Heartbreak has a way of bringing us face-to-face with this warring relationship with ourselves.

We get to (have to? are forced to?) take an uncomfortably close look at the outdated beliefs, abandoned parts of us, and crossed boundaries that brought us here.

As painful as this reckoning can be, it offers us an extraordinary opportunity:

to stop turning against ourselves.

To trade brute force for passionate conviction, intimidation for intimacy, overriding for understanding, and combat for kindness — with ourselves.

A new podcast episode is out today, on this dear-to-my-heart topic.

I hope you devour its medicine and/or pass it along to someone who could really use it:

Stop Fighting Yourself
Podcast with LiYana Silver

You can find it on any platform you get your podcasts:

In this episode, look & listen for:

• How to stop fighting yourself (the practices I use myself and with clients).

• Why your heartbreak demands you reckon with how you treat yourself.

• How the Excavation phase of a Dark Night of Heartbreak asks you to examine the beliefs, patterns, abandoned parts, crossed boundaries, and old stories that brought you here.

• The most important relationship you’ll have in your entire life

As one of my mentors asked me, I ask you:

When you are at war with yourself and you win… who loses?

Being hard on yourself doesn’t make you stronger.

It severs you from the very strength you need to make it through heartbreak.

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A new episode is out now in my new podcast, Waking Up in Heartbreak:

The Sacred Work of Falling Apart

with guest Mirabai Starr (and me, your host, LiYana Silver)

I would not have gotten through or been able to write about any of my dark nights of the soul without . I am lucky to know her as friend and colleague as well as spiritual teacher. And to have dined with her recently in our homeland of Taos, New Mexico, pictured above.

Please be ready to receive manna in this luminous and deeply personal podcast conversation.

In it, Mirabai Starr, translator of ‘Dark Night of the Soul’ and author of ‘Ordinary Mysticism’ and I explore the Dark Night of the Soul: what it is, what it isn’t, and why experiences like heartbreak, divorce, grief, and profound loss can become unexpected doorways into a more intimate relationship with ourselves, with love, and with what is sacred.

This is a conversation about surrender, soul, and the mysterious grace that sometimes arrives only after everything we thought would save us has fallen away.

Listen/watch wherever you get your podcasts:

In this episode, look and listen for:

• What the mystics knew about heartbreak.

• What the “Dark Night of the Soul” actually is and why it’s far more than simply going through a hard time.

• Why divorce can become one of life’s deepest spiritual initiations, whether you left or were left.

• The surprising difference between suffering that breaks us and suffering that transforms us.

• The moment when the spiritual practices, beliefs, and certainties that once sustained us sometimes stop working, and why that’s not failure.

• Understanding grief not as weakness but as evidence of our capacity to love.

• Why authenticity, not positivity, is the most healing companion during heartbreak.

• Mirabai’s own extraordinary story of love, loss, spiritual abuse, divorce, and the death of her daughter Jenny, and how those experiences reshaped her understanding of the sacred.

• What the mystics mean when they say that something in us must die before something truer can be born.

• Why there isn’t just one dark night but many, and how each one invites us into a deeper intimacy with life.

I hope this conversation meets you in your own dark night of heartbreak, reminding you that you are not lost, even if everything familiar has fallen away.

Please share this with a beloved in your life for whom this could be medicine.

Sometimes the deepest transformation begins precisely where certainty ends.

See you in the podcast,

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Waking Up in Heartbreak
Podcast with LiYana Silver

This podcast is shaped by a beautiful, radical idea:

Heartbreak isn’t just a breaking.

It’s also an awakening.

And a remaking.

The first episode is out now: Let This Heartbreak Remake You.

Have a look/listen on any platform you get your podcasts:

Spotify

Apple Podcasts

YouTube

Amazon Music

Waking Up in Heartbreak podcast website

Whatever your preferred way of watching/listening to the podcast, please remember to subscribe, so you’ll get alerted every time there’s a new episode.

Not currently in heartbreak or relationship loss?

My friend, please have a look/listen anyway, as it might be precisely the medicine needed by someone you love in your life — and you can connect them.

The episodes alternate between talks by me and conversations with guests. We follow the themes in my forthcoming book, Waking Up in the Dark Night of Divorce.

Some episodes to look forward to in the coming weeks:

• What I Said When She Called Me Sobbing

• How to Stop Fighting Yourself

• The Sacred Work of Falling Apart with guest Mirabai Starr

• When Everything Burns with guest HeatherAsh Amara

Here’s what else we’ll be talking about in this podcast:

• How to get through (but not bypass) the hardest parts

• Why losing yourself in relationships, especially for women, is not an accident but by design.

• The inner work of reclaiming yourself that must happen before and as you rebuild your life.

• Trusting yourself (again), being good to yourself, and being as big and bright as you truly are

If you’re new to me, hello! Allow me to (re) introduce myself:

I’m LiYana Silver, author of Waking Up in the Dark Night of Divorce & Feminine Genius. I’ve been a relationship coach for 25 years, guiding women (& their partners) through deep transformation, all the way through heartbreak to rebuilding lives and loves that are unapologetically alive, beautiful, meaningful.

The Waking Up in Heartbreak podcast is for you when …

Your heart is shredded. Your identity is dissolving. What you’re going through is so intense and complex it feels like a dark night of the soul.

Yes, you want to be on the other side, glowing and confident. And you will. But something in you says, stay here for a spell. Listen. Because who you become as you stay instead of running away, IS who helps you emerge.

There is an indomitable inner fire in you — even if it feels faint at the moment — that won’t let up until you are more fully awake, lit-up, fully yourself.

All of this is precisely what led you here.

Welcome.

Any heartbreak feels like failure. But it’s an initiation.

I know you might feel like you are lost. But you are somewhere:

In a rite of passage called a dark night of heartbreak.

So come in close. Grab a soft blanket and warm beverage.

Let this heartbreak remake you,

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If you just got hit by the oncoming train of divorce (or breakup or heartbreak or loss or, or, or …), this is for you.

If the train hasn’t hit yet but will soon, or if the collision was a while ago, or if the train is more perimenopause than divorce, if it’s more caring-for-aging-parent while single-parenting, this one is still for you.

Maybe all of this hit all at once, a shock and surprise. Maybe you’ve been watching it come along the tracks, closer and faster, for a while now.

Maybe the person who was your best friend is now erratic and mean. Maybe they were already erratic and mean, but now they’re getting exponentially so. Maybe you are concerned for your safety. Maybe the awful question now invades your mind, “are my children safe with their parent?”

Maybe you have to find a new place to live. Figure out how to make it all work on a single income, or with half of everything now going to your ex. Figure out how to find a job again after a long time out of the market.

Maybe you can’t sleep, or sleep too late and too much. Can’t eat, or just can’t seem to get enough to eat. Cry at surprising intervals. Migraines, panic attacks, wishing for the off button. Feeling mad enough to scream and throw things. Or simply screaming and throwing things.

Maybe you’re really alone and desperately lonely and there’s no one to talk to. Maybe when you talk to your friends, all they seem to do is dole out chipper advice or tell you you’re going to get through this or there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.

You know what the words mean. But they don’t mean much.

And you want to say fuck you even though you love them and are grateful for them but maybe that light in the tunnel is the oncoming train of divorce you just got hit by.

However the mess piles up in your specific situation, this is a tender time: When everything is shaken up, falling apart, makes zero sense. When nothing seems to help.

Here are four things that just might help.

Or if they don’t help in the sense that they make things better, they will help make things less bad.

And “less bad” is honestly a really important milestone in the dark night of divorce.

First one: Discuss.

This could mean you get to ramble and vent and voice all the disorganized, unpleasant things crowding your brain. You get them out.

This could also mean a back-and-forth with a friend or coach or therapist, where you say something and the other person reflects. Helps make sense. Helps make a plan. Gives advice (that you want to hear). Validates what you’re going through.

Discuss means talk it out, voice it out, puzzle it out, muse it out. Move the feels into words.

Second one: Detox

This could mean any means to get the feelings out of your body: crying, dancing, smashing, wailing, processing through words (see Discuss, above), singing, shaking, journaling, writhing on the floor, screaming into a pillow.

Get it out. Holding it in can become a toxin for you. Let it out.

Third one: Delight

Yesterday I had day off. A wise past version of myself knew I’d be teaching a workshop all weekend and would need a day off afterward. Brilliant past self! I’m not always great at this kind of planning, but yesterday I was.

A friend invited me to the pool at her gym. We sat in the sun, breaststroked through the water, and I read a book. Later in the afternoon I sat on my porch and watched the summer storm slide down the ropes of rain and rush recklessly down the street-turned-river. I didn’t look at a screen all day.

Yesterday’s delights were pretty big ones, as delights go. Micro delights count too. Cup of coffee while watching the sun come up. Snuggling into the cool sheets for an extra snooze. The beads of rain that ornamented the tree boughs after the torrential rain.

Delight: It adds mass and flexibility to our Rest muscles, our Thank You muscles, our It’s Going To Be OK Somehow muscles, our Be Here Now muscles. It lets our minds notice what is here not just what is missing or what we forgot to do. It gives us something to focus on — for a breath, an hour, a day — aside from dodging and weaving out of the path of that oncoming train.

Fourth one: Distract

I used to think distraction was a bad thing. There are problems that need solving, plans that need to be made, obstacles that need overcoming; isn’t distraction just postponing the inevitable, lodging our leg in the slats of the railroad ties, so we can’t yank free when the train barrels down?

But no.

I learned this from psychologist Lisa Damour in her book The Emotional Lives of Teenagers. What I learned and tried out with my teen, it turns out, applies to me and to friends and to clients, too.

Watching a movie or having a glass of wine or taking a hot shower or whatever counts for you as distraction from the main event of the train that just ran over your life, can be useful.

It puts your attention elsewhere. It lets the feelings and problems and issues sit and sift a bit. Sometimes distraction means you laugh at the comedy show or feel lighter after the movie. And so then you have a few iotas more lightness and humor to apply to your life. Or, you just got a break from the intensity of it all, like a marathon runner getting to pause for a moment, drink some water, eat a bite of a protein bar before getting back to it.

Sure, distraction can be a tricky one. Too much distraction could start to hurt you rather than help you. No glass of wine if you’re sober, as an obvious example. Too much distraction can add up to you unengaging and numbing out, when what the whole rite of passage of divorce will require of you is to engage and lean in.

But, engaging and leaning in can come later.

For now, the next time the shit hits the fan, try one of these tools: Discuss, Detox, Delight, Distract.

If the tool you choose and use does indeed help you feel a little better — or just less bad — I want to know. Come back here and tell me about it, please.

Until then, my friend, I know what you’re up against is huge and impossible. It is bad.

But it also has the greatest potential to reshape you into who you dearly want to be anyway. As one of my clients (who just got hit by the oncoming train of divorce a ten weeks ago, but who’s counting) puts it, “The journey back to yourself will be magnificent.”

Yes, it will.

And until then, I wish for you discussion, detoxing, delighting, and distraction,

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First, a word:

This article is the last in a series of five, naming and chronicling the Five Phases of Heartbreak Transformation that carry you from breaking to awakening.

This article welcomes the phase of Emerging in which you start to make your way out of your dark night of heartbreak, more fully awake, aligned, alive.

Article #1: Let This Heartbreak Remake You (Phase 1: Initiation)
Article #2: What I Said When She Called Me Sobbing (Phase 2: Dissolution)
Article #3: How to Get Away With Soul Murder (Phase 3: Excavation)
Article #4: Someday My Prince Will Come (Phase 4: Reimagining)

In The Ending Is Your Beginning

We were really doing it, really getting divorced.

That was six years ago: Uttering the word divorce that I had vowed never to use. Contemplating the difficulty of living, working, and parenting unpartnered.

Even now, six years later, standing on the far shore of that devastation, when I think about it, the bottom drops out of my heart. I want to throw up or cry. My bones crumple into tissue paper. Panic licks at my heels like flame.

These are appropriate responses to something that is as disorienting and horrifying as divorce or heartbreak is.

How was I going to make sense of that monumental ending?

About nine months after we first said divorce, one afternoon while my kid was at his dad’s house, I pulled out the keepsakes from our wedding party.

Our photos. Our invitations. Our vows to each other, handcrafted on handmade parchment, which we read during the ceremony like a prophecy.

Our guests’ wishes for us, handwritten on little paper squares, which we strung up over the reception area as a prayer flag.

I laid them all out on the floor and read each one. Played our songs. Cried. Crumpled. Panicked. Cried more.

Had we failed? Failed to live up to their wishes for us? Failed to live into our wishes for each other? Failed to try hard enough for long enough? Failed at marriage?

But no.

We never promised ’til death. We vowed to stay together unless it became clear we were no longer helping each other live healthy, expansive lives.

Longevity isn’t the only — or even the best — measure of success. Plenty of couples make each other miserable for decades and will continue to the bitter end. That is not necessarily a triumph.

And still, the death of any dream is agonizing.

If we are alive, we will love. If we love, we will grieve. Grief is a kind of drowning, an unfathomable tsunami that crashes over our lives and erases the sky.

How is it possible to not die from the grief of what has ended?

Because, my friend: grief is praise.

Grief Is Praise

I learned this astounding idea from Martín Prechtel, author of The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise. Prechtel teaches that “Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.”

My friend, mentor, and translator of Dark Night of the Soul, Mirabai Starr adds, “Your grief is sacred. It is evidence of your capacity for love.”

When we grieve, we honor what we love. When we do not grieve, we dishonor our beloved, as well as our own hearts that love so boundlessly.

This is a far cry from what dominant culture teaches us about loss and heartbreak, that it’s like a temporary bout with the flu, something that can and should clear up in a few weeks with bedrest and tea.

In the most current version of the handbook for mental disorders, the DSM-5-TR, prolonged grief disorder (PGD) is defined by intense, persistent preoccupation with who or what has died, along with emotional pain, identity disruption, and impaired life functioning — for longer than a month.

A month? Come on, people.

Intense, persistent preoccupation with who or what has died, emotional pain, identity disruption, and impaired life functioning, for longer than a month, sounds like a dark night of divorce to me.

Grief (or a dark night of heartbreak) isn’t a disorder; it’s something nearly everyone goes through.

It’s not something to fix; it’s the healthy response to losing what we loved with our whole hearts.

It won’t fully go away; it’s something we learn to carry.

It’s probably going to be with us for more than a month; it’s a timeless terrain that refuses to be rushed.

It’s not something to get over; rather, it’s a demarcation of an ending — and the cracks it makes in our heart let in the stirrings of our next beginning.

Heartbreak isn’t weakness; it’s full-throated love.

Sorrow isn’t a toxin; it’s a remedy.

Grief isn’t sickness; it’s praise.

Of course, knowing all this doesn’t remove the grief of an ending; nothing can. But it helps.

Of course, our loss can make it feel impossible to get on with living.

But grieving what has died is part of what helps bring us more completely alive.

More Completely Alive

So, instead of running from my heartbreak, I let it surge over me.

I let the pain hit me with its full force. I dove as deep as I could; I let it scrape and bruise and burnish.

On torn pieces of paper, I wrote praise to my marriage.

What was lost.

What I will miss.

What I learned about love.

After who knows how long of this impromptu ritual of grief and praise — a few minutes? Months? Lifetimes? — it slowed and ebbed as wild storms of emotions do.

I caught my breath and came up for air.

Grief became love.

My marriage was miserable for a majority of the time toward the end — for years upon years.

But before that it was stunningly beautiful, a work of cocreated art. I would not disrespect it and all its nuanced goodness by calling it or myself or my former husband or our marriage a failure.

We can all recognize that a butterfly is not a failed caterpillar; the butterfly is simply the next chapter in the caterpillar’s life story.

Likewise, I could hold my marriage as a story that had completed rather than failed. And I could extend that attitude to other losses and misses and heartbreaks in my life: not as failures, but as a last page — or the next phase — in my life journey.

I caught my breath and came up for air.

Failure became completion.

I placed my marriage mementoes and my freshly written notes in a sturdy white box and tied it with red string. I set it on an upper shelf in my closet, honoring the life and death of my marriage.

In honoring what had ended, I set in motion my next beginning.

In recognizing my divorce not as a failure but as a completion, I began to emerge from the dark night of heartbreak.

Phase Five: Emerging

In the Emerging phase (the fifth and final phase in a Dark Night of Heartbreak), you start to make your way out of the dark and into the next chapter of your life and love.

Are you done? Is the ordeal over? Yes. And no.

Undeniably, something is complete.

Life begins to feel lighter. Not perfect, still demanding — but more doable, more beautiful, more meaningful.

Grief mingles with praise, joy mingles with pain.

You can hold both, your psychic muscles grown robust by embracing paradox.

You feel more solid in yourself: who you are, what you want, and what you know.

Your boundaries are clearer, to you and to others.

You have renewed confidence and trust in yourself, asking for what you need, and believing good things about yourself, even if it’s sometimes shaky.

You feel more capable, perhaps even inspired, to rebuild the next chapter of your life.

You are integrating what you learned and unlearned throughout your dark night of heartbreak.

You haven’t been magically made over; and yet you are no longer the person you were before.

Emerging marks your re-entry into your life with new awareness, humility, and strength.

Emerging isn’t the end of your journey — it’s a confirmation of your transformation.

You are emerging not just because you have endured or enough time has passed but because of how you engaged and struggled with all that you have endured.

You emerge from the dark not because you avoided, bypassed, put your head in the sand, gritted your teeth, waited it out, or thought positively.

You emerge from the dark because of who you have become in it.

The Ritual of Ending and Beginning

My do-it-myself ritual with my wedding memorabilia thrust me over the threshold from someone who held divorce as a failure to someone who knows that divorce is

An initiation

A completion

A demarcation

And even — eventually, inevitably— the triumphant beginning of the rest of our precious lives.

And yet.

The dark night isn’t some mystic facelift. Yes, you’re different. But you’re still you, always in one phase of transformation or another. You’re still on your particular soul’s path, with your unique soul curriculum that will keep you learning, growing, expanding, and evolving. Hopefully forever.

Which is to say, Emerging doesn’t mean you’re done. Fixed. Finished, frosted, festooned.

It doesn’t mean that you’ve arrived at some perfect nirvana, never again to be rocked by the dark. Even though this sojourn is complete(ish), none of us leave the dark completely. You’ll take your underworld insights with you as you emerge.

