Ever wondered how to heal from a toxic relationship and truly thrive? Lily is joined by licensed psychotherapist Ginger Dean, the genius behind the book, Loving Me, After We. They dive into the journey of healing from toxic relationships, highlight the importance of self-soothing, and chat about how to rebuild self-trust. 

Ginger shares her personal and professional experiences, drops some wisdom on emotional recovery, and introduces her latest book, ‘Loving Me After We,’ packed with practical steps to go from hurting to thriving. They also get into what it means to be the ‘green flag’ in relationships and the power of self-care practices like yoga, massages, and somatic work.

You’ll hear about:

• The inner work needed to become the best version of yourself, focusing on baseline levels of emotional availability and self-awareness.

• Practices and shifts, in addition to therapy, to come home to yourself and create a self-care plan after a hard breakup.

• Self-care practices and ideas to take care of your well-being.

• Building or rebuilding self-trust after being in a toxic or the wrong relationship.

Links:

✨ Get Lily’s Free Training: Creating a Confident and Joyful-as-fuck Dating Life That Makes the Right Relationship Inevitable ✨

Ginger’s website

Ginger’s book, Loving Me, After We 

Show transcript:

[00:00:00] Lily: Hello, gorgeous friends. I can’t wait to dive into this episode with you, especially if you’ve been through a hard breakup recently, or you have been through some toxic relationships like I did. This episode is really going to help you. I did want to give you a heads up that we do discuss abuse. So just be mindful of your own needs.

[00:00:21] And I will talk to you with you. In a moment in this amazing episode with ginger Dean.

[00:00:34] Hey, I’m Lily Wanville, former top matchmaker and founder of date brazen. After setting up hundreds, I realized that with coaching women could match themselves better than anyone else ever could. With my unconventional feminist approach, I’ve helped women around the world build courageous and self trust filled love lives.

[00:00:49] And now I’m here to support you get ready. Cause I’m about to show the exact steps you need to attract a soul quenching partnership. And feel amazing about yourself along the way. This is the date [00:01:00] brazen podcast. Hello, gorgeous friends. Welcome to another episode of the date brazen podcast. I am so freaking glad that you’re here today.

[00:01:08] We have a special treat for you. And I know that this episode is going to be so inspirational, so motivational, especially if you have been through a hard breakup or if you have been in toxic relationships before raising my hand over here. We have an expert in the house who’s going to really help. So today we have Ginger Dean, who is a licensed psychotherapist and founder of Loving Me After We.

[00:01:34] As a licensed psychotherapist, Ginger has guided thousands of women worldwide to heal from toxic relationships so they can become the best versions of themselves. Over the last 15 years, Ginger has specialized in complex trauma with clients of all walks of life. Loving Children in foster care, victims of child abuse, domestic violence, victims, substance abuse, veterans, sex workers, executives, government officials, and the children and partners of narcissists.[00:02:00]

[00:02:01] She has seen how codependency and toxic relationships show up in all its forms and shares what’s worked with her clients and members in her new book, Loving Me After Wheat, which comes out today, July 16th. And I’m so excited to get into all of it. Ginger, welcome.

[00:02:23] I’m excited to have you. So I want to know just like right off the bat, how did you get into this specialty of, you know, helping people heal after toxic relationships?

[00:02:34] Ginger: Well, it’s a little bit of a combination of personal and professional. I started off my own journey working with kids. Actually, I worked with kids for about 6 to 7 years and, you know, there were kids in foster care.

[00:02:46] And so, of course, they come with their own brand of attachment issues. In grad school, we learned about attachment issues. Somewhat from the adult perspective, we do start with kids, but you kind of expect to deal with it from adults. And so eating that, oh my gosh. And [00:03:00] when I went into working with adults later on, they had the same issues.

[00:03:03] The kids that I worked with are like little minis of the adults and made the connection that, oh my gosh. So on a spectrum, it’s all connected. And, you know, a lot of therapists will tell you much of our work and what we do and know. is in practice, not necessarily what we learned in school. So it was helpful for me to connect the dots between childhood and adult attachment trauma.

