A Practical Guide to Solving Your Emotional Debt

When my client first came to see me, I saw a middle-aged woman torn between staying married and getting divorced. She and her husband had been together for ten years. “Why thinking about divorce now?” I asked. In a low voice, she replied, “I don’t want him to get mad at me anymore.”

What are your emotional needs?

I asked my client to tell me the need she wanted her husband to fulfill in her life. Her face went beet red. She quickly said she did not know. After a while, she ventured, “I want him to make me happy.”

What should others do to make you happy?

I gave my client the following exercise. Maybe you can do it too. Write down all the ways you want your partner to make you happy. Say when and how often they need to perform each action for you to feel satisfied with yourself. With that in mind,

Let’s take a closer look at emotional debt.

Is your happiness too hot for you to handle yourself?

My client did not know what being happy meant to her. She was not specific about what she needed to feel content and satisfied. Because she did not know how to give herself what she needed, she put her happiness in her husband’s hands like a hot iron to the touch. Guess what? He got burned. And so did she.

What if you stopped getting burned by emotional debt?

Emotional debt is: putting our needs onto others without a conscious agreement or self-awareness on both sides. We do it when we find our needs too hot to handle.

Let me be bold. Your needs are yours to own. It’s your happiness at stake.

Here is a practical guide to solving your emotional debt:

❤️ Identify your emotional needs.

What do you need to make yourself happy?

Go beyond the obvious. Dig deeper. For example, my client needed to reexamine childhood beliefs. Why? Because those beliefs had made her a nice girl. Though she was a successful entrepreneur, she got that she had secretly depended on others to make her happy.

If you haven’t done the exercise I gave you earlier, go back and do it. It’s for your own good. You’ll get valuable clues about your needs and where you might have accumulated emotional debt.

❤️ Release false bonds.

Heal the false bonds that bind you.

When she was a kid, my client saw her parents yelling at each other about her. As a result, she believed she was the source of their misery and the cause of their happiness. As an adult, she put that false bond onto her husband. She tried to make him responsible for her happiness. My client now understands her happiness is hers to own.

❤️ Embrace accountability.

Even in the heat of the moment, you are still 100% responsible for what goes on in your life. Your life. Your power. No excuses.

My client wished she had come to see me sooner. Emotional debt burned her marriage to the ground.

Don’t wait until your life turns to ashes. Reach out to me now.

Anne Beaulieu, inspiring the next generation of emotionally intelligent, strategic women through

• developing strategic emotional intelligence
• financial EQ coaching and financial emotional intelligence consulting
• financial EQ implementation of your emotionally intelligent strategic plan
• chartered financial analysis and finance economics
• emotional rudder guiding you in solving emotional debt
• Forbes and The Curious Leader value contributions