I share my personal experiences with overcoming resentment towards an ex-partner who had cheated on me. It took me a long time to realize that the resentment I carried was only creating more suffering inside myself. I discuss what is possible if you choose to let that go.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hello, my friend Sarah Curnoles here. Your breakup bestie. I caught a bit of a cold, and so my voice has this really fun, stuffy and raspy vibe to it. So I hope you get to enjoy my voice as long as it lasts. This way, I am giving myself the opportunity to practice so much of what I teach, which is all about how do you slow down, how do you really care for yourself and give yourself full permission to do that without beating yourself up. Of course, I have goals and things I want to do every week, and when I'm feeling sick, those things have to sometimes adjust so that I can accommodate my energy flow and can really turn inward and listen to my body. One of the other great things when I let myself rest, I actually come up with some really great ideas sometimes, and I'm excited to share some of that with you in the coming weeks.
(01:03):
So creativity can sometimes come out of rest, which is lovely. But today I want to tell you a story, very personal story. I met a woman the other night and she reminded me so much of myself. She shared that she no longer believed that love was possible for her, and she opened up and shared that her last relationship had hurt her so badly. She just concluded, maybe love just isn't for me. And I was sitting next to her and when I could really be there for her, I could really feel her pain that this was coming from a place of so much pain and there was so much resentment that she had for her ex. And because of those things, she was really cutting herself off from what she really truly wanted, which was love. And yes, I'm an empath and I can feel other people's feelings and I'm very sensitive, but also I can recognize it because I've been there. Oh my gosh, have I been there? I had an ex who cheated on me and I found out the day after Valentine's Day, a friend called because she was friends with me and the other woman, and she couldn't keep listening to each of us telling her about what a great boyfriend he was. I had been dating him for over six months, and I thought we were in an exclusive relationship and she let each of us know what was going on, and my world just shattered.
(03:01):
I had been cheated on before, but it wasn't like this. The lies were so extensive and thorough and what was even worse about it, I had suspicions that something was off. And every time I brought it up, he had a good explanation. And even the times I didn't bring it up, I just really ignored my gut and made my own excuses for him. So the betrayal stung twice. He betrayed me. I also betrayed myself when I wasn't listening to my own intuition. And that double betrayal created so much hatred and resentment towards this person, and I thought it was for him, but really I was doing this all to myself and I didn't even know that I was doing it.
(04:06):
And maybe you can relate. Maybe you've been betrayed, and maybe it was a long time ago, but you are still holding onto it and still nursing that wound and that resentment. And I held onto it for eight years. I spent eight years making this guy my worst enemy. I wish I could count the hours I spent telling my friends all about the ways he was just the worst person. And let me pause. I'm not excusing his behavior. I'm not saying what he did was okay. I'm just saying I spent a lot of time focused on how awful he was.
(04:56):
And as I spent all this time building a case against him and I got to feel so self-righteous of I was wronged, I was the victim here. I also got to ignore the fact that he wasn't actually the problem. The problem was how much of my time, my energy, my mental capacity and my focus was spent focused on hating him. The problem was how much I was letting him live rent free in my head and in my heart because I kept telling this story about how awful he was. And gosh, this behavior is so sneaky because it's sort of like we've all sort of agreed on if somebody cheats, they are obviously the bad guy. And it's just so normal to hate an ex that of course all my friends agree that they're the jerk. No one's ever going to be like, Hey, Sarah, take a step back.
(06:05):
Maybe he's not that much of a jerk. Maybe the problem is you. Nobody's ever going to say that. So I just held on to my resentment for eight years, and what it did was it just ate away at me on the inside. I didn't even realize it did that eight years and it ate away at me. And so I still would see him socially sometimes, and I just couldn't figure out how to be normal around him because I didn't want to make a scene and I knew I should be over him. It had been a long enough time, so I was trying to act normal, but inside I felt awful. And I didn't even know how to talk about it with my boyfriend at that time. It was like something inside of me was still so activated, even though this happened so long ago. And I know I'm supposed to be neutral about it, and it's supposed to be like, oh, he cheated on me, but I'm over it. I'm fine because now I'm in this happy relationship. It's no big deal. It's whatever. I wish him love and light, and I hope he is happy in his life. And all those good things that you hear people say, I didn't know how to genuinely get there and genuinely feel that. So I did the fake it till you make it. I pretended. But there was this tension because that wasn't really how I felt.