In the same breath, Emerging does mean you’re done.

Emerging is a declaration that this is separate from that; then is distinct from now; who you were is making way for who you are.

That old habit, pattern, shitty sense of yourself? You’re done with it. It no longer puppets the choices you make, the actions you take, or the boundaries you set.

A deep, true part of you declares: I will no longer suffer that foolish belief. I unchain myself from that pain. I quit that habit. As I set foot in this next phase of my life, I will not bring that nonsense with me.

This is the essence of the Emerging phase, the nature of any dark night of the soul:

We are both half in and half out of the dark.

We are at once in death and rebirth.

We carry our grief and shake off our shackles.

We honor what we have lost while making room for the beauty of what we’re beginning.

Because it’s who you become in the dark that helps you emerge brilliantly.

Perhaps you too might want to make a ritual of that.

Making Rituals to Remake Yourself

Rituals help us embody who we have grown into during our dark night of heartbreak.

Who you are now, what you know now, where you’re headed now, is all different than it was then.

One way to symbolize, corporealize, as well as actualize your transformation, is a ritual.

Having the same kind of tea in your favorite mug while sitting in the chair by window every morning, is an example of a daily ritual.

Putting fresh marigolds on the altar to your ancestors every autumn, is an example of a yearly ritual.

Weddings are rituals. Divorces are too, happening a handful of times throughout our lives.

Rituals help us honor our rites of passage, and are themselves rites of passage.

However, it’s likely there’s no prefab ritual for what you’re leaving and where you’re going. So I’m a big fan of do-it-yourself rituals.

I made you a guide so you can create your own ritual that best symbolizes and actualizes your Emerging. So you can define and embody for yourself what is ending and what is beginning.

Here’s how to get your hands on it now.

Make Your Own Ritual

In the final chapter of Waking Up in the Dark Night of Divorce: The Radical Road Through Breaking, Awakening, and Self-Reclamation, my forthcoming second book, is an extensive exercise that walks you through how to create your own ritual.

Although you’ll have to wait til October to have the book in your hands (or ears), when you pre-order now, you will receive the Waking Up Workbook as a pre-order bonus.

The Waking Up Workbook is a collection of all the exercises and practices in the book, laid out beautifully for you with extra space to write, sketch, and doodle — including, of course, the exercise for Do-It-Yourself Rituals.

Pre-order Waking Up in the Dark Night of Divorce &

Get the Waking Up Workbook

Whether you do a ritual once to punctuate your emergence, whether you practice it repetitively to help you live into a new sense of yourself, it’s time to mark the shift from how it was to how it will be, from who you were then to who you’re becoming now.

Honoring all that’s ending and beginning for you,

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This article is the fourth in a series of five, naming and chronicling the Five Phases of Heartbreak Transformation that carry you from breaking to awakening.

This article welcomes the phase of Reimagining in which you redefine your relationships, fortify your boundaries, reclaim your joy, and dream deeply into what’s next.

Article #1: Let This Heartbreak Remake You (Phase 1: Initiation)
Article #2: What I Said When She Called Me Sobbing (Phase 2: Dissolution)
Article #3: How to Get Away With Soul Murder (Phase 3: Excavation)

Before you read ...

Before you read, love, take a breath. Slow your scroll. Remember why you choose to read long-form articles written by a human heart and hand. Don’t skim. Let it in.

Also: This article is written for women, by which I mean anyone who claims that identity or is reckoning with it. This article is for anyone of any gender wishing to unshackle themselves from the narrow yet heavy social prescriptions for what deems a woman ‘ideal,’ valuable, and lovable.

Someday my prince will come

Someday my prince will come.

That line from a “timeless, romantic ballad” has been going through my head a lot lately as I’ve been thinking about the influences of popular culture and dominant culture and how they have shaped how I — and most of us — have learned to think about love, romance, and marriage.

And how culture’s scripts and media’s myths keep us stuck in place as we reimagine what we want for ourselves now.

As I moved through the sticky layers of my divorce and supported clients through theirs, I discovered an important unconscious ‘contract,’ which I sometimes call The Arrangement. It’s like the unsaid version of marriage vows.

It’s different for everyone, of course, but for many women it goes something like this:

Choose me. Prove I’m ‘Chosen,’ which means I’m lovable and valuable. I, in turn, will be not who I am but who you want me to be: ever closer to the ideal woman, because ideal women get chosen. Choose me.

Spotting that unconscious contract — and then shifting it — is not only the heart of my work, it’s also the point of this article as well as the invitation of the fourth phase of heartbreak transformation, Reimagining.

Someday my prince will come is a line is from a song in Disney’s 1937 animated classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It’s Snow White’s hopeful song about her romantic prospects as a young, innocent, never-been-kissed girl: true love is on its way to her — along with a happily ever-after future.

It was the highest-grossing film in 1938 and, adjusted for inflation, is still the highest-grossing animated film of all time. It is widely regarded as one of the most influential films to date: because of the themes in its story, its innovations in animation, even its catchy tunes. As one example, Miles Davis is among many iconic musicians who made the film’s song into a jazz standard, helping it make its way into popular culture everywhere.

I heard the catchy tune when I was about 6 years old. We didn’t even get a TV until I was 10, so I must have seen the movie a bit later. I imagine I had it on record, though, singing along while I played with anatomically misleading Barbie dolls on the stairs of my childhood home.

The line from the song is lodged in my mind, much like jingles for the sugary breakfast cereals we didn’t eat (Lucky Charms! they’re magically delicious! sung with what passed for an Irish brogue).

That’s no accident, friend.

It’s an example of a tactic in marketing called emotional branding — also called Cradle-to-Grave Marketing or “Hook ‘em Young”.

Makers of movies and commercials use characters, jingles, and mascots to nudge kids to form a bond with the brand — whether it be cereal or fairytale — and to associate that brand with happiness and positive feelings. They leverage the fact that brand impressions formed in childhood often persist into adulthood.

What you loved as a kid, you’ll keep buying (or buying into) as an adult.

I was raised on an intentional community in the 1970s counter-culture in Northern New Mexico. We didn’t cereal out of a box for breakfast, we had hand-ground cornmeal, made in a pressure-cooker atop a woodstove, topped with honey from the bees we kept and milk from the cows we milked. We didn’t go to Disneyland; I read Feminist Fairytales by kerosene lamp light, gifted from my wise aunt who taught Women’s Studies at a prestigious university.

I was raised to question the status quo, to live differently than the dominant culture prescribed, but still somehow it seeped in: I learned that when it came to love, someday my prince would come.

One little line of a song contains so many myths that we take with us into our relationships and that set us up for misery later on.

Three Myths

Even if you weren’t raised on Snow White or Disney’s myopic view of ideal romantic love and the ideal woman-as-princess, even if you aren’t interested in princes, you were awash in emotional branding that told you exactly what steps you would need to follow to have your own fairy-tale ending, your own Happily Ever After.

Myth #1: The Relationship Escalator

Take “the relationship escalator,” a term coined by journalist Amy Gahran in her book Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator: Uncommon Love and Life.

This script, taught to us by popular culture, parents, and religious institutions, deems a relationship successful when it moves through a series of certain steps:

You date. You have sex. You become sexually exclusive — meaning you are monogamous, having emotional and physical intimacy only with each other. Then you move in together. You get engaged, get married, and maybe have kids. You merge your social, spiritual, and familial circles. Then, you grow old together, ’til death do you part.

Although different cultures and religions may place the escalating steps in a different order, we learn that following these steps will make us fulfilled and happy. Ever after.

We also learn that failing to follow these steps will doom us to unhappiness.

Myth #2: The Trance of Romance

This myth tells us that the most important relationships we will have in life are the romantic, sexual ones. The lifelong, monogamous ones. And especially those that include procreation and conform to a nuclear family configuration. The myth also informs us that if we don’t have that, our lives are meaningless and empty.

In his book Love in a F*cked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together, Dean Spade calls this the romance myth.

Under the spell of this myth, we become completely besotted by the idea that one romantic partner can and should be our everything. That our lives should revolve around this one relationship. That our true love will meet all our needs. That they will keep us safe. That we will be attracted only to them. That sex will be natural and easy. That they will be the solution to our problems — or at least make our problems easier to deal with.

And if any of that doesn’t happen, there’s something wrong with either them or us.

But being so focused on one primary romantic relationship can harm us and limit our lives.

We might get quite isolated and lonely, expecting our partner to be our entire social world. We might disregard our values, move cities when we don’t want to, quit a job we love, let our inner lights dim low, or put our creative projects on the back burner, all for the sake of our romantic connection.

We might even blame our unhappiness on a romantic relationship that isn’t escalating properly, and then have an ‘excuse’ to treat ourselves or others badly.

Horrifyingly, the person that a woman is most likely to be hurt and killed by is her primary romantic partner — the same person the romance myth assures us will keep us safe and be our ‘everything.’

In this ‘trance’ of what romantic love should look like and the steps it should follow, we are ironically less likely to experience the love and security we so wish for.

Myth #3: Be Who He Wants

This is the myth I’ve spent most time unraveling for clients and within myself. It was strong when I met my former husband and undergirded our relational dynamic for most of our 25 years of knowing each other.

Even as we grew and changed, my unconscious contract was still underneath:

Who do you want me to be? Forget who I am, I will become who you need me to be. Because then, of course you’ll choose me. Then I will be ‘Chosen,’ which proves I’m lovable and valuable.

I was raised by counter-culture hippies. Minored in Feminist Studies in college. Paid my own way through said college. Held a job since I was 14.

Strong-minded and self-determined as I was, still lurking under the floorboards, that would later help rot my marriage, was Myth #3: Be Who He Wants.

This same myth is poured over every little girl within earshot of a fairytale, like sugar poured over those Lucky Charms.

Here’s how that myth is made:

#1: Someday your prince will come.

Translation: He’s coming, so get ready. Are you princess material yet? Whatever parts of you need to be improved, hidden, cut out, or enhanced, do it. Do whatever it takes.

We learn to ourselves into that ideal, so our prince will find us “fairest of them all,” so he’ll pick us out of the bunch, so he’ll deem us worthy of love with “love’s first kiss,” so we will become Chosen.

#2: Be the fairest of them all.

Translation: Make yourself appealing and attractive, so your future husband will spot you out of a crowd and choose you. There’s a specific set of criteria for becoming Chosen. Ditch yourself and become the ideal: the fairest of them all.

What does “fairest” mean, you might ask?

Although what is considered beautiful and desirable shifts from culture to culture, the standards of beauty as defined by (mostly male) media makers of the West are disseminated worldwide. Hollywood’s influence, Victoria’s Secret’s influence, Disney’s influence is global.

Globally, we learn: The younger, thinner, more able-bodied, lighter-skinned, Caucasian-featured, and blonde-haired, the better. The more demure, accommodating, needless, pliable, pleasing and princess-perfect, the better.

#3: Wait to be awakened by “true love’s first kiss.”

Translation: Stay chaste and pure, like white snow, Snow White. Don’t have sex before marriage. Wait until someone else awakens you; you don’t do it yourself.

We learn that someone else owns and activates our sexuality. Eros becomes something we experience for someone else, and is activated by someone else. We learn to be sexually available, but not to ourselves. We are left mostly ignorant about our bodies, what brings us pleasure, what we want, what we need, what lights us up. Sex becomes a performance, another trading piece for being Chosen.

#4: Your prince will come. Princess, stay put.

Translation: Princes act, princesses are acted upon. Princes set out to find what they’re looking for, princesses stay put and wait to be looked at. Princes find, princesses are found.

Princes choose, princesses are Chosen.

We learn that our happily ever after depends on someone else — a mobile, free prince. Our value, power, and agency are all granted by our prince. And by being Chosen by our prince.

#5: Princesses want princes.

Translation: Girls want boys, of course! Instead of, say, other girls. Or both girls and boys. Or anyone of any gender.

“True love” is packaged up for us as heteronormative. What fairytale has offered us any other happily-ever-after? If any other version of “true love” is true for us, we have to name it and claim it for ourselves.

#6: Princes want princesses, not queens.

Translation: the young and innocent are Chosen, the old and wise are left behind.

In many modern fairy tales, as in Snow White, an older wicked, scheming stepmother is pitted against our innocent ingenue. The older woman tries to trick her way into staying the “fairest of them all,” not losing out to her young, upcoming rival.

Who hasn’t been touched by the trope of a man trading in his queen for a younger princess?

Princes don’t want you, we learn, they want the ideal.

So if we want to be loved, cherished, and secure, we learn, if we want to be kept rather than discarded, we’d better stay young (or young-seeming). We’d better stay who he wants us to be.

#7: Lose yourself in love.

Translation: this is what you’ve been waiting your whole life for, princess! Give yourself to it, to him, fully. Selflessly. Enthusiastically. Leave your family, your friends, your work, your culture if you must. Be giving, attuning, accommodating, nurturing, measured, soothing.

Forget what you need. Give him what he needs.

Forget self-discovery. Be selfless.

Forget feeling whole and complete unto yourself. He completes you.

Forget what you want. Focus on being wanted.

Give your all to this happily-ever-after. It will make you happy.

And yet. Studies generally show that in heterosexual romantic relationships, women become worse off.

Married men — significantly and consistently — live longer, are healthier, and make more money than single men. As author Elizabeth Gilbert puts it, “Perhaps the healthiest thing that a man can do is to get a woman to marry him.” A wife is a husband’s lucky charm.

Married women, however — significantly and consistently — do not live as long, earn much less, are less healthy, are more likely to die in car accidents and of homicide, and are dramatically less contented than single women.

While princes are happier ever after, princesses are unhappier ever after.

Elizabeth Gilbert adds, “The percentage of herself that a woman gives to a man, she loses and he gains. She’s literally giving her life to him.”

No wonder we feel like we lose ourselves.

That was the plan all along.

Reimagining Something Different and New

I’m sure there’s more, but I’ll stop there. You get the point.

That’s the unconscious contract. Then comes the time to tear it up.

We ask:

How many of these myths actually belong to me?

If I didn’t need to be awakened, saved, or stay forever young, if my bright, happy life wasn’t dependent on a prince, how would I act? What would I do? What would be my own damn opinion of myself?

If I didn’t need to be Chosen, what would I choose?

What if true love isn’t just experienced with someone else, but also in the deep regard I have for myself?

I know how the ‘Hook ‘Em When They’re Young’ cultural script thinks love, sex, and relationships should go. But what do I think?

If I peel away those myths, scripts, trances, spells … Who am I? Who am I becoming? What does she want? What is meaningful for her?

If I don’t want the same old shit, what is it that I want to rebuild?

When we question these myths and scripts, when we step off the relationship escalator to take a different road entirely, we may be seen as weird, wrong, or deviant. And our choices less valuable or valid.

But I see this kind of questioning as brave. Revolutionary. Necessary.

What if, instead of the one word we have for “love” or the one gold standard we have for “relationship,” we had scores of words that could accurately reflect the nuance and variation of our actual lives?

I’m in love with the idea of us getting out from under the trance of romantic love so we can see what fits us.

What we reimagine and recreate might be quite similar to what we had before, what we see around us, what we grew up with. Or it might be something entirely different and new.

This kind of audacious reimagining is the ‘medicine’ of the Reimagining phase, the fourth phase of any dark night of heartbreak.

Reimagining

Here we are at phase four: Reimagining.

In this phase, the dust begins to settle. We come up for air. We listen to ourselves. We redefine our relationships, fortify our boundaries, reclaim our joy.

We begin to dream again and afresh.

Because who you were then is not who you are becoming now.

(Read about all five phases of a dark night of heartbreak, including how to recognize them, navigate them, befriend them, and unearth the ‘medicine’ they each offer.)

And yet, how, in the midst of our utter dissolution, do we reimagine ourselves into being?

We can borrow from the journey a caterpillar takes to become a butterfly: inside the cocoon, it dissolves into goo, soon to be remade into a flying creature. In all that gooey chaos are wise things called imaginal cells. They contain the blueprint of the butterfly to be. They hold the memory of what new shape it will take.

Imaginal cells imagine the caterpillar goo into the eventual yet inevitable butterfly.

In the phase of Reimagining, we do our own version of this reassembly. Like the butterfly follows its imaginal code, we are guided by listening to ourselves rather than to expired advice, old scripts, or ill-fitting expectations.

Sometimes our reimaginings come easily: We move forward, clear and inspired.

Other times, we struggle to lift the limits previously placed on us, slowly rooting out what we can no longer live with — or live without.

Where once we only had questions, now we dream into some answers:

What is possible for us now?
What do we require in order to thrive?
In which direction are we moved?
Where does our soul lead?

The phase of Reimagining invites us to:

Trust our own voice. To prioritize our aliveness, even when — especially when — we have literally given our lives to our relationships.

To imagine a life path that fits better and feels brighter. To allow who we are growing into, to shape what comes next.

To consider that in our relationship’s ending, we have not failed; we have escaped.

We have been given a chance at new life.

PS: The next article is about the fifth phase, Emerging.

In the Emerging phase, we start to make our way out of the dark night of heartbreak. A trapdoor swings open. Fresh air wafts in, and you get ready to fly free.

That door? We make it ourselves, while in the dark. Our own imaginal cells help us remember who we truly are. Let us dream into what we want now. So that we can rebuild lives and loves that better fit who we are becoming.

So, stay with me. Subscribe if you haven’t already, love.

PPS: Please join me in welcoming my forthcoming second book, Waking Up in the Dark Night of Divorce: The Radical Road Through Breaking, Awakening, and Self-Reclamation.

A roadmap for moving bravely through a breakup, breaking the repeating patterns, reclaiming what you lost in the relationship, and rebuilding a life that is luminous with love.

It’s available now for pre-order, with two beautiful book bonuses:

Bonus #1: Waking Up Workbook

All the practices & exercises, beautifully laid out for you with space to write, make notes, draw, doodle, and paste in pictures.

Bonus #2: Waking Up Together: Book Club with LiYana

Once a week, for three weeks, you’ll join from wherever you are in the world. I’ll read from the book. We’ll do practices, discuss, connect, and have some Q+A time.

Pre-order Waking Up in the Dark Night of Divorce.

