276. Trust Yourself Again: How Human Design Heals Decision Fatigue After Divorce

You’ve read the books, gone to therapy, tried to make the “right” choice… and still feel like you’re second-guessing everything. After divorce, even simple decisions can feel like emotional quicksand.

In this episode, Dawn introduces Human Design—a quantum-meets-psychology framework that reveals how you were built to make decisions, manifest, and recharge your energy. Whether you’re wired for logic, emotion, gut instinct, or reflection, understanding your design can transform the way you trust yourself again.

Dawn shares stories from pulling her own chart—and Tiffini’s and Joy’s—to show how this system validates what women already know deep down: you’re not broken, you’ve just been trying to live by someone else’s rules.

You’ll learn:
 ✨ Why traditional therapy can keep you second-guessing your own wisdom
 ✨ How your Human Design type influences burnout, boundaries, and intuition
 ✨ The surprising reason decision fatigue skyrockets after divorce
 ✨ How alignment (not hustle) creates real healing and coherence

If you’re ready to stop asking, “What’s wrong with me?” and start remembering who you are—this episode is your permission slip.

🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Human Design App by Jenna Zoe
• Follow @healthy.madeline for breathwork + Human Design insights
• Take the Divorce Recovery Nervous System Quiz
   to discover your post-divorce healing type

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.

Chapters

• 0:00 Why decisions feel so heavy
• 0:22 Human Design as a framework
• 3:19 Old therapy vs you as expert
• 5:02 Energy types explained
• 9:19 Living by your type day-to-day
• 12:19 Profiles and team dynamics
• 15:20 Decision strategies by design
• 18:06 Manifesting: specific vs non-specific
• 22:16 Digestion of food and information
• 24:27 How to pull your chart and use it
• 26:45 Parenting, partnership, and dating with design
• 28:12 Quantum overlap and community

