Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce

289. Trauma Bond Signs You Can’t Ignore After Divorce (& What to Do When Your Body Wants Him Back)

• My Coach Dawn • Season 4 • Episode 289

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If you’ve ever felt that tug toward your ex...not the man, but the idea of him...we've got you. That pull is your nervous system trying to finish a story it never got closure on. And after divorce, that pull gets loud.

In this episode, we break down why trauma bonds feel like soul ties and why your body keeps reaching for someone who couldn’t give you safety. You’ll learn what’s actually happening in your brain, why familiar pain feels magnetic, and how to interrupt the urge to text him back.

We also give you a simple sentence you can use the second your spiral starts, and we help you begin separating trauma from truth—because those two feel identical when you’re hurting.

And inside Cocoon this week, we’re celebrating wins, joy, and nervous-system rehab with this month’s Magic Drop giveaway. (If you’re not in the community yet… get in there.)

If peace feels unfamiliar, if chaos feels like home, if your body keeps wanting what your mind already left—this one’s for you.

Don’t miss Thursday’s premium episode. Dawn is guiding you through a nervous-system visualization designed to soften the cord where it actually lives—in your body. It’s how you break the loop for real.

The Betrayal Bond: Breaking Free of Exploitive Relationships Paperback
by Patrick Carnes PhD

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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.

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SPEAKER_01:

Ever wonder how to handle that pull? Not to him, but to the idea of him. Maybe your brain whispers, it wasn't that bad, or your chest clenches when his name frickin' pops up. It's not drama, it's not weakness, it's this. Your nervous system trying to finish a story it didn't get closure on. Trauma bonds aren't about love, they're about unfinished safety. You don't miss him, you miss who you hoped you could be with him. So let's talk today about why your body hangs on and how to slowly take your power back without fighting yourself. 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, Don Wiggins, a therapist, coach, integrative healer, and divorcee. Join me for a fresh approach to healing grief and building your confidence after divorce. All right, loves, today's episode is jam-packed. We are going to explain the actual reason trauma bonds feel like soul ties and why you keep pursuing this repetition compulsion. Later, we're going to give you a sentence to use that can stop your maybe I should text him back spiral. But we're also going to really explain to you the truth about why the idea of cord cutting or like going no contact doesn't get the job done and what will actually get the job done. We're going to give you one of our book recommendations that will like spell out for you what's happening neurobiologically in your body mind and how to actually get it so that your body feels like the cord is cut. Because I think we do cord cutting rituals and we cut cords conceptually, but then we still feel that pull and it doesn't actually feel cut. So screw that. Let's actually cut it. And then stay with us because by the end, we want you to really understand if it's trauma or if it's truth calling you back, right? Because that's the ultimate power you need to have to know if there's which path to go down. Do you keep engaging him because there's some truth behind it, or is it trauma and you need a whole different toolkit to enact? So we will get to that at the end of the episode. In the meantime, help me welcome Coach Tiffany and producer Joy. Good morning, ladies. Hey, hey. Good morning. Okay, let's touch base for a minute before we dig into trauma bonds and repetition compulsions and all the things. Let's just review the magic drop that dropped inside of our community last week. Because if you're listening to this episode on the day it aired, you still have a few days left to participate in the magic drop. So it's this awesome giveaway we do every month inside of Cocoon, our free community. And the magic drop is related to the thing that we're working on inside of the community. And this month's magic drop is a book called Your Resonant Self, which really helps work differently with your nervous system. A bottle of cell salts that we use all the time with our clients in our lives and our families that helps biochemically repair the nervous system. And one of our favorite bespoke homeopathic remedy blends that we developed over here that works with the neurotransmitters in your body and helps rehab your nervous system. So it's a total like nervous system magic drop. So to be entered to win it, all you've got to do is join our community and then comment on the post. Tiffany, tell them what the post is and what we're asking them to do this month to be entered to win.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. So basically we want you to share your wins with us so that we can share them on the pod in our community. So those small things that are happening throughout your week that you notice that you know is moving the needle on healing, we want to hear about it and we want to celebrate with you.

