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
217. Why Understanding Internal Family Systems is Crucial For Women Healing Attachment Style After Divorce
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After divorce, we struggle with trusting ourselves and fear repeating past mistakes. Could understanding your Internal Family System be the key to breaking free from those patterns and creating a more secure attachment style?
In our journey through life, especially after navigating the rough seas of divorce, we often find ourselves entangled in patterns we can't fully understand. This episode dives deep into the power of Internal Family Systems (IFS), offering insights on why we make the choices we do and uncovering the internal dialogue we have with ourselves.
In this episode, you will uncover how IFS work can illuminate your dating and relationship patterns, enhance self-awareness to understand and heal trauma, and develop tools for emotional regulation and secure attachment in future relationships.
Join us and discover how IFS can transform your inner dialogue and empower you to live with intention and trust. Tune in now and start your journey to self-discovery and healing!
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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 swore your marriage wouldn't end up here, but somehow the same relationship patterns kept repeating. The same emotional rollercoaster, the same what am I missing? Over and over again? Because part of you is actually stuck in the past, trying to protect you from some perceived threat. What if you could meet that part, understand it and help it break free from these relationship patterns you've been experiencing? Today we're diving into internal family systems, a mind-blowing approach that could transform how you see yourself, your relationships and your healing. Stay with me. This episode might just change everything.
Speaker 1: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. Okay, let's talk about parts. What if I told you that there are parts of you that sabotage relationships, overthink everything or people please, and that those parts aren't bad. They've been working overtime to protect you, but it's time to help them shift their strategy? So in just a few minutes, we're going to walk through exactly how to identify these parts and, more importantly, how to help them shift from the strategies that they've been using. A little bit later on, we're going to talk about that feeling you get when you scroll Instagram at midnight or numb out with Netflix or pour the extra glass of wine that you swore you weren't going to drink, but you sense that something deeper is going on when all that's happening.
Speaker 1:Well, these aren't just bad habits. These are actually firefighter parts trying to put out emotional pain. And later on in the episode, we're going to talk about how you can spot these moments and shift them into real healing instead of self-sabotage. And then, towards the end, I'm going to ask you to imagine this you walk into a new relationship or new friendship or a new job and, instead of questioning yourself or falling into old patterns, you actually feel grounded, confident and free. Can you even imagine what that would be like? That's the power of this work using IFS. And before we wrap up the end of the session, we're going to give you a simple but powerful exercise that will help you start shifting those patterns. Today, let's dig in. Today, let's dig in.
Speaker 3:Welcome back. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We're going to talk about internal family systems, which is parts work, right, and I'd love for this to be like a more round table conversation, like anyone hop in any time about, because we've all done work with our parts and we've all had really vulnerable I don't know things we've discovered about our minds, and because we've all done work with our parts and we've all had really vulnerable I don't know things we've discovered about our minds and things we've worked through as a team, things we've worked through in our personal lives, right. And I think, just to preface this, so much of what I hear women talk about as they're wanting to recover from divorce is being able to trust themselves again and not repeat the same mistakes when they're dating or picking another partner. And I think one of the most powerful things you can do, the most powerful things you could do, to get clear on your patterns and why you're making certain choices and how you're reacting or responding to certain things, is through internal family systems. Yeah, this is a theory that was developed, I think, in the eighties.
Speaker 1:Yes, does that sound about right? Yes, by a pretty well-known, widely accepted psychologist and I heard Huberman from Huberman lab. I posted this in one in our chat for our ladies. This week Huberman had an IFS therapist on his podcast recently. So, like IFS theory is it's gaining popularity, yeah, and so that's to say right. It's become pretty widely accepted and it does have a lot of specialty trainings in the world of therapy and coaching and whatnot. And coach Tiffany loves IFS and so we're going to let her kick this one off.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm on fire about it. I think it was developed by a therapist that started listening to his clients in session. Start describing these different parts of themselves and the voices that they were hearing in their head. Not like, not a schizophrenic right?
