My intuition said leave; my fear said stay. Here’s how I made the impossible choice.
Have you ever known that you needed to leave—but felt unable to do it? Suspected that something wasn’t right—but just couldn’t let go?
The unthinkable thought—“I don’t want this anymore,” “This isn’t right for me,” “I have to leave,” “I can’t keep doing this”—is the moment that precipitates many major life transitions.
In this article, I’ll share my own journey arriving at the unthinkable thought in my romantic relationship. We’ll explore why it can take so long to confront the unthinkable—how our bodies often sense it before our minds—and how protracted, messy endings can actually reflect profound inner wisdom. Finally, we’ll examine how to cultivate the inner resourcefulness we need to follow our intuition—even when it whispers the unthinkable—so we can leap into the life that’s calling us.
The person setting boundaries can be heartbroken, too.
In mental health discourse, we frequently discuss boundary-setting guilt: the fact that sometimes, setting boundaries hurts the people that we love. But we rarely acknowledge the fact that the person setting boundaries is often heartbroken, too.
By heartbroken, I don’t mean “feeling guilty” or “experiencing sympathetic pain for others’ pain.” I mean personally heartbroken: mourning the ease, intimacy, familiarity, love, or idealized future the relationship offered before the boundary was set.
Being able to acknowledge, and tend to, our heartbreak separate from our guilt is crucial to our healing—and in this article, I’ll explain how.
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