BW 117: Rebuilding Your Identity After Loss: Who Are You Without Your Spouse?

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Description:
In this episode of the Brave Widow Podcast, we dive into the emotional and practical journey of rediscovering who you are after losing your spouse. The loss of a partner can often leave us feeling lost, unsure of our purpose, and disconnected from the person we used to be. I’ll be sharing my own story and offering hope, clarity, and actionable steps to help you begin rebuilding your identity.

 

If you’re feeling stuck or overwhelmed, this episode is for you. Let’s explore how to embrace who you are now and create a meaningful future full of possibility.

 

Episode Highlights:

•  I share my personal story of identity loss after my spouse passed away and explain the purpose of today’s episode: helping you begin the process of rebuilding your sense of self.
•  Common feelings of confusion, loss of purpose, and uncertainty about the future.
•  Normalizing the experience of feeling disconnected from yourself after loss.
•  Practical Steps to Rebuild Your Identity  
•  Grieve what’s lost: Acknowledge not just the loss of your spouse but the life and identity you built together.
•  Reconnect with your passions: Explore activities or hobbies you enjoyed before or during your marriage.
•  Give yourself permission to evolve: It’s okay to change and grow into a new version of yourself.
•  Set small goals: Regain a sense of control over your life by setting manageable goals.
•  Emotional Healing and the Role of Community
•  Thought-provoking questions to help you explore who you are now.
•  Join the Brave Widow community for guidance and support as you rebuild your identity after loss.

 

Connect with the Brave Widow Community:
Ready to start exploring who you are now and find support on your journey? Join us at bravewidow.com and let’s walk through this together.

 

 

Timeline:

00:00 Introduction to Episode 117

00:12 The Brave Widow Membership Community

01:25 Tracking Progress in the Community

02:10 Five Key Areas of Progress

03:58 Success Stories from the Community

06:12 Rebuilding Your Identity After Loss

07:09 Personal Journey and Reflections

19:02 Practical Steps to Rebuild Your Identity

21:28 The Importance of Community Support

27:02 Encouragement and Final Thoughts

 

 

 

•  Join the Brave Widow Community: https://www.bravewidow.com/join
•  Schedule a consult with Emily:  https://calendly.com/bravewidow/widow-consult-call?month=2024-08 

Hey hey, I’m Emily Tanner.  I was widowed at age 37, one month shy of our 20 year wedding anniversary.  Nathan and I have four beautiful children together, and my world was turned completely upside down when I lost him.  

 

Now, I love my life again!  I’m able to experience joy, achieve goals and dreams I thought I’d lost, and rediscover this next version of me.

 

I did the work.

I invested in coaching for myself.

I learned what I needed to do to move forward and took the steps.

I implemented the tools and strategies that I use for my clients in my coaching program.

 

 

This is for you, if:

•  You want a faith-based approach to coaching
•  You want to move forward after loss, and aren’t sure how
•  You want to enjoy life without feeling weighed down by guilt, sadness, or regret
•  You want a guide to help navigate this journey to the next version of you
•  You want to rediscover who you are

 

•  Join the Brave Widow Community: https://www.bravewidow.com/join
•  Schedule a consult with Emily:  https://calendly.com/bravewidow/widow-consult-call?month=2024-08 

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TRANSCRIPT

 

 

Hey, hey, and welcome to episode number 117 of the Brave Widow show. Today, we're going to talk about rebuilding your identity after the loss of a spouse.

The Brave Widow Membership Community
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But first, I want to talk to you about the Brave Widow membership community. And the reason I'm so adamant about telling you about the community and about encouraging you to join it is because people are getting results.

Now, if you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you know, I've offered one on one coaching. I offer the mastermind, which is group weekly coaching, and I also offer the community, which is coaching, courses, calls, community, just camaraderie. It's all of the things.

And the community is really a great way to start. If you're not sure where to start, you're not sure which program is the right for you,

you can join the community. If you're not sure if the community is right for you, you can schedule a free consult call with me. During that free call, we'll walk through the current challenges that you're facing, where you want to be over the next three to six months, and which program I believe is the absolute best fit for you to help ensure your success.

Tracking Progress in the Community
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I also want to share some things that we are tracking. Things that maybe you haven't thought about being able to track progress because these things are relatively intangible.

