Flourishing After Adversity

S2:E28 How Empty of Me to Be So Full of You

• Laura Broome

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How to Find Yourself After a Relationship Ends: Grieving the Roles, Rituals, and Identity You Lost

Host Laura Mangum Broome explores how major relationship losses can leave women grieving not only the person but also the roles, routines, future, and identity built around that connection, quoting “How empty of me to be so full of you” from Louise Hay and David Kessler. 

Drawing from five major losses in five years (her teenage son, breast cancer, a heart transplant, her father’s death, and a sudden divorce after 27 years), she explains how women gradually “disappear” through over-giving and lack of boundaries across marriages, friendships, family dynamics, death, and even workplaces, noting that “grief is grief” regardless of the source. She introduces Radical Acceptance, the first phase of her iCope2Hope System, beginning with “face the truth,” and offers three starting points: grieve without a deadline, ask who you were before, and don’t refill the empty space too quickly.

00:00 When You Lose Yourself
01:00 Welcome and Free Resource
01:46 How Empty of Me
03:23 Grief Is Grief
04:04 The Layers You Lose
05:07 How We Disappear
08:00 Grieving the Old You
09:33 Radical Acceptance
10:34 Three Places to Start
13:32 Recap and Closing

When You Lose Yourself

Have you ever poured so much of yourself into a relationship that when it ended,  you didn't just lose the person, you lost yourself?  Have you ever looked around at your life after a loss and realized you don't recognize the woman standing in it? Not because something is wrong with you, but because so much of who you thought you were was built around someone else.

Or maybe the relationship is gone, the grief is real, and the question you can't shake is, "Who am I now that this is over?"  If any of that sounds familiar, today's episode is for you.  Because here's what I know from my own life and from walking alongside women doing this work.  You can love someone fully and still lose yourself in the process.  The grief that follows isn't just about them. It's about the pieces of you they got left behind.  That's what we're talking about today.

Welcome and Free Resource

Welcome to the Flourishing After Adversity podcast. I'm your host, Laura Mangum Broome. If you've been knocked down by life--grief, illness, loss, divorce, or unexpected change, you're in the right place. Here, we turn setbacks into stepping stones because healing, growth, and joy are not out of reach. They're available to you even in this season. 

 Before we dive in, if you ever find yourself caught in loops of worry, self-doubt, or mental exhaustion after a hard season, I created a free resource called Reframe the Spiral:  5 Quick Coping Strategies to Shift Negative Thoughts and Reclaim Your Day. You'll find the link in the show notes. 

How Empty of Me

I wanna start today with a line from Louise Hay and David Kessler's book, You Can Heal Your Heart.  "How empty of me to be so full of you."  Six words. When I read them for the first time, they stopped me completely because I knew exactly what they meant,  not as a concept, as a lived experience. I've walked through five major losses in five years: the loss of my teenage son, breast cancer, a heart transplant, the death of my father, and a sudden divorce after twenty-seven years of marriage.  Each one changed me. Each one took something. But one of the deepest losses across all of those seasons was the loss of myself.

Not in a dramatic sense, the quiet kind, the slow kind, the kind that happens when you spend years being so full of someone else, their needs,  their crises, their expectations,  that you forget to remain full of your own.  When those relationships ended by death, by choice, or by circumstances that chose for me, I was left standing in the middle of my own life, genuinely unsure of who was still in there.  Maybe you know that feeling.  That question, "Who am I now?" is not a sign of failure. It's a sign you were present, that you cared fully, and it's an invitation to come back to yourself. That's what today is about. 

Grief Is Grief

We live in a world that ranks loss. Some grief gets casseroles, sympathy cards, and public permission to fall apart. Other grief gets silence, raised eyebrows, or a quiet expectation that you should be over it by now. But grief doesn't follow these rules. Your heart knows what it lost, and the validity of your grief is not determined by whether anyone else understood the relationship.

David Kessler,  one of the world's leading grief experts, says it plainly, "Grief is grief." The source doesn't determine its validity. What you lost was real. 