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Think of how it feels when you look back at a decision you made about a marriage, a divorce, or maybe what you ordered for dinner and think why. What if the problem isn't that you're indefective or that your picker is broken? It's that no one ever taught you how you were specifically designed to decide. Today we're talking about something that's going to sound a little woo at first. Human design. But stay with me because it explains why you burn out when you're doing what lights someone else up, why your gut screams no, but your brain is begging you to be reasonable, and why every woman I've ever worked with breathes so much easier once she understands her own human design part. Hi, love. Welcome to Dear Divorce Diaries, the podcast helping divorce days go beyond talk therapy to process your grief, find the healing your grave, and build back your confidence. I'm your host, Don Wiggins, a therapist, coach, integrative healer, and divorce guy. Join me for a fresh approach to healing grief and building your confidence after divorce. In today's episode, you're going to hear us discuss how old school therapy assumes the therapist is the expert set. But when you know your human design part, it flips that and it identifies you as the expert at that. When I first pulled Joy's part, it made so much sense. Why she is literally the heartbeat of our group is built for building community and coach definitely all intuition and action, which is exactly how she helps women stop spinning and move forward. And it's just reinforced for me feeling it's not about fitting into um, you know, checkbox system. It's about really leaning into what your body already knows and the map for you. So later on in the episode, the three of us are going to talk about how after divorce, even the tiniest choices felt like freaking emotional weightlifting, but we're not all meant to decide the same way. Some of us are gut-driven, some of us are emotionally driven, and some of us need to talk it out and cure our own tone. And once I identified my chart version of my decision making and then helped my clients see the way they were designed to make decisions, it made sense why logic didn't work because you're not actually indecisive, you're just using the wrong operating system. We're gonna wrap up the episode by talking about that sort of aha experience. Every woman I've ever shown her chart to says the same thing. I have always known that about myself read, but didn't trust it, right? Or doubted it, I can guess it. And that's the moment you expose because human design doesn't give you a new identity, it gives you permission to trust the one you've always had. When I started honoring my design instead of forcing productivity, everything softened. More energy, more alignment, more peace. And that's what we want for you today through this episode on human design. Stop puzzling for alignment and start living it. All right, let's talk a little bit about human design, right? It is this really interesting approach that the discoverer of it, I will say, discovered it around in the 80s. And what he discovered is that is is an element of human evolution, right? Has anybody ever watched the Big Bang Theory? Where you have this show full of brainiacs, right, where they talk about quantum physics a lot, or uh Marvel movies, right? Where we just put the word a quantum in front of something and it makes it cooler. But from a quantum perspective, we understand that there are packets of energy called neutrinos. And when neutrinos move through the universe, that um they're packets of information that can move through walls and can move through our physical bodies, and they contain these actual packets of information and data. And so what the discoverer of human design noticed was that we as humans have actually been evolving. And part of how we evolve is when these neutrinos get released and our bodies upgrade. And so human design looks at our energy systems and our chakras, and it looks at our astrology, and it looks at gene keys in the quantum field, and it says, like, hey, each of us has a unique blueprint or design for how we are individually meant to live and love and work and relate to people. And so in human design, there are a lot of different elements of who we are and how we function that we can look at. So I'm only going to cover a couple of them here. But what I want to highlight is that when I'm working with clients in my practice and in our program, is one of my favorite things to do is pull your human design chart. And when I pull your human design chart, I can see a number of things. I can see your personality profile, I can see your energy type, I can see how you are uniquely designed to make decisions. I feel like that little piece of information right there is a game changer, especially for women. And we can see how you're supposed to make things happen in life. I can see how you're supposed to manifest, I can see what your specific unique gifts and abilities are, and I can see the things that are just sort of not your strengths, right? So when I pull someone's chart in the beginning of working with them, it just really helps supercharge how we can make progress in certain things. I think that the old way of doing therapy is where you go into the therapist's office and there's sort of the therapist is the expert, right? And I think the new way of doing therapy when we're looking at somatic techniques and things like IFS and EMDR therapy and homeopathy, right? There's an acknowledgement that you have an innate wisdom and you have a unique and innate way that you're meant to life. And you have that information stored inside of you, and I'm not the expert on you. I'm the expert on things, you know, you know, certain brain structures, and I'm the expert on relationship dynamics and patterns, but I'm not the expert on you, you're the expert on you, and your subconscious mind is going to tell me what it needs to work on. So when I pull a human design chart, we're able to sort of clear a whole bunch of crap about how you're meant to make decisions, how you're meant to live your life, how you're meant to wake up and go to sleep and really just function optimally. And so we introduced this in our in our program this last year and had some beautiful discussions specifically around decision making was one of the primary ways. And then communication, right? And so a handful of things that we that I initially look at in a human design chart is what's your energy type? Uh, and so there are a handful that are more common than others. So one is a manifestor. And if you have a manifestor energy type, you are somebody who's gonna initiate things. And you're probably gonna really march to the beat of your own drum. And the way that you initiate things is is meant for the the rest of us to like come along with or not. And if you have a manifestor energy type, that's really supposed to be the discernment around whether or not people are supposed to be in your circle or not. When you initiate something, do people join? And if people don't join, they're not your people. And then there's a generator type, and this is someone who is supposed to really, um, yeah, is supposed to really focus on things that like you light you up in life, right? And and I always say this to my husband, like, I'm I'm a generator energy type. I am not supposed to do things I don't want to do. Because when generators are doing things they love, our job is actually to create energy for the people that that we're around. We're actually meant to inspire other people and feed you our energy from us being lit up. Then there's manifesting generators, which is sort of a blend between those two. Manifesting generators are a multi-hyphenite people. I watched the most hysterical reel today about manifesting generator energy. And it was like a man trying to chase his dog down the street, and the dog kept going like this, like this, like always changing direction, and he could never quite catch the dog. And that's manifesting generator energy. They're multi-hyphenite, they're gonna pivot a lot in life, they're not gonna have the same career, they're gonna change jobs all the time. And see, when we start to talk about these types, already we're like, oh, we're not all supposed to do it the same, right? You like you can go into a therapist's office and you could have had four different jobs in eight years, and that person is like, maybe we should focus on sticking with something. But if you're a manifesting generator, you're not supposed to stick with things. Then there's projector types and reflector types, those are much less common, but projectors see something, see things from a very different perspective. They can see how to optimize things, and they have very different flows of energy, and then reflectors and reflectors are meant to reflect back to us the things that are working and aren't working in our society. And so, first knowing what your energy type is is really, really important. Generators, I'm a generator. Our energy is always going to be higher when we're doing things we love. So, for instance, let's say I got invited to do something on a Friday night, and I'm supposed to really listen to my body to make decisions, right? And let's say my body says, I really don't want to go do that thing, you know, and and it's it's really valuable to play with it, right? But if I go to do the thing, I force myself to do it, and I can't tap into good energy while I'm there, there's a sign I wasn't supposed to do the thing. I was supposed to really listen to that wisdom of my generator energy type. For um manifestors, manifestors have big ebbs and flows in their energy, right? There are times that they're gonna have like balls to the wall energy, and there are times that their body is gonna say, like, it's time to cocoon now. And so when we talk about how energy flows in our unique bodies and the culture that we live in that tells us we're supposed to show up like 24-7 in a particular way, knowing your human design energy type can be a game changer. Then there are our personality profiles. I'm not gonna get in all the numbers, right? We would be here all night just talking about human design in general, but even just the three of us knowing our profile numbers, right? You're both two fours, right? And I'm a six-two. Okay, so twos are quick starts. We learn things very quickly, we can run with things. It makes us a great team, right? Because one of us can convey an idea to the other and it's like, oh yeah, got it, right? Can run with it very quickly. But twos also tend to need to hibernate and have a lot of alone time or downtime. That's so valuable for us to know as a team because each of us can say, like, we did a work day together, like a month or two ago. And there was a period of time we met with Kate earlier in the morning, did some quantum healing for ourselves as a team, and then we said, we're all gonna go to a different room in the house, right? And we're gonna get away from each other so we can all be in our own energies. In college, I remember having a girlfriend who was my roommate, my bestie at the time, right? And she would get really upset with me that I wouldn't go to the club a lot. I just wanted to stay home. I've always just sort of been a homebody. And I wasn't a rejection of her. I had that too in my profile, right? And so I'm always just gonna be a little bit hermit-y. Yeah. I think one of my favorite human design moments was with producer Joy when we were like sort of early on in the in growing this podcast and this project, right? And pulling her chart and saying to her, You're two four. Fours thrive on community.

