(00:10.895)

Hey friend, welcome to the Unfolding Podcast where science meets soul and healing becomes an act of power. I'm your host and friend, Yvonne Wink, life coach, writer, student, and total nerd of all things psychology. I'm also a woman in the middle of her own unfolding. Someone who believes that self-awareness is the new success. Every week we explore how the brain

The body and the heart work together to create the life you truly desire. Because you're not starting over. You're rising higher. You're unfolding.

After last week's door episode, I was inundated with so much feedback and support questions. I loved it all. Thank you. But I want to say truly I'm learning and growing every day and the way your messages and DMS land in my heart is immeasurable. So keep them coming and thank you. Last week, I talked about the door.

that defining moment that split my life into before and after. But here's the truth. The hardest part wasn't the moment itself. wasn't the door and what happened at the door itself. It was the quiet after the ache, the stillness that follows when something ends, whether it's a person, a friendship, or a version of yourself.

(01:57.944)

Today I'll be talking about that ache. The ache of losing people. My mom, those I once loved deeply. And friendships that were part of my becoming, the ones that felt like forever.

because endings are teachers. They ask us something. They ask us, who am I now that the door has closed?

(02:25.28)

Some of you are a bit savage. I got a lot of these people asking if I was following up with a revenge episode. Great suggestions though. I'm going to hand that over to my producer. You know what? In fact, let's just do a revenge episode right now. It'll be quick. Here we go. I'll tell you what the best revenge actually is. Nothing. Here's my advice.

Heal yourself. Love yourself. Take really good care of yourself. Take yourself on dates. Get dressed up. Create a wonderful playlist of music that makes you happy. Buy yourself flowers. Laugh. Cry. And I mean really cry. Surround yourself with good people while your heart heals. Travel.

get a puppy. But most importantly, remind yourself of this. My person, my real person, the love of my life, my future life partner, husband, wife would have never treated me that way. And my real friends.

would have never done that to me. My village, my real crew, they would have never treated me that way. That's the antidote.

Because here's the truth. They know.

(04:03.384)

He knows he'll never find another love like mine. He knows he'll never find another woman who loved him at his absolute worst and who kept reminding him of his worth, reminding him of those incredible qualities that I saw. Someone who believed that he could do better and be better and treated him that way.

And those friends, the ones who tried to speak poorly of you after you pulled away? They know too. They know you were loyal, selfless, trustworthy to a fault. They know you were legit, you were the ride or die. They know your love was unconditional, and they hurt you anyway. And that tells you everything you need to know. So no.

I don't believe in revenge. don't believe in the TikToks and the Instagram reels of the glow ups, you know, to make someone jealous or the notion that in order to get over someone, you got to get under someone else. It's far more powerful to walk away silently. It doesn't matter if your story, if your side of the story is never told, if your story never comes out to light.

And this might be a one to swallow, but I'm to go one layer deeper and I'm going to say this clearly. Don't regret people. No regrets, only revelations.

And look, I know this next part might sting a little, but stay with me here. We don't have to regret people. I know what you're thinking. know you're thinking, Yvonne, you have no idea how I was played. You have no idea what those friends did and said to me and, and how I was treated so unfairly. I absolutely regret that man. I absolutely regret that group of friends.

(06:12.823)

Some of us were played pretty dirty. I was. Some of us were devastated by people we once loved and trusted.

And I'm sure that some of you are probably even wondering, so wait, so are you going to forgive the guy from the door? Can you find a lesson in that pain, in that betrayal? And the short answer is yes. Yeah.

Not for him, but for me.

Here's what I mean. We don't have to regret the people who taught us what we were ready to learn. Boom, mic drop.

Sit with that for a second. I mean it. That truth can sting, but it also can set you free. We don't have to regret the people who taught us what we were ready to learn.

(07:13.473)

They were mirrors reflecting back what still needed healing. They unveiled the parts of us that still needed our attention. They revealed where we still believed love had to be earned, proven or rescued.