Speaker 1:No, but like, on the one hand, I want to have the ice cream sandwich and, on the other hand, I won't let myself have the ice cream sandwich. Right, like, as simply as that. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 3:And so he started to identify that people have certain parts of themselves, and so the whole preface behind IFS internal family systems is you can kind of compare it to the movie Inside Out. So there's all of these little sides of you personalities, emotions that are presenting, and then, when those big, heavy emotions start to present, your managers start to come on scene because they're not comfortable with you feeling those heavy emotions, and so this is where we develop all of these beautiful things like being a perfectionist, being a people pleaser, being able to just kind of shut down, like all of those things.
Speaker 1:Like be stoic.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, and so what I'm starting to learn about it is that when something happens in our childhood that creates a wound and it's basically described as any time that an adult in our life does not take responsibility for their behavior so there was an action that happened as a child, the adult did not take responsibility, and so we then took that responsibility on as children and internalized it. It created a part, created an emotion associated with that part of us that couldn't be processed, like the kid.
Speaker 1:Because trauma right, a lay definition, like one way of thinking of trauma is when there was too much of something for too long or not enough of something for too long, right. So when there's too much of something or not enough and the kid can't, me, I couldn't process, right. Then that content, that painful experience, becomes a burden that I dissociate, right, I put it in a box, on a shelf, where it lives.
Speaker 3:It gets stuck. So it's like these little parts of ourselves along the way that have gotten stuck in certain times in the past in our lives. And so what we start finding is that and you've heard me describe this on the podcast is that you know, my dating style was I always felt like I was dating, you know, the same situation. It was just different. People Like I can literally lay out like a pattern was the same, oh my God, like it was the same thing.
Speaker 1:But like insert different.
Speaker 3:Yeah, insert different person. And so one of my biggest fears after divorce was how do I prevent this from happening to me again? Why do I keep picking men that are the same type of guy that I keep having these triggering reactions to that, that trigger me in a way that is just so severe that it's obviously like something that's happening. And so when I started figuring out my own parts work, what I started figuring out was that there were these parts of me that were still like in this very childlike mindset, that didn't understand that I am now a 47 year old woman with a stable life and things are normal and I'm safe, and so these, these parts of me don't have to protect me anymore, because that's what happens physiologically with trauma.
Speaker 1:We can we know now from doing brain scans actually that when we scan the brain of someone who's experienced trauma it actually changes the structure of the brain. We can see dissociation on a brain scan and so what trauma does is it freezes those parts in time so they're not oriented to time right, like our parts still think it's 1989. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:I just laughed because I wish I would have done brain scanning before. I probably would have lit up like a Christmas tree, you know, but honestly like so taking it through the journey. Then I started going a step further and you know, it's like you have these roles, that kind of start to take over for you, but then when that doesn't work, then you have the firefighters start to take over and that's when you're severely triggered, yeah, like when it was too much.
Speaker 3:And so you know, pick your poison. Are you binging Netflix? Are you doom scrolling on Instagram? Are you disassociating? Are you drinking? Are you dealing with it in sexually addicting ways, like, what are you doing to deal with the pain?
Speaker 1:Because the firefighter's job is to put the pain down at all costs?
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely, because nothing else in the system is working.
Speaker 1:Right. So the most extreme version of a firefighter is like suicidal thoughts.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. And then you know what I started to learn too is that's how people develop addictions to alcohol, eating disorders, because at that point your firefighters take over as the manager and that's just how you live, because they think that you have to drink to be able to keep functional and safe and prevent the emotion. So now the alcoholic part is just going to completely take over. And so IFS work is very interesting because you walk through your clients, you know. You walk them through these core memories that are stuck in the system and the goal of it is to be able to heal those parts of you.
Speaker 3:And it worked beautifully for me because I was able to see the little girl at the stage that I was, where the memory was stuck, and bring her into my life now and start repairing that and start repairing that, so that way my system can say every time you're in a situation where XYZ is going on, it does not mean that XYZ is going to be the outcome right.
