This episode explores why you might still feel stuck on your ex despite doing all the “right” things, and reframes your breakup as a powerful turning point for stepping into your authentic self. Sarah breaks down common myths about healing (like distraction, time, and vague self-love advice) and introduces a practical framework for aligning your heart with healing through nervous system safety, mind management, reduced attachment, and a compelling future vision. She closes by inviting listeners to see their breakup as a catalyst for growth, resilience, and a bigger, more purposeful life—and offers one-on-one coaching support to help guide that transformation.
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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)
If you are still stuck on your ex, if you are really struggling to move on, even though it's been months and you've been doing all the quote right, things like talking to a therapist, journaling, maybe you're even doing a breakup workbook that are all over Amazon, right? You're doing all these things that you're like, why isn't this working? Why I should be further along by now? And maybe you're still replaying those happy memories and feeling crappy about it and replaying conversations, wishing they've gone differently. If this is you, I want you to know there is a reason why this is happening and it can stop very quickly. And we're going to be talking about that today. We're going to talk about why you could be doing all these things and it still feels like you're not moving the needle at all with your breakup, and we're going to talk about what to do differently instead.
(01:50)
So welcome. I am so excited to be diving into this topic with you today. And this really came up for me because I'm working with a new coach this year and I am tapping into something that I think was my underlying driver for a long, long time. If I sort of look back at the pieces of my life going back to my breakup, I look at the choices I've made and I really see it has led me to what I'm doing now, which is learning how to be a woman, stepping into power, having positions of power, using my voice, speaking up for what I believe in and leading other women to be able to do the same. And it's so interesting to me as I trace back what I've done and the choices I've made since my breakup, I realized that I had a decision point after my breakup of realizing I have been playing my life so small and safe in order to keep this relationship because I was afraid if I fully stepped into who I believe myself to be, who I have the capacity for, who I have the potential to be, I think he wouldn't have liked me.
(03:13)
I'll be very blunt and honest. I think he needed that relationship. He needed somebody who was going to be small and compliant, and I'm not going to say tread wife material, it's not that. It's just I think our dynamic didn't actually work. And so I spent a lot of time in that relationship pretending to be somebody I'm actually not. It was really trying to step into this role of like, can I be the perfect girlfriend, therefore the perfect wife? And I was trying to play that rather than listening to the pull of my own soul of who do I want to be? How do I want to grow? And I look back at the relationship of those moments where I was stepping into that part of myself to allow myself to grow. Those were actually the moments of friction where he didn't like it. He did not like it one bit that I wanted to have my own business and I wanted to bring in lots of money he liked if I had a reliable job and it was predictable and steady hours and all those things.
(04:21)
So I knew after that relationship ended, I didn't know exactly what it was, but I knew, no, I'm not doing it that way anymore. I'm doing things my way. I don't know what that is, I don't even know what that means, but I'm going to figure it out. And after that breakup, I had a bunch of savings because I thought we were going to buy a house and I thought we were going to get married. And I took the savings and I booked a trip to Cuba with an educational group and Cuba is a place I've wanted to go forever. And then I also joined a women's embodiment program that involved a lot of deep intensive work and it also had a lot of travel as well. And so I took that money that I had put aside for what I thought was going to be my future and I put it towards my future in a different way that has truly led me to where I am today of feeling like, yes, this is my path, this is my path where I'm stepping onto something and I'm helping people and I share that part of my story because if you are here, I wonder what that looks like for you.
(05:46)
I wonder if it's relatable of almost feeling like programmed to be the perfect partner of like, I got to figure out how to be this person's perfect partner and I'm going to show up that way and I'm going to be playing the part. And there is something inside of you quietly dying, gasping for air, saying, but don't forget about me. Don't forget about your soul. Don't forget about what I really think you're here to be doing.
(06:19)
I think that your breakup is an opportunity to learn how to start listening to that voice. Alright, and I got a little ahead of myself because I got really excited about this for you. I got excited about the pivot. So let me back up a little bit to talk about where you're at now. If you are in the place where you're still stuck on your X and it feels like nothing is budging, the first thing I want to do is I want to invite you to look at that and ask yourself, is that really true or am I just focusing only on the parts where this still hurts and I'm neglecting that I've actually probably made some progress. Maybe at the beginning I couldn't sleep because I kept replaying the same thing over and over and over again and now I am at least able to sleep.
(07:20)
Or maybe you're not seeing that you're having these moments of relief, maybe they're short, but you weren't having those before where it felt like you were constantly being inundated with thought after thought after about your ex, but now you're having these brief moments of relief even that is progress and it's so easy. All of our brains do this. So you're not alone here. Our brains do this where we direct our thoughts to what's not working. We're constantly looking at, I don't like this doesn't work. And we get really stuck in that narrative. So the first myth I want to bust is that very story that I haven't made any progress. And I want you to ask yourself, is that actually true?
