Ep #203: It Was Always You

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, episode 203, It Was Always You.

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, the only podcast that offers a proven process to help you work through your grief, to grow, evolve, and create a future you can truly look forward to. Here’s your host, Master Certified life coach, grief expert, widow, and mom, Krista St-Germain.

Hey there, welcome to another episode of the podcast. Getting another one recorded before I go to Spain to see my daughter because when this one airs I will probably still have jet lag. I will probably just have gotten back from Spain. So she sent me yesterday someone to follow on Instagram who has a whole lot of information about Mallorca, because I’ve never been to Mallorca. But we’re going to go there, we’re going to spend about a week there, while she is on break from school. And then we’ll head back to Sevilla where she lives and studies.

And then I’ll get to spend some time with her there in her little own environment and then I will come home. And I’m so looking forward to it, except that I also need to do some shopping before I go. I’m not so great with the clothes shopping. I don’t really like it, never really have. I would like it if somebody else just bought all my clothes. I just would rather somebody hand me outfits that are put together already and I just put them on. So anyway, I need to go out and brave the stores and make things match and look put together. So that’s coming too.

Okay, so this might be a slightly shorter episode than normal, but it comes up so much in coaching that I wanted to do an episode on it because I think it’s important. Here’s what it is. So often widows come to me for coaching and they are attributing the happiness, the satisfaction, the fulfillment, the confidence, the joy, anything good that they once felt to their person or the relationship that they had with their person. And as I say that, I recognize it very clearly because I did it too.

And the way it shows up is they made me feel so happy. They made me feel so good. Life was good because of them. Life will never be as good without them, they were the reason. And I get it and I don’t want to diminish anyone’s person. If you believe your person was wonderful, I am sure that they were and I love them and I love you. And I also don’t want you to believe that you are less powerful than I know you to be.

If you always believe that the reason you were happy before, the reason you were satisfied with your life before, the reason you felt any ‘positive emotion’ before is because of them then you’re missing out. You’re missing out on what you get to create in the future. You’re missing out on what you actually created in the past. You’re missing out on what is really true is that it was always you. It was always what was going on inside of your mind that created your experience.

It seems like it was them and I’m sure they were wonderful and I’m sure you loved your life with them. And in the most loving way possible I offer to you that it wasn’t them, it was you. I can joke about this. Hugo’s first wife is, so I didn’t actually know her before Hugo died really. We had met but we never really interacted. And once he died we actually had conversation and kind of became friends. And clearly two people having very different emotional experiences of the same person.

She had a whole different experience of Hugo than I did but yet he was the same person. Now, she wasn’t wrong and I wasn’t right or vice versa, but we had different experiences of a human based on what was going on inside of us. I look at my ex-husband, my first husband and his new wife, same thing, same person, she’s having a different experience than I had. I wasn’t right and she’s not wrong, but we’re having different experiences of our relationships with them and our lives with them because we’re having different thoughts about them.

Again, not good or bad, not right or wrong, I’m not trying to wrong anyone, to shame anyone. I’m trying to empower you. All those feelings that you felt when they were alive, it seems like it was because of how they treated you or the things that you did or the life that you shared. Really it was what you thought about yourself and what you thought about your life and what you thought about them. They actually didn’t create your confidence. Now, you may have heavily leveraged their belief in you.

You may have given yourself permission to believe things about yourself because they believed those things about you. And so you may have no practice believing those things about yourself without them being there. But they actually couldn’t have ever created your feelings, other humans can’t, they just can’t do it. Our feelings are caused by the way that we think, which is why we can all have different emotional experiences of the same humans. And also that life that you had with them, you are the one who put yourself in a position to have that life.

You put yourself out there to meet that person. You were willing to feel vulnerable, to have an authentic relationship. You did the hard work that relationships require. You stayed and stuck it out. And whatever it is you thought about your relationship, I want you to own it in the most empowering way possible. Because if you can own what you have created in the past, whether you now perceive it as positive or negative.

If you can own what you created in the past then you will start to see what I believe, which is that you have so much more power in your life than it feels like you do when you’ve lost your spouse. And that really matters to me. As long as you attribute your fulfillment in life to them, you give them credit, you never get to feel fulfilled again because they can’t come back. And again, we don’t need to believe that they weren’t amazing. We can believe they were amazing. They were amazing. Hugo was amazing and it was always me.

I put myself in that place to meet him. I did the work that it required of me to be vulnerable and honest and open up and form a connection to him. I did the work of staying in that relationship. Now, he did too, I’m not diminishing him. But I use this to empower myself and I use this to empower you because if you did it then, it’s still you. Now, you don’t need a relationship to be happy, please don’t hear me say that.

I know there were socialized as women in this country to believe that we do, that somehow we are damaged if we are not in relationships and that somehow it’s better to be partnered than to be solo. I totally disagree with that. I think you can be 100% loving your life and not be in a partnered relationship. Now, I have still chosen to be in a partnered relationship. So that’s my choice and also I got to that place because I figured out how to love my life and then decided it would be fun to be in a relationship, fun and a bunch of work.

So notice when your brain wants to tell you that you didn’t create what you once had. Notice when your brain wants to give credit to something outside of you for something you experienced inside of you. And get really curious. What if I took credit for my part in that. What if I gave myself a little bit of love and said, “Yeah, you know what, you did do that. You did put yourself in that place. You did do the work of that relationship. You did think all of those thoughts that made you feel so good even though you probably didn’t even know you were doing it, you did that.

It was always you and if you did it then, what if you could do it again in whatever that means in your next chapter. It doesn’t have to mean another relationship. But if you genuinely loved your life before, it wasn’t because of your life. It wasn’t because of something outside of you. It was because of what you believed about yourself and your life and your future and the things that you did to get you to that place of belief. You’re so much more powerful than you know. Please don’t give credit to things outside of you in a way that holds you back from what you want.

Okay, short, sweet, to the point. I hope it helps you. I hope it helps you. I hope you see yourself as more powerful and you don’t give that away to something outside of you because we all have it. Alright, I love you, you’ve got this, take care and I’ll see you next week, bye bye.

If you like what you’ve been hearing on this podcast and want to create a future you can truly get excited about after the loss of your spouse, I invite you to join my Mom Goes On coaching program. It’s small group coaching just for widowed moms like you where I’ll help you figure out what’s holding you back and give you the tools and support you need so you can move forward with confidence.

Please don’t settle for a new normal that’s less than you deserve. Go to coachingwithkrista.com and click work with me for details and the next steps. I can’t wait to meet you.