Speaker 3:You know and it has. I remember when I was going through getting my coaching certifications neurobiology oh my God, I'm a huge nerd like all I wanted to do was study the brain and I found it fascinating that you know that's how trauma it gets ingrained in these roadways in your brain and the fact that you could actually reprogram your roads and you could reprogram that. You know the way that your brain responds to trauma. Oh my God, like I wish I would have had it 10, 15 years ago. Yeah, that neuroplasticity piece.
Speaker 2:Yeah, one of the reasons I love ISF so much is because it gives you the vocabulary to understand your body and what's happening and those parts when they get activated versus when you're. You know what I mean. Like the vocabulary is so important to give you permission to understand your body some more right.
Speaker 1:How often do we say like I'm not crazy, I'm sensing this, I'm feeling this or whatever's happening right, yeah, but we don't maybe have awareness, because we haven't attended to it, that there are these facets right of what we're experiencing and a progression right of triggering like and that different. It's so interesting to build relationships in the mind's eye right with these parts of self. Right because it gives you so much more capacity I almost said control, but I take it back Capacity to support a part that feels out of control Compassion for yourself, the little girl.
Speaker 2:That was Right.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, and I think it was interesting when Candice asked earlier you know, how do you come back to yourself like that? I mean a huge part of it is IFS work. Yeah, it's huge. It basically starts to repair the parts of you because, again, if these parts aren't being repaired, you're going to keep reaching for the same things, the same partners, the same.
Speaker 1:That said, though, I did so much at the time we weren't calling it IFS, we were calling it inner child work, because there's a lot of overlap between IFS and inner child right. I had done boatloads of inner child work until homeopathy. It was very hard for me to unblend parts Right and I think that there's a piece about somatics in there.
Speaker 2:There's a piece about you know and, and to your point, I had done a lot of homeopathy before I did IFS.
Speaker 1:So like it was easier for you to drop into that process, yeah.
Speaker 2:I was able to drop in, I was able to process and understand, because that was clear of the fog Right Um, when you pair them together, or multiple different values, you get a more pure version of yourself both you know both ways it's a very interesting combo between the two and I think it's important to point out because I, you know, have been a therapist my entire adult life and I had done all these therapies.
Speaker 1:And so to have done all this inner child work, parts work, you know, when I did my most advanced DMDR training is when I first learned about parts and um, I was like sitting in the training and they were talking about parts of self and I was like and there's this, there's this exercise that they do with coming to a meeting place, a table, a meeting table, and I was like, holy crap, they're talking about me, I have parts and and you can do EMDR with one part at a time, which helps create integration, because the goal right is for these parts to like work as a team, because all parts are necessary, all parts are important.
Speaker 1:Parts were developed as a strategy to cope with what is not able to be coped with right. But even with all the EMDR and all the parts work, I still struggled with certain things and um, add homeopathy and boom, which is a lot of the inspiration for why we do our program, the way we do yeah, yeah and yeah, and I think that's that is the reason right, like we can go deeper when we have all the things.
Speaker 3:So, it's IFS with homeopathy, with somatics, with quantum healing like all of that is going to transcend the experience.
Speaker 3:But for me, the IFS piece, it was just mind blowing. And you know, I think that it does take a while for clients to get to the point where they have the self-awareness to start making these roadmaps. But it's interesting because you know, basically it's like, hey, every time I feel this overwhelming sense of isolation, then I start to people please, because I don't want to be alone, and then if the people pleaser can't take over, well, then I'm just going to sit around and drink, because that's what you know. And so you can start to see that when you start feeling, yeah, the emotion, the same thing starts to happen and I think, as women, like we don't slow down enough to pay attention to our patterns.
