Uncertain About Your Relationship? You Need This... - Matthew Hussey - #1057

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
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One of the most common issues that I'm seeing online at the moment, and people talk about a lot, is working out when to end things. How do you come to think about advising people on knowing when to leave a relationship?

**Matthew Hussey** (0:48)
I coached, there's someone I was coaching recently, who had given me all sorts of reasons why they should already be gone.
I sat in front of her and she was like, what do you think I should do? I was like, you've already given me so many reasons why you shouldn't be there. But I can't make you leave.
I don't love this metaphor because I believe in renewal and rebirth, but I sometimes think it helps to think of things like a cliff edge. At a certain point, you go over the cliff edge and then you're in free fall and there's a lot of damage that gets done or maybe the cliff edge is, your life blows up financially because you put off doing something sooner, or maybe the cliff edge is that there's a certain amount of time that's passed that you can never get back. But that idea of going off the cliff edge is, in some ways has been important to me because I see part of what I do is, can I get someone to act? Can I almost even create a fake cliff edge now that stops them from getting to the real cliff edge where there's going to be so much time passed that they're now going to have deep regret about having spent that long with that person or there's going to be such chaos in their lives or they will have lost so many other relationships because of this relationship. And I said to this woman I was coaching, I can't make you leave. And the reality is the really tough reality is you might need to experience a lot more pain yet before you leave. I can't say, I can't determine for you how much pain you need in order to leave. We all have our threshold. And the scary thing, and I'm kind of in a way talking about a certain kind of breakup here because there's some truly toxic and dangerous relationships that people get into. And I don't mean just dangerous physically, but just dangerous in the sense that they're with someone that really rubs them of their soul, their identity, their confidence, everything. But there was a Beth Macy, I think it's Beth Macy who wrote about the opioid crisis in America. She said, the scary thing about opioids is that, the cliche about drugs is that, someone will hit rock bottom. And it's at that point that they'll ricochet back up again. And she said, no, no, no, with opioids, people hit rock bottom and then they realize rock bottom has a basement, and that basement has a trap door.
There are relationships like that, where you think somewhere, oh, this is the point where they leave. And it's like, no, no, no, something even worse has to happen yet, and something even worse has to happen. So there's no one answer, but at a certain point, I think that we have to hit a kind of pain threshold, where we say, is this really, can I endure this for the rest of my life? Do I deserve to endure this for the rest of my life? And one trap we have to be very careful of is the, someone asked me a question in my membership the other day. Do, what did she say exactly? She said, what if what I have right now is like-

**Chris Williamson** (4:31)
The best that's available.

**Matthew Hussey** (4:32)
The best that I can get. What if better isn't out there? And I said that you have to be really careful with that logic, because you're saying that the only reason to leave is if you believe from this place of fear right now that you're coming up with this question from that someone better is coming. But you can't compare it with if you think something better is coming. You have to compare it with the happy that you can be without this person. And there's a thousand different versions of that happy and not all of them even involve another person.