[00:03:24] Then of course I got married young, right? And that’s when a lot of my own attachment stuff was going to come into play. Being in an abusive relationship and having to navigate what all that means after divorce and still finding myself. I’ve seen clients. Wow. Right. That’s

[00:03:41] Lily: a lot. No, just like pausing. Like, that’s a lot.

[00:03:44] And just to share some belonging of like, I was in a very toxic romantic relationship while I was a professional matchmaker. And so doing that job while coming out of or being in a terrible relationship, like that’s so intense. And so that’s a [00:04:00] lot. That’s a lot of, uh, Work that you were doing, it forces

[00:04:03] Ginger: you to do so much introspection while you’re doing the work and you start to see, you know, honestly, like, you’ll start to see yourselves and your clients and you start to realize, oh, gosh, I need to go back and do some of my own work.

[00:04:15] Right. Luckily for me, I’ve had a couple of great therapists who were just. A one awesome, you know, like it really forced me to look at myself and not really focus so much on the other people. And that’s where a lot of my perspective comes from, right? Where she said to me, I remember in our first session, and this was a relationship I was going through after my divorce, my first relationship after my divorce.

[00:04:37] And she said to me, we’re not going to spend, it was the second session I was crying on her couch. And she’s like, you know what? At the end, she’s like, I want you to know, we’re not going to spend the entire session. Crying about him. We’ve got to get to you because you’ll never make any shifts as long as we were just focused on what was going on with him.

[00:04:53] So she let me vent and ultimately I had these just eye opening realizations about my childhood relationship with my [00:05:00] parents, the death of my father, how that made me choose. This person I was with because I wasn’t finished creeping my father and they had so many similarities and plates. And so it was just, I said to her, it’s like, I found myself on your couch because we do so much on social media about like the gender wars and, you know, transactional relationships.

[00:05:21] And rarely do we talk about what’s the inner work that I am doing in order to become the best version of myself for a partner in a relationship. And we’re not talking about Perfection, but just baseline levels of emotional availability, self awareness, right? And it just feels like, why do we want to contribute to more gender wars?

[00:05:43] Let’s just focus on how we can actually heal. And one of the things she really made me look at was, I would come in there and say, well, you know, it’s, well, they did this and they did that, you know, and they kicked me out of their house at two o’clock in the morning. And she’d go, well, why did you go back?

[00:05:57] And I’d be like, what do you mean? Why did I go back? It was never a [00:06:00] question I asked myself. It was just like, of course I’m going to go back because I love them. And she’s like, well, they kicked you out the house. They cursed you out. They were. Verbally abusive. They were manipulative. That doesn’t feel good.

[00:06:13] So why did you go back? And it never made any sense until she really had me process like repetitive compulsion, you know, which is essentially when you’ve gone through something earlier in life, you’re more prone to replay it later in life, especially when it’s traumatic. In order to master that. So if I could get this person to love me, to accept me, to, you know, look at my good and my bad and just take all of it, then it would make up for all the times I felt rejected growing up for my mom or my, or just abandoned by my father.

[00:06:41] And so I was like, so I’m doing this unconsciously. And she’s like, yeah, because you didn’t even answer why you’re going back to someone who was so, you know, hurtful to you. And I was going through a lot at the time. And she made me realize just because you went through this kind of pain growing up, it [00:07:00] doesn’t mean that you’re now tough enough to tolerate it and just deal with it today.

[00:07:04] Cause I was like, well, I’ve got the worst. So, Hey, I’m cursing me out. You know, I’ve had verbal war medals with my mom. So that’s And she said, but just because. You had that experience. It doesn’t mean that you have to keep doing that today. The other side of that is if she can continue to let me just talk about him, him, him, him, him.

