Welcome to the GPYP/GPYB Blog!
Welcome to V4 of the GPYP/GPYB blog!
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Life Is Not Fair At All. Sorry.
Requested repost
When I opened “The Road Less Travelled” by M. Scott Peck back in 88 or so the first words are “Life is difficult.” and I flung it across the room and yelled, “No KIDDING!” That was NOT what I wanted to hear and thought that any book that started like that was just going to be a downer.Read More
Look Me In The Eye and Say That
Judge Judy has this thing where she says to litigants, “Look right here (pointing to her eyes.)” Long before she ever came on the air and people inevitably compared me to her, I did that to my kids. “Look me in the eye and say that, no don’t look THERE, look HERE (pointing to my eyes).” The boys gave up trying to say anything untruthful–they just spilled the beans. My daughter tended to say nothing rather than incriminate herself. She also mumbled quite a bit. I think women and men lie (fail to tell the truth) differently. They also scratched their noses. If a person is lying they sometimes inadvertently scratch their nose or have a tendency to twitch it. Body language is a beautiful thing sometimes.
But for me, that is for the kids. As adults I expect the truth and I don’t allow people in my life who cannot or will not give it or who have the capacity to lie, a bald faced lie, directly to my face. To cheat, to be indirect or even to make one excuse after another. An issue I’m having with my almost 20 year old daughter is that nothing is her fault. “I didn’t mean to…” “I wanted to be there but…” (When my kids were making excuses, I would say that everything after “but” is bullshit).
Responsibility. You have to take it to be a healthy person. Not too little and not too much. If you’re taking on others’ responsibility, that makes you a codependent, not a hero. Not a martyr, not the “good” one. You’re a tool. You’re a fool. That’s not healthy.
Everyone in your life, no matter what circumstances, no matter what the deal is, needs to tell the truth, be responsible, suit up and show up, and act like a decent human being. If people in your life are not or have not, they have to go.
You have to make that your standard and if it’s not your standard and you’re being mistreated, used, or lied to time and time again, take a look in the mirror. Look yourself in the eye and say, “It’s your own damn fault. You know that right?” Chances are, you won’t look away. Because you’ll be telling the truth.
Forgiveness of Self and Others
Forgiveness of others starts after we do our grief work and our Relationship Inventory and our examination of the relationship and feel the spectrum of emotions. It does not start right away. Forgiveness of others is the end, rather than the beginning, of the process.
However, it is very important to start on self-forgiveness. This process of moving on and healing our hurt cannot possibly happen if we are holding our own feet to the fire. We didn’t know that we didn’t know. We didn’t do as well as we should have/could have. Okay. What have you learned? If you are working on your stuff and doing your inventories, you are learning a lot about you.
Aren’t You Special? (Personal Insight)
When I was an Emergency Services Clinician, one thing we had to fill out on our report after an evaluation was a person’s personal insight (how well they could assess themselves and their behavior, situation etc). If a person winds up in an Emergency Room (or jail or detox or some other places we went to do evaluations), chances are you would be writing “lacks personal insight” on your report. Although if a person was in a situational depression or something like that, chances were they did have personal insight but were just in a rough time of their lives. So let’s talk about personal insight and/or lack thereof.
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New
Protected post for Premium Members: password in Premium Area
New video (for everyone) at YouTube on What Is Breakup Coaching?
05/13 Check in Thread
How is everyone doing? Reminder: Please log in to see all posts on this thread.
Videos, Comment Moderation, Etc.
Hi all! I am sorry to those, especially the new members, that it took me a while to approve your comments. I’ve had the week from hell with several people going in the hospital either unexpectedly or going in and having unexpected and serious complications. If you saw my house (normally immaculate), which look like a bomb went off in it, you would be able to tell what a week I’ve had. And my daughter-in-law goes into surgery tomorrow so it’s not over yet. Hopefully all goes well. The unexpected and nature of the issues really threw me. I honestly have had days this week when I did not know whether I was coming or going. So my apologies for that.
Coaching clients, please email me to remind me or tell me about appointments coming up. Not only do I have a lot on my plate with the hospitalizations, but also that software isn’t working right and I am not getting the notices. If you are a regular client and we make appts through email, please email me if you have an appointment coming up this week. If you don’t know the email go to http://www.GPYBCoaching.com and it’s right up top. Also feel free to call me and leave a message. I am sorry if I have missed anyone. It’s been a horrible week and I was bombarded by much I did not expect.
If you have emailed me about approving your upgrade to premium membership or are a coaching client who emailed me and did not get an answer, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE email me again and again until you get an answer if I have not responded within 24 hours. This week I had hundreds of emails and was not able to get to everyone and missed a few and then found several in my spam folder. So again, I apologize for the week from hell ramifications.
