The Savanna Noelle Podcast

1:1 Coaching/Book a Session: www.savannanoelle.com/comeback

Let’s be honest. The birthday text to your ex is rarely about their birthday.

It’s about regulating the part of you that still feels you need closure.

It’s also the hope, even in a small way, that their response might give you the dose of validation and assurance that you mattered, that they still care.

It’s your attachment strategy playing out again, hoping for confirmation that you were loved, that it meant something, and that you weren’t so fully rejected that it means you’re unlovable.

I don’t believe it’s grounded in reality or an embodied, felt, secure place. It is often coming from the place of reactivity, a child part, so desperately seeking to know they are safe and protected.

When we dig deeper and get to the roots of our attachment strategies, we find a very old story playing out of unmet needs.

We find a primal human tendency surface because our nervous system has learned how to adapt to survive.

I believe that some of the hardest work we face is learning to sit with ourselves in discomfort and fear.

It is learning to sit in the unknowns and the uncertainties of our lives, trusting in ourselves.

Self-trust is just a necessary part of the journey.

It has taken me a while to finally understand that we must be so fierce about tending to our own nervous systems.

The moment we notice a child part surfacing, our need for security, validation, and assurance, we immediately come to the aid of that child part, without looking to external sources of validation that would only temporary satisfy our attachment wounds.

And what I mean by this isn’t for us to have to go through these moments alone- but to tend to the needs of that child part through breath work, exercise, therapy, calling a friend, and by learning to nurture the parts of us that are scared, activated, and operating from a trauma response.

So going “no contact” is a self-care boundary that must be rooted in our own self trust so that we stop feeding the lion.

We cannot keep feeding the thing that continues to activate us in ways that make us spiral.

It means we have a sacred discipline to care so much about our own nervous system and emotional calm and peace, than whether someone approves or validates us.

It means we care so deeply for ourselves that we no longer chase closure or seek their attention in order to be whole or to feel okay.

We no longer abandon ourselves.

I hope you’ll have a listen, and if you feel called to share it with someone who could really use it, please do.

Thank you. Keep choosing yourself.

1:1 Coaching: www.savannanoelle.com/comeback

www.savannanoelle.com

I missed you last week. I was under the weather and needed to rest, but I’m back with a new episode for all my personal growth junkies.

You know who you are. *raises hand

You’ve been digging into “the work,” looking at your unhealthy patterns, reading the books, going to therapy, jumping into those cold plunges, building up your social network, and wondering if any of it is actually making a difference in your day-to-day life.

For a long time I thought that I’d healed something just because I’d survived it.

To be fair, I’ve survived a lot of insane things thus far.

My ambition is always trying to speed-run healing and my conviction and intuition are strong, so I’d go through a hard season and assume that meant I was more integrated, wiser, healthier.

But going through hard s**t doesn’t automatically make us experts on what it means to be a whole human, to truly be healed.

I mean, it just means we went through it, and maybe we’re more resilient and have more capacity because of it. That capacity matters... I won’t downplay that. I’m very proud of the “getting through it” part. It speaks for itself.

But how do you know you’re actually healing? How do you know you’re on the healthier side of things? How do you know the conversations in therapy and the insights you’re collecting are translating into something powerfully transformative for you? That you aren’t repeating the same dramas over and over with different characters?

What I’ve realized in this new decade is that we heal to the degree that we become aware. To the degree that we can let go. To the degree that we care less about what other people think and more about what WE think.

To the degree that we somatically release what’s been held inside. To the degree that we start embodying the things we say we want: self-compassion, kindness, grace, ad the ability to surrender and become unencumbered. To the degree that finally….something which used to light us up with charge no longer does.

We heal to the degree that we understand ourselves more deeply and take full responsibility for how we think, how we behave, and how we show up to the people around us. As one of my spiritual teachers would say, “We heal to the degree that we become more and never less than our true selves.”

Whatever that means… I mean, you get the idea, right?

In this next episode I talk about what it feels like when drama is no longer the operating system we live from. And when that energetic charge starts to dissipate. When you stop chasing the familiar chaos from the past. When peace no longer feels boring to you, and it feels so damn good to actually be bored for once without constant distraction.

And when you can sit with someone else’s discomfort without abandoning yourself to fix it.