Speaker 2:Yes, fair? Absolutely don't. But also I do believe that we're conditioned to do so.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Especially, you know, especially in the church. I grew up in a very, very conservative baptist church and I, you're, you're basically taught to be a wife that keeps her head down, her mouth shut and her legs open, like that is your role on this planet, and I think that we are. Our culture keeps women small and so we are designed to suppress we're're not designed to suppress, but we are.
Speaker 1:No, we're conditioned to suppress. Well said Well. And then the expectation for women to work nine to five jobs, when our hormonal cycles right Don't absolutely Right. We are so suppressed as women.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, and I think that's where a lot of these things get stuck in the system.
Speaker 3:You know, because again and it started manifesting in my physical body you know, with health issues and problems that I started having, and especially, you know, I'll be honest as a single parent. When the hell did I have the time Right? You know, when did I have the time Like? Yeah, there were nights when I would, you know, cry in my bedroom every once in a while, but for the most part, I'm like for what? Like it's not helping, you know, and I just continue pushing forward.
Speaker 1:I think that what you just said is so important, like how many women are scrolling TikTok or Instagram and they're learning about mental health. But then, when it comes to sitting in your room at night, you're exhausted. You know you maybe have two jobs and single momming it and you got to fix the toilet yourself too, and you could cry and you may write some things in your journal, but it's like, but that's not enough. And then you feel so stuck, so helpless, hopeless, right and despairing, like they keep saying fricking Dawn on the Dear Divorce Diary keeps saying this could be the catalyst for my greatest life, but it's like no, it's. This is complicated, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is.
Speaker 3:And I think for me, like post-divorce, I was so afraid of feeling my feelings that I just kept going and going and going, that I was the yes girl. Yeah, like I wanted my entire day to be full. And I don't know how many women out there I'm sure feel this way, cause I've talked to them as a single mom. When your kids go to their dads for the weekend, there is this anxiety like, oh, my God, holy shit, how am I going to fill my time? It made me so anxious to just sit about thinking now I love it, like now I'm like well, like quiet evening at home, give me a book. Like I'm very comfortable with myself. But I think when women talk about the loneliness of divorce again, we just talked about this last week in one of our emails You're just lonely for yourself.
Speaker 1:Like I miss myself so much.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. And when it was quiet, the stuff that used to go through my mind was horrible. I didn't know how to deal with it. I didn't want to feel it, I wanted to push it away, I wanted to drink it away, I wanted to, whatever it was, you know that's.
Speaker 1:That's why having a team to heal in is so valuable, right, because we're not supposed to feel all that pain and isolation. We're supposed to feel it in community. Who was I saying this to recently, was it? Oh, oh, you remember when y'all covered me so I could go to Savannah with my husband for the weekend? I was sitting in the Airbnb I'm taking it to the crazy place now but I was sitting in the Airbnb and I was looking at the little sign that was like our wifi password is whatever, right.
Speaker 1:And I was like they have us so separated by they, right? I don't know who I'm talking about, but like, right, every little apartment has its own wifi. Like, we're so separated. And then we all have to pay for wifi and we all have to play for Netflix, and we all have to pay the grocery bill and the water bill and the electric bill. And then when we get divorced, then who do we have? We're so separated, and that's part of why it is so hard for women truly to recover their lives, because we are so isolated in our communities. Our communities aren't communing anymore in really vulnerable ways, right. And then we have our internal family system, and our internal family system isn't communing either, yeah Right. And then we have our internal family system, and our internal family system isn't communing either, yeah Right.
Speaker 3:One part is arguing with how another part is strategizing this pain, and it's just so overwhelming, and then our nervous systems freeze yeah I mean, most of us live in neighborhoods where, to be honest, you can literally reach outside of your window and touch the house next door, but you don't know those people, right, you don't know anything about those people. I mean, I didn't meet any of my neighbors until the hurricane happened this year and all we all had were chainsaws, no cell phone and nothing, no 911 services, like we were stuck. Yes, we are, and I threw something together, yeah, and I know now that if there was ever a zombie apocalypse, my neighbors and I would have it together. We're coming to your house safe with them, yeah, but again, there is, there's this disconnect and I don't know where in society.
