After a breakup, it’s easy to feel like you’ve lost yourself. For women, that often looks like shame for having given everything to the relationship. For men, it can mean feeling stripped of the pride and roles that defined them as a partner, husband, or father. In this episode of Breakup Pep Talks, Sarah helps you uncover who you are without external titles or roles. You’ll learn how to separate external identity markers from the gifts that come naturally from within you — and why those unique strengths are the foundation of rebuilding your confidence. Sarah walks you through practical tools like creating a strengths inventory, logging daily wins, and taking a “curiosity audit” to reconnect with your natural gifts and interests. Think of it as strength training for your identity: every rep helps you become stronger, more grounded, and more you.
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Speaker 1 (00:44):
Welcome to breakup pep Talks. Friends, this is Sarah Curnoles, your breakup bestie. I want you to think of me as your best friend who is giving you advice from a place of perspective, wisdom, and lived experience that isn't at all tainted by many of the things that can happen when your friends or your family members try to give you advice. And I'm sure we've all been there right where they feel like they're well-meaning, but really it's just being filtered through their own personal experience and the advice just doesn't feel really good. I want to be giving you insights and wisdom that hopefully feels really good to you. So today we're going to be building off of last week's episode, and if you missed it, feel free to go back and listen. Last week we talked about healing your nervous system so that you can self-soothe and you can reset, which leads you to being able to sleep again, leading you to be able to eat and being able to function and take care of yourself without always feeling like you have to turn externally to somebody else for regulation.
(01:51)
So now that we've gotten your body out of crisis mode, it's time to rebuild the most important thing that you have your identity. Because if you don't know who you are without your ex, you'll just stay stuck. This is such a big topic for everybody I talk to for women. It's really interesting for women, there's a lot of shame around. I gave all of myself to the relationship and my relationship became my entire world. They feel shame about it and then when they lose the relationship, they almost double down on feeling lost and feeling stuck and feeling shame of, I hear it all the time, I shouldn't have lost myself in the relationship, but I did, and now I don't know how to get out For men. It's interesting. It's not that they feel shame, they feel so much pride around being a good partner around being a good husband, a good father, and they are fully identified as those things.
(02:55)
And when that relationship changes and they are no longer the husband or no longer a full-time father, they don't know who they are. The root of this is the same problem when we go through a major divorce, a breakup, your role as partner, as husband, as boyfriend, girlfriend, it gets ripped away and that is really scary. What has been happening is something very natural and it's actually what we're taught to do for almost our entire lives. And so I don't want you to be listening to this episode, beating yourself up of I should have known better. I should have been doing this all along because really you shouldn't have, if nobody ever taught you how to define who you are without some sort of external marker, I mean even a job title is an external marker. How many of us identify ourselves by what we do in the world?
(04:00)
So if nobody's ever taught you how to create your identity and to find yourself outside of those external things, then why would you expect yourself to have been able to do it? This for so many people is probably going to be the first time you're really hearing how to define your identity. And it's always an honor to me because I know I talk about this stuff differently. So I know that a lot of what I share is probably the first time many of you hear this way of thinking about a breakup. So I want to help you really start to look at who am I when I strip away the titles? And we're not going to do that from a place of victimhood where they left and they took it from me. We're going to do this from a place that feels like it's inspired, like it's a creative impulse of now I get to create who I am.
(05:03)
Now I get to define myself, and it's a blank canvas, and I know a blank canvas in its own can be very scary, but you've got me. You are not doing this alone. I'm going to be walking you through this every step of the way. So here's why it can feel like right now you are so lost and you are so stuck when you feel like you've lost yourself in your relationship and in your breakup. It's really common. Like I just said, it's really common to define yourself by what you do and the role that you play. So think about in your relationship, what were all the roles that you were playing? You were the boyfriend or the husband or the girlfriend or the wife. You were the partner, right? You also probably had a dynamic within your relationship that there was a role that you were playing there.
