Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce
We are on a journey to get into the nitty gritty of divorce recovery and reveal why your divorce healing journey is still not working for you–even after you’ve tried therapy and read all the books.
Let's transform your pain into strength and take charge of your own narrative. Now’s the time we reclaim your healing journey–and why exactly we struggle to not only heal from past traumas but move beyond them to the ultimate goal: inner peace. That is real self-empowerment, and this is Dear Divorce Diary.
I’m Dawn Wiggins, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and EMDR specialist. I draw on decades of experience to help women navigate the emotional rollercoaster after ending a marriage. Using a little bit of science, a few alternative remedies and emotional release techniques, a whole lot of love, and zero BS, we step out of the victim mindset and into building a new life after divorce.
We emphasize nuance because overcoming challenges after divorce means questioning everything that got us here and using your divorce as a springboard to a better, more resilient (and certainly happier!) you.
On Tuesday, we have our listener segment called: "Getting Unstuck," where we anonymously unpack a difficult situation a listener is going through in their divorce healing journey.
And, on Thursday, we explore a "Hidden Healing Gem," which is a healing product or process we've tried and tested personally and/or professionally and are sharing our results and observations with you!
We cover essential life after divorce topics like grief, anxiety, codependency, loneliness, boundaries, nervous system health, attachment styles, the Law of Attraction, and homeopathy.
Join us twice a week as we go beyond talk therapy to process your grief, find the healing you crave, and rebuild your confidence.
Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce
214. Overcoming Inaction 🧊 Break Through the Frozen State & Trust Yourself After Divorce
Join The Waitlist for A Different D Word
Do you ever feel so overwhelmed post-divorce that you don't know where to begin? Us tooooo...and we're here to help.
Life after divorce has probably left you feeling stuck and unsure of how to move forward, paralyzed by indecisiveness or fear of making another mistake. In this pod, we delve into everyone's internal battle—how to start when you feel frozen by your circumstances.
In this episode, you will hear how emotional paralysis is tied to your nervous system, why community can be a game-changer in your healing journey, and how to overcome the fear of taking those first steps.
Tune into the episode now and take your first step toward freedom from that frozen state—your new beginning awaits.
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A podcast exploring the journey of life after divorce, delving into topics like divorce grief, loneliness, anxiety, manifesting, the impact of different attachment styles and codependency, setting healthy boundaries, energy healing with homeopathy, managing the nervous system during divorce depression, understanding the stages of divorce grief, and using the Law of Attraction and EMDR therapy in the process of building your confidence, forgiveness and letting go.
If you sometimes feel overwhelmed listening to the podcast because you don't know where to start or how to start, this one's for you. Hi, love, welcome to Dear Divorce Diary, the podcast helping divorcees go beyond talk therapy to process your grief, find the healing you crave and build back your confidence. I'm your host, dawn Wiggins, a therapist, coach, integrative healer and divorcee. Join me for a fresh approach to healing grief and building your confidence after divorce. In today's episode we are going to touch base on how to know where to start and how to break through, why it feels so hard to start, what all that has to do with being able to trust yourself and the thing that you're probably resisting most. But first a story. We were getting ready to record this episode today and in popped one of the most amazing members of my team who helps us administratively. She puts together little swag boxes we send out, and she helps me build homeopathic remedies and she oh gosh, there's just so many things that she does to keep us organized and keep the wheels moving over here at Dear Divorce Diary and beyond. And she happens to be twice divorced and now remarried and she's been a longtime listener to the podcast. But she lives here locally and we were talking about how she has been struggling to apply the things that she learns from the podcast, from the books that she reads, from the conversations that we have, and she talked about how difficult it is for her to trust herself because she feels like she's made so many wrong turns in her life and very often she'll ask for direction or guidance and then, once she gets it, she's like oh, I knew that, I knew that that was the right answer, but she has a hard time trusting herself and taking the action. When we were talking today about what's contributed to all of that and how she's been able to start taking more action, she said that homeopathy has been a game changer in terms of her being able to take action. And well, why does that matter? It matters because, from a nervous system perspective, when you feel like you're struggling to start taking action, or you're feeling frozen in inaction, like you're not sure if you can trust yourself, or you don't know what the next step is to take, or in so much pain that it just hurts to move, either physically or emotionally, very, very often that spot is like a lose-lose spot. Right the answer from someone like a coach or a therapist, even if they're very trauma-oriented and nervous system-oriented, is they're going to say love, you need to get your nervous system unfrozen. You are in a nervous system collapse state, right? You are frozen in your fight flight freeze response, right, you are in a frozen nervous system response.
Speaker 1:And so very often the recommendation there is going to be things like nurture your nervous system, eat good foods, gently move your body, remove the things from your environment that are causing you to feel more sense of threat. Do some nervous system exercises like humming and gentle massage and do some somatic exercises where you can feel into the tight spaces and loosen things up. Right, there's going to be a lot of recommendation around somatic processing and bringing water to the fire, but I think that when you're a single woman and you're juggling all of the new things in a very early post-divorce phase, that even the directions around bringing water to your nervous system fire feel very overwhelming. Actions around bringing water to your nervous system fire feel very overwhelming, and so it feels like a catch-22 place that you can hear folks like me coach you around the nervous system thing, but you feel so sort of stuck that you literally need someone to sit in front of you and say this is what your next step is. And that's what this beautiful team member said today. She's like I guess I need a therapist and I was like, well why? Because she wants someone to tell her the very next thing to do. And so, when you're struggling to start taking action, the first thing I want you to get present to is that your nervous system is probably in a somewhat frozen state, and that is the thing that's blocking you from feeling like you have capacity to start.