[00:07:23] It would have just been like, I would just keep on going back into the same types of relationships. And so those kinds of eye opening insights really made me look at how I was even practicing as a therapist. You know, a lot of people say, talk therapy, just go in and you talk about your stuff, but what are you really fixing?

[00:07:40] And I was finding that it wasn’t really helpful to clients to just say, Well, just come in and talk. It’s helpful to process. It’s helpful to have someone hold your pain and hold space for all of that. But is it going to be helpful to like, just, okay, go in, out and out of session and nothing. We’re not moving the [00:08:00] needle and clients would say that they would say, well, I just go to therapy.

[00:08:02] I’ve been in therapy for 10 years and you know, it’s the same stuff. And I’m like, well, what progress do you think you’ve made? And it’s like nothing, you know, I’m still dating the same people. You know, I don’t really understand my childhood trauma. Then you start to realize like, okay, so we should be making progress.

[00:08:18] In therapy. Right. And I think with this generation today, they want homework, right? And that’s something that I think 10 years ago, people, they were already looking for homework. But as we start to talk about therapy and being important and destigmatizing it and really moving the needle to becoming, you know, better versions of ourselves, you know, a lot of therapists are realizing like, yeah, clients want active work.

[00:08:39] They want directive therapists, not just, uh huh. Okay. Yeah. They don’t really find that, you know, model helpful. So my experience. Just getting divorced, going through my own psychotherapy really revolutionized, I think, just my practice, who I am as a therapist, and then also just who I was becoming at the time.

[00:08:59] Lily: Ginger, [00:09:00] how did you find that in addition to therapy, what practices were you, or what shifts were you making after that relationship ended to come home to yourself?

[00:09:12] Ginger: Self soothing. And I think so many others. We don’t realize how important it is to have a regulated nervous system, especially when you’re anxiously attached and you wake up with anxiety.

[00:09:25] You have situational anxiety. You have the all throughout the day, just anxiety about life. And then you have these relationships that spike it. And so what was super helpful for me was. I was running away from myself and trying to find that comfort, that peace in other people, because if I wasn’t in a relationship, I was lonely and I was anxious, right?

[00:09:47] And I felt like I was sometimes like swirling the drain, like what is life? I’m not with anyone. Am I valuable? If not, anyone even wants me. And so learning how to Be with myself. But in order to [00:10:00] be myself, I couldn’t feel threatened. I couldn’t feel anxious. I couldn’t feel like I didn’t like this space.

[00:10:05] And so learning how to self soothe made me feel safe in my own body. Because as you probably know, like when you’re anxious about relationships, you don’t feel likable. You don’t feel lovable. And then when you get all these anxious thoughts and feelings away, you can say, okay, so this doesn’t feel that bad.

[00:10:21] Right? I’m not feeling so anxious. I’m not feeling like. You know, my thoughts are running all over the place. I’m sleeping at night. So I think for me, finding a great self care plan, but more importantly, because as you get out of these relationships, it’s more important that you’re self soothing. And then once you’re self soothing on a regular basis, getting into like a regular self care plan, right?

[00:10:40] So that the body, the somatic work that I was engaging in, really helped me just learn how to come home to myself just so that I could be with myself. Like, my chiropractor said to me, that lower back pain creates anxiety. And I was like, Wow. I was playing volleyball a lot. I played volleyball in [00:11:00] high school, in college, and I went back to playing it after my divorce.

[00:11:04] And so of course he’s like, yeah, you’re playing and you’re jumping and you’re spiking. And so he would say, come every two weeks. And I would say, yeah, I just feel really good every time you leave here. And he’s like, yeah, that lower pain that you’re experiencing and just even the adjustments that we’re doing in your upper back.

[00:11:21] It’s like that has a lot to do with the anxiety that you’re experiencing blew my mind and really made me look at. So there’s really a connection between the mind and the body because we weren’t talking much back then, but yeah, somatic work definitely helped out.

[00:11:35] Lily: Is there any other somatic practices that you were doing that really helped you?

[00:11:39] I hear chiropractor visits and anything else.