I also share about a moment with a friend who ran into an ex of his at a work dinner, and what he did that showed me how far he’d really come.

And I talk about my own years of going back time and again to the same men who never chose me or honored me, because the dopamine felt like proof that I mattered.

I feel that healing isn’t the absence of triggers.

It’s the speed and ease with which you return to yourself.

Coming home to yourself is the greatest gift you’ll ever give your life.

As always, please like, comment, and share my work with someone who’s been doing “the work” and could use the reminder.

As I always say….You’re amazing. Enjoy the episode.

Happy to be doing “the work” with you.

Savanna

1:1 Coaching Available at: www.savannanoelle.com/comeback

Free grounding meditation: www.savannanoelle.com/freeaudio

No matter what attachment style you tend to lean into, when a relationship ends, your nervous system gets thrown straight into dysregulation.

We are taught by movies, songs, and our culture of how to fall in love, but we aren’t really prepared or taught what to do in the initial stages of activation after something ends.

We typically fall into our coping mechanisms and conditioning, which often looks like dissociation, escape, avoidance, shock, or depression.

When you bond with someone, your nervous system literally wires itself to them. This is why co-regulation is such a beautiful thing. Their voice regulates you. Their texts spike your dopamine. Their body next to yours tells your system that you’re safe.

So when they leave or when the usual, familiar pattern stops, your brain doesn’t just go, “Okay, noted, moving on.”

It usually goes into panic. It’s trying to fill in the blanks with what just happened, what to fill the space with, who’s to blame, what went wrong, and how to make the pain of it go away.

Studies of the brain during heartbreak have shown that the same circuits that light up for physical pain and drug withdrawal light up in the brain during a breakup. That’s why you feel it in your throat and chest. That’s why you’re staring at your phone waiting for a text, replaying old voice notes, or looking for them to walk through the door.

That’s why you can’t stop scrolling on social media or watching countless videos on breakups so that you have some sense of control.

It’s a trauma response. Your body is in actual withdrawal. Your nervous system wants to familiarity of the pattern back.

And something I wish I had understood long ago is that you cannot logic your way out of a nervous system response. You have to feel your way out.

The feeling is the healing.

Trying to outrun the grief with work, food, or distractions just postpones it.

I deeply believe that the pace at which you heal is directly tied to your willingness to stay with yourself through the uncomfortable void… and to build that resilience muscle, reframe the narrative, and remember who you are, we have to learn how to work with our nervous system and our protective parts.

In this week’s episode of the podcast, I’m walking us through what’s actually happening in your brain and body during a breakup, why “just moving on” is unhelpful advice initially, and some of the post-breakup mistakes I’ve made that you should definitely avoid.

I hope you enjoy it. :)

P.S. If your system feels disregulated right now and you need a grounding space, check out my free meditation for download at www.savannanoelle.com/freeaudio.

Or, if you’re ready to dive deeper into attachment work and healing these patterns, check out my 1-on-1 program, Come Back to Yourself. Links are in the show notes.

1:1 Coaching: www.savannanoelle.com/comebackMy girlfriends who know me best have asked me a very important question over the years, one I can finally answer without hesitation.

“Savanna, if an emotionally available, stable, safe, ready, secure man, doing his own work on himself, showed up in your orbit, would you even know how to spot him? Would you be ready to stay?”

You see, I know how to operate and dance in the land of the unavailable, inconsistent man.

It’s familiar. It’s how I learned what love was.

But would I know in my nervous system what safety and security actually felt like if it appeared before me?

Would I recognize it, and feel calm in my body, if he was consistent, made an effort, reciprocated, and had the crucial conversations when conflict hit?

For a lot of my life I thought maybe I was just kissing too many frogs.

But really, it was my nervous system running my love life, hopping from one unavailable, inconsistent, abusive man to the next.

So when initially asked this question years ago, I figured that if that kind of man came along, my anxiety would finally settle, and I’d know how to step into it.

But in reality, it was something much deeper than that.

As I talked about in Part 1, our attachment wounds and unhealed traumas shape our nervous system, and that shapes our capacity: how much discomfort and uncertainty we can hold, how much we cling, and how close someone can get before we shut down or run.

Are we able to self-regulate instead of cling to someone when we fear abandonment, when those attachment wounds are screaming at us?

