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
220. The Unspoken Realities of Divorce: When "Who Am I" is Unclear & Letting Go Seems Impossible
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Feeling Lost After Divorce and Struggling with Self-Doubt? We've Got You.
Divorce shakes things up, making you question your worth and wonder what’s next. But imagine if you could rediscover who you really are and put taking care of yourself first—even when life gets hectic.
This episode dives deep into how self-abandonment and self-doubt might be messing with your healing vibe. You’ll get tips on how to handle your daily grind while making room for your own needs and learn ways to tackle those heavy feelings when healing seems like just too much.
Hit play and join us as we share the must-have tools for getting back to feeling like yourself and stepping forward with confidence and self-love.
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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.
It's not enough that divorce leaves you to sift through the rubble of your former life, but amidst that chaos, you find yourself questioning your own worth and doubting your next steps forward. Today we tackle how many women unknowingly hinder their own healing and recovery by succumbing to self-doubt and self-abandonment. In today's episode, we're going to confront those hidden barriers head on and illuminate the path to a smoother recovery. 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:Have you heard that phrase, self-abandonment? It is a hot, trending topic and we love to talk about breaking the cycle, which is where we're going to start in this episode, because we have had multiple very cool people ask for us to talk about how we lose ourselves in marriage and how hard it is to recover ourselves post-divorce, which is doing the behavior of self-abandonment. Self-abandonment is rooted in feelings of not good enoughness and it will stall your healing journey. So we have to look at those layers and so reclaiming your identity and prioritizing self-care. They're not just luxuries, they're necessities. So we will talk about how to interrupt that pattern and lay the groundwork for authentic, deeper healing, finding yourself. Then we will talk about the struggle, the very real struggle, to balance daily responsibilities while navigating a healing process. So I think it's very, very common for people to have this struggle to juggle day-to-day work, parenting crises that come up and feel like they can still focus on recovery and finding themselves. But beneath that struggle often hides a sneaky, hidden belief that your needs are less important and focusing on your healing is going to cause a big problem. So being able to identify that mindset so that it doesn't keep you trapped, so that you can move forward, we're going to unpack all of that.
Speaker 1:And then, finally, we are going to talk about when healing feels just way too hard. Right, have you ever decided to tackle some healing and you just get stuck in the feelings of it all and you just need the feelings to stop? So when healing feels too hard, too heavy, too much, too impossible, it's really tempting to say things like I'm too busy, it's not the right time, I just need to move on, I need to be done with this, and so those justifications are fantastic protective barriers against discomfort, but they ultimately hinder your progress. So let's look at how we can confront that self-talk head on, because overcoming those are vital to your healing journey. Let's dig in, remember how on Tuesday's episode, we talked about that viral video with Gabor Mate and Mel Robbins and we looked at what didn't happen in your childhood can be just as destructive as what did happen in terms of picking partners, breaking relationship patterns and not repeating old mistakes in relationship selection and how you do relationship. Well, we're going to talk about that a little bit here.
Speaker 1:Right, when we look at self-abandonment, this is the tendency for women to fall into this sort of Disney World way of viewing relationships that, at the end of the day, truly believing in ourselves and abiding with ourselves and betting on ourselves and being able to trust ourselves and trust the universe that all of that feels very, very hard for us Because of that thing I referenced in Tuesday's episode, where it feels like file not found, like I don't know how to do that because I don't remember it ever being done for me or with me and so deep in that habit of abandoning yourself, like losing yourself in your ex-marriage, losing yourself in your role as parent, losing yourself in your role at work, losing yourself is rooted in this idea of not good enoughness, that you can't abide with your pain, that you can't face the most dissociative parts of yourself, that you are not good enough to be able to overcome whatever this challenge is, and that maybe God isn't good enough to actually recover you from some of these things. Right? There's a sign there when self-abandonment is happening chronically, there's a real sign that there's a fundamental breakdown in your belief in your good enoughness, or God's good enoughness, right? Or the universe's good enoughness. And so we end up falling back into I can take care of these people, and it feels good to take care of these people, and I can control and predict my surroundings, right? Remember when Brene Brown went viral telling us about our urge to control and predict back in like 2010 or 2011? And so we fall back into these habits of needing to control our environments and needing to give, give, give to the people and to the roles that we uphold in our lives, abandoning our deepest emotional needs and patterns, because that old way is super familiar, right? And so when you notice you're struggling to consistently take action that's self-caring, to consistently abide with your most painful feelings, to consistently ask for help and receive help. When you consistently prioritize other people's needs or say things like I have to be realistic or I have to, you know you can see yourself trying to control your environment. Just know that underneath all of that is a, you know, a deep insecurity that has to be tackled using some tool that will give you the potency that's needed to break that cycle. And so, when it comes to a pattern of self-abandonment, I want you to ask yourself what tools are you currently using? What healing modalities are you currently using that are fundamentally affecting that pattern of self-abandonment? So, when you're triggered, when you see yourself doing those old patterns, which tools are you using and do you sense that they go deep enough? Because if those tools don't go deep enough to create some lasting effort, then you know you need a different tool to actually shift the pattern.