Meaning, we track things that aren't numbers on a scale. They're not minutes. They're not hours. They're not steps. These are things that are intangible, but they're things that we measure routinely to gauge where people are making progress, where people are feeling stuck and where people are seeing a lot of volatility with ups and downs.

I'm excited to share that so many people are seeing success.

in these areas that I want to see this for you too.

Five Key Areas of Progress
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So I want to share with you just quickly five things that we track routinely within BraveWidow to gauge where we are making progress and where we can start seeing success. Okay. The first category we track is your daily routine, like having a sense of routine, having a sense of calm, living with a life that's just stressful on a day to day basis.

The first one that we rate is a sense of routine. So does your day to day life feel like you have a routine? Or are you feeling overwhelmed, stressed out, kind of just tossed about by everyone else's priorities? The second thing that we rate is how stuck you feel. So do you feel stuck? Do you feel like you're moving forward?

How do you feel about having traction, direction, all of those things? The third thing that we rate is your level of confidence, your confidence in yourself, confidence to make decisions, confidence to follow through on what you say you're going to do. The fourth thing we rate is a sense of purpose. So does your life give you a sense of purpose and meaning?

Or are you waking up every day feeling like life is pointless, there is no purpose, nothing is lighting your fire? The fifth thing that we rate is relationships, including dating.

So how do you feel about having healthy boundaries with current relationships? How are you feeling about developing new relationships and making new connections? And if you're dating, how confident you're feeling about dating and where you currently stand with that. So these are the five things that we track routinely.

These are the five areas where widows tend to make a lot of progress.

Success Stories from the Community
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And listen, I have some clients and some members of the community that when they start tracking these things, they are at a big fat zero. Okay? So you don't have to come into the community feeling like you're a level three or you're a level eight, or you're a level six.

This is all based on how you're feeling about these different areas. Okay. And people are making progress. I have people moving from a 2 in the confidence level to a level 7 or 8. I have widows that were at a 0 from a routine and organization perspective and they're now at a 6. We have widows that were at a 4 or 3 with relationships and they're closer to an 8 or a 9.

Like, it is truly incredible and just amazing. Three to six months, how much progress people can actually make in their day to day life. And it's mind blowing at times, how being

able to share some of that tracking with widows and allowing them to see like, wow, look how far you've come. Look at the challenges that you brought up in our first session. Look at some of the goals that you had. Look at the ones that you've already accomplished and some of the things that are challenges now, and look how far you really have grown, even in just a couple of months of being part of a coaching program or being part of the community.

It is exciting. So I have to tell you about it, and I want you to join. So you can join the Brave Widow community by going to BraveWidow. com. Again, if you're not exactly sure where to start, what's going to work best for you, if this program is going to work for you, please schedule a consult call with me.

You can find that link on BraveWidow. com. It's a free call. I'm going to give you a ton of value with that call. I'm going to share with you the exact next steps that I would take if I were in your shoes, in your situation, and what is going to set you up for you to have the best success possible.

Rebuilding Your Identity After Loss
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Okay, now it's time for one of my favorite topics,

Which is a part of the process in building a life that you love again. So many widows think that once they lose their spouse, that they're going to be subjected to a life that's less than like they've lived the best years of their life. Then their spouse died and now they have to live this sad subpar life that might be kind of good, but it's always second choice and always going to be a little gray, a little less than the life that they had before.

So today in particular, I want to talk to you about how to rebuild your identity, how to figure out who you are without your spouse, and Give you some practical steps to start moving towards rebuilding your identity and your confidence in figuring out who you are now.

Personal Journey and Reflections
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When Nathan and I got married, it was 10 days after I had turned 18.

I went from living in a house with my family to living in a townhouse with my new husband to less than a year later, bringing a baby into the world.

Nathan and I had been married for just three weeks short of 20 years. So at the time that Nathan died, I had been married to him and with him longer for more than half of my entire life. Certainly all of my adult life had been with Nathan and we truly had through marriage become like to the two becomes one flesh.

That was definitely us like we did life together and Even though I had friends, they like to go on girls nights or girls weekends, or, do things without their spouse, it always just felt a little weird to us, a little awkward, like I was always wishing that he was there, and we truly, truly both enjoyed just doing life together, just hanging out together, running errands together, just, we just enjoyed being together.

