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
225. How To Let Go After Divorce *Without* Dwelling On Your Ex’s Faults
Join The list for A Different D Word
Divorce is tough enough without being your own biggest critic. When you dig into this episode, you'll realize those harsh judgments may actually be a reflection of issues you need to work through within yourself, offering a starting point for genuine healing.
You'll figure out why those pesky habits of your ex drive you nuts, get to the bottom of why some folks just push your buttons and snag a dead-simple tip to start flipping that internal script from critic to cheerleader.
Tune in now to find out how to turn projecting judgments into a superpower for self-discovery and pave your way to more freedom and peace post-divorce!
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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.
Ever catch yourself rolling your eyes so hard at someone that you give yourself a headache? Or maybe you're convinced your ex's new partner is definitely a downgrade. But what if all those judgments about others and yourself are actually mirrors reflecting your own lack of self-acceptance? Yep, plot twist Today we're exposing how projections shape our reality, why our judgments say way more about us than the people we're judging and, most importantly, how to stop being your own worst critic during this post-divorce season. Buckle up, because this one might call you out and set you free. 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:One of the things I fundamentally believe about our experience as human beings is that our bodies and minds were designed to heal themselves. I have so much faith in the intelligent creator and the intelligent creation, and this episode really is one of those things. So in today's episode, we are going to take a look at how judgments and projections are part of that design for us to be self-aware and to heal ourselves. So, first things first. You know that super annoying trait your ex had that you just couldn't stand. Ooh, your body just talked to you, didn't it? It's like what, if I told you, that trait of his might just be living rent-free in you also, what? So stick around, because in just a minute, I'm going to share a truth bomb about why the people who drive us crazy are actually showing us something we need to see. And then, a little bit later on, we're going to look at why certain people trigger you way more than they should, and the hint is that it's probably got less to do with them and so much more to do with a wound from your childhood. And so, before we're done with the episode, I'll show you how the childhood experiences trained your brain to see the world and certain people a particular way, and how to rewrite that script so you could stop reliving that same old pattern. And then, finally, we're going to look at the self-acceptance hack. That changes everything, because the key to feeling less judged and less judgy probably isn't about changing anyone else, because that would make you helpless and we're not helpless. It's more about shifting the way you see yourself. So, before we wrap up the episode, I will give you one ridiculously simple mindset trick that will help make you feel lighter, freer and way less triggered by other people's nonsense. Let's dig in.
Speaker 1:In my very early post-divorce days I really immersed myself in so many different forms of healing and therapy and started doing that relationship autopsy thing that we all do right, and it had become all this. It had hit me like a ton of bricks, honestly, that my ex really struggled with a couple of types of addiction and it was really easy for me to analyze, project and judge the lack of emotional awareness, the lack of emotional availability, the similarities between how his addiction presented and the experiences that I had in my childhood, that I had in my childhood. Long story short, it was really easy for me to see the things that he had done and was doing that really hooked into my traumas and wounded me. But you know, what took me a lot longer to figure out and sort of be in on the joke about was the ways in which my untreated trauma and highly dissociative tendencies also kept me completely emotionally unavailable. I could intellectually like assess something up one way and down the other, but that didn't make me vulnerable, transparent or emotionally available and that's what this episode is really about is the things that we tend to get really distressed, stressed, triggered, frustrated with. We are usually last to be in on the joke that that thing has a kernel of truth inside of me, inside of you, about our own behaviors, and so I want you to think about a handful of the things that have been sort of driving you crazy lately, about people in your life, and it could be your ex mother-in-law, it could be your ex, it could be your ex's new partner, it could be like any number of things, and I want you to take a breath, pull out your journal, and I want you to get ridiculously honest with yourself about the ways in which you may be doing that exact thing in some way, shape or form.