(06:04)
Maybe you were the good listener. Maybe you were the one who always had the great hug that made your partner feel better. Maybe they were always coming to you for advice that you were the one who did certain chores and they did other chores, right? Look at all of your daily routines that you shared within your relationship, all of the ways that you showed up and where were you deriving a sense of self-worth or value from those things. And it's not bad. We're just doing this to look at and to raise your awareness around what you lost. Because once we can identify what you've lost, then we know where to start to start rebuilding. So you also want to think about future plans that you had. So many people come to me and they share, oh, I was planning this big vacation or we were planning to get pregnant, and I was already working on myself in that idea of a role of a mom or a father. And so even future plans that you had or future roles that you were anticipating stepping into that counts also just because it hadn't happened yet doesn't mean that you weren't making it very real in your own mind. And that's that's very valid.
(07:38)
So I want you to think about exactly what are the places where you lost a sense of who you are. And that's a really great question to take to a journal because it's something you might want to come back to over time. I don't expect anybody to be able to sit down and knock it all out. So feel free to let that question ramble around in your brain and you can keep coming back to it and keep creating your list so that you understand what was lost. Once you understand these areas of where you lost yourself, you want to separate out where was it that I was doing and I was being defined externally. So an external definition of yourself, of your role would be something that is defined by another person. So you can only be a partner if there's another person involved. That would be an external identity marker.
(08:51)
There are also internal identity markers. So being a good listener, being a person who gives great hugs, being a person who gives great advice, those are more internal because it comes from within you. It is something that is naturally a part of you that you're giving as a gift to another person. So you want to look at your list and look at where was it external such as the role of a partner and where is it internal? As I'm a great planner, I plan great vacations. I am a good listener. I love grocery shopping, I love cleaning, whatever it might be for you. Funny enough, my ex loved cleaning the apartment, which I was like, amazing, please take it. I am happy to give you that task. So that was a big loss for me. I'm having to start cleaning my own apartment again, but I digress.
(09:56)
So looking at the external definitions versus the internal ones reflect back where was I placing a lot of my focus, a lot of my weight. And the interesting thing is we often will place more value on the external things and we'll really think about identifying ourself as that partner, right? I am a good partner. I am a partner to so-and-so. I am their wife, I am their husband, right? We think about that. We give that a lot of weight. And the interesting thing is we often undervalue our own gifts that we are bringing to the world. The reason we do that is because the gifts that you bring naturally to the world come to you naturally. And we as human beings take for granted what comes naturally. And what I mean by that is often when somebody is a really good listener and it's just natural to them, they didn't really have to work at it.
(11:00)
They just are a great listener. They have good presence, they're giving their full attention, they ask good questions, they really take it all in. They're not judgmental. When somebody does that naturally, they assume it's easy for them because it's easy for everybody. That's the natural conclusion we all make in our brain. This isn't special. Everybody can do it. And the truth is, you have special gifts that other human beings do. Not everyone is a good listener, in fact, many people aren't. And so when you come across a good listener, like maybe that's your gift, when you come across a good listener, it's so rare and it is so valuable because most people aren't. And that's how it is with your personal gifts, the things that you're really good at, the things that you think everybody else can do. But the secret is only you can.
(12:04)
And so some of these are going to show up in your, I apologize for interrupting my own train of thought. I had a knock on my door in my hotel room. As you know, I am traveling through England. I am in London currently, and housekeeping was coming to check on me while I was recording this. So that's lovely. Anyway, your gifts, the way that you identify what your gifts are, you can look at what were those things that you were bringing to the relationship. You can also look at what you bring to work. Where do you excel at work or where do you excel in your friendships or your family relationships? What do people come to you for? And it can't hurt to ask a couple trusted friends or colleagues of what do you think I'm really good at? And just see what they say and see if that resonates with you.
(13:00)
So you want to start looking for what are your natural gifts? And this is one way to start building your identity. And it also starts to build your confidence when you remind yourself of, this is my gift that I get to give to the world. Not everybody has this. This is unique to me and this combination of gifts is unique to me. So other people might be good listeners, but maybe they're not good listeners and good planners of vacations, that's something that you bring to the world and it's who you are naturally. So you could also look at this like a strengths inventory. I would challenge you to start making a list, and I'm going to say start with 10 things that you are good at that have nothing to do with your ex.
