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
226. What If You Could See Yourself Through My Eyes 😍 Rebuilding Confidence After Divorce
Join The list for A Different D Word
For many women, the aftermath of divorce is riddled with self-doubt and relentless self-criticism, hampering the path to healing.
What if the true step towards renewal isn't in trying to fix perceived flaws but in transforming the lens through which you view yourself?
This episode unravels the profound impact of retraining your brain to see yourself with Loving Eyes, offers a powerful exercise to diminish the hold of self-criticism, and reveals how embracing self-kindness can lead to an unstoppable sense of self-worth.
Dive into this transformative journey—tune in now to learn how the practice of Loving Eyes can redefine your narrative and invite abundant self-love into your life!
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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.
After divorce, it is easy to see yourself through the harshest lens, picking apart what went wrong, what you could have done differently or how you should be healing faster. But what if the real key to moving forward isn't fixing yourself but seeing yourself through a different lens? Today we're diving into loving eyes, a powerful practice to shift the way you see yourself, soften self-judgment and finally embrace the woman you're becoming. 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. 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, let's be honest. The way you look at yourself is a habit, and think about it. When you look in the mirror, do you automatically scan for what you love or for what you hate? Ooh, you know it. Right there, right, right there. Most of us have trained ourselves to see our flaws first, but your brain can be retrained. And stick with me because in a minute I'm going to share. The simple act of changing how you see yourself can shift your entire sense of self-worth. Because what we need to be aiming for is what if you saw yourself like someone who loves you? Imagine for a second that you could borrow the eyes of someone who truly adores you, like your best friend, your child, your dog. What would they see in you? So, by the end of this episode, I'll walk you through a powerful exercise that will help you stop seeing yourself through a lens of criticism and start seeing yourself with kindness and the love you deserve. Kindness and the love you deserve. Okay, loving eyes. This is the tool I want you to start practicing and it's going to be most impactful if you can start with a little journaling. Right, I want you to sit down with your journal and I want you to start writing down. Sit down with your journal and I want you to start writing down the people, places and things where you are looking through your eyes in a loving way at them, whatever they are right.
Speaker 1:So for me I talked about last episode. It's a little put the Frenchie Sometimes these days my daughter although post-divorce, it wouldn't have been that Very often nature I will see through loving eyes. Very often. I will watch really cute stuff on Instagram through loving eyes. These days, I don't know, I feel like loving eyes is more my state of being, like I just see so many things through loving eyes my patients all the time. Right, they'll be sharing something deeply painful and I'll find myself smiling in love, and I don't know if that sounds weird to you or not, but like I just love you so much. But that has come as a result of all this work all these years, right?
Speaker 1:So I want you to sit down with your journal, drop into your body and write several sentences about what loving eyes feels like in your body. What is it about these people, places or things that feels so good to you? Why are they so easy to love? That friend, loving eyes is your natural state of being, and that might be the most important thing I've said in this podcast episode, or could say in this podcast episode that loving eyes is your natural state of being. And now I want you to think about how much of your day you spend in loving eyes. In your natural state, is it more or less than the, you know, average? And so that's really something for you to look at, because our intelligent creator created us and this world through loving eyes. Everything around us is immensely beautiful, but we have literally trained ourselves to look at ourselves and the world around us through a lens of criticism, finding flaws everywhere we look. Finding flaws everywhere we look, and what that does is it separates us from our, or it gives us the perception of separation, right, or the absence of love in our existence. And then we feel like shit and wonder why. And so this is your call to really look at the habit with which you see the world around you, and especially yourself.
Speaker 1:So, once you've sat with and you've journaled this sense of loving eyes, I want you to try something even harder. I want you to sit down in front of a mirror and I want you to close your eyes, and I want you to drop into your body, find the sensation of loving eyes towards that other person, place or thing where it's so easy for you to see them through the lens of love. And then I want you to open your eyes in the mirror and see how long you can hold it with yourself. Now, for some of you, you won't be able to even open your eyes, because the idea of looking in the mirror in that vulnerable way is so intolerable. It's going to feel impossible and that my love is the issue, right. And so if you are able to open your eyes for a moment and hold it and see maybe younger versions of yourself, can you see like you know you, when you were a baby or a teenager or various points in your life?
Speaker 1:This is now combining mirror work with the idea of loving eyes and, oh man, that's advanced level crap right there. And so once you've got a sense of, okay, I can tackle this loving eyes in the mirror work or I'm not there yet, dawn, okay, great. Now let's look at our next step. From that sort of seated, comfortable place where you've been able to find loving eyes towards someone else, I want you to consider just doing a little butterfly tap when you're locked into that body awareness, that loving eyes sensation, just anchoring in the loving eyes sensation, just gently crossing your arms across your body or just, you know, with your hands on your lap, just left, right tapping, and just allowing yourself to feel the good feeling of what it feels like to love someone else so deeply. And remember, the reason we need to pick someone where there's no split energy around it right is because we really want to be able to call in that loving eye sensation Really get it clear in the body.
Speaker 1:And then I want you to think about the least threatening version of yourself you as a baby, right Least threatening Like who couldn't love baby you. And then just think about having loving eyes towards your baby self. You're doing that butterfly tap and just noticing that baby you deserves so much love and belonging. And that's where we start, friend. And then, after baby you, we'll probably start getting into zones where you're going to come up with all sorts of reasons why maybe you weren't lovable. And that's the issue, right, where we have to start shifting those negative beliefs into positive ones. Like I did my best, I am worthy of love. I don't have to be perfect, I'm worthy of acceptance and just capturing an extra microsecond of loving eyes towards self.
Speaker 1:If you make this a daily practice for five minutes, just five minutes, it doesn't even have to be daily. If you did it like, let's say, four days a week for five minutes, what's that? 20 minutes in your week of loving eyes practice, you will start to change the habit of the way you look at yourself and from there, from the place of self-acceptance, self-love, loving eyes towards self, you will start to see the world through loving eyes. But that's a process and it takes practice and it takes intention, and I know you can do it and so you have to take a look at is there lots of resistance to doing this work? Shit, yeah, there is lots of resistance to doing this. Loving eyes, mirror work. But then we must measure that against.
Speaker 1:You want beautiful relationships, you want abundance in your life, you don't want to be judged by people and so right now, if you're sort of stuck in judgment, the habit of judgment by looking at yourself and other people through criticism, then you are attracting judgment to yourself.
Speaker 1:There's sort of no avoiding it. So it's like, well, do I feel resistance to doing this work? Yes, but what feels stronger, the resistance to doing this work or the urge to create this abundant, delicious, yummy life where you feel peace and excitement and you're calling in manifestations left and right and one directly leads to the other love. So just to recap, loving eyes is your natural state of being and the way that you habitually look at yourself is probably not that way. So changing the process of moving one into the other is sort of the birthplace from all abundance love, the birthplace of all abundance that you are longing to call in. So drop into your body, grab your journal, do some mirror work and start to change the habit through which you see yourself and watch everything in your life shift, because, remember, a woman who loves herself is un-freaking-stoppable. I love you so much. Peace.