SPEAKER_01: 11:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 11:46

And that's Joy's role, right, in in our program is to facilitate community. And it was like, oh, that's a aha moment for her to lean into that element of who she is and to say, like, no, it's not just something she's interested in, it's actually something she's built for. The greatest gifts of human design is permission for us as women to live into our unique energies, right? But one of my favorite, favorite, favorite elements of human design is knowing our unique ability to make decisions. And I think this one is so important because again, if you go the old way of doing therapy, when you go into your therapist's office, right, your therapist is gonna have their own bias about how to make decisions. Is it logical? Most people will tell you not to make decisions based on emotion. But there are some people based on their home and human design chart, I'm actually one of them, that is supposed to make decisions based on how it makes me feel. Um, but for some people, their chart says make a logical decision. For many, many, many people, they're supposed to make sacral or gut decisions. Some people, right? One of the women in our program is supposed to make decisions based on talking things out with other people. And it's because when she bounces her thoughts and ideas off of other people, she can actually hear her own tone of voice and her own energy level about it. And it gives her this feedback, this auditory feedback about her own sense of things. That's a self-projected decision-making process. So to have that information about your unique ability to make a decision, especially in a post-divorce season where you feel lost and decision fatigue, knowing your human design is a game changer.

SPEAKER_02: 13:22

Well, for me in gut decisions, right? And I know you and I had this conversation in business, is that Don and I have to ask each other yes or no questions.

SPEAKER_00: 13:29

That's a generator thing, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 13:30

When it comes to business, right? Like it's like not, well, how does this know? Like, do you want to do this? Yes or no? And we'll just like boom, like we know it.

SPEAKER_00: 13:37

When we start hemming and hawing, yeah, it's like, oh, there's something in there that you're not acknowledging, right? Yeah. And so then it's like, it's either a yes or a no. And if it's a no, does that mean it can't be a yes? Not necessarily. Maybe there's a way to get it to a yes, right? But it gives this clarity that as it currently stands, I'm a no, right? And it's listening to the body again. So there's a there's a massive somatic element to human design for sure. Right. So one of my other favorite elements is about how we manifest, because, like, oh my goodness, there's so much content out there about manifesting these days, right? Like we use that word a lot on the podcast because it's such a popular topic. But but manifesting, there's a specific way we're supposed to do it. And so there are specific manifestors and non-specific manifestors, which I do. I'm a non-specific too, right? And so it's super interesting because if you're a non-specific manifester and you start trying to manifest specifically, you're gonna feel a lot of resistance, which is gonna lead to negative emotion, which actually blocks the manifestation. It's really interesting, right? So, but as a non-specific manifester, that also gave me so much freedom because I know all I have to do is sort of have a vague idea of what I want, and the universe is gonna fill it in as long as I can trust that.