(07:35.24)

Every experience becomes part of your unfolding process. That, that, that method, the process of revealing what still needs to be seen, healed and integrated. So don't regret people honor the lesson, transform it into wisdom.

(08:02.09)

I wish I'd learned this lesson years ago that not everyone is going to understand me, like me, or even try to. I know that's hard to believe, but truly for most of my life, I don't know why, but I needed people to get me. Okay, come on. All my Aquarius is out there. You know what I'm talking about here. You know what I mean. We're

We're different. We're a little eccentric, a little rebellious, maybe quirky, odd, weird. We're deep one minute, detached the next. We crave deep connection, but also we own our space. Beat it. Kick rocks. I need some time. I know it's confusing even for us. So I spent years trying to translate

myself to people. mean, I was trying to prove that I wasn't a bad person. wasn't cold, aloof, rejecting them or complicated or that I wasn't too much. I wanted them to know that I was a good person. So I'd explain and I'd over explain and over explain. I'd even shrink myself to fit their comfort zones.

I'd stay too long in places that no longer felt like home.

But here's what I know now. I don't need everyone to like me. I just need to stay someone I like. And that's freedom.

(09:45.162)

The truth is not everyone will accept you, understand you, or vibe with your energy. For some people, you'll be too opinionated, too loud, too soft, too spiritual, too something, too blah. And none of it has anything to do with you. Let it go. People respond to life through their own lens, their unhealed wounds, their stories, their projections.

We all do it.

It's exhausting trying to contort yourself to fit someone else's comfort. I'm exhausted. So now as a recovering people pleaser, I just focus on being a really good human. Just, I'm just doing my best to love people, to listen, to have compassion and empathy and also to self-reflect and to take responsibility when I get it wrong, when I'm wrong. I own my s**t.

Because here's a simple truth that I wish we were all taught. If someone hurts you, it's their responsibility to tell you and yours to listen. Cause what I don't do anymore is try to read people's minds. I am actually really good at it as an Aquarius, very intuitive, but I don't.

I'm over that part. don't walk into rooms wondering if I'm liked or if I'm good enough or if I should be there. I just assume I am. I assume love. I assume peace. I assume that I belong.

(11:36.746)

until someone clearly tells me otherwise. And if someone's energy shifts or they seem distant or having an off day, I don't automatically make it mean that I did something wrong. Maybe they're just at war with themselves. Maybe it's not about me at all.

That's the kind of freedom that comes with self-trust. When you stop guessing who loves you and start knowing you do.

That's emotional maturity. It's boundaries with grace.

(12:18.858)

I posted something the other day. don't exactly remember it, so I'm going to butcher it. So bear with me here. You'll get the gist of it. It said something to the effect, we don't have haters. We have people who don't know how to love themselves. They hate themselves and they try to project that onto you. And it hit a nerve because it's true. People who are at war with themselves will always find something to battle in you.

Think about it. The angry cashier during the holidays. Maybe the relative who always needs to be right. Well, it's rarely about you. It's just, it's bumper cars. It's unhealed people bumping into unhealed people.

Your job isn't to join the fight. It's to stay anchored in your peace and let them work out their reflection.

Because once you understand projection, you stop personalizing other people's pain. And that's when you finally feel free.

(13:29.546)

Last night I got a message from someone who asked me a really, really interesting question. It was several that I read through, but this one just stood out. And it was, came to, my answer came to me instantly. I even blurted it out loud. And then I responded. But the message was, the question was, what was the most difficult thing you faced this year while traveling, writing, dealing with your broken heart, moving?

What was the most difficult thing you faced this year?

(14:03.232)

And my response was, having to walk away from people I loved with every ounce of my heart.

(14:15.615)

having to walk away from people that I loved with every ounce of my heart that I wasn't ready to let go of.

but I had to walk away from them. No one really talks about that.

