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
216. Why Keeping Calm During Divorce Might Be a Bad Idea? Hot Take on Emotional Expression
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Can Somatic Techniques Revolutionize Your Divorce Recovery Journey?
Have you ever felt like stress and unprocessed emotions might be sabotaging your well-being during or after a divorce? You're not alone, and this episode is here to guide you to freedom.
When Producer Joy, Coach Tiffini, and I dive into the world of somatic practices, you'll discover how these powerful techniques can help release stuck emotions and improve your nervous system health. We know how challenging it can be to navigate emotions post-divorce, and incorporating somatic elements into your routine might be just the game-changer you need.
- Learn how ear massages can rapidly downshift your nervous system, offering instant stress relief.
- Discover the mom sway and other movement techniques that help ground your emotions and promote an empowered state of mind.
- Explore the benefits of foam rolling and body scanning as tools to enhance emotional and physical wellness.
Ready to alleviate stress and start healing? Tune into this transformative episode now and empower your divorce recovery journey
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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.
You know that moment when you replay a conversation in your head, wishing you had said what you really felt, or when frustration builds but you push it down because good girls don't lose their cool. What if I told you that all that unspoken emotion is still in your body? In this episode, we're breaking the silence on how your suppressed emotions affect your health and energy and how to release them. Your health and energy and how to release them. 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.
Speaker 1:Okay, here's the truth about trying to keep it all together. We've been told our whole lives you need to calm down or just be nice or just let it go. But let's be real. Where does all that swallowed frustration actually go? In just a minute, we're going to talk about what happens when you hold onto it all and how to finally let it out in a way that feels safe and powerful, and then we're going to take a look at the ways your body is talking and assess whether or not you're being a good listener. You might think the stress is in your head, but the tight jaw, the heavy chest, the debilitating exhaustion is all trying to tell you something and before this episode ends, we're going to talk about how to decode those signals to give your body exactly what it needs to feel lighter, calmer and free. Let's dig in. So we talked about adding a somatic element to our day today because it's such an important, you know, conversation about, especially for women. I think about how to move, stuck emotion and energy. But even just from the perspective of how much we sit I sit all day at work and it's not good for our bodies, it's not good for our circulation, it's not good for our nervous systems.
Speaker 1:Oftentimes, one of the things I do in session with clients there's a whole host of somatic tools that I do in session with clients there's a whole host of somatic tools that I use in session, but one of them, especially when I'm trying to help people access emotionally when they tend towards dissociation is the ear massage. So our ears, all, all, like the entire ear structure and around our ears, is directly tied to our vagus nerve, which is the information superhighway in our nervous system and so when we're feeling stressed or wound up or dissociated, numb or upset, massaging our ears is a very powerful way to immediately start to shift the nervous system. So I have such an amazing job that when I sit with clients and I say, okay, and now we're going to do some ear massage, and I just start literally with a decent amount of pressure like not so much that causes pain, right, but a decent amount of pressure just really rubbing in all these sort of crevices my ears feel hot right now. And it's because I have a lot of nervous system activation. Right, when we're engaging with people or we're presenting something, we do get some nervous system activation. It's just how life works, right. If I was in full rest and digest, like nothing would be happening, right. So because I'm here and I'm thinking and I'm juggling things, I'm activated and I can feel my ears hot. So by doing this ear massage it really starts to downshift the nervous system and what I find when I do this in session with clients is I will feel a yawn, start to build and then there will be like mutual yawning right. But it really does create for folks who are feeling a bit frozen or a bit dissociated or a bit overstimulated or stressed.
Speaker 1:This can help them land in the session. It can help them process things. If there's something that's particularly difficult to process, if we're having some really extreme releasing in the session, it can help bring water to that fire. So this is just a tool. See, it's hard to talk and yawn and do ear massage. So if this isn't a thing that you do like, I do ear massage. So if this isn't a thing that you do like, let's start doing this all the time right, it's something you can do in a meeting. It's something you could do, you know, at the game or in car line or you know. It's a great nervous system tool to just be taking really good care of yourself.
Speaker 1:So from a nervous system perspective, our nervous systems are supposed to be like rubber bands. They're supposed to be able to respond appropriately when stressed and then go back to a place of peace when not under stress. And most people in our culture today we're just stretched all the time right and we don't downshift. Our nervous systems don't come back to this place of restfulness and it's why we have so many digestive issues and why we are so stuck and traumatized and wound up and stressed out and anxious and angry. So the ear massage is one I've been leaning on a lot lately and one I love, but one of the other ones I love is going to feel a little more shocking.
