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
224. Rubbing Your Ears?! The Divorce Anxiety Hack Nobody Told You About
Join The list for A Different D Word
Navigating through the emotional turmoil of a divorce often feels like a battle between your mind and body.
Yet, there's a surprisingly simple tool at the tip of your fingers that can help you regain control.
In this episode, you'll gain insight into the profound connection between your nervous system and emotional health, learn an effective ear massage technique to ground yourself quickly amid chaos, and discover how consistent practice can transform your stress and anxiety into calm and clarity.
Tune in to harness the calming power of your body's natural healing through ear massage, setting you on a path toward emotional balance and empowerment.
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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.
What if I told you that relief from stress, overwhelm and the emotional pain of divorce could be as simple as massaging your ears? Sounds too easy, right, but science packs it up. Your nervous system holds the key to your healing, and today, on the pod, we're diving into this one simple practice and its capacity to calm your divorce anxiety, release the tension of heartbreak and help you feel more grounded than ever. 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:In today's episode, we're going to take a look at why some days you feel strong and others the weight of your divorce knocks you down, and why it's not just your emotions, it's your nervous system, and in just a minute I'll explain why regulating it using ear massage can change everything. We'll also talk about how all of your stress, anxiety and heartbreak don't just live in your mind I know you've heard me say this a lot they live in your body. And here's the game changer your ears hold access points to instant calm. So stay with me as I show you how to do it. You know, one of the things I wish I could just like download into everybody's brains is the difference between a thought, an emotion and a nervous system impulse. Right, those three things, they're all connected, they have relationships with each other, right? Our thoughts trigger emotions and our emotions trigger our nervous systems. Does it work in reverse? Yes, it absolutely can. Right? So? Because if our nervous systems are super keyed up, then it's going to keep our amygdala going, which means our brain is more likely to grab for a extreme emotional pattern. And then, when we're feeling feelings, we don't always know why, and then we're like but why am I feeling this way? And we reach for a thought. So we could see there this sort of backwards and forwards, like just looping relationship between our thoughts, our emotions and our nervous system. And if I could just help you understand that better, I feel like you'd have so much more mastery over how you feel on any given day. But alas, it's a process to learn.
Speaker 1:For today let's talk about on the days that it feels like divorce, stress is knocking you down. That ear massage will immediately start to ground your nervous system, which then will allow you to sort through your thoughts and your emotions. When we can sort through our thoughts, we can start to see how many of them most of them are irrational and self-sabotaging, and then we can start to feel our emotions rather than dissociating from them. But you can't really process emotion in a meaningful way if your nervous system is in the red zone, because you're just not in a place of rest and digest right where you can actually process emotions and let them go. So using ear massage is a way to get more out of your therapy sessions, more out of your journaling sessions, more out of your meditation sessions, more out of your you name it right. It's just how you can really keep your healing process moving at a nice clip. Because the more regulated your nervous system, the smoother everything is going to go, the more you'll be able to think from your top brain right, using your prefrontal cortex, your decision-making, your executive function, because when you're triggered all the time, love, you're using your lizard brain, your low brainstem brain. That is not good at making executive decisions. It's really good at getting you into trouble. So ear massage will help you regulate your nervous system and on the really, really hard days, it will very quickly.
Speaker 1:Honestly, it depends on how far gone you are right, like how jacked up you are, and often we have to use more than one tool at once, like, for instance, you could add humming to your ear massage, or you could do all that while you're walking or while you've got your feet rolling on a spiky ball. There are lots of ways we can layer in tools, but ear massage, when I've been doing it for usually less than a minute, I will trigger a yawn response, and a yawn is a sign that the nervous system is downshifting. And as I'm talking about all of this, I feel a yawn trying to get out of me, which is complicated while you're talking on a podcast. All right, let's take a look at how all of this lives, not just in your mind but in your body, and I know you know you've heard me sort of bang this drum about all of the work we're emphasizing over here with semantics, right, the processing of emotion and trauma out of your body and the ears are. You know, god really designed the body to heal itself. That is just the truth of it. But there we often just have so many blocks in the body for so many reasons, there are so many blocks that we're just not sort of accessing or tapping into or leveraging fully right, the body's innate healing ability. But our ears, like our entire bodily system, is mapped on our ear. So like, think about that for a moment Every organ system, from an acupuncture right there is a corresponding point on your ear to every single function in your body. Now, we're not going to map all that in this episode, but I want you to know that as you're massaging your ears, not only are you providing a relaxation response for your nervous system, but you are stimulating all of these essential functions and organ systems in your body. You are providing them with TLC, with care and compassion. You are really supporting yourself in a very deep, meaningful way when you are massaging your ears.
Speaker 1:Now, the more I use this tool, the more times in a day, the more days in a week, the more nights that I'm experiencing insomnia, the faster my nervous system is going to start to shift and the better nervous system hygiene I'll have. So what do I mean by that? If you only brushed your teeth once a week, how much effort would you have to put into teeth brushing that one time? You did it? A lot. It would be gross. You'd have to spend a good amount of time to get your teeth back to this really clean state and then, honestly, you'd probably need a trip to the dentist, right, because of the plaque buildup. So it's this idea that the more we do something, the better maintenance we provide. The more well-maintained something's going to be, the easier it's going to be to get it back to sort of the baseline that we want it to function from right. So at first, when you do this, you may have to do it a number of times a day, but then over time there's a cumulative effect.
Speaker 1:Our nervous systems are meant to be like rubber bands. They're supposed to be nice and stretchy. We're supposed to be able to stretch it out and it goes. And when we let go, it goes back. And most of us who are moving through a divorce process, our nervous systems aren't very flexy. They're sort of stuck in a fight, flight, freeze, fawn state and it's very hard for them to cycle back down to a rest and digest. A nervous system relaxed, green light, safe to connect place.
Speaker 1:But start using ear massage. The next time you're feeling insomnia. Oh, reach for that one. And so what do I mean by ear massage. All right, let's dig into that. So I want you to just be creative and go with it, right, and if it feels uncomfortable, then go lighter. Just use touch. It doesn't have to be massage in the sense of squeezing and causing pain. It's not like where you go to have a really strong sports massage and they're digging into the tight spots, not like that, right. I want this to be gentle and supportive and I want you to find what feels good.
Speaker 1:But you can run your fingers in all the grooves, in all the little nooks and crannies of your ears, so you can do it inside. That way you can do gently just sort of outside of and just barely inside of the ear canal, not like in in right, but just in the opening. You could do little spirals. You can also do the skin on either side of your ears, so like in the back of your ears, where they attach to the back of your head, and up to the front of the ears where they start to transition into the side of your face, and you can just gently rub all of this. Your ear lobes most of us have piercings, but that's okay. Work with it, because even the ear lobes are part of what's mapped on the body in terms of organ systems and essential functioning.
Speaker 1:So don't leave any part of the ear out, and if you're noticing some sensitivity here or some discomfort, there's probably a corresponding explanation to do with your nervous system, and so stick with it and keep coming back to it, do whatever just sort of comes naturally, if you just want to stick with your earlobes for a while and then, do you know, grab big chunks of your ear and do nice big sweeping movements. Basically, what I want you to know is you can't get it wrong. Right, just play with it and just give it a couple of minutes and stick with it. If you get bored, that's okay, just stick with it and notice, before too long you're going to start to feel a sort of I'm doing it right and I'm having trouble reaching for my words because I'm relaxing, just a relaxation response coming over your body, and if you're someone who's really having a hard time, you may need to do it for five minutes or do it for two minutes and then come back to it 10 minutes later. But I'm just saying this is a powerful technique that will work for you if you stick with it and it will give you such a capacity to process your feelings, to shift out of triggers, to relax, without needing a glass of wine, I promise you. Your body was designed to heal itself and everything you need is already inside of you.
Speaker 1:If you don't already follow me on Instagram, please, please, hit me up at Dawn Wiggins and send me a DM about how ear massage works for you. I am dying to hear how this improves your days and your weeks in the future. And if I have not told you this enough already, thank you so much for being here. It is so meaningful to me that you take your time out of the day to sit with us and to listen. Time is one of the greatest gifts we have, and that you share yours with us means a lot. Without you, there is no Dear Divorce Diary. Sending you all my love, peace. Dear Divorce Diary is a podcast by MyCoachDawn. You can find more at mycoachdawncom.