The walking away from the familiar? The letting go of people you once imagined forever with?

(14:39.923)

And so it got me thinking, it got me actually ruminating on something even deeper. Why didn't we learn this in school? Why didn't we learn how to self love, right? How to love ourselves the way we were taught to love and serve others. Why wasn't it? Why wasn't that a requirement?

Why wasn't there a class on boundaries, on understanding healing, on understanding our trauma, you know, our childhood trauma and grief, or even our adult trauma and the grieving process or how to walk away from people who don't treat us right. I mean, we learned algebra, photosynthesis. We learned how to write a five paragraph essay. And I don't want to age myself here, but

I learned how to churn butter and not like a colonial woman on a on an airplane wing. But no one taught us how to say no without guilt. No one taught us that no is a complete sentence. Period. Or that protecting your peace isn't selfish, it's self-honoring.

We weren't taught what to do when someone we love keeps hurting us. We weren't taught that walking away from disrespect is an act of self-respect. Think about it. As girls, many of us were encouraged to do what? Be sweet and kind and share, be accommodating and just smile. Don't be too loud. Keep smiling. God forbid you have a potty mouth.

(16:26.603)

I must have missed that lesson, but right. We're told to be confident, but not that confident. Be soft, but not sensitive. Keep your chin up, right? Be strong, but don't you dare intimidate. Be beautiful, but don't make others jealous.

And for boys, it was the opposite message, but the same wound. Toughen up. Don't cry. Why are you acting like a girl? Well, boys will be boys.

So from a young age, we all learned to perform our worthiness. We learned to measure love by approval, to silence discomfort for connection, to apologize for taking up space.

We learned that keeping the peace, even when it hurt, that was noble. Right. And staying quiet and following the rules, being a good person made us just lovable. Bending made us good. And maybe that's the moment that we started leading ourselves little by little. Every time we chose harmony over honesty.

And so we improvise. We stay too long. We try to fix what we didn't break. We even let people bleed all over us, even though we weren't the ones who cut them.

(18:06.314)

And one day you wake up and realize you've been editing yourself out of your own story. You've been proofreading your personality to make other people comfortable. Rewriting your boundaries in pencil. I did this for years. I even handed over the eraser here. Here you go. Just in case they needed to erase my boundaries when it suited their needs.

You've been auditioning for roles in other people's narratives, forgetting you were the author, producer, and the main attraction all along.

And that's when the ache begins. There's the ache again, the ache of realizing how much of yourself you've traded for love, for belonging, for being the good one, the easy going and chill one.

But here's the truth, you don't have to keep auditioning for a part you already own.

Your worth was never meant to be negotiated. It was meant to be remembered. And I hope you do.

(19:20.138)

I was thinking about it, wondering if maybe that's why we struggle so much as adults, not because we're broken or we don't know what to do or how to do it, but maybe because we were never taught the emotional basics of being human.

And when you finally stop editing yourself, when you start standing in your truth, that's when the holy ache begins. There's a strange, I want to call it sacred pain that comes with choosing yourself for the very first time. It's not loud. It's not dramatic. It's quiet, almost reverent. You almost just blurted out.

like I did when I answered that question. It's like the body is exhaling after holding its breath for years. It's that, huh.

(20:24.744)

It's the ache that follows the awakening. The ache that tells you I can't keep betraying myself to stay loved.

And you start to see clearly the relationship you outgrew, the friendship that's been one sided for far too long. The version of you that survived on pleasing and pretending and choosing yourself in those moments. It feels like freedom, but it also feels like grief, because growth always has a cost. And when you heal, you start losing things that were never meant to stay. Illusions, attachments, versions of yourself that made everyone else comfortable.

It's sacred, but it hurts. And that's why I call it the holy ache.

(21:25.969)

I first learned the shape of grief when my mom passed.