Speaker 1:So something that I will often do in between session, or just like, let's say, I wake up on the wrong side of the bed, or let's say, you know, something I feel like has not gone my way, I have found, because I have such a tendency towards dissociation, I really benefit from fully discharging any sort of emotion that I am experiencing or would tend to suppress or want to dissociate. And also, from an astrological perspective, I am like a double air fire sign. So for me, like I'm just very, very, very cerebral, so for me to get into the body and act emotions out physically is really really, really important. So oftentimes, right, I will do this. Producer Joy calls this the mommy rock. Is that what you call it? The rock Sway, mom's sway.
Speaker 1:So I may start like this, but I'm really going to be listening to my body and what it's asking for. So this mom's sway is actually very, very nervous system regulating and grounding and it can just help the nervous system sense that, okay, I am safe in this moment and, let's say, there's something that I'm really pissed off about. I will get really, really into that emotional expression and I will act out what I wish I could have said or what I wish I could have done in that moment that was deemed not appropriate and, I think, to all the women in the room we can really really relate and resonate to. There's so much about discharging emotion that is judged as not appropriate in our society and in this world and for those of us that work behind a desk, we're not properly discharging that emotion out of our bodies and then it piles up and it turns into disease and so I will grunt, growl, groan, yell like, scream things.
Speaker 1:I will not do that to you right now, but I will absolutely when I am away from the situation. We'll make sure I complete that emotional experience and I will pair it with things like no, no, no, right. I will literally physically act out boundary setting or expression or like what I wish I could have said, and I have found that to be just absolutely a game changer in terms of how I go to sleep that night or how I transition into spending time with my family in a day, how I wake up the next morning, I will absolutely feel such a relief and I will just go and go and go until I'm either exhausted or I feel a shift right, and I finally feel like, oh, that feels really, really better. So just know that when you're feeling feelings, or you're thinking feelings, or you're frustrated or stuck or whatever, right that even just starting with this mom's way is so good and then starting to give yourself permission to welcome an emotion and listen to your body and what it's asking for, right, if it's asking for no, if it's asking for no, if it's asking for a hug, or you know it's acting, asking to stretch a particular way.
Speaker 1:I will tell you there's one other thing that I do a lot somatically throughout the day.
Speaker 1:I have a foam roller, I have a foam roller downstairs this one is aggressive and I have a foam roller upstairs that's less aggressive.
Speaker 1:But I do a lot of foam rolling to really upregulate circulation and emotional processing, grounding in general, and I will absolutely concentrate on rolling this on my back, so I put it on the floor and I roll my back up and down, and so it's a little like self chiropractic, right, but also it helps keep my heart open because as we get stressed and our nervous system gets dysregulated, we start to, without even realizing it, close off our heart centers, right when we just have the onslaught of content that we experience in a day, even from just scrolling Instagram, absolutely your heart can close because you get triggered by whether it's news content, political content, the sufferings in the world. You saw that that lady that you really wanted to be friends with went on vacation and she didn't invite you, and so when I foam, roll up and down my back and allow my heart to open, I just find that that is a really good maintenance tool for me somatically and to keep the flow going in my spine, in my nervous system and in my heart center.
Speaker 3:So we're going to do a somatic break and we're going to do the one of the easiest things you can do. Oh, I love an easy thing right, okay, so everybody has pillows, everybody has something in mold, everybody has a bedroom pillow, something something so the easiest thing you can do is really drop into the feeling that you're struggling with Sometimes.
Speaker 3:You can't do it automatically Like you can't. You can't throw things at the grocery store, you can't scream, you can't stop your feet, you can't throw a tantrum in the grocery store because a you might get arrested people right. People would look at you right. So go home and then put yourself back in that spot until you connect with it you know what?
Speaker 3:that you connect and you get angrier and you start perseverating on what you should have said or you could have said, and then you throw the pillow on the floor and just now I got chills right, so you put it on the floor, you can fun fact women in a sepia state are better from violent motion.
Speaker 1:Ah, so like, where are sepia qualifications?
Speaker 3:here makes a lot of sense, just connecting all the dots today. And as you do this, you will feel yourself release that anger, like you don't hold onto it anymore, like it's like oh, that person who made me mad at the grocery store or hurt my feelings or whatever activated part happened which was a bad day. And it had nothing to do with me and it didn't Right. Other people have parts You're just a victim of somebody else's form right. So like get the chills, move your shoulders, move your neck.
Speaker 1:Do you ever scream things when you're throwing your pillow?