(07:39):
I'm not that good of an actor. I'm a terrible liar. I didn't know how to get to a place where it wasn't affecting me. I didn't want my emotions and my total internal state, my mental capacity. I didn't want it to be affected by somebody who did this to me and somebody who didn't want to be in my life. And I was aware that this is what they mean when they say that you're giving your personal power away. Because I didn't feel like I was in control of myself. I genuinely didn't want to feel what I was feeling like all this resentment and animosity and activation around him. And I just didn't know how else to get out of my way. And mind you, I was a life coach during this time. So I had tools and I had friends, and I had coaches, and I still didn't know how to get out of my way around this.
(08:47):
So if you're there, please know that you're not alone and that this isn't obvious and nobody actually teaches this stuff. So if you don't know how to get over it, that's okay. I learned the very hard, slow way so that I can help and teach you so that you can do it better. And I'm sharing all of this so that if it resonates with you and you can see yourself in it, you know that you're not alone. And I'm here to tell you that I found a way out and I stumbled on it accidentally, but I now know how to create it intentionally. So what happened was he eventually, he had tried to apologize to me many times and I shut him down. I said, I don't want to revisit it. I don't want to go there. I just want to move on and keep it in the past.
(09:42):
The past is the past. I don't want your apology. I get it. I don't need an apology from you. And eventually he just sent one. I do not recommend this at all, please don't do this. But I don't know what caused him to send it, but he did, and it really pissed me off that he disrespected my boundaries that way. And he even sent it during work hours. So I opened it while I was at work and had a flood of emotions happen immediately and nowhere for them to go. I was at work. It was not an appropriate place for me to be dealing with all the rage and sadness and the grief and everything that was coming up to the surface. When I read that email and disbelief. And what I did was I had enough skills at the time to see all of it and to acknowledge it and say, not right now.
(10:52):
I promise I will get to you when we are not at work. And it's like I'm mentally set an appointment with when I get to my car in the parking garage at 5:05 PM by the time I walked there, I got you then I'm going to take care of you then. And it was like as soon as I got in the car and I closed the door, I exploded into tears. And I think I cried for the rest of that weekend. It was like I could not stop. I cried and I raged and I lent all my emotions out. I had an appointment with a friend who was recovering from her own surgery, but I wasn't going to cancel on her. I hadn't seen her. I wanted to make sure she was doing okay. And luckily for me, all she had energy to do was listen.
(11:46):
So she didn't try to give me advice or anything, but it was actually really helpful that I just was able to word vomit everything in my head and everything I was feeling. And she just let have it. She just let me have that space without trying to do anything about it. So after a weekend of purging all my emotions and all my thoughts about this, it was really like I woke up on Monday morning feeling totally clear. It was like, I hate this analogy, but I don't know a better one. If you've ever had food poisoning and you spend maybe 48 hours just emptying everything out of your system, probably violently at times, but everything got out and then you just kind of wake up and you're like, I'm good. It's all gone. I'm fine. And that's how it felt. And that was also the moment that I became aware of how much I had been holding onto and for exactly how long I'd been holding onto it, which was the eight years.
(13:10):
I wasn't even aware that that's really what I was carrying around was all this resentment and anger. And I cleaned it up. And let me be really clear, it wasn't his apology that cleaned it up. It's not because somebody apologized for their behavior. It was the fact that I finally, oh, I'm going to get emotional because I'm really proud of myself. I finally got honest with myself and I let myself have all of my feelings without any judgment of them being bad or wrong, and I let them be fully expressed instead of pushing it down and hiding it. I let it all out of my system and it just needed it to clear out.
(14:07):
And now I can see him in social situations and I can have a friendly conversation with him, and I feel nothing. And this is a wild experience for me because for eight years I had been so awkward and I was trying to force everything. And I feel like I did claim my power back because I'm not excusing his behavior. I don't really need to be his friend. I don't to, I don't have any desire to date him again. I can see the behavior and separate that and say, that was a experience that I had. I learned a lot of lessons. I don't need to repeat that and I can keep you separate, but also I don't have any hate or animosity towards him. There's even a flow of love of that's just a human having a human experience doing the best that he possibly can.
