New social circles
Hayley Quinn talks to a hypnotherapist and social organiser Matt Kendall about building a new social life, where to meet new friends and how to combat loneliness.
You can listen to the whole episode here!
The interview
Okay, ladies, welcome back to another Love HQ podcast. Now today I've been joined by a really good friend. I only get people on here that I trust, like and respect. His name's Matt Kendall. He's a fantastic hypnotherapist specialising in social anxiety. He also runs one of the biggest meetup groups in the UK with nigh on 15,000 members, so he knows what he's doing. And he's spent a lot of time speaking to people about getting a good rebuild going on after they've come out potentially a long term relationship.
I know what it's like, believe me, I'm breaking up Queen over here. I make no bones about that dating expert or not. And what can happen is as women we invest so much time in our relationships, often maintaining relationships, the crappy guys, which is like throwing pennies down a well. We're never going to get anything back. And then when they eventually fuck off, to put it mildly, you can be left feeling like o, this big investment of my time and energy is just gone forever. What do I do now?
And what Matt helps me with is getting the rebuild going. Reestablishing your social life, getting back into yourself, and finding those ways that you can rank yourself. So when he inevitably turns back up cap in hand, you can slam the door in his face.
Matt
The basis of the batons, people who I've worked with, women are usually 25 upwards and have come out to a long term relationship trying to get over a partner. The actual work I do is called IEMT, which is Integral Eye Movement Therapy, which is like EMDR. This won't mean anything to people.
It's like the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind- can you remove a negative memory, essentially? And can you remove the existence of somebody to not say you don't know them, but so you can move on. I deal with an awful lot of people are coming out of relationships, whether that be boyfriend, girlfriend, or marriage. Of course, everybody else's lives have moved on, as well.
Uncoupling
When you're in a couple, you tend to do a couple of things. You spend lots of time with your couple friends. Exactly. So when spending time with the couples, if it's with one person, it's a bit of a third wheel thing kind of going on. So when you spend it with other couples, when you break up, you can have that whole which friends do we get and? Yeah, divide the friends that you're getting see them at different times and things. So it is a really good time to reassess how you're spending your time. How you're spending your time and who you're spending your time with has a major impact on your self-esteem or your competence.
What's good to do is to reassess how you spend your time, who you're spending your time with, and who you'd like to spend your time with. Because there's been a lot of studies, which do show that you are the total of the five closest people who you spend time with. So if you take the five people you spend the most time with, you add up their careers, their wealth, their family life, their status, their jobs, and divide that by five, then that's essentially your life.
If you're hanging around with some pretty low-grade people, that you just continue to hang around with, simply because you spent time hanging around with them already. Well, you're never gonna be able to grow as a person and they will keep you held down. Seek people who are better than you. People ask how do I do so well in what I'm doing. The fact is I stand on the shoulders of giants.
