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
222. Your Nervous System Has a Post-Divorce Secret Language...Are You Accurately Translating?
Join The list for A Different D Word
Have you ever felt like you're at war with yourself, trying to heal after a divorce? It might be time to stop fighting and start listening.
We all want a life full of peace and clarity after ending a marriage. But surprisingly, our deepest fears and beliefs can throw unexpected obstacles in the way of healing.
What if, instead of fighting these feelings, you could decode them to find the life you desire?
- Learn how to interpret resistance as a message from your nervous system rather than a hurdle to overcome.
- Discover common post-divorce patterns that keep you stuck and how to gently shift them.
- Explore somatic techniques to transform negative beliefs and expand your capacity to receive goodness in your life.
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A podcast exploring the journey of life after divorce, delving into topics like divorce grief, loneliness, anxiety, manifesting, the impact of different attachment styles and codependency, setting healthy boundaries, energy healing with homeopathy, managing the nervous system during divorce depression, understanding the stages of divorce grief, and using the Law of Attraction and EMDR therapy in the process of building your confidence, forgiveness and letting go.
You say you want peace and clarity and healing, and I believe that you do. But part of you is also secretly slamming on the brakes and that part of you isn't sabotaging you, although it looks like it. It's protecting you from something. So how do you stop fighting that part of you and start working with it so you can have the post-divorce life you want? 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:This episode is really completely inspired by the conversations I've had with so many of you, or Coach Tiffany has had with so many of you over the last weeks and months, as we've been enrolling our personalized program, a Different D Word, and coming out of this enrollment period, we are on fire Like. We are more inspired and on fire as a team around this program and the women it serves more than ever. We learned so much this enrollment period about personalizing a program, about you, our listeners and about the things that are blocking you from having the life that you want, and so, in the inspiration of this episode, I wanted to talk about how to manifest a vision over the next several months. There are many of you who have said I'd really like to enroll in the fall, but I know that if we don't take very intentional steps between now and the fall, the fall is going to show up in a blink and you won't be ready and we won't be ready to receive you. Right, there is capacity work. Have you heard that phrase on the tiki taki or on Instagram lately? Right, there's this work to do to expand your capacity to receive.
Speaker 1:And so what producer Joy and I did over here was, well, plan this podcast episode where number one we are going to talk about the truth, about resistance. Right, because we're told resistance is often something to push through. But what if it's actually a message from your nervous system? And so, in this episode, I'm going to show you how to decode that resistance so that it doesn't feel like a blockage or a failure and it starts to feel like a clue. And then, later in the episode, we're going to talk about the most common post-divorce pattern, and what I see all the time is that when you get out of a painful marriage and you are finally free to heal, and then you find yourself stuck in the work, unconsciously living from negative beliefs or numbing out to just try to keep your head above water. If that's you, don't panic. I'll walk you through why that's happening and how to gently shift it.
Speaker 1:And what we are doing as a team over here to continue to shift our capacity and to receive and to serve you in the fall is we are going through some manifestation steps. We have created this very intentional vision board that lives in our headquarters, with each of the names of the women we have been in touch with lately, right? And so, if you have not yet been in touch with us about a different D word, our personalized program, even though enrollment is technically closed, we're still building our list and building our community for joining in the fall. So feel free to scroll down to the show notes and click the form and do the thing right, because we want you on our vision board, we want you part of our intentional manifestation process, we want to coach you through removing any resistance. You have to making a massive commitment like that, right?
Speaker 1:So let's dig into talking about the truth, about resistance. It is a message from your nervous system when you feel fear, tension, resistance, blockage. There is in there a negative belief that lives in your subconscious mind about what's possible for you, and so that negative belief may sound something like this I am not enough, there is not enough, I cannot have what I want. I cannot trust this thing. I cannot trust myself and my decision making. That's not possible for me. The working gal can't get ahead right. There are negative beliefs that you have, for whatever reason, inherited as yours, whether they started as yours or you got them from somebody else. Right, you have claimed them. And now, when you try to make decisions that run counter to those beliefs, you are going to feel resistance Because your nervous system, your reticular activating system, their job is to protect you and they are going to function based on your belief system.
