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
261. The Mask of Success: How Divorce Shatters the High-Achieving Woman
Success hides pain well—until divorce rips the mask away. What happens when achievement no longer protects you?
You’ll Learn
- The hidden cost of performing strength during marriage.
- Why high-achievers feel the crash harder in divorce.
- How to rebuild identity without the mask.
💎 Tired of hiding behind “I’m fine”? Join A Different D Word
and heal without needing to perform strength.
High-achieving women often wear success like armor. But when divorce cracks the surface, all the grief, shame, and exhaustion underneath finally spill out. This episode explores why high-achievers struggle so deeply after divorce, what the nervous system reveals about burnout, and how to release the mask once and for all. Freedom isn’t about pretending—you’re allowed to be seen.
Divorce recovery for high-achieving women means dropping the mask and finding safety in being real.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MyCoachDawn
Instagram: (@dawnwiggins)
Instagram: (@coachtiffini)
On the Web: https://www.mycoachdawn.com
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.
Post Divorce Road Map : 21 Days of Journaling
Promo Code: MAGICDROP
You can have every degree, every promotion, every glowing review and still be bleeding out on the inside. High-performing women know how to win the game, but that doesn't mean you're free. Being the strong one doesn't protect you from trauma love. It just makes you better at hiding it. And maybe you've noticed it too that you can solve impossible problems for everyone else, but the one thing you can't outrun is yourself.
Speaker 1: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. In a few minutes, the ladies and I are going to share the one question that instantly tells us if a smart woman has been using her achievements to outrun her own grief. Don't feel attacked, we're here to support you. Later in the episode, we're going to talk about the silent burnout tax you've probably been paying for years and how to start shifting that and what to do with it. And, before we wrap, we are going to tell you the real reason that smart and high achieving women avoid deeper healing and spoiler it's not about a fear of failing. It's something entirely different. Let's chat. Hi ladies, good morning, good morning. Anybody know any smart women, smart high?
Speaker 3:high, high, achieving high performing. We're surrounded by them.
Speaker 1:I love that, yeah, and so it's interesting right to be someone who is able to solve so many problems and be so high performing and then really struggle to capture the vulnerability or the ability to put that load aside to do your own deep work, right? We see this with women a lot.
Speaker 3:I resonate with this so much because in my prior life I was a corporate executive and.
Speaker 3:I ran companies and you know I oversaw teams and I always felt like you know I was a good mentor, you know I was a great coach to the people who work for me and the women that work for me, and I don't know there was something that just didn't translate to my personal life. So I always felt like in the corporate world I was a badass, I was very high achieving, but in my personal life I was a hot mess.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of women struggle with this, I know, you know that feels relatable in the sense that, as a professional, I have a therapist and it feels like maybe I'm not supposed to struggle so much personally, and I also feel like there's an image I've always needed to uphold, especially when I became a business owner. I think that felt like more pressure that I had to uphold a particular image in order to, you know, make sure people felt safe, right to use my services. And I also think about some of the women that have an enormous amount of pressure on them to perform and not show cracks, right. Think about, like our kids' teachers, you know, or our medical professionals, you know what I mean Like there are just so many smart, high-performing women who are problem solvers for our communities and then feel like they can't crack.
Speaker 1:You know other therapists, doctors, people who really, really feel an enormous amount of pressure to maintain a particular I don't know is it image or is it image or is it something else but high level of responsibility, right, and they feel like they cannot show cracks. And I think that must be so painful and challenging to be going through something as painful as divorce and feel like you can't feel, you know like, you just can't. You have to hide it all.
Speaker 3:I feel like there's shame too, in being the woman who has all the answers for everybody else but you don't have them for yourself. So you know, when I was in corporate, I was in an industry that was very male dominated and it was very, very high pressure and high stress. Like it was nothing for me to have employees go to the ER for chest pains monthly every other month, just from the sheer pressure of it, right?
Speaker 3:So it's like these women always look to me as the person to be the calm to their storm. Anytime they had a really crazy meeting or they had a phone call that they needed to take that was insane, or whatever, I was always the one that would be in the room with them.
Speaker 2:And so being able to speak to other women?
Speaker 3:Yeah, right. So then, like when I turn it around in my personal life and I feel like I'm floundering and again I have answers for everybody else but not me, I knew that I had a huge mental block there, like I was not seeing the things that were preventing me from moving forward in my own life, like I was not self-aware enough with myself. Yeah, and that sucks when you have so much intuition with other people, but when it comes to you, it's like a blood doesn't translate, yeah Right.