Speaker 3:I don't because I have neighbors. I like screaming in the woods when it's not necessarily picked up.
Speaker 1:I love this one too. Yes, obviously. So I'm a big fan of adding the grunt or the growl, or the yell. Yeah, even if it's Sometimes, I'll be in the shower and I'll make some pretty weird noises.
Speaker 2:It's like getting it out right.
Speaker 1:Whatever it is. Also, humming is such a powerful one. I'll hum a lot in the shower or I'll I don't know vocalizing while I throw a pillow. It's just up levels. It it's an excellent tool.
Speaker 1:You know, I we have somebody, actually one of our favorite listeners not that we have favorite listeners. Podcasters don't have favorite listeners. What's wrong with you, Dawn? One of our favorite listeners sent me a text message today. Also, if we don't DM on Instagram, like come on folks, like send me a DM. She texted today and said her kiddo did some pillow throwing because her kid watched her pillow throw recently. And this is a kid, a child, who has had trouble with anger management for a very long time and went to pick up a pillow recently. And I think it's just so empowering for any person to know that they can manage their emotions. I think we very often, especially in this very polarized country where we just seem to have such big feelings about everything and don't seem to feel like we can manage them Right, but to be able to do so, it's a. It's very empowering, yeah, yeah, yeah, Very relieving.
Speaker 3:I I'm sure this is probably very relatable but like when my kids were younger, I would just ignore their tantrums. I would step over them.
Speaker 2:I would do. You know what I mean.
Speaker 3:Because, like they're getting out and they're fine. Now I encourage my 10 year old, bigger, bigger, like, set your feet, like you know my, my 10 year old Bigger Stomp their feet Bigger. I can't stomp her Like stomp your feet. Like you know, my 10 year old had a very heartbreaking situation the other day and she was just so and she was feeling so much shame and she was just in her little head. So you know, just getting her to move her body and stomp and anger and like.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because we get so in our head, right, like when you had my kiddo the other weekend back in Savannah, right, and she was feeling all the feelings about being separated, yeah, and I had her get up and do jumping jacks, right. And then all of a sudden she's giggling she shifted so fast.
Speaker 1:Somatics, somatics. We've adopted the jumping jacks as well, but also I gave her a random number of jumping jacks to do, because when the brain is trying to do math, it also it's going to move from the lower brain, stem right triggered brain into the top brain, and so I gave her a super random number. I think I said 37, because when you're right, it's like what? And then it just it takes you out of whatever you're feeling. Yeah, yeah, all right.
Speaker 2:So Dawn knows this very well. Joy's learning this about me as well. I am the disassociation queen. In my past, through my journey, through my healing journey, my favorite way to deal with my problems would be to completely just shut down and disassociate. I had a really hard time dropping into my body. I had a really hard time feeling big feelings because my managers which we will cover in a little bit in IFS as soon as I started feeling a feeling, they would come in and save the day and they'd be like nope, we're going to protect her and take her over here and she's just not going to feel anything.
Speaker 2:So to me, my favorite somatic technique right now is body scanning. So this has given me the self-awareness to where, if I'm in a situation where I feel like I'm starting to become triggered, I immediately just drop into my body and just take a quick moment and I'm like where am I feeling this? Am I hot in my chest? Is my pulse quickening? Am I starting to feel fuzzy and lightheaded? Normally that's the cue that I'm about to disassociate is when my mind and my thoughts just stop completely and I just go blank. It protects me from feeling the big emotions and then I move into fight flight mode, so I will usually like hang out in the corner by myself or I want to leg it the hell out of there. So what I've started doing is just taking a breath, just really going inside and saying okay, I'm feeling these big emotions right now. So what are they feeling like inside, you know, and how are they presenting?
Speaker 2:I had a lot of health issues prior to starting homeopathy and doing this, because my stress was actually manifesting in my body in physical ways. I had things that were showing up on tests medically that were very scary. I had to go through a lot of very scary tests because of the physical signs I was showing. My doctor at the time had put me on six antibiotics. Nothing was touching anything, any of my symptoms, and so I started using homeopathy with Dawn and I started being very aware of my stress level because what I started noticing was I felt okay, but clearly my body was telling me it's not so. If you feel like you're okay in your mind and you kind of feel calm, but you're still feeling like these physical signs of stress, tiredness, exhaustion, fogginess that's your body telling you that something's wrong. It's not so.