Now, we didn't both always like the same things. Nathan would have not wanted to go to a Dave Ramsey conference, or a real estate investors meeting, or some of the things that I enjoy doing and I still enjoy doing to this day. I didn't necessarily care about going golfing, or going to the shooting range, or doing some of the things that he enjoyed.

So, while we both had independent things that we liked to do My identity was very much, wrapped up in my work, in being a mom, in being a wife, and who I was as a person with Nathan.

Now, a few months before Nathan died, I had something really interesting happen. So we moved into a house that we absolutely loved. We finally lived out in the country. We finally had, 37 acres of land. We had just this beautiful place. And in my mind, this was a culmination of my dreams starting to come together.

So for as long as I can remember, I've always wanted horses. I've always wanted to ride horses as a teenager. I did take some horse riding lessons. I volunteered at a stable that did events and functions for kids with disabilities. So I got to be around horses every day during the summer for that. And I wore a horseshoe necklace almost every single day.

Like I just loved horses. I really wanted horses and Nathan and I had envisioned in our future retirement that we would have a huge ranch with, hundreds of acres and cattle and horses, and Emily was just going to be in horse heaven. Like that was just going to be my dream. No neighbors, no one around in sight, just beautiful God's country.

We didn't even care if we had cell or internet service. We just wanted to be out in nature and just to be able to enjoy each other's company and the things around us.

So a few months actually, before Nathan died and we had moved into this amazing house, I was starting to pressure him more about setting up some fencing about clearing off some of the land. And I was debating back and forth on where are we going to put a barn? Where could we put the horses? Is this the right setup or should we buy something that's.

a little more suitable for pasture land instead of like wooded land. And we started to really have these conversations. Well, one day out of the blue, Nathan just said, I don't really think that you should ride horses. And it really took me aback. And I was like, well, what do you mean I shouldn't ride horses?

And he said, well, you know, you're getting older now, you haven't really ridden horses very much. What if you get thrown off and something happens to you. And he named a couple people that had been in some very serious accidents. He named someone who'd been paralyzed and someone that had come close to losing their life from being thrown off of a horse.

And so, , I just said, yes, accidents and things can happen, but, that that's part of just being around horses. That's part of owning horses and back and forth. We went for a few days where he was just very adamant that, ultimately I could do what I wanted, but he felt very strongly that I shouldn't have horses.

I shouldn't ride horses. Horses were dangerous and, During those last couple years of his life, his anxiety had really ramped up, so he's very anxious, struggled a lot with depression. And so I just thought maybe this was his anxiety and his worry because his fear was really how he was going to live without me.

I knew that I was feeling really selfish and I was pushing back a lot on having horses and riding horses and feeling like he was just killing my dreams because I'd always wanted this and he knew that from before even before we got married. And for those of you that may remember, there's actually a funny story about how we met and horses like it just there has been so much.

About horses in my dreams and what I had wanted for my future. And I just felt so discouraged. Like this was my dream. My whole life is to have horses, to be around horses, to ride them. And you're telling me that you don't think I need to do this. And I remember just being in like a selfish. Mind drama circle about all of this and I just had this thought that felt like it was from God and the thought was The rest of your life is not going to be the way that you thought it was gonna be And that shook me to my core.

I had no idea that what that would ultimately mean was that Nathan was going to die. What I thought that meant was, maybe a big ranch isn't in your future. Maybe having farm animals isn't in your future. Maybe if I did do that, something bad was going to happen. So I began to really soften and to begin to open up to what all the other possibilities were.

When we lived in Ohio for a few years, we lived in an amazing neighborhood. They did all kinds of stuff with kids, and they did things together as a community, and it was really just a beautiful experience. And so I started playing around with the idea of maybe we have a retirement home in Florida and we live close to the beach, or maybe we live in one of the Carolinas where you have the mountains and the beach.

And I just really became open to this idea that my future and my life wasn't going to look like what I thought it was going to look like.

Weeks after Nathan died, I would suddenly recall. All of those conversations, I would recall that moment when God was telling me your life isn't going to look like the way that you think it is. And all of a sudden I felt like, oh, that makes sense.

