Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce
This isn’t a breakup pep talk. It’s a full-body recalibration.
Welcome to Dear Divorce Diary—the only podcast for women navigating the messy aftermath of divorce who are done with quick fixes and spiritual fluff.
I’m Dawn Wiggins, therapist and homeopath, and I’m here to give you something the divorce advice space rarely does: real healing.
Through somatic therapy, EMDR, IFS, and homeopathy, we go deeper—into your nervous system, your unspoken grief, and your buried rage.
Every week, we hold the tension: the body-based anxiety you can’t shake; the hormonal upheaval no one warned you about; the unresolved longing for identity.
You’ll hear raw solo episodes, real voice notes from women in the trenches, and intimate interviews with experts who do more than perform healing.
Here, you won’t be asked to “just move on.”
You’ll be asked to feel.
If you’re tired of tutorials that leave your nervous system humming and your heart disconnected, hit subscribe.
Your nervous system already knows the truth—it just wants a safe space to embody it.
Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce
260. Why People-Pleasing Wives Struggle After Divorce (and How to Break Free)
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Dear Divorce Diary: Dedicated to Healing
Exclusive access to premium content!Peace-keeping wives keep everyone happy—except themselves. Divorce forces the silence to break, and that’s when real healing begins.
You’ll Learn
- The hidden cost of people-pleasing in marriage.
- Why peace-keeping creates burnout and quiet resentment.
- How to reclaim your voice and your boundaries after divorce.
💎 Tired of peace at your own expense? Join A Different D Word
and learn to rebuild with safety, boundaries, and freedom.
So many women spend years smoothing things over, avoiding conflict, and carrying the weight of everyone else’s comfort. But in divorce, silence doesn’t protect—it suffocates. In this episode, I uncover the silent epidemic of peace-keeping wives, why it feels safer to appease than to speak, and how to finally let your truth breathe. Real recovery isn’t about keeping the peace—it’s about finding your peace.
Breaking free from people-pleasing is essential to post-divorce healing.
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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.
I'm starting to understand. Maybe it wasn't just him and I don't mean I was awful or anything, but I think I might've been toxic in my own way, not the screaming or cheating kind, but in a way where I sort of disappeared. I kept quiet, I went along with things. I told myself I was being easygoing for a lot of years, and now I'm not so sure. Maybe I was abandoning myself and calling it love. Maybe I thought being needed was the same as being loved. And now, all these years later, I'm only just now connecting the dots. Hi, love.
Speaker 1: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. In today's episode, we are going to witness the woman who wrote this, who has been married for a very long time and has lost an identity and an understanding of where she fits anymore in our society, who values youth and beauty and virility over and loyalty and abiding. We're going to talk about the kind of grief that goes so far beyond the loss of a marriage or a role, but around an identity. What happens when we divorced ourselves from ourselves before we got divorced? Hi ladies.
Speaker 1:Hi, hi, hi so we have spoken to and worked with a number of women who have given 20, 30, 40 years to marriage and are now sort of sitting holding the bag saying what was the point, what did it all mean, and who the hell am I and how do I like, where do I go from here? I really relate to this idea of feeling needed or self-sacrificing being love, and it's the opposite. Right, yeah, when we think about how Jesus loved, like, yes, jesus sacrificed it all, right, but I don't know. He saw people, right, really saw people, and that's the difference right when we lose ourselves, we're not being seen.
Speaker 3:Love is this sort of mutual seeing of each other celebrating. In that seeing, I think it's a lot like quiet quitting, like that's a trend now right At work. But what about when that happens in your marriage? I remember just kind of being like when I started giving up I just stopped reacting. You know, when I was upset you'd get into the arguments, you'd fight, you'd get loud, all of that, but when I stopped responding, that was the point when I started to lose who I was when I just it was like this quiet acceptance of, like this is how it's always going to be.
Speaker 3:So I'm going to fall in line because I don't have the strength to leave right now. And so it's the text message that shows up on the phone that you pretend like you didn't see is the looks that they're giving somebody across the room that you pretend that you don't see. The way that he's speaking to you, the way that he's speaking to your children. It kind of just makes you fall in line. And that's to me when I knew that I was losing everything of who I was, when I did not have the energy anymore to fight back.
