230. Heartbreak is Mandatory Tranformation Is a Choice with Sara Avant Stover

This episode is for you if you are going to through any type of heartbreaks. We are not just talking about relationship heartbreak, we are talking about heartbreaks in general, and that’s including career transitions, bankruptcy and other hardships.

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Sara Avant Stover (she/her) is an author; teacher and mentor in women’s spirituality and entrepreneurship; and a Certified Internal Family Systems Practitioner. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa and Summa cum Laude from Columbia University’s all-women’s Barnard College, she had a cancer scare, moved to Thailand, and embarked on a decade-long healing and spiritual odyssey throughout Asia. Since then, she’s gone on to uplift tens of thousands of women worldwide. Sara has been featured in Yoga Journal, The Huffington Post, Newsweek, Natural Health, and on ABC, NBC, and CBS. She lives in Boulder, CO.

In this episode we talked about:

• Why is it important to expand the heartbreak conversation beyond just grief, break ups, and death.
• How do single heartbreaks then lead to cascading losses?
• How can we become more aware of how this impacts us?
• Where do you see most women getting stuck on their heartbreak journeys and why?
• What are the most important mindsets or practices women need to embrace during their heartbreak journeys so they don’t get stuck?
• and so much more

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

I love your newest book about heartbreak. And since we’re talking about healing from heartbreak today, I felt it was important to point out that we are not just talking about relationship heartbreaks. We are talking about any heartbreak in general, and that can include career transitions, bankruptcies, and other hardships, right?

What are some examples of types of heartbreaks that you’ve seen or worked with with your clients, Sarah?

Well, I also wanna name that this book also includes the global heartbreaks that we’re experiencing with climate change, with political divisiveness, with the level of uncertainty that we’re all living with. And this global heartbreak just moved to the forefront with the pandemic. So even if we as individuals are not living with heartbreak right now, we are all living with this broader context of this global anguish that’s happening right now.

And other forms of personal heartbreak that I speak about, in the introduction, I actually named like 21 different kinds of heartbreak. And some examples are losing a home in a natural disaster, or being a refugee of war, getting a challenging health diagnosis, your own or one from a loved one, raising a troubled teen, caring for an elderly parent, losing a pet, going through menopause, having an identity shift. All of these are examples of heartbreak.

And of course, there are many more as well.

I love that. As long as we’re human, we’re breathing, inevitably we’re going to go through some type of heartbreak, right? Why do you think it’s important to expand the heartbreak conversation beyond just grief, breakups, and death? Like the usual ones?

Because we already live in a heartbreak illiterate culture, where we’re all encouraged to hurry up and move on with it at all costs. And when this happens, we are already invalidating our own experience of suffering when we’re moving through a challenging season of life. But then when we turn to a book about grief or heartbreak, and it’s only talking about death or the end of romantic relationships, which of course are very valid forms of heartbreak.

But if that’s all that we’re reading about or really learning about, and we’re not feeling included there, then we can feel even more kind of estranged and outside of the normal flow of daily life. So I really wanted to make this an all-inclusive space so that people who are just experiencing any form of challenge can really recognize that their suffering is valid too and needs time and care and attention. Yes.

And I think we go through these difficulties and heartbreaks for a reason. I believe everything happens for a reason. And I think in life, like you talk about, there are so many types of heartbreaks that we can’t escape them.

These heartbreaks are actually mandatory in our life, right? But what we get out of these heartbreaks, if we choose to have a personal transformation through these heartbreaks, that is a choice. Would you agree with me?

Absolutely. One of the kind of taglines for the book is heartbreak is mandatory, transformation is a choice. And something that I see very often is because we live in a society that urges us to hurry up and move on with it and to put a smile on and just paint everything with pink paint, we often get stuck because we’re not feeling the feelings.

We’re not feeling the grief. We’re not feeling the anger. We’re not feeling the depression, the anxiety.

When we’re not feeling it, it can’t heal. And so the transformation actually happens by choosing to turn in and to feel those hard things and to get the support that we need to. And this book is a simple way to get that support, to just kind of learn how to be with these challenging emotions so that they can help to carry us through, so that they can help to bring us to the shores of our new lives.

And where have you seen most of the women that you’ve worked with getting stuck on their heartbreak journey?

