Overcoming Pride and Growing Forward

An excerpt from Breakup Rehab by Rebekah Freedom McClaskey

How does one regain confidence and optimism about love after a breakup? After her own relationship ended, author and counselor Rebekah Freedom McClaskey developed and practiced a series of small, step-by-step actions that ultimately helped her heal her heart and live in harmony with her destiny.

In Breakup Rehab: Creating the Love You Want, Rebekah meets readers in their states of grief or resignation and walks them through twelve steps to forgiveness and self-responsibility, self-compassion and self-awareness, power and purpose.  We hope you’ll enjoy this excerpt from the book.

Step 8 of Breakup Rehab is about overcoming pride and growing forward. Without forward motion we just get stuck. It’s risky to love and risky to grow. I’ve witnessed my clients’ relationships break apart because one partner will look at the other and say, “Do your work.” Pride keeps us from seeing that it’s “our” work. Now the real work is to use self-awareness about how pride contributed to your breakup so that you can grow forward.

This is a crucial step. Overcoming pride is the difference between repeating old patterns and creating a new life. If we keep an eye on the past it will replicate in our future. Remember, our reality is a collaborative effort between mind and matter.

It’s Not a Race 
Who are you really competing against when you make breaking up a race to win? Or were you racing to get your way? Either way, we tend to compete with each other only to lose sight of the real prize — creating the love we want with someone who wants it too.

Western culture prides itself on individualism, which leads to competition over collaboration. Both growth and creation are collaborative processes. If your relationship was a competition for who got their needs met most — the power struggle — then chances are that caused the breakup. We do the best we know how at the time. Some attempts are better than others. It’s true, your ex may really suck at life. You may suck just a little too. You have a choice to be prideful and competitive about it or seek to work in collaboration with cooperative components — people, places, and things that contribute to your well-being.

Let me talk to your heart for a minute. Hey, I know you feel broken right now. I know that the mind is barking orders at you. It’s okay. You know what to do. That’s right. Find your rhythm. You feel a little off right now. A little confused. But you know where true north is for you. Just give yourself a little time to stabilize. You’ve been running a hard race after all.

I assure you, we’re all unstable after a breakup. Our pride is often a major contributor to the fallout. Adam Shannon, the author of the website DeadlySins.com, defines pride as “excessive belief in one’s own abilities, that interferes with the individual’s recognition of the grace of God. It has been called the sin from which all others arise. Pride is also known as Vanity.” I believe that vanity is the denial of impermanence in that all things will return to dust and ash in this physical world. We cling tightly to dysfunctional beliefs because of pride and vanity.

When I’m working with clients to help them through their breakups I often ask, “What caused the breakup?” Of course, there are a variety of answers, including finances, kids, cheating, lies, falling out of love, a bad sex life, residual pain from trauma, and more. Of those issues, the underlying force seems to be someone who is too prideful to let their walls down, to admit they feel shame, and to ask for help.

Pride, like judgment, blocks our growth. We get stuck and can’t make the transition into healing and moving forward. I like to flip the script and bring up that a lot of people feel pride in “being unencumbered.” If you date, it sounds like, “Let’s just keep it casual.” Well, you know, I think fear of commitment is fear to grow. What do you think?

Where do commitment issues come from?

Pride.

“But, Rebekah, what about good pride? Can’t I be proud of all the things I’ve collaborated on? Is collaboration good and competition bad? What’s the difference?” Thank you for asking, person whose voice I pretended to be right there. You can be proud of yourself for leaving a bad relationship, which is good. But you can have pride and think you’re better than anyone else because you left that relationship, which is vanity.

Growth comes not in running the race against others and winning. It comes with realizing it’s not a competition. You can be proud of who you are without having pride.

Rebekah Freedom McClaskey is the author of Breakup Rehab: Create the Love You Want. A relationship specialist with a master’s degree in counseling psychology, her private practice focuses on helping clients get what they want out of life and love. She lives in Rancho Santa Fe, California. Visit her online at www.rebekahfreedom.com.