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Please join me in welcoming my forthcoming second book …

Waking Up in the Dark Night of Divorce:

The Radical Road Through Breaking, Awakening, and Self-Reclamation

A roadmap for moving bravely through a breakup, breaking the repeating patterns, reclaiming what you lost in the relationship, and rebuilding a life that is luminous with love.

It’s available now for pre-order, with two beautiful book bonuses (more about them below).

I wrote this book for you, as an expansion of the section “Navigating Your Dark” in my first book, Feminine Genius.

I started writing it in 2019 with a series of interviews of folks whose breakups were so intense they felt like a dark night of the soul.

Then we went through the covid pandemic and a period of global racial reckoning, economic destabilization, and political polarization that many called a collective dark night of the soul.

Then I myself went through a divorce — or should I say, a dark night of divorce.

Then my son became mysteriously sick for two years, one of the darkest heartbreaks of my life.

It’s been a long, intense writing process through several long, dark nights. But perhaps I should expect nothing less from a book on how we let our heartbreaks remake us.

Thank you for helping me welcome this book into the world.

I wrote this book for those of us on the knife’s edge of heartbreak.

Not after it. Not over it.

Not yet putting the pieces back together.

Mid-rip, mid-falling-apart.

So dark it feels like a dark night of the soul.

I wrote this book for you, at the moment you most need:

• Guidance to get through the ordeal (not go around it)

• To reclaim what (and who) got lost in the relationship

• Tools for composting crap into gold

• Stories from real-life folks who made it out not just alive — but aligned, awake, and lit up.

Pre-Ordering Waking Up

The book won’t be out and in your hands until October 20, but when you pre-order, two beautiful book bonuses await you:

Bonus #1

Waking Up Workbook: companion to Waking Up in the Dark Night of Divorce

All the practices & exercises in the book, beautifully laid out for you with space to write, make notes, draw, doodle, and paste in pictures.

As you read or listen to the book, you can do your soul-work in this workbook.

Bonus #2

Waking Up Together: Book Club with LiYana

Once a week, for three weeks, you’ll join from wherever you are in the world.

I’ll read from the book. We’ll do practices, discuss, connect, and have some Q+A time, together.

Pre-order Waking Up & get your beautiful book bonuses

Advanced Praise for Waking Up in the Dark Night of Divorce:

“Few soul-guides have dared to harness perennial wisdom teachings to help us navigate one of the most excruciating yet common experiences of our lives: the end of an intimate relationship. Love itself is waiting on the other side of this ferocious initiation.”

Mirabai Starr, translator of Dark Night of the Soul and author of Wild Mercy and Ordinary Mysticism

“A fiercely compassionate and beautifully-written guide to help us turn towards our heartbreak and let it reshape us.”

Britta Eskey, author of Initiations in Love

“This book doesn’t promise you a way out of your dark night. It promises you something better: yourself, on the other side.”

Alexandra Beller, Artistic Director & author of The Anatomy of Art

“For those of us who don’t know what to do or say to a friend in a dark night of heartbreak, now we can show up with a hot beverage, an offer to talk or not talk, and an ear-marked copy of this book.”

Sarah Ramey, author of The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness

So, friend, our date is set!

Divorce isn’t a failure. It’s an initiation.

Heartbreak isn’t just a breaking. It’s also an awakening.

The ending of the relationship is the beginning of your self-reclamation: your truth, your voice, your joy.

It’s who you become in The Dark that helps you emerge brilliantly.

I can’t wait to meet you on the page,

This article is the third in a series of five, naming and chronicling the Five Phases of Heartbreak Transformation, that carry you from breaking to awakening, from life-ripping to soul-ripening.

This article welcomes the phase of Excavation in which you mine your muck and retrieve your soul.

To read the first article, it’s here: Let This Heartbreak Remake You. The second is here: What I said when she called me sobbing at 1am.

Before you read:

Now, love, before you read, take a breath. Slow your scroll. Remember why you choose to read long-form articles written by a human heart and hand. Don’t skim. Let it in.

How to get away with soul murder

Oh, love, it’s the easiest — and hardest — thing we can do.

We’re trained into it from when we’re in diapers. And sometimes it takes a dark night of heartbreak to help us undo it.

In 2020, I started collecting stories from people whose divorces and breakups were so intense they felt like dark nights of the soul. It’s over sixty people now, mostly from those who self-identify as women, and their stories form the backbone of my newest book, Waking Up in the Dark Night of Divorce (now available for pre-order).

Today I get to share with you one of the story-sharers, Kai — and what she learned, like we all did, about how to murder a soul. And most importantly, I want to point toward how to un-murder yours.

Before we begin, there’s some frank, graphic details to come, including self-harm. Take care of yourself. Pause if you need to. Come back when you’re ready.

Kai got married young. And truthfully didn’t put a whole lot of thought into the decision.

As she considered spending the rest of her life with her fiancé, she thought, Well, he’s never been mean to me. So maybe we’re meant to be.

Both Kai and her husband struggled with depression, without really naming it or knowing what it meant for them. Within a year, they stopped connecting, talking, or having sex.

Lonely and starving for touch, Kai started having an affair with a married man. When his wife found out, she sent Kai death threats. She got Kai fired from the lab where she worked as part of her PhD program in neuroscience. Kai’s husband moved out and filed for divorce. Most of Kai’s friends wanted nothing to do with her.

Kai stopped sleeping well and started drinking more. Aware that things were slipping off the rails but unable to care, Kai fell into a deep, dark hole. Also known as a dark night of the soul.

Kai just didn’t want to be in her life anymore. She felt stuck and she wanted to get free. One night, she took one hundred extra-strength painkillers, deciding it would be her last night on earth.

But after throwing up all night and then calling 911, Kai found herself still alive.

In the following weeks at the hospital’s psych ward, and in the months after she was released, Kai started to look deeper at what got her there, including her depression. Why was it there? What might it tell her?

Asking questions like this, digging into the darkest of the dark, requires some huge-ass courage. Often, we can summon that courage if we know it’s going to come with a huge-ass payoff.

At the end of our interview, I asked every story-sharer, including Kai, what they’d tell someone smack IN a dark night of divorce, if they could somehow get the message through.

I have Kai’s answer tattooed on the inside of my aorta:

“When I think back over this ordeal, it might seem weird, but mostly what I feel is gratitude.

“I lost almost everything. I was stripped down. All the worst things I could imagine happening, happened. I had to hit the basement floor in order to stand back up. I wouldn’t have chosen this route, but I’m not sure any other route would have gotten me here.

“Whatever you are getting ready to face, let the wave come. Running from it or trying to shelter from it clearly hasn’t been working. I’d never say, try to kill yourself, but don’t run from the fear or blackness or sorrow or grief. We spend so much of our lives being scared of it, but this is the time to go in as far in as you can go. I’d want to hold your hand, but honestly, let it hit you with its worst.

“Rolling around in it, getting scaped and bumped, that is where the wealth was for me. It was one of the worst but one of the best experiences. It made me.

“So, get in as deep in it as you can possibly stand. It will make you.”

There on the basement floor, something ancient and instinctive activated in Kai.

There at the bottom of rock bottom, there was nowhere else to go but IN, nothing else to do but DIG.

This is in a phase of a dark night of heartbreak called Excavation.

It’s the phase in which we dig.

It demands huge-ass courage. It almost always comes with a huge-ass payoff.

Excavation

This article, the third in a series of five, explores the Five Phases of Heartbreak: how to recognize them, navigate them, befriend them, and unearth the gems they offer.

Each phase invites us to unlearn one thing and learn another; to come closer to ourselves and our souls. Each phase acts as a mini-initiation within your great initiatory journey of heartbreak or divorce.

This article is about Excvation, but here are all five, in their abbreviated form:

Phase One: Initiation

This phase marks the beginning of the end. And invites you to recognize you’ve been swept into a process that will remake you, if you wish it to.

Phase Two: Dissolution

This is when things really start to fall apart: your outworn illusions, your old identity, your outdated strategies for coping.

Phase Three: Excavation

In this phase, you mine your muck and retrieve your disowned parts: your self-trust, your self-love, your soul voice.

Phase Four: Reimagining

In this phase, you come up for air, redefine your relationships, fortify your boundaries, and reclaim your joy.

Phase Five: Emerging

In this phase, you learn through trial and error, you struggle and stumble, you get ready to fly free.

Excavation helps us dig: into where we got those outdated illusions and identities, the old beliefs puppeting our actions.

Excavation helps us sift: what we want to leave behind and what we can no longer live without.

Excavation helps us examine: especially our relationship with ourself — and make sure it is no repeat of that mean, punishing, contemptuous dynamic we learned from family or culture, but rather one that is loving, tender, true.

In Excavation, a deeper reckoning begins. You start looking inward, asking:

Why did I stay so long? Why did I leave so soon?
Why did I ignore my no? Why did I silence my yes?
What are these inner demons that are coming back up?
Why have I lost myself?
What parts of me have I abondoned, betrayed, locked away and left for dead?

This phase isn’t comfortable, but it is clarifying.

All this digging will eventually help you know what’s true for you now; to listen to, value, and trust yourself.

But first you need to see where you banished parts of yourself and your soul. And to retrieve them.

To see why you killed off parts of yourself and your soul. And to revive them.

Soul Murder

The word divorce comes from the Latin divortere. It means “to turn away from, to separate or disconnect from.” It is a cousin to the word divert.

There can be a moment in a divorce or breakup where you recognize that you have turned away from, separated from, certain parts of yourself. The self-separation may have happened before your relationship, because of it — or both.

When we are divorced from our true selves, when we separate from our inner knowing, when we cut off our authentic parts in order to fit in, we experience a profound inner deadness.

In her body of work, author bell hooks names this severing soul murder: the result of trying to kill off what we naturally and organically feel, want, need, and know.

Skinned your knee? Boys don’t cry.

Don’t want to kiss your creepy uncle? Be a good girl.

Feeling full? Finish everything on your plate.

Feeling hungry? You’re a pig. Push away what you want.

Afraid of getting hurt? Don’t be a pussy.

Exhausted to your marrow? Keep going, no matter what.

Be attractive, even if you have to starve yourself. Smile, even if you’re in pain. Don’t cry, even when you’re hurt. Have sex, even when you aren’t into it. Get married, because that means success. Don’t get divorced, because that means failure.

Kai had been naturally mopey and melancholic as a teenager. But her parents told her to “just get over it,” so she did.

Whether a loss, a disappointment, a heavy workload, or a new diet to get her to her goal weight, Kai pushed through, telling herself to make shit happen. She got busy making herself into the person her parents would approve of and the woman some guy would want to marry. In overriding her need to slow down, listen, and course-correct, she had suppressed her inner voice to barely a whisper. She had muted her soul.

But why are we busy murdering our souls?

Why is it so easy? Encouraged? Rewarded?

Yes, we get it from our families, but it starts with dominant culture.

Dominant culture assigns some aspects of our humanity inferior and others superior, some strong and others weak, some desirable and others detestable; then links the “weak” aspects to femininity and the “strong” aspects to masculinity.

We learn to war against “weakness,” to dominate over our “feminine” traits, whether in others or ourselves.

Although the self-warring is at work in most of us, it will show up in specific ways as we are socialized to be men or women. Boys are taught to bury tenderness; that to feel is to fail. Girls are taught to bury our voice; that to stay small and silent is to succeed. We all learn to enforce these roles by praising dominance and punishing weakness — violently, if necessary.

Those socialized as men are especially encouraged to project dominance; violence toward others is encouraged. Those socialized as women are encouraged to introject, directing violence on ourselves.

What is a nasty inner critic, a punishing workout, cutting, bingeing and purging, or an extreme diet if not cruelty and contempt, turned inward?

The contempt dominant culture has for us, we unleash upon ourselves.

We kill off what we naturally and organically feel, want, need, and know. Regardless of our gender or how we are socialized, in this system our souls get smothered.

Fractured by dominant culture’s contempt, we are robbed of our ability to truly love — ourselves or another.

Dominance is antithetical to real connection — with ourselves or with another. This is because intimacy is two or more people (or parts of ourselves) meeting on equal footing, with respect and regard.

Dominance, however, is one person (or part of ourselves) having the upper hand over another. Dominance, by its very nature, denies equality and doles out contempt, and therefore snuffs out intimacy.

Contempt kills our souls.

Dominance creates an atmosphere in which love can’t live.

Self-severing is soul murder.

Reunion

But then.

For some of us, in comes a dark night of the soul. There, in the dark, our severed souls become available for reconnection.

This is what Kai encountered on the basement floor of her life, excavating the depression that had nearly ended her life.

The word depressed can be heard as “deep rest.” Kai could see that was precisely what depression was trying to give to her.

And what did Kai need a rest from? Put simply, from pushing down what she naturally and organically felt, wanted, needed, and knew — from killing off her soul.

For Kai, depression was her soul’s voice.

Throughout her life, depression had stilled Kai, sticking her in place, protecting her from heading in the wrong direction, from treating herself poorly. Lying in bed for hours feeling dark and terrible helped Kai listen to herself and figure out what she intuitively needed.

All along, depression had been directing her to go inside and get some deep rest, so she could once again hear her own sweet soul’s voice.

Kai thinks often of the sage words of the late poet laureate Andrea Gibson: “Maybe depression is the den you dug, sweetheart, instead of a grave.”

Depression is complex. It can make life unbearable and unworkable. It can lead to — as it almost did for Kai — the end of a life. I don’t tell Kai’s story to simplify the experience of living through depression. Not everyone’s depression will ease or lift after excavating it, as Kai did with hers. Additional support like therapy and medication can help us stay functional — and alive — while we dig into depression’s meaning for us.

As of this writing, depression is still part of Kai’s life. And she’s doing well. Her brave excavation came with a huge-ass payoff.

Yes, she lost many friends after her relationship imploded, but she was also able to create a tight new community. She’s close to finishing her doctorate. Kai was able to make some amends to the woman who was affected by her affair. Sometimes Kai works too hard, but she also rests. She’s been in a healthy and stable relationship for several years — with lots of good s3x.

Perhaps most importantly, Kai’s relationship with herself is no repeat of that mean, punishing, contemptuous dynamic we all learned from family and culture, but rather one that is loving, tender, true.

Her soul is alive and well.

And then.

And then, soul murder — which is so easy and encouraged — becomes the hardest, most impossible, intolerable thing.

We can go no further without our souls, which is to say, without our selves, which is to say, without our wants, our loves, our feelings, our needs, our knowings.

Which is to say, the very parts of us that dominant culture would have us kill off and then give us a medal for the murder.

There in the dark, scraped and bruised at the very bottom of rock bottom, the phase of excavation invites you to ask,

Love, why did you turn away from yourself?

Is the inner divorce really what you want?

What kind of relationship do you want to have, with yourself first, with another next?

Is now the time to welcome back your soul?

Self-love is soul-reviving.

What now

Here’s what can help in the phase of Excavation

ONE:

A simple practice for some mouth-to-mouth soul-resuscitation.

1. As soon as you’re able to, NOTICE the moment you start to turn against yourself.

   It might show up like inner criticism, impatience, imposter syndrome, perfectionism, restriction, self-punishment, self-dismissal, self-judgment, self-doubt, or self-loathing.

2. Pause. Take a breath.

3. How might you turn toward yourself in this moment? How might you be kind?
   
   Perhaps you simply name what you’re really feeling like, I’m anxious. I’m overwhelmed. I’m heartbroken. I’m exhausted. I’m hungry, angry, hangry.

   Perhaps you rest if you’re tired, eat if you’re hungry, play if you’re bored, journal if you’re confused, call a friend if you’re lonely.

TWO

Come pre-order Waking Up in the Dark Night of Divorce: The Radical Road Through Breaking, Awakening, and Self-Reclamation.

A roadmap for moving bravely through a breakup, reclaiming what you lost in the relationship, and rebuilding a life that is luminous with love.

When you pre-order, you get two bonuses:

Bonus #1: Waking Up Workbook: practices & exercises w/ space to write, draw, doodle; companion to the print or audio book

Bonus #1: Book Club w/ LiYana: Waking Up Together, three weeks of book readings, practices, discussion, connection & Q+A

Kai’s story is inside. I can’t wait to meet you on the page.

THREE

Stay with me

Stay with me here on Substack, for the next article in this series, The myths that set us up for misery in relationships. And how to dream deeply into what’s next.

It’s an exploration of the fourth phase, Reimagination, the phase in which you come up for air, redefine your relationships, fortify your boundaries, and reclaim your joy.

FOUR

Tell me

Before you close this tab or exit this email, tell me what stuck with you.

Drop it in the comments. Or email me back.

I would love to know what this stirred up. That’s part of why we’re gathered here on the page: to say what’s so.

Leave a comment

To you and your soul,

This article is for those who are reckoning with heartbreak so complex it feels like a dark night of the soul.

It is the second article in a series of five, naming and chronicling the Five Phases of Heartbreak Transformation, that carry you from breaking to awakening, from life-ripping to soul-ripening.

If you missed the first article in this series, it’s here: Let This Heartbreak Remake You.

Grief Squared

The message she left me was soaked with inky, bottom-of-the-well despair. Her grief radiated from the phone, hot, dense, fathomless.

She had just days before broken up with a boyfriend of about a year, which was a decision that was hard to come to, but one we’d been working on together.

That was a grief, yes, but what compounded it all a thousand-fold was a second grief: an ex had reappeared in her life, and for a few days, reconciliation and reconnection seemed possible.

But it had ended in a final and fiery breakup with him blocking my client’s phone number and promising with stony finality that he would never talk to her again. Ever.

Which brought up even more, past grief. A father who never stayed for long, each leaving its own stony finality. Her own sad scared small self who wanted only to crawl into someone’s lap and weep for a thousand years.

Two breakups in the span of a few days, plus past grief upwelling, brought her desperate to my voicemail. Understandably.

What did I say to her? To her two heartbreaks? In her profound moment of loss? To help her make sense of not one but two devastations? And also the pain from the past that those two devastations had kicked up?

Here’s the haiku version of what I said. The longer version follows in this full article.

My beloved, doubly heartbroken sister:

There aren’t words for what you’re going through. It’s hard, love, one of the hardest things ever. It makes sense you’re feeling all of this. This is a rip — a double rip — straight to your heart.

Of course you’re panicked and can’t breathe. Of course it’s so dark you don’t even remember the word light. Of course it feels like everything is burning and all is lost.