Are we able to stay in the emotional discomfort with someone when we fear rejection or not being good enough, without fleeing?

We can all say we want secure, consistent, healthy, communicative relationships. But if we don't consider and work with the nervous system we've developed over the span of our lives, all the ways we learned to cope to be seen, loved, and validated, we keep attracting the very thing we don't want.

This is why the dance of the unavailable person is so seductive, and such an easy scapegoat. Our wounds keep us in the cycle of the familiar ways we’ve learned to cope. Until our relationships become so unmanageable and toxic, and the cost of self-abandonment and self-betrayal grows so great that we are finally forced to learn how to soothe our own inner landscape. You start to see that you are the common denominator in all of your relationships. It takes work with our protective parts.

So this next episode is all about how we build capacity. The actual tools.

Capacity is something we practice.

It’s learning how to stay when you want to run, or when you’re sitting in discomfort.

It’s getting curious instead of reactive.

It’s the ability to hear a need without falling into shame or defensiveness.

It’s the capacity to let someone be exactly who they are without abandoning what you know about yourself.

It’s the ability to listen with compassion first, without needing to be right or to be understood. (I struggle with this one.)

And most of this work happens in the body, not in the mind.

You can study your attachment patterns and understand them completely and still feel flooded the moment things get real in a relationship. That’s because your nervous system learns through experience, contrast, by getting curious about your own triggers and why you react the way you do.

In this episode, I explore how emotional capacity is built, how disconfirming experiences help us reprogram our deeply held beliefs, and the practical tools that can help you begin strengthening your own nervous system and inner resilience.

I also share more of my own story: what it has taken to stop abandoning myself, and how learning to regulate changed not only my relationships, but my relationship with myself.

I hope you enjoy it, and as always, if this episode resonates with you or you have a topic you’d like me to cover on the pod, please “like,” share and subscribe or send me an inquiry at: www.savannanoelle.com/support, and I will make sure your question or topic is covered during another episode.

Hugs, Savanna

For my coaching program go to: www.savannanoelle.com/comeback.

I’ve spent a number of years feeling completely crazy in relationships, and i’m starting to finally understand why.

I’ve been sitting with these questions for some time:

Why do some relationships fall apart without any real conversation?Why do people walk away instead of repairing or learning to repair?Why do needs often go unmet and silence or ghosting becomes normal behavior?

Why do our attachment wounds show up so loudly the moment things get emotionally real?

It all comes down to capacity.

The capacity to hold difficult emotions. It’s the shame, guilt, and unworthiness we carry.

The capacity to stay in discomfort when you want to shut down.

The capacity for hard conversations.

The capacity to hold another’s pain or fear with reverence and curiosity without attacking or getting defensive.

Until I began learning about somatic work, nervous system regulation, and building emotional capacity, I found myself constantly second-guessing my intuition, over-functioning in relationships, and shrinking parts of myself in the hopes of being chosen.

I carried the emotional weight for two people, often for someone who wasn’t even fully all in with me, and I rarely felt truly met.

It wasn’t until I began seeing my role in these relationship dynamics with honesty and compassion that everything started to make sense.

I watched my own unhealed wounds and attachment patterns collide with theirs, playing out the same familiar dance over and over again.

Ultimately, my awareness became a doorway for me discover the missing piece I had been looking for in all of my personal growth work. It clicked.

Through nervous system work, “parts” work, and learning to expand my capacity to stay present with discomfort and uncertainty instead of trying to escape it, I finally began transforming the patterns that had kept me stuck for so long.

I believe that the quality of your life isn’t determined by how much pain and discomfort you avoid. It’s determined by how much discomfort you can safely hold without abandoning yourself.

It’s determined by how often you can sit in the unknown and fear of abandonment, in difficult emotions without tapping out, shutting down, or placating. And what i’m discovering is that nervous system regulation and our ability to, moment by moment, lean in to the hard things and get curious about them, the more equiped and resilient we are when we’re in the fire with another.

The fire doesn’t burn us up so quickly.

In this Part 1 episode of the podcast, I break down what capacity actually is, how it shows up in anxious and avoidant dynamics, and what it looks like in the day to day when one person can stay and the other can’t.