Speaker 1:Can you think about the last time you felt yourself abandon yourself? So let me give you a very recent example of when I could have done that right. So this morning I woke up in the four o'clock hour and my mind decided it was going to work on shit in the four o'clock hour and I started to recognize that and I was like maybe I could just get up and pee and take a remedy and go back to bed and fall back asleep and take a remedy and go back to bed and fall back asleep. Or I could have taken, maybe like some supplement or something right To just go back to sleep. So in that moment what would have felt better is going back to sleep, but I was getting all the signals that there was some stuff that my subconscious needed to help make conscious in that moment. So instead I got up, I did some bilateral simulation, I pulled out my phone, I journaled some things, I did some bagel breathing. I actually got out of bed other than to pee afterwards, right and I got on my foam roller and I rolled on my back because I knew I was having an urge to close my heart when I needed to keep it open and I knew that that's what right. That's like that four o'clock hour is that griefy hour, and so I knew there was some things that I was having the opportunity to break through in there. So this is like an example of abiding with self and doing the thing when it feels hard or you don't feel like it or feels like something else is more of a priority. It would have been easier to go back to sleep. I could have justified and said sleep is crucial to my day going well. But when we are being called to do deeper work and we deny that call, we are delaying the outcome we say we want All right.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about the hidden belief that's been sabotaging your healing. So very, very often post-divorce we have way more crisis and way more responsibility, although some of us already had too much. You know, like most of us had too much responsibility in our marriage as it was. You know let's not open the loop of masculine-feminine dynamics here and how that's gotten all messed up in our modern culture, but the reality is is that we've had way too much responsibility and not enough support for a very, very, very long time. And then in post-divorce that's like on steroids. And then you add like a family crisis or a kid crisis or a health crisis or a community crisis to that or like I don't know, the internet telling us that we must panic about all the things that are going on globally, and it can be very, very hard to stay focused and prioritize our healing.
Speaker 1:And what I want you to really consider here is that all of those things can be true, that those crises are real and they do call your attention and they cause you to make hard choices, but the reality is that somewhere in there there is a limiting belief that if you don't attend to everybody else's crises and you attend instead to your deepest needs, that that's going to cause a problem, right? So, for instance, if we look at the patterns in childhood, where, if you didn't attempt to take care of in some way your family's emotional needs, if you weren't good-girling your way out of conflict as a child, if you weren't trying to soothe other people's pain in childhood, what would happen? Dysfunction or alcoholism or just like a family history of, maybe sexual abuse or you name it right Any of these things that our families are so good at handing down from generation to generation we see that a lot of the ways that systems learn to solve a problem is by having conflict avoidance and codependency and just smoothing things over and avoiding right, just like smooth it over, smooth it over, smooth it over. And we do these things a lot of subconscious ways. So when we actually ask for help or focus on getting our needs met, we can have this subconscious fear like if I don't do this thing for them, that I'm going to cause a major problem. There's going to be a major blow up here and it's going to be worse than if I actually. You know like tending to my needs is going to cause way bigger problems than is already existing in this family. So I just want you to know that when you struggle to focus on your own healing and it feels easier to you know, try to smooth over all the other things that are in your environment. I just want you to know that deep in there there is a very, very early brain map, for I can't focus on myself because it's going to cause a bigger problem. And then I want you to check in Are the tools you're currently using effectively helping you touch that hidden, negative belief I'm pointing to? Are you aware that that's what's activated? Just notice right that when there's this need to control and take care of other crisis and it feels impossible to juggle that, there is a frequency in there that goes way, way back, that might be dissociative from your conscious mind. That has to be shifted. That frequency, that pattern, that vibration has to be shifted in order for it to be safer and for that lock to unlock, for you to feel like, ah, I can refocus on my needs, right? So are the tools you're using effectively unlocking that lock and helping you shift into it feels safe to focus on my needs Now?