Of course it does, love, of course it does.

And:

As lost as you feel, you’re not lost. You’re in a phase. This phase has a name. Its name is Dissolution. It’s the hardest phase of heartbreak. It’s the phase in which everything burns.

So:

Your main task now is to let it burn.

Because:

This fire is holy fire: alchemical. This phase of Dissolution burns it all down to ash, so that from the ash, the phoenix will rise.

So:

Be with the burning.

Don’t run, stay.

Feel what’s here to feel.

Stay with sensation, don’t get swept into story.

Let illusions dissolve.

What’s true will emerge.

It will remake you.

But first:

Dissolve.

Dissolving in The Dark

What is it that dissolves? What is that is dying, what is that is lost?

The relationship, yes: the connection, the companionship, the sex, perhaps someone else paying for dinner or the rent. All real and tangible and healthy and beautiful things.

But also the illusions are dissolving.

The fantasy of security. The dream of being together. The hope for lasting love. The identity of being partnered.

And also what dissolves any protection from our old beliefs: those we thought were good and buried now moan from their graves:

I don’t matter I’m unlovable I’m not enough I’m too much I’m insignificant I’m the afterthought you’ll always pick her over me men always leave people always disappoint in the end I’ll be alone.

But.

Much of what dissolves didn’t really exist. It was the dream of what should be, could be, maybe someday.

The fantasy of rescue. Of someone coming along, who will stay for good, who will relieve us of our pain. Who will prove, beyond doubt, that we are worth sticking around for.

The hope of finally feeling loved.

Even illusion, fantasy, and hope hurt as they dissolve. In fact, they might hurt even more than the healthy parts of the relationship we’re also losing.

And so, as my client spent the next days and weeks letting it burn, she began to see that most of the pain of her heartbreak came from the dissolution of her illusions.

Which is precisely what this phase is for.

The Phase of Dissolution

In the Dissolution phase, things really start to fall apart: not just the relationship, but our outworn illusions, our old identity, our outdated coping strategies.

It is a radical paring away. A crumbling of the dreams of the relationship, the ground under our feet. It is intense and seemingly endless.

We are stripped of what has covered our vulnerabilities, masked our motivations, and provided a plan for our lives. What used to work stops working.

We start to see how we have built a fragile, beautiful piece of our identity on what seemed like a bed of solid, truthful earth. Only to discover that it is not solid at all, but mostly a tumultuous sea of assumptions.

Our assumptions catch fire, burn up, and fall onto the cosmic compost heap.

Dissolution is acute. It can feel shocking, torturous, unbearable. With nowhere to hide or run, we are scorched by the loss of what we gave our whole heart to.

Dissolution is not an easy process of letting go, like allowing a diaphanous scarf to fall gracefully from our shoulders. No, Dissolution is like nothing we’ve experienced to date: the ripping of our dreams from the sockets of our hearts. All nerves exposed and seared. Grief waves pulling us under. Scraped raw by the depths of rock bottom.

The phase of Dissolution can be so severe — the sense of danger so visceral, the heartache so overwhelming, the rage so overpowering — that our second task (after letting it burn) becomes to just keep breathing. In. Out. Repeat.

The phase of Dissolution dissolves us, so that later we can regrow.

Dissolution eventually gives way to Excavation, the third phase: the phase in which we dig — into where we got those outdated illusions and identities, the old beliefs that we’re unlovable and love always leaves.

Excavation helps us sift: what we want to leave behind and what we’ll take forward with us. Excavation lets us examine our relationship with ourself and make sure it is no repeat of that mean, punishing, contemptuous dynamic we learned from family or culture, but rather one that is loving, tender, true.

But I get ahead of myself.

Excavation comes in the next article, so stay tuned.

For right now, don’t even worry about that. It’s natural if you can’t comprehend much good or light in the Dissolution phase. That will come later.

In fact, the medicine of Dissolution comes when we don’t rush to make a new plan, find the blessing in the mess, rebuild our identity, or dream again—yet.

Later the regrowth. But first the stripping.

Later the brilliant clarity. But first the disillusionment.

Later the awakening. But first the breaking.

Later the flying free. But first the falling apart.

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Feel it, all of it

After plenty of burning and breathing, we can start to see Dissolution as an opportunity for a ground-floor rewrite.

We are in a highly neuroplastic state in which we are re-shapable. The clay of our identity — currently complete goo — will dry soon. We only have a few months to dig in and do the work.

We don’t waste time. We let it burn. We keep breathing. We stay with the pain. We feel what is there to feel.

Surprisingly, this is precious.

In a way, our disorientation and distress become highly valuable — because of the deep, radiant presence they bring us into, because of what they will eventually help us reconfigure.

What Doesn’t Kill You

Of course my client was afraid she might die from that grief. Just as we all are.

And why is it so hard to feel our feelings?

Why does it feel like we might die if we do?

It’s because our brain treats emotional threats and physical threats the same way. To our brain, getting hit by the feeling of heartbreak seems as lethal as getting hit by a speeding train.

But this instinctual response to run from emotional pain is inherently problematic. Because in running away from suffering, we run toward things that are soothing in the moment but toxic in the longer term.

When something big and painful comes up, off we run: maybe we numb ourselves with a drink, defend ourselves with an outburst, or placate someone with a compliment.

The drink, the defense, the appeasement: each can be a temporary solution. But it usually leads to addictive patterns, deteriorating relationships, and disconnection from ourselves and others.

Our running ultimately makes our suffering worse.

You may have heard the phrase, “What you resist persists.” It’s a simplification of an idea from Carl Jung; the full quote is, “What you resist not only persists, but will grow in size.”

When we are in a dark night of heartbreak, wishing to be anywhere else, of course we resist with everything we’ve got.

And there are so many ways to resist, aren’t there? Fight it. Fix it. Rage at it. Deny it. Ignore it. Judge it. Stay busy. Play dead. Placate.

But whatever we fight against, flee from, or fawn in the face of just grows stronger.

Our resistance to what we don’t want pins it in place.

Our refusal to feel it expands it exponentially.

So what do we do instead of resist?

Simply put, we feel it.

We meet it. We witness. We unclench. We get present for whatever is present. We name it. We see it for what it is, not what we wish it to be.

This is how we make our way through Dissolution: we develop the strength to feel whatever we wish to resist.

So, if we want to feel better, as a psychiatrist friend of mine says, we have to get better at feeling. To get better at feeling, we practice not running, but staying.

And realize that, no, we’re not going to die as we do so.

Stay With Yourself

This is what my dear client did: she stayed with herself.

She reminded herself of the two-minute guideline: that most feelings have a life cycle of about 90 seconds, if we simply stay with them, let them burn through.

So, for a few minutes or even a few seconds, she would unclench, take off her metaphoric armor, and let the fire of Dissolution blow through her.

And then confirm that, indeed, she did not die.

In fact, it was the opposite.

The more she stayed with a sensation instead of jumping to solve it, the more she let it all dissolve, the more present she felt.

The less she left herself, the more she stayed with the pain she previously couldn’t, the more alive and awake she felt.

This not only helped her feel less bad (which is good), but it helped her feel better.

Feel Better: Embodiment Practice

Here’s a practice to help you get better at feeling, especially in the Dissolution phase.

You can do this at the moment you are feeling an emotion, or you can think back to an emotion you have felt recently.

1. Direct your attention to what you are feeling.

   Does the feeling have a name? For example, anger, sadness, loneliness?

2. Name it by saying, aloud or silently, “This is anger,” “I am feeling anger,” or “Hello, anger.”

   Stop yourself from searching for a logical reason why you’re feeling what you’re feeling. That comes later, in a different practice, perhaps a different phase.

   For now, stay with what you’re feeling (not why you’re feeling it). Stay with sensation, don’t get swept into story.

3. Where in your body do you feel that emotion?

   For example, do you feel it in your chest, belly, forehead, knees? All throughout your body?

4. What are the sensations?

   Examples of sensations are hot or cold, dense or loose, sharp or smooth, expansive or contractive, fiery or icy, etc.

   Name the sensations by saying, aloud or silently, which you are experiencing.

5. On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the most intense, how intensely do you feel the sensation(s)?

Don’t try to change anything about what you feel.

Noticing, naming, staying: this is the whole point.

Feel what’s here to feel.

Let the feelings be. Let them burn. Let them dissolve.

With you in the breathing and burning,

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I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments (or email me: liyana@liyanasilver.com)

PS: If you want support getting all the way through the five phases of heartbreak, breaking the repeating patterns, and emerging awake, aligned, and lit up, I’m about to have three spaces open up for 1:1 coaching. Let me know you might be interested in one. In this highly-shapable state, we only have a few months to dig in and do the work. Let’s dig in.

A note before we begin, love:

This article explores some tough terrain alongside the magnificent and the hopeful. Please take care of yourself. Pause when you wish.

Initiation

We had just said the word, divorce.

It was January 2020, just a few months before COVID-19 would explode around the globe, shut down schools, stores, and supply chains, and send us all into profound disconnection and uncertainty.

In the first nine months of our separation, the only human touch I experienced was a hug from my child. It was bleak.

Outside my office window, on lockdown, the winter trees had been laid bare, stripped of what once clearly defined them. I was likewise being stripped of what defined me.

What patterns had contributed to our relationship’s erosion?

What was true for me then but not now?

Had I been consciously creating my relationship—or reenacting a script I’d outgrown?

Did I know what I wanted—or had I contorted myself into who I thought my partner wanted?

What could I depend on myself for? Could I stop shaking after reading a text from my ex? Could I support myself and my child—in a global pandemic, no less?

Of course it was painful beyond, beyond, beyond.

Of course I raged against the death of the dream of my marriage. Of course my living situation, finances, future, parenting, and sense of myself splintered.

Some days were not so good. Most were unbearable. I wasn’t sure how I would get through the next few seconds, let alone a whole week.

I somehow showed up clear-eyed for client meetings, figured out online school for my kid, remembered to buy cat food—all while huge swaths of my identity flaked off like blistered paint.

And yet.

Even though I felt lost, most importantly, I knew: I had been here before.

Even though it was my first time getting divorced, I knew I was in an initiation—again.

Several years prior, I had been swept headlong into my first dark night of the soul.

A dark night of the soul is a crisis—spiritual, physical, emotional, relational—one of the hardest things we will go through in our lifetime.

The doorway to the dark is always marked by loss. My first time, it was a loss of health. In my second, loss of love. But a dark night of the soul isn’t only a crisis, it’s also a transformative process, in which our selves and souls will be remade. That is, if we want them to be.

Everything I had learned and unlearned during my first journey through the dark, then led clients through and taught courses on—to surrender to process, let illusions burn, mine for gold in each of the five phases, trust myself no matter no matter no matter what—I now brought to my divorce.

As my multi-decade marriage ended, sure, there was relief—no more days of unsettling emotional storms, weeks of stony silence, or nights crying myself to sleep—but I also knew that life unpartnered would likely be harder. Magnitudes are harder. There are all kinds of financial, legal, and social perks to staying hitched.

But inside the marriage, I couldn’t find myself. I couldn’t hear my truth or know what I needed. I was always on edge, shrinking, energetically smaller than my true size. My light was dimming.

So, yes, I was in heartbreak hell. But I was also in the first phase of a holy journey: Initiation.

Initiation is the first phase of five. In the fifth, Emerging, having reclaimed what you lost in the relationship, you emerge awake, alive, aligned, lit up.

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But before we go there …

I am sorry you are here.

Heartbreak is so big, complex, and disorienting that there are no words. I am sorry for what you have lost. What you are going through. Have gone through. I know how much it hurts.

Divorce, separation, breakup—whatever it is that broke your heart—is the death of a dream. A beautiful dream into which you poured your heart and soul.

You went in with the full intention of it lasting forever—or at least, not ending in a spectacularly sh!tty firestorm. Whether you were together for a few months or fifty years, your life has now gone down a road that was not in your plan. Maybe you never asked for this. Maybe you’ve been praying for it. Either way, it’s a devastation.

And there’s more.

Any rupture in a relationship brings to the surface whatever was underneath. So, along with the emotional, spiritual, physical, and perhaps legal upheaval of the breakup, you may also find yourself face-to-face with things like past trauma. Betrayal. Health crisis. Spiritual crisis. Spiritual awakening. Depression or anxiety or addiction. And of course grief: loss of the dream, loss of innocence, loss of meaning, loss of community, loss of family, loss of home, loss of work, loss of love, loss of soul, loss of self.

For many, certainly for me, this is best named as a dark night of the soul.

When the dark night comes, you find yourself thrown into your darkest depths.

Things feel so wrong that you might assume it’s because you’re wrong. Flawed, broken, fallen. You might feel like you’ve been thrown off your path. You don’t recognize yourself. You wish to be anywhere but here—or wish not to be at all.

Your inner demons are coming up—or coming back. You can’t think or plan your way out of the mess. Gritting your teeth and fighting harder no longer work. In fact, they make it worse. I can’t do this. It’s too hard. It’s too much. It’s impossible. It’s gone on too long. When will it end? has become a constant chant inside your head.

The dark night. Does not. F*ck. Around.

Is this really the best time, then, in the fierce heart of the dark, to wax on, as I am, about waking up, about remaking yourself?

Admittedly, it’s hard to see much light when you’re in the dark of heartbreak.

But you can be exactly in the dark place you’re in, and also know the bright things that are to come. That is, if you want them to.

It’s Just a Phase

So here we are in the first phase of five: Initiation.

What used to work then stops working now.

What we knew then no longer applies now.

Our former shape stops fitting.

We find ourselves totally lost, standing at the edge of a vast abyss with no map, no compass, no directions, no guide.

Initiation marks the beginning of the end.

The end of a relationship, yes. But also the end of who you have been—your unhealthy beliefs, unsustainable habits, outdated patterns.

This phase invites you to let yourself be unmade. To sit for a spell in the dark.

How long does this phase last? How long will you be in this undoing, hanging out in this underworld? Honestly, no one knows.

Though it feels like destruction, it is also preparation.

I’ll introduce you to the rest of the Five Phases of a Dark Night of Heartbreak in future articles, but here they are in their abbreviated form:

Phase One: Initiation

This phase marks the beginning of the end. And invites you to recognize you’ve been swept into a process that will remake you, if you wish it to.

Phase Two: Dissolution

This is when things really start to fall apart: your outworn illusions, your old identity, your outdated strategies for coping. This phase invites you to quit avoiding what hurts and instead stay put.

Phase Three: Excavation

In this phase, you mine your muck and retrieve your disowned parts: your self-trust, your soul voice, and your inner truth. This phase invites you to stop fighting your inner demons and learn new ways to love.

Phase Four: Reimagining

In this phase, you come up for air, redefine your relationships, fortify your boundaries, and reclaim your joy. This phase invites you to listen to yourself and dream deeply into what’s next.

Phase Five: Emerging

In this phase, you learn through trial and error, you struggle and stumble, you get ready to fly free.

As we go, I’ll explore each of the Five Phases—how to recognize them, navigate them, befriend them, and unearth the gems they offer.

Each phase invites us to unlearn one thing and learn another; to come closer to ourselves and our souls. Each phase acts as a mini-initiation within your great initiatory journey.

Your awakening has been set in motion—even though it’s going to look pretty dark for a while.

Phases Shmases

When you’re in the depths of the depths, you might wonder: Why should I care what phase I’m in? Why should I even care about phases at all?

Because, love, knowing where you are can orient you when you’re all turned around.

Knowing there is medicine in each phase can be a comfort.

Knowing there are phases can remind you that you’re in a process—an intelligent, universal, sacred arc.

And eventually, you will emerge from the wise, wild dark.

Awakening

My friend, I am glad you’re here.

I know it just feels like sh!t right now. Totally disorienting. But allow me to orient you.

Through this totally ordinary portal of having your heart shredded, you have entered an extraordinary, timeless rite of passage.

Yes, you are in a hellish place. But it’s also holy. You are not being destroyed, but reshaped. You are not being punished, but invited:

To strip away who you were to find who you will be.

To see the breakup not as a failure but an initiation.

To revise your painful beliefs about your value.

To become deeply connected to your inner knowing.

To trust yourself. Put your joy and pleasure at the center of your life. Bring home parts of yourself you disavowed. Find wisdom in what seems crazy. Establish a renewed connection to what is sacred. Look in the mirror and see your true love.

Say what you silenced. Feel what you buried. Be confident where you caved. Move, build, and create where you froze. Love what you warred against. Celebrate what you used to apologize for.

To wake up what has been too long asleep.

But all that is to come.

Here you are, smack in phase one: Initiation.

Yes, you will be remade. But first you need to become unmade.

First you’re undone, and then you become.

Because it is who you become in the dark who will help you emerge brilliantly.

At last

The dark has been and continues to be one of my most ferocious yet loving teachers. It has humbled me to my knees and rebuilt me with diamond strength. It has shattered my life yet left me with a crystal clear understanding:

Divorce isn’t a failure, it’s a rite of passage.

Heartbreak isn’t just a breaking, it’s also an awakening.

Peeling away patterns that no longer fit.

Reclaiming parts of you that got lost in the relationship.

Changing shape.

Emerging unfettered from the patterns that keep repeating, keep erasing you inside love.

Emerging wholly, unapologetically yourself.

One of the bravest, most beautiful things I have ever imagined for myself is to follow my inner knowing even through the dark night of heartbreak.

I no longer cry myself to sleep. I am there for myself, even if a beloved leaves. I trust myself, no matter no matter no matter what.

I hold tight to the tail of my joy and let it lead me to the next step to take, the next pattern to break, the next part of life to remake. My inner light is big and it is bright.

I’m not saying that divorce or a dark night of the soul is some cosmic renovation, that you’ll get everything you always wanted and trot off into the sunset of your best life.

In some ways, life may become more demanding. But I need you to know there is a far side of any dark night of heartbreak. And you will reach it.

Love, please know that while you may feel off course right now, you’re being carried by something deeper.

Even in such darkness, you’ll become your own light.

And although you may have lost yourself or your way, you’ve got me as your guide on this radical road.

Stay with me for the rest of this series.

Next up, Phase Two, the hardest, most intense phase of them all: Dissolution, when things really fall apart.

I’ll share with you how to survive it—and also precisely what I said to a client who is currently smack in the phase of Dissolution, when she called me sobbing at 1:00am.

