You Are Not the Glue: Over-Functioning in Love

You Are Not the Glue: Over-Functioning in Love

I once spent three and a half years staying in a relationship with a man who was never really in it. I adjusted my life around his. I rearranged my schedule, flew to his country to make seeing him easy, told myself that if I just kept showing up, eventually he would choose it and reciprocate. He didn’t. Not fully. He was never in it the way I was. And the whole time I called my efforts unconditional love and care, when really, I was doing too much. I was holding on to hope and potential. He would give me crumbs, not because he was malicious, but because it did not cost him much- except maybe his own integrity. I was not being honest with myself about his capacity even though I intellectually knew what was happening. I over-functioned. I made everything easier for him, became smaller and quieter, shrinking my needs and not speaking up about my frustrations about his unavailability because I worried I would lose the connection. Over-functioning can be so deceiving. You think you’re being helpful, caring, useful, helping hold it all together. You think you’re being low maintenance, the understanding one, the easy girl who he will want to be with. When really, you’re abandoning yourself and not facing the truth about his capacity and your need for control and certainty. This episode is part 1 of 2 where I get into what over-functioning actually is, why it operates on anxiety and control, and how it shows up in your relationships as detrimental behavior. If you’re the capable one, the glue, the one everyone says they couldn’t do without, start here and listen. I hope you enjoy it. Join my bimonthly Live group call starting July 1st! Register and check it out at: www.savannanoelle.com/savichats Get full access to Savanna's Substack at savannanoelle.substack.com/subscribe [https://savannanoelle.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

The Closure No One Can Give You

For my coaching program, go to www.savannanoelle.com/comeback. I’ve always been a writer. As a teen I was the girl filling up the back pages of yearbooks, scribbling whole paragraphs, writing affirmations with the date inside the cover of a book before I gave it to someone. Writing has aways been where my voice goes when I don’t feel heard. So it makes sense that for most of my life, when a relationship ended badly, I reached for a letter, a text, an email, something. While it would’ve been decent and emotionally mature to be met with an actual conversation, often, the only way I’d finally get to have a conversation was this way. This week’s episode is about that. About closure. But it’s not the version you’ve heard a hundred times on TikTok, where closure is the silence, closure is them not choosing you, closure is no response. Those are for sure real. I’m talking about the closure of choosing a new behavior, of holding a higher standard. In this episode, I tell you about a breakup that gutted me, what it had in common with the one relationship I've never been able to write about, and the thing I finally understood that changed how I see closure now. And I get into the question I think actually matters when someone disappears on you. Not “what is wrong with him,” but “what is the standard I am willing to hold for myself?” Here’s what I continue to come back to: You want to get to the place where no matter what, you got you. The full episode is right here. Go listen. And as always, please share with a friend, like, and review on Apple and Spotify to help this podcast grow. I’m grateful. If you’re sitting in his silence right now, the not-knowing, the spiraling, the checking your phone for the hundredth time, I made something for you. It’s a free 10-minute audio called “When He Goes Silent.” You can grab it here: savannanoelle.com/freeaudio. And if you’re tired of running this same pattern and you’re ready to actually come home to yourself, that’s the work I do one on one inside “Come Back to Yourself,” my 4-week intensive. www.savannanoelle.com/comeback. Remember, You’re amazing. Savanna Get full access to Savanna's Substack at savannanoelle.substack.com/subscribe [https://savannanoelle.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Your Nervous System Is Running Your Love Life

For a free audio of "When he ghosts, goes silent, or pulls away," go to www.savannanoelle.com/freeaudio. I moved to Cairo for a man during the Arab Spring back in 2012. I left a cute apartment and a corporate job at a temporary agency in Downtown Denver because I didn’t want to regret every wondering “What if?” I was in love and convinced this was the great romance of my life. And for a while he was. To be fair, he was and still is an amazing human. I just had to know if this move and our relationship could stand the test of time and, well, a freakin’ revolution. The streets weren’t that safe then, and I didn’t speak the language very well. Everyone back home thought I was nuts for moving there during such volatility. Military in the streets, protests, bombs going off across town, men following me along the non-existent side walks side streets when I tried to do anything as small as buy groceries or take a taxi somewhere. My Egyptian boyfriend was photographing the happenings in Tahrir Square, often in danger of being tear gassed or right in the middle of the conflict. And I — strong, independent, “I can handle anything” me — was depending on him for mostly everything. I often felt tense and crazy, unsure how to navigate each day. I didn’t realize until years later that I lived that entire chapter of my life in nervous system activation. There was no rest. No regulation. Every nerve was on watch constantly. And eventually, it came out sideways. I lashed out at him in a way I didn’t recognize. He saw the scared little girl underneath the woman I’d built, and at the time I could not understand what was happening to me. I didn’t have the tools yet. I hadn’t built the capacity. My window of tolerance was paper-thin — and I called it love. I mean, it was definitely love. But what he represented for my nervous system was both safety and familiarity in his unavailability. He was physically and somewhat emotionally safe, but also mirrored the unavailability I felt as a child. Most of the time, when we think we are choosing partners — choosing to stay, choosing to leave, choosing to text back too fast or pull away or get small or get loud — we are not actually choosing. Our nervous system is choosing for us. Based on what it learned was safe a very long time ago. Usually before we had language for any of it. And when your nervous system is in chronic activation, what you experience in love is not love. It’s relief. Brief moments of relief when he texts back. Brief moments of relief when he says the thing you needed him to say. The relief feels so much like love because it feels so much. The contrast is what’s electrifying. The relief is what’s addicting. It breeds codependency. You weren’t crazy. You weren’t broken. You were hooked on the relief. This week’s episode is the first time I’ve put this all in one place in a succinct way— how anxious attachment lives in the body, why self-abandonment isn’t a moral failing, why chemistry is so often recognition rather than fate, and what it actually takes to do the work. (Spoiler: you cannot think your way out. I tried for years.) If you’re in the middle of a silence right now and you don’t know what to do with your body — I made a free audio for that exact moment. It’s called ‘When He Goes Silent.” Grab it at savannanoelle.com/freeaudio. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. I’d love to know what landed for you. I’d be super grateful. With love, Savi *If you want to go deeper into this work with me, my 1:1 coaching program Come Back to Yourself is built on exactly what we talked about here. You can find it at savannanoelle.com/comeback. Mixed, Mastered, and Recorded at Luna Sound Get full access to Savanna's Substack at savannanoelle.substack.com/subscribe [https://savannanoelle.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

