How to Help Your Teen Through a Breakup
Welcome to You Are Destined For Greatness
Hey, Shane coming to you this week. Appreciate you being with me for You Are Destined For Greatness. Pretty windy outside, so we're inside today, right here in HQ headquarters—what I call a little recording studio where we record the podcast.
I recorded a pretty great podcast today, and I'd like to—today’s subject is on the subject of that podcast, which is how to help your teen through a breakup. I actually go through 16 ways to help kids experience loss with self-respect and grace.
Understanding Loss in Relationships
So you know with horses, talking about horses and humans, we experience loss. With horses, it's often when they die because they have such a shorter lifespan than we do. So, a lot of times, we experience the loss of the life of our pets.
With people, as we go through life, the good relationships we have, a lot of times, end as they leave us through death. But breakups are the same thing. You know what I'm saying? It’s the loss of a relationship. And especially when you're young, boom—you get hit. You might not know what to expect, how bad it's gonna feel, or what it's gonna mean. You're trying to make meaning out of it.
If you haven't been prepared and you don’t know what it’s all about, it’s pretty hard. It can be. And a lot of times, kids and adults will take these feelings of pain and make meaning out of them. They can have suicidal thoughts and actions towards suicide, or they try to feel better because it hurts so much.
So, they turn to substance abuse of all different types and engage in all kinds of destructive behavior. But you don’t have to, right? It’s hard, but it doesn’t have to be that hard.
So today, I just want to cover three of the 16 ways I go through in the podcast to help kids experience loss with self-respect and grace.
It’s Okay to Feel Bad Sometimes
That sounds simple, but just knowing that going in—the goal is not always to feel good. It’s okay to sit and feel, to feel life, and to have it not be okay. You don’t have to feel good all the time.
Just knowing that is power. That’s helpful. That’s number one.
This Too Shall Pass
Number 11—I'm not giving them to you in any specific order, just the ones that jumped out at me. The others are equally important.
This is a big one. It happened to me in one of the lowest points of my life. My dad—why this one is important to me—my dad gave me a paper article he cut out of Reader’s Digest. It was an old magazine, I’m sure it probably doesn’t exist anymore.
It was advice from Ann Landers. She said to expect trouble as inevitable and to look it in the eye and say, this too shall pass in hard times.
The mindset I took from that is just to know. A lot of times, we’re so engulfed, we’re so covered, and we feel so overtaken—really overpowered—by the pain, the struggle, the sadness, and the meaning we’re making out of all of this. It just feels terrible, and it feels permanent.
It feels like this is the way it is, and this is the way it's going to be. A lot of times, we can’t see out of it. And I believe that’s where a lot of suicidal thoughts come from—just thinking that this is the way it is, and this is the way it will always be. It’s so heavy that we can’t see beyond it.
So, knowing that this too shall pass can sometimes be helpful—if we can help our kids see that mindset.
What You Choose to Believe About Yourself Matters Most
Number 16—the last one—is to know that the most important factor in our lives is going to be what we choose to be true about ourselves, okay?
What I mean by that is that we can learn to depend lesson what other people think about us and more on what we think about us. If we can develop the skill of generating self-confidence—the willingness to feel any emotion, to feel fear, sadness, pain—then we can understand that this is part of loving, part of participating in relationships.
Having the vulnerability to expose ourselves to the risk of potential pain and knowing that going in allows us to love ourselves enough to go through it, live life, and feel it anyway.
Know that you are 100% lovable. Just because somebody else may or may not love you does not mean that you are not lovable. You are 100% lovable, 100% priceless. No more or no less than any other soul on the earth.
You are not damaged, not wrong, not less than, not deficient in any way—just because a relationship ended.
And we must become less reliant on what others think for our long-term well-being.
Final Thoughts
These are just a couple of the keys in this week's podcast.
I hope they’re helpful as you contemplate how serious breakups can feel to kids. They feel so personal. A lot of times, they’re not even personal, but they feel like a big deal.
We can have such an influence. They’re listening, even if they don’t show it. We can have a big impact.
That’s also part of what we do here at Stable Living. Check us out at stableliving.com.
And remember this—You Are Destined For Greatness.
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