If you’re stuck in the same relationship patterns, replaying the same heartbreak, or wondering why nothing changes no matter how much work you do—this episode is for you.
The problem isn’t your ex, your trauma, or your past. It’s your unexamined mind.
In this episode, Sarah breaks down how unquestioned thoughts quietly run your love life—and why awareness, not effort, is the real starting point for freedom.
Book your free and personalized consultation call here: https://app.acuityscheduling.com/schedule.php?owner=13002720&appointmentType=2184073
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 Kernows, 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)
Hello my friends. Sarah Kronols here, your breakup bestie. And I want to talk to you about a very real experience that happens for so many of my clients and it happened for me too after a breakup. And what better time to be talking about it than right after the new year? I want to be talking about that feeling of losing yourself after a breakup. And if you feel like you lost yourself, it's not because you disappeared. It's because your body, your nervous system, your mind and your identity are no longer aligned. And if you've been trying to fix that by thinking harder or journaling more or staying really busy, this episode is for you. So I had a new client come to me recently and she had met her husband in college and they got married in their early 20s and now she's in her 50s and they are getting a divorce.
(01:46)
And she spent her formative years that most people are identifying like who they are as a person. They're growing. Well, she spent them with this person and she was going through this divorce and really struggling because she was feeling untethered. She was second guessing every decision that she made. She wasn't sure if she could even trust herself again and was so far from feeling like she could enjoy her life. And she was spending a lot of time sort of moping and just thinking like, who am I now? And feeling, honestly feeling a little bit worthless of I'm no longer in that relationship and that was my entire world and I don't know who I am now. I spent so much of my life with that person and I just don't know what comes next. It feels like a big giant black hole. So this is a really common experience that people come to me with all the time because this is what happens when identity is built inside a relationship and then suddenly that relationship is gone.
(03:02)
It feels like your identity has left the building with that relationship. And I want you to know that if you are experiencing something like that, maybe it's not the exact same relationship dynamic or the exact same experience. I want you to know that you're not alone. Breakups don't just break your heart. They are interrupting the identity of who you saw yourself to be in the world. And so if you are following the common advice that's out there and that's given most often on the internet, I honestly, like I don't even know why people are still giving this advice. It's extremely invalidating and extremely unhelpful. For anybody who's going through a big question of like, I don't know who I am, but the advice out there is still, "Oh, just focus on yourself and you have to love yourself more and change your mindset, right? You have to have a positive mindset." Well, that doesn't actually help because what all of those things are doing, they are just addressing surface level problems.
(04:17)
And it's the equivalent, it's why that cliche saying happens of like, it's like putting a bandaid on a bullet hole. When we are constantly identifying who we are by outside circumstances, by things that are happening outside of ourself, and that includes like a job title too, right? We have big identity interruptions when we lose a job, right? When we've identified who we are based on what's happening outside of us and when that changes, we lose our sense of self. And so anything that's like, "Oh, focus on yourself, which is way too vague. What does that mean? How do you act on that or love yourself more?" Again, what does that even mean? Right? We need things that we can actually act on, that we can actually do, that we can put our attention on and steps that we can take. And it doesn't mean just spend all your time journaling.
(05:22)
And I think a lot of people hear my advice and they think that just means go to your journal. Actually, no. That might be a piece of what we're going to do, but it is not the only piece. You're not going to just rebuild your identity based on changing your experiences outside of you by going to the gym a lot. You're not going to rebuild your identity by getting into another relationship right away or by focusing all your time on your kids or your career. No, you're going to rebuild your identity from a really grounded place, right? And most advice is telling you you're just going to rebuild your identity from the outside in, right? Like get that revenge body, spend on your time in the gym or get a promotion at work, right? That's like an outside circumstance focusing inward again, so you're repeating the same problem or they're telling you change your mindset.
(06:13)
And so you're just rebuilding from the level of your mind while your nervous system is still in upheaval and your body is in survival mode, right? You cannot rebuild confidence, self-identity or self-trust while you are still in a dysregulated nervous system.