Speaker 3:So there was a lot of shame and confusion for me around that Like am I as smart as I think I am? Because you know, my personal life is kind of a hot mess right now. You know, like my dating life, like I'm picking all the wrong guys and like doing all the wrong things and creating all this unnecessary stress for myself and I just I could not get the hell out of my own way in my personal life at all.
Speaker 1:And I think that just so demonstrates like we're not supposed to heal in isolation, we're supposed to heal in community, we're supposed to heal in connection like we literally cannot recover elements of our story and our lived experience and our pain unless it's done in deep connection.
Speaker 1:And so it's so beautiful how you know so many people are able to hold that space for other people, but like we try to do it without that for ourselves. Also, I know, joy, you mentioned this earlier but that idea that like we can't think ourselves well right, we can't strategize ourselves well, it's just not a thing we have to feel safe and that's a layer of shame in and of itself, because if we have that hype performing, there's nothing that we can't do because we're badass women, but then we can't do this.
Speaker 2:It's like a level of shame all on like failure, failure.
Speaker 1:It's such a lie we tell ourselves, like profound lie. We tell ourselves.
Speaker 3:So I always find it so interesting that the women who gravitate to us in our program are women who are really badass but also who are caregivers.
Speaker 2:The nurses, the teachers the therapists.
Speaker 3:you know these women who it's their job not only to provide for their children emotionally, but then also to provide for people in their own community in some sort of a capacity. So it's like we attract caregivers and I feel like there's a lot of shame that we unprogram from them, saying like it's okay that you can care for everyone else, but you really need to start putting yourself first, I think that's a foreign concept yeah. It's hard to let yourself be cared for.
Speaker 1:So let's, let's dig into the question, right, that tells us about the ways in which, right, a smart woman, a high performing woman, has been using her achievements to outrun her own grief. Right, and let's just like peel back the cover on that. So I want you to take a deep breath, I want everybody to just sort of drop into your body, right, and I want you to consider this question. I'm going to do it too, right now. Right, we're all going to do it with you, all. Right, if you weren't achieving, fixing or helping, who would you be? If you weren't doing something for someone else, who would you be? And I just want you to notice what that brings up in your body. I want you to notice what kind of thoughts it brings up.
Speaker 1:I had a girlfriend this was years ago now, grace was probably four, so six years ago at least and she said to me you know, if you did nothing today other than just be a person, you would be enough. And I was like what? Like what Does not compute, right? So as recently as six years ago, I still very much felt like I had to achieve or perform in order to feel like I was I don't know valuable at the end of that day you know, the idea of being being supported, being provided for like that all still felt really foreign to my nervous system, really interesting, and it is a nervous system training, right, like our nervous systems are trained in certain patterns and it's it's really pattern based. And so I think it's a big question what comes up for you, ladies?
Speaker 3:I just remember I could have the messiest morning with my daughter, you know, when she was younger, like trying to get her to school. I remember one morning she was trying to eat her cereal in the car line and spilled milk all over the front of her uniform Like it was disgusting. But like mornings like that, right, where it's just like, yeah, anything that can go wrong did go wrong. And when I would pull up to my office building I'd have to take a break, or a big breath rather, because the second I walked through the door I was on display and the way that my staff studied my emotional reactions to everything. I was under a microscope all the time because if they didn't feel safe in my reaction, they didn't feel safe to be there.
Speaker 3:And that is a tremendous amount of pressure when you're on stage and you feel like everyone is looking at you. And I learned how to be that way in other parts of my life, right, I learned to be like that with my quote unquote friends, you know, on dates, even with my family, no, I'm fine, everything's fine. You know, I live 600 miles away. Nobody's going to know if I'm not fucking fine.
Speaker 3:There's only a couple people that I can fly under the bullshit radar, with which one is my mother.
Speaker 1:She knows I'm not fine.
Speaker 3:She knows I cannot yeah no, there's certain people that I can't front with right. I'm the other one, yeah. Dawn definitely, and I really, really hated that when we first started working together, because not only will Dawn call you out in a team meeting and say, hey, you're not okay today, no-transcript.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So then, who are we right when we're not fixing and I know you know this is for every woman who's listening to Explore right now right, but we get so attached to roles as identity, smart, accomplished, achieving, caregiving, and so who are we if we're not filling a role and we're not filling a need? Who?
Speaker 3:are we? I mean, over the course of my journey in coaching, I've learned that it's so important for me to put myself first, and so I have learned to take a step back and be able to ground and practice different modalities with myself, because I know that if I'm not feeling okay in myself and my body like, I can't do the work that I need to do as a healer and a coach.
