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.
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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.
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Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce
227. How To Stop People Pleasing After Divorce Without Becoming “The Difficult One” (Because It's Destroying Your Nervous System)
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Have you ever found yourself saying “yes” when you desperately wanted to say “no”—and then wondered why it’s so impossible to break this pattern, especially now that your marriage is over?
If you’re feeling exhausted from constantly trying to keep the peace and worried you’ve lost touch with who you really are, you’re not alone. Many women discover, in the wake of divorce, that their tendency to people please isn’t just about being “nice”—it’s a survival response hardwired into their nervous system, keeping them locked in stress and self-doubt even after leaving toxic dynamics.
By tuning in to this episode, you’ll learn how your nervous system creates people pleasing as a form of sympathetic activation, discover how these patterns are rooted in childhood experiences and not personality flaws, and walk away with practical, body-based tools to finally break the cycle and reconnect with your true self.
Ready to reclaim your sanity and confidence? Press play and learn how understanding your biology can help you become your most authentic—and peaceful—self after 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.
What if I told you that your post-divorce people-pleasing isn't a personality flaw but a survival response. If you've ever found yourself saying yes when you really meant no, it doesn't mean you're weak, it means your nervous system is wired. And today we're going to talk about your nervous system's role in the people-pleasing pattern and how healing starts with understanding that biology. 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:Nervous system health is a very popular conversation right now, and so is people-pleasing, and this episode is all about the connection between those two. In today's episode, we're going to talk about the biology of being nice, so we're going to look at your sympathetic nervous system, the part of your body that kicks into fight or flight when you sense danger. But we're going to talk about the twist right, because for most women, especially post-divorce, danger doesn't always look like a threat. It can look like disapproval or it can feel like rejection that those are the threat, and so people-pleasing becomes a way to stay safe. Instead of seen right, people-pleasing allows you to camouflage your environment so that you don't have to feel threatened or trigger into fight, flight, freeze, fawn. We're also going to talk about those of us who grew up needing to earn love or to avoid conflict, that our body started to learn fawning another term for people-ple pleasing and that it wasn't just emotional, there was this neurobiological conditioning. So when you keep the peace that your nervous system actually believes it's saving your life, we're going to look at how to really positively impact that and how you can start to work with it differently. And then, finally, we're going to look at how important it is to not shame yourself for this pattern, instead to really understand it because and like what to do in the moment when you feel it coming up. Because once you understand that and you can recognize people pleasing as a symptom of sympathetic activation, then you gain power. And it's the first step in being able to regulate, set boundaries, speak your truth and become a version of you that, rather than asking like will they be okay, is able to ask yourself but am I okay?
Speaker 1:Let's dig in your nervous system. We have talked about in many episodes this idea of your nervous system as a traffic light right, that when it's in a green state it's flexible and you feel safe to connect. I would venture to say that no woman going through a divorce spends very much time, if any, in a green nervous system state that most women are going to hover, like in the yellow, orange, red, you know, traffic light state of nervous system dysregulation. And the work is to be reaching towards a green state right, a safe to connect state. And so the reason that I think the post-divorce phase for nervous system health and people pleasing is so acutely just on fire is because most of us came up through life already in this state of nervous system hyperarousal, not realizing that people pleasing is a flashing red light sign that you are already in a hyperarousal state, that you are already feeling threatened or unsafe. And so here we're talking about how disapproval or rejection is the thing that caused your nervous system to feel like you're not safe. Nervous system threat where the body says you must be quiet and you must be good and you must please and you must pacify and you must do all those things in order to stay safe. The problem here is that the longer you do that habit, the more your nervous system is pumping out all those stress chemicals and you are becoming more and more disconnected from self.
Speaker 1:And so many people talk about once they're sort of moving through the divorce process. They're like realizing they no longer know who they are, right, they lost themselves in their marriage and they're not in touch with. Well, what do I like and what do I want, and can I see a future for myself? And, ps, did you know that not being able to see a future for yourself is related to liver stagnation? Isn't that interesting? And most of us coming out of divorce, right, have a lot of anger clogging our livers because we've suppressed all that anger to be people pleasers, right, and so it clogs the liver and you can't see your own future. So there's literally this biology of being nice that has to be rehabilitated over time.