(08:10)
Maybe it it's my gut says there's probably been a little bit of progress. Maybe you want it to be more progress. I get that. I totally get the impatience, but that thought I haven't made any progress may not be necessarily true. Alright, so let me look at some of the other things that you're probably doing that we think work but they actually don't. One of the things that most people jump into right away is they're like, I got to stay busy. If I distract myself, then I'll be all right. This might look like spending a lot of time at the gym, overworking, really filling your calendar with all kinds of activities. Maybe you're joining a bunch of meetups or clubs or it could be anything really picking up extra shifts at work or picking up extra projects so that you stay busy. I understand this impulse of if I just stay busy, then I don't have to think about it and my mind can stay distracted. Those are my only moments of relief when my mind is distracted.
(09:25)
However, there will always come a point where you're not distracted anymore. You come home, you dread going home because home is empty and you have to slow down and get ready to go to bed, and that's when everything creeps in. When we stay distracted, yes, we do get a little bit of relief, but nothing heals. We don't get to address head on what we're feeling. We just keep escaping it. And as long as you keep escaping your pain and your feelings, they don't heal, they persist. It's very true. That old saying, what you resist persists, distraction is just a way of resisting. So you're basically saying, I don't want to deal with it, and you're trying to run away from it, but it's like chasing you. It's like you can't outrun me. I'm your feelings. I'm with you all the time, whether you like it or not. All right? So one of the reasons why you might be stuck on your ex is you might be stuck in a cycle of trying to distract yourself rather than actually dealing with what's going on head on and resolving the pain. If you're always distracting, you're never resolving, so it's going to linger.
(10:57)
Another reason or another myth that people tell you to help you heal is just give it time. Time heals all wounds, right? Well, I get that of yes, eventually time does tend to resolve things. It tends to blur the edges. But how much time? And you know what? I don't know about you. I don't have time to waste. And so what I figured out was that it's not the amount of time that passes that helps you to heal. There's no magic equation. They used to say it's like half as long as you were with the person is what I always heard. It was like, oh, if you dated somebody for six months and it takes you three months to heal, that's not true.
(11:50)
I've known people that can get over somebody in a moment, and I've also been the person where it took me eight years. It's not the amount of time, it's the quality of what you do with the time. It's how you are using that time to resolve what's happening. Another myth that I hear a lot, and it kind of goes with the give it time, it's the go. No contact. No contact is not a one size fits all solution. Not everybody has the ability to do that. Maybe you work with your ex or you have to co-parent. And so contact is necessary in certain situations. So how can you heal while maintaining proper contact? Again, it's the quality of what you're doing with the time apart from that person. It's not about how much time you're apart from the person. If you're spending all your time apart from them beating yourselves up or wondering what you did wrong or wondering who are they with now, I bet they're in a better place and a better relationship. I'm just throw away to them. I bet I meant nothing. It's the quality of your thoughts that are going to determine your healing.
(13:18)
And the final myth I want to look at here is the advice that people tell us that's so infuriating. You just have to love yourself more. This really is infuriating to me because it is so vague and I think we all misunderstand what that even means of does that mean I'm supposed to book massages and take bubble baths and paint my nails? I mean, I can remember times in my life where I was doing self-care, like it was checking off to do items and it never felt like it was helping me to feel any better.
(13:56)
And most of us don't know what it means to love and accept ourselves as we are. So it's not about this platitude of you got to love yourself more while the whole time we're still, our brains are running wild, beating ourselves up for all the things we did wrong or we weren't enough or we were too much. We have to change the way that we relate to ourself in order to heal. Alright, I want you to think about all of this. Treating your broken heart, you would treat a broken arm. You don't heal a broken arm by continuing to bump it into things, by poking at it, by wailing it all around or by ignoring it. You can't ignore a broken arm and then expect it to be healing magically on its own. You seek out care, you put it in a cast, you protect it, you align it properly with the healed position.
(15:09)
And then you go through physical therapy to retrain yourself how to use your arm, how to use those muscles in the way that is aligned with healing, not aligned with re-injury. That's a big part of physical therapy is we want to strengthen these muscles so that you don't hurt yourself again so that you put in good movement patterns when we're healing your heart, it's really similar. We don't want to keep prodding it. We don't want to keep re-injuring it. So we need to align your heart with healing and what are the patterns we need to build in so that we don't reinder it that same way again? How do we align your heart with healing? And I think if we all started looking at it from that way of how can I heal a broken heart? I heal a broken arm, we would actually get so much more clarity about what it actually takes to move on from an X.
(16:13)
So if I were to put a big umbrella over the root of what's happening here, I would look at the real trap of turning inward to blaming yourself. And there's a caveat there of sometimes we're doing that because we don't even know who we are, and so we just have this habit of criticizing ourselves the problem must be me. So the biggest mistake is really making yourself the problem. What did I do wrong? Why am I not good enough? It was so good. What did I do to mess this up? Or why wasn't I enough?
(17:02)
This is why most people get stuck because you will never change as long as you keep berating yourself. I want you to look at your breakup like it is a major life change. You are making a major change in your life, and I actually think it's probably among the most stressful events in a person's life, job loss moving, and I think divorce breakup is one of those five most stressful events because you are impacting every part of your life and you are having to go through major change. This is an entire identity shift wrapped up in a major loss.