(21:33.991)

When my mom passed, it wasn't just sadness. was disorientation. I woke up one morning and it's like waking up in a life that suddenly didn't make sense anymore. It didn't fit anymore.

And grief certainly doesn't ask for permission. It just moves right in. It just kind of guts you out. It hollows you out. It felt like someone used a heart-shaped cookie cutter and then just pressed it hard against my chest and just carved out that whole stamping, that heart-shaped vacancy, yanked out the what was inside and just discarded it.

Where something sacred used to live. It's now hollow. The hole never gets filled but it's a reminder of how deeply you are capable of loving.

(22:31.655)

Right? The days blur together. The world keeps spinning and going. Right? You feel underwater watching life just move while you're standing still there.

And every loss that comes after touches that same scar not to reopen it, but to remind you where love once lived.

Once you've known that kind of love, you recognize its absence. The way a room feels different when the laughter is gone. The way silence can sound like memory. That recognition, that echo.

It's both the cost and the proof of having loved so deeply and been loved so deeply. And after that, you start to recognize its fingerprints everywhere in friendships that drift in partners who betray the safe places that you built for them. In moments you realize you've been trying to make almost love, almost in love with me, feel like enough.

(23:52.177)

Love and loss live in the same room. You can't separate them. They come as a set. One teaches you depth. The other teaches you release. And those of you that have that know loss and grief all too well, you know exactly what that means. One teaches you depth. The other teaches you release.

It also reminds me of something that we don't talk about enough. And that's the quiet heartbreak of friendship breakups. We talk endlessly about romantic heartbreak, right? There's a book, there's a class, there's a therapist, there's everything you can think of when it comes to romantic heartbreak. But nobody warns you about the quiet grief of friendship breakups.

Our brains don't separate romantic love from deep friendship. Attachment is attachment. That's why friendship breakups can hurt just as much, sometimes more, because they're woven into our sense of safety.

Some friendships don't end in explosions. They evaporate quietly. They dissolve in slow motion without confrontation or closure. And that's what makes them so confusing. You start wondering if you imagined the closeness, you did something wrong.

And then there are the ones that end all at once, a sharp word, a sudden silence, door that closes without warning. The shock of that can sting just as deeply as the slow fade though. Different stories, same ache, both hurt because both are loss. One leaves you aching with confusion. The other leaves you reeling from impact, but either way your heart is left trying to make sense of the empty space where connection used to live.

The truth is, it's not that you're broken, it's that you're evolving and not everyone will want to rise with you. Some people were only meant to meet the version of you that needed them then, not the one who is currently unfolding.

(26:16.659)

Here's the thing, emotional attachment isn't just poetic, it's biological. When we bond with someone, our brain releases oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin, the beautiful chemicals that tell us this is safety, this is love, this is home. And over time, your nervous system starts to weave itself around theirs. And that's why even when a relationship isn't good for you, your body still reaches for it.

letting go feels like withdrawal because in a way it is think about it like this. Your brain is losing its favorite chemical cocktail. That's why detachment feels like deprivation, not because you're weak, but because your biology hasn't caught up to your truth yet. It's true. MRI MRI studies. It's even shown that the same regions of the brain that activate during physical pain,

light up during emotional loss. So if you've ever felt this or have heard someone say that their heart physically hurts, there's no exaggeration there. You're describing neuroscience. It's not just emotional, it's neural. You're performing delicate brain surgery, unwiring thousands of tiny emotional filaments that once whispered, this is home. It's delicate. It's messy.

and it's absolutely necessary. I want to say something and I'm going to say it gently. When we keep allowing poor behavior, especially from people we love, we abandon ourselves. And every time we do, we teach our nervous system that their comfort matters more than our peace. That's not love. That's conditioning. Learned Survival.

but I got some good news for you. This is where your unfolding begins. Your brain can heal itself. It's called neuroplasticity. It's the brain's ability to rewire itself through new experiences and repeated choices. So guess what folks? You can teach an old dog new tricks. Every time you choose peace over chaos, truth over denial,

(28:45.052)

You're teaching your body something new. That love doesn't have to hurt to feel real. Every time you place your hand on your heart and repeat after me the affirmation, you're teaching your brain something new. You're literally rewiring your brain for safety. One choice, one breath, one boundary at a time. That's the real unfolding. Not in the absence of pain, but in the reclaiming of your peace.