[00:11:43] Ginger: Yoga was really, really helpful. Um, I would say regular massages. Aromatherapy baths. Those are really good for me. I would say also just going for long walks to kind of shut the noise out. For me, simple work where anything that I could do because I’m talking to [00:12:00] people all day, anything I can do to really just clear out the noise so I can learn how to be with myself was really, really helpful.

[00:12:08] So a lot of that was just getting my body moving. So for some people, they like dance. Well, for me, it’s volleyball is the equivalent because you’re moving around so much. So I say to my clients, you know, if I have a five o’clock client and I volleyball games at 6 30, I’m like, I leave here so I can get some of this risky energy off of me after clients for the day.

[00:12:28] And it felt good. Like we often say, well, you know, you do all these like yoga and meditation. That’s great. But I think that when you’re dealing with so much anxious energy, just being able to get all that frisky energy out, whether it’s like dancing, movement, however it is. But for me, that was with, uh, volleyball.

[00:12:46] Lily: Yeah. I love that. Do you still play? I do. Yeah. I have a meetup. I didn’t meet

[00:12:50] Ginger: a group on, so, but I still go, but I do some pickup volleyball.

[00:12:54] Lily: I love it. Okay, moving toward what you would recommend for folks [00:13:00] who are resonating with your story, who are out of a breakup, who, you know, I hear so often. Let’s just start with the basics.

[00:13:08] I get a DM the other day from somebody on Instagram who just says to me, Lily, I am Have just gotten broken up with and I feel so devastated and what do I do? I thought this is the person I was going to marry. I’m devastated. What do I do? What would you tell that person? What do I do? How am I ever going to get over this?

[00:13:32] Ginger: I think it depends on what they’re experiencing. Attachment style, things like that. I would say initially first, how do you feel? Do you feel like you want to jump out of your skin or just generally, are you okay? So typically they’re ready to jump out of their skin. So I get similar DMs and a lot of it centers around like.

[00:13:51] How are you self soothing right now? Because I can’t talk to you about anything when you are in a state of hyper arousal, right? Like you’re anxious. You feel like you’re just about to jump out of your [00:14:00] skin. You’re out of your mind and you have all these ruminating racing thoughts. I can’t sleep at night.

[00:14:05] Can’t focus at work. Terms of like what I do, like having to write. Notes for people to kind of like take some time off work because they just can’t function. They can’t focus. And so my first go to is somatic work. Could you go for a massage? Can you take a bath? Can you get one of those weighted blankets that you can like sleep under, take a nap in for example?

[00:14:25] Because. Yeah. Yeah. We can talk all day about acceptance, about grieving, about attachment, trauma, red flags, boundaries. None of that is going to sink in unless you are feeling calm and regulated, and that’s a practice first. So, for example, like when I was seeing clients in the office, You know, therapists know this, right?

[00:14:43] Like if you come in and you don’t have a four or five o’clock client, you’re like, Oh yeah, I get to go home early today. Right. And then I’d have clients that just call into the assessment center and say, Hey, I need to do that. I just broke up with my boyfriend, you know, five o’clock comes in. Right. And I wanted people that were like on my [00:15:00] floor in the office.

[00:15:01] Crying hot tears, and when someone is in that place where they finally feel safe enough to just like, let it all out and talk about their insecurities and see what happened and how they got here and they’re sobbing, we can’t talk about any of that theoretical stuff. We can’t process anything necessarily.

[00:15:17] It’s just really about. Showing them through modeling, holding space for them, validating their feelings and then giving them the tools for when they come home. And in between our next session, well, what are we going to do to take care of ourselves? We can talk about what break up, but what are we doing right now to take care of you?

[00:15:36] Because you probably abandoned you a little bit. Just a little bit during this relationship. So how can I, you start to feel like you’re getting in a place where you can take in some of the things that we’re going to be talking about in the subsequent weeks.

