You were never too much, you were just asking the wrong person to fill your cup.
A breakup can crack something far deeper than the relationship itself—especially if it activates an abandonment wound you didn’t even know you had. In this episode, Sarah shares her personal story and breaks down why some breakups feel disproportionately devastating, leaving you panicked, frozen, or questioning your worth. You’ll learn how abandonment wounds form, why insight alone isn’t enough to heal them, and what it actually takes to rebuild self-trust so you stop abandoning yourself when someone else leaves.
Join my free masterclass to learn how to understand why you've struggle to get over your ex and finally get clear on what to do to move forward. Sign up here: www.sarahcurnoles.com/masterclass
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 KLEs, 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, friends. This episode is one that's near and dear to my heart because the abandonment wound is something I have put so much time and effort into healing so that I can show up in my relationships in a different way, that I'm coming from a different place. I can come from a place where I feel healed and not feel wounded, but it took so long for me to do this work because is actually, I don't know why. I think there's a lot of misguidance when you have an abandonment wound. And we're going to get into all of that. We're going to get into how do you know if you have an abandonment wound and what you can do about it. So if this feels like your breakup shattered something really, really deep in you, it's touching a really old fear about being left or unwanted or alone.
(01:44)
This episode's for you. Okay, so I think this might be the first time I've talked about this on my podcast, but I'm adopted and I am in a very loving, adopted family. My family was always very clear from day one that I was adopted and that I was chosen and that I was loved. So I don't don't want to be pointing fingers. This isn't about blame of this isn't a woe is me adoption story. I have a very close relationship with my biological mother. I know the reasons that she had for choosing adoption and I, I logically know that I wasn't given up and it wasn't an easy decision. It was sort of a choice. It truly was between a rock and a hard place. And my family always loved me very deeply. They were very clear that I was very much wanted in that family.
(02:50)
And yet for me personally, I think going through that process as a newborn baby when you're developing your attachment and feeling safe to be loved, I think somewhere deep down this wound opened of abandoned, of being abandoned. And even though I logically know that this isn't the case, but you don't have logic as a baby, but it feels like, oh, I must be too much. There must be something wrong with me, that I don't easily have this love. And I think it took me a long time, a lot of therapy, a lot of personal work to really get to the point of recognizing that there wasn't anything wrong with me. It sounds so obvious when you say it that way, but I really truly had to do work to believe that. And it's the work of not just knowing something, but knowing it in your body, knowing it in your bones and your soul and your heart.
(04:00)
And it still comes up sometimes. And I think that's the tricky thing about those deep wounds of we feel like we do the work and that means I'm healed and everything's going to be great. But it'ss sort of like our life lessons of it evolves over time of how we interact with that wound and how we choose to grow from it. And whether we choose to act out of the place where we're feeling triggered and insecure, or if we're making a powerful decision about how we want to be showing up. Anyway, I'm getting a little too far down the line, but I share my background story, not because I'm looking for any kind of sympathy, but so that you understand each of us can come by this abandonment wound in a very honest way, and we can have all the logical reasons. Of course, I was loved and wanted as a kid, and yet that wound still existed.
(05:01)
So it's not anybody's fault that it existed. Nobody did anything wrong it it's there and it's in my history, it's in my body. It feels like it's in my soul of something that I work with on a regular basis. And if you are having that, I think the trick is, and what got me stuck for so, so long is that I'm a smart person. I bet you're a smart person too. And we can logically know something of there's nothing wrong with me, or we could logically know I'm not too much or I can logically know I'm lovable. I'm great. All my friends say that I'm great. So why am I still single? Why do guys keep breaking up with me? But this wound, especially an abandonment wound is deep and it's often going to lurk in your blind spots. So you might logically know something, but it is working so deep in your subconscious that you might not even be aware of it until it gets touched, right, until a breakup happens and you feel disproportionately upset by it, where it feels like this seems so much harder for me than it does for everybody else.
(06:23)
It seems like other people bounce back from this easier than I do. What the hell's wrong with me? And we can feel stuck in that for a really long time. And I believe those are the signs that you have an abandonment wound if you're feeling extra panicked or desperate or completely frozen after somebody leaves and you feel like you can't move forward. If you feel a phrase, I hear a lot thrown away garbage and left on the side of the road. If you feel like you have to have contact with the other person, even if you know it's not healthy and it's not even really what you want, it's just a persistent urge of I have to have contact with the other person to feel like, okay, I'm okay. You might also feel like your worth just completely evaporated.
