E084 - Why You Feel So Lonely This Summer — And 5 Tools To Actually Feel Better After Narcissistic Heartbreak

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[00:00:00] In this episode, you will better understand why you feel so damn lonely this summer and how to start feeling more like yourself after narcissistic heartbreak.

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Speaker: Welcome to Heartbreak to Wholeness, the podcast helping you heal from the mindfuck of narcissistic relationships and move towards the secure, peaceful woman you want to become. I am your host, Bre Wolta, Relationship Clarity Coach and EFT Certified Practitioner. Let's dive in.

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Hello and welcome back to the episode. So Summer is here, and I'm curious if the idea of summer is actually doing the opposite of what you would expect it to. Like seeing people playing out at the park or inviting you to rooftop Happy hours is actually pushing you further down into this sadness pit because you just don't want to go.

This season with all of its pressure to be happy and social can actually feel lonelier when your heart is hurting or healing from a narcissistic relationship. So today we're gonna talk about what it [00:01:00] means to move through the sadness and the heartbreak in a season that just tells you to smile or just be happy.

We will explore how you can honor your emotions and actually create these quiet moments of connection that feel really real and deeply rejuvenating, even if you're not poolside with your friends or falling in love with the beach. So in this episode, you will learn five real ways with zero toxic positivity that will help you care for yourself when the summer feels heavy.

You'll learn how to let go of the guilt when you just don't have it in you to be social, and you're gonna learn tiny but powerful ways to build real connection without forcing a new chapter that you are not ready for.

This conversation is gentle. It is honest. It is for you. It is about being human in the midst of the summer and trying to navigate heartbreak, whether that was yesterday, last week, last month, or three years ago. Whatever period you are in your healing if you are hurting, this episode is for you.

And remember to stick around to the end of the episode where I [00:02:00] will pull an Oracle card to offer you a specific message that you can use this week to take with you as you. Continue in your healing

so we have to start this conversation by naming that narcissistic heartbreak is painful and often more painful and more fucked up than normal heartbreak. And so I want you to just take a deep breath. Acknowledge how much you are moving through and sitting with and trying to make sense of because it is a lot narcissistic.

Heartbreak is a layered, you're trying to make sense of what happened. The person that you thought was one person turned out to be a whole different person, and you're trying to reconcile in your, in your mind, who the hell that person even was while you were with them.

And I'm sure you don't even know where to start with the anger that is just like boiling inside you that you feel like might just overflow at any moment. You could be hating them and missing them at the same time. I know in my story, in my experience, I [00:03:00] literally was filling out a restraining order and in the next 10 minutes was like crying on the floor because I missed my ex.

It was so confusing and painful and I felt damn near crazy. Crazier or at just as crazy as I did in the relationship. So if you're feeling any of those things, you might be totally beating yourself up.

You might really just wanna crawl into a hole and be left alone, which actually amplifies the sadness and the loneliness, especially when everyone is out frolicking and seemingly enjoying their life.

At least in the wintertime, you don't actually have people like walking past your window all the time. Or maybe you live by a park and you can hear like kids having fun and just see pe. You see people having fun more often than we do in the winter, normally just outside on, on a day-to-day basis. And so it can be a constant reminder of like.

All of these people are out enjoying their lives, and all I wanna do is hole up on my couch and binge watch some trash tv. So to give you more options than [00:04:00] just the trash tv, although sometimes that is the option, we're gonna talk about five things that you can do today to help to start to nurture yourself, to start to feel like you are coming back into yourself. And I wanna be careful here in saying these aren't five things to do to get rid of loneliness. We're never trying to get rid of feelings. Our goal is to provide the space to be with the feeling, to be curious about the feeling and space to bring in other experiences that can remind us of who we, who we are outside of that feeling.

So feelings are not bad. Some feelings feel better to feel than other feelings, but feelings are not inherently bad, so, with that in mind. The first thing that you can do if you're feeling a lot of feelings, is to let go of the pressure of being summer happy, quote unquote. You don't have to match the energy of the season 100% every day of that season.

It's not realistic to think that you're going to be happy a hundred percent of the [00:05:00] days during the summer, just like it's not realistic to think that you're going to be more sad and kind of introspective during the winter. These energies can help us move into those spaces, but there can be this pressure that we assume that we have to be that way every single day of that season, and that's just not realistic.

Emotions come and go sometimes multiple times in an hour, sometimes multiple times in a day. Sometimes you're in one emotion for most of the day. The more that you can just meet yourself where you are and not make it wrong, the more that you will be able to be with that emotion and move through that space.

