I thought if I was the perfect partner, he’d never leave. I was wrong. Being the "good girl" in my relationship actually caused the end. I decided to heal by doing the direct opposite of what I usually do. And what I learned were 5 lessons that turned my breakup into my comeback.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Have you gone through a breakup and you're tired of feeling low, lonely or lost? I've got a pep talk through you. I'm Sarah Krnules, your breakup bestie. I'm a certified life coach with years of coaching experience, helping people just like you turn your breakup into the best thing that ever happened to them. Each week, tune in to get a pep talk to heal your heart, let go of the past, reclaim your power and get back into your main character energy. Your breakup may have shattered your world as you know it, but together let's build a new better world. Let's go.
(00:44)
Hi everybody. Sarah Kernows here and welcome to another episode of Breakup Pep Talks. And I am trying this for the first time with video. So hello people on YouTube. I am looking forward to connecting and bringing this to a lot more people and hopefully helping you to heal from your heartbreak and come back stronger than you ever thought possible. And I want to start with a little bit more of my story because what I really want to be talking about today is that I feel that we, especially women, are handed a breakup manual of how we are supposed to heal from this. And it's written by society, but it doesn't have your best interest at heart. It doesn't have your healing actually at the center of it. In fact, it's quite lazy and it's what's keeping you feeling stuck, small and stagnant. So we are going to be breaking that manual apart today and I'm going to tell you how I did it and how I help a lot of other people to do it too.
(01:45)
Sound good? All right. Let me dig in with my story. So I could have what you say, a case of the good girl syndrome. I thought that if I played by all the right rules and if I was the perfect partner, then I would be safe. If I was the woman who took care of my man, and not in the ways of like, I was always making him dinner or I always did his laundry. It wasn't those ways. It was actually the small, subtle ways that I can see now in hindsight. It was more like walking on eggshells. I never wanted to say anything that would rock the boat. I didn't want to have those difficult conversations, so instead I avoided conflict altogether. I would prioritize what he wanted over what I wanted to the extent that I pretty much had given up my coaching business because he was less risk averse than I was and he wasn't that comfortable with me starting a business and all the risks that that involved.
(02:51)
So I pretty much had put it on a shelf and focused on my full-time day job and really put myself aside for the sake of him, for the sake of keeping the relationship. I thought if I could be the perfect partner, then he'd never leave. And I was completely wrong. And I think anybody with that logic, you're going to discover that there is no such thing as a perfect partner. And it is not you behaving in the quote unquote perfect way or being the good girl of doing all the things that are maybe subtly hinted that you should be doing. This isn't how you stay in a loving, healthy relationship. This is exactly how you stay small and unsatisfied in your life. Now, traditional breakup healing would have told me to give it time because time heals on wounds and to go no contact and to do a lot of journaling and to take up meditating, which fine, fine.
(04:06)
Okay. But I didn't have any time to waste. I was working a stressful job where I was responsible for a lot of people and a lot of big projects. I could not afford to be unfocused or crying in the middle of a meeting just suddenly, and I didn't know how long that was going to take. The old rule was it takes half the amount of time that you're with somebody in order to get over them. I did not have two and a half years to wait. I don't know about you. I needed to keep doing my job. And I also knew that that way just got me loads of journals full of calling myself a failure, full of beating myself up, of wondering what he was doing or who he was with or when he would come back and how I could be better at fixing myself so that I'd be ready when he changed his mind and realized I was the best thing that ever happened to him.
(05:05)
And yes, I can't wait to take you back. That's truly what the old model just got me. And I went into that particular breakup, my most recent breakup with an idea. I decided, what if I just did the opposite of everything I'd ever done? I've always done the whole journaling thing. So what if instead of journaling, I decided to get out of my head and into my body. So I joined an embodiment group and I learned what does that even mean to be in your body? What does it mean to feel your feelings? I had to actually be taught those things and I realized I had never been taught those things before and it felt really big and overwhelming. So I also had to learn how do I regulate my nervous system so that I feel safe within myself, without that person next to me in my bed letting me know that everything's going to be okay.
(06:05)
How can I take care of this for myself? So I had to learn embodiment and nervous system regulation. Cool. Check. Another way that I used to get over a breakup would be spending hours trying to fix myself of doing the self-help binge of reading all the books and listening to all the podcasts and really trying to dig into everybody else as an expert. They must know the right way to do this, so let me figure this out and I'm just going to do it all by myself. Instead, I decided I'm going to be the expert in my own healing and this is the fun thing. It was a both and thing and I'm not going to isolate. I'm going to ask for support. So I signed up for a travel group and I went to Cuba with a group of people. I joined that embodiment group that I mentioned and I worked in a group of women for six months about getting into my body.
(07:03)
I hired a therapist and I hired a coach and I got a lot of support because I knew for me personally, I was breaking a lot of old patterns that weren't working for me and trying to do that all on my own felt overwhelming and like too much for what I could handle. So I wanted professional guidance and advice and support and almost like somebody that could paint a roadmap for me of, "Don't worry, I'm going to hold the map. I'm going to be your GPS. I'm going to give you the directions of where to turn. I'm going to hold the flashlight so you're not stumbling around in the dark and I'm going to show you the way to go.
(07:39)
" And I also did if I ... I was really hard on myself. I'll just say it that way. I was really hard on myself in my previous breakups, beating myself up, thinking I was a failure because my relationship ended and I was making that breakup mean that I was going to be doomed forever and I would never find love or happiness because finding somebody with a connection was hard and what if that was my only shot and I never meet anybody that I feel that connected to ever again. And that's how I would beat myself up and try to motivate myself to understand what did I do wrong so that I never do it again and how do I get into a relationship as quickly as possible so that I can find my perfect person. Instead, I took dating off the table entirely. It started with six months.