Speaker 2:I think part of me being like ignoring was because I wanted to be a good Christian wife. I wanted to just pray harder. I wanted to just if I love him more, he'll. He'll love me. If he, if I serve him better, if I show up better, if I just keep myself small, then he'll feel bigger and will love me more and, um, ultimately, choose me, be happy, like, choose, choose me, and one day he's going to become a completely different person. Yeah, and can we talk about the women?
Speaker 3:I'm just going to like say it. Can we just talk to the women right now that have been in marriages where their husband is either addicted to sex or porn. That was me Right, Because in your sex life you want to keep taking it to the next level to keep his interest right. There's a pressure there, there's an identity that you take on sexually and so when you come out of that, a lot of my clients have a really fucked up relationship then with sex and like what that means and who they are, because they were forced into carrying this identity that never really felt like them this identity that never really felt like them, to keep him happy, to keep the peace.
Speaker 3:And they're almost afraid of sparking something in a new partner. Well, if I act this way sexually in a relationship, is that going to spark him then into some sort of an addictive spiral?
Speaker 1:Well, sure, but for me what that led to was just a complete loss of a sexual self, Like I, just like my sex drive just disappeared. So it became a mission to recover her, you know because, and I think that so many women these days, especially post-menopausal, and I think that so many women these days, especially postmenopausals, like what is sex and who cares? Who cares Because-.
Speaker 2:And then I did all of that for nothing, uh-huh.
Speaker 1:And what do I have left? What do I have to show for it?
Speaker 2:What is life? What does it?
Speaker 1:all mean yeah, yeah, yeah, the things we will do to not feel abandoned, alone, rejected, or to double down on making it work, to pour everything in to make it work. And then how big is the fear that there's nothing left in life now, right, like other than you know, my children or my grandchildren, like you know, I think it must be unreasonably scary to face it all, to think how do I rebuild a life from here and can I be all in on myself, right? Can I be all in on owning and learning and living into who I am, and can there be joy in that? Can there be more than grief in that, right? Cause it's like gosh, I think. Just every time you look at it, it's like the grief is overwhelming, the loss of self, it's overwhelming, yeah.
Speaker 2:Hard to look in the mirror. There's cause. There's also shame, right? It's shame that I there's, because there's also shame, right? It's shame that I, that I let this go or let that I ignored, or that I didn't have the strength to face it, or that I didn't I wasn't strong enough.
Speaker 3:There was a woman that I work with one time and she was in her probably early 60s and we were just having a conversation and she said to me and we were just having a conversation, and she said to me wait till you find out what it's like to be a woman this age and to see how society starts to view you differently because of your age, right, god? And it made me so sad because I'm like is that real? Because I don't feel that way when I'm working with my clients who were in their 60s, their 70s. They are these vivacious women who, my God, like if they only knew their own power.
Speaker 2:There's a certain that's so beautiful.
Speaker 3:There's a certain power that comes with age, the experience and life that you don't have until you've earned it you know, and I want to disagree with what that woman told me, because I'll tell you, my mom is in her early 60s and every decade that she gets older, she has always said, like Tiffany, every decade I get older, I feel more beautiful, I feel more powerful, I feel more in control of my life. There's like zero fucks. You know what I mean. She is just a vivacious woman and that has been my example.
Speaker 3:So I've never looked at aging as a bad thing. I love my birthday. I want to celebrate my birthday big every year, you know, and when I look at my body and I see these little sunspots on me and I will tell you guys, you're going to laugh at me. My grandmother used to have these red spots, like little red spots, on her, like legs, and when I was younger I remember sitting at her feet and like seeing these little and she would hate them. She's like that. When I got my first red little spot on my leg, I'm like, oh my God, because I loved it.
Speaker 3:Yes so how do we get these women to the point where they can see that you know what? Yeah, you might be 60 years old on the other side of your divorce, but, honey, this is a whole new chapter and it is a whole new world for you. Well, I think right as women.
Speaker 1:We also need to look at how we perpetuate that right.
Speaker 1:I you know, I know I was not prepared for all the ways in which it's and it's been a process of letting it go right, but all the ways in which I relied on youth as I don't know element of my esteem or my identity in these last last couple of years, as I've stopped doing Botox and the various things right, and as I've decided to like let go of some target weight on the scale and just be well fed right as I started wearing one pieces.