The Layers You Lose

Here's what we don't talk about enough: when a significant relationship ends, you don't just lose the person, you lose layers.

You lose the role you played: wife, best friend, devoted daughter, loyal employee, the one who held everyone together.  When the relationship ends, that role ends with it. And for many women, that role was their identity.  You lose the future you imagined: growing old together, reconciling someday, the trip you never took, the conversation you never got to finish.  You lose the rituals that shaped your days: Sunday calls, inside jokes, the person you text first when something happened.

And you lose the identity you built around this relationship.  Who you were because of them, and sometimes who you suppressed for them.  That last one is the quiet one. It's also the heaviest. 

How We Disappear

I'd like to talk about how we disappear into the people we love.  It doesn't happen overnight. It sneaks up.  In a marriage or long-term partnership, it happens in small surrenders.  Maybe you stop making plans with your own friends because his schedule comes first, or you set aside what lit you up  because it didn't interest him.  Sometimes you stop voicing your opinions because the conflict isn't worth it. You manage the household, the relationship, everyone's feelings,  and somewhere in all that managing, you lose track of yourself.

In a deep friendship, it looks different but feels just as consuming. You rearrange your life around their needs.  You become the one they call in crisis, always available. You carry their pain alongside your own.  When that friendship ends through betrayal, distance, or growing apart, the grief catches people off guard. "It was just a friend," they say. But you know better. That was someone you built part of yourself around. 

In a family relationship, the roots run deepest. We don't choose our families, but we can spend decades trying to earn their love, manage their reactions, or simply survive their dysfunction.  You may have shaped entire decades of choices around a parent's approval, a sibling's volatility, or a role assigned to you at birth that you never chose.  When that relationship breaks or when you finally walk away, you're not just grieving the person, you're grieving the family you needed and never had. 

After losing someone to death, the loss is immediate and total. The spouse who was your partner in everything, the parent whose voice was woven into the background of your whole life.   The child who gave your life its fiercest meaning.  When they're gone, the routines and roles that grounded your sense of self shift all at once. 

In a workplace relationship, the grief is the most dismissed. But years of loyalty to a company or a leader, years where your job became your identity, leave a real wound. When that relationship ends, you don't just lose the paycheck,  you lose the version of yourself who believed in what you were building.   Here's what all these have in common.  We give so much of ourselves to the people and places we love that we forget to keep some of ourselves back. When those relationships end, we discover just how much of our identity was wrapped up in someone else. That's not weakness. That's what happens when we love without boundaries. 

Grieving the Old You

Grief after a significant loss doesn't just hurt, it gets into everything, your routines, your reflexes, the small daily moments you don't know you'd miss until they were gone. You reach for your phone to share something and then remember. You move through a day that used to feel full and wonder what to do with yourself.  You walk into a room and feel like a stranger in your own life.

I know this from the inside.  What nobody warned me about during my own hardest stretch wasn't the grief itself. It was this: I wasn't just grieving the people I'd lost, I was grieving the version of me that had existed inside those relationships, the self who had a role, a place, a sense of belonging.  When those were gone, I didn't know what was left, and I had to make a choice, the same choice I want to offer you today.

I could stay in that grief, or I could honor it and decide to move through it. Not move on, move through.  Honoring grief doesn't mean staying in it forever.  It means giving it the attention it deserves, not rushing it, not bypassing it, not pretending it isn't there, and then making the intentional choice to rebuild.

Time alone doesn't do that. I've seen women wait years thinking grief would eventually lift on its own, and sometimes it softens, but it doesn't rebuild you. Only intentional reinvention does that.

Radical Acceptance

That's where the first phase of the iCope2Hope System(TM) comes in: Radical Acceptance.  Let me be clear about what radical acceptance is not.

It's not being okay with what happened. It's not forgiveness. It's not pretending the loss wasn't real. It's this: You've stopped burning energy on the thought that this shouldn't have happened. You stop fighting reality long enough to see it clearly, and from that clear place, you choose your next step.

The first move within radical acceptance is what I call face the truth. Not the story you keep replaying, not the fantasy of what could have been. The truth of where you actually are right now. You are here. The relationship is over or changed forever, and you are still standing. That's not nothing. That's the starting line.