Speaker 1:The third thing I want to talk about is when healing feels too damn hard. It's too damn hard, and it's really. It's too damn hard and it's it's really. It's too damn painful, right, it's too damn scary, it's too damn risky. It's too damn something, right, it feels too painful too. It takes too much self-discipline, it takes too much of something I don't have. And so then we say I just need to move on, I just need to put this back in my box. I just need to move on, I just need to put this back in my box, I just need to. I'll tackle that later, I'll tackle it later. I'll tackle it later. It's not the right time, and you know, sometimes that's absolutely true because we need more resources, right, or we just we don't know how to do that abiding.
Speaker 1:But I just want you to take a look at how those are 9.9 times out of a 10. Justifications that are protecting us from some discomfort. They're protecting us. They're those in internal family systems right. It's those manager parts and firefighter parts protecting us from facing those pains.
Speaker 1:And so that's why I am so passionate about homeopathy, because so much of what gets talked about in the trauma world is having to re-experience our pain right. Emdr is a re-experiencing of our traumas, which is also very, very hard to do when we're trying to treat something that never happened right. So why I love homeopathy is because it is a very gentle, quick move through that re-experiencing moment, and it just more often than not we don't even have to re-experience with homeopathy, and so when your pain feels too, too painful and you can't face it, you can't abide with it, and the urge is I just have to move on, I just have to face this later. There's just too much, I can't. I want you to know, I want you to check are the tools you're using powerful enough to shift that? Are the modalities that you're currently engaging? Are the helpers who are currently helping you? Are they able to touch that pattern and fundamentally shift it? And if not, then why not? And it's time to look to a different or additional modality, because unless we break that habit of it's too painful, it's too hard, it's too much, it's too overwhelming, then the patterns are going to repeat.
Speaker 1:So this is just an invitation to really take a look at are the tools I'm using, are the modalities I'm using, are the healers that are helping me heal? Are they really helping me shift these hidden struggles that keep women stuck? You know, I've had so many women reach out in the last couple of weeks and say how do I find myself when I feel lost? How do I get unstuck when it feels so hard to start? How do I take more action in these places where it feels too overwhelming or like I can't?
Speaker 1:And the answer is typically you need a solution that's bigger than your problem. And in the law of attraction I have heard Abraham Hicks say a number of times the solution is always bigger than the problem. But when we're not using solutions that are bigger than the problem, it can feel like there's not solutions, and that's not the case. So it means that it's time to find solutions that are bigger, they have a greater mass, they have a greater potency, they dig deeper, they are stronger than your problems. I promise you they exist, love, and it just means not avoiding the path or the answers, and sometimes we call in those solutions. We pray so hard for them.
Speaker 1:We beg right for miracles and then, when the solution arrives, it's like that joke, right where the guy was standing on the roof while the floodwaters were coming in, saying like I need a miracle, and then the boat comes. He's like that joke, right where the guy was standing on the roof while the floodwaters were coming in, saying like I need a miracle, and then the boat comes. He's like, no, I'm waiting for God. Right, I'm waiting for my miracle. So it's like can you recognize that solution that's bigger than the problem? Can you recognize it when it comes in and can you reach for it?
Speaker 1:If you've heard yourself in any of these words today, I want you to scroll down to the show notes. I want you to click the link where it says apply to join a different D word our comprehensive, personalized, one-to-one healing program that will help you have solutions that are bigger than your problems. Because even though you're struggling to believe in yourself, love, I am not struggling to believe in you and I'm not struggling to believe in the solutions that we bring to the problems. I love you so much. Peace, dear Divorce Diary is a podcast by my coach Dawn. You can find more at mycoachdawncom.