[00:15:50] Lily: Mm hmm. So good. So good. And building off of that, a question that I get so often that I had for myself after a toxic relationship [00:16:00] ended years ago for my clients specifically who I knew were listening.

[00:16:03] And the community members here. How do you build or rebuild self trust after a toxic relationship ends? You know, I, I saw this on your website. I was like, Oh, I need to discuss, I bet it’s in your book. Like, how do you rebuild self trust after being in the wrong relationship for you?

[00:16:23] Ginger: I think it goes back to doing a post mortem on your relationships and really seeing what are some ways in which I.

[00:16:31] Betrayed myself. How did I sabotage things in this relationship? What are some decisions that I made that I’m not proud of, for example, and then going back and writing those down and then saying, okay, so what would I have done differently? And then make it your goal to make those decisions moving forward.

[00:16:49] So for example, Verbal abuse is something that in my community, some people just don’t, they just kind of overlook it because it’s what they grew up with, right? Because if I’m healing from verbal abuse, emotional abuse of what [00:17:00] I grew up with, I can’t heal if it’s something that I’m dealing with in my relationship.

[00:17:04] So now when I feel badly about myself and saying, well, how could I have let them talk to me like this? Right? Like what’s going on? What I have to do moving forward is learning how to make decisions that honor the woman that I’m becoming. If we’re going to project this out, Your new self concept, this new version of you, does she tolerate?

[00:17:22] Verbal abuse. Does she tolerate someone cursing at her? And something that I want to almost unwind so that we start normalizing it is verbal abuse, the way that we talk to each other. For example, I would see, you know, I would say to some college age clients and have them talk to me, tell me about how their high school peers would talk to them and you start to realize that it’s not just about parents, it’s about our peer groups, like if you hear daughter.

[00:17:49] Being cursed out by her bestie and teased and bullied. They’re now learning to internalize all that stuff. So when they’re in an adult relationship in their twenties, [00:18:00] thirties, forties, that’s already normalized. So now my muse of concept has to say, well, that’s just not something I’m going to be doing anymore.

[00:18:07] Like I say all the time, like we’re not doing this anymore. And I would say that to my clients, like, what did they say to you? And then they’d say, wait, I had one client break down and say, I’ve never had someone look at me with any level of concern about what this person has been doing to me.

[00:18:22] Lily: Wow.

[00:18:23] Ginger: And I started crying myself.

[00:18:24] I was like, what do you mean? And she’s like, when I tell people about what’s going on, they just kind of, You know, it’s like so normal. Well, okay. So what did she do it? Well, maybe you should have done this. Right. Instead of like, oh my God. And I would hear my things and I’d be like, what, what did they say? I didn’t have any clue that.

[00:18:45] When you start to look at who you want to be, right? And it happens a lot where so many people say that to me, like the way you just reacted, I have an idea of that. And I’m like, yeah, because we get to this place where we take these wounded selves into our [00:19:00] relationship. And if we’re going to rebuild self trust, this new version of ourselves, we have to create that and then decide what will this person be open to?

[00:19:08] And what are they not going to be open to? And if I’m not open to verbal abuse and emotional abuse, we have to call the things as they are, right? So if someone needs a problem, I’m going to trust myself moving forward to say, I don’t want to have that experience anymore. My new version of me, I have to trust by making that decision.

[00:19:29] And for a lot of us, it’s, oh my God, but what if they leave? Oh, my God, but am I going to be okay? Self soothes through that anxiety of having to make that decision that you don’t want to simply because if I’m going to trust myself, I have to make decisions for myself that I probably don’t want to, even if it’s hard and then deal with the emotional fallout later and self soothes through it.

[00:19:54] Lily: Mm. Yeah. I’m so curious about the like post mortem piece, something [00:20:00] that I do something similar with my clients as well in a coaching relationship. And I love what you’re saying about building the new self concept and deciding like, okay, this is going to be okay in the future. And this is not going to be okay in the future.