Speaker 1:And our belief systems are thoughts we've rehearsed over and over and over again. And so if you had a traumatic childhood at all or a traumatic marriage, and your endocrine system has been delivering you stress, chemicals and hormones directly associated with that, and you have told yourself stories about what's possible for you and what's not, enough times you have come to believe them, you can be in a season where you want to claim better for yourself and your subconscious mind is going to say that is not the agreement we made love, that is not the agreement, and you're going to feel it as resistance, fear to move forward, fear to take the next step, fear that you know you can't do the thing that you, on one hand, one part of you, feels like this is a no-brainer, this is, it'll be fine, it'll be great, it'll be wonderful, right? So I want you to start looking at resistance right as a clue that there's a negative belief, or more probably, more than one, inside of you that needs to be identified. The most common post-divorce pattern that I see is women who get out of a painful marriage and they're finally free to heal, and then she gets stuck in the work, right? So let's walk through together what's happening and how to shift it, right. So this is piggybacking on our Tuesday episode about where your manifestations are breaking down. But I'm going to help you. I'm going to, with you, do it with you, drop into the body and walk you through how I shift or how I work with resistance in my body.
Speaker 1:Okay, so for funsies, let's work with, for now, the idea of perhaps joining our program in the fall. Right, it's a bespoke, personalized program that we guarantee is going to get you to this place of peace and clarity and healing. But you have some resistance in your body about what's possible. And for my guys out there that are listening because we have some amazing guy listeners friend, you can still do this exercise, right, and you can call in whatever the perfect healing process is going to be for you. So you know, just because maybe you can't join this particular program, like there's still about, there's still this process about believing that the perfect healing process exists for you, right? Okay, so now I want you to take a big deep breath and if you don't want to do the topic of joining the program, you can pick something different, right, but I want you to drop into your body and I want you to connect with whatever resistance you feel. Okay, so I'm working with something, a different resistance, right, because we are the program, so I can't work with resistance around joining the program.
Speaker 1:But when I feel resistance in my body, the first thing I want to check out is what are the negative beliefs that I have activated? For me, it's probably often something around control, like I'm going to lose control and that's going to cause me to be unsafe, not be able to protect myself. So I want you to notice what kind of negative beliefs do you have? Is it something about protecting yourself, trust, safety, something bad happening? They're having enough, being enough, being able to get what you want, things working out for you. What are the negative beliefs you have? And so then, rather than resist whatever feelings there are about that, we want to welcome them in.
Speaker 1:Okay, I have big scary feelings about losing control and not being able to protect myself. We could sort of hear how that's a trauma thought and I bet you relate to it a lot, right, especially coming out of traumatic marriages. That is such a common feeling. And so if I notice that there's a really strong negative belief in there because when I look at that I'm like actually I know that that's not true, although I am getting a different flavor of it today Like I can see where there's a little more work that I could do around being able to protect myself, right. So we want to acknowledge any work there is to do around shifting negative beliefs into positive ones. Actually, I've gotten really good at protecting myself, protecting my energy. Actually, I've gotten really good at choosing rather than waiting to be chosen. I've gotten really good at expressing myself or setting boundaries. I've gotten really good at those things and nothing horrible has happened.
Speaker 1:I love to add some bilateral stimulation, some immersive journaling when I'm doing this, some somatics. Maybe I need to hum, maybe I need to punch something, throw something, maybe I need to grunt or growl or move my body and I want to play with this resistance and I want to gently help my reticular activating system. Notice that I have the intention to shift this negative belief into a positive one. Now, very often we have to come back to this work over and over and over again, shifting this negative belief into a positive one, and we have to. We must use somatic techniques to do that. We've talked a lot about somatic techniques. Emdr is a somatic technique. Homeopathy creates a somatic outcome. Ifs has a lot of somatic components. Eft has somatic components, pillow throwing somatic right. Like we have to use somatic techniques to do this work and we can't say, oh, we're just going to do it once and never come back to it, because that negative belief is going to shift over time. So what is the negative belief about joining a personalized program that you need to shift over these next few months.