I also share some of my own very vulnerable, messy story: my unhealed patterns, the over-functioning, and the moments I finally started to see what was really happening.

What is so beautiful about this is that we can change it!

We can expand our capacity, learn to self soothe, and build healthy connections with others. I believe this is some of the most important work of your life.

Part 2 will be about how we build capacity through learning how to become emotionally resilient through disconfirming experiences and what tools you can use to start to learn about your inner landscape.

I hope you enjoy it, and as always, if this episode resonates with you or you have a topic you’d like me to cover on the pod, please “like,” share and subscribe or send me an inquiry at: www.savannanoelle.com/support, and I will make sure your question or topic is covered during the broadcast.

Hugs,Savanna

To send a question or if you have topics you'd like me to explore on future episodes, email me at: www.savannanoelle.com/support.

Savi Chats: www.savannanoelle.com/savichats

Coaching Program: www.savannanoelle.com/comeback

I’ve spent a number of years making someone’s capacity and inability to sit with their discomfort my own worthiness problem.

And for an even longer time, I didn’t realize they were just not available and neither was I to myself. I did not understand this because the familiarity of abuse, unavailable people, and emotional neglect was extremely high in my early years.

Someone can love you and still not have the capacity to meet you where you need them or want them to be.

In this next podcast episode, I talk about what unavailability actually looks like, and what we do in response to unavailability. I speak about the ways we play small, we shrink, we carry the emotional labor for both people, avoiding speaking up for our needs or how we feel. I share what self abandonment really looks like and how to walk the path back to ourselves.

I also share a personal story about a relationship I had where I had to draw a line in the sand and walk away from someone I genuinely loved because staying meant leaving myself.

This episode is for anyone who is waiting for someone to change, waiting for someone to become who they’ve shown you they’re not ready to be.

Some people can’t meet you, and when they show you this, believe them.

Then grieve. And return to yourself.

Listen on Spotify, Apple, or here on Substack.

In the meantime, if there is a topic you are wanting me to cover on the pod, please do reach out here in a message, reply to this email, or send it to www.savannanoelle.com/support. I’d love to address any comments, questions, or topics you’d like me to explore further.

I hope you enjoy it.

-Savanna

Savi Chats Monthly Group: www.savannanoelle.com/savichats

1:1 Coaching: www.savannanoelle.com/comeback

In part 1, I told you about the three and a half years I spent over-functioning in a relationship with a man who was never fully in it with me.

Ugh. Well, what I didn’t tell you is what it did to me.

It is incredibly lonely to be involved in a relationship that you know is full of potential and chemistry, but the person you’re with is simply unavailable.

And you don’t want to admit it to yourself. You don’t want to believe this is true.

You want to believe that the breadcrumbs they give you is care, and you don’t realize how much effort and emotional labor you’re carrying in the relationship.

You tell yourself they are just busy or going through a hard time. They still want to see you and get all the benefits of a relationship, but the moment you want to talk about your relationship status or about doing things together, they’re too busy, they don’t want labels, or they only want to “keep it light.”

There is an illusion with this dynamic that if you love harder, support more, do more, make everything easier for them, then eventually they will choose you fully- it will someday align.

And eventually, the disappointments start to become greater, needs go unmet and you find yourself angry and resentful because of how very little about them has changed.

Choosing potential and people pleasing has a huge cost: your self respect.

You stop trusting yourself, and your nervous system and fears of disconnection and ultimately abandonment is running the dynamic.

You forget what you really want because potential seems more appealing than the facing the truth that they really don’t want the relationship you want.

It isn’t until we get radically honest with ourselves about the lies we continue to believe that we will be free.

So in the case of that relationship and all that effort I was making? It let him off the hook. He never had to show up because I was already doing it for both of us. Then I’d be quietly furious that he wasn’t trying harder. He got to live in the dynamic without having to work very hard to keep it intact or show up fully because I did it for us.

I was so afraid of losing the connection that I abandoned myself over and over not realizing that I could have better.

This episode is about the actual cost and what over-functioning takes from you.

My hope is that as you listen, you remember that when you stop over-functioning and accepting bad behavior from the people in your relationships, not only do you start to respect and trust yourself more, but you start to attract people who are aligned with you.

I hope you enjoy the episode.

Love,

Savanna

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

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

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