[00:20:12] And a lot of people Um, really that I see are struggling with self blame and shame as it relates to the postmortem and that thought like, Oh, like I did everything wrong. I’m the problem then leads to more shame and, and less self trust. So how do you encourage people to go through that postmortem and acknowledge how they might have self sabotaged or made decisions that weren’t in their best self interest without getting stuck in the spiral of shame?

[00:20:43] That’s self blame.

[00:20:44] Ginger: Something that we do inside my inner circle membership. I have a membership for women who are healing after toxic relationships. Amazing. So one of the things we do is a life timeline. So whatever it is that you’re dealing with right now, I’m going to see in your timeline. That’s just how the whole [00:21:00] exercise is set up.

[00:21:01] And so we start to look at. What it’s like age situation feelings, right? And so in the feelings column, I’ll tell them, look at those feelings and tell me which ones jump out at you. Meaning you have a physiological reaction in your body. And so anxiety about abandoned, you know, I felt like I wasn’t good enough.

[00:21:21] I felt scared. They’re typically experiencing those things in their relationships today. And those, because of the situations fuel their toxic shame. So the toxic shame essentially says there’s something inherently wrong with you. So that belief, that belief now comes as a result of an incident that happened.

[00:21:39] So I get to see through the timeline. What’s the incident that happened that created this belief that’s also now fueling this shame. And what we can do then is help them reframe all of that. You may blame yourself for your father walking out on your mother, for example, right? Because kids are egotistical, meaning that the son in a boon, it [00:22:00] turns out their parents, it’s like, that’s their life.

[00:22:02] They’re thinking if mom leaves, if dad leaves, mom is mad. If dad is mad, it’s about me. And I’m really educating them and saying, well, no, it was never your job to make sure that your mom would be in a good mood or that your father wouldn’t leave. Why would you think that? Well, you know, my mom depended on me so much, you know, I felt like responsible for her, but dependent relationship.

[00:22:23] And so we do some psycho education around helping them understand that these are the dynamics that you were growing up in and you should have never had to dealt with that. So underneath toxic shame, we have all of these. Dysfunctional codependent dynamics that makes you feel like the weight of the world is on your shoulders.

[00:22:41] And as a result of not being able to fix the world around you, something is wrong with you. Right. And so we start to look at where did this come from? And. Sometimes, sometimes, because it depends on your history, it’s not really always about having to go into some deep psychoanalytical, psychological concepts.

[00:22:58] Sometimes your simple [00:23:00] awareness that I should never have had to go through that is enough for people to say, Oh yeah, so that wasn’t my fault. No, it wasn’t my fault. And it unlocks. You’d be able to see things through a different lens, from a different perspective.

[00:23:14] Lily: Right. It’s putting yourself in your context.

[00:23:17] Instead of saying like, Oh, I just made these mistakes and I made these choices that I shouldn’t have made in this relationship. It’s like, well, these make sense in the context of where you were raised. And now we get to figure something else out.

[00:23:29] Ginger: Right. Like it makes sense that you would want to fix your partner because you had to fix your mom when she was depressed going up because it was your job.

[00:23:38] Maybe you experienced, you know, emotional incest, which is a big one where they have this almost like a little professor, a little therapist relationship with their parents. And they’re the little fixers and so they grow up in these relationships where they’re doing the exact same thing, but they themselves are not emotionally available because it’s too intense of a relationship that they’ve experienced from growing up [00:24:00] and doing this today.

[00:24:00] So it’s a fixer relationship. It’s not a passionate romantic relationship. So we help them. And do you realize that because of what you want to? When you were seven, that this is what you’re doing today. Yeah. Is that something that you really feel like a little kid should have had to, or like adults find that hard.

[00:24:18] It’s this aha moment, this light bulb moment, what they realize, like some people just saying to me at 30, 40 years old, they’re just learning about boundaries that they get to say. No. Growing up, a parent who, you know, kicked the hinges off the door can tell a child, you don’t get to say no, you don’t get to have physical boundaries.

[00:24:39] And I’m saying, I didn’t know that I just thought I had to go along just to get along.