Shout out to Matthew, a new member, for the Springsteen reference. I followed Bruce since before anyone knew who he was and if you go up top to the tab GPYB videos, you’ll see at the bottom a video of me on stage with Southside Johnny singing “I Don’t Want To Go Home.” For those of you who follow the GPYP channel on YouTube I think there are one or two videos on there that were not there before. I have also subscribed to Vimeo for the premium membership so that I can post longer videos and not be doing parts 1, 2, 3, which I have to do on stupid YouTube.
Speaking of Premium and videos, the FIRST of many premium members only video is going up tomorrow morning. I finally have all my technical issues ironed out with the camera, software and hope that using Vimeo will help the process. The Premium membership videos will be shorter but more of them.
Things are kicking in, the technology is working better. (now that I say that the whole site will probably crash) and as I get this together, the Premium members site should be working better. The daily texts don’t make it out every day and I’m not sure why. If you haven’t signed up for it, please do and let me know if there is a day you don’t get one. I look at the history and some days it says 0 subscribers received this text message and I have no idea why. I am also still working on getting text messages to those outside the U.S. I have not forgotten you!!!!
The women’s retreat is half sold out and possibly completely sold-out. I am trying to keep the number to 6-8 and have 5 fully paid attendees and 2 with deposits. So if you want to come, please let me know soon.
THANKS ALL!!!
Check in and Welcomes and Introductions
Hi Everyone: People have asked if there are certain days we put up check-in threads and there isn’t really.
We try to put up a new check in thread when the current one gets up around 100 posts. Some weeks that could be a day and a half and other weeks it’s a week and a half. I used to put them up on Mondays but sometimes we’d be up over 100 posts by Wednesday and the blog would become bogged down for the rest of the week. Through trial and error (much error!) we found that over 100, we have issues with page loading etc. So now we let it go to about 100 posts (sometimes a little more and sometimes less). So that could be anywhere from a few days to over a week depending on how much is going on.
If you are new, please feel free to tell your story and introduce yourself in the check-in threads. Do not apologize for length and if you introduce yourself on the tail end of one and don’t get a lot of responses, please feel free to copy and paste to the new thread. We are here to help you…not to scold you for double posting 
Welcome to all our new members and please feel free to use the check in thread to introduce yourself and get support! We have people here who have been through the worst breakups and stay around to help others and we have brand new members and everyone in between. We are a caring and supportive community although we do give out tough love when we need to (not usually right away though).
We have been where you are (even me, otherwise none of this would be here) and we are here to help you as others have helped us, so reach out and grab a hand…there are plenty here who will help you. Welcome to a warm and loving community!
What About Me?
Over the years a few things have happened on this blog and through the blog, seminars, retreats and bootcamps that have surprised me, but one of the most surprising things to me has been the friendships formed.
I get photos and emails from bootcampers, people who met at seminars or on the blog all the time and have stayed in touch and become friends.
A few weeks ago I received a photo of 3 of my bootcampers who were having a great time on an outing. I saw 2 last summer together, 3 at a retreat together, 2 again this winter and yesterday I received a photo from the wedding of one of the people who started here, went to a seminar and is friends with at least 2 of the earlier blog readers.
So this morning, the person who sent me the photo said, “And she married a good one!” Well I hope so! Seriously, I’m thrilled for her…and for all the friendships and support that do find their way into real life. And I know many who are pursuing their dreams, living lives that they have dreamed of that do not involve getting married, and I love those photos too!
I love when they come and see me when in New York (esp together and esp if they’ve got great outings planned!)
I love all the photos people send me. I love the ones of people who are independent and have figured out how to build their lives and are helping each other do so, I love the ones who are supporting others in relationships or out of relationships but getting one of 2 of my GPYBers at the wedding of one who just “married a good one!” just melted my heart and I had to share.
Healing happens and love will happen again too when YOU are ready, not when you think it should. Give it time. As I said, these are two of my earliest GPYPers (I don’t even think the book was out yet when they met), so do your work, trust the process and give it time.
04/28 Check in Thread
How is everyone doing? Reminder: Please log in to see all posts on this thread.
Life – The Place to Be
HELLO GPYB Readers!
As most of you know, this blog started in 2006 and at the end of the year will be 7 years old. It’s been an amazing journey with all of you (don’t worry, I’m not about to prepare you for ending the blog), I just woke up this morning April 27, 2013 and thought that I felt pretty good and for the longest time never thought I would wake up feeling like this.
The past few years have been challenging to say the least. I’ve had a whole bunch of tragedy and medical issues and financial collapse all happen at the same time. Last weekend I did a short talk at a wellness fair - it’s in a series of videos on YouTube. If you look over to the right hand column you will see GPYB Channel on You Tube Click here for GPYP You Tube Channel.
This talk wasn’t prepared and I had no idea what was going to come out of my mouth when I started talking. But the take away should be that no matter how bad things get, you can right your ship if you have the tools.
If you’ve come off a breakup and you are not clear on where you are going and what is going to happen, I can tell you that if you follow the process as designed in the book, you can heal not only from the wounds of this relationship, but from wounds of long ago. You can heal, you can move forward and you can build a life that is wonderful. You can become a happy, healthy person.
From Our Readers