Speaker 1:And so if you're someone who's been following the nervous system health conversation and you've been working to get grounded and you've been working to reduce dissociation in your body and you've been working to help your nervous system feel more regulated and healthy, I want you to really take a look at for a moment, just sort of pause and reflect on how often you have this urge to people please or keep the peace. And I want you to really start connecting the dots that when you have that urge to keep the peace or people please, that, it means you are in a state of fight, flight, freeze, fawn, that your nervous system is more activated than usual, and so, if you struggle with insomnia and overthinking and all of these things that say there's not a groundedness, your root chakra is not grounded, that you are in a chronic stress response, that this is part of it. People pleasing has to be on the list of things that you tackle in order for you to feel safe in your body and in the world, and it's a feedback loop that reinforces itself. Right, the less grounded you are, the more you have nervous system dysregulation, the more that you have fear-based thoughts that cause you to want to keep the peace in your environment, which then leads you to continue to be disconnected from yourself and not grounded. And right, like it just is really this feedback loop of nervous system activation and a lack of groundedness in who you are and what actually is safety. And so let's talk about a little bit about how rejection and disapproval could have become such a threat in your nervous system. Okay.
Speaker 1:So let's look at our childhood scripts that have now become your adult form of coping. So in your childhood, if you grew up with any sort of significant family dysfunction right, let's say you had a parent who tended towards anger. Or let's say you had a parent who tended towards anger or rage, or you had a parent who tended towards addiction, or you had any situation or maybe a sibling right? I have heard so many women talk about in their lives how maybe there was a sibling that had behavioral issues or special needs. There are so many circumstances in life that were just normal for you, and so maybe it doesn't stand out to you, or maybe you've already started connecting these dots right, but there are so many situations that cause us, as children, to learn that keeping the peace makes things go better. Right, if I keep the peace, if I don't say what's on my mind, things are going to go better, my parent is going to feel better and therefore my environment will feel safer. But what ends up happening then is the neurobiology of that experience, right? Is that your brain starts to perceive you speaking up as a threat to your safety. And so now here you are, picking your partner or your spouse and gosh.
Speaker 1:I was just talking to a woman about that this week where she loved her husband. They were like best friends but she was never like on fire about him and they got married because it was like the logical next step. But she wasn't as into it as she wanted to be and they ended up having kids and all the things right. But she was so conditioned she had some sexual abuse in her teen years, she had addiction in her family life and she was just so conditioned to suppress her truth, her pain, her fear, her needs, in deference to the family dynamic that then she married this person. And now here we are, 15 years in, and things are falling apart and she's questioning, right, like, what can I do to hold it together? Is this the right relationship? Should I stay? Should I go? Should I try harder? What should I do? And in her gut she already knows like this is not a viable marriage, but keeps trying to talk herself into. But maybe it could be salvaged.
Speaker 1:And I think that so many of you relate to that on some level and this comes from a very long, rich history of people pleasing in childhood and then it happens throughout marriage and then here you are at the end of a marriage and it's like gosh, it doesn't feel safe to speak up, to truly, truly speak up to family, to friends, to your boss, to whomever right, and especially when it comes to anger. And so there's work to do here to reprogram your subconscious mind and retrain your nervous system, because your nervous system at this point thinks it's saving your life friend. And so it's like we can say, oh, just set boundaries or just be your authentic self. Right, brene Brown taught us so much the importance of authenticity. But now here we are in like a post-social media era where we are just so conditioned to say the thing that makes us fit in, rather than be truly seen for who we are and feel safe in that right.
Speaker 1:And so how do we even change this childhood script? How do we even shift away from this adult way of coping where the nervous system literally has prioritized suppression over expression? Because there is a negative belief there in your subconscious mind that your reticular activating system is then like scanning the environment to prove which is. It is not safe to express what I feel. I have to be perfect, I cannot show my feelings, especially not my anger. Right, there has been this internalized entire belief system around prioritizing emotional suppression.
Speaker 1:And so how can we move from autopilot to awareness? Where you are moving from, it's just the subconscious thing you do, where you suppress, so that you don't have to feel that you don't have to be in touch with that nervous system distress, right, you don't have to be in touch with the feelings, you don't have to confront that negative belief system that you've internalized, internalized. How can we move from that way that you just have been moving through life to like truly being aware and reprogramming that whole cascade of events that happens in your body, mind, right, neurobiologically Okay. So when you catch pause and ask yourself, am I okay, am I okay, take a deep breath, get into your body intentionally for a moment and notice, okay, I have some negative beliefs activated that in order to be safe, I have to suppress what I'm feeling. But I am learning that the longer I do that it's actually causing my body to self-destruct, it is causing a disconnection from self, it is reinforcing dissociation, it is reinforcing stress hormones in my body. And I have to in order to actually find peace, in order to recover from an anxiety disorder, in order to not live as a traumatized person with chronic nervous system activation. I have to change those beliefs, okay.