(08:35)
It ended up being over a year. That's what I needed. That's not meant to be a recommendation for anybody, but I just decided what if I take a romantic relationship off the table and instead of orienting my life around how do I get over this relationship so I can get into the next one, which is how I always used to do it. I decided I'm going to be the main character of my story. I'm going to put myself at the center. I am going to decentralize men and dating from my life and I'm really going to focus on myself. What does that actually look like? When I start asking myself, "What do I actually want? Where do I want to live? What do I want my life to be about? What do I want to stand for? What's important to me? " And I was able to do that without any filter of trying to be pleasing to another person or try to fit in somebody else's mold.
(09:30)
Instead, I got to work with a brand new clean slate because my relationship had ended and I had to move into a new apartment. So I literally was starting almost completely fresh and new in my life. What is the life that I want to be living? And what I found was I want to be helping people in a deep way, in an impactful way, and I wanted to create a business taking what I had learned through my breakup and helping other people to do their breakups better. And then I took that a step further and I said, "What if I take my love for travel and I figure out how can I be location independent so that I can do my job, do my business from anywhere in the world?" And that's what's gotten me here in a lovely little cottage in San Jose, California, when I'm all the way from Baltimore, Maryland.
(10:29)
I've been to all over the UK doing this and I did a cross country road trip and I was in Washington and Oregon and now I'm in California. So I'm sure you'll notice week to week to week, I'm here for a couple more weeks, but the background's going to change because where I will be filming these is going to change because I'm living a life that I can go wherever I want and have the business I want. And that clarity came to me as I was healing and as I was going through this breakup process. And so what I really found was, it was actually, it was five pieces that I just described in more of a narrative way rather than a list way, but I'm going to put them in a list for you right now. So if you do want to go back and re-watch this or re-listen to it, you can hear each of those points.
(11:22)
So what I was able to find was I went from labeling myself as a failure to being somebody who was creating her own life, who was the mistress of my own life, the creator of my own life. I went from feeling like I had to always fix it to allowing myself to just grieve and get over it in a natural process without beating myself up or making myself wrong. Three, I declared it was an end of DIY healing. I no longer was going to be the person trying to figure it all out, doing a one size fits all method from a book. Instead, I asked for help and I was open to receive that help. Four, I learned to trust my body over my brain and that's the value of learning how to get in my body and trust my own process for healing. And five, I figured out who am I and what I want in this life.
(12:28)
And I started to orient my life around what brings me joy and delight and pleasure rather than what I needed to be in order, you should have air quotes around them, in order, rather than orienting around what I think I needed to be in order to be the most attractive to who I wanted to get into a relationship with. And what happened was this accidentally became a blueprint for how I help people to heal from their breakups. I stumbled along kind of piecing it together because there really wasn't anybody out there like me who's out there as a breakup coach saying, "Here's the roadmap, here's the way." No, I took a little bit from column A and I took a little bit from column B and a little from column C and that's how I chose to heal. I had to hire all these experts.
(13:18)
So instead I decided to take the best from each of those and that's how I created my blueprint for how I help people. And I want you to be thinking, am I the kind of person who is really craving to own my own life and not have it orbiting my last relationship or my next relationship?
(13:45)
Do I want to have unshakable self trust and don't mess with me energy that even if he popped up in my Instagram feed, I'm going to be unbothered and I'm going to be able to keep scrolling and being like, "Whatever, because I have something much more exciting going on in my life." Are you the kind of person who wants the clarity of who am I in this world? What do I stand for? And what do I really want? What are the foods I actually enjoy? What actually delights me and gives me pleasure and lights me up?
(14:22)
These are the people I love to work with, the ones who are seeking that level of clarity and seeking to become the main character in their own life. We are destroying the narrative of having to always be the good girl, always having to be perfect and orienting ourself around another person or a relationship. And instead we are learning how to center ourself in our own life and learning how to invite the right people in to join us on the journey of what we are creating in our life. If this resonates for you, I have a really special invitation for you. I want you to join the wait list for my Bad Girl Breakup Society. What this is, it's going to be a very exclusive community of just 10 women where we come together for coaching in community. I will be the lead coach helping you get that clarity, helping you through the struggles, teaching you the necessary skills that the world doesn't teach us about how to actually feel our feelings or how to manage our thoughts when they tend to run away with us.
(15:31)
I'll be teaching you all of that, but you are going to be doing this linking arms with your sisters who want to say, "I am no longer prioritizing a relationship in my life. For the first time ever, I'm prioritizing the relationship with myself." These are the women who are going to become your ride or dies. The ones that you can call when you're like, "I'm doubting everything. I don't know who I am." And they're going to be the ones that pick you up and remind you, "You are a badass too. You got this. You're going to be okay. I'm right here, right next to you. There is nothing wrong with you. " I can't tell you how valuable it was for me personally to have those kinds of friendships as I was going through my healing, and that's why I really wanted to create this community of a very special select group of women to heal together and to come together in unity, to link arms towards what they most want is that main character of life.
(16:26)
If that sounds of interest to you, I want you to come to my website and sign up for the waiting list. So you can go to sarahcurnoles.com/badgirl. And I cannot wait to see you there where we can all come together and we can really create almost a revolution in the way that breakups happen. It's not about crying for hours and hours on end. Yes, sometimes you're still going to cry, but we're going to do it in a way that serves our healing and doesn't make us feel worse in the long run. That sounds like you. Come join me on the wait list. And as always, you please come over to Instagram. I'd love to connect with you there @SarahCurnoles. I'd love to hear from you of what was the one takeaway that you have from this episode. All right, my friends, that's it for this week.
(17:21)
Until next time, take good care of yourself, all right?