SPEAKER_01: 15:03

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 15:03

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, as long as I'm living within my human design alignment, right? Because when we're living out of alignment, you're not gonna attract again back to that where we talked about homeopathy, coherent versus incoherent energy. So the more we live in alignment with our own unique human design, the faster we're gonna manifest things, the easier it's gonna be to make decisions, the more self-acceptance we're gonna feel, and the more peace, right? So, one of the women that I love to follow, whom we actually brought into our program, this this cohort, is a breath worker. On Instagram, her handle is Healthy Madeline, I believe. And so she does breath work and human design coaching. I love listening to her talk about human design. She had a lot of autoimmune issues and digestive issues. Human design will tell you how you're best meant to eat and digest food, what you're meant to eat and how you're meant to digest it. And so she started following her human design chart. This is what got her into human design coaching and why she's so lit up about it. And when she started living according to her human design, her autoimmune issues disappeared and her digestion improved, and all of a sudden she was healthy. And so it's everything we've been talking about today, whether it's IFS or it's homeopathy or it's somatics or it's human design, it's about living in alignment and coherence, right, with who we were meant to be. And it's sort of trusting that we were designed to self-heal and we were designed to thrive. And when we're not living in alignment, we're going to be sick, right? We're going to be suppressed. We're going to, our vital force is going to be low. Human design is one of my favorite ways to personalize this program. Because after we did our human design workshop, right, we were able to say to this one, like, hey, what do you need to bounce off of us, right? What do you need to project? Or to this one? Well, how do you need to make that decision? You know, is it a yes or is it a no? And probably it's time to circle back to that, right? As a refresher. But it's one of the most beautiful ways that we can personalize this program. The coaching, the way that you move through it, the way that you make decisions within the group and outside of the group, because we are meant to have a personalized approach to living and loving and and learning. The digestion piece of human design is really interesting because it highlights not just how we digest food, but also how we digest information. And so I think many of the things about human design, when people read their charts or learn their charts, it's like, I knew that about myself. I knew that about myself, right? But we have a lot of self-doubt and we second guess. And clicking in, right? Yeah. And we don't give ourselves permission to trust the things that we intuitively understand about ourselves, right? So in my human design, I digest food best with high sound in the background. But it's also how I digest information best. So, like when my whole life I've studied with music in the background or TV in the background. And for one person, that would be horribly distracting. But for me, I'm gonna learn and I'm gonna synthesize better and I'm gonna digest my food better. It's so interesting. Isn't it? And so some people are meant to digest in direct light or in indirect light, or you know, with high sound or low sound, or it's so interesting, right? And all of that can be found in our human design chart.

SPEAKER_03: 19:04

We've had we've had a couple people ask where would you find the human design? Like, where would you find this information? How do you find your human design?

SPEAKER_00: 19:10

Yeah, so you have to know your birth date, time, and place. There are several Instagram handles that I love. Jenna Zoe, J-E-N-N-A-Z-O-E. She actually has an app that I use. Um, and that's how we've pulled all the charts. I have I have her app, Human Design with Jenna Zoe. So if you could Google that, it comes right up. You could pull your chart there. She has an app that I use. I love using the app because I put all my clients in there. I put all of our group members in there. Actually, Joy put them in there for me. I have all of us in there, right? I have all of the family members in there. If you know your family member's birth time or you can get close, I learned so much. I had to guess on my parents, but I guessed close enough. And even if you could sort of test it, right? Like if you change the time by six hours, six hours, six hours, I could sort of get a feel for it. And I figured out that both of my parents are projectors, which is not super common. A projectors are like somewhat less common, and then to have two projector parents, super interesting. But like it's helped me parent my kids so much. It's helped me wife my husband so much. You know what I mean? Like when you understand someone else's human design chart, then you can sort of celebrate their uniqueness and their beauty and stop trying to expect them to be something that they're not. Being able to pull my kids' chart and be like, oh, this is what it means to parent this particular type of child. My kid is a manifesting generator. She is multi-hyphenate, right? So with a manifesting generator kid, if they didn't, if they wanted to do ballet one semester and they wanted to do art the next and they wanted to do taekwondo the next, you would want to encourage them to try all those different things rather than sticking with one thing. And then with regards to my husband, you could sort of see that when it comes to emotional awareness, that's just not his strength in his chart. He has a very strong mind, he has a very strong gut instinct, but like emotional articulation isn't his gift. It's my gift, right? And so we've had to learn to work together that um we're just we're just not gonna have the same communication style about feelings. And where men sort of get a bad rap, I think, for like not being able to identify feelings and this and that and the other, like it's genuinely not his strength, but he's got all these other strengths that are not my strengths, and that's what as a team makes it so beautiful, right? So I think when it comes to dating and it's a beautiful tool to have to use to be able to know, right, what's a good fit and what's not. It's also super interesting when we talk about the quantum aspect of our program and just how you know we sort of do things over here. When I pull client charts and I pull when I pull client charts, right, there's always a lot of overlap. Like a lot. I'll pull charts and like certain clients will have very identical elements in their charts to me or to you or to you, right? Like it's like we are attracting the same elements that show up in our chart. Yeah. It's super, super interesting. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 22:16

I think for me, figuring out that I was a non-specific manifestor was important because anytime, like I'm super spiritual, and so I would pray a lot. And I remember like everything in my world started to shift when I stopped praying for very specific things and just praying for like my path to unfold in the way that it was going to. And so when everything got very nonspecific, everything became much clearer, if that makes sense. Because I would pray for these very specific things and nothing would happen and it would upset me. Right.