(06:38)
So I want you to start noticing where am I overthinking and really trying to overanalyze what's happening or what's going on in my life as a way for me to create a sense of control in my life, which is letting me feel safe. Because I get it, this is a really unstable time. After a divorce or a breakup, it feels like the ground from under you is shaking or it's totally gone. And so we snap into this mode where it's like, I have to control everything so that I can feel safe. And the way that we create control or the way that we've been taught to create control is with our mind, with our thinking, not like Jedi mind tricks, but like, let me analyze this. Let me understand every single thing that's happening so that I can then understand it. And once I understand it, I will have control and I will feel safe.
(07:36)
So where are you already doing that? Where are you overthinking and where are you using analysis to try to create control and safety in your life? And where are you staying busy as a way of avoiding feeling something? Because staying busy is one of my favorite ways to avoid certain feelings like rejection or feeling actual pain or feeling humiliation, right? And I think that if I stay busy, eventually I'll just heal. If I give it enough time, it'll heal. Nope, that's just avoidance. Fronting as healing. And so you can have all the thinking and all the gym gains that you want and all of like the mental breakthroughs, right? Insight can explain the pain and distraction will numb the pain, but neither is actually going to resolve it. So that's why people come to me after months of struggling saying, "I don't know why I'm still hung up on my ex.
(08:48)
I don't know why I'm still thinking about them. I don't know why I'm spending all my time focused on them because you have not actually resolved your pain. You've only distracted yourself from it to numb it or you've just sort of explained it, but you haven't healed it or shifted who you are on an identity level." And so here's what I want you to come away thinking with this. I want you to know that rediscovering yourself after a breakup has to happen across five levels, not just one. We go deep here because what I am so much more interested in is creating a rock solid foundation for you so that the next time there's some sort of outside circumstance where things get shook, you have a solid foundation to fall back on that is not defined on an outside circumstance, right? So outside circumstance would be your job title or your identity as a wife, a husband, a parent, right?
(09:57)
That's all external. What I'm going to teach you is five levels of creating identity. Okay? So the first level is your physical body. Your physical body is where stress and grief live, but it's also how you nourish and take care of yourself. And it's building your strength as well, like physical strength, right? We've got mental strength, absolutely, but also physical strength. So your physical body is one level. The second level is your nervous system. This is where safety and attachment are regulated. So if you're feeling really dysregulated, really activated, of course you are. Your safety and your attachment has been threatened and taken away and your nervous system needs a new way to rewire its safety. It needs to feel safe again that you create internally.
(10:58)
The third level, emotional processing. We don't skip over our emotions here. We feel them. This is looking at things like grief and anger and longing, rejection, embarrassment, shame. All that really icky stuff that we spend so much time trying to avoid. Nope. You got to feel it. You got to go through it and you got to move it in order to get to the other side. Okay? That's level three, emotional processing. Level four, your mind. That your mind is the place where we tell ourselves stories and we make meaning of our experiences and we create like a narrative of our life. Okay? Fifth level is your self identity. This is how you see yourself. Who are you? Without the titles, without the external stuff, deep down, who do you believe yourself to be?
(12:03)
And so you could see how it's really easy. There's probably one of these areas where you feel really comfortable spending all your time and attention on. The one I hear the most often, it's either the mind or the physical body, right? And occasionally because nervous system work is becoming bigger. Some people feel a little comfortable there because they've been doing the TikTok videos, but most people only work on one level and then they come to me wondering why they still feel so disconnected. It's because who you are and how you regulate and how you move forward from this and how you see yourself after this is working on those five levels of physical body, nervous system, emotional processing, mind and self identity. And let me tell you this, if you choose not to do this work, which you can, you can choose to not do this kind of a work.