(17:52)
So no wonder everything feels like it's in chaos. And when things are in chaos, we try to get control by controlling the only thing we know how to control. Blaming ourself or blaming another person, neither of which actually helps you to heal. So what does heal? If we think about aligning your broken heart like you get, align your broken arm. If we align this with healing, what do we need to do instead? We need to think about four steps. The first step is creating nervous system safety, right? Nervous system regulation work is kind of big right now. It's very buzzy, but basically all that means is letting yourself know that we are not under immediate threat. We're just going through a loss and a change. We're going to be okay. All is well, we're not being chased by a bear. We're going to be okay. We're going to get through it.
(18:59)
The next step is learning how to manage your own mind. Your mind has a negativity bias, which is why we slip into blaming ourself or blaming the other person. However, this isn't a line for healing. This is a line for reinjury, so we need to learn how to manage your mind so that it stops getting the best of you. We want to know how to handle it. When your mind goes off track and it starts going into self-blame mode or blaming the other person of like, Ugh, he was such a jerk. He totally changed. It's all his fault. That actually doesn't help you with healing. What aligns you with healing is comfort. Celebrating those little steps of how far you've come, even if it's only a couple inches, that's still progress. We need to align with healing, not with injury.
(19:59)
And so we need to figure out a system of what to do with the mind trash that your brain keeps offering you. We need to be able to take that trash out to the curb and replace it with healing thoughts, with comforting thoughts, and that's a process and a skill. The third step is we have to decrease your desire to be with that person. So instead of feeling like I need them or they were the best part of my life, what else is the best part of your life? What else could there be for you?
(20:39)
What else could make up a big fulfilling life for you? Just like if you were going through a program where you were losing weight and we are going to say you're going to drink more water. I'm sorry, I'm cat sitting and the cat has found a toy, so I apologize if there's some noise in the background. Just like if you were going to be losing weight in a weight loss program, and one of the first things we're going to do is we're going to decrease the amount of soda that you drink. We want you to drink more water. We're going to look at how do we decrease your desire for soda. One of the things is we're going to first increase the amount of water you drink because of how beneficial water is for your system. The second thing we're going to do is we're going to pick apart that soda.
(21:27)
I'm like, look at the ingredients here. Look at what Coca-Cola does to a car battery. It takes rust off of a car battery and we're going to decrease the desire for that soda systematically. And then finally, after we decrease your desire for being with that other person or having that relationship, I want you to create a purpose for yourself. I want you to have vision for your life that is as good or better than the relationship you had because it's so much easier to let go of a relationship if you have something that you're looking forward to. I think one of the places we get stuck is those are our most recent memories and we have nothing that we're looking forward to. So if you start devoting yourself to something that you are looking forward to, something that you can be working towards, it gives you a forward momentum, which is so important with getting over something from your past.
(22:32)
What happens when we start doing it with these steps is you start feeling better right away because you have something you're looking forward to and because you are more aligned with healing than you are with hurting, you treat yourself more kindly. You speak to yourself with kindness and compassion, and you start building your own resiliency. I truly believe that your breakup is the most potent time to change your life. And when you do it like this, when you learn how to align yourself with healing, you are coming home to yourself. You're not beating yourself up anymore, you're not blaming yourself, you're really truly looking forward of what else is possible for me, and you begin to know yourself really deeply and you know your boundaries without ever having to do specific boundary work. You're naturally expressing what you want because you are more aligned with the future of where you're going, and honestly, this helps you to become more resilient so that you can handle any bumps that come along in the future.
(23:44)
We just heal yourself once we have these bumps that we keep adjusting in our life over and over and over again. You have the opportunity, but then you will have these skills and know how to do it so that you're like, oh, I got this. Just I'm going to line myself up just like that. So that's what I have for you today for our episode. If this resonated with you, I want to hear from you. Is this work exciting to you? You were the kind of people I really want to work with, the people who are like, I want a life bigger than what I had. I just am not totally sure how to get there. I am thrilled to offer you a spot with my one-on-one coaching because I love working with people who are going somewhere. It's okay if you don't know how to get there, but you're like, I know I'm meant for more than this.
(24:35)
I just got to line up. I got to have the right focus, right? I'm going to teach you how to build all these skills, how to line up your heart for healing so that we take care of healing what's current, and then we're going to help build your future in a way that lights you up if that's exciting to you. I want you to can go to my Instagram, I'm going to link it here, and you can DM me the word coach, and I will send you all the details of what it would look like to work with me, and we can set up a time to talk about it a little bit more so that you can make an informed decision if this is the right next step for you. I can't wait to talk to you more. I know if you're listening to this, you're really looking for something deeper. You're looking for that healing and you want more for yourself in your life. You're my people. So let's talk a little bit more about how I can help you. Alright, my friends, that's it for today. I hope that you take very good care of yourself and I can't wait to see you again next time.