(15:09):
It's very neutral. And I had a client recently that worked through something similar, not a cheating situation, but he was friends with his ex and they mutually agreed to be friends, but every time he saw her, he had these romantic feelings pop up. And it was like he was always fighting them, trying to push them down of like, no, no, no. We agreed to be friends. I'm really okay being friends. It was like he always had this tug of war of go away, romantic feelings. I don't want you. This is really inconvenient. And then after he would see her, he would spend this time missing her and reminiscing on the good times. So it was taking up all this space in his head and his heart. And so that was the focus of our work together was to get him to a place where he could see her and be neutral.
(16:00):
And it didn't have to hold any space in his head or his heart. And I feel like we were very successful in doing that. I know he was successful because he emailed me recently to say at a holiday dinner, she reached out and held his hand in the spirit of friendship and he felt nothing. And that's a win that it doesn't take up any more time than this is my friend holding my hand. That's all that that is. And the energy totally shifted. She even reached out after that to say, I'm really glad we got past the Amherst feelings that we can just truly be friends now. He didn't even have a conversation with her about all the work he had done and what he had been trying to struggle with and what he was trying to do. He hadn't told her any of that. She felt it. She felt that they were truly just friends.
(16:53):
And man, that's huge when you're not carrying around all that extra resentment and the hatred and whatever energy and all that space that's taking up in your brain, oh my gosh, wow. You take your power back truly, and you learn from the past. You don't have to hold onto the resentment. The resentment isn't what keeps you safe from it happening again. It's that you learn not to do it again and then you don't have to do it again. Resentment doesn't keep you safe from not feeling pain again, because this is a human life. We're going to experience pain. And if you hold onto the resentment, you're actually just feeling the pain over and over and over again, and you don't really need to. You're keeping yourself at arms distance from actually feeling all of the wonderful emotions in this human life of joy and love. If you're holding all that space with resentment like I did, I was resenting him for so long when it turns out I could have just felt normal human love for the guy, not romantic love, but just like you're a human being and that's cool that you're a human being and I wish you well when your options are.
(18:27):
I am thinking about a paper cut when we hold on that resentment. It's like we're giving ourself a paper cut over and over again of like, if I give myself this paper cut, then I'm not going to get hurt in a bigger way. It's going to prevent me from something bigger. But that paper cut still hurts, hurts a lot, right? And it's totally unnecessary. And when you learn how to hold yourself through those emotions, and we're going to talk more about that here in this podcast because that's another thing nobody ever teaches, was actually I actually had skills at the point that I had my emotional breakdown that I could be with myself through my pain. So once you learn how to be with yourself through that and allow those emotions to flush out of your system, then you are able to get to the other side where it's just clear and there's just a sense of love and peace and ease if you're willing to let go of the resentment that's waiting for you on the other side and feeling free, it's that feeling of I am free from having to carry around a shield all the time from that weight that I've been holding up in front of me.
(20:00):
I am free to choose how I want to go through this life of who I want in my life.
(20:09):
And if you were to ask somebody, if you were to ask yourself, how do I really want to feel? How do I want to feel right now? If you really go deep the way most of us really want to feel most of the time, let yourself go all the way deep. We want to feel peace, we want to feel love, and we want to feel free. Those are the common experiences that most of us want to feel most of time. So why spend so much time and energy and mental capacity holding on to anything that's blocking you from that? Anything that's keeping you unavailable for those feelings. And once you do become available for those, then what becomes possible for you? What could you then create in your life if you weren't so busy spending all this time holding onto anger and resentment and hatred and spending those stories? If I hadn't spent all those hours with my friends telling those stories, what could I have done with those hours? I could have learned a language, I could have picked up a new hobby and learned a new sport or something, I don't know.
(21:32):
But I'm not willing to give up any more time on emotions that aren't helping me move forward, that aren't helping me towards possibilities. And that's what I want for you is a life full of possibilities. And that's my message for you today. I want you to live a life full of possibilities. Open yourself up to 'em. Let's make those possibilities real. Okay, friends. So I hope this was useful for you today. And if it was, would you please do me a big favor and share this with your social media or somebody that that might really benefit from it. Maybe it's your way to connect with somebody of like, Hey, I heard this story on a podcast. This is actually what I'm going through. Could you give a listen to it? And then maybe we could talk and I can share how this is resonating for me. I would really love that. So I really appreciate you. I want you to take good care of yourself this week, and I can't wait until next time.