Speaker 1:So then there's that mindset work that you're doing, but then we have to do the nervous system work right, which is to do some vagal breaths, which is where your exhale is longer than your inhale and, ps, your inhale has to go down into your diaphragm. If you're a chest breather, right, you have to train yourself to breathe down into your diaphragm, because that's what touches the vagus nerve, which is what you know is the foundation of vagal breathing, right. So there has to be these big, robust, deep breaths that touches your vagus nerve, where your exhales are nice and slow, because that's what sends the cue to your nervous system that you are safe. So, if you're going to gather yourself and you're going to drop into your body and you're going to do a little mindset work and then you're going to go speak truth to your boss, you want to make sure you are grounding your body and your nervous system in behaviors that send the cue back up to your brain that there is no Tyrannosaur chasing you. You'll maybe want to do a little ear massage, not just before but especially after, right, because again, we are reprogramming and retraining the nervous system and this is a process. So doing this nervous system health stuff very, very specifically before and after you go and speak your truth to somebody is going to take consistent repetition over time, and I will note here that there have been a number of homeopathic remedies that I have used in my own healing journey and with clients which have profoundly expanded nervous system capacity to tolerate this kind of behavior.
Speaker 1:So we've talked about starting to feature some homeopathic remedies here on the podcast, so that's probably something that you can look forward to. But Staph Sagria is a remedy that profoundly influences suppression of anger in order to keep the peace. Kark is a remedy where there's this sort of loss of sense of self and this inability to set a boundary verbally that really, really, really transforms women's ability to speak their truth. Lachesis is a remedy where there's a sensitivity to rejection and, very specifically, a difficulty expressing oneself. Now, how to know if any of these three remedies are remedies for you? That's where it comes to this sort of nuanced case taking and identifying.
Speaker 1:Each of these remedies has their own very specific profile, right, and it matters to use the right remedy in the right order and to use a remedy that matches your current vibration. And if you pick a remedy and it doesn't work, it's not because remedies don't work, it's because it wasn't the right remedy for your pattern. And so this is one of my favorite things to treat homeopathically is this tendency to emotional suppression because that's what homeopathy does is it removes the blocks to suppression so that we can express freely. Now I will tell you that even with homeopathic treatment, I still feel nervous system activation if I have to confront something, but it's way shorter, it moves so much faster and it has become quite easy to say things and I might just feel like a tiny bit of activation. It's like, oh, look, okay, and then I said that thing and I'm safe.
Speaker 1:So this work, in my opinion, gets a lot easier when you add things like energy medicine, because otherwise you can literally spend decades implementing what I just said, recognizing when you are using people pleasing to try to feel safe, but it's actually creating a lack of safety in your overall body health, and then having to use all of these nervous system tools just to be able to speak your truth to someone. You could do that for a decade and still have to really force yourself to do that, which sounds really exhausting to me. So the most important thing I want you to take away from this episode is to notice that if you are a chronic people pleaser and I cannot imagine that you aren't that that means that there is some real nervous system reprogramming to do there and that once you start to connect the dots and use some of the new nervous system tools that we talk about here, you can start floating back through your memories to see when this behavior started and retrain your subconscious mind to really do the thing that it was programmed to do originally. Right, which is that health comes from free expression, and that doesn't mean be a jerk that's not what I'm talking about, right, but being able to say I feel sad, I feel hurt. I really appreciate it when you blah right. Being able to speak your truth is how you are able to be seen in relationships, and if we can't be seen and accepted in relationships love then they're never going to feel truly safe and we're never going to feel like we're truly in our authentic selves. And that's what really brings a secure attachment style is being in touch with who I am, feeling safe to express and share who I am with the world, and feeling loved and accepted by my group of people when I'm doing that. That's peace, love, being able to be present in my body and feel loved and accepted for who I am. And we can't get there when chronic people pleasing is our go-to behavior. So, gentle reminder that chronic people pleasing means your nervous system is stressed and that's why you're feeling, that's why your hair is falling out, that is why you are struggling to sleep, that is why you're feeling, that's why your hair is falling out, that is why you are struggling to sleep, that is why you are overthinking all the time, and that's even why your skin is dry, right, and that all is clogging up your liver, and we got to get working on that, all right.
Speaker 1:Last thing I want to say today is over the last several episodes, I've been asking you to DM me, and many of you have done that, and I just can't tell you enough how much it means to me when you reach out and you tell me what's going on for you. I want to ask you today to send me a DM and talk to me a little bit about what are the feelings or fears that are currently holding you back. What are your feelings or fears that are currently holding you back. I know something just came to mind, and when you put the car in park or whatever it is, you're finished folding that load of laundry. Shoot me a DM, right, and let me know.
Speaker 1:What is it right now, the thing that's on top, what's your body saying right now that's holding you back? And if it's related to this people pleasing and being able to speak your truth, I bet it's related for a lot of women, right? And so let me know. I love getting to know you, your authentic self. That behavior of letting yourself be seen is part of what creates this new nervous system, health and this greater sense of peace. Thank you so much for being here. You are pure magic Peace. Dear Divorce Diary is a podcast by my coach, dawn. You can find more at mycoachdawncom.