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Practice

What’s to be done in this first phase of Initiation?

What’s its medicine, and how do you spoon it up?

How do you let this heartbreak remake you?

1. COMMIT. Commit to rooting out the medicine in each phase, so that this whole ordeal can be an awakening.
   
   This means a radical shift in attitude: that you’re not just trying to “get over it,” “stay positive,” or “move on,” but that you pause here, in the precise excruciating moments you’d wish to skip over, and engage.

2. TRUST. Trust that even though you feel lost, you’re somewhere: a timeless, sacred road.
   
   Trust that even though something’s ending, you’re at the start of something transformative.
   

3. FEEL. Feel yourself, not alone.
   
   Imagine you, me, and all the heartbroken travellers, gathered in a group—each with our own inner night-light. Let’s take three deep breaths together, each exhale longer, slower, and smoother than each inhale.
   
   With each breath, imagine our personal and collective lights growing stronger, helping light the way as we take our first steps into our initiation.

This heartbreak will remake you. That is, if you’ll let it.

Let it, love. Let it.

PS: My forthcoming book is about letting heartbreak remake you: Waking Up in the Dark Night of Divorce: The Radical Road through Breaking, Awakening, and Self-Reclamation. Come join the waitlist and I’ll tell you as soon as it’s available for pre-order along with book bonuses.

PPS: I also made you a Breakup Transformation Map, a guide to help with heartbreak. It makes a lovely companion to this article and series, explaining why relationship loss is so hard and the five phases that help you through it.

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I love that you’re curious about waking up in heartbreak, how to make it through the ordeal, breaking the repeating patterns, reclaiming what was lost in the relationship, emerging self-trusting and lit-up.

Although I always want to know how my writings land with you, I know it’s not always easy to share about what you’re pondering, going through, trying to make sense of.

Honestly, talking about relationship loss—and the shitstorm of identity dissolution, nervous system disarray, death of the dream, wondering how the F you’re going to be okay, and somehow envisioning your beautiful, joyful life beyond this mess—requires safe and sacred space.

We need to come in close.

We need small numbers.

We need spaciousness.

We need to be fiercely, compassionately held.

To get into such space, to get more up close and personal with me (and a small group of fellow kindreds) becoming a paid subscriber might just be the ticket.

Here are four beautiful reasons why you may want to come closer and go deeper:

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Come Closer, Go Deeper

Here’s what comes along with a paid subscription:

ONE: A monthly live workshop with me

On topics like: breaking the pattern of losing yourself in relationships, knowing what you need, asking for help (without dying from shame), how to know if it’s fear or intuition, etc. For example:

In May, we’ll go through the five phases of heartbreak.
As difficult and disorienting as heartbreak is, it has a shape, a pattern, a trajectory: a map.

Together, we’ll go through my guide, The Breakup Transformation Map, so you can recognize which phase you are (or a friend is) in right now; get the particular ‘medicine’ of each phase; and know which tools to use (and when) to make the journey way less daunting.

In June, we’ll decode baddie emotions like anger, grief, jealousy, regret.

I’ll show you a simple process to pivot from being overwhelmed by feeelings to getting clear about what each emotion is telling you—about your value, a non-negotiable for you, your heart’s desire, a next step in your life.

(Timings and topics subject to change. If you can’t (or don’t want) to attend live, there will be recordings, only for paid subscribers).

TWO: Practices and tools that I myself use and give to my private clients.

To help you move through (not just “get over”) the ordeal, so you know what you can do to feel better and get grounded, especially for the confusing, excruciating, pivotal moments.

THREE: Personal connection via chat, discussions, and Q+As

I look forward to knowing you, what brought you here, where you’re coming from, and where you’re headed.

FOUR: The satisfaction of knowing you’re a part of a circle of support

Many years ago a friend asked me where in my life I received “spiritual nourishment,” and to consider “tithing” to those places and people. I now have about a dozen organizations and individual people to whom I gladly “tithe” a modest monthly amount.

I love that I have a way to honor the work these folks are doing, making a difference in my small way. In a world that can seem pretty dark at times, it allows us to take our place in the web of goodness, feel a part of Team Good Work.

In this case, it also allows me to keep writing and putting this work into the world.

That’s what becoming a paid subscriber with me, means.

It’s $8/month (or $88/year if you want some savings).

That’s it.

And you’ll still receive my regular writings about waking up in the dark night of divorce & breakups.

If this seems like your cup of tea, it would be my honor to welcome you.

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If you feel something from this article, I’d be grateful if you’d ❤️ it, restack, or share it. And/or leave a comment, because hearing from you is fuel. Writing pieces like this (personal, vulnerable, thoughtful, no AI) takes an astonishing amount of time and soul. Knowing it’s landing with you, sparks the next and the next and the next one ...

A father who can’t see you

My father was easy to love. Passionate, brilliant, funny.

He loved homemade pecan waffles onto which I thought he poured way too much maple syrup. When Jehovah’s Witnesses came by with pamphlets, instead of pretending not to be home, he welcomed them into rousing conversations that would last all afternoon. He insisted I learn the difference between Beethoven and Mozart, be able to change a tire in the dark, take martial arts classes when I was 11 so I would be strong and safe in my body, and understand that modern schools were based on the Prussian system of creating automatons and never let them have my mind.

He was also—as my half-siblings and I pieced together over the years, each with a scrap of story—battered, physically and emotionally, by his father. Each school day, my dad was chased home by kids several heads taller than him, throwing rocks and threatening, “Jew!”

None of that violence landed on me.

When I learned about it later in my life, it was a surprise, such a gentle and generous man he was.

I can only guess what my father did with the brutality carved into his body. With the fear of running from tormenters who should have been friends. With the sadness of being hit rather than being held. He passed away almost two decades ago, or I would ask him now.

My guess is he shoved it in a box, shut the lid, and trembled with the effort of keeping it buried. I think he did his level best to keep a riptide of shit from claiming his kids, pulling us under.

How much of him was available, then, to see his children?

Left alone

In the year following my divorce, after the ending of my 17-year marriage, I was desperate to understand how I got here.

One after another, I dug into the complex dynamics I had carried into my partnership, and that the relationship had in turn calcified and even intensified.

One dynamic was my reaction to rifts.

When it came to conflicts, my then-husband often exited abruptly: the room, the conversation, the house. I, on the other hand, prized connection. I wanted to talk it through. Understand. Find resolution. Reconnect.

His departures didn’t trigger annoyance or anger, but rather a deep, desperate fear.

Was I afraid to be alone? Me, who could travel solo, be alone with my thoughts as I meditated, or take myself on a date to the movies without a second thought? Was I afraid to be left?

Always one to lift the rocks of my psyche and examine what wriggles out from underneath, I got out my shovel and dug.

I traced my panic back to my early childhood, to my brilliant yet easily-distracted father.

He loved me, I know. But just as much, my nervous system remembers him leaving. Never staying with me for long, alwaysalwaysalways leaving. Trailing off mid-sentence, eyes drifting to some inner scenery, wordlessly getting up from our game, without any warning wandering back to his work.

In his gaze, I felt interesting, wanted, loved. His attention was rare. And it was also like air. So his disconnection meant my suffocation.

Each time he left, taking with him his precious attention, I didn’t know what I had done—or hadn’t done enough of—to cause him to leave, to go off in search of more interesting, valuable things than me.

Each time he left, I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t feel my body. Floated, unmoored and immobile, in cold outer space.

Being left alone felt like death.

Being unseen was like ceasing to exist.

Dependent on his attention—another word for love or care or acceptance or safety—of course I was terrified of losing connection.

Of course I was desperate to get it back.

Making a love dependent

I’m not at all unusual. Most of my clients, most of whom identify as women—and I’ve been in practice for over 24 years—have similar patterning.

Many (too many, my god) had mentally-ill, abusive, violent parental figures. Or ones who were never really there at all but left early on for another family, another life, another distraction.

Some, like mine, were preoccupied or inconsistent: there for a golden moment, then poof! Gone. Which can be harder to pinpoint because abuse and absence are grossly obvious compared to inconsistency and silent neglect, but the pattern forms nonetheless.

Many of our unseers were fathers, but just as often they were mothers or other caregivers. The gender of the parental figure varies, but feeling invisible breeds a fairly predictable set of beliefs.

Whenever a parental figure leaves us suddenly or repeatedly, it feels like we are being abandoned. It lands in our bodies with the terror of being left by the side of the road in the middle of the night. It lands in our hearts with the grief of our best friend dying suddenly and no one saying a word about it.

It is a shock, the worst kind of surprise. It signals to our brain that we could die: because the person who’s in charge just took off. What might become of our bodies, our hearts?

How do we, as little ones, make sense of this shock?

We ask ourselves:

Why did he go? Why would he leave me? Why did he take his attention away? Was there something better over there? Was I so bad he had to get away?

We assume:

It’s my fault. I’m a disappointment. I’m irredeemably bad. I messed up (even though I don’t know what I did wrong). I’m repulsive so he couldn’t stand to be around me. I’m not worthy of his attention.

We jump into action:

What do I have to do to get him back? How can I fix my deficiencies? Do I run after him, beg and plead for him to come back? Wait patiently in hopes he’ll notice how good and well-behaved I am? Become extra impressive so I catch his eye? Soothe his bad feelings so he’ll feel good about me, so he’ll return?

We make a terrible set of misunderstandings: that he is the holder of love, the purveyor of connection. We have no control; he giveth and he taketh away. When he sees us, we are worthwhile. When he looks away, we are unlovable.

We swallow our sadness like a sword. We put on a bright face, determined to solve the puzzle of making someone else feel good about us so that we can feel good about us. We determine his leaving is our fault and is ours to fix.

He leaves. We chase.

He doesn’t see us. We become invisible.

He severs connection. We learn it’s up to us to get it back.

He creates distance. We hope to perform, achieve, impress, and dazzle him enough to earn his attention.

He takes love away. We become desperate to get it back.

This has a name, or many names: Love dependency. Love addiction. Anxious attachment. Pursuing, preoccupation, perseverating.

A love avoidant creates distance, takes space, severs connection. And a love dependent tries to get ever closer, hopes desperately to reconnect.

As the ol’ cliche goes, what happens with our parents, we recreate in our other intimate relationships.

When we are unseen by our fathers, we’ll probably feel unseen by our lovers.

When there’s an argument and he (or she or they) storms off, our tears prickle and throat tightens. Our belly blooms with an urgency impossible to ignore: How can I get back in his good graces?

When he doesn’t call or text back, we get dropped into a bottomless pit, totally convinced of our worthlessness. We ruminate on what tiny misstep we must have made. What did I say, what did I do wrong? Why aren’t I grateful, why do I want more?

Never does it occur to us—until years or decades later when we’re working with a coach or therapist or excavating our psyche during the dark night of divorce—that it had nothing to do with us. Not a fig. It had all to do with him.

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Parents are Imperfect

Imperfect parents, that’s all there is. There are no perfect ones.

I’m not particularly fond of this truism, since I am a parent. I don’t relish the idea that despite my effort and care, I’m likely still helping to install shitty patterns in my child for which he’ll someday go to therapy.

14 years ago, when I was in one of my coach training programs—to learn how to repattern the very kind of love dependency dynamic this article is about—I was pregnant with my son. We students were learning all about all the ways we get messed up at the hands of our parents and caregivers, and here I was, about to be a parent.

I asked one of the teaching assistants with a teenage son, what parenting wisdom she might impart. How could I make sure my child felt loved? Valued? Seen?

I got out my notebook, prepared to take pages and pages of notes, but she said simply, Just see him.

Which I do. And have done wholeheartedly from that moment on.

What does seeing him mean? It means I look at him, letting my eyes take in the miracle of his eyelashes, his earlobes, his big toes that are shaped like mine. It means I am curious about the worst and best moments in his day. It means I ask and I listen. When he cries or is frustrated or angry, I stay right there in the hot center with him, resisting rushing to fix anything, reminding him his feelings make sense. When he shares an interest, even if I don’t get it, I know each detail is a piece of his heart which I treat like a gemstone.

None of which guarantees my son will feel seen.

There are no perfect parents. Imperfect parents are all we’ve got. Sadly, that includes me.

Let’s be clear. I’m not letting brutal, addicted, sadistic parents off the hook as in, Oh well, they were imperfect, what do you want from them?

But most parents who didn’t see us were made blind—partially or fully—by their own pain. Like my father, they were carrying generational trauma, trembling with the weight of it, weakened by the gravity of it, and didn’t have much left over for us.

And yet.

Here’s what we need to see, you and me; here’s what we need to let burn into our cosmic retinas:

We were delightful, whether or not they could delight in us.

We were miraculous, whether or not they could see us.

We weren’t invisible. They were blind.

We weren’t awful or boring or talentless or worthless. They were blind.

And so then, what do we do with the burning hole left by a father who left?

When there’s no hope of filling it with the next father-figure?

When there’s no amount of fixing ourselves that will evereverever convince him to stay forever?

Really, this isn’t about our parents. It’s about the version of our parents we hold inside of us, in our memories and imprints.

That’s where the work is done: Inside ourselves, in our own hearts. Learning to re-parent ourselves, stay with ourselves, see ourselves.

Sure, some healing can happen between you and your parent-the-person, if they are still alive and are up for that kind of relational reckoning.

But mostly, it’s our work to do with ourselves.

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I Alone

And so there in that first year after my divorce, I set to work. Learning to be okay with my aloneness. To be there for myself, even if a beloved left. To see myself, even if no one else could.

When I started to feel distance between me and someone else, I didn’t panic. I chose not to interpret it as rejection or abandonment—or punishment for not doing enough to keep our connection. I breathed. I stayed in my body. I didn’t fill the gap with worry or blame. If my panicked self might shout, but there’s no one here! I reminded her, I am. I could be the steady companion that scared part of me needed.

And then, something else remarkable became available: I could sense that the other person and I were still good, even if there was some space between us.

At first glance, disconnection was poison for me. But with some excavation, it became the medicine I needed to stay connected to myself.

This is the beginning of the welcomed unraveling of love dependency.

As it really takes hold and we reshape our nervous systems and belief systems, we stop scanning for any change in the emotional temperature. Our breath evens out. Our shoulders stop tensing. Our bellies unclench.

We start to feel that maybe we could be loved, not for our performance or pretend perfection, but because we are simply, precisely, only, exactly who we are. The pervasive belief “he always leaves” loses its hold. We trust our bonds of friendship and love will not break so easily. We start to consider we’re okay as we are, not worse or better than anyone else. We learn how to see ourselves well, which—ironically—allows us to finally feel seen by another.

Years on, I have an abiding comfort with myself, regardless of who is or isn’t there with me. A love for myself that is independent of who I might be in love with. A priceless peace that doesn’t rely on anyone else’s presence. Which paradoxically lets me connect more freely and fully with others.

At the time of this writing, I have not remarried or repartnered. I am delighted to be solo. Singular. Sovereign.

I’m also currently in perimenopause, which means I’m half-in, half-out of the hormonal cocoon. Will I want a partner when I emerge? I just don’t know yet.

But I do know I’m not afraid to be alone.

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Seeing yourself & being seen

I have a beautiful practice readied for you, to help you see yourself well and allow yourself to be seen.

It’s below, for paid subscribers in the ‘How To Not Lose Yourself In Love’ Inner Circle. Please come join.

Here’s what the Inner Circle includes:

• My beloved tools and practices (like the one from today’s article) to help you move through (not around) the ordeal (especially for the confusing, excruciating, pivotal moments); to spot and break repeating patterns; to reclaim what got lost in the relationship, and to emerge awake, aligned & lit-up.

• Monthly live workshops with me, on topics such as Know What You Need; Decode Difficult Emotions to Access Your Truth and Clarity; Ask For Help (Without Dying); The Five Phases of Heartbreak Transformation; Separating Fear from Intuition.

• Personal connection via chat, discussions, and Q+As.

• Revelations from my “bleeding edge”: unpolished writings, conversations, and practices based on what I’m learning right now (vs what I have learned) - heart-open shares that are less tidy, more timely.

• It’s $8/month (or $88/year if you want some savings). That’s it!

And you’ll of course continue to receive writings (like this one) about waking up in the dark night of divorce & breakups.

As you and I know well, talking about relationship loss—and the shitstorm of identity dissolution, nervous system disarray, death of the dream, wondering how the F you’re going to be okay, and envisioning your beautiful, joyful life beyond this mess—requires safe and sacred space.

We need to come in close. We need small numbers. We must sniff to make sure it smells trustable.

You need to know your heart will be fiercely compassionately held, you’ll be nourished, and you’ll be seen as the magnificent being you are.

The Inner Circle is that safe and sacred space.

I look forward to welcoming you.

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WTF

I stared at the computer screen and a metaphoric anvil fell on my head.

Was it love that had fueled my 17-year marriage — or co-dependence?

It was 2018 and I was in a couples counseling session with my then-husband and our then-counselor who held her sessions by Skype. A year later, we would separate, then divorce, but at this point, we were all working really hard to stabilize what was crumbling.

Our counselor was trying to teach us how to “co-regulate” and “create secure attachment” in our relationship.

We in turn were trying to adjust what we said and did so we could better care for each other’s nervous systems, create an atmosphere of safety, and connect more easily — emotionally, physically, and sexually.

As we all worked really hard, our counselor casually let drop a definition of co-dependence: losing touch with what you need and being overly focused on what the other person needs.

I recognized myself in her definition immediately.

Throughout our 17 years together, nearly every time I noticed my partner having a preference or getting agitated, whoosh, out the window would fly my own needs, wants, and convictions.

He could observe, “something smells” or share his upset from a work meeting and my heart rate would spike. My inner people-pleaser would get tunnel vision: Do something. Immediately. It’s your job to make sure he’s okay and you’re already late, so hop to it.

He could share his idea for where we could go to dinner, and suddenly, my own preference would seem less appealing or important. I assured myself, I’m sure I can find something gluten-free at the burger joint.

I didn’t think I was losing myself. I thought I was being a good partner.

For a long time I blamed myself, assuming it was a me-problem.

I needed stronger boundaries. I needed to be less porous, less influenceable, to bolster my connection with my own needs and convictions. I needed to heal the trauma in my past that made me terrified of abandonment, contorted me into a cheerful, can-do fixer of everything and an eggshell-walking, conflict-avoidant attendant to everyone. I should be less of a simpering people-pleaser and more bold, more badass, more myself.