So just because it's summer and you feel this pressure to be social and playful, allow those moments when they come because you will feel those at times, but also give yourself the grace when you're not feeling those things. So it's the middle of summer, but that doesn't mean that you can't jack up your AC cozy yourself in a blanket, make some tea, light a candle, and treat it like you would do in the winter, [00:06:00] right?

We get to do all of the things all of the time.

You can do things indoors in the summer that tend to you, that doesn't have to just be reserved for the cold months. Now, if you want to use some of the warmth and the light to your advantage during this time, you can go outside for a walk. You can let the sun warm your back. You can literally go outside, take your shoes off, and just put your feet in your grass, or your neighbor's grass, or whoever's grass is nearest by feeling the earth, feeling yourself grounded in the earth.

And you can just sit there and feel your feet in the grass and feel the breeze on your face. Feel the warmth on your face. And that can be enough. That can be enough for you to find that moment of stillness with yourself using the energies of summer, but in a way that feels welcome and helpful instead of this pressure to be out and about and socializing and putting on masks with energy that you don't have.

The second thing that you can do is tend to something [00:07:00] living.

So it might be a house plant, it might be a window sill, little herb garden. I have this cool, I think it's called like a hydro sill garden thing. I don't know. It's like little seed pods that you put in water and it has light on there. That lights it for like 10 hours a day or something crazy.

And it's easy when I get to watch the herbs grow. So whether it's your indoor plants or maybe you have a little backyard or a garden, planting something helps you to nurture something small and alive and give you a sense of groundedness and purpose, and you also get to watch very literally something grow over time. Oftentimes in our healing journey, we're like, well, I should be done with this, and it doesn't really matter what, how much time you've spent.

We always think that like, I shouldn't still be feeling this, and the reality is that growth and healing take time. And so to watch the plant start to like butt up from its seed and then start to grow taller and start to bloom or start to [00:08:00] grow the different herbs, whatever type of plant you have, it's cool.

It reminds you of the pace of growth.

Helping you really to find some patience with your plants and yourself.

Pro tip, maybe also Google, like, what is the easiest plant to keep alive so that you're setting yourself up for success, um, because you want this to be a helpful thing and not something where you're like, oh my God, I killed another plant.

So just putting that disclaimer out there. Take it as you will.

The third thing that you can do right here and now if you are feeling something is name what you're feeling. So I know this can feel like a wild concept, but instead of saying, today sucks or I feel like shit saying, I feel sad. I feel angry, I feel enraged. Whatever the feeling is. Name the feeling. This is so powerful because it gives us language for what we're feeling.

Brene Brown wrote a book called Atlas of the Heart, which you should read if you have not, [00:09:00] but it, it categorizes feelings and what they actually mean. And if we don't have the right language for the feeling, we can't accurately express and accurately like process through that feeling. And so. As you're learning to do this, there's something called the feelings wheel.

I use this with my clients at the beginning of every session that we have because in the center of the wheel, it has the big category of emotion, sad, angry, happy, et cetera. And as you move out of the wheel, it gets more specific and more specific within that category.

So it gives you a lot of, again, language for what you're feeling. When I was in the beginning of my recovery from codependency, which has been a long journey. I couldn't name what I was feeling, and if you are like me, where you tend more on the people pleasing side of things, where you are really, really good at identifying what everyone else is feeling and what everyone else is needing you maybe also have lost touch with the ability to.

Name what you're [00:10:00] feeling. And so when I started that journey, I used that feelings wheel every day and made myself sit down. I had accountability buddies and we would text each other like, this is what I'm feeling today to really get in the habit of just naming it. Because another beautiful part of that is once you name it, you can observe it.

It's something outside of you. Instead of being all like mushed up with this feeling where you can't really articulate it or see yourself outside of it, it's like I'm feeling angry now. I can look at the anger. And it's such a simple little shift in the way that we view ourselves, but it really opens all of these doors to find understanding, to get more curious about that anger in this example.

Where did it come from? What do you need in order to help you feel the feeling?

If you take this even further like I do with my clients, we incorporate EFT tapping after we've identified the feeling so that we can regulate our nervous system while we're processing the feeling in [00:11:00] session. EFT stands for emotional freedom techniques and it's a somatic modality

while we tap on our face in our torso in a specific sequence while we're processing a feeling so that we can regulate the nervous system and show our body that we're safe as we're feeling the feeling we're giving ourself permission and space to be with it.

Because to go back to the beginning of this episode, you know that by being with a feeling, it's how we can begin to feel those shifts because feelings are impermanent.

So try it right now. What are you feeling? And I'm gonna tell you that if you wanna say I feel like shit, or I feel like they're a piece of shit, or I feel like I just can't take it anymore. Those are not feelings. A feeling would be anger, grief, sadness, outrage, embarrassment, shame, sadness, overwhelm.