Speaker 3:Dissociation. Well, yeah, I don't know where this happened in society, but we are taught now as women.
Speaker 1:Honey, you got to be a hustler, you got to grind, you got to pull your big girl pants off, and that's not how we were designed and it goes against everything that we are. Yeah, let's talk through. Um, let's give some examples. Right, let's talk about like when I called you the other day. So I called you and I'm like in this, obviously like manager state, or would you have said firefighter?
Speaker 3:No, you're a manager manager state.
Speaker 1:I had probably dipped in and out of firefighter though, because earlier in the week I had been isolating right, which is more of a firefighter state. So this was sort of me coming out of firefighter vibes and you called out that I had been triggered around belonging, and so as soon as it started to dawn on me in our conversation that that's what was happening, I I sat for a moment and then I waited for a memory to pop in, because that's how IFS works, right. And so I had this memory pop in from high school where I had had this very traumatic experience where these kids had made a bunch of signs and hung signs all over the school about me and my girlfriends. It was mortifying, right. It was horrible bullying.
Speaker 1:And then I sat with that for a couple of days and I worked with that memory and I worked with that part of me and. But that came as a result of us having this conversation and you having the awareness that I was in that triggered state. So that's the power of IFS, right when it's like when we're feeling uncomfortable in our bodies but can't put our finger on it and can't get it to clear and don't know why, right. So as a result of having that conversation with you that day, I was able to integrate parts and clear some things, rather than just happen to be like I'm tired of feeling like this Let me take a Klonopin or push past it or numb it out or run away from it and just hoping it'll clear eventually and not having actually done that integration work.
Speaker 3:So now, the next time something comes up around belonging, it'll be less triggering. Yeah, yeah, and that's the thing is like every time you work through a memory on IFS it's like you're starting from a new point.
Speaker 3:Right, you're not starting from rock bottom. You know the trigger is not going to feel as severe as next time. You're going to be able to. You know, before I used to ruminate on my thoughts for days, like I would be triggered, severely triggered, and it would take me two to three days to move back out of it, whereas now it's maybe 10 minutes, it's maybe an hour, it just depends. But it's so much easier this time because I have the self awareness to know this is what's happening, like there's literally a roadmap to my triggers.
Speaker 1:So I think that's a really good thing to point out to women about, like do you qualify right? Who is IFS for? Do you qualify for this type of approach? And I think that's a really good sign right, Like, if you have a lot of like reoccurring thoughts that are intrusive and repetitive, that's a really strong sign that you've got some manager, firefighter vibes going on and women stuck in a loop constantly's a really strong sign that you've got some manager, firefighter vibes going on and women stuck in a loop, constantly in a loop.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think, and that's what I hear a lot from our clients. Yeah, like, basically, you know, every single time I was in the same setting, I would get severely triggered. It didn't matter how much I felt good going into it, how much I'd had to prepare myself for it. Every time I got into a social setting with alcohol, I just went hypervigilant, I was watching everyone's behavior, I was anticipating the worst things to happen. I was this and that and I would just, it would end up the same thing every time. I was disassociating. And I'm like a very social person, I'm like super energetic, I'm like very whatever. I would be the one in the corner and I would just be scared to death, not yourself. No, oh my God.
Speaker 1:Not yourself. No, yeah, yeah, in a trauma practice we see lots of people who say, well, I can't remember my childhood that well. So you know, I would say, like homeopathy loosens that up so much, right, so that you can sort of follow the body sensation when we clearly have parts activated but we can't remember where it comes from. Can we just work with the body sensation?
Speaker 3:yeah, that'd be enough. Yeah, I think that the body remembers. The body remembers the feeling and the first time that it felt that way yeah, and so you just trust that sensation and go with it.
