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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this episode of Stable Parenting Podcast (formerly The Horsemanship Journey Podcast). My name is Shane Jacob, your host, and I thank you for taking your time to be here with me today.
You know, with horses, they have a shorter lifespan than human beings do, kind of like dogs, much shorter lifespan than we do. And when they leave us, when they die, a lot of times it's a tough deal. You know, it's a tough deal. It's kind of like when our fellow human beings leave us and they die. It's a—depending on, you know, our relationship—it can be hard, it can be painful, and it's a grieving process.
And in Stable Living Coaching, I deal a lot—you know, I talk a lot—to parents and with teens who are experiencing breakups and try to handle, like, how to handle breakups with teens. Like, how do you manage that?
A lot of us—you know, I think—you know, we just don't know what we didn't know. You know, it just happened and we just tried to figure out how to get through it and we survived it and we went on. But it can be pretty painful. It can be very difficult. It can be so painful.
Like I've talked about before, our brain takes rejection as physical pain. Okay? I mean, our brain is taking—we take this stuff serious. And with our kids, we can be at risk of, you know, suicidal thoughts or suicide and all kinds of substance abuse or doing all kinds of stuff to try to feel better because we feel so bad because of these breakups or rejections.
So, a while back I came up—I thought to myself, I'm like, well, what would be helpful? What would have been helpful for me if I would have known then what I know now? What would have been helpful if I could go back to my younger self, my younger teenage Shane and say, “Hey, here's what you need to know, brother.”
And so I came up with 16 ideas to how to help your teen through a breakup, 16 ways to help kids experience loss with self-respect and love. And the thing of it is, it's just not a couple of ideas that I've dreamed up. These are actually things that I have implemented in Stable Living and that have positive results with people. And I hope that you can use them in your life. Doesn't have to be for a teen, but for any rejection, but specifically this is targeted to helping teens through breakups. Okay?
So I got 16 of these little bullet points and here we go.
Number one is to know it's okay. It's normal to feel bad sometimes. Okay? Just knowing that the goal isn't to feel good all the time is a thing. Okay?
And I'll—you know, when I was a kid, I didn't know. Hell, I didn't know it. I thought you were supposed to feel good all the time. Nobody told me that that's not necessarily the goal. I mean, why wouldn't it be? Feel good, feel bad, and I'm going for good.
So I went for good so much that, you know, when I didn't feel good, I just drank and then I felt better. And of course, that was a terrible destructive—oh my goodness. Okay? And so that's the things that I did and some—and you don't want to go down those roads, right?
You want to try to avoid some of the pain and destruction like the road that I was on if you can and help your kids do the same thing. Have it a little bit smoother road. Okay, they're gonna have a tough road. It's not gonna be easy, but you don't want it to be a... You don't want it to be such a destructive one as it could be.
So, just knowing that hey, life's gonna feel bad and you need to know that upfront. I want you to know that that's gonna be the way it's gonna be and when those things happen, we're just going to feel it and go through it and it's going to be okay. So just knowing that is number one.
Number two is to choose and trust just a few people, okay, that we are willing, that we have the courage, okay, that we can exercise the courage to tell anything to, to tell our story, okay, because this can help us, okay, in times that we feel pain, when we feel really bad. And this includes prayer, okay?
So what I'm saying—I'm gonna say this again—to choose and trust just a few people that we are willing to, even though it might require courage, to tell anything to, to tell our story, how we feel, because that's gonna be the thing that's gonna help us. And I included prayer in that trusting a few people, okay? To talk to your God, okay? And if you have some human beings that are nearby, then that'll be helpful too.
Number three is to know that thoughts create feelings. Okay? I didn't know this until I was way into, you know, recently. Thoughts create feelings. Knowing this is power.
Just knowing that a thought—okay, a thought is a sentence or a phrase that's going through my mind—okay? That if I recognize, I can, you know, move that one out and move a new one in, I can intentionally think thoughts and thoughts create feelings.
And maybe if I don't like how I'm feeling and I don't like what I do, my actions—because when I feel a certain way and I don't like my result, when I feel a certain way—that I can backtrack that one step to the thought that's creating the feeling that's leading, driving my action, that's getting my result, I can just go back over here to the thought. To know that thoughts create feelings is just power. Okay.
The next one is number four, which is that we can change how we feel by changing what we're thinking. Okay? We have the agency, the power, the gift, all of us, to change how we feel.
We are not doomed or decided or determined or because of this we feel that because of what we're thinking. So when we intentionally try new thoughts, try thinking different things—intentionally, on purpose—we can change how we feel which is going to change our result down the road. Okay.