Being afraid to feel the grief. I’ve worked with some women who went through a major heartbreak in childhood and still have not felt that grief. And they’re feeling disconnected from their creativity and wondering why.

And when we trace it back, it’s because they’re still afraid to feel the pain from that experience. I also see women getting stuck in anger, either suppressing the anger and turning it in on themselves or expressing it outwards through bitterness and resentment. And both of those things are normal and valid parts of the process.

But if we stay there, because we’re not fully feeling the anger, we’re not just letting that fire burn us and help us to transform into something else, we’re gonna get stuck there too. That is so true.

We want to feel the emotions, right? That’s a normal part of life. We’re human beings.

You don’t wanna- And we’re not taught how to feel. And especially as women, it’d be very taboo to grieve or to be angry. And we especially are taught to be pleasant and to be nice no matter what.

And so that can really hold us back during these times that are really asking us to fall apart and to get messy and to become undone.

So what are the most important mindsets would you say that women should practice if they’re going through any type of heartbreak?

One is to let it take as long as it takes. There is no set timeline. There is no right amount of time that you should be grieving.

And to really let your process lead you wherever it leads you. Another one is that there’s nothing wrong with you. We can feel a lot of shame.

We can feel like we’re really messed up when something isn’t working out the way that we wanted it to, or when it doesn’t look good to other people’s eyes. But the truth is there’s nothing wrong with any of us. And we all experience these things.

This is part of being human. And the last one I would say is this too shall pass. And that’s a phrase that I have at the beginning of the book.

I know it’s a very universal phrase and it’s very true that there isn’t permanence. Things shift and change. And even these hard seasons of life, they’ll pass.

Oh, I can’t agree more. Everything, I mean, even our life right now is temporary. Right?

Just, I mean, if we think back when the pandemic first happened, it seemed like it was never ending. And look at us now, we’re on the other side already. Right?

Absolutely. You know, there’s a fine line between thinking positively and really healing. What do you think about that? Putting that bandage, right? Just thinking positively. Is that beneficial to a heartbreak journey?

Yes and no. It is during the later stages. But in the earlier stages, we really want to embrace the concept that you have to feel it to heal it.

And it’s very normal to not be thinking positively when your world is falling apart. And if we try to again, paint that all over with pink paint, we’re going to get stuck because we’re not actually turning into what is and that what is, is the medicine that’s going to transform us. So the positive thinking will be a natural outcome of the healing when we allow it to happen.

But I think it’s a mindset that you can get through it. That in itself is a positive thinking though, right? It’s believing that yes, it’s going to take time to heal.

And we are always, all of us, we’re always healing from something in life. But I always believe, knowing that I will have the confidence to get through it. Just like you said, we can’t put a timeline on how long that’s going to take, but I have to believe that there is an end to this tunnel.

And I also want to validate that there’s sometimes devastation that’s so intense that it’s very natural and normal to doubt that we’ll make it through or that we have the capacity to. And there were certainly many points along my journey that I write about in the book where I felt that way, where I wanted to give up, where I just thought it was never going to end. And that’s also one of the reasons why I put that, why I made this book so encouraging to keep reminding people of this because we need other people in our lives to reflect back to us that we can do it, that they believe in us, even when we lose sight of that within ourselves.

That is so true. I always say this, I believe in everyone more than I believe in myself and more than everyone believes in themselves as well, because we are blinded, but someone else might have that bird’s eye view. For example, I’m a coach, I do that.

And you as well, Sarah, you have that bird’s eye view over your client’s journey as well. So working with a coach, whoever it is that you resonate with will help you expedite the journey for sure, but definitely seek help if you are in the midst of it, but it will take time. What other tips do you have for women who are looking for a transformation?

Well, another thing that I find is important is to have some sort of a spiritual connection. And I want to really emphasize that by spiritual, I don’t mean religious. If that means religious for you, that’s great too.

But by spiritual, I mean just a connection with something that’s greater than us. And that could be a connection with nature, with universe, with source, with spirit, or if we know that as God or goddess, whatever it is for us, that connection helps us to do what you were just saying, Lucy, to hold that bigger perspective and to remember that there is something bigger holding us, that we’re not breathing ourselves, we’re not beating our own hearts. None of us know how we got here or where we go when we die, but there is a larger mystery that’s living through us.

And if we can tune into that, that can help us to keep finding our next right step as we’re stumbling through the dark.