Speaker 1:You know, like these are all choices about, like enjoying the body I live in rather than trying to like fight some inevitable process. You know, but I think as women we do, we invest a lot in celebrating youth and beauty over wisdom and experience, and I think that's something that I always want to be mindful of. I know that when I was going through divorce, the women who I was in group therapy with, the women who I was in Al-Anon with, who were significantly older than me, they completely changed my life forever and we're still very, very, very close, like some of my dearest female friends, are women who were closer to my mom's age than my age, and I know we each offered each other something in our healing journeys that was meaningful and I think that we complimented each other in our processes, you know, and it was magical, and I think that that we complimented each other in our processes, you know, and it was magical, and I love that. I love that about group healing and I love that about like I needed what they had to offer. It was something I couldn't get anywhere else, you know. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And I think, instead of this mindset, I hear so many women say like I can't believe.
Speaker 2:I have to start over. You're not starting over, you're becoming. And I immediately texted, and I was just like. This was so powerful because it's such a beautiful. You know, we call ourselves reframe. The program calls right. We call ourselves the cocoon in our program because we're becoming, we're becoming something that this world has tried to bring us down. And now we're becoming powerful and we're stepping into our own, who we are intended to be.
Speaker 1:And so then, though we often ask women like what do you want to be, you know, like how do you want it to feel Right? And then the immediate, the subconscious mind is like but maybe I can't have it but maybe love isn't real and maybe I'm not really powerful.
Speaker 1:Right, there's that dark voice that says I'm different, I can't have it, I can't, it's too late for me, and I think that's the piece I wish. Right, if I had a way to bottle. Bottle that antidote. Oh, what do you know? I actually do have an antidote that I've bottled, but it's like, what do you know? I actually do have an antidote that I've bottled, but it's like, how do you give women a? But how do you give women a taste of, like, the opposite belief?
Speaker 1:Right, there's such a trust fall or a leap of faith. Yeah, that has to be made in order to. It's like the question and the answer are different vibrations, right, the negative belief and the positive belief. They're different vibrations and there's no one big manifestational sweeping change, right, it's like we think about people who win the lotto, or like.
Speaker 1:Like you just don't go from feeling scarce to feeling abundant in one fell swoop, right, like today happens to be 8-8. It's like Lionsgate portal or whatever. Like we're not manifesting a billion dollars today, right, what we're manifesting today is becoming the woman who can tolerate receiving a little bit more and a little bit more, and a little bit more, and that comes through a lot of baby steps and micro shifts, and the process of becoming right is one that happens first underground and then above ground, and it happens in cycles, happens in cycles and I think that for women in middle age, which we're going to call a big fat span, right, we call it like 40 to 60 or something like that right, it's a big fat span For women in middle age there's a lot of interesting considerations in this modern era of what it means to become at this stage, and we love it, we're here for it, we value it.
Speaker 3:So I'm going to say this because I know people have probably seen it, but pamela anderson, yes, no makeup anymore, she's completely reclaiming herself.
Speaker 3:She said she's played an identity her entire life and she's tired of it, and so she wanted to know who she was, the real her yes, yes, and I remember watching a segment with her on the drew barrymore show and they agreed that none of the women that day who were guests Drew Barrymore like, don't wear makeup to the set. And it was the most beautiful thing because all these women just felt so powerful sitting there without this shell on of themselves was trying to be anybody else.
Speaker 2:I'm going to have to go. I'm immediately going to go look that up because I I love that. I want that to have all the views, all of it.
Speaker 1:So I did hear her say in one interview that she started it as an experiment. She had no idea it was going to take, she just started it as an experiment, right. And I was like, oh God, what's going to happen when the experiment's over?
Speaker 3:Like I wonder if she goes back, you know.
Speaker 1:But yeah, I think, when you think about the amount of effort we put into our appearance and I don't mean like making sure your clothes are clean and you're you've- washed your hair this week. Right, I mean the amount of time, energy, effort, resource we put into looking a particularly being curated, right, it's so not the truth. And um, I think that it's a beautiful thing to move in the direction of authenticity, and it's scary, it's really scary.
Speaker 2:Yeah, very scary.