(13:01)
If you don't recalibrate all of these five layers, what happens is, and I'm not saying this to like create any kind of fear or anything. I just want you to see what's coming down the road because I lived it for so long. So if you don't calibrate all these five levels, you do end up repeating patterns. I just had a new client the other day tell me, she's going through a divorce and she goes, "I can see now I was meant to learn these lessons in another relationship I had forever ago. I am repeating the same patterns I've always had." It just took me this really, really painful divorce to really come face to face with it, to reckon with it and to learn the lessons, okay? So you could be repeating patterns if you aren't healing on all five of these levels and realigning yourself on all five of these levels.
(13:54)
I shouldn't say healing because you may not need healing on all these levels. You just need sort of like a realignment, like getting your tires realigned on your car. One other pattern that I see is that you might attach too quickly or stay single and stay guarded for a really long time. Thinking that the problem again is in the relationship, right? So it was that relationship that was the problem. So let me get into another one and I'm sure it'll be fine. Or thinking, "I'm never going to date again." I hear that a lot. "I'm never dating again." So that could happen if you're not realigning yourself. And then you also feel like I can never trust myself. I can never trust my intuition and you continue to outsource your worth thinking that I have to hustle and prove to everybody that I'm worth it rather than lining up from the inside where you feel rock solid in who you are and what you're offering and have like that unshakable confidence.
(15:04)
So I want you to think about it this way. An unyield identity doesn't just sort of like follow you. It's not just sort of like hanging out by your side. That's actually where you're coming from. An unhealed identity is what chooses your next relationship and you could choose a relationship like my client had said, where it's just a continuation of the same patterns and problems and it feels like an even more painful lesson for you to choose to go through or you realign yourself on these five levels and you choose a relationship from that place. So this isn't this moment after your breakup, I want you to be seeing this in a new light. This isn't losing yourself. It isn't a like, where did I go? We are actually uncovering a new level of you because your old self was aligned with those experiences. But now that that is over, you have the option to choose like, wow, it's like being at ground zero, let me rebuild, like reset the foundation and move in a different direction that feels really good and really aligned with where I want to go.
(16:32)
And you get to intentionally rebuild yourself from here. And if you're still feeling a little stuck, I want you to know once you feel safe again, that's when clarity comes back. That's when your creativity comes back. That's when it feels like I can't wait to wake up in the morning and your confidence will follow you feeling more regulated and you will start to tap back into the pieces of yourself that maybe you forgot. And we reclaim our identity and we create new identities when we're bringing along the body and the mind and the emotions, right? We want to bring all of you along. All of you is welcome.
(17:23)
And I want you to know if this episode really resonated for you, it doesn't have to stop here. You're not behind. If you're like my client who is rebuilding herself in her 50s, she's not behind. She's exactly where she's supposed to be. And the work that we've been doing together, we've really been working on feeling those emotions so that she feels safe, knowing it's okay to be in grief around a loss. It's okay to have anger, but I don't have to stay there. I get to move it and then go, "Okay, what's next? What is the story I want to be telling myself about this breakup of ... " And we're starting to play with that, of how she can start to see gratitude for that chapter of her life because now it's setting her up for her next chapter.
(18:23)
So that's possible for you too. When a relationship ends and we take care of your body, your nervous system, your emotions, your mind and your identity, they just haven't caught up yet, but we're going to take care of all of them. And this is the work that I do with my clients. I'm helping you come back into safety and clarity and self-trust. We're not forcing positivity or overthinking your way forward, but I want you to start thinking holistically, like you are a whole system. You're not just a brain. You are so much more than that and you deserve solutions and a process forward that works with you on all those levels. And if you're ready to stop doing that alone, I would like to invite you to check out the show notes where you can find ways to reach out to me and that we could work together.
(19:20)
And if you're feeling that nudge of like, this is the right next step, trust yourself and see what happens when you take that step forward, okay? And I want to leave you with this thought. If your breakup didn't happen to break you, but to help you return you, yourself, who are you becoming? Because you didn't lose yourself in the breakup, you just outgrew a version of you that was built around someone else and the version of you that comes next, we don't have to rush it. That person is going to be regulated and supported and met with compassion. Okay, my friends, take care of yourselves this week and I will see you in the next episode.