(13:50)
So make that list in your journal and start looking for those things. Start paying attention to your everyday life. What am I naturally good at? I'm also going to invite you in your journal every day at the end of the day to write three daily wins. This habit changed my life this year because I started doing it at bedtime. I started writing down three daily wins. And what ends up happening is that you end up looking throughout the day or where are my wins? Where are my wins? And you start creating more. It becomes exponential for you. So this will also build your confidence and it's also going to start showing you where your strengths are, where you tend to gravitate in your life.
(14:37)
And then the next thing I want you to do is a passion audit. Actually, I'm going to take out the word passion. I wrote passion in my notes. I'm going to take that word out and I'm going to say curiosity audit, because sometimes don't have passion after a breakup, but there might be a tiny little spark of curiosity. Sometimes we're so exhausted, we're so worn down by it. Passion might feel like too big of a reach, but there might be something you have a little bit of interest in. And it might be, I'm interested in standup comedy. I've never watched that before and I find that watching people make jokes is lifting my mood. And so that's a new interest. So that's a curiosity. That's something that you're curious about. And I want you to notice each of these things, your strengths, inventory, your daily wins, and also starting to take a curiosity audit of what are the things that I'm a little curious about. This isn't about distracting yourself. This is about remembering. You are a whole person, not half of a couple. This is about getting back in touch with you and what makes you uniquely you.
(16:02)
And so your curiosities might range from anything of getting back into the gym, picking up a new hobby, meeting new people, trying a new game, any of those things. And sometimes if it feels like I don't even have a spark of creativity, look back to who you were before the relationship. What were the things that you gave up and you stopped doing while you were in the relationship? And you can go back as far as you want. Sometimes it could be really fun to think back, what was I into as a kid? And it might be something really simple like action figures or coloring. What if you picked it up again? And you might tell me like, Sarah, that's so childish. Maybe it would be fun to get back in touch with your inner child and let yourself play a little bit. Because when we bring a spirit of play or a spirit of lightness, right, as an opposition to heaviness, when we start coming with more curiosity, more fun, more play, more lightness, we are able to move through hard times just a little bit easier.
(17:13)
So as we wrap this up, I want you to know that you are not defined by who stayed or who left whom you are defined by yourself. Every small action you take, every win that you put in your log, every strength that you're able to identify, every gift that you're able to identify, all of that that you do throughout this week is proof that you are more than the breakup. You are bigger than just this one thing that happened to you, and I'm including that one thing is that relationship, because that relationship is only one part of your past. It is not a definition of who you are. You are so much bigger than that. So this identity work is like strength training. Every rep in the gym builds strength in who you, in your muscles, every little bit that you do from this episode today, every rep builds who you are becoming.
(18:19)
Okay? So your weekly challenge, what I want to hear from you is I want you to identify one of your gifts, and I want you to DM me on Instagram and share it with me. I would really love to hear what one of your gifts is, and then I can celebrate you and I can help affirm that for you. That's amazing. That's so needed. How many people can be helped by that, right? So this also starts to touch a little bit on finding purpose, which can be helpful, and we will get to that in a future episode. So send me your gift or your strength. I want to hear from you. I'm at Sarah Kernels, you can find me on Instagram and you can DM me that and I, I'm the only one that's checking it, so I will be the one to respond. So please feel free to reach out if you want to take this deeper and you want to receive some personalized support through your breakup, and you want help identifying who you are and moving through this with grace, with courage, with strength, and building up your sense of worth.
(19:28)
I love doing that for my one-on-one clients. And I'm actually currently signing up a few new people. I have a few spaces in my calendar. If that's of interest to you, please feel free to book time on my calendar. I'm going to put that in the show notes as well. We'll do a free consultation where I'm going to guide you through a process that I use with everybody, and I help you to understand where you're really stuck and where you're struggling so that I can understand it too. And then I create a personalized plan for your work that you can either decide to do it yourself or you can decide to work with me as your coach. Either option's, totally fine. So it's a free consultation call and there's absolutely no pressure, no obligation. I'm just here to help you. So feel free to click that link in the show notes and definitely DM me your strength, and I look forward to getting those messages from you. Alright, my friends, I hope this was a helpful episode. I'd love to hear from you. Please take care of yourself this week. Celebrate yourself this week, and I will talk to you soon.