💔 relationship tips from a former troubled teen
🌈 BEFORE WE DIVE IN…
Two months ago, Colin and I had the pleasure of talking with Tony Mosier and Craig LaMont on their podcast Ultimate Potential! We cover some of the cheat codes we give our clients for success after treatment, and we think this is one of our best duo podcasts yet. Thanks again for having us!
*Gets in one healthy relationship* … “Let me give you some advice on relationships.”
I spent this past week in India visiting my boyfriend and meeting all his friends and family. Very eat pray love of me, I know. Fair warning: this week’s newsletter is a little more in my feelings than usual, but I know some of what I’ve learned will resonate with parents with teen or young adult children struggling right now.
I went into this trip feeling very excited but fully expecting it to be overwhelming. And it’s been the most life-changing trip I’ve ever been on.
Not gonna lie though - I cried pretty much every night. Not a few tears here and there. Full-on sobbing. Very drama.
I experienced deep feelings of gratitude and joy, alongside feelings of insecurity and anxiety. My boyfriend got the “full Hayley experience,” which people in the past have described as bat sh*t crazy. So, I have never shown a partner all sides of myself.
But the most beautiful thing happened on this trip.
For the first time in a romantic relationship, I was able to experience and be present in all my feelings with my boyfriend, EVEN the ones I judge myself for, like insecurity or anxiety. AND how he supported me through each nightly breakdown helped me reframe many of my fears, judgments, and past experiences in ways that never even occurred to me. He helps me think differently about the world, and it’s the most refreshing feeling a (very stubborn) girl can feel.
It felt as if many of the tough lessons I learned in my 20s prepared me to be the partner I’ve always wanted to be, with a partner I’ve always wanted to be with. Who would have thought that hard work could actually pay off??
In that spirit, I reflected on what I needed to learn and do in my 20s before I could be in this relationship that just hits different. This is after MANY years of making every dating mistake in the book with a range of people who had their own problems to work through.
For all the parents who hope their child will one day find a healthy partnership, I highly encourage you to let them experience the struggle and challenge of these lessons.
🚨DISCLAIMER: your children may learn some of these lessons by being in relationships with people you don’t think are right for them. Just expect that.
🚨ANOTHER DISCLAIMER: just like every other newsletter, this is what I personally needed to learn and go through. This isn’t meant to be an end-all-be-all guide; it’s just my experience.
Patience is key here; it took me over 10 years, a lot of hard work, and A LOT of mistakes to understand these concepts.
On that note, these are the top four things I’m grateful I learned in my 20s that I needed to find a healthy relationship:
Separate the person you want to be, from the person you want to be with 🐝
It took me YEARS to grasp this concept. Early on, I understood that no person could ever fill the holes I had in my self-esteem. But I only recently saw how this manifested in my relationships.
I would think I wanted to be with someone because they had the traits I actually wanted for myself - some of which were healthy traits, some unhealthy.
As I got closer and closer to people with the qualities I coveted, I became increasingly insecure about not embodying them. It made me feel like I needed to be with them to take on those traits when in reality, I needed to fill those gaps myself. I would seek out people who weren’t right for me because I thought they would give me a shortcut around doing the hard work I needed to do for myself.
Once I accepted that I needed to “become” the type of person I wanted to be with, it opened up an entirely new door for a relationship with someone I never expected. In a hilarious twist, what I needed from a partner was pretty much the exact opposite of what I had been seeking all along. Very on-brand for me. Parents, friends, and therapists have been telling me for nearly a decade that the type of person I need to be with is someone like my boyfriend, buuuut here we are. She finally made it to the party.
Don’t be afraid to breakup 💔
This is often learned by going through at least one really bad breakup. Not wanting to go through something awful again is an excellent motivator for being more discerning about who you date in the future.
But not feeling scared of a breakup is another level of freedom. After going through a few bad ones over the years, I became very confident in my ability to grieve, learn from it, and move on.
