If you ever wanted to get your ex back, listen to this first. I'm not going to tell you what to do, I'm going to help you ask better questions to understand what's happening in your mind and body underneath so that you can solve for the right problem before deciding what you really want.
If you’re ready to stop chasing the wrong ending and start writing a story you love, DM me ‘PLOT’ on Instagram. I’ll send you a free first step to help you turn your breakup into your best chapter yet. https://www.instagram.com/sarahcurnoles/
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 for you. I'm Sarah Curnoles, 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.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Hello, my friends, Sarah Curnoles here, your breakup dust. And I'm coming to you from beautiful England and I am in the countryside, so you might hear some cooing, doves in the background or pigeons. I've got both. I'm not sure which is which just yet. I know them by sight, not necessarily by their call. And it's been very healing to be living a slower pace of life and being surrounded by so much nature. The countryside of England is just gorgeous. But all this is for another episode because I'm really excited about what I have prepared for you today because this is a really personal story. This is for anybody out there out who has ever felt like, if I could just get my ex back, then I'm going to be okay. If that's you, I want you to know there's nothing wrong with you first off, and you're not foolish and you're not a loser and you're not hopeless.
(01:51)
It's actually really human and I'm going to explain why this is happening and what you can do about it. And before we go there, I want to tell you a little bit more of my story. So I used to be the girl that always thought that getting my ex back was going to be the solution to my problems. And I was identifying my problem as my feelings. I feel things really deeply. I dunno if anybody can relate to that. I'm feeling like my emotions were just too much and I couldn't handle them and that they were out of proportion compared to everybody else who seemed to go through breakups with a bit more, I don't know, ease or control. I always felt like I couldn't focus on anything in front of me. I was crying constantly so that my face was always puffy. I would either cry myself to sleep or I would drink three, four glasses of wine so that I could get to a place where I could sleep.
(02:52)
And so yeah, maybe that also contributed to the puffiness. But anyway, I digress and I felt like a terrible friend at the time because I couldn't focus on the person in front of me. All I could think about was how much pain I was in and how much I just wanted to talk about my ex and the breakup and I just didn't have any capacity to listen. It was brutal. My breakups were really brutal and I was just miserable. I don't know if you can relate to that at all, but I want you to know you're not alone if you can relate. And I thought the solution to all this pain and suffering that I was in, I thought that what I needed to fix this was to get my ex back.
(03:42)
And I will tell you I was usually pretty successful at that. Usually I would do some personal growth work. I'd listen to some books and some podcasts and I would learn where I needed to be taking a bit accountability for myself and my actions and I would do a little bit of healing and I would come back and I would take responsibility for all of our problems. And I would say, just give me another chance. Let's try this one more time. We had something really special. I'm not ready to give up on it. And we would try again. I'm not going to lie. We would try again and again and again because what would happen is that it would be fine for a couple of months. I would feel better for a couple of months, I'd be happy again because I got what I thought that I wanted that relationship.
(04:39)
But inevitably, the old problems were still there. The problems that were actually in the relationship never got fixed and never got addressed. And so they would just come up again and we would still have the same issues that caused us to break up in the first place. So we would just break up again and the whole cycle would start over. Except this time I added on top of it beating myself up because how could I be so foolish and so ridiculous to think that I was enough this time and that he would stay? So I ended up making myself feel even worse the second time.
(05:22)
And it took me a really long time to realize that I was solving for the wrong problem. I've done a lot of therapy, a lot of personal growth work, and a lot of studying actually as a part of my work as a life coach. And it has taken me all of that work to realize I was solving the wrong problem and I was using the wrong solutions, which is why I never ended up feeling any better. And so what I want to do in this podcast is to show you that with the proper tools, you can actually answer a better question, solve for a better problem, so that you end up feeling better for longer and more sustainably, which is what happened for me. I ended up stumbling upon. It took me a long time, but I feel more confident in myself, more grounded in who I'm more calm in my dating life than I have in a long time.
(06:24)
That's not to say that I'm perfect. I'm still figuring my way through all of it, and I am far from perfect there, but it has gotten easier and I have seen improvement in how I feel moving through relationships and dating. So what was actually the problem that I should have been solving for all along? And if you are struggling with this, what really is the problem? What's going on here? So the first level of what's going on of why you keep thinking you need to go back to your ex is that the problem is our nervous system is dysregulated. After a breakup, you are facing a lot of change and uncertainty, which creates a lot of stress. You also might be facing rejection, which creates a lot of stress. You're dealing with heartbreak and disappointment and grief and maybe anger or betrayal. All of these feelings are big and they are heavy and dark and they dysregulate your nervous system. When we're in a relationship, we co-regulate our nervous system with that person, meaning that they are somebody that helps us feel better. We adapt our nervous system to theirs. There are things that we have in our system called mirror neurons that we sync up and we mirror the people around us. And so we are used to regulating with that other person. So not only are they the cause of a lot of our dysregulation, but we have also lost our biggest co-reg. So we feel really out of whack right now.
(08:24)
And what we will typically do in order to regulate our nervous system is that we will try to go back to the familiar and in this situation, the familiar is your ex. They're the person you cod with and they were the person who caused the problem, therefore they must be the person to solve the problem. It doesn't make logical sense when you say it out loud, but that doesn't mean you don't feel that way in your body, right? You say it out loud and you're like, I hear the problem in that sentence, why would I go to the person who dysregulated me in order to regulate me? That doesn't make logical sense, but it doesn't land in your body. How many times have you been like, I know something, but I don't feel it. It hasn't gotten down to my body and so I don't do it. This is one of those situations where you're like, logically that doesn't make sense, but my body, my nervous system is craving them and that is really normal. That's actually how we're wired. We are wired to go to the familiar hell rather than the unfamiliar heaven every single time.