For a while I blamed him, too.

Maybe it was just as much a he-problem! He should be less overbearing, more attuned to me. He should pause, not interrupt, not claim all the space in the room before I could even start to speak. He should learn that making it inconvenient for me to voice what I needed was a form of covert manipulation.

There was and is so much usefulness in all those inquiries, in the healing I did and the shifts I made, as well as those that he tried to make (although ideally sans blame for all).

But right in the middle of my inquiring, strengthening, and trauma healing, another metaphoric anvil fell on my head.

Aren’t women trained to be people-pleasers?

Aren’t girls groomed to be good? Aren’t females trained in the art of self-erasure? Aren’t women (and people of color and folks on the margins), molded to be needless, nurturing, pliant, perfect?

Aren’t we coming off centuries of being dependent on men — and dependent on men being pleased with us?

Perfectly Pleasing

As I learned after that counseling session, co‑dependence is a term that emerged from addiction recovery groups in the 1970s to describe those in a close relationship with a loved one struggling with addiction: organizing life around managing the other’s behavior, moods, and wellbeing.

Over time, the definition expanded beyond recovery circles to include living through another person, accommodating destructive behavior, or being relentlessly in service to others at the expense of yourself.

The pattern of codependence overlaps perfectly with people‑pleasing, a ‘condition’ that afflicts most of the people I work with and (of course) includes me.

People-pleasers believe it’s our job to keep others happy, comfortable, and regulated (even at the expense of our own nervous system regulation).

We are generous, capable, competent: when things fall apart, we keep it together.

We’re also well-trained to feel others’ feelings, meet their needs, soothe their pain, and help them get what they want, while our own needs go unmet, even by ourselves.

People-pleasing is costly AF.

We hide our truth to keep the peace. We don’t mind feeling bad as long as others feel good.

We override. We say yes when we mean no. Because saying no feels like cruelty. Or selfish. Or dangerous.

We over-give. We excel at being generous, secretly hoping that we’ll be given back to. Asking for what we need feels selfish. Feeling depleted feels normal.

We apologize for our existence. We shrink our size and dim our light. Even as we’re praised for being so capable, we feel unseen.

Our safety becomes tied to someone else’s mood. Our worth to their approval. Our happiness to their satisfaction.

And love becomes equated with disappearing ourselves.

People-pleasing might be sapping our will to live, pouring gasoline on the fire of our self-loathing, making us question our sanity.

But at least we’re nice.

That’s nice.

Codependence and people‑pleasing aren’t just about being nice; fundamentally, they’re survival strategies.

They have been the best (or only) tools we’ve got, if we want to stay safe, connected, and alive.

Alongside fight, flight, and freeze, there’s fawn: our nervous system’s impulses to appease in the face of threat.

Our compulsion to fawn (to please or appease), belies a deep, overwhelming panic.

From our learned and lived experiences, we know if others get uncomfortable, they could get upset — with us.

If they feel bad, things could go badly — for us.

If the people we are dependent upon — so often men — aren’t pleased with us, we might be hurt, do without, be cast out.

No wonder we stay hypervigilant. Avoid conflict like it’s fire. Refuse to displease others. ‘Lose ourselves’ in relationships.

I see some wicked overlap between what is culturally expected of women, girls, and females and what has historically been expected of a wife.

If we are expected to be pleasing and needless in everyday life, these expectations often ramp up inside a marriage.

This is where it stopped being just about me and started being about something much bigger.

Losing Yourself in Relationships

Let’s peel back some layers of the past that still shape our lives today.

For most of human history, marriages had little to do with love, compatibility, or fulfillment. They were a way to bring together families, forge political alliances, transfer property, build wealth, even stop disputes and wars.

Tellingly, an old Anglo-Saxon word for wife meant “peace weaver.”

Coverture was a legal doctrine in English common law in the 12^th Century. The law regarded husband and wife as one person: the husband. Coverture dictated that a woman’s identity was absorbed into her husband’s when they married; the husband ‘covered’ the wife and she ceased to exist as a sovereign self.

Coverture enshrined male dominance as a marital right. A wife couldn’t sign contracts or own property; she was property. Her husband had control over — and legally owned — her labor, her earnings, her children, and her body. In an archaic English legal doctrine from 1736, jurist Sir Patrick Hale wrote that by marrying, a woman gave irrevocable consent to sex. She became ‘Mrs. John Smith,’ losing both her first and last name in public usage, framing her erasure as both moral and lawful.

Early colonizers of what would become America brought European marital laws and customs with them. Versions of coverture remained in U.S. law until the late 1800s. Legal recognition of a wife’s autonomy, safety, and bodily integrity — let alone her needs, wants, and desires — is very recent, a little more than a hundred years old.

The term “rule of thumb” is an 18th century English saying, referring to a man’s legal right to beat his wife with a stick — as long as it was no thicker than his thumb. It wasn’t until 1994 — about 30 years ago — that the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) was passed, a federal law that recognized domestic violence as a public crime, establishing legal definitions and protections.

Still, a marriage is often the least safe place for a woman to be. Over 55% of all female homicide victims in America are killed by current or former intimate partners. (source)

Women still have shockingly little say over what happens to our bodies sexually. Marital rape — the non-consensual sex by a spouse — wasn’t considered a crime until 1975. Only in 1993 did it become illegal in all 50 states. (A few days ago, CNN broke a story about an online rape academy, where thousands of men learn how to drug and rape their wives. The site got 62 million hits just in April 2026.)

A woman couldn’t open a bank account or credit card in her own name, without a husband’s or father’s permission, until 1974. It wasn’t until 1960 that the birth control pill was approved, offering widespread and reliable birth control.

Although many of these misogynistic laws and systems have been repealed, the attitudes behind them didn’t entirely disappear: they seeped into our nervous systems.

While we might not consciously assign women to the roles of people-pleasers and peace-weavers, they live on in our shared subconscious.

We learned that we were put on this earth to be pleasing — and might be taken out if we aren’t.

So when we disappear ourselves in love, we’re not just reacting in real time, we’re repeating something that’s been rehearsed for generations.

Today, we expect marriage to include love, choice, emotional intimacy, sexual fulfillment, and personal growth. And plenty do.

Many long-term relationships of my friends, family, and clients have been thoughtfully crafted to be egalitarian, to be crucibles for mutual self-expression, joy, and satisfaction. Often, both partners develop an even more robust sense of themselves because of their pairing.

Yet many of us still carry the unconscious idea that marriage — or an intimate partnership — means dissolving into someone else.

That love requires merging, worth comes from being chosen, goodness means self‑sacrifice, peace requires us to weave it.

What’s the self we lose?

What gets lost in all this people-pleasing and peace-keeping? Our selves.

That is to say: Our needs. Our knowings. Our boundaries. Our desires, truth, and joy.

And no, we’re not malfunctioning. We’re well-conditioned.

From day one, those of us socialized as females are trained to be nice, not honest. Helpful, not boundaried. Quiet, not clear. Nurturing, not demanding. Supportive, not challenging. Modest, not lusty. To smile, even when we feel like screaming.

Being kind, generous, capable, considerate: these are great qualities to have as a human being and bring to any relationship.

But when we lose access to our own wants and voice, it slowly siphons our life-force.

Yes, learning to ‘lose ourselves’ in relationships can be traced back to our families of origin, but it’s not only due to our personal upbringings. It’s collectively condoned.

We were always expected to lose ourselves in our relationships.

It’s conditioning doing exactly what it was designed to do.

As for me

As for me and my marriage, no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t outgrow in time what had been culturally conditioned over millennia.

Despite all our conscious work on ourselves and our relationship, our unconscious patterning was puppeting us, influencing our choices, forming our words, and making our actions.

We had spent nearly two decades living and loving ‘outside the box,’ bucking convention, carving our own path. We purposely never legally married, crafted our own vows, carefully defined what '“marriage'“ meant to us.

And still, dominant culture was at the wheel, exactly as it was designed.

Regardless how it got there, the patterning was still in me — in my habits, self-talk, nervous system reactions.

All the work I did (and am still doing) was good and necessary.

But so was learning it wasn’t all (or even mostly) mine to begin with but rather my inheritance from a system that is pleased as punch when I lose myself.

If you too lose yourself in relationships, my friend, it’s not an accident. It’s not because of some personal deficiency. And it’s not just you. It’s most of us.

People-pleasing isn’t just a you-problem, even though we each must figure out for ourselves how to jailbreak out of its cage.

The work now isn’t to blame ourselves. It’s to build back and come back to ourselves. It’s to notice where we disappear — and practice staying.

Antidotes

Are there any antidotes? Is there hope?

Here are four:

1. The book.
   
   My friend, I wrote you a book about this. Waking Up in The Dark Night of Divorce: The Radical Road through Breaking, Awakening, and Self-Reclamation reframes divorce, not as a failure, but an awakening. A radical self-reclamation.
   
   It will be out in October 2026.

   Get on the waiting list and I’ll tell you when pre-order book bonuses are available (+ other cool opportunities coming soon).

2. The class.
   
   Know Your Own Voice is a no-cost short video + worksheet to help you reconnect with what you want, need, and know. You’ll:

• Distinguish what is a YES for you — and what is absolutely a NO

• Build a strong connection to your inner knowing that will point you to your best next steps

• Feel your self-trust deepen & expand

• Be able to make with ease the decisions that affect you, the people you care about, and define your future

It’s free. It’s here.

3. The practice.
   
   The following was shared with me by a bestie who went through her separation and divorce at generally the same time as I did. It helped me break a fawning pattern with my former-husband that felt unbreakable. Stopped my people-pleasing in its tracks.
   
   Try this:
   
   When you’re feeling urgency arise, as you’re getting taken over by the compunction to fix or fawn, to please or appease, tell yourself (about the other person):
   
   That must be hard for you.

   Here’s how it breaks down:

   That: that thing over there, that’s your experience, not my experience.

   Must be hard: I have empathy that you are feeling pain, without taking it on.

   For you: What you are experiencing is yours, not mine. I don’t have to absorb it, claim responsibility for it, fix it, fade it, fawn over it.

   Try it. Repeat it. Let it help you stay in yourself.

   That must be hard for you. That must be hard for you. That must be hard for you. That must be hard for you. That must be hard for you. That must be hard for you.

4. The breakthrough.

   Metamorphosis: Breakthrough Sessions

• Losing yourself in relationship

• Walking on eggshells

• The terror of being abandoned that makes you stay when you know you should go

  Bring me your toughest, most intractable pattern and we’ll create a beautiful breakthrough in record time — so you can build your next chapter awake, aligned, and lit-up.

  Package includes:

• Pre-session clarity + foundation-laying: your history, challenges & goals

• 2-hour deep dive Breakthrough session: we elegantly (and permanently) transform the painful pattern

• 45-minute Integration coaching session: your practices + next steps to actualize in your life the changes we just made within

  Book your session before May 8 + tell me you’re coming from Substack for $100 off.

Here’s to you, claiming yourself in love,

PS: Photo by Wendy K. Yalom Photography

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Here we are.

Here, at the knife’s edge of heartbreak, reckoning with a divorce or breakup so disorienting it feels like a Dark Night of the Soul …

This is where I meet you — and friends and clients and colleagues and readers of the forthcoming Waking Up in The Dark Night of Divorce. (You can get on the waiting list here; I’ll tell you the moment pre-order book bonuses are ready + other cool opportunities).

Not AFTER the ordeal.

Not when you’re fairly put back together, ready to date and get your glow on. Not when you trust yourself, feel safe in your body, and radiate eros. Not when you’re waving from the far shore of heartbreak, cheering, “that was the best, most liberating thing ever!”

Those are lovely moments. You’ll be there soon. Plenty of great writers write great things about those moments. I myself wrote about them in my first book Feminine Genius. Week in, week out, I help clients get there.

But not right now and not here.

My sacred assignment now and here is to meet you IN the ordeal.

Not when you’re put back together, but as you’re falling the f*ck apart. When you’re questioning everything, wondering if you’ll be able to support yourself, if you’re too messed up to be loved again. When it’s too dark to see your way out.

A Dark Night of the Soul is harrowing. Excruciating. But also good news.

A Dark Night of the Soul is a fire that melts down the former-you and forges the new-you.

So how do you know if it’s a Dark Night of the Soul you’re in?

Here, love, are some signs:

1. You feel like you are.
   
   Here’s the sophisticated diagnosis from LiYana, Doctor of The Dark: If you feel like you’re in a Dark Night of the Soul, you probably are.
   
   Starting in 2019, I started collecting stories about people in a self-described, self-diagnosed Dark Nights of the Soul. Some were clients or course participants. Some were friends, friends of friends, even strangers. I collected nearly 60 incredible stories, which helped form the backbone of my new book.
   
   Very few people knew where the phrase, ‘Dark Night of the Soul’ came from: the 16th Century mystic monk John of the Cross, whose harrowing, excruciating story led him to articulate why these dark times in our lives are such a blessing in a poem titled, ‘Dark Night of the Soul.’
   
   No matter. We don’t need the historical context to feel the resonance ourselves. It’s good and important to know where things originate, but even without it, the gong of recognition still rings in our bones when we hear it.
   

2. It’s Dark.
   
   A Dark Night of The Soul is dark. It’s one of the hardest things we will ever go through. An emotional, physical, mental, logistical, spiritual crisis, it profoundly shakes our faith in what we hold sacred. Whatever we previously knew, devoted ourselves to, and relied on, no longer applies in The Dark.
   
   In the dark, you feel profoundly lost. You don’t know where you are, as though you have fallen off your path. You don’t know who you are, as though your identity is collapsing. You don’t recognize yourself.
   
   All your inner demons are coming up, or coming back up. You thought you healed that sh!t, slayed those bad habits. But no, they’re back and darker than ever.
   
   Although this time is insanely difficult, a part of us might recognize our journey through The Dark as archetypal: It’s personal, of course, but we also sense it’s a collective human experience, something that most of us go through, at least once if not more, in this wild carnival ride of life.
   
   Part of us might even recognize that The Dark is a loving force — not punishing, not spiteful, not vengeful.
   
   Fierce, yes. Loving, always.
   

3. It’s a Night.
   
   Or rather, a Dark Night of the Soul is a too-long string of too-long nights.
   
   When we hear ourselves saying things like, “I can’t do this, it’s too hard, it’s impossible. This has gone on too long, I can’t endure this any longer. When will it end?” it’s a sign we’re in a Dark Night and that it’s taking waaaaay too freaking long.
   
   But friend, what we are going through is a razing of who we were and a rebirthing of who we will be. Change of this magnitude is no daytime matter but rather one that requires the depth of the dead of night.

   What I’ve felt and seen often with friends and clients, is that there’s a moment of … surrender … of relinquishing our preconceived notions of a timeline by which we’ll be through this.

   When we give up our cosmic time-keeping, we trust-fall into the loving Dark Night. As we fall, we open to the process.
   
   And then, transfiguration begins.
   
   When will The Dark Night end? No one knows exactly. But it will.

   It will probably take longer than we all think it should or can bear. But reshaping an identity and life trajectory takes the time it takes.
   

4. It’s about your soul.
   
   You don’t go through a Dark Night of the Soul without your soul.
   
   Often, in a Dark Night of the Soul, your connection to your soul — or higher power, the sacred, the divine, god, or love — is shaken. You feel abandoned, forsaken, forgotten, and even betrayed by a source you had put your faith and belief in.
   
   Our soul — or intuition or inner knowing — is an aspect within us that is deeply aligned with our truth. And in our relationship loss, we may have lost connection to this soul-voice.

   But in The Dark, on the charred, flattened ground of our lives, our souls come in close, nuzzle in, get comfy.

   In our childhoods, during the relationship, or due to the divorce, we may have lost connection to our self-trust. Our needs. Our wants. Our feelings, knowings, truths, voice, boundaries, power.
   
   We may have become disconnected from beauty. From awe. From tenderness. From meaning itself: a reason to be here.

   But in The Dark, reconnection is afoot.

5. You can’t fight your way out.
   
   Neither willpower, strategy, or logic will jailbreak you out of The Dark. Nor will spiritual bypassing, vision-boarding, or positive thinking. Definitely not pushing, battling, or conquering. Sadly, not even gritting your teeth or biding your time.
   
   What used to work in your life, no longer works in The Dark.
   
   You can’t think your way out, you have to feel your way through.

   You can’t avoid the crap, you have to meet it with a welcoming heart.

   You can’t fight your way free, you have to figure out how to love the precise parts of you you’ve kept in contempt.
   
   Then a trapdoor swings open. Then you can climb out.

A Dark Night of the Soul is an invitation.

To strip away what is no longer working for you.

To welcome the parts of yourself you have disowned, hidden, or wished away.

To re-examine the painful beliefs you hold about your worth and lovability.

To claim your joy. Attend to unattended sorrows. Let your soul speak.

To trust your intuition (as much as your logic), your feelings (as much as your mind), your vulnerability (as much as your inner warrior).

To find safety in your body. Home in yourself. A refined connection to the divine.

To see that even as it’s all falling apart, you are being radically reshaped.

With fierce love,

PS: Photo shared with permission of Kate Niebauer.

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There is a moment.

Usually right after — or in the death throes of — a breakup or divorce.

When it’s very dark. Maybe even a dark night of the soul.

When everything is in flames. Or maybe the flames have consumed everything and what’s left is ash and rubble.

It is one of the worst devastations of this lifetime.

And it’s also one of the most potent, even holy, times of this lifetime.

Maybe you’re in it. Were in it. Have a friend who is.

As hellish as it is, this moment is precious.

Because in these next few months, you have before you an opportunity for a ground-floor rewrite of who you are:

Your beliefs. Boundaries. Confidence. Self-trust. Your connection to what is sacred. And certainly what kind of life and love you create next.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

This is most certainly not the time to plan what you want next.

That will come, but right now, don’t rush to form new beliefs about yourself or envision the healthier relationship you want and need.

The part of you that plans and fixes and strategizes is the very machinery that helped create the mess of the breakup.

That part of you cannot lead now. Ask it to step back.

The moment you are in is not a vision board moment.

This moment is an inflection point, when you choose to engage with the very stuff you’d prefer to avoid.

I know right now it probably just seems dark. Of course it does.