Tbh, I learned that breakups have many positives. Breakups can strengthen friendships when you lean on them for support. Breakups shine a light on where your self-worth and self-esteem are at and force you to face that reality. Breakups teach you how to live with grief. Breakups teach you how to compartmentalize and show up for your commitments while going through something very difficult. They teach you what you are and aren’t willing to work through to stay with another person.
Which leads me to my next point.
Be deeply okay with being single 😱
This doesn’t mean you have to love being alone or want to be single. At the beginning of my 20s, much of my growth around relationships was done while I was in relationships. Towards the end of my 20s, most of that growth had to happen while I wasn’t in a committed relationship.
The pre-requisite is that you have to want to learn to be okay with being single. That’s where most people get stuck. My mentality was that I wanted to be able to take care of myself, by myself, no matter what life throws at me. To be fair, that mindset can be a double-edged sword.
However, it empowered me to prioritize building a deep level of self-trust in my ability to work through anything without relying on a partner, if necessary. I now realize that only then did I feel safe enough internally to be ready to find a healthy relationship.
I still always wanted a partner with whom I could weather the ups and downs of life and build on our emotional and professional foundations together. Still, I worked to reach a point where I knew to my core that my career, friends, family, and other pursuits could be enough for me to feel fulfilled in life.
Having fun with your partner should be a non-negotiable ✅
My grandma told me this shortly before I started dating my boyfriend when I asked her for advice on finding a good life partner. She said, “The most important thing is to find someone you have a lot of fun with.” And she’s not exactly the type of person I would have expected to say that 😅
I told her, “But the ones I have fun with are never the ones who can support me emotionally.”
She replied, “Then you’re not really having fun with them, are you?”
I cried and told her she didn’t know what she was talking about because she hadn’t dated in 70-ish years. Literally a month later, I realized she was 100% correct.
In my relationship, and specifically while on this trip in India, I realized that having fun goes much deeper than sharing the same sense of humor or even the same sense of adventure. You only truly have fun when you feel safe. For me, safety comes from being listened to, feeling heard, and knowing that I can consistently rely on my boyfriend to celebrate my emotions and provide a safe space to express them.
There’s no way to find out if the person you’re with is someone you can consistently lean on unless you consistently show them all sides of yourself, which is very scary and very vulnerable. You must have a solid foundation of self-worth to take that leap of faith.
• • • •
I get that none of this is rocket science, and there are a hundred other things I had to work through before I could be in what feels like a completely different (i.e. healthy and interdependent) relationship than I’ve ever been in. And we haven’t even touched on the timing piece of it, which is largely out of our control.
But when I take a step back and think about 15-year-old Hayley, she would have NEVER believed she could do any of this. I couldn’t even be okay with myself in my home environment, let alone in another country halfway across the world, with someone with whom I share all sides of myself.
Honestly, even 25-year-old Hayley would have struggled to believe she could 1) find a partner who celebrates her emotions and creates a safe space to express them, let alone 2) immerse herself in a different culture, have fun, and feel like she belongs.
Relationships have always been my Achilles’ heel. But it feels like the hard work of learning from my mistakes is finally paying off.
My message to parents is this: the more you let your children experience the shitty things that life is going to throw at them, even relationships, and celebrate it as an opportunity for them to grow and challenge themselves rather than a problem you need to solve, the more confidence and self-worth they’re going to gain.
That’s the foundation no one else can build for them but themselves, and it will propel them towards a life they love living with healthy relationships, whatever that may look like for them.
And now……our vibes this week🔮
📚 What we’re reading
When teenage angst went mainstream, vogue
Influencers pitch Harris at DNC, bloomberg
🎶 What we’re listening to
💡 One last thought
THANKS FOR READING!
If you found this valuable, this is your sign✌️ to send this to parents or young people who can relate to the feelings we’re having this week so we can make sure they know they’re not alone. Sharing is caring 😎
We’re in this to collaborate and support. Please feel free to reach out to us:
If you’re a parent who has a child in treatment, we’re happy to answer any of your burning questions and share our experience in treatment and with transitioning out!
If you’re passionate about changing the narrative in the therapeutic program industry.