Speaker 1:Very often, it's easier for us to see our own stuff in other people, but it's stuff that's been dissociated or disintegrated from our self-awareness, and so, in that whole idea that we are designed to self-heal and self-regulate right, this is one of the built-in tools for us to become self-aware, but we're so used to being validated for criticizing and blaming right, brene Brown talks about blame as one of the most pain-relieving things we do to shift out of our own discomfort and vulnerability. It's like, oh, if I can blame you, then I can immediately get pain relief from the shame and insecurity that I'm feeling. And PS, that's been rewarded in popular culture today, right On social media and just in general, right, we have really been rewarded for not being vulnerable, right, and for instead like cultivating these sort of curated presentations of ourselves, right, our skin, our outfits, our age, our relationships, our this, our that, our vacations, right. It's like it's just not transparent and authentic anymore. And so this is really a deep dive in starting to understand what radical self-acceptance, the roots of radical self-acceptance is really looking at how all the things that we judge in other people are really also self-judgments in places where we lack self-acceptance, self-forgiveness, self-awareness, self-integration. So if that didn't already piss you off enough, I will give you that every now and then.
Speaker 1:A judgment or a trigger isn't just about something inside of yourself that you're judging, but it could be a projection from your childhood that you have projected as like a film that you're projecting onto a screen. Right, we project things from our childhood onto our life around of us. What's that movie, producer Joy, where the guy is actually playing in a whole movie set and the Truman Show, right, like that's really like the Truman Show really is us in our lives, right, we're just constantly replaying sort of these old early childhood experiences, and that's just because when our brain map was formed and when our beliefs were structured, and it can be tweaked over the years with lived experiences. But we're all just projecting our own reality onto each other as we move through life and we're often seeing things the way we see them and not the way they are right. So every now and then I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that sometimes what we're actually doing is we're projecting onto other people our wounds, our pain from early childhood.
Speaker 1:So, for instance, my wonderful now husband for the first five years of our marriage I projected my parents onto him left, right and center, like all the time. And that doesn't mean that he wasn't doing things that were problematic right in center, like all the time. And that doesn't mean that he wasn't doing things that were problematic, like there were problematic intimate relationship behaviors, right, also a lack of emotional awareness or, you know, a difficult time expressing himself or looping me in on what he was experiencing or thinking or feeling or whatever. Right, but also, hey, my parents did all these behaviors. The intensity with which I would react like really react to my now husband was more in line with the intensity of the emotions that I have towards my parents and my childhood, not towards my current husband. Right, my current husband has always been a willing engaged partner who is willing to take his own inventory, you know, like nine times out of 10, right Is willing to accept feedback and have the conversation with me and would literally put himself on train track.
Speaker 1:So why would I get so angry? Why would I get so wounded and so hurt by him? Ah, because I was projecting the way I would anticipate my parents would respond to me, onto him, and I was like living out this whole fantasy you know, pain script screen with him and he wasn't even responding to me in that way, right? So, because of the way that we internalize beliefs, painful experiences, especially in the intimate realm, there is a part of our brain called the reticular activating system and it is the part of our brain that's responsible for filtering out information in our environment and it's going to filter it based on the beliefs that we hold about people in the life around us, and it's going to sometimes filter out the good stuff because we've programmed it to see the bad stuff. I can't trust anyone, I can't be myself, I can't get my needs met, I should have done better, I'm not lovable. And so when we're functioning from these negative beliefs, the reticular activating system is actually filtering out the good stuff. Isn't that interesting and that often can make or break a relationship's success or failure, because of the way people trigger us from those old projections, from negative beliefs we have carried with us for a very, very long time. And we're not aware that we're doing it because it's in the subconscious mind, right? And so until the subconscious becomes conscious, then we just keep living out these projections over and over again.
Speaker 1:So how do we rewrite that script so that we can break the pattern, both in the way that we're judging other people, the way that we're judging ourselves and the way that we're judging the world around us? Well, I would say post-divorce, like man, what a time where we're feeling shut down, shameful, insecure, inadequate, second-guessing everything, struggling to trust, right. We're just really in, I would say, a defensive position in general, feeling on the back foot, right, and I think that that's a time where we really have to take a look at. Okay, the way it feels to be in the world right now does not feel good, it feels threatening, it feels hard, it feels insecure.