Speaker 3:So, to be that conduit. Yeah, yeah, and I think before I was just surviving in corporate and that's why it felt so unauthentic to me, because I just felt like every single day when I got up and I put on my heels and I walked into that office, I was playing a role. There was nothing real about it and anything that I achieved over the course of my career which was a ton never meant as much as it should have, because it just never really resonated with me. It was all part of the bigger screenplay all part of the bigger screenplay.
Speaker 3:Yeah, survival.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think we've really like, culturally right, lost track of what it is to be woman, feminine, right. We've gone into this like we've learned. I feel like we've adapted and learned how to celebrate boss, babe, culture, and like I'm grateful, right, I'm grateful at least that we did learn how to celebrate that. No-transcript. We're meant to feel, we're meant to be connect, sit process, you know, hang out with each other, be connect, sit process, you know, hang out with each other, commune, and and I think for most women there's not a lot of space and time for all of that and it's it's a massive thing to grieve and it's a massive thing to understand that it's a it's actually affecting your divorce recovery and it's fascinating to consider, right, without community, without some stillness, without some femininity, recovering from divorce is not fully available, and how do you drop into your femininity when everything you're doing is taking care of your children, working the corporate job and having all these other people look at you because you are a badass in the workplace?
Speaker 3:right, me and my best friend we joke about this all the time and I know that people probably like. If you look over the course of my life, you probably assume that I'm like this hardcore feminist, and in some ways I am right, but also also. I want to dress in a dress and bake pies and shit Like literally.
Speaker 3:I feel like I'm very proud of, like all the lengths that we as women have gone to for you know, different rights that we have, yeah, but sometimes her and I joke and laugh and we're like some bitch took it too far because we just want to be we just want to hang out I mean like.
Speaker 3:so that's what it is and I feel like too, like women are designed to be, all of these things and softness, and I always remember, like my dad is somebody that's followed my corporate career for a long time and he was always my biggest cheerleader and he would see me in meetings, you know, and he would see how I worked and you know he would say to me Tiffany, you understand, when you walk into a room with all of these other men that you have the biggest balls in the room and it. It would crack me up, but it was the truth. It was the truth because I couldn't afford to falter or embrace any type of femininity or show emotion or do anything that was going to make people look at me as weak.
Speaker 1:Well, and I think that that happens a lot also, like as women are going through litigation in the divorce process, right, like show no weakness, yeah, be tough, be strong, all of that. But I think that it's it's killing us. Right, it was killing me. It was killing me, the hustle grind. Yeah, I think that there were a lot of things that helped me drop into femininity more over the years.
Speaker 1:Yoga was one of them, and I don't mean like power yoga right, I'm not talking about vinyasa like power flow, I'm talking about the slower forms of yoga, and it's funny when you talk to women about trying yoga when they've not done it before, and they're usually like smart, high achieving women who are trying to outrun their problems. They're like I hate yoga, it's too slow, it's too boring. Or if they do like yoga, it's like fitness yoga. You know what I mean, but that's not what I mean. I mean like slow flow, hatha breath, focused yin. You know like mean, but that's not what I mean. I mean like slow flow, hatha breath, focused yin. You know like types of yoga that call for stillness and breath, and I think that that is a really deeply valuable way for women to start moving in the direction of femininity and still be achieving, if you will. You know what I mean, because you could go to a yoga class and you can move your body and you can be productive in, you know, burning a calorie, moving your body, supporting your lymphatic system and your nervous system, but be really connecting with your breath in the class and if that feels hard to you, it's probably the thing you need to do. So yoga was probably one of the most profound things that really helped me start to shift into my feminine body more and to be more in touch with my nervous system.
Speaker 1:I think EMDR for sure helped. Beach walks helped right, like connecting in nature. I think when we get outside of the walls of the buildings we live in, we're able to capture some perspective more right, because when we're constantly in the four walls of the buildings, we're in it really. I mean number one, from a frequency perspective, vibrationally right, takes us out of flow. And number two, we start to really like fall into this lull that, like what goes on in the walls is, is it is the thing right, and it's it's not the thing, it's, you know, it's the world right, it's the world, it's not the creation you know, like.
Speaker 1:So I think connecting in big nature is very, very helpful for being able to reconnect with being, and so I think being community too right.