SPEAKER_01:

And it's such an essential part of recovery, right? Joy, talk a little bit about if we're not doing joy. You are Joy, right? If we're not doing the behavior of joy, if we're not doing the behavior of optimism and gratitude, that there's a whole leg missing in our three-legged stool of healing. Talk about what you notice that way.

SPEAKER_03:

Absolutely. So, like it's so fun joy and silliness is so fundamental in our existence. It helps you vibrate, it helps you raise your vibration, it helps you seek good, right? When you have joy, you're seeking good. I know for our our women in our community, that's something that I really kind of push because you can you can be in the moment of your sadness and your struggle and forget so easily that how important it is or how it feels to be joy. Because when you're in a depression state and you're in a um this heavy grief deep stuff, yeah. Healing, right, healing heavy state, it helps you kind of remember what the fight is about, what the fight is for. Yes. Right? And so when you jam out to a little silly song, or when you make a silly face, it it reignites the passion and the joy that you inherently have that you lost or has been taken from you through throughout the course of your life or whatever, right? So it's just so fundamental to be able to take joy in the little things or the silly things or the stupid things, right? Amen. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

And we know from all the research and the data that we heal faster when we're laughing. We heal more deeply and completely when we're laughing, when we're playing, when we're having fun, right? When we're so serious all the time, it takes us longer to learn a lesson. Like whether it's literally math or self-esteem. Right? Like kids who have fun at school learn better. We learn better and faster and we recover faster when we are playing. So, yeah, one of my favorite abundance tracks to listen to right now. If you're on Instagram, go to at Abelheart. And he also has music on Spotify and Apple Music and all the things, right? And I just played it for the three of us before we hopped on this to record this episode because it's so joyful and it's got the frequency music with all of these manifestational things, and it's just so silly and so happy. And it's an instant vibe shift. So this month's magic drop is to help rehab your nervous system. But in order to enter to win, you have to submit us your joyful, happy, winning moments so that we can share those in the community. Because if we are not sharing our wins, we are not healing completely. Joyous.

SPEAKER_03:

So can we I would love to just give examples of some wins because like that what what what is a win when you're in the deep darkness and heaviness? Like, what's a win, right? So, you know, a woman in our community was able to go to the city where she previously lived and didn't drive by the house. You know?

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

It was huge because she was breaking that repetition and compulsion. She was breaking that habit of trauma bonding. You know, being that little nosy, being that little, like, what is he doing? What is like Zerekar and that's it, your past and your future. Choosing her. Yes. Yes. She chose her in that moment. Something as small as seeing someone in the grocery store and not needing to engage. That just you can just go home. It's just that you can choose you. You can choose no drama. You can choose no conflict, no no um victim mentality. You just can go get in your car and go home. And it's so beautiful, those little wins, or you know, not choosing a glass of wine when all you want to do is just kind of numb out. When the easy thing to do is just to kind of dissociate and doom scroll with a glass of wine. When you choose when you make those micro choices for yourself, that is a win. That is what we want to hear about. We want to hear how you are choosing you. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01:

Exactly. How about the challenge you had the women do this week where you wanted them to lip sync, right? Lip sync little video. And for so many of the women, it was really, really hard to record themselves lip syncing, but they did it anyway, right? It's like this choosing self, choosing, choosing to go. Choosing yourself. Yeah, like any of these types of wins, we want to hear them all. If something happened in court, if something happened with your kiddos, if you're proud of yourself or something, if you cleaned out a closet, if you fixed your toilet, if you like any freaking thing, right? If you went to the gym when it was hard, if you did yoga when you felt like not, if you washed the dishes and you didn't have the energy, like we want to hear about it. Anything, anything like that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

Um, the these are gonna fill my soul so much. I cannot wait.