[00:24:44] Lily: Well, I’m curious about the book and Loving Me After We, and what is a book going to take people through? And what’s the transformation that, that they’re going to get from reading Loving Me After We?

[00:24:56] Ginger: So the book takes you on this journey from hurting to [00:25:00] healing to thriving.

[00:25:01] And so after breakup, you kind of don’t really know what to do with yourself. And you’re in this space, what I like to call hermit mode, where you don’t really want to talk to anyone, but you miss connections. You love your solitude, but you Don’t know if you can even stomach anyone at this point. You have days where you’re high, you’re on top of the world, maybe you’re anxious, and you have days where you’re, like, depressed and sad, right?

[00:25:24] And call that hermit mode. And then, so we talk about hermit mode, we validate that because a lot of people just think that there’s something wrong with them if 9 months in, They’re just like, I just don’t feel the energy to date. I’m exhausted by it. And I just noticed that we didn’t have the language for it.

[00:25:42] In psychotherapy, I’d say this is hermit mode. Like you’re, you just don’t really feel like coming out of your shell. You were abused. You were taunted. You were gaslit and manipulated. If your house was robbed, would you be like open? Would you go to bed with your door open? No, you’d be like everything down when it get in, when I get [00:26:00] a system.

[00:26:00] And so that’s what your nervous system is doing. It’s shut down and being able to relate that for them and help them understand that that’s an understandable response. It’s understandable. We just don’t you to live there. All right. And so you understand that this is a thing. I think it was healing people realizing that a lot of these things that we’re talking about.

[00:26:19] This is a thing. So the next we go into the heart sabbatical, which is my favorite simply because there was a big difference between who I would see in psychotherapy and who encounter on instagram on instagram. People don’t really know generally what’s going on. They’re just Googling things at two o’clock in the morning.

[00:26:35] Lily: Yeah.

[00:26:36] Ginger: It’s a breakup. I’m depressed. I’m sad. You know, this is what’s going on, but both ends, it would be, I’m going to jump right back into a new relationship in order to forget this old one. And what? No, I have to find my soulmate. So jump right back into a new relationship. I would have clients that talking to me about a breakup on Tuesday by next Thursday.

[00:26:55] They have gone through, they’ve cycled through another [00:27:00] relationship, right? These like fly by night relationships and realize that they did not know how to be with themselves. So now we’re talking a lot about these days about coming home to yourself. Well, self abandoned, right? They go chase love of people who didn’t really like them.

[00:27:17] And I’ve done that too. So I get it. And so the heart sabbatical helps them understand. It’s okay to take some time off from dating so that your nervous system can regulate so that you can look at what are the lessons I needed to learn so that you can look at intuition versus denial so that the opposite of intuition is denial.

[00:27:37] So if you’re interested in trying to tell you something, do this and you’re like, no, I’m going to go forward anyway. And then you’re like, oh my God, my attention was right. Really learning to hear that voice did start out with this word saying, you know, just take four to six weeks off. Really? You want to take, depending on what’s going on, I would say three to six months off and people, I think five years ago would gasp and say four to six weeks.

[00:27:59] What do [00:28:00] you mean? And today I’m hearing, Oh my God, I love my heart’s about to go so much. It’s so peaceful. I don’t have anyone stressing me out. And it’s the first time in their lives where they’re like, wait a minute. This is a thing that I actually like, actually like spending time with myself.

[00:28:15] Lily: Yeah.

[00:28:16] Ginger: And so taking them through that journey of realizing that there’s an entirely new world open to you when you do learn how to take the sabbatical, come back home to yourself and make.

[00:28:27] Your emotional home, something that you want to come home to so that when you’re with someone you like yourself with or without them, right? It’s this journey from taking them through, you know, the initial crash learning of a breakup through how to heal and eventually thrive is the best version of themselves.

[00:28:45] Lily: Amazing. And then what does the thriving look like in the book specifically? What, what does the thriving look like?