The Text Breakup

Come Back To Yourself Coaching Program: www.savannanoelle.com/comebackI take pride in my Sagittarius Sun, with all that fire, my adventurous spirit, and my passion, but I can be very direct. And sometimes it stings. And as of late, a series of events have brought forward this beautiful sacred rage because of the number of situations I’ve experienced in my life that continue to stun me. It’s like human decency and kindness has gone out the window in what it means to have a real, honest conversation these days. I think about the days where cell phones and computers didn’t exist. (Yes, I was alive then.) And even further back when people wrote letters and had to wait for days to receive them in the mail or they had to ride on horseback to ask their love interest’s father if he could date his daughter. If he wanted to end the relationship, he would have to face her head on. Those times are definitely gone. So if someone you cared about recently ended things over a text, a cold, weirdly clinical text that didn’t sound anything like the person you’d been falling for— and then went silent on you afterward… No conversation. I get it. I’ve been there. Recently, actually. Saying “this too shall pass” or “there are other fish in the sea” is not helpful right now. If you’ve experienced this, it’s like you are holding all this confusion and disbelief, running the whole relationship back in your head trying to figure out when it shifted, what you missed, what you could have done differently. Checking your phone way too much. Wondering if you should reach out. Wondering if reaching out would be a mistake. The terrain is unknown because it just seems so ridiculous and cowardly. So here’s the one thing I want to say, because it’s what actually started to help me: A text breakup is not a reflection of your worth nor is it because you did something wrong. It’s a reflection of their capacity. Their capacity to sit with discomfort. To have a hard conversation. To stay present when things get real and vulnerable, instead of finding the nearest exit the second love starts to feel like something they could actually lose. And I know they probably told you the opposite. Probably said come to me when you’re upset. Probably showed up early on with a kind of presence and consistency that made you think okay, here’s someone who can do this. These things are easy to say at the beginning when the stakes are low and their stuff isn’t activated yet. The real test is what they do when things get hard… when their fear comes up, when intimacy starts asking something of them. When their nervous system wants to run because they’ve equated love with danger. That’s where people show you who they actually are. A text breakup is communicating this, even though not realizing it… I don’t have the capacity to be present for this conversation. I’m more worried about managing my own discomfort and protecting myself than about honoring what we shared. I know this isn’t right but I’m doing it anyway because I don’t know how to do it differently. And honestly? They probably know it’s wrong. That’s why some of them offer to “talk” afterward. That little breadcrumb. “Maybe we should chat sometime.” That’s them quietly admitting what they just did wasn’t enough. But they offered the conversation AFTER the detonation. Not before. That’s the part that matters and the part that really sucks. Because a regulated nervous system doesn’t send a text breakup. A regulated nervous system says, “I’ve got some stuff coming up for me, can we get on the phone?” That’s the conversation that builds trust and what could have changed everything. You weren’t given that conversation. And that’s not on you. You don’t have to keep waiting to be chosen by someone who keeps putting you down and picking you back up. You’re allowed to choose yourself, right now, even while you’re still sad, even while the love is still real, even while you’re still kind of hoping they’ll come back around. That’s the work I’m in too. This week on the podcast I’m going deeper into all of: What’s happening in your nervous system when this happens, fearful avoidant attachment, the pacing conversation we never have, and what to do (and not do) in the aftermath. I hope you enjoy! -Savanna Get full access to Savanna's Substack at savannanoelle.substack.com/subscribe [https://savannanoelle.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Why You Stay When You Should Go

You left. And then you went back. Multiple times. The shame is real as is the self judgement. I know this feeling well. The the voice in your head says — what is wrong with you? Why do you continue going back to the person who hurts you? Research shows it takes an average of seven attempts to leave an abusive relationship. Seven. And it isn’t because you’re crazy or weak but because the addiction is real and so is the withdrawal. I’ve been there more times than I’d like to admit, but when we can really unpack the dynamic and not just pathologize ourselves and them but truly deepen in our grace and love for our nervous system trying to protect us, we start to see that the work we are required to do to heal is within our reach. I had to physically move to another state to sever the highly addictive abusive relationship I was involved in for 5 years in order to truly understand the hold it had on me. In this second episode of this two part series, I share what breaking a trauma bond actually looks like. We talk about the shame of going back and the grief nobody prepares you for. And of course, the path that leads you back to yourself. This episode is about finding your way back to you. Listen to Part 2 — Trauma Bonding: Coming Home to Yourself — wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening. I’m super grateful. Please like, share, and subscribe here and on other platforms. Your ratings and review helps me get this podcast into more ears. Get full access to Savanna's Substack at savannanoelle.substack.com/subscribe [https://savannanoelle.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]