Speaker 1:Like you know, y'all have heard me talk about post-divorce and like the duplex I lived next to my girlfriend, lauren, and all that Right. But just being able to, like sit on a sofa and hold a girlfriend's hand like super feminine thing to do, you know, and to have that person that you can sort of drop in and put your head on their shoulder and have someone to call and I definitely did a lot of that in the groups that I was in right Whether it was group therapy or Al-Anon made sure I had a list of women that I was in right, whether it was group therapy or Al-Anon made sure I had a list of women that I could literally physically connect with. That could be safe spaces. And then you know later on, obviously, like homeopathy is sort of the most profound and fastest energetic shift, right To be able to down-regulate the nervous system enough that you can very quickly feel safer to be rather than do.
Speaker 3:For me. I think it was homeopathy, Like obviously, like that was a huge piece of my journey through going through EMDR, but sepia, for me, did wonders. I mean, sepia made me feel like I had a heart again. It made me feel like I could be a nurturer, that I could be soft and loving without losing that edge.
Speaker 3:I always find it so interesting how, when we start dealing with women in our program, how they look physically in the beginning versus how they look physically at the end, because all of them it's like they come in and they're super hard and guarded, and that's all over their face, yes, and like by the end it's like they come on camera and they're just glowing, you know, and there's this big like exhale and relief and like I love seeing how they're able to embrace their femininity and they finally feel like they're in a healed state and they don't have to have that hard exterior anymore.
Speaker 1:And maybe not never, right, because those are things that we reach for sometimes when we get either triggered into an old pattern or, you know, it's still a tool in our toolkit, right, but it's not a chronic state of being anymore. Yeah, all of our faces have changed too.
Speaker 3:Mine did. I mean I when I started using sepia, and now, like when I'm looking in the mirror, I feel more feminine, I feel softer, softer and not as edgy yeah.
Speaker 1:So all of this doing rather than being right, achieving rather than being cared for it's shredding our nervous systems, and I think that what I see so many women experiencing is getting to this place where then all of a sudden they get diagnosed with autoimmune conditions. And there's such a high correlation between autoimmune disease, trauma, nervous system distress and doing rather than being right. And so I just want to really encourage any woman that has been diagnosed with an autoimmune condition because that is the tax that you pay eventually right that if you don't start getting a handle on all of this, you end up sort of at a tipping point in the nervous system right, where all of that that you've been suppressing and repressing becomes physical disease state in the body, and then the work is that much more right. So I just want to encourage any woman who sort of has been considering this right or has recently been diagnosed with an autoimmune condition.
Speaker 1:These things are reversible, they are unwindable, they are completely treatable Using all the tools we use right in our program. It's not any one tool, there's no one size fits all, one magic bullet that's going to recover all of this. You know culture of high achievement or you know productivity, but there is so much reason to hope if you can start taking baby steps in the direction of reclaiming femininity and integrated wellness, and I mean I had two issues at the beginning of last year that were autoimmune related, that I was told I would always just deal with.
Speaker 3:It was something I had to learn to deal with, that there was not a cause for them, there was not a reason I had them, but they were very problematic symptoms that I was experiencing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, should be a crime to tell women that, yeah, there's not a cause.
Speaker 3:Like there wasn't something that they could point to and tell me that it's like, hey, just avoid these foods and you'll be fine. And it's like what the like, I don't know. So then I started doing homeopathy right around the same time and literally when I went for my tests I was cleared of everything. Like everything was clear at that point and you know, if that didn't make me an advocate before for it, it certainly does now. And you know, I tell women all the time, like, whatever you're experiencing, whether it's perimenopause, premenopausal you know there are remedies that I've taken that literally alleviate. And when I tell you that I used to have the most painful menstrual cramps, I used to rage, I used to be a complete bitch, I used to cry, like everything around the time of my period. And after three months on sepia I don't even know when it's coming, like it literally just appears and I'm like, whoa, okay, but there's no cramps anymore, there's no emotional distress, there's nothing. So for me it's like, why wouldn't you want to try it, that remedy?
Speaker 2:was a really good match for you. What other thing is on the market that's going to?
Speaker 3:say hey, like yeah, absolutely yeah.
Speaker 1:And not every woman is going to have that much right. Like it's that's a very well-paired remedy for you, like in general, like not just for the situational issue, right, but like it's a good remedy for you, yeah so, but for another woman it might be a different remedy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, so let's talk about the real reason. We've talked about some of the reasons, right, that our nervous systems have patterns, that other people are looking at us or expecting us to do certain things, or the very real realities and responsibilities right. But what's the real, real, real reason that high performing, smart women don't want to dig deeper? Maybe it's not even don't want to dig deeper. Feel like they can't. Maybe that's more well said, right.
