we must let go of the emotional chains that stop us from moving forward, from forming new relationships, from seeing what’s possible.
Boundaries are key — but here’s where most people get it wrong. Boundaries aren’t about telling someone else what they must do. Boundaries are about telling ourselves what we will do to stay safe and honour our values.
Rewriting the Programmes
If you can, go back to a past memory that is emotionally hard to deal with. Chances are, you are focused on everything that went wrong — what was said, what was done, how it made you feel.
When we’re fearful or trying to avoid pain, we become hyper-focused on the threat and block out everything else — all the opportunities, all the other meanings that might have been present in that moment.
When we carry that kind of focus forward into new environments, we risk dragging the same old programme into new relationships. We react to triggers, we feel anxiety, we anticipate what could go wrong.
you are not broken.
You’re running a programme that was designed to keep you safe. A programme that has been running for so long you may not even realise it’s there — one that goes straight from stimulus to reaction, skipping over meaning, understanding, and choice.
NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) illustrates it like this:
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Stimuli: picture, sound, feeling, smell, taste
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Interpret / make meaning
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Feel / emotions
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React / behave
If your interpretation step has been hijacked by fear, your emotions and behaviours are running on autopilot.
Seeing the Whole Picture
For this exercise, go back to that past experience — but this time, focus on everything that it was not.
What did you delete from the memory because it didn’t matter at the time? What was the weather like? What were you wearing? What were the surroundings? Were there children playing? Friends visiting? Food cooking?
Shift your attention to everything that wasn’t the problem.
The goal is to train your mind to see all possibilities — not just the threat. This lets us approach new experiences with openness, rather than scanning for danger and preparing for pain.
Not all relationships will end badly. Not all genuine connections are a setup for loss. It’s okay to test whether someone is who they say they are. It’s okay to enjoy the feelings, to set boundaries, to protect your energy.
What we don’t want are walls so high that they keep out the very people we actually want to let in.
Your Choice to Change
We have so much choice in how we live, but our perceptions heavily influence those choices.
If you want to discover the programmes that no longer serve you, thank them for keeping you safe, and give them a new mission, then reach out.
You can’t solve new problems with a mind built only around familiarity and survival. But you can change, when you’re ready.
It is your choice.
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