You’re grieving a future you placed your whole heart and faith in. You might be terrified how you’re going to make it, if you’ll ever know love again.

But soon you’ll come up for some air. You’ll start to unravel those long-standing, hard-to-look-at, repeating patterns. Brick by brick, you’ll rebuild trust with yourself. You’ll listen to yourself (your soul) with greater precision.

All of this soul-work will let you — later — rebuild something more fitting and more true.

But not if you grit your teeth and bide your time in this dark night of divorce.

If you make the ferocious choice to go through the dark (not around it) you’ll reshape yourself into someone who can jailbreak yourself out of this hell.

You’ll grow new eyes to see what kind of future and life and love is meaningful and beautiful to you. Still, those eyes don’t exist yet. You will grow them, but it’s going to take the time it takes.

Before you can grow or regrow anything, you must meet this moment.

Moments like this don’t come often.

In the disorientation and wreck of the relationship loss, our identities are soft, open, unmade, shapable.

Soon, the clay of our personalities will harden again.

Now is a fork-in-the-road moment.

Which way our lives will swing — whether we recreate a version of the old madness (same shit, different day) or whether we rebuild something newer, truer, more fitting of who we’re becoming — depends on which road we take at this fork-in-the-road moment.

Do we take the bypass route, trying to swing wide of all the crap?

Or do we take the road that leads straight down into the molten core of our very selves?

I remember my own fork-in-the-road moment.

My then-husband and I had just said the word, divorce. It echoed in my head like a slur, something I promised never to say out loud.

Outside my home office window, the winter trees had been laid bare. Those that in springtime I could easily identify as Redbud or Maple,were now naked, stripped of what once clearly defined them.

I was likewise being stripped of what had defined me.

In the coming months, I fiercely examined:

What ideals had defined my marriage? What patterns had contributed to my divorce? What was true for me then but wasn’t now? What did I believe — and did I still want to believe that?

Was it love that had fueled my commitment — or co-dependence?

Had I been consciously creating my relationship — or reenacting a script I’d outgrown or that never fit in the first place?

Did I know what I wanted — or had I contorted myself into who I thought my partner wanted?

Did I desire intimacy, or just proof I was desirable? Did I like cohabitating with other people, or did I just like the inoculation against loneliness? Had I committed to marriage because I believed in staying together, or to save me from the terror of abandonment?

What could I depend on myself for?

Could I financially, emotionally, spiritually support myself and my child?

Could I stop shaking after reading a text from my ex?

It was as though the walls and floors of my mind were disintegrating and I could see the code underneath. For each belief that revealed itself, I asked:

Do I want to grow out of this? Do I want to double down on it?

This is deep work. Some of the deepest work there is.

Breakup or divorce isn’t just the end of a relationship; it goes much deeper. It dismantles:

Your footing.

Your faith in love.

Your sense of yourself.

The future you were building.

The roles you played, the patterns you replayed, and the rules you played by.

Whether you’re going through it right now or it all went down a while ago, I know it is excruciatingly hard.

But.

If you seize this moment with both hands, your whole heart, and the span of your soul, if you dig in and dig deep, if you surrender to whatever time it might take, it can be a profound psychological, spiritual, and emotional transformation.

I wish that for you with both of my hands, my whole heart, and the span of my soul.

Because:

What if this is not a failure?

What if this is in fact one of the most hopeful, creative triumphs of your lifetime?

What if the moment you are in — as excruciating as it is, as much as we would wish it away if we could — what if this ending of the relationship is the beginning of your life?

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When a relationship ends, your whole life can unravel.

And not just your life, but also who you thought you were, what you defined yourself by, what you were committed to, how you made choices and steered your life.

So when I say that a relationship’s end could be a divine intervention, I am not being glib.

I don’t mean to imply that the relationship was wholesale terrible and some divine hand swoops in to airlift you to safety. (Although sometimes that’s pretty accurate).

Mostly tho, relationships aren’t wholesale anything. They are a complex, paradoxical mix of terrible and wonderful.

Usually there are also things like kids, shared finances, family, businesses, and intertwined relational patterns that make separating even more complex and paradoxical.

Otherwise, the decision to leave or stay would be fairly easy.

But sometimes (well, more like 100% of the time when it comes to friends, clients I work with, and the scores of folks who shared their stories with me for my forthcoming book, Waking Up in The Dark Night of Divorce), a divine hand — or voice or nudge or knowing — does swoop in.

That voice or nudge or knowing speaks up. Clear.

Kind yet strong. Loving yet fierce.

And from that moment, the entire trajectory of the relationship and life shifts. A new north star appears, a new compass bearing directs us toward a different future, even if we don’t really know what it is yet.

It might take hours, weeks, or years for the changes to be fully made, for the engagement to be broken, the wedding guests to be told to NOT save the date, the bags to be packed, the divorce papers to be signed, the future to be reimagined.

But I want to speak of That Moment. Of divine intervention. The moment (or moments) our souls speak up, unmistakably. Irrefutably.

And the remarkable courage it requires not only to hear our souls, but move in the direction they point.

Knowing Soul

For Yuna, the moment was Tuesday evening.

Although she didn’t know it yet, Tuesday would be the last day she would spend in the shared flat, in the engagement, in the increasingly violent partnership of eight years.

Tuesday would also mark her first step into an overdue reunion with herself and her soul.

Brushing her teeth before bed, Yuna was suddenly struck with a knowing, a body-voice rising from deep within:

You’re not going to marry him. That’s not how things are going to go.

It wasn’t coming from place of fear. It was calm. Loving. True.

Hearing it, Yuna felt like … herself.

Yuna knew it was not right for her to stay in the relationship. She didn’t yet know why that was true. But it was true.

The voice felt so good and true that Yuna wasn’t able to choose anything else, even though it meant everything would be upended — the marriage, the dreams, the co-created plans.

It was a strong moment. Yuna’s soul stepped in, stopped the scene, and diverted her toward a different future.

Diverted

The word divorce is a cousin to divert and comes from the Latin divortere, which means to turn away from, to separate or disconnect from.

There can be a moment in a divorce or separation from a partner when you recognize that you have divorced — turned away from, separated from, disconnected from, diverted from — certain parts of yourself. And your soul.

The separation from self and soul may have happened before the relationship, because of the relationship — or both.

Like it did for Yuna, our soul steps in, first as an intervention, a diversion, a course-correction. Then, our soul invites us into an un-diversion from — and a re-union with — ourselves.

How do any of us know if the inner voice we hear is our soul?

We know because we know.

You Know

Another word for knowing something just because you know it is intuition.

Intuition is direct understanding or spiritual insight — without the need for conscious reasoning.

Said differently: You just know, without having to think it through, explain it with logic, or back it up with facts. You just know, even if you can’t see it, touch it, or prove it.

It’s an inner truth detector. Like a tuning fork that vibrates when it’s near your truth, resonating at a frequency specific to you.

It’s an inner compass. As a carrier of your destiny, it places your ear to the ground, points you toward your personal north star, and nudges you to course-correct when you veer off your path.

It’s an inner x-ray machine. It sees the invisible, senses what is possible, and shows you what is hidden but wants to emerge.

It’s an inner microphone, sometimes as a news flash, sometimes a puzzle. Often as a gentle tap, but frequently an urgent intervention.

Intuition — or soul — doesn’t explain itself, and it doesn’t need to. It just arrives. Straightforward. Instant. Unshakable. You just know.

‘Til Death

Sometimes, what we know is that before us lies a life-or-death choice.

Linda’s soul intervention came one year into her marriage, as she lay next to her sleeping husband, miserable.

Linda was 19 when he had proposed. She saw an opportunity to have a roof over her head and didn’t know what else to do with her life. So she said yes.

Although he was kind and she was provided for, Linda was shrinking, shriveling, disappearing off the face of the earth. For most of the marriage, she was depressed, disappearing into a darkened room for days at a time.

Linda just knew. She heard it. And felt it. Deep in her belly, something kept prodding, and Linda just couldn’t not hear it anymore:

I don’t want to be married to this man.

Linda wanted to live, but not like this. So, her choice was to stay and live the life she had committed to. Or commit to herself, to go and live an unknown — but her own — life.

She rolled over, poked him in the arm, and confessed, “You’re a great person, but I have no business being married. I need to move out.”

A few years later, with a great joyous clarity, Linda would realize she was a lesbian. As of this writing, Linda has been married to her wife for 40 years.

Maeve’s intervention came 22 years into her marriage.

They had married young. Had three children. And for over ten years, Maeve’s husband had been having an affair with Maeve’s best friend.

Maeve suspected. Felt the stomach aches, the headaches, the sense that something just wasn’t right. Whenever she brought it up, her husband denied it, spun into a rage, and told her she was crazy.

He never hit Maeve, although the thrown dinner plates came awfully close to her head at times. The self-doubt was constant. And crippling. But whenever Maeve thought of leaving, she wasn’t sure she would be OK, could hold down a job, could care for the kids. Or if she really was crazy.

The night of her 44th birthday, blowing out the candles on her cake, Maeve felt her inner light dimming, losing her will to live. The next morning, she woke up to a simple inner proclamation:

You’re fine as you are, you just need to leave.

Maeve’s soul-voice pressed her to leave the marriage and to live, to live well, to be true to herself, to value herself, to trust herself.

It’s no small thing to repair trust after betrayal — of others or of ourselves. But ten years after her divorce, Maeve has made this repair. Of course, self-doubt creeps in at times, but within herself and with her boyfriend, Maeve does indeed feel fine as she is.

Soul Trust

Whether we call it soul, inner knowing, or intuition, it’s personal, intimate, and unique to each of us.

And yet, here are some common characteristics:

1. It is simple and direct.
   
   Not dramatic, frantic, panicked. Not fearful, blaming, or shaming.

   Calm. Loving. True.
   

2. It arrives from the body.
   
   The gut, the womb, the heart. Through a feeling or a twinge. Even if it arrives as words or thoughts, it’s confirmed as a knowing in our bodies.
   

3. It often contradicts … everything.

   
   The rules we’ve obeyed, the scripts we’ve followed, the plans we’ve made, the roles we’ve played, the expectations we’ve lived into.
   

4. It course-corrects our path.
   
   It doesn’t usually give us a series of steps forward: usually just the next one, the right one, the true one.
   

5. It changes the trajectory of our lives.
   
   It asks us to reclaim our desire. Choose authenticity. Listen to ourselves. Value our happiness.

In The Ending is Your Beginning

I’m not suggesting that whatever you lost, along with the relationship, is good news.

And yet.

There is something luminous at the heart of our heartbreak.

The divorce can reunite us with ourselves.

The breakup can realign us with our souls.

A soul intervention invites us to see the relationship rupture not only as an ending, but a beginning — of living more aligned, more alive, more awake, more fully ourselves.

Maybe you and I have known each other for years. Maybe this is the first you’ve heard of me and what I call a Dark Night of Divorce — or somewhere in between.

Either way, welcome.

I’m LiYana. I’ve been a Transformational Coach and teacher for 24 years. I’m newish to Subsack but not new to writing about some of the most important, vulnerable, and hard-to-talk-about topics in life.

I’ve been blogging since the word blog was created. In 2017, I wrote Feminine Genius so women could have a map to stop trashing and start treasuring ourselves. I wrote my second book, Waking Up in The Dark Night of Divorce (forthcoming in October 2026), so we, the divorce-devasted, have a map to help us make our way through The Dark and emerge Aligned. Alive. Awake.

I came to know a Dark Night of The Soul — and divorce — in the best/worst way: by going all the through — not around — these profound rites of passage.

Dark Night of The Soul

At 40-something years into my life, things were pretty peachy. Great marriage of over a decade, good health, lovely new baby, expansion in my multi-decade coaching practice, my first six-figure year, beautiful community and friends.

Then one day (or should I say night), I got plunged into The Dark.

I had panic attacks by day and insomnia by night. I would get caught for days at a time in storms of rage, grief, depression. In between caring for my baby and writing my first book, I would shake uncontrollably, afraid of what might be wrong with me.

All my life-long techniques for joy, positivity, and motivation, stopped working.

Was it a brain tumor? Cancer? Chronic Fatigue? Hormone imbalance after an emergency C-Section and new motherhood? Was I losing my mind?

My beloveds, friends, and community tried to help, but had little idea how to.

Doctor after healer plied me with expensive regimes and, after collecting tens of thousands of dollars from me and sending me along to the next practitioner, eventually threw their hands up as well.

In the coming months, bad got worse. And worse. And worse still.

This lasted for a year. Of excruciating hell.

As I flailed about in an ocean of shit, I found some driftwood here and there, in research, in wise friends, and then in my friend Mirabai Starr’s memoir about loss, transformation, and the Dark Night of the Soul.

Yes. That is where I am, I realized. A Dark Night of The Soul.

I didn’t know where that WAS exactly. But now I had a name for it.

I was still lost, still drowning, still felt unwanted and unlovable. But I was SOMEWHERE that others had been — and had been through.

But I had the vaguest of notion that here (in The Dark) treasure might be buried — if I knew where to look and found tools to help me dig.

So I dug.

Physically, I found that I was dealing with the fallout from a life-long addiction to over-working, people-pleasing, and warring with myself, as real as if it were to heroin.

Metaphysically, I found that I was dealing with the fallout from a life-long misunderstanding around my inherent unworthiness and compulsion to put everyone’s needs and well-being above my own.

I began to heal my physical body as well as my disconnection from other people, my Soul, and my Self.

I found that each of my Inner Demons had a startling message for my healing.

I learned how to quiet my vicious mind, stay safe in highly charged situations, feel my feelings without drowning in them, and follow my inner knowing, no matter no matter no matter what.

To a degree I had never done before in my life, I began to listen to myself, trust myself, care for myself, and even cherish myself.

None of this was drizzled on me like honey from heaven.

I hauled each insight and skill out the blazing, brutal, beautiful forge of The Dark.

Eventually (long, long after the point which I thought I was sure I couldn’t take one more step), I emerged.

I emerged with an astonishing appreciation for — and an uncanny ability to guide a fellow human through — the brutal, loving process that is a Dark Night of The Soul.

Then, five years later, when my son was eight and the COVID pandemic was about to sweep through the globe along with unprecedented economic destabilization, political extremism, and racial reckoning, I got divorced.

Dark Night of Divorce

And yet.

What I had learned and unlearned in my first Dark Night of The Soul, and in the years of guiding clients and course participants through their Dark Nights, I brought to my divorce.

Of course it was painful beyond, beyond, beyond.

Of course I raged against the death of the dream of my marriage. Of course my living situation, finances, future, parenting, and sense of myself splintered.

Divorce is a separation from another, yes. And it is also an invitation to see where we have separated from ourselves.

The physical and metaphysical healing I began in my first Dark Night of the Soul, I deepened in my Dark Night of Divorce.

I looked lucidly at the places I had betrayed myself, muted myself, and let myself run dry.

It was (and is) a powerful time of shedding illusions and assumptions.

Of reimagining love, family, safety. Reclaiming parts of me that got lost in the relationship. Reimagining a future that I am in love with and is in love with me. Placing joy at the center of my life, no matter no matter no matter what.

These hauls through The Dark did NOT leave me with perfect health, at my ideal weight, and as rich as royalty. In some ways, life is even more demanding now.

But they did leave me transformed. Shattered yet whole. Connected to my Self and my Soul. At home in the depths. Aligned. Alive. Awake.

This Reclamation — so often initiated by a relationship rupture — is the heart of my work, personally and professionally.

Here we are

When any of us first find ourselves in The Dark — bewildered and heartbroken, lost and lonely, in disbelief and despair — we can break open to a humble, powerful perspective:

That The Dark Night is not a punishment, but a reconfiguration.

A loving force that strips away what is no longer needed or true.

An invitation to drop into a depth of Inner Knowing that is yours alone and cannot be taken from you, because you extracted it with your bare hands from the molten center of the earth.

My Dear Fellow Dark Night Traveler. You are not lost. Somehow you found yourself here. I’m so glad. You are giving birth to yourself. And it f*cking hurts.

But I’ve seen where you’re headed, and it’s a reassembly of a life and a self that is beautiful, true, and vibrating with aliveness.

I’ve doula-ed thousands of clients, course participants, friends, book-readers — and myself — through The Dark Night.

It is my honor to do so with you, too.

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My friend, I know this is impossible, but these are the exact signs that you’ve left What Was and Who You Were.

But before you can build or become What’s Next, you have to go through — not around — the Terrain of Change.

Also known as a Dark Night of Divorce.

So please consider:

What if it’s hard not because you’re doing something wrong, but because you’re being reshaped?

What if it’s all falling apart because that’s a natural, necessary phase of any Big Change?

What if ‘one step forward, two steps back’ isn’t a problem, it’s a course-correction?

What if you’re not lost, you’re in a Metamorphosis?

Metamorphosis: The Terrain of Change

The word Metamorphosis comes from the Greek, meaning “transformation beyond shape.”

Used originally to describe the Greek gods’ shape-shifting, it was borrowed by scientists to describe reconfigurations like snakes shedding skin, tadpoles growing legs and lungs, and caterpillars liquefying in the cocoon before emerging as a butterfly.

We humans transform, too.

We too are wrecked and reassembled.

Not just in the flesh — through puberty, pregnancy, menopause, or ‘manopause’ — but emotionally, spiritually, archetypally — through threshold-crossings such as divorce, heartbreak, and breakup.

And if we let it, Metamorphosis will do what it’s always done: pull us beyond Who We Were into Who We Need To Be Now.

The Five Phases of Metamorphosis

As Something Big ends and a Self is being remade, there are five phases to move through.

You might cycle through these phases more than once. You might recognize yourself in more than one phase at the same time.

But knowing these phases can bring relief.

They can orient you when you feel lost. Knowing there is medicine in each phase can be a comfort. Knowing there are phases can remind you you’re in a process — an intelligent, universal, sacred arc.

Our Metamorphoses match that of the badass butterfly.

Eventually, you too will emerge from the Cosmic Cocoon.

Phase One: Initiation

This phase marks the beginning of the end — of What Was and Who You Were.

Much is ending. Yet something imperative is beginning: your transformation beyond shape.

In this phase, time warps. You may feel numb, disoriented, panicky, or strangely calm. Your mind spins and loops, grasping at answers for questions, certainty for confusion, and reassurance for doubts.