Speaker 2:Feel like they can't, that's a hard pill to swallow to ask for help or to say you can't like high achieving women, like for them to come to the table and be like I can't do this, when their identity is historically been kick ass. I can accomplish any task, I can climb any mountain, I can do. You know what I mean. So there's a level of um, there's a love of um, there's a level of humility and like. It's not safe to be able to say, but I can't do this. This is something, this is a mountain I can't climb by myself and it's a lot of shame based not being able to perform that well.
Speaker 1:Coach Tiffany, what would you say from an IFS perspective? Is the real reason. Women don't really high achieving women, productivity based women don't feel safe. What's happening from a parts perspective inside of this beautiful woman?
Speaker 3:So there's going to be a couple different exiles that we call them or feelings right. So you know, for me it would be a guilty part, you know, ashamed part, that they're kind of covering up. And then of course, your managers are going to take flight. So that's going to be your perfectionist manager, your overworking manager. You know, I feel like the reason, one of the reasons why I was such a badass in my career is because I was using it as a way to deflect from all of the things I didn't want to feel right.
Speaker 3:So for me trying to come to the table and finally saying, hey, I need EMDR or I need another modality because this is not working anymore. For me it was like, but if I take the time and do this, what else is going to fall apart? Was my fear going to fall apart? Was my fear, Am I going to?
Speaker 2:be able to heal and still be able to maintain myself from a work perspective, or is everything going to go to shit?
Speaker 3:Is everything just going to unravel and fall apart? That was my biggest fear.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, from an IFS perspective, right, the system has worked in the cohesive way. The system has worked to keep us alive, right? So from a nervous system, ifs perspective, the system really perceives that the way it functions is keeping us alive. It's a survival-based programming. Yeah, and so there's some deep-seated fear that like this doesn't work without this old system. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I remember even this was years ago now, but I remember, joy, you saying, when we were talking about you starting EMDR, this idea of I don't know who I'll be right. It's like, yeah, this lost, this idea that what if I'm lost? Right Like I don't know who I'm going to be.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So there's a lot of layers.
Speaker 2:I can feel it in my body.
Speaker 1:That day those words or what?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you say those words to me. I remember feeling that in my body of just like, so fearful and so sure of who I was and what I like. No, I like who I am.
Speaker 3:I don't know who I'm going to be on the other side of this, so like I don't want to do it, mm hmm, I don't know who I'm going to be on the other side of this, so like I don't want to do it Also from an IFS perspective, you've got that ugly controller manager and every high performing woman has it. Every high performing woman has a controller manager. You do not like to feel out of control and healing feels really out of control.
Speaker 1:That's right, you can't heal without letting go.
Speaker 3:Yeah, correct, correct. So like I'll have like choice. She has a controller manager. When we did IFS she sat there and she's like but what questions are you going to ask me? And I've had other clients say to me that have controller managers. You know well what's going to happen, what are we going to talk about, and I don't tell you on purpose because I want that manager activated when you come in, because I want to poke a little bit, you know. But I mean my entire life fit in a box. I had a really hard time stepping out of anything that felt uncomfortable, like. I didn't want it Like a theoretical there's a lot of fear in that.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think that's what also sets us apart. Right Is that when we come from an IFS perspective, paired with, obviously, somatics and homeopathy, we know when you have these parts come up and we know how to help those parts feel safe. And that's trauma-informed care, right, and that's where we shine as a team. Yeah, it's helping each of those parts feel safe enough that they can take on new strategies for survival that are more balanced right.
Speaker 3:And to me there's no better feeling than hearing a client say I need to tell you this. I've never told anyone this before. I love that because it's like that safety that we're providing in our programs is a place for women to feel seen and not judged, and really get to embrace all of the darkness and all of the light together. And that's what you truly, truly need.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:If you don't know and you haven't heard, tomorrow night we are doing our first ever premium subscriber only somatic event where, if you are a premium subscriber, you get to come to this event. We're going to walk through my favorite somatic exercise that I've been doing in session with clients and in my family, with my kid and myself and you name it. So we're going to help women really shed and put down the pain they're carrying, the rage they're carrying, and sleep better, because that's what this somatic exercise does. So if you're not a premium subscriber or you haven't signed up for this event, please be sure to do that. It is going to be Wednesday, august 27th at 8 pm Eastern. Cannot wait to see you there. Love you so much. Peace, dear Divorce Diary is a podcast by my coach, dawn. You can find more at mycoachdawncom.