Number five is to know that our first love or our first sex is just what it means. It means our first. Any other meaning, okay, about those people or those events is optional. Okay? It's meaning that you're choosing or that you may not want to choose to assign to that first, okay?
Because the only thing about it is just what it says. This is your first relationship. This is the first time you've felt love. This is the first time that you experience sex. It just so happened to be your first. And if you wanna make that—I guess the point is that I think a lot of times we can make it mean so much more. And then when we get rejected or we have the breakup or somebody leaves us or breaks up with us and we're the one that was left being broke up with, we're not the breaker-upper, we're the break-ee—I don't know which one we are—but we're the one that somebody left and we assigned all this meaning because it happened to be the first whatever. It can be harder.
So I'm just saying that any other meaning that you assign to that—all it means is it's first thing. Okay? There's going to be other experiences in your lifetime and there's going to be other relationships in your lifetime.
And so number six is what a relationship is. A lot of us don't know this as adults, so know it and help your kids know it. And that is that a relationship is the sum total of your thoughts about another person, about another human being—the other side of the relationship. That's what a relationship is.
And so knowing that, we get to choose what we think. We want to change the relationship, we change what we think about the other person. Boom, relationship changed. And that's what it is, and it's that simple.
Number seven is that we can change what we think about the other person at any time. Whether we're, whether it's a breakup, whether it's after the breakup, whether it's in the middle of a good ongoing healthy relationship, and any time we want to improve it, we change it. We change what we're thinking if we want to improve the relationship. We change what we think about the other person. And we can do that at any time that we want to. And so knowing that is power. Okay?
Moving on, number eight is to know that most breakups don't even have to do with you. Most of them have to do with the person doing the leaving, not the person being left. That's a hard one to really fully accept because it feels so real, and rejection feels—your brain's taking it as pain, real physical pain—and it's not easy. And so just to hear that, you might want to discard it, but the truth is that most of the causes, most of the reasons have to do with the one that's leaving.
Things like unresolved personal issues like trauma, insecurities, or somebody else's limiting beliefs, self-worth or a lack of self-love. Somebody struggles with their self-worth and they, in order to seek validation, they push their partners away out of fear and out of vulnerability.
There's this thing called projection and that is that people often project their insecurities onto their partner. And then when people feel unworthy, they might think that their partner doesn't love them enough and then they leave and self-sabotage. Or just a lack of emotional regulation and emotional maturity. You know, many, a lot of breakups just happen because both of the people are just struggling with emotional—a lack of emotional regulation or emotional growth. And so then the relationship just becomes like this conflict, conflict, this battlefield for a conflict rather than a place for connection.
And so, there's so many reasons, but a lot of the time, most of the time, it doesn't even have to do with you. Okay?
Nine is that you get to choose what it means that somebody broke up with you. And there's no limits placed on what you can choose that you believe. So you can believe whatever the hell you want to about why that person left. It's up to you. You get to choose it. Okay?
And so if you know that, that you are not subject to, you know, a certain thought that you have about why, then you can make it mean whatever you want to, and that is power.
Number 10 is that relationships ending is something that's going to happen throughout our lives. And so if you just know that upfront, it's really helpful to know that. I mean, this is going to be an ongoing thing. We're going to be—it's something that we're going to experience as part of the human condition. And if you know that, it can be helpful.
Eleven is, is that, uh, this is a big thing. And that is, is that the immediate feels like the permanent and it's not.
One of the times that I was like the low point, one of the lowest points of my life, my dad gave me—he cut out an article out of a Reader's Digest, and it was Anne Landers commentary. She was an advice lady in the Reader's Digest, I remember. And I still have this actual piece of paper. And basically what she said is the best advice that she's given, and what seemed to be the most helpful over her time of helping people, advising people, was that to expect trouble is inevitable and when it comes to know that this too shall pass.
And that those words and that thought helps to be able to get through it, to be able to see beyond the immediate and to know that there's a future. And it's hard, okay? You're in so much pain and I've been—I had suffered plenty of breakups—and the most recent one, and I certainly wasn't a teenager with the most recent one, you know, is painful.
And in my own pain, it seemed so permanent. You know? Right at the time it just seemed so heavy, so overbearing and so like overpowering, right? That it just seemed like I couldn't get out, you know?
And so you can imagine—now think about that as an adult or something that you may have experienced similar—now put that on a kid who is not fully emotionally or physiologically mature that's having the same kind of thing happen. This is tough stuff. And you can imagine why, you know, you can see where these thoughts of suicide or, you know, trying to escape through using substances and all kinds of harmful things in an effort to feel better can come from.
Okay, so what I'm saying here is if we prepare our kids and ourselves to work for this and then be there to help them support them through it, it can make all the difference. Okay? And it does.