(07:21)
Those are all potential signs that maybe you have an abandonment wound and this episode's going to be especially for you. And I want you to know it's not about your ex. This is just something within you that you get to now be aware of and you get to decide how to heal, how to move forward, how to take care of yourself. And I think what's also important to know is around the word triggered. I think the word triggered gets thrown around a lot today in society of I've been triggered. When you are triggered, and I'm not talking about A-P-T-S-D way or anything that's related to trauma, but when you are triggered, what is happening is that it feels like the past is present and it's happening right now. It brings up feelings from a past occurrence, and it seems like it's happening right now in the present moment. So when a breakup happens, even if it's a breakup where the relationship was toxic, I'm glad that it's over, but you are still feeling worthless, abandoned, alone, devastated beyond what feels like maybe it feels like it's out of proportion. Like I said, that probably has roots that go back somewhere else in your history.
(08:58)
There's a saying, I think it's in the Codependence Anonymous community or the Al-Anon community where they talk about if it's hysterical, it's historical. Okay? So what a trigger means is it's really just showing you where there's some unhealed stuff from your past and it's getting brought up in the present moment. If you were able to just be present, the reaction would be directly in correlation to what happened. You might be sad, but you would be okay. Like, well, yes, that wasn't the greatest relationship. I realized I'm going to move on from this, or it wasn't what I wanted. It would be directly correlated to that instead of feeling like it's really, really big when it feels like it's really, really big, it's probably also got roots in something historical. Okay? So when we talk about abandonment, I always like to get really clear on words. So I looked it up. Miriam Webster says, it is to give up with the intent of never again claiming a right or an interest. In another definition I found was the voluntary and permanent desertion or forsaking of a person property or a duty.
(10:30)
Another interesting definition I found was to give up control or influence of another person or entity, which got me thinking. It got me thinking pretty deeply about the idea of how this really does play out in romantic relationships. Okay, so I want you to stay with me here. When you're a single, you know that you are 100% responsible for your happiness. So you are constantly filling up your own cup. You're listening to that advice, right? Like fill your cup first and everyone else gets to drink from the overflow. When we enter a relationship, we have this person contributing to our happiness, and it's amazing. It feels like we're in constant overflow because they're contributing so much. And then what's human nature is that we tend to stop contributing to our own happiness and satisfaction and wellbeing, and we let that person start doing more of the work.
(11:29)
And so they're not necessarily contributing to our overflow anymore. We've actually stopped taking care of ourself a little bit, and we're letting them do that work for us. And I will tell you, if you have an abandonment moment, this feels really normal and easy to do. I think a lot of people do this that don't necessarily have abandonment wounds. I think it's that idea of I let myself go in the relationship, but when you have an abandonment wound, it's really common to let the other person fill up that wound for you. It's like they are filling up the hole in your heart, but that hole in your heart was never their responsibility to begin with. It is not their job to fill that hole. That's your job. You just delegated a doubt and you were giving it to a contract worker instead of saying, oh, this isn't supposed to be delegated. This is supposed to be part of my job description.
(12:35)
And that contract worker was like, well, my contract's up, I'm out, or I quit, or I'm moving on, whatever it is. So they leave and you have a disproportionate hole because you stopped contributing to your own happiness, so that muscle got a little bit weaker. You weren't filling yourself up as much. They were doing a lot of the work. And so it's not just that your cup is full and the overflow is gone, it's that cup has been drained. That hole in your heart now feels even bigger because you have been giving up your responsibility, and this isn't meant to shame you or make you feel bad about it. It's just raising your awareness of what has been happening for some time. So yes, this does feel like it's out of proportion because you were giving too much responsibility to somebody who shouldn't have had that responsibility.
(13:35)
And when they have deserted their duty, it wasn't their duty in the first place, but when they have left that, when they said, I no longer want to have influence over or responsibility over this hole in your heart, right? I'm out. I want to take care of whatever they do their own thing, we are left. You truly are left in that desertion. That's why this feels so, so, so bad. And while your brain is trying to solve it, your brain is saying, oh, I'm too much. Or if I understood this, or if I had closure, I could be able to feel better. Your brain is going about this in probably two very wrong directions. One is trying to understand it. Two, it's turning it into self blame, which is actually making that hole in your heart even bigger. Because when you blame yourself, you are breaking trust with yourself. You're lowering your confidence in yourself.
(14:51)
The ways that we typically go about healing this are not helpful. And even going the route, if you did nothing else, if you stopped here, you will have new awareness about what's happening and what is causing the pain that you're in. That is helpful to know it's not complete because what will complete it is when we start to make change. We need to start healing five levels deep, not just one level of telling ourself, oh, I love myself again, we need to take this fully deep, which is why I teach five pillars of healing. I want to help you heal your vitality, which is how you feel on an energetic and physical basis. Your sleep, your eating, your energy to do things that you love and enjoy, right? We're going to heal your nervous system. We're going to regulate that because right now you're all out of whack and we want to have emotional processes so that you can move through these emotions without them taking you out.
