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How can taking risks help me cope with a break up?

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Host:How can taking risk help me cope with a break up?

Adrian Ashman: I tried to get people to think about taking risks. Now, that doesn t mean you go mountain climbing without your proper equipment, but I do suggest to people that they look at taking physical risks, emotional risks, intellectual risks. The physical risks, yeah, okay, maybe it is time to look at a sport, maybe it is time to think about taking up gym, which is a physical risk, something you have never done before.

Emotional risks, sometimes you just got to look at that person, who you have been working with for five or ten years and say, Hey! Do you want to go for a cup of coffee that is an emotional risk. You have never before thought that you have the guts to do it and so intellectual risks, sometimes there are things you would really want to do right upon, write a short story, start a novel, go back to school, whole range of things that actually take you away from the person you were before.

You are actually moving; you are out of that scene; you are going somewhere else now. So, where am I going? And those seems physical, intellectual, emotional, those are risks that you take to make new life and there are people who have broken up in a relationship and they have got a new career, they have moved out of their job, they have changed occupations, they have moved away, they have done things that they never wanted to do before, they have gone and done community service overseas.

Not running away from the breakdown at marriage, but saying I have always really thought that that would be a really good thing to do. The kids are now away, the marriage is finished, I can do that now. So, it is looking from setting aside what is the past and looking at what is the future, what holds it. I think they are really important challenges because it is those challenges, those risks that you take, that move you on from where you are, to take you to the next phase of your life and I think we have a number of phases in our life and the breakdown in a marriage, breakdown in the really long-term relationship is the end of one phase and then we start another.

So, how do you make the transition? I think the risk is a really nice way of being able to set some goals for the person you want to be as opposed to the person that you were in the previous relationship and I think that s really important.

Expert: Adrian Ashman

Email: adrian.ashman@bigpond.com

Adrian Ashman is currently Professor of Education and a former Head of School at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. He was trained in the 1970s as a psychologist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada and was elected as a Fellow of the American Psychological Association in 1991. He has operated private psychology practices in More »