Nothing has gone wrong here.

This is exactly what it feels like to step over the threshold from all you have known, into the fertile void of The Unknown.

The caterpillar also goes through this kind of initiation: it creates and then enters its cocoon, inside of which it dies, totally transforms, and then is reborn.

If caterpillars can do it, so can we.

This initial phase of Metamorphosis invites you to trust this intelligent, sacred Terrain of Change.

You’re not lost, you’re in a Metamorphosis.

Phase Two: Dissolution

This is where things really fall apart: your outworn illusions, old identity, outdated strategies. Who you thought you were in the relationship, in the world. The future you were counting on, committed to.

Dissolution is not gentle; it is acute. It can feel shocking, agonizing, unbearable. You don’t recognize yourself. You feel like you’re coming undone.

With nowhere to hide or run, you feel drenched by the loss of what you gave your whole heart to.

But this phase is doing essential work on you.

Before anything new can form, you have to shed what no longer fits. This is not a personal failure. It is a necessary unmaking.

For our friend the caterpillar, inside its cocoon-tomb-womb, some sh!t is also going down. Trusting its instincts without question, it completely dissolves itself. Into goo. Its perfectly wonderful caterpillar self melts and morphs until it is utterly unrecognizable. (Maybe you can relate?)

Give it some time and a few more phases, and all that goo will remodel itself into a lovely thing with wings. But first it must dissolve, sloughing off its former identity.

No goo; no butterfly.

No Dissolution; no newer, truer you.

This phase invites you to quit running from what hurts and instead let it dissolve you.

What worked then won’t work now.

Phase Three: Excavation

After some of the initial shock wears off, something else begins.

You start to look Underneath.

In this phase, you mine your muck and retrieve your disowned parts. You begin digging into patterns, history, and long-standing dynamics:

When you left too soon, stayed too long.
Why you erased yourself.
Why certain fears feel so big.
When being alone feels unbearable — or strangely relieving.

Excavation is not about self-blame, but about truth-telling. It’s about sifting what you want to leave and what you want to take with you.

How, we might ask, does our dismembered caterpillar not stay a heap of goo?

This is the work of Excavation.

You dig into the goo of What Was. You see what was true in the past, but not anymore.

You stop fighting your inner demons, and make amends with yourself.

Out of the goo, you find —or rediscover — your inner compass. So you can get your bearings, course-correct, and move in the direction of What’s Next.

The phase of Excavation invites you to listen to yourself — and trust the clear bell of your own voice.

What got you here won’t get you there.

Phase Four: Reimagining

At some point — often quietly — you come up for air.

Reimagining is the phase where the sediment begins to settle. When you have some space to ask different questions.

What actually works for me?
What do I no longer want to live with?
What feels true for me — even if it scares me?
What is the beautiful What’s Next that I see for myself, even if I don’t know how to make it happen?

How, in the midst of complete and utter dissolution, do we butterflies reimagine ourselves into being? Out of caterpillar soup, how is a butterfly formed?

Inside the chrysalis are wise things called imaginal cells. They contain the blueprint of the butterfly to be. Imaginal cells imagine the caterpillar goo into the eventual yet inevitable butterfly.

This is not a phase of fantasy or forced positivity, but a deep reimagining of a life that fits you better.

You follow your own north star instead of the preordained path. You wake up what’s been dormant too long. You toss the compromises that cost you too much. You reclaim your joy.

The phase of Reimagination invites you to dream into What’s Next.

Who you were then is not who you are becoming now.

Phase Five: Emerging

Emerging is not a finish line. It’s a re-entry.

We’re half in the cocoon, half unfurling into new life. Grounded in what we learned in The Dark, we fly free.

Emerging brings us some surprises about Metamorphosis.

When the once-caterpillar-now-butterfly is ready to emerge, it chews its way out of its cocoon. Which is hard. Inglorious. You try gnawing your way out of your own body-sized uterus with tiny butterfly teeth and toenails.

Yet if you or I helped it out to cut short its struggle, something awful would happen.

That butterfly would never be able to fly.

But if the butterfly gets to bite and gnash and stretch and stumble on its way out, the cocoon goo will get all over, especially on its wings. Goo is what makes its wings work. Then the struggle strengthens them, so our butterfly becomes sturdy enough to fly.

The gnashing, the erroring, the trying again are vital to Emerging — for butterflies and humans alike.

In your Emerging, you too trial-and-error. You struggle and stumble, you’re still tender, still grieving. But you are solid in yourself.

Pleasure returns in small, surprising ways. Color comes back into the world. You feel clearer about your boundaries, even if sometimes shaky.

You are not Who You Were.

You are more Who You Truly Are.

Even so, the process isn’t over. Metamorphosis is cyclical. We don’t complete it once and graduate. We move through its phases again and again in our lifetimes, each time with more honesty and self-trust.

Emerging invites you to see this Dark Night of Divorce not as a failure, but a rite of passage. Emerging invites you to love not only Who You Were but Who You Are Now.

It’s who you become in your Metamorphosis that helps you emerge brilliantly.

My friend, if you’re in the middle of this and it feels unbearable, I want you to know:

You are not lost.
You are not stuck.
You are not failing.

You are in a personal yet universal, ancient and archetypal process of becoming.

And you are made for this.

There’s a simple practice for you, below.

Practice: Locating your phase of Metamorphosis

Take one slow breath. Then, gently ask yourself:

1. Which phase am I (mostly) in right now?

Don’t overthink it. Let the answer arise.

Remind yourself (out loud or inside): Of course this feels hard. This is the phase I’m in.

2. Optionally, share in the comments what phase you’re in. (I’d love to locate you)!

Leave a comment

That’s it.

No action steps. No self-improvement. No positive thinking. No manic planning. Just locate yourself in a phase, with kindness.

Knowing what phase you’re in shifts how you treat yourself — which is the first, most important step on your road through The Dark Night.

What to do/practice in each phase of Metamorphosis — and how to feel better along the way — I’ll share with you in my next writings.

With love from the radiant dark,

But I need you to know: you’re not being punished; you’re being reshaped.

The Dark is Delicious

It was about nine months into what I would later discover was a Dark Night of the Soul.

On a cold summer day in San Francisco, I took refuge in a tea shop to meet a new friend, Domenica. As I entered, I saw she was already seated on a cushion at a low table under saffron-colored curtains.

I wanted to crawl out of my damp skin. Not because of my friend or the tea shop or the curtains or the cold-ass day, but because I had no idea what was wrong with me, why everything seemed gray, why my mind attacked me with verdicts of worthlessness and ugliness.

I sat. I told Domenica about the anxiety, the shakes, the crying, the fights with my husband, the exhaustion, the way I couldn’t change my mood no matter what technique I tried. I told her I was in a very dark place.

That’s when she smiled.

Not at my agony or confusion or wretchedness. But at my recognition, my naming of The Dark.

“I’m excited for you,” she said. “The Dark is delicious.”

She may have even licked her lips.

She shared with me that in The Dark, everything is backasswards. Things that used to work, no longer do. You can’t think your way out of it, can’t plan your way through it: you have to feel your way.

The Dark is The Shadow, The Underworld, the unseen, unconscious, unknown. You have to lift up rocks and reckon with whatever wriggles out from underneath.

The Dark is the fertile void, the seat of creation, the womb of the world, where you germinate like a seed and birth yourself to yourself.

The Dark is a holy place, even when it’s hellish.

Well.

Until then, whenever I had spoken of the hell I was experiencing, I had been met with care, confusion, even revulsion. Never with excitement.

The Dark delicious? Holy? A place to birth myself to myself? A source of heat that could put a fire under my ass to grow? Rather than buried in the deadly dark, perhaps I was planted in fertile earth, my transformation imminent and inevitable?

My curiosity swelled. I wanted to know for myself the reverence I sensed in Domenica for the very dark place I was in.

A Very Dark Place

If The Dark is not all bad, what good is it?

The first clue comes from a humble 16th Century Christian mystic monk, John of the Cross.

John was a devotee of Teresa of Avila, considered dangerous and heretical by mainstream church patriarchs. For this, John was captured and imprisoned. For nine agonizing months, he was beaten daily and starved close to death, his captors hoping he would renounce his faith.

He felt, as most of us would, lost, forgotten, and forsaken even by the light of The Divine he had devoted his whole life to.

But at this lowest moment, he was struck by a realization: The Dark he was experiencing was not uncaring or punishing but in fact deeply loving. John’s former ways of connecting with god, were dying. Something more mature was being reborn. In The Dark, any separation between John and his soul, dissolved.

A short while later, a guard took pity on John and smuggled him to safety. As soon as John was well enough to write, “Dark Night of the Soul” poured out:

An ode to The Dark as a loving force that strips away what is no longer needed or true, patiently ripens us, and reunites us with our essential selves.

The second clue comes from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

A bardo means “in-between” and refers to the literal passage between death and rebirth, where consciousness realizes it’s left the body and hasn’t yet landed in the next life. It can be a time of tremendous confusion. But it is also a rare moment in which we, as souls, also have the chance for massive growth, revelation, and possibly even enlightenment.

Leaving physical death aside, for those of us grappling with divorce, a bardo is the dark landscape between the death of the relationship and what comes next.

In this rare moment, in between worlds, our old identities burn away.

In place of what was, our truth gets louder, our desires stronger, our next life clearer.

The bardo of the breakup is a pregnant pause, in which we will rebirth ourselves to ourselves.

The third clue comes from Jungian scholars.

Through the Jungian lens, The Dark is The Shadow: the archetype of the hidden, the repressed, the unclaimed.

The basement of our psyche, The Shadow holds everything we disown, refuse to see, or have yet to meet:

Our fears. Our desires. Our rage, shame, grief. And — perhaps most importantly — our raw, untamed power.

The Shadow keeps us caught in a tangle of confusion and incapacitation — until we gather our courage, open the basement door, and look at what comes wriggling out of The Dark.

Of course this is hard. Of course we’d rather not deal with our old wounds, inner demons, relationship patterns.

But when we engage rather than avoid The Dark, something surprising happens: it awakens our authenticity. It course-corrects our lives.

Unless, of course, we resist.

Meeting The Dark

You’ve likely heard, “What you resist, persists.”

The actual quote — by psychologist Carl Jung, an OG Jungian scholar and explorer of The Shadow — is, “What you resist not only persists, but will grow in size.”

When we are in The Dark, wishing to be anywhere else, of course we resist with everything we’ve got:

We fight it. Rage at it. Deny it. Ignore it. Judge it. Stay busy. Play dead. Placate.

It’s exactly what we’ve been taught: to treat our fears as problems to solve, enemies to fight, skeletons to bury, shortcomings to eliminate.

These clever tactics may have worked in the past, or in certain circumstances. But in a Dark Night of Divorce, they not only don’t work, they make things worse. Magnitudes worse.

Avoiding The Dark doesn’t eliminate our discomfort; it prolongs our suffering.

When feelings aren’t welcomed, they escalate.
When truths aren’t spoken, they sicken us.
Whatever we fight against, flee from, or freeze in the face of, grows stronger.

Our resistance to what we don’t want pins it in place. And expands it exponentially.

If we resist The Dark, The Dark persists.

My first Dark Night of the Soul lasted about two years, a crisis of health and of faith. Like all of us, I wanted to run fast and far. But I slowly settled into an altogether different attitude: meet The Dark.

So I hung out in my basement, felt my feelings, quit trashing myself, and recognized part of my life’s work in helping folks wake up in The Dark.

Five years later, I got divorced. In that bardo, I honored the death of my relationship while I renewed my commitment to myself. ​​I wrote my second book, Waking Up in The Dark Night of Divorce.

In the heart of The Dark, I retrieved my truth, grabbed tightly to its tail, and let it lead me into my next chapter.

Thanks to a Christian mystic, the Tibetan Buddhists, a Jungian or two, and a lick-lipping wise woman in a tea shop, we can break open to a humble, powerful perspective: The Dark is friend, not foe.

In the Dark Night of Divorce, unconscious crap rises up not to punish us, but to be integrated. To reshape us.

The Dark is not cackling with maniacal glee, plotting our eternal suffering.

It’s simply inviting us to stop running. To listen more closely. To look at what we previously couldn’t. To let our illusions die. To unbury our truth. To renew our faith in ourselves, our lives, our love.

To wake up and live true to who we are now.

The Dark isn’t an enemy trying to take our life. It’s a wise friend, helping us rebirth.

So what do we do instead of resisting The Dark Night of Divorce?

Simply put, we meet it.

We witness what we’re going through, without adding a silver lining.

We unclench our body, feeling what’s there to feel.

We see our ordeal for what it is, not what we wish it to be.

We gentle our mind, getting present for whatever is present.

Even as we are bewildered and heartbroken, lost and lonely, in disbelief and despair — we develop the strength to meet whatever we wish to avoid.

And of course, divorce hurts like #&#?!*@?!.

The Dark is here to help.

Reflection

As a way to meet — rather than resist — The Dark, consider, write on, or even share in the comments:

1. What are you currently resisting? What do you wish was different? Want to avoid, not look at, fight against, run from?

Leave a comment

To all that you’re reshaping,

Welcome, my friend, I’m so glad you’re here — even though it likely means your life has fallen apart in some spectacularly sh!tty firestorm you never expected, didn’t want, and certainly don’t welcome.

The relationship has ended, or is ending.

The future toward which you were walking has vanished.

The ground beneath your feet no longer feels solid.

The dream into which you poured your faith and love, is dying.

You might feel unrecognizable to yourself. Like you’re doing everything you’re supposed to and still barely holding it together. Overwhelmed by your old demons coming up again. Can’t trust yourself. Ashamed you’re struggling this much.

And so so so lost.

For most of us, especially for women, and certainly for me as well, a Dark Night of Divorce is a rupture so profound it dismantles not just a partnership or comingled life but our very identity.

And yet.

In the midst of all that is ending, let’s begin with something surprising and true:

You are not lost.

You’re IN something.

You are in a radically transformative process that has long been called a Dark Night of the Soul — and in this case, a Dark Night of Divorce.

What The Dark Night is (and isn’t)

In 2015, as a new mother, I found myself lost.

I became mysteriously, chronically sick. My marriage of 17 years began to show cracks. On top of the inability to sleep or concentrate, the anxiety and depression, I wondered if I was mentally ill, a spiritual failure, and being cosmically punished because I didn’t try hard enough, love well enough, or get it right.

I felt absolutely lost, wondering where my nice life had wandered off to.

That year, I first heard the phrase Dark Night of the Soul, and something inside my bones knew: Yes. This. This is what I am lost in.

While the mental, physical, emotional, relational, and spiritual crisis that I made my way through was nothing short of torturous, what I discovered was nothing short of revelatory.

I wasn’t just sick, something deeper was afoot.

Although I felt lost, I was IN something: a powerful alchemical process that is both individual and universal. Bewildering and intelligent. Harrowing and healing.

In The Dark Night and over several years, I learned how to quiet my vicious mind, stay safe in highly charged situations, stop fighting myself, transform my inner demons, feel my feelings without drowning in them, and trust myself, no matter no matter no matter what.

Then, five years later in January of 2020 when my son was eight and the COVID pandemic was about to sweep through the globe along with unprecedented economic destabilization, political extremism, and racial reckoning, I got divorced.

Another Dark Night had arrived.

And yet. What I had learned and unlearned in my first Dark Night of the Soul, I brought to my divorce.

Of course, it was painful beyond beyond beyond. Of course, I raged against the death of the dream of my marriage. Of course, divorce brought up old issues I was sure I’d already healed. Of course, my living situation, finances, future, parenting, and sense of myself splintered.

But it was also a powerful time of shedding illusions and assumptions.

Reimagining love, family, safety.

Owning my voice.

Trusting my needs.

Learning to stop abandoning myself.

To rest.

To place joy at the center of my life, no matter no matter no matter what.

This self-reclamation and soul-reclamation — so often initiated by a relationship rupture — are the heart of my work, both personally and professionally.

You are here

As lost as you might feel, this is the territory of transformation that you are IN: a Dark Night of Divorce:

Exfoliating old patterns that no longer fit.

Reclaiming parts of you that got lost in the relationship.

Reimagining a future that you are in love with and is in love with you.

A Dark Night of the Soul is not a mental illness. It’s not a spiritual failure or cosmic punishment. It isn’t because you didn’t try hard enough, love well enough, or get it right — even though at times it sure feels like it.

The Dark Night of Divorce strips you of what is no longer needed or true. Demands you reckon with whatever you hid away or have been blind to. Asks you question your assumptions, obediences, and indocrinations. Requires you to compost the bullshit, so you can emerge transformed — more fully yourself, astonishingly alive, and deepened in your spirituality and humanity.

A Dark Night of Divorce ends your relationship. And then grows you into who you truly ARE.

A Dark Night of Divorce shows you where you have fallen asleep. And then wakes you up.

This sounds nice and poetic, but I know: every trek through The Dark is unfathomably, impossibly, insanely difficult.

Which is why I’m so glad you’re here. And why I invite you to stay here with me in your Dark Night and on Substack.

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Stay with me here

I have been right where you are. Thousands of my readers and clients have as well.

For over 24 years, as a coach, teacher, and author of Waking Up in The Dark Night of Divorce and Feminine Genius, I have helped women move through life’s darkest times into lives that are unfettered and lit up.

There is a far shore to any Dark Night of Divorce, and I’ll show you how to find your way there — and how to emerge from your ordeal Aligned. Alive. Awake.

I won’t push you to think positive, or tell you to turn your frown upside down.

I won’t offer you quick fixes or tell you everything happens for a reason.

I will share tools that help you feel better.

Practices that provide some soothing.

Stories to refill your cup of hope and bottle of joy.

Maps to make your way through The Dark.

I will offer you the reframe of a lifetime: that whatever you are going through — as awful as it is and as much as we would wish it away if we could — can be a profound reassembly of your truth, voice, and power.

This work is deep by design.

It is slow by necessity.

It honors the intelligence of what you are moving through.

It demands you be both soft and strong as f*ck.

Reckoning with relationship loss is soul work: the deepest, most important work you can do.

It’s who you become in The Dark that helps you emerge brilliantly.

So, my friend, in the midst of all that’s ending, let’s begin,

Take a moment and share:

A word or two to describe what you are IN?

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