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

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

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.

Come Back To Yourself Program- Apply at: www.savannanoelle.com/comeback

You know you should leave. You’ve known for a while. But every time you get close to the door, something pulls you back in. It feels like love. It feels like longing and a chemical rush.

You think that if you leave it, you won’t find anyone else and you’ll be left alone forever. You will not feel safe. It is toxic but familiar. You convince yourself that you need it.

I’ve definitely been there. I don’t speak often of the number of abusive relationships I’ve been involved in, but these dynamics speak directly to the way our childhood trauma sets the stage for these types of relationships we can’t seem to leave.

In Part 1 of this two-part series, we’re going deep into what a trauma bond actually is, why it forms, and what’s happening in your brain and body when you can’t seem to break free from the toxic relationship you’re in.

We’re talking intermittent reinforcement, nervous system hijacking, and the cycle that creates attachment not despite the pain — but because of it.

I’m also sharing my own experience with a specific relationship I was in where that trauma bond played out over five years — and how I finally found the courage to choose myself and what it took to let go.

If you’ve ever stayed longer than you should have, gone back when you swore you wouldn’t, or found yourself defending someone who keeps hurting you — this one is for you.

I hope you enjoy. 🤍