SPEAKER_01:

Literally, and we just can't underscore enough that if this isn't a regular practice, and if it is a regular practice, why wouldn't you want to share it with us? If it isn't a regular practice, it has to become it. And so this is us just building it into your the way you do life, right? Like, if you're listening to us, you know we want to send them, send it over to us. We're gonna be so excited, we're gonna celebrate with you. So, like, that's it. All right, back to the topic at hand, which is the repetition compulsion or trauma bond of going back over and over again, the urge that seems like like physiological, like it's literally drawing you forward, like the um I don't know, like something from Star Wars, like is like like a tractor beam pulling you towards it, right? Towards a trauma bond. So let's talk about the reason that trauma bond feels like a soul tie. And and one of the things that I just want to mention at the top of the episode is one of the books that I have had on my bookshelf my entire career, and so much of the work that we do in our communities and in my own personal healing journey and in in our practices is um based on the work that I'm gonna share in this book. But the book is called The Betrayal Bond. It's written by Patrick Carnes. It will be linked in the show notes. It's breaking free of exploitative relationships. And this book gets into the weeds, the black and white step-by-step of how to identify what happened in your life that you continue to revisit the persons or people who hurt you, who did harm, who continue to treat you some type of way. And so it is like trigger warning about this book. It talks about a lot of hard things, but it is gonna outline everything for you step by step by step, so that you will literally be able to very clearly say this is specifically what I experienced that led to this pattern happening inside of me. So, first things first, let's talk about the reason trauma bonds feel like soul ties, right? So I there's this idea that at some point early in life we reached for safety as a either an infant or a very young child and did not experience safety. Does that make sense how I say that, ladies? Absolutely. We had a need for someone to provide us with some sense of security, whether it was a diaper change or we were hungry or we got frightened, or we felt alone, or any number of these things, right? We felt a pain or we felt alone or we felt disturbed in some way, and we called out for security, and security didn't come. And for some of us, that's it. The security didn't come. For some of us, not only did the security not come, but we got injured also, right? Like got yelled at or got physically injured in the process. So when there becomes this pattern, and and this can happen in families that are good families that really mean well and are just doing their best and they're just overwhelmed and overburdened, and maybe there's issues of um there's not enough um resources, right? Whether it's time, money, energy, um, food, right? But but there's a lot of love, but there's just not enough resource. Or it can happen in families where they're rampant with addiction or abuse or trauma and those patterns just are still alive, right? So even in quote unquote normal families, you can still have this thing unfold, right? But where you reached for security and it didn't come, and then that became a habit or a pattern that I got used to reaching for security in a place where it does not arrive, and that became a brain map. How does that land with you ladies? What comes up for you?

SPEAKER_00:

And I think everybody can relate to at one time or another not feeling like they were seen or understood or whatever by their parents or people that were caring for them. Like we all have all of those memories in us that we felt alone or we felt neglected or, you know, issues of abandonment or things like that, where it just felt at the time like when we asked for something we did not receive. And so we learned internally, you know, somewhere along the way that that those needs were not going to be met. And so that kind of shaped us into other behaviors, other things to sort of help. And that's where parts are formed, right? So in IFS, a part is formed when an adult acts in a way that um is not acceptable, right? Irresponsible behavior, like whatever it is, and then the adult does not take responsibility for it. And then you internalize it, take responsibility, and form a part, whether, hey, I got yelled at that one time, so now I'm gonna be a perfectionist or I'm gonna be a people pleaser and fly under the radar, right? Like there's all these parts that we take on when we feel like the people in our lives who are responsible for caring for us are not doing that well, not able to for whatever reason.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so we, you know, to your point, we can all relate to like having some memory where we got, where we felt like, you know, we threw out that high five and and no no hand came, you know, left me hanging.

SPEAKER_02:

But what I know this is like the most awkward feeling in the world, right? Where you go to high five someone and they don't, and it's like, ah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

We we all felt that in our bodies. Um but what about when you're like zero to three and you don't remember it? And maybe it's just because you were the second kid or the third kid, right? And it's like it wasn't necessarily necessarily pathological. It's just there wasn't enough of your mom to go around or whatever, you know what I mean? And so what if you can't remember that happening? But like there's this tendency to reach for things that don't feel good. It's fascinating, right? And it's like, on the one hand, it's very, very cool because our brains are problem solvers, right? Like our brains want to solve problems all the time. And I love that about my brain, but also sometimes when we don't train our brains, they want to solve problems in the way they're used to solving the problem, not which is not necessarily healthy. It may be adaptive, right? It may be said, like, oh, um, you know, I'm not getting my needs met. I'm just gonna keep doing the same thing over and over again, trying to get my needs met over and over and over again. And when I do, it will feel so good. And that's all the brain is doing all the time, right? Is trying to solve a problem. In this instance, it's reaching