Speaker 3:Yes, and start describing. And so I work the clients through the senses. You know, what does it smell like, what does it feel like, what were you dressed in, what you know, and a lot of times I'll have clients. They will talk about the room, they will talk about things people were wearing and even as kids, like they, have these glimpses, glimpses, yeah.
Speaker 1:But so often people say to me I don't know if I could trust this memory. Maybe it was a dream. And I have found, I think, 10 out of 10 times it wasn't a dream. Memory is not reliable. We know that right. Memory is malleable. It's what's so beautiful about tools like IFS and EMDR is we can literally go and intentionally change how we remember a thing to our advantage.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so memory is not reliable, but 10 out of 10 times when there's a body sensation and a trigger that's not just a random dream you had like something happened, yeah, yeah. Are there any examples that either? Like you've done some cool IFS stuff also, like any any aha moments or anything you want to share about? Like, oh, these are, these are the parts that I'm in touch with or what I've noticed about myself.
Speaker 2:I'm. I'm the quintessential people pleaser and I used to wear it as a badge of honor, like I'm a two on the Enneagram. I'm here to serve and like all these identities that I had as a people pleaser. But when, when I really started unpacking that with Tiffany's help, it was, it was more of a way to control or cope with a situation and when someone was upset at me or or had even had a like a baseline, very reasonable conversation and I would get activated because I felt like a bad girl, my identity was just like in question, or or well because I think from a parts perspective, that is the identity right.
Speaker 1:When we're clicked into that, it is an identity right and that part doesn't want to give up any ground unless it sees a benefit.
Speaker 2:So, being able to identify, being able to feel it coming like and being able to manage it now that I have with the tools that I have in the semantics and the process, and being able to manage it now that I have with the tools that I have in the semantics and the process in the, it's just such a game changer for my self acceptance and me being able to live my authentic self versus this, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because I think it's important to point out, right, just because a part has some traits. Yeah, like you know, caretaking is can be on the manager list. Right, because we can often shift into caretaker mode as a way to avoid feeling big emotions. But that doesn't mean that caretaking is all bad, right. And so you, as a people pleaser, as a servant, you're somebody, you're a Sagittarius, like your nature is going to be to want to serve your community, right, and so I think it's an important distinction to make that.
Speaker 2:But being able to examine like why am I right? When and why am I wanting their approval or because I'm it's a pure intention? Like I do, I want to look better, you know? I mean, do I want to have this of sort of having my stuff together, or or is it because I truly believe God has laid it on my heart to go serve? It's a pure intention versus try to avoid pain?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, like a psychological Tylenol. I have a great example of when I was with a client just recently who did this beautiful parts work in session and then, like really a first time breakthrough drop in like massive shifting Right. And then at the very end of the session, first time breakthrough drop in like massive shifting Right. And then at the very end of the session they very quickly shifted into are you okay, how are you? I worry about you when you're back to back in session, like that, what can I? I'm going to give you some minutes back at the right. And so we wrapped up the session and I just sent a sweet text message that was like that caretaker part really like attempted to tuck all those painful emotions back in the box at the end of the session. There didn't it? And that's an example of that right. Caretaking is a beautiful thing, but it's like understanding when you're doing it to distance from your emotions versus processing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. And we talk a lot about sense of self. Like women, you know they have a hard time, especially coming out of divorce, that they don't trust themselves. Oh right, so like there are these words that we use the eight C's to describe self, and a lot of it is like are you coming from a place of calm? Do you feel connected to yourself? Do you feel confident? Because women can say yes, yes, yes, I do.
Speaker 3:And that's when you know that you're acting in a manager like state I mean for me, like my hypervigilant and need to control every single setting around me. Like I knew that was my manager and when I was in that mode I couldn't be creative, I couldn't be calm or connected to myself because I was so damn busy looking at what everybody else was doing around me. So, fixing these parts of yourself and reintegrating, that's the way that then, when you get signals from other people, you know whether this is going to be a good fit or not for you. The next time you don't keep picking those same types of men, those friends that trash you and talk about you behind your back. You know, like Dawn was mentioning that earlier, for such a long time in my life I didn't have female friendships Like. I had acquaintances and, yes, I had a couple of besties out there, but people only knew what I wanted them to know about me. Like I, there was no vulnerability, and without vulnerability you can't have true connection. And then you feel lonely, yes, and so in the program, the more vulnerable we can be with each other.