So let's see, where was I? It's not permanent. Okay, and so there's that.
12 is to—hey, expect to feel bad for a while. It's not gonna be—I like to think, I'll be, you know, in the horse business there used to be, I think we still use this, it's called a scarlet—what's it called? Red scarlet oil, okay? And we used to joke that if you painted it on a horse's injury, that'd heal up and hair over by morning.
Okay, which reminds me, which I think about this is that I want to think that when I'm in pain, I would like to believe that it's gonna begone by morning. Okay, I got this. Don't worry about me. Thank you. I'm good. I'll be fine by tomorrow.
It doesn't really always go that way for me. And I think it's important for kids to know that, hey, have an expectation that it's okay for this to hurt for a while.
I’m not saying to dwell in your misery or make up a bunch of excuses or go isolate and live in a hole and feel bad for a while. I'm just saying expect that this is going to be with you. It's something that happened. It's part of your life experience and it's not going away.
It's just something that you have to feel and choose how to deal with, and it's going to be there, and it's going to be okay that it's going to be there for a while. Sometimes, you know, sometimes it can take quite a while to really feel like you've grieved and that you've been fully through the process.
Okay, of coming back, bouncing back from a breakup or rejection.
13 is what you think about you is far more important than what you imagine anybody else is thinking about you. Okay?
What I mean is, is what you believe to be true about yourself is far more important than what you're thinking somebody else might be thinking about you. Okay?
First of all, you don't even know what somebody else is thinking. And regardless of what somebody else is thinking, what you think about you is what's the most important. Okay?
Talk a little bit more about that.
14 is being with people that you love—excuse me—being with people who love you and will help you and support you, will help you heal faster than being alone.
You don't want to isolate. That can be more risky. It can be dangerous. You want to be willing to surround yourself. Talked earlier about willing to share your story with people you trust, but for sure surround yourself with people that love you and people that trust you. You're going to heal. You're going to go through it faster.
15 is be, just being prepared by knowing upfront and having an expectations around that this is going to happen. It's part of life. Okay. It's much better than being blindsided. Okay. That's like, boom! What? You know, I didn't even know that this can happen. It's a part of life and it's so painful and I don't know, I can't find my way out.
And so just knowing that going in and you can prepare your kids that, know, love is being willing to love and be vulnerable and being open is a risky business and it's okay. You know, it's part of life. It's having the courage to be vulnerable and to feel life and to live it and to be willing to, to suffer those pains to go through the bad and just experience all the up and downs of life.
Okay. It's a, it's a risk that hopefully that we are willing to intentionally take on purpose, but just knowing that upfront, okay. That was 15 is to be prepared by, by just knowing upfront, okay. That you're in to some degree you're at risk and living that risk. We're all at risk to some degree if we're participating in life.
16 is the most important factor. Okay, and that is is that what you believe to be true about yourself is the most important thing in all of this. Okay, so what I mean is is that that if you can depend if you can depend less, if you can depend less on what other people think and more about what you think, okay. If you have self-confidence in this, and self-confidence means that you, what I mean is if you have the skill to generate your own self-confidence, which is a feeling of how you approach things.
Having self-confidence is basically the willingness to be able to feel any emotion. To be able to feel fear, be able to feel rejection, to be able to feel pain, to be willing to feel that instead of to cower back and not participate and not have the courage to go through these things that are gonna help us grow and develop as human beings.
Part of believing about yourself, what I mean by believing, what you believe about yourself is that to know that you're 100% lovable, regardless of what somebody else thinks. If they don't love you, hey, that's their own business, whatever. You can love you. And you can know that you're 100% lovable, regardless of what somebody else is doing.
You can know that you're 100% valuable and invaluable and priceless, regardless of anything. You can come to know that people around you that love you that go to to help support you that love you will help you with that. And to know that you can become less reliant on what somebody else thinks for your long-term well-being. Okay?
These are things that they're pretty easy to say, right? But they're a little bit harder to internalize when it's actually happening to you.
But if you take these 16, use some of them, use all of them, implement them, prepare your kids, build them up and let them go into this world prepared and willing to feel, to know the risk that they're taking, gonna, relationships are gonna end, they're gonna experience that in this lifetime. It's gonna be okay that you're there for them.
Prep them with some good thoughts on how that they can be. Continue to work on their relationship with themselves by teaching them how to develop self-confidence and these are the things that you can do and these are the things that I also do in Stable Living ongoing.
So I appreciate that. I hope that helps and I appreciate you taking your time to be with me today.
Remember you cannot fail as long as you Don't Ever Stop Chasin It.