But for most of us, especially those of us who are dreamers and planners and very forward and future focused, when we grieve the loss of a person, we're not just grieving the loss of that person. We grieve so much more. We grieve the loss of our family and friends. We grieve the loss of everything that we knew to be secure and stable.

Because it feels like the rug's been pulled out from underneath us. We grieve all of the unmet hopes, dreams, and expectations that we had for the future. And we really grieve just our own identity and who we are. Because while there are some core things about us that haven't changed, in many ways we are significantly changed.

After Nathan died, I felt like this tiny little boat out on this big, huge ocean, where everywhere I would look, it was just water. Water, and waves, and storms, and sharks, and, like, nothing good. And I felt so lost. I have never in my life felt so untethered. Unanchored, just drifting, just drifting and subject to the big waves, the storms, the, the creatures that move in the water, like everything around me was just impacting me and I felt so lost.

And for me, it was so incredibly unsettling. Apart from going through those teenage years and your young adult years of figuring out, like, who you are, who you want to be, what your style is going to be, all of those things, I had never not known who I was, what my values were, who I wanted to be, and what dreams I would have for the future.

Now, could I still have chosen to pursue the dreams that I had before? Sure. But, As I looked at them, I was like, I don't even know if that's what I want anymore. Like, that's what we wanted together. Do I want to have to manage hundreds of acres and livestock and horses and all of that by myself? No, not really.

I'm just trying to get through the day right now.

I really find myself trying to just evaluate, What do I want? Who am I? What am I going to want for my future? And I have never felt so unsettled by just having this darkness in front of me. I would have to go through this tunnel where there was no light at the end. Where I didn't know.

I had no idea. So, if you're going through this, or if this resonates with you, know that I have, the deepest compassion and empathy for you and where you are in your journey. It is so incredibly Heartbreaking to have lost your person to have lost all the secondary things that come with that loss and then to have to look at yourself in the mirror and say, I don't even know who you are anymore.

I don't know what you like. I don't know what you want. I don't even know if it's possible to find something that like lights you up inside or that gets you feeling excited because at that point it was like, What was the point? What was the point of having dreams or having things to look forward to if Nathan wasn't going to be there?

None of that seemed to matter anymore. So if this is where you are, I want you to know that you're not alone. That this is very normal. That most widows I talk to have experienced this same phenomenon of rebuilding who they want to be. And I want to give you hope. I want to give you hope that you can rebuild your identity.

You can create a life that you love and that you enjoy again, even if right now it seems totally impossible and you have no idea how you're going to do that. Early on for me, I would listen to other people's stories and I would look for people in particular who did love their life, who had found joy, who had found peace.

And so I would tell myself that Even though I had no idea how to get there from where I was, I had to believe that some way, somehow, it was going to be possible. And that's where you must start as well.

Practical Steps to Rebuild Your Identity
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All right, I want to give you four practical steps to start rebuilding your identity. The first is to grieve and acknowledge what has been lost.

To grieve and acknowledge not only the loss of your person, but the loss of the life that you had. The loss of your social circle, the loss of your confidence, the loss of you knowing who you are and what you want for your future. All of those things are things worth grieving.

The second step is to reconnect with some of your passions and interests. So, even if it feels a little pointless right now, maybe look at taking a class of something that you used to enjoy doing. Going to a local event, testing out hobbies that you did before, or even your person did before, and see if that's something that you're interested in.

Think about this all as some sort of adventure. You don't know how it's going to end up. You don't know whether or not it's going to work out. But just get out there and try. I went to a pottery class. I did a line dancing class. I did a real estate investing class. I've gone to all types of different things just to get a feel for it, whether or not it would be something that I enjoyed doing and something that I wanted to do more of.

The third step is to give yourself permission to evolve. It is okay that you are going to change. The life that you had is gone. It's in ash, it's over. You must choose and decide that you are going to build a new life. This is the next part of your story, the next part of what the rest of your life is going to be like, and you get to decide what type of life that's going to be.

Step number four is to set small achievable goals.

These goals might be making new connections and relationships with other people making small talk when you're in line for coffee, it might be reaching out to an old friend, whatever your goals are, give yourself some very small achievable goals, and this will be the building blocks to helping you build up your purpose and finding a sense of meaning in your everyday life.

The Importance of Community Support
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One of the challenges with rebuilding your identity is that most widows lose a significant part of their social circle after the loss of a spouse. I read a statistic where widows lose 75 percent of their social circle within the first year. Which is wild. So one of the biggest things that you need as you're discovering who you are is a strong sense of support and community.

A community that's going to validate you for the experiences that you've had. Who's going to see you and your hurt and your loss and who's going to sit there with you in it. A community that values you as a person that wants to support you and to see you succeed. And a community that can be part of your life in the future, that can be part of connections you have to hobbies and interests and just things that you want to learn more about.

This is one of the key reasons why I founded the Brave Widow Membership Community. And yes, I'm going to talk about it a little bit more. Because I wanted a community where you can learn, so you can learn how to navigate grief, you can learn how to heal your heart, you can learn how to start rebuilding your life, how to start making new friends, how to start dating again, how to find purpose and meaning and create.

A new life and a next chapter as part of your story, because all those things are really hard, but I didn't just want to put a bunch of books out there, a bunch of courses out there. I wanted to create a sense of community of widows who can look at you and hold space for you, who can hold belief for you, and who can allow you to express yourself without a sense of judgment or being flooded with opinions and platitudes and things that just don't work.

Resonate and land well. Your family and friends in many cases are not going to be able to support you or don't support you the way that you want and need. So it's very powerful for me to create a community of people who will do that, of people who want you to be successful. They want you to chase your dreams.

They want to see you win in life.

And we'll walk by you side by side on that journey.

All right, I have some questions for you to consider as you're thinking about How you want to rebuild your identity and who you are, who are you outside of your role as a wife and potentially a mother? Who are you? For me, for many years, my identity was tied up in all of my titles. My job at work, my kids, my husband, my extended family, all the titles of things that I had, that became a lot of my identity and I didn't know who I was apart from that.

What is something that excites you or even piques your curiosity right now?

What values or characteristics are important to you in this new chapter of your life? And finally, what is something that you've always wanted to explore? There are so many things that I've done that Nathan never would have been interested in, or he never would have wanted to go to, or he never would have wanted to do at all.

So while, yes, it is bittersweet, to experience some of those things. I have been grateful for the opportunity to do that, and I have just really enjoyed the whole journey of just figuring it out. Figuring out if I like those things or not, if that's something for me in my future, or if I can go, Eh, not really for me.

I'm going to try something else. This is an amazing time for you to be able to test out all of those new things without feeling the pressure or the criticism of other people in real life.

Rebuilding your identity can be done in a beautiful way that honors the love and the legacy of that from the past. While acknowledging that you're growing and you're evolving and you're becoming this next version of you in the future. This doesn't mean you're leaving your person behind. It doesn't mean that you're abandoning old family and friends and people that are important to you or commitments that are important to you.

What it means is that you can move forward in life. Having learned so much about what priorities should be, about what's important to you, about how we should take, how we should not take any moment for granted, because we know that life is short, and at the end of the day, a lot of the superficial things we used to get worked up about don't even matter anymore.

You have a new lens on life now and a new appreciation for the time that you have left here on earth. Use that to make an impact on the people around you, to make an impact on others who are hurting, to leave an impact for your family and the members that eventually you leave behind one day.

Encouragement and Final Thoughts
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Ultimately, I want to encourage you, if it feels like you're a totally different person, if it feels like your old life doesn't really fit anymore, or that it's something you keep yearning for, but you just can't bring it to fruition, I want you to know that you are totally normal and

that there is a way to move forward. We want to acknowledge and appreciate our old life. And what our past has in store for us. And we also want to create a beautiful new version of us and a beautiful new path forward in life that we can appreciate and enjoy for the time that we have left here.

If you're not sure how to do that, if you're thinking about exploring things, but it seems a little overwhelming and scary, join us in the Brave Widow membership community, and we will help you walk this journey. We will help you get there. Go to BraveWidow. com to learn more.

[00:28:00] Emily: Are you a widow who feels disconnected? Do you feel like you're stuck or even going backwards in your grief? Widowhood can be lonely and isolating, but it doesn't have to be. Join us in the Brave Widow membership community and connect. We teach widows how to find hope, heal their heart, and dream again for the future.

Find your purpose and create a life you love today. Go to bravewidow. com to get started.