You don't need a grand plan right now. You need a place to start.

Three Places to Start

Here are three with reflection prompts.  Number one: grief without a deadline.  The most damaging thing we say to people in grief is that they should be over it by now. Someone probably said it to you. Maybe you've even said it to yourself. Drop that deadline. It doesn't serve you.  Grief moves in waves. Some days you'll feel stronger than you expected. Others will knock you flat--a smell, a song, a random Tuesday. Both are normal. Both are part of it. Neither means something is wrong with you.  The reflection prompt is this: What emotions am I currently pushing down because I think I shouldn't still be feeling them?  Don't rush to answer. Just ask it. 

Number two, ask yourself, "Who was I before?" One of the most powerful questions you can bring to this season, " Who was I before this relationship became my whole world?  What did you love before your energy got absorbed into someone else's needs and expectations?  What mattered to you before you started centering your life around theirs?  That woman is still in there. She hasn't gone anywhere. She's been quiet.

Survival mode silences everything that isn't immediately necessary. But she's waiting.  You don't have to have answers yet. You just have to be willing to ask.  The reflection prompt is write down three to five things you loved, wanted, or cared about before this relationship took center stage. Just three. Don't filter for what seems practical. Write what's true. That list is the beginning of your map back to yourself.

And number three: don't refill the empty space too fast.  Here's the trap that catches almost everyone.  When you're left feeling hollow,  every instinct says to fill that space quickly with another relationship, with  busyness, with food, scrolling on your phone, or a new situation to pour yourself into.

I get it. Emptiness is uncomfortable, but that empty space is not a problem to fix. It's room. Room for something new, something genuinely yours to take root.  Fill it too fast and you miss the opportunity. You delay the real rebuilding. You risk going right back to the beginning, giving yourself away again before you figured out who you are.

The goal isn't to stay empty. The goal is to get intentional about what comes next, starting with yourself.  Here's your permission slip. You are allowed to be a work in progress. You are allowed to not have it figured out yet. You are allowed to take up space in your own life again. 

Recap and Closing

Let's recap what we covered today.  Grief doesn't follow society's ranking of loss. Whatever type of relationship you lost, marriage, friendship, family, pet, or workplace, it's real and it deserves to be grieved.  When a significant relationship ends, you lose more than the person. You lose the role you played, the future you imagined, the daily rituals, and the identity you built around that connection.

We disappear into the people we love gradually through small surrenders, over-giving, and centering ourselves around others until we forget to keep any space for ourselves.  What nobody warns you about is this: you're not just grieving the person, you're grieving the version of you that existed inside the relationship.

Time alone doesn't rebuild you. Intentional reinvention does.  Radical acceptance,  The first phase of the iCope2Hope system starts with one step: face the truth of where you actually are right now.  Three places to start: grieve without a deadline, ask who you were before the loss, and don't refill the empty space too fast.

If you're in a season where you feel hollow, where a relationship has ended or been lost, or you're not sure who you are on the other side, I want you to hear this. You haven't lost yourself. You've lost a relationship that held a version of you, and as hard as that is, it's also an opening to come back to yourself,  to find out what it feels like to be full of you, your values, your voice, your vision.

Not the version that shrunk to keep the peace, not the version that gave herself away trying to earn love that should have been freely given. You, the real one.  The grief will move through. It always does when you let it, when you face it, feel it, and make the daily choice to keep going. Not moving on, moving through with intention, one step at a time.  You're right where you need to be. Growth happens one step at a time. 

Thank you for listening to the Flourishing After Adversity podcast. If this episode resonated with you, share it with someone navigating a hard season of loss or rebuilding. Leave a review. It helps more women find this community. And connect with me at iCope2Hope.com. The link is in the show notes. 

And don't forget to grab your free guide, Reframe the Spiral: 5 Quick Coping Strategies to Shift Negative Thoughts and Reclaim Your Day. The link is in the show notes, along with other free resources. 

Until next time, adversity can make you bitter or better. Choose better! You've got this!