Speaker 2:I would just encourage everyone to be able to really take a little bit of time, drop in, check in with yourself and ask what does it feel like in my body when this is happening to me? Can I catch this? And so it starts giving you this self-awareness to where I know when I'm about to trigger, to the point where my body is about to shut down and everything else is about to take over. It's helped me tremendously in staying very present in the moment. Sometimes, if I feel myself going out, I'll start to look at things around the room and I'll start to name them just to keep myself very, very present.
Speaker 2:So the key to preventing disassociation is staying present in the moment. A lot of times I will take an object and I'll pass it back and forth through both of my hands, because the part of the brain that activates your disassociation cannot work at the same time that you're doing some sort of physical activity. So it will actually stop me from disassociating as well. So a couple of my favorite techniques. For any of my other fellow sisters out there that just love to shut off their feelings, I see you a couple of cool techniques that I like to try.
Speaker 1:You know, when I was in an advanced EMDR training they did that ball technique where we would throw it back and forth. Like you know, between you and I same thing. It's something about having to have spatial reasoning or spatial awareness. Yeah, it like inhibits dissociation. So throwing a ball back and forth right, like a squishy ball back and forth across the room is a great somatic technique. Yeah To to regulate dissociative tendencies.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So being able to be mindful of stress too. And then the homeopathy. It was crazy because in a year later, when I went back to my doctor to rescreen, I had none of my symptoms. Um, like some of the masses that had formed in my body were completely gone.
Speaker 2:Um and I was not having as many flares or anything like that. So it's definitely I would tell you to take charge of your health. That's one of the things and in part of finding your tribe is like finding a really good doctor that's going to listen to you and is going to advocate for you. This was the first time that I went to see my doctor two weeks ago. It was a brand new doctor. I wanted to try her. She was kind of she's like an osteopath, like natural.
Speaker 2:You know, like I was, like I was so excited I knew I was going to love her right away, Cause she came in the room and she's sitting Indian style and she was like all up in my face. Oh, my goodness, that's amazing. Oh God, she was so great, Right. So like it was the first time I've ever been asked in an appointment what homeopathic remedies are you on? That's amazing. Yes, Like she cared, she wanted to know why do you take this and what does this do for you and why are you? And again, going back to the whole empowerment thing, you know I'm very sepia. I carry a lot of masculine energy because I had to do all the things as a single mom and so it's very hard for me to tap into my womanly nurturing part.
Speaker 2:My daughter gets that very quickly with me, but not a lot of other people get my softness and so, yeah, I mean having something that I know, like I already can tell you guys during my period week, I just automatically dose sepia. I don't even guess, I don't even play around with it. It helps the rage the anger that comes out. So yeah, for sure, but that's one thing that I will say about homeopathy is that it has given me my power back to feel like I no longer have to sit in these feelings and that I do have a solution.
Speaker 1:Well, that's the thing, right, I think homeopathy has allowed me, when feelings come up right, they don't get stuck, they'll move through right. So the somatic techniques are so much more effective because, well A, I just feel freer to do them, to be in my body and to be myself. But it's so much easier to move emotion through my body using the somatic techniques. Now, the body scan and the awareness right, like being able to articulate like, oh, I'm holding my breath, right, when you were just now body scanning and I was like, oh, I'm holding my breath, I'm going to breathe with her, okay, oh, I always do that and if you're someone that disassociates, you're always numbing, you're always holding your breath and it's, it's held and like.
Speaker 2:What I find is that I usually hold it down here in my stomach so it results in digestive issues and like all kinds of crap that like comes up in here that manifests in all of these autoimmune diseases. You know that are really just my stress coming to the surface.
Speaker 1:That's one of the very cool byproducts of our program. Right Is and we've had this on the docket to maybe record an episode about like, divorce recovery and autoimmune disease because, like, as a natural byproduct of being in our program, it is more likely than not that your autoimmune issues will go into remission. Yeah, yeah, as mine did, as yours have, as you're right, like it's yeah, so remarkable for sure. How about a little vagal breathing? Like, if we all just do a little like intentional breathing together as a group, it'll be co-regulating for our nervous systems. And so a vagal breath we have an episode on this, episode number I don't know, but vagal breathing is where you take a nice deep inhale into your core, right, so you want it to touch that diaphragm. The diaphragm is what signals the vagus nerve. And then, where your exhale is longer than your inhale and something about that exhale being longer nice, slow, steady, long exhale allows the nervous system to perceive that it's actually safe, because so often our reticular activating systems are just scanning the environment for threats and we perceive threats are threatening even when they're not right. Like, oh, I'm hanging out on an Instagram live. I feel threatened, I'm holding my breath Like there's nothing threatening happening right now. Right, we're hanging out with some cool people on the IG, so let's take some big breaths, cool. So everybody at their own pace. But just a nice big inhale, maybe a little hold at the top, maybe let your shoulders go and then a nice slow exhale. Yes, already I felt a nice relaxation response. Nice big inhale, we'll hold at the top, a nice long exhale.