I can't think of other ones off the top of my head, but feelings. Google the feelings wheel and start to use that every single day. [00:12:00] Another thing that you can do in this sort of category of naming what you're feeling that I love is leave yourself a voice note. Talk it through, talk it out loud.

This is also part of EFT tapping where we're naming what we're feeling out loud. Because when you hear it back to yourself, it sounds different. We, we just receive it differently. So if you don't know what tapping is or you haven't gotten there, simply use your recording app on your phone, talk to yourself and then play it back.

You can also do this when you're feeling really like I'm fucking killing it. I'm taking on the world. When you're very centered and grounded and like everything makes sense and you can see all of these pieces and you wanna feel that way forever, leave yourself a voice note of what you know to be true about you, about your healing, about that moment, whatever you wanna remember, and then remember to go back and listen back.

It's so powerful to hear your own voice in both of those scenarios when you're processing something and when you're [00:13:00] reminding yourself of your truth.

Okay. The fourth thing that you can do is take a freaking break from social media. Oh my God. Social media. So I just had a baby and I took three months off of social media, like didn't even open the app and it was partly intentional and partly I then just forgot about it because I was so busy like keeping this human alive.

But something beautiful happened at the end of that three months where I seriously thought about never getting back on social media again. And as far as my business, I've really scaled back, like how much I post on there. And I don't consume it in the way that I used to, where it was just sort of this automatic thing,

social media is so good at hooking a sin, right? There's so many studies proving the addictive nature of social media and the intermittent reinforcement really just like sucks us in like any other drug or gambling or anything that is addictive. So that and [00:14:00] social media is like FOMO Central. And summer is FOMO Central, and all these people are posting all these things that they're doing in the summer.

And so if you're not doing things, if you don't wanna be doing things, if you're not in the head space to again, be social don't look at it. We're not, as humans, we're not meant to know this much about people all of the time.

And it can be information overload, which can compound the feelings that you're having of, I'm not doing it right, I'm missing out, I'm not going out. Why don't I wanna go out? Why am I still sad? I shouldn't be feeling this way? It's not, it's not helpful.

So try taking a break and if that feels really unmanageable, I want you to try it for a day, just one day, and then I want you to try it for two days. And then I want you to try it for three days and see how it feels. Give this, let this be like a little challenge for yourself or a goal, something that you can work towards in building up.

And while you are scaling back. Also consider really curating the people that are coming into your feed. [00:15:00] So for me now, my feed is like all babies. It's all, it's all baby stuff. It's all baby parenting experts, it's all, all, all, all these things.

And if I'm not careful, I can slip down the rabbit hole and I can come out the other side believing that I'm a terrible parent and I am raising my child in every single wrong way, and I should be doing 75 other things that I'm not doing. And I will literally close my phone and I'm like, why do I feel so exhausted and inadequate right now? I was just scrolling through the reels on Instagram, so it's so subconscious of what the information is and how we're receiving. Like, I'm not doing that right, or I'm not doing that at all. What I've started doing, which maybe is helpful for you, is I don't just scroll, like I don't just doom scroll.

Sometimes I do, but most of the time I try not to. What I do do is I have a list of people in my search, like you hit the search bar and it brings up your recently searched. I have a list of people that I really like to go and actively look at their stuff and a lot of it's [00:16:00] parenting 'cause I do want some help with that.

But it's people who teach in an uplifting way. So I can go, I can actively look at their stuff. And then that takes me like five minutes and then I can get off. I don't get stuck in the scroll of the reels and I'm curating what I'm seeing.

The more you do that, maybe more the algorithm like will feed you that stuff. I still, I don't know anything about the algorithm so I will not pretend to be an expert here.

Um, but I do know that intentionally going in and looking at people's stuff makes me feel better, makes me feel more in control of the content that comes onto my screen.

Okay. And the fifth and final thing that, well, not the final, but the final in this episode for the sake of time, is to give yourself something to look forward to. And this is something small. I want you to plan something tiny and nourishing. That could look like a time that you carve out to go to a coffee shop and do your work at a coffee shop.

That could look like a visit to a bookstore or a walk in the [00:17:00] park. Or a new recipe to try. It doesn't have to be a vacation. I know for me when when someone says like, what are you looking forward to? I'm like, oh shit. I don't have a vacation scheduled. I have no answer. But it can be small things.

Small, small, small things. Small things. This is like having the point of the day, having the point at the end of the week that gives you something to look forward to, to remind your brain that there's movement. Because when we are healing, we think that we're stagnant. We think that we're going backwards.