Speaker 3:So let me say this what if you took the time and all the money that you spent on all that shit? That you put on yourself and your body instead, you focused it on your mental health and wellbeing. Imagine what that would feel like.
Speaker 1:Well, listen, my skin looks so much better today at 45 than it did at 35. And that is because of all of the recovery, right, like dark circles and all the creams that are sold for dark circles. Guess what? That's your kidney function. You know what the kidneys do in the body they filter on behalf of your lack of boundaries, right? So all of those emotions that you swallow, the lack of boundaries you have, the worry, the fear, the anxiety that's putting undue stress on your kidneys and then your lymphatic system becomes sluggish and then that shows up as dark circles under your eyes.
Speaker 1:Do you know what will go so much further in terms of just this youthful glow and a solid under eye look, without having to put like line other people's jets, right, like with a hundred dollar bills is be well, be yourself and feel good doing it, and your skin will glow and you will not have bags under your eyes and you know nobody else will own your wellness. You know it's. It's remarkable, yeah, how youthful we become when we feel good. It's wild, yeah, and there's no amount of I'm going to say supplements, right, and that I'm distinguishing that from homeopathy, because homeopathy truly clears all the energetic blocks and returns us to wellness Supplements. I mean something we had to keep buying in order to maintain a cause, right.
Speaker 1:So homeopathy is not that Homeopathy clears the things that your body recovers itself. So you're not dependent on something to maintain, right, yeah, so there's no supplement in the world that can give you this sort of feeling of? And they're going to sell you a million of them, right? What are the new ones, like methylene blue and NAD and yeah, and those things can offset. I'm not saying they don't work, right, I'm saying they they do. They can give you a boost, but it's not sustainable, right? Yeah, you become dependent on it.
Speaker 3:It's not fixing the actual problem, right, yeah, right. And I'm always, I'm always amazed at in our program as we go through and clients. We see how differently they like, how much they physically change as they go through the program. We're in the beginning right, like they seem, a lot of people commit women. They're very withdrawn right and they're very just sluggish.
Speaker 3:And it's like they can't formulate thoughts, and God love them, like they're so dissociated. And then you know we're almost to the end of our current program and my God, they're showing up in session just glowing. Their vibration is raised so much and I think about these women who I know, who were in their sixties, seventies, eighties, that have high vibration states that are fucking magnets. These women are fucking magnets and, like you, just want to flock to them and everybody has the ability to be. That has nothing to do with your age.
Speaker 2:That's it. That's it. Everything to do with your vibration and your energy.
Speaker 1:Vibration. Yeah, I posted this other one to stories recently. We're going to have to redo this one, but it's like we've been. We've been talking about this for a while. But it's like the words, like I found the words, I saw them on the interwebs that the universe doesn't respond to your effort. It responds to your vibration. And so, right for all of us who have been trying to effort our way into alignment and wellness, right, it's, that's not it, it's your vibration, and anyone can become vibrationally aligned or vibrationally high. But you have to purify, right, you have to be willing to feel into and release and unburden all those places where the vibe is low, and that's a journey, it's a journey.
Speaker 3:I can look at myself at 20 years old and some of my pictures in my 20s, and I look older than I do now, because I was caring so much, so much.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love a good before and after photo. You know what else has gone away since all this healing and homeopathy is melasma, right, like, how much money do people spend on melasma? Like I used to have all this shading on my forehead and it's like my skin has just improved over the years. It's wild. It's wild. It's wild Aging in reverse. You know how I love to sing that song I am aging in reverse. I am aging in reverse.
Speaker 1:So if you have not taken our quiz yet, right, which is about our nervous system and hormonal health and grief and the intersection of those things post-divorce. We want to invite you to take that quiz because that is how we approach healing over here in this integrative way where we acknowledge the mental, emotional, spiritual and physical realms of how all of this lands in your body and how to walk you out of it. And so take the quiz. It's so fun and it will give you not just the results right, of what your nervous system type is looking like, but some next steps you can take to start moving in the direction of alignment and wellness, regardless of your age pre-menopausal, perimenopausal or post-menopausal. Let's do it. We love you so much. Peace, dear. Divorce Diary is a podcast by my coach, dawn. You can find more at mycoachdawncom.