[00:28:51] Ginger: So the thriving essentially look like. Talking about emotional availability, self awareness, becoming the green flag that you actually [00:29:00] want. A lot of us will say, well, I want a partner who does all these, and you’ll listen to all the green flags.

[00:29:04] Are you the green flag? Right? You have discussed, processed a lot of your history, but what are you doing to implement and integrate everything? So when we talk about, for example, boundaries, well, you learned about boundaries in the master classes that we provide, maybe you can read a few books. But how are you actually integrating and implementing them?

[00:29:23] Right? So it’s not good enough just to say, Hey, get some boundaries. Well, how are we going to assert them even when it feels hard? How are we going to make sure that when they’re challenged, someone’s calling you at two o’clock in the morning because you’re a people pleaser. You’re like, okay, sure. Come over, but you know, you don’t really want to.

[00:29:39] Well, what’s the language that we’re going to use to say, Hey, you know, What about at 10 o’clock? Because I’ll call me past 10 o’clock. Right? So if I’m calling, then you have to say, well, you know what? I think it’s best that we leave it here because I’ve already said to you two, three, four times. Do not call me fastest.

[00:29:56] I’m keep on calling. I’m, you’re not coming over at two o’clock in the morning. And so [00:30:00] I have to leave this here, right? Right. Right. Give me the tools to be able to do that. Because with the best version of ourselves, we want to be those green flag relationships. We just don’t want to do this thing where I see people say I’ve gone to therapy, but they’re still doing the same thing.

[00:30:16] Or they’ve gone to therapy and now using therapeutic concepts in order to manipulate the other person, because something that happens in healing is. A lot of people do this where they will stop short in their healing process to teach what they still need to learn. So what they’ll do is they will become a version of the person who harmed them to other people in their lives.

[00:30:40] They’ll know things are wrong. They shouldn’t be doing certain things, but they stop short because now, okay, I’ve learned about why I do the things, but now I have to actually put that in place. Let me go try out what was done to me onto other people. And so that’s, you hear a lot of people, for example, they use a [00:31:00] lot of therapy buzzwords.

[00:31:01] And they’re still doing the same things, right? But instead of being the victim, in some cases, now they become the victimizer where they’re the ones actually causing harm to others. So what we want to do is build that self awareness, right? Which is, you know, saying, you know what, You did this, you know, they did this to me.

[00:31:19] So now I’m going to get a tape. I’m going to give them a taste of what, you know, and I’m going to be this. And it’s like, that’s not what we’re going to do. Right. How’s your, this, how’s your ego playing into this? How was your inner child working and showing up now that you’ve learned how much you’ve gone through?

[00:31:38] So like, what does that new version of yourself look like? And it’s essentially about embodying self awareness, you know, becoming emotionally available and ultimately becoming. The green flag that you’ve always wanted to be with.

[00:31:52] Lily: Hmm. I love that becoming the green flag. It’s so powerful. It’s a great image as I’ve written my book.

[00:31:57] I so appreciate when I hear [00:32:00] an author, a fellow author say their concepts and I’m just like, Oh my God, that’s so brilliant. Like that’s so much clearer than I’ve ever been able to think about it or put it. I just love it. So thank you for that becoming the green flag and for sharing your brilliance with us.

[00:32:14] Where can the listeners get your book and how can they work with you?

[00:32:19] Ginger: Uh, they can get my book at www. lovingmeafterwe. com, um, you can just scroll down and then be able to order the book. And then you can find me anywhere on Instagram, lovingmeafterwe, um, on Facebook, TikTok, all the web. I’m mainly on Instagram.

[00:32:33] Lily: Okay. Amazing. And the book is out now, everyone. So you can buy it wherever you buy your books. And I know, um, you can, uh, Go to lovingmeafterwe. com to also learn more about the book and Ginger’s work, and we’ll put all of these links in the show notes to this episode at datebrazen. com. Ginger, thank you so much for coming on the show and congratulations on your beautiful book.