Speaker 1:If you're sitting there right now and you haven't taken some breaths or you haven't moved your body, like pop up right, like let's move together. What is your body asking for? What is it? What is it saying? It needs to move the emotion, to get unstuck right, like so often when we're recovering from emotional things and we feel stuck in life and we don't know. You know what to do next or where to go or how to make a decision. You know what we do in the body, we do in life, what we do in the body, we do in mind, what we do in our right. So, like, let's move.
Speaker 1:You know and trust that the more you just listen to what your body is asking for, the more you're going to improve the relationship between your body, mind and spirit and the more you're going to be able to be tapped into your intuition and you're going to know from practicing none of this stuff comes overnight, right, but from practicing all of these things together. None of the women in this room came to these things overnight. It's been a journey, it's become a lifestyle and it's become a joy to live this way together. I think we're living in the way that we were designed to live and move and love, and I think the world would have us, you know, buy more supplements and more wrinkle cream, and I'd rather like laugh and own my health, whatever, and pay attention to what your body's saying.
Speaker 2:I think that women don't do that. We would rather just push it all down.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, absolutely like one of my earliest things, when I was recovering from divorce and I was a therapist, right was like, yeah, like how often did I have to pee? And I would hold it. I would just hold it and hold it in deference to like whatever session I had next or whatever thing I had to take care of, or I wouldn't eat when I was hungry or I wouldn't you know. It's like, yeah, just listening to my body. So it's interesting if I'm tapping in right now, like I feel like I got pretty connected there when we did some vagal breathing, but I, you know, we scheduled a whole Instagram live today from 3 PM to 10 PM.
Speaker 1:It's a lot of, it's a lot of ask from our bodies and from our minds, and I knew that when we we talked about this, like building in these little somatic moments, it was going to help us function better through this. I actually feel like I could yawn a little right now, which I'm going to go with, because it means my nervous system is discharging, and so what are the expectations I had of us as a team today? To perform right. So much of how we live life is so performative and I didn't want this to be that I wanted us to connect with you. I wanted us to you know, like we produce a podcast every week, right, but this is sort of like podcast production live. It's super cool, right. It's authentic. We're just here with you and I don't want it to be performative, and so I could feel how my nervous system maybe slipped into a little of that, right, and just coming back to like, hey, let me be honest with myself.
Speaker 1:What's going on in this moment? What's my body asking for? Just this, mom's way, as producer Joy calls it, feels so good. Yeah, so to anybody who's live with us right now, if you scan your body, what are you feeling? Is it hot? Is it cold? Is it tight? Is it burning? Is it sharp? I don't know what are some of the words you find, tiffany, when you do a body scan. What are some common ones for you usually?
Speaker 2:it's. I'm hot, hot, hot. My pulse is quickening. My brain is starting to feel foggy.
Speaker 3:I can't formulate my thoughts, yeah Triggered brain fog.
Speaker 2:Yeah, my mouth gets very dry. Um, I started to feel sick and nauseous. You know, the problem is my. My body used to signal and it still does a great job, but I hit my snooze button so much during my life that now I really have to pay attention. And I think that most women are like that, where we have just been subjected to situations for so long that we've hit snooze on. Now we don't trust ourselves to know what's right, we don't trust our bodies, we don't listen to it, and if our body does sound an alarm, we question it.
Speaker 1:Well, it's really a thing you know instead of just trusting it Well and how often does the medical community gaslight us Like I don't know? Your labs look normal. You must be fine. Yeah, like I'm not fine, yeah, yeah. So yeah, movement, movement, movement, right, the semantics is so, so, so powerful. There are a lot of things with neck and emotion, right. I'm just going to say there's so much to do with suppressed emotion and the body, and so I cannot say enough for doing really good trauma work, really good trauma, informed, somatic internal family systems, homeopathic work, like that's how, why we built our 12 month program the way that we did, that it's so personalized to be able to clear all this shit that's just built up in your body the emotions, the toxins, the negative beliefs that have built up in your body and in your subconscious mind, and doing this work just will clear all of that out. Dear Divorce Diary is a podcast by my coach, dawn. You can find more at mycoachdawncom.