Speaker 3:You know, and we set the example, ladies, when you're in our program you get a behind the scenes look at all of our stuff, because it's like we're not sitting on the other side of this saying, oh, we're perfect, nothing ever, no. Because life, saying, oh, we're perfect, nothing ever, no, no, because life's life, yeah, life's life. There's always contrast in life. The difference is when we are triggered in situations or when things happen, like Dawn. She reached out to me and said, hey, I need coached into this situation, you know, or whatever. And we reached out, talk, yeah, like, got coach, just were able to come out of it. And this is the beautiful thing that I'm seeing with the women in our program is that they're halfway through it and they're reaching for the tools and then they're coming back to us and saying, hey, this happened today, but I came out of it so quickly, and so that's the beauty of it.
Speaker 1:For me, the goal of this program is emotional regulation, because life is never going to be able to be controlled Well, and a secure attachment style is my goal, but in a secure attachment style requires being able to take care of those parts of self so that I can remain in relationship with myself and then remain in relationship with you even though we're having hard conversations or I feel triggered or I feel threatened. Right, I can work through those parts and I can stay in there and I can keep my heart open, even in conflict or even when we don't agree. And that's a secure attachment. Right, and that's what all these tools all mushed together facilitate. Right, is emotional regulation a true secure attachment style, the capacity from a nervous system perspective to tolerate painful emotions? Yeah, oh, one thing that I just think probably is a common example.
Speaker 1:I'm wondering if either of you relate to this. I know, before EMDR even right before I was EMDR trained or anything like that Workaholic was my main firefighter. Right, I perceived, like always, that the money monster was chasing me. Right, and I just work, work, work, work, work was how I maintain a sense of wellbeing. Yeah, not really. And then, when I didn't have to work, I would not be able to relax. So like, let's say, it's Sunday and I don't really have to work, but I couldn't feel at ease at all right, I couldn't shift out. Or let's say it was nighttime and I was going to put Grace to bed and I couldn't feel at ease putting her down.
Speaker 1:I wonder how many moms relate to that. And it's because I was stuck in a part right. There wasn't integration, because the goal is for all of our parts to work together. Like God forbid, something happens in life. You need that workaholic part to call on it for some reason. But you want to be able to have this fluidity amongst parts Right. And so I can look back on those seasons now and see, like man, the reason I couldn't shift and be present in those moments was because I was stuck in a either a manager part or a firefighter part. And so I think to the woman who struggles to be present, there's parts activated right. And for the woman who struggles to be able to shift into connection or relaxation or peace, it's because there's probably some pretty significant parts activation but there's a solution, there's a path out.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, yeah. It took me a long time to figure out how to be present as a mom. You know, and I know a lot of other moms struggle with it. You know, because it's such you're a box checker and things need done and bills need paid.
Speaker 1:Oh, I think when you got to pay the bills and parent your kids and yeah, yeah, like it's a lot of survival mode.
Speaker 3:So, you know, in those moments when I could really be present with her, you know, and tap into myself like that's really what drove me to want to be able to heal, is because I knew that the time was fleeting, you know. And now here we are and my daughter's an adult, and so it's like I look back and I don't have any regrets about it because I know that, you know, if I was having a really shitty day and I came home and all she wanted to do was sit on the floor with me and play with her Barbies or play with her little Shopkins or whatever, she healed me too in ways that I didn't realize, and I think a lot of women are able to, or do, heal themselves through their children. On behalf of yes, absolutely.
Speaker 1:Absolutely Dear. Divorce Diary is a podcast by my coach Dawn. You can find more at mycoachdawncom.