SPEAKER_00: 22:46

That's what I mean about resistance and negative emotion. Yeah, and it's a total manifestation failure.

SPEAKER_02: 22:50

So then when I was just like, hey, let's lay it out the way it's supposed to be laid out, and just give me the strength to deal with whatever is coming, that's it, and things just start falling into place, like very universal things.

SPEAKER_03: 23:00

So yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 23:01

It's fun to play your chart and see your specific gifts and be like, Oh, am I living in my gifts? Yep, check, check, or nope, I should lean into this, or yeah, super fun. I think a lot of people when they have jobs that don't light them up and then they pull their human design chart, it's like, oh, this thing that I wanted to do or try is actually what I'm supposed to be doing. And I think that can be really strong confirmation for taking leaps of faith in um in the workplace. It's it takes, I think one of the things that is challenging about it, it's very exciting to learn all this this stuff for the first time. But I think one of the things that's challenging about it is to keep it top of mind around living into it in alignment, right? I think as women, I don't know, how would you say that you would have historically typically made decisions before you got good at making gut decisions?

SPEAKER_02: 23:52

I think as women, right, we're encouraged to make logical decisions off of 50 million people and just not with popular opinion. Yeah, which is horrible, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 24:02

Like, what should I do? What do you think I should do? What do you think I should do?

SPEAKER_02: 24:05

Well, it's like, and and you know, no offense to any woman that's still like this, but it's like, you know, in high school, I have to pee who has to go with me. Like I can't go to the bathroom by myself. It's like you have to have an entourage to walk anywhere. I think it's that same thing of needing constant reassurance from people because I didn't trust myself, I didn't trust my decisions, and I think that that's I think that's how divorce can be very jolting to the system, is because I think that every woman goes into their marriage feeling super sure. And then when it does not work out and it blows up in your face. I don't think I went into my marriage feeling super sure.

SPEAKER_00: 24:39

Uh yeah, I didn't either. But well, parts of me did, and parts of me didn't. Right. That's if let's tie it all together, right? IFS.

SPEAKER_02: 24:46

Yeah. Yeah. And and I've said that before. The the clients that I've worked with, when I asked them when was the first time that you saw the red flag? Oh, when we were dating. Yeah, okay, cool. Yeah. And we just continued going down the path. But we don't trust ourselves, right? Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 25:02

I think that's the goal, right? Is when we can really trust ourselves, then we're unstoppable. That's what I want for women is to feel unstoppable, yeah, to feel the depth of our power, right? It's not a small thing to be able to create a human life. You know, we have the power to create, like on that level. And then I think so often we back away from that power if we subvert our own power. And I think that's one of the reasons I got so excited about human design is because it it it validated for me the ways that I needed to step into my power. And honestly, for me, like you two are a manifestation of that, right? Meaning I need to outsource certain things, right? Because the things that that there are certain things that need to be done in a in a workspace that if I do them consistently, my energy tanks because I hate it that much. And by having a team around me to be able to delegate and take those things off my plate, it makes the entire organization run so much more smoothly because my energy is better. And that is my gift to the world is my energy. And so when I'm high vibe, I provide energy for other people. So it's like having a team is a game changer. Yeah. And that and knowing that about myself and my chart, right? Is like, yeah, hire the team. Hire the team because it's gonna ultimately, right? When we hem and haul, like all the cost and this and that, like, no, ultimately, it creates everything to be more abundant when you live in your human design. Yeah. Yeah, I love that app. Some some days I'll be in it like a lot, right? Like, and some days some some weeks I don't open it at all. But I love having all of the people in there and being able to, yeah, immediately um, especially when somebody is reaching out to me with a complex issue, right? And I'll say, like, well, let's go to your chart, right? I don't have all the wisdom on you. Let's check your chart and see what it says about this. Yeah. So I often love just using that as a tool to refine and reinforce people's healing journey. You can find more at mycoachdawn.com.