KAREN IN THE PRESS
Karen in the press
Karen has been featured in:
|
WELCOME TO HEARTBREAK
Your mission To get over that no-good, waste-of-space ex-boyfriend. Tanya Gold, newly single and seething, went to meet the GLAMOUR team of pros who promised to help her fight her way back to her former fabulous self. Photographs by Ian Brodie
The experts
Let me tell you about the heartbreaker (he’s one of many). His mother loved him enough to give him a name but to me he’s known as Moron. We ha a passionate six-month affair, where we tangoed between dinner then sex and sex then dinner.
Then he dumped me: “I’m lazy and selfish and I can’t be bothered,” he told my answer machine at 8:22 one morning. Then he came back: “Can’t I just have a kiss?” Then he dumped me again: “Sorry!” Then be one-night standed me: “I really want you tonight.” And dumped me again. So I lie in bed, longing for death; possibly mine but ideally his.
But there is a chink of light poking through the curtain of despair. GLAMOUR has arranged for me to attend a Heartbreak Boot Camp, staffed by four experts – a psychotherapist, fitness trainer, re-inventor and cleanser – who, I am told, can mend my broken heart. The least I can do is drag my body out of bed to see if maybe, just maybe I can send Moron out of my heart and back to hell.
I tell the taxi driver everything. He agrees that Moron should be killed and offers to give me the telephone number of an assassin in the Ukrainian Mafia.
Boot Camp is based in a large, bright house in west London. My first thought is. “I’ll never own a house this nice because I’m such a failure with men.” The door opens and I am guided upstairs to meet …
The final expert of the day is Karen Ali, a professional and personal life coach. She gets straight to the point. “What were the high points of the relationship?” I am feeling a bit sorry for Moron by this point. “The sex,” I mutter. “And the low?” “Everything else.”
I tell Karen about the appalling answer-machine message. She sighs and says I have, “a Gremlin. If you’re dumped in a nasty way you’re left with a fear of rejection. You have to take off your rose-tinted spectacles and get some perspective. Then you can heal.”
I start to cry. Karen takes my hand. “You have to take responsibility for knowing what you want from love. You must have that clarity. You can move one.” When I stop sniveling, Karen asks me what I’ve achieved in life and the qualities that required. “Tenacity, courage, hard work,” I tell her. “In the same voice, tell me what you want from a relationship,” she commands. I take a deep breath. “I want intimacy, tenderness, complexity. I want a complicated man I can explore.” “A nice man?” asks Karen. “Of course,” I reply. “Just checking,” she adds.
We’ve done emotions, now we do behaivour. I promise to do three of four “new things to get the relationship I deserve”. I promise to go out and talk to new people and to email Karen to say I’ve done so. I promise to write a gratitude list of what is wonderful in my life (my Luis Vuitton dress? My breasts?). And I promise to create a “success journal” where I note down my daily achievements. “As you see the positive things happen, more positive things will happen. I promise you,” says Karen.
Next is Post-It Note therapy. Karen produces brightly coloured Post-Its, and a jar to put them in, and asks me to write down, “your strengths, your successes and your best qualities.” After a false start, I write “I am beautiful” on a yellow one and “I finished War and Peace” on a pink one. “Whenever you’re feeling wobbly, take one out, re-read it and reclaim your positivity,” instructs Karen.
Now we reach the high point of Boot Camp. We return to the garden for a burning ceremony, to torch the relics of my relationship: a solitary love letter; a pair of boxer shorts; a Barry Manilow CD (w****r!) and a small care bear. We pour lighter fluid over the boxes and watch them burn.
“The burning is cathartic,” says Karen. “It cleanses and closes. Imagine burning away all the nasty bits of that relationship – the hate, the hurt, the obsession.”
The boxes smoulder, “It’s over,” says Karen. “It’s gone.” I feel liberated – high and excited – and I tell Karen so. “Do you want more of that feeling?” “Yes.” “Then we’ll build on it.” I feel imbued with some mysterious confident life force. I shout, “Yes” to dinner and flowers and communication and being cherished. “No” to silence, lame excuses, casual and deliberate cruelty, selling out, and seeing Tanya as the victim. And a big “yes” to honesty!
Then I take a deep breath and scream, so the whole of west London knows it: “I want to have a relationship with a man who loves me!” Karen smiles.
Boot Camp is over. I loved it. Apart from all the attention from my kind and wise experts, it forced me to look at myself as I am, the role I played in the wretched relationship and what I can do to make sure that next time it’s a bed of roses, not of thorns. If this morning my heart was a bleeding wound, tonight it wears a bandage. The bandage is covered with glitter and some words are written there. They say, “This girl is not settling for second best any more.”
NEXT STEPS
Book a complimentary, no obligation, telephone coaching session:
CALL 020 7681 4823 info@karenali.co.uk