(16:09)
Sometimes I think those of us with abandonment wounds, we have outsized emotions, and if we go into them without proper structure and support, they overtake us. That's not what I mean about processing your feelings or feel your feelings, which is what we hear a lot. There is an actual way to do that, and we want to examine your thoughts so that we can pull out the weeds of the ones that aren't helpful and we can plant the seeds of ones that are going to help you. And we want to repair your identity of how you see yourself. We want to start taking responsibility again for filling our own cup.
(16:54)
And I think one of the big keys here, and I'm going to give you a gift of a bonus episode on Thursday with an audio that you can listen to. So to stay tuned, there's going to be a bonus audio dropping on Thursday that's going to be in this idea of I can never be abandoned if I don't abandon myself. That hole is your responsibility and showing up for yourself through the muck. Now you're in the muck. You are in the messy in-between phase. You are in the grief, and often we're so scared of that that we either push it away and we pretend like it's not happening. We pretend like we're fine or we thrust it on other people around us, and we try to make it their responsibility to fix me. We reach out to our ex because we used to feel better when they were around, and we try to make them explain what happened so we can understand it, or we try to get them back, which was my pattern of I try to get them back so then I can feel okay again, or we're always crying to our friends, but we're never resolving anything.
(18:08)
And what we're really afraid of deep down is that my feelings and this awful period, this mucky period, I'm scared that it's too much. I'm scared that I can't handle it.
(18:26)
And then what happens is that, of course, because we're scared it's too much and we don't even want to handle it, of course it never gets handled because nobody can satisfy you the way that you can. Nobody can give you the comfort that you're looking for in the way that you can give it to yourself. And we do this, maybe it's through daily habits and building some morning rituals or practices throughout your day that are really going to support you and show up for you of knowing that I need to prioritize my self-care and taking care of myself on all these levels of my vitality and taking care of my nervous system and my emotions and my thoughts and my identity, working on all those levels so that you stop abandoning yourself.
(19:27)
And what happens when you practice that for a while, and I'll tell you, it takes time. There's a reason why it's called a practice, and this is where it has really helped me to have outside support through a therapist and a coach, and I've worked with women's groups to have almost that modeling of the ways that other people show up for themselves, and the mirroring that I would get from a coach of somebody reminding me that I'm lovable and seeing the best in me and reflecting that back to me on a consistent basis is really what started to rewire the way that I saw myself. What happens is that we start learning how to fill our own cup, and then everyone else contributes to the overflow as it's meant to be. That's the way it's meant to be balanced.
(20:22)
It's like I'm the ice cream sundae, and everybody else gets to be the toppings, the cherry, the sprinkles, the nuts and the hot fudge or whatever you want to say. Yep. But on the ice cream, I'm the base. I'm the most important part. Okay? So I want you to know that it doesn't end here. These are ideas. I love ideas. Ideas are how we start creating more awareness and we start having more insights, but the work doesn't end with the insight. That's the beginning. What's really important is that you do the work, and I will tell you, as somebody who has done the work by herself for way too long, the longest way to do it is to do it by yourself. It's possible. It's hard.
(21:25)
A much easier way to do it is when you are doing it with someone else. You could do it with me as a coach. You could do it with another coach that you like. You could do it with a therapist, right? You want this with a trained professional because oftentimes our friends don't know how to hold us the way that we need to be. They are just seeing us through their eyes, through their own wounds, reflecting their advice, that is really just based out of their experience. They haven't been trained how to be neutral. This is the work that I do with my clients. I help you change these patterns so that you start regularly reaching for your own tools so you start regularly feeling better so that you can see the blind spots in your subconscious of what's holding you back so that you start making change and you start evolving.
(22:21)
So if this is really resonating with you, I want to invite you to join me for a free masterclass. I have one coming up. I'm going to put a link for it in the show notes. We're going to go really deep on this. We are going to go deep on how important it is to rebuild your own self-trust after a breakup, and how this is the most potent time for your transformation. If this is the moment where you get to wake up and you get to say, oh my gosh, I've been acting out of an abandonment wound thinking that everyone else was responsible for my healing, huh? I don't think I want to do that anymore. That's a really powerful transformation, and it would be my pleasure to help you with that. And if you want to make this change of like I did of, Ooh, I'm living a life that's pretty far out of alignment with what I actually want, but I don't even know what I want.
(23:12)
I don't even know where to get started, I can help you with that too. Come on over. I'm going to put the link in the show notes. My website is sarah kernels.com/masterclass where you can sign up for a free one hour class where I'm going to teach you how to make this change and the difference it could make for you. I want you to know as we wrap up this episode, the breakup didn't create your abandonment wound. I would say that with 99 point percent accuracy, this didn't create the abandonment wound, it just revealed it to you. So now you are aware of it and you get to choose how you want to heal it and how you want to change the way that you interact with it going forward. Alright, my friends, that's what I have for you today. I hope that this was useful for you and I look forward to seeing you on a free masterclass coming up. Take good care of yourselves, as always.