Speaker 1:And in order to start really fundamentally shifting that script, we have to consistently take the steps to say, okay, my mind is going to give me a bunch of feedback, information, input. We rewatched the movie Short Circuit this weekend. Oh, my goodness, johnny Five's alive and he would eat the robot. He would keep saying input, input, need input. But our minds are going to give us tons of input, right, and we have to start getting clear that the input is rarely fact, right?
Speaker 1:And so our thoughts and our feelings, they're valuable, they need to be processed, they need to be sifted and sorted through, but they are rarely factual. There's a lot of data in that input that the mind and the emotions in the body gives us. It's data and it needs to be felt through and it needs to be processed. But I want you to really get clear that you can feel through those feelings, you can sift through the thoughts and the messages without believing them, without believing them, so I can drop into my body, do a body scan and I can feel into how defensive and insecure I feel and like really feel how crippling and debilitating that is Not now right, I'm remembering back, but then say to myself, okay, but that's not true. It's a feeling state that can pass, based on how I respond to it. So I find it helpful often to think about weather patterns with regards to thoughts and emotions, that there are weather patterns that come in and how long they stay right, how long this storm lasts, depends on how I respond to it and whether or not I believe it is me versus a passing pattern.
Speaker 1:So, for example, last night I was having a lot of worrisome thoughts in my sleep, like so many, like worry, like one thought led to another worried thought led to another worried thought and I was like what is going on? This is weird. I just haven't felt like this in such a long time, right. And then when I got up this morning and I was like sitting with it, I was like, ah, I started a new detox protocol this week because I used to have to take so many medications for cluster headaches that when I start detoxing specific medications, sometimes that creates kidney inflammation because, all of the right, the kidneys have to filter out all those medications and I have a kidney vulnerability. Well, guess which organ system is tied to worry? You guessed it the kidneys, right? So as I'm up this morning and I'm like, oh, my kidneys are inflamed and therefore my mind is doing this worry, you guessed it the kidneys, right?
Speaker 1:So as I'm up this morning and I'm like, oh, my kidneys are inflamed and therefore my mind is doing this worry thing, let me go take my little kidney drops and let me just interact with this differently today, so that I'm not like getting all like, ah, I am worry, right, there is a behavior of worry moving through my body as I'm detoxing certain things, and so, in order to get a handle on projections and judgments, first you got to get honest with yourself about where it's coming from, what it's got to do with you, what it's got to do with your childhood, and then you've got to get clear that, oh, this is old stuff moving through me and I don't have to believe it. It's feedback, it's input. I can process it, I can feel into it so that I can release it, but I don't have to trust it. I don't have to believe that it's still happening, or that it's real, or that it's now, or that it's my truth or that it's me. It's not me, it's a weather pattern to do with me, and I can release that Now.
Speaker 1:The final thing that I really wanted to talk about today was one of my favorite tools to move closer to self-acceptance and to move closer to this sort of open-hearted way of living and seeing ourselves and the world around us. Quite frankly. Right, because if we continue in this post-divorce world to stay stuck in projections and judgments, guess what? We're going to attract some really awful dating partners. We are going to be in a very low vibrational state, which means we're going to have trouble breaking out of financial blocks, relationship blocks like career blocks, parenting blocks, right, we're just going to stay super blocked and attracting a bunch of crap to us. So we need some fundamental tools right to start shifting into self-acceptance, and I am not going to sugarcoat it for you. Like, the path to self-acceptance is a process. I find that the tools we use over here at Dear Divorced Diary are the ones that will get you there fastest.
