Being hard on yourself doesn’t make you stronger. It severs you from the very strength you need to make it through the Dark Night of Heartbreak.
In this episode, I explore the inner war we wage with ourselves: criticizing, shaming, overriding, restricting, pushing, and trying to defeat the parts of ourselves we’ve decided are the problem.
Heartbreak has a way of bringing us face to face with this relationship. As painful as this reckoning can be, it offers us an extraordinary opportunity: to stop turning against ourselves. To trade brute force for passionate conviction, intimidation for intimacy, overriding for understanding, and combat for kindness.
In this episode, look and listen for:
- How you stop fighting yourself.
- Why your heartbreak brings you face to face with how you treat yourself and demands you reckon with it.
- How the Excavation phase of a Dark Night of Heartbreak asks us to examine the beliefs, patterns, abandoned parts, crossed boundaries, and old stories that brought us here.
- The most important relationship you’ll have in your entire life
As one of my mentors asked me, I ask you: when you are at war with yourself and you win… who loses?
Books & resources mentioned in the episode
Let This Heartbreak Remake You: episode that explores Initiation, phase one of the Dark Night of Heartbreak.
What I Said When She Called Me Sobbing: episode that explores Dissolution, phase two of the Dark Night of Heartbreak.
Pre-order Waking Up in the Dark Night of Divorce by LiYana Silver
And receive two beautiful book bonuses:
- The Waking Up Workbook to accompany the book, with all the practices from the book plus space for you to write and draw; and
- Book Club with LiYana: 3 weekly meetings in which I’ll read from the book, we’ll practice together, discuss, and have Q+A.
Order Waking Up in the Dark Night of Divorce+ book bonuses:liyanasilver.com/wakingup
Connect with LiYana
Website: liyanasilver.com
Waking Up in The Dark Night of Divorce book: liyanasilver.com/wakingup
Feminine Genius book: liyanasilver.com/femininegenius
The Heartbreak Transformation Map: liyanasilver.com/map
Fresh From The Fire newsletter: liyanasilver.com/newsletter
Waking Up in The Dark Night of Divorce substack: liyanasilver.substack.com/
About LiYana Silver
Relationship coach and author of Waking Up in The Dark Night of Divorce and Feminine Genius, LiYana works with women at the knife’s edge of heartbreak — reckoning with divorce, breakup, and heartbreak so complex it feels like a dark night of the soul.
LiYana guides women (and their partners) through (not around) the darkest passages of their lives. Through her transformational methodology, LiYana helps individuals, couples, and groups reclaim what they lost in the relationship, break repeating patterns, and emerge awake, aligned, and lit-up.
A former professional dancer and lover of painting with oils, LiYana lives in Asheville, NC with her son, their two cats, and a frankly impressive number of houseplants.