(09:37)
And so what is the solution here? What is the real problem and the real solution? If the real problem is my nervous system's dysregulated because of all this change I'm going through and all this stress and all this emotion, I don't have my co-regulation. Does that mean I find another co regulator? What do I do? Actually, what you want to do for your nervous system is learn how to self-soothe. This is an amazing time to figure this out, and most of us have never taken the time to figure this out because even as babies, we never really have to learn how to self-soothe. Someone else is always helping us with that. Someone else is always helping us regulate. And so we've always learned to be dependent on others to soothe ourselves. So let this be your invitation for maybe the first time in your life to learn what do I need? And what you need is actually going to be totally individual to you. And so try this as an experimentation phase, and I'm going to say play with it. So there's some really great nervous system healing tools that are out there. I really do like EFT tapping emotional freedom technique, especially the Orner. Jessica and Nick Orner are really great resources for, they call it the tapping solution.
(11:12)
I highly recommend that and I recommend that to my clients. You want to find something in your body. By the way, this isn't a mind thing. You're not going to think your way out of this, your nervous system's in your body. So the solution is also going to be body-based. I also really love a tight hug that might not be possible to get from another person, but you can give one to yourself either with your arms or you can get a blanket and wrap yourself, swaddle yourself like a burrito really super tight and it gives you the compression. You can also get a weighted blanket and it has the same effect.
(11:52)
You might want to do either a burst of energy, like dance it out to a song, or you might feel like it's more appropriate for long steady state, slow use of energy, like a long slow walk. I highly recommend singing. So putting on a song and singing along to it is really regulating. And also I like self touch and self massage. So lightly grazing your fingers along your forearm, giving yourself a hand or foot or calf massage or a neck massage or just above your temples massaging while you take deep breaths and think about rounding. These are all ways that you can calm down your nervous system and let yourself know it's safe. We're okay, even though we're going through a lot of change right now, we're feeling a lot of big feelings. It's okay and we're going to be okay.
(13:01)
So this is how you establish safety for yourself. This is self-soothing. This is a tool that is going to save you for the rest of your life because that's what life is. It's ups and downs. And in those down moments, you want to be able to take care of yourself and bring yourself back to normal without always having to rely on someone else. Okay? So that's the first point. The first point is soothe your nervous system. But there is actually a tricky second point here. That first point gets you out of the first part of the woods, but you still have a long way to go because you can get past the grief in the morning and then the sneaky thought's going to come in because it did with me of my ex. He's as good as it's going to get. I don't know if I'm ever going to find anybody I like as much as him or anybody who gets me the way that he does or makes me laugh or whatever you want to say.
(14:06)
It's this false story of my past is as good as it's going to get and it's never going to be that good again. And that's a story I hear a lot. And so what's the real problem there? The problem is giving way too much importance to your ex and thinking that he's the only person he or she or or whoever you date thinking they're the only person out there for you that you could love and that can love you on a planet of. Aren't we at 8 billion people now and a planet on a hell of a lot of people? Do you think it's possible that there's one other person out there who can love you as good or better than your ex? There's a fun meme that I see circulate every once in a while of you haven't met all the people who are going to love you yet, and that's the solution we're going to lean into.
(15:06)
So it's about stop looking at your past as if that's your peak. You didn't peak if you did it once, you can do it again and better. So the solution here is that I want you to start thinking about how do I want my future to look? So that's as good or better than my past. How do I create a future of something that I'm excited about, something that gives me something to look forward to? And this can look like a variety of things. Like I said, I'm planning a podcast to talk about travel as a breakup tool. So maybe you put a great trip up on the horizon. Maybe you think about all the ways that your ex actually wasn't a great fit for you in a relationship, and what does your relationship look like and feel like that you really actually want. So paint this picture of the future that you want living in the house you want in the place that you want with the pets and the babies and the garden and all of the things and the travel. What does your life look like? That lights you up and then you start working in baby steps towards that, becoming the person who lives that life. And that's a process. Of course, it's actually something I work on all the time with my clients because it is a transition of who you're now into, who you'll be.
(16:39)
But that person isn't thinking about your ex. They're thinking about how happy they're, how much they love their life, how glad they are that their ex broke it off, because otherwise they wouldn't have had this awesome life. They wouldn't have been inspired to create this life if they hadn't been heartbroken, which is true. Often we need a catalyst like heartbreak to get our butt in gear to actually go after the things that we really want. So I want you don't have to go backwards for your happy ending. Your happy ending is you in the future loving your life so much that the old chapter just feels like a plot twist that set it all in motion.
(17:35)
So to recap everything, I want you to start thinking about where am I in this journey? If you're in those early phases where you're still having those big feelings of anxiety and grief and you feel very overwhelmed and you can't sleep and you can't eat, start with self-soothing. If you've moved past those big feelings, and that's not really where you're at anymore, start working towards building or visioning first. You want to vision what does your life look like that you really want, and then you're going to start taking baby steps towards it. And so I do want to invite you, I have an invite for you if you're ready to stop chasing the wrong ending and start writing a story that feels more like you and what you actually deserve. I want you to come over to Instagram and I want you to DM me, and it's just my name, Sarah Krons, all one word, and I want you to DM me plot twist.
(18:39)
And I'm going to send you the first step to help turn your breakup into your best chapter yet, because we all know no good story is all smooth. Sailing with the plot twist is where it really starts getting good. So maybe this is just your plot twist. I feel like this might be an upcoming podcast episode because I'm really feeling this plot twist energy. So I am so excited to help you start your next chapter and I'm going to help you exactly where you're, so come on over to Instagram, let's connect, and I look forward to talking more with you soon. Alright, my friends, take care of yourselves. Have a wonderful week and we'll talk again soon. Bye for now.