Speaker 1:But in the journey of self-acceptance, there is this very, very quick, down and dirty tool that I love to use, and it is called loving eyes. And so when you feel judgment welling up inside of yourself, whether it's towards yourself, towards someone else or towards an early childhood experience. I want you to remind yourself that A, you don't have to believe every thought you're thinking and every feeling you're feeling. And then, b, I want you to grab for this tool called loving eyes. Now I'm going to unpack in the next episode loving eyes from top to bottom, marie, and help you apply it, but for this episode, I want you to at least get the hang of it. What do I mean by it? So I want you to think about a handful of things in your life that when you think of them, you feel your face soften, you feel your eyes soften, you feel the corners of your mouth turn up right.
Speaker 1:For me, consistently, that is almost always going to be a little put the Frenchie or a little podcast pup or something in nature. Very, very often it will be my daughter or my husband or something like that. But I think when you're in an early post-divorce phase, I don't think it is your kids. In fact, when I was in a post-divorce phase, anything to do with kids was actually very painful and triggering for me and I think for many people, kids can remind you of so much of the pain and hurt, so it's not that right. But think of something that is very, very consistently going to trigger you to feel warm and soft and good and open-hearted. And when you find that, I want you to drop into your body, I want you to do a body scan. I want you to notice how, when you are engaging that thing, I could just stare at Lilliput, the Frenchie's face, like all day long, it's just. I just soften when I stare at her right.
Speaker 1:And that is your key or your bridge to self-acceptance. Because when we can find that feeling state in our body, then we can bridge over to adopting and adapting that feeling state towards ourselves and towards other people. Now, that's a deeper dive. How to get from one to the other is a deeper dive that we're going to unpack in the next episode. But I want you to just notice that when you can find something in your body in a feeling state, then it can be applied to a different area and being able to find loving eyes for your enemies right or your yeah, I don't know your enemies right.
Speaker 1:I think very often people are afraid to do that because it feels like letting them off the hook or condoning their bad behavior. But it really is the key to peace in life, to finding forgiveness towards yourself, towards other people, and you can't forgive other people if you haven't learned how to forgive yourself first. And you can't learn to radically accept other people unless you've learned to to forgive yourself first. And you can't learn to radically accept other people unless you've learned to radically accept yourself first. So loving eyes is a necessary tool and if you're like, oh, dawn, I hate this, that's fun, cool, I get it. You can hate it, but it's an essential part of your healing journey and you cannot skip it. There's no bypassing this. So if what you want is peace and what you want is a future love, that's like worth it. And if what you want is abundance, then Loving Eyes has to be part of your toolkit to releasing judgment and feeling a greater sense of self-acceptance and acceptance for the people that you today feel like you could never, ever, ever forgive.
Speaker 1:I know that by the end of this episode, it feels like I have just given you a massive to-do list. Like Dawn, you have just given me like way too much crap that I now have to work through, too much crap that I now have to work through. And you know, yeah, that's right, because because, again, as I mentioned at the top of the episode, our body, minds were designed to heal themselves and when we know where to focus our attention and what to heal, then all of a sudden we can start having breakthroughs left and right. And you know, this is why we designed our intensive healing program that is so personalized the way that we did, because we know that it feels really overwhelming to have to take responsibility for all of this stuff in order for you to have an abundant life. Yeah, it's overwhelming and it's a process, and sometimes it can feel like, well, crap, where do I start? Right?
Speaker 1:But I think what you start with is just the awareness thing like, oh, when I'm feeling judgy or when I'm feeling afraid of being judged, that what's actually popping up for me is a lack of self-acceptance and that's something I can work on. And when I can work on it, then the sky's the limit for what I can manifest, because it's within the realm of something that I can positively influence and to me that's intoxicating. So, thank you so much for hanging with us today and really taking a look at how judgment is really something that you can work on around self-acceptance. Thanks for spending your time with us. Thanks for coming here to hang out with us. It means the world to us that you are here and raising your vibration, because it makes a difference for you and it makes a difference for the world around us. And without you there is no Dear Divorce Diary podcast. So get on with your bad self and we'll talk soon. Peace. Dear Divorce Diary is a podcast by my coach, dawn. You can find more at mycoachdawncom.