That higher power is there. It doesn’t matter who you believe in, but you gotta believe the higher power is there and everything’s happening for a reason and that you are learning from it. Nothing is extra.

Everything is mandatory in this journey. And you are in this journey for a reason and you are remarkable in your own ways. Sarah, what was your heartbreak journey?

What was the most devastating heartbreak you experienced personally?

It was the one that I open up this book with. It’s kind of like the first, I write about serial heartbreaks that I experienced between 2016 and 2020. And the first heartbreak was finding out the news of a really devastating betrayal where my former fiance came home one night and told me that he had been cheating on me, not just with one person, one time, but with many people over many years.

And with that news, I just felt like my entire sense of self was just spliced open, was just split apart. And it took me a long time. It took me several years to really weave myself back together again.

And this book was born out of that experience.

And what was most helpful for you to get out of that heartbreak?

A few things. One was what we were talking about, feeling the feelings and getting support to do that when I found that to be hard. Another thing that we just spoke about, having a connection to a higher power and really using prayer and using ritual to connect me with that higher power, using journaling to open up to a deeper wisdom to help guide me.

And the third thing was a cutting edge psychotherapeutic technology called Internal Family Systems or IFS that I now am certified in that helps us to work with the different parts of our personality that can feel challenged during heartbreak. The parts of us that feel grief, that feel anxiety, that feel depression. And also the younger parts of us, like the older wounds from past heartbreaks that maybe were unresolved, that come back to the surface in adulthood when we’re moving through challenging times.

So combination of those three things, I would say is what supported me the most.

And how did this system, the IFS system help you heal from your heartbreak exactly?

It helped me to really go back to those childhood wounds that were not fully resolved and that had come back up to the surface during the heartbreak. And that were somehow unconsciously driving the bus of my life. For instance, they were the parts of me that led me to be in that kind of relationship in the first place.

Parts of me that I didn’t realize it at the time, but held a deep sense of unworthiness, that held a fear of abandonment that allowed me to tolerate being in a relationship where I was being lied to so much. And so IFS helped me to heal those parts of me and to really emerge with a deeper sense of wholeness and a sense of being at home in myself.

I love that. And do you feel like now looking back in hindsight, do you think that relationship now for it happened for bringing you your abundance now?

Yes, and I don’t say this in a Pollyanna kind of way, but I really see that as that experience and everything that happened in those several years that I write about as one of the greatest gifts or maybe the greatest gift that I’ve ever experienced because I could not be who I am right now. I could not have the life that I have right now without having gone through that. I would not wish that on anyone, but I trust that that was my path.

And I’m just so proud of who I am as a result of all that.

I love everything you just said. And I asked that question exactly for the same reason. I am so grateful for each heartbreak I ever experienced in my whole life because once you’re on the other side, you really get to appreciate what it teaches you and what kind of transformation and opportunities and new profound ways of thinking that it’ll bring you and the rest of your life is a new beginning.

So in that, I am grateful.

Yes, and that’s us living the truth of choosing that transformation, right? Having to go through that heartbreak and then choosing the transformation so that we can experience this fruition on the other side of it.

And that is the decision. And that is the decision that you can make that will either change you or break you, right? You can let the situation break you if you don’t choose to let it become your opportunity of transformation.

And that’s why we’re here today because we hope that in every negativity you find in life, you see that as an opportunity for an upgrade in your life, no matter how hard it is. And actually the harder it is now, the easier it is on the other side and the bigger the transformation.

I totally agree.

Be grateful for everything life throws at us. And Sarah, in the difficult times, is there a favorite quote that you go by to help you live your better life?

Yes, this is a quote that I share at the beginning of the conclusion to the book. And this was a quote that was kind of like my lighthouse through those years, because I just saw that of, I saw this quote and I just felt like I want to get to that point. So this is by, I’m not sure if I’m saying his name correctly.

So forgive me if I’m not, Paruki Murakami. Once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure whether the storm is really over.

But one thing is certain, when you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in.

100%. Well, thank you for sharing your story and your insights on heartbreak with us today, Sarah. It was a pleasure to have you. Where can we find you?

The best place is at my website, sarahavantstover.com. And there you can find my book wherever books are sold.

And you can also find me on Instagram at sarahavonstover. And my podcast is called Herself. So any of those places I’d love to connect.

Beautiful, thank you.

Thank you for having me.