And what's incredible here is once your brain starts to feel safe again, guess what? Your heart follows and you begin to remember yourself. The noise quiets, the panic softens. You stop mistaking chaos for connection. You start hearing your own voice again. At first it's faint, like a memory trying to find its way home. But over time it does, it gets stronger.

And then you do, remember your light, the one that's always been there, even when you forgot how to see it.

Here's your unfolding. When we finally walk away, we think we're losing something outside of us. But what if we're actually remembering something inside of us? I've been deep diving and I've been teaching a lot on this lately because sometimes I'm just going to say it. It's our love that makes people so special. It's our softness, our grace, our presence, our forgiveness, our capacity, our humor.

That's what makes people so special. We pour so much light into others that we forget we are the source of that light.

(30:35.781)

So when they leave, the glow goes with them for a while. And the world, for a moment, looks dimmer. The things that used to sparkle feel muted. But eventually, and slowly, that light finds its way back home to you. And one day, you catch yourself laughing again, smiling for no reason, saying yes to new people and new adventures. Planning your future, dreaming without the ache. And it doesn't sting anymore. That's the light returning home. That's what I mean when I say you're not breaking down, you're unfolding.

And as you start to feel that light return, helps to understand what's really happening beneath the surface. Because healing isn't magic, it's method. It's science guys. It's the brain, the body and the heart finally working in sync again. So before we close, here are a few terms to help you name what's unfolding inside of you.

Okay, here we go. Homeostasis, you ask. Well, it's your, your body and minds. It's, it's a natural drive to it. It's okay. Your body and mind's natural drive to maintain balance. wants to maintain balance. So when you lived in chaos or emotional instability, balance can actually feel uncomfortable at first. Healing invites your system to find a new equilibrium. One rooted in peace rather than the former, which was survival. All right. Okay. Next self-coherence. The alignment between what you feel, what you need and how you act. It's when your nervous system, emotions and choices finally start speaking the same language. The three of them merge.

(32:47.321)

You stop betraying yourself to be loved and you start living in sync with your truth. And finally, we talked about this throughout the episode, neuroplasticity. It's the brain's ability to rewire itself through new experiences and repeated choices. Study that a little bit more. I'm so fascinated by it. It just means that really that healing isn't just emotional. It's biological. Every time you choose calm over chaos,

or truth over denial, your brain literally starts building new neural pathways that make peace easier to access next time and the next time and the next time. here's your suggested journal prompt. So if you're listening while driving or walking, make a mental note. And when you get home, write this down. Where have I been abandoning myself to stay connected to someone?

And then write the antidote. One small boundary I can honor this week is, and fill in the blank.

Let your nervous system learn that safety and solitude can coexist. It's safe.

(34:09.433)

Okay, take a breath with me. Let's do this.

All right, we've walked through a lot today. The ache, the release, the remembering. So now let's bring this all home. Place your hand on your heart and repeat after me this affirmation. Even when it hurts, I choose to honor my peace. My love is sacred. My boundaries are holy. My unfolding is my homecoming. Take a deep breath and let that land.

(34:46.266)

Thank you so much. You've been listening to the unfolding podcast. We'll talk about healing, self-trust, and the art of becoming. I'm your host and friend, Yvonne Wink. If this episode touched something inside you, share it with someone who's learning how to stay soft without staying small. And remember, sometimes the most sacred act of love is the one that says,

I choose me too.

Get full access to Yvonne Wink at theunfoldingpodcast.substack.com/subscribe