We think that we're doing it wrong, and we need reminders that we're moving, that we're growing. We have patients, we're watching our plants grow, we're watching ourself grow, and not to say that you can never be in stillness.

Stillness is different than stagnance. You can be still, while still being in a growth period. Stagnant to me means like you're not growing and we don't want that.

And this thing can involve other people, this thing that you're looking forward to. So I want that though, to be on your terms. I don't want [00:18:00] it to, again, feel like this pressure that you have to be doing the, the things with the groups of people that you don't wanna be doing

the things with. You don't have to reach out and go to a huge 4th of July party, but can you reach out to one person and maybe set up a coffee date or a happy hour that you're looking forward to, or can you join a book club that meets once a week that you can look forward to or whatever. Just make it something that feels nourishing for you, that you look forward to every Wednesday or every Friday or every Sunday, and let that be like this sort of predictable routine that really helps our brain and our body feel safe as we're moving through a lot of unpredictable feelings and experiences that come with this heartbreak experience.

So there you go. Those are five super, super easy, doable things that you can do literally today to help yourself feel more like yourself, to help you find these little connected moments, to help you be with the emotions that you're feeling to help [00:19:00] you make space for you when you're coming out of a narcissistic relationship specifically.

We lose ourselves. We don't know who we are anymore. We don't know where to start. We don't know what to do with all these conflicting emotions. We don't know how to make sense of what happened. We feel lost. We feel like we're floating at sea, like someone just dropped us off and we don't know where the hell we are or who we are anymore, or how to swim.

And so giving yourself compassion, so much compassion. I have a client who's always like, yeah, yeah, yeah, Bree. Compassion, compassion, compassion. Because I say it so much to my clients because we have to start there. We have to start there. As we are moving through this experience, you have been in a situation most likely where the narcissistic person was really cutting you down and was really telling you that you weren't important or you were too emotional or too much, and we can start to adapt that dialogue with ourselves when we have been gaslit and manipulated like that for months or years. [00:20:00] And so catching yourself as you have these narratives too, is really helpful in like taking back your power from them. Taking back like, no, I know where that voice came from. That was his or that was hers, and I don't like that. I'm choosing a different voice. I'm gonna sit with this feeling and I'm gonna allow this sadness because that was never allowed in my relationship. And I'm gonna learn how to do that so that I know that I'm important, that I am worthy, that I am enough.

The more that you give yourself this time right now as you are feeling sadness and loneliness and grief and a million other feelings, the more that you will come through this experience, come through this like fire of the experience as a more whole integrated person, which will only set you up for success in your future relationships.

So this time is vital. This time is so important and this is why I do the work that I do. I help women [00:21:00] become who they want to become for themselves, first and foremost. And in relationships. We unpack all the experiences from childhood and the relationships that are like in the way.

I look at it like this tangled ball of yarn and we just start to, to bring these pieces out so that you have a new piece of yarn that you can weave into exactly what you want, exactly, who you want to become. If you are stuck, if you're like, these five things sound cool in theory, but I can't even make myself start.

If you're like, I really just need someone to hold me accountable. I need to be with a group of women who understand this. I have that for you, and I've curated my programs and my offerings to be exactly what you need because I was you.

I was you. I was exactly where you are, and I created exactly what I needed. If you feel a poll at all to explore what that could look like, there's an interest form in the show notes.

Okay, so let's pull an Oracle card. If you're not familiar with this part of the [00:22:00] episode, it's where I shuffle a deck of cards that I'll have different messages on them. And as I feel like the shuffle's complete, I pull a card and we read from the book what the message is. So the card pulled for today is the herd, and let me find the herd in the book here, and I will read to you what it says.

The herd is a message from the Divine Collective letting you know that you belong. You are an integral part of the herd and there's great power in the collective, the herd. Your herd values, your talents, flaws, individuality and needs. Your gifts in order to enhance and harness its collective power. Feel your place.

Settle in. You belong here. The herd is an affirmation that you are where you should be. You have your people, but the safety of the herd holds you while you explore you, your unique contribution to the larger collective. If you're feeling isolated, lonely, or afraid, allow the herd to call you home. Find your people.

They're out there, the ones who get you, love you, see you. [00:23:00] They're waiting for you. You won't risk them at home all alone though, so take the risk. You won't find them at home all alone though, so take the risk. Make the connections network. Be brave dear one. They're waiting to embrace and celebrate all that you are.

I love how this is encouraging you to find your people and do it in the ways that feel good to you, the ways that feel nourishing to your soul.

I would be so honored to meet you and whether or not I ever get to meet you, please remember that you are not alone. You are not crazy, you are not making it up. You experience is valid. I am here with you and I'll see you in the next episode.