Speaker 1:And I think it's a very real experience that when you've experienced traumas in life and divorce is a trauma and you have some health concerns you know she talked about the inflammation in her body she experiences fibromyalgia, like literally just taking action causes her to feel pain, and pain feels like a threat to our nervous system in and of itself. So it's like the very initial actions to take are ones that the nervous system is going to be like. I don't know if this is the right move, and I think that that's where you know the feedback loop can feel very exhausting for us when we're in like a post-trauma loop. Right, it's like in order to start creating movement or oiling those wheels of change, you're going to feel more pain first, and the nervous system experiences pain as a threat. And that's why we have to do somatic exercises in order to help coach the nervous system that actually, this movement isn't a threat, this pain isn't a threat, it's a perceived threat, right? So I hear this catch-22. So get present to the fact that your nervous system feels frozen and it's perceiving a lot of threats, including outside of you and inside of you, and that's the first thing to break through.
Speaker 1:Now, interestingly, as she and I and producer Joy were chitty chatting and I said okay, help me quantify, if you can, how much of a difference homeopathy has made like 8%, 22% and she was like I don't know how to answer that because I don't know how much percentage there is, like I don't know how to answer that because I don't know how much percentage there is Like I don't know how far this goes. You know this healing journey and I think that's a really, really relatable point that people often say to me how much more of this do I have to do? How far is there? When does it end? When does this healing shit end? And I think that it's beautiful that she's experienced movement from homeopathy. But even those beautiful steps and to start to get relief and feel like, oh, there's some space to move, it feels a little better in my body, it feels a little better in my mind, I can actually take some action. But also it opens this whole other loop about, well, crap, how much more path is there to go?
Speaker 1:My awareness is about that is I don't mind being on the path when I'm doing it with some cool people who I like, and we're doing it together and I don't feel so alone in the doing of it. Right, and I think that's true for her as my team member. Right, it's been a lot easier. She could show up to work and I'm like, oh, what do you need today? And we dose a remedy and give her some feedback and she helps me and I help her, and you know. And then she goes and carries on. And it's the same thing with producer joy and coach Tiffany and I and the women in our current coaching program. Right, it's like, ah, we're doing it together and it's just just because I'm the the lead here doesn't mean that I'm not doing it with you.
Speaker 1:You know, I was away this weekend while coach Tiffany and producer joy covered everything back at home and I still had crap I had to work through while I was away. You know why? Because I was away and I had time and space for the crap to actually surface, for me to process through right. And so, as we were having this conversation and I was like thinking, well, obviously for so many of us, the missing piece is community, is people to do it with, so that it doesn't feel like, well crap, how much further I have to go because it's just a lifestyle I just do it with, so that it doesn't feel like, well, crap, how much further I have to go because it's just a lifestyle. I just do it with these people that I love and I feel close to and I feel inspired and they encourage me when I feel like quitting, and you know they back me up and I back them up and it's just this delicious community and lifestyle that we've created to do it together.
Speaker 1:And so I said to this team member of mine I said you know, what would stop you from joining a program like this, where you have someone to tell you what you need to do next and then you have someone to support you through while you do it? And she said, oh, fear of being in a group and I'm like that's it, right, it is it's fear of being in a group Because she says it would feel uncomfortable. She would automatically assume that people are judging her, and so I think love that very, very often, when we don't know where to start, it's because the very thing that is going to heal us is going to first feel painful. Right, joining a group is going to feel painful at first, and going to the gym when you're physically in pain is going to feel painful at first. And going to the gym when you're physically in pain is going to feel painful at first. And turning your attention inward is going to feel painful at first. You know she talked about that.
Speaker 1:It was so easy for her to just handle life when she had kids dependent on her, and that's so true, right, because it's so much easier for us to do it for them than it is for us to do for ourselves. And that's because, again, our focus gets to be outside of ourselves rather than inside of ourselves, so we don't have to be in touch with all this pain we carry around all the time and love, we carry a lot of dang pain around with us all the time, right, and so you're not crazy. If it feels hard to trust yourself, that's for a reason. And no, you can't wait until it feels easy to trust yourself, to take action, because we don't learn just from listening to the podcast or reading a book. We learn from doing it.
Speaker 1:Experience is the greatest teacher, and so how to start is A attend to your nervous system. And B you have to do the thing you're avoiding, whether it's joining a group or moving your body or turning within. Those are the things that you have to do. You can't heal in isolation. You have to join some sort of group, and you can't do it without moving or moving through the pain the physical, emotional pain and it is going to be a stinking process. And so find people to do it with that are freaking fun, because otherwise it's unbearable, and I think that's so much of what this process and this program and this podcast provide.
Speaker 1:Right is. I don't want you to be overwhelmed all the time. I want you to feel like you have someone you can ask what do I need to do next? And someone answers, and then you have some fun with the people beside you doing it. If we are not already friends on Instagram, let's do that, because what do best friends do? They send each other memes, and I want to send you memes, and vice versa, and I want to be a source of support for you when you feel frozen or stuck and you don't know what to do next or how to start. All right, take a deep breath, do a little bit of unfreezing in this now moment. You are safe. Love and you are loved. Love. And if you haven't followed me on instagram or put me on your favorites list, do that asap, right, so that when we're live or something new is coming around, you get that notification. I love you so much. Peace, dear. Divorce Diary is a podcast by my coach, dawn. You can find more at mycoachdawncom.