Speaker 1:And then I want you to notice the common emotional patterns tied to that. For me, it's this little sort of panicky anxiety. What is it for you? And so, if you can't feel the panicky anxiety or whatever your particular emotion is, then there's that. Then the clue is ah, you need to create a safer environment for those feelings to come up. How can you do that? If you can feel the feelings great, can you just sit with them for a moment? Hello, fear.
Speaker 1:And then what would you prefer to believe? I would prefer to believe that I am divinely held. I would prefer to believe that my God is not a God of chaos, that I am being called to expand my capacity to receive good things. I would like to take some deep breaths and allow my nervous system to feel me reprogramming my beliefs. Have you seen any of those design images where there are two squares and they're both gray and they're the same shade of gray, but they look very, very different shades of gray because there's a line down the middle that's shaded and it causes our mind to perceive two different colors of gray. This is what working with resistance is we have taught our mind to perceive the world one way, and we are gently working with the resistance to help it perceive the world a different way.
Speaker 1:When you think about being held by the universe, being held by our coaching team, being held by, you know, a group of women who will get you from here to there, what comes up? What comes up about feeling truly seen, about being vulnerable, about having to feel feelings on a consistent basis. What are the negative beliefs there? What are the negative emotions that you're wanting to run away from? And now, as I've felt through these feelings, I've learned the negative beliefs. Maybe I've done a little journaling, maybe a little butterfly tapping. Now I'm gonna intentionally reach for joy and for positive thoughts.
Speaker 1:Right, because our tendency is to really be in tune with what could go wrong, but not really in tune with what could go right. And so, what could go right? I could get my life back. I could feel powerful, I could feel supported, I could feel safe. I could, one step at a time, experience solutions coming to me day after day after day. I could experience relaxing. I could experience letting go of being hypervigilant and having to figure it all out. I could learn how to trust myself and people and the world around me, so I don't feel freaked out all the stinking time.
Speaker 1:And so this is your call to action is to practice sitting with the resistance and exploring these layers of it, the layers of beliefs, the layers of tendency to negatively predict versus positively predict, the layers of emotions you're avoiding, when we can sit with those emotions and be like, huh, okay, yeah, could go. Worst case scenario it could, it could, but what about the emotions that could go. Best case scenario, and that's what we're missing, right, is the rehearsing of what it feels like for it to be best case scenario, and that's what we're missing, right, is the rehearsing of what it feels like for it to be best case scenario, and that's why manifestations often don't come to pass, because we're not good at rehearsing best case scenario in an embodied way. So what could it feel like to actually have what you want? What could that feel like?
Speaker 1:Now, if we are not best friends on Instagram yet, this is an invitation to jump on Instagram at Dawn Wiggins and send me a DM. What does the perfect personalized healing program look like for you? Because if I'm walking us through a guided visualization of a beach walk, your beach is going to look different than my beach, right? I am so curious. What's in your mind's eye, what does it feel like in your body to anticipate a perfect personalized program that gets you from here to there? What's that feel like in your body? Can you practice that sensation and maybe close your eyes and send me a voice note right, hit record and voice note it, because from that place of eyes closed, you can be more in touch with how it feels, the somatic elements of what it feels like to have a perfectly personalized program.
Speaker 1:You want to get from here to there. You want peace, clarity and healing. I know that, I believe you, I trust that. But, as someone else said to me, I feel like I've taken the car apart Dawn and I don't know how to put it back together. And I think that's because we don't know how to embody positive anticipation. We know how to avoid, we know how to deny, we know how to suppress. We don't know how to embody positive visualization. So let's drop into this resistance, let's help it shift from the negative into the positive and then reach out to me and share what you're tuned into about a perfect personalized program for you. Can't wait to connect. Talk soon. Peace, dear Divorce Diary is a podcast by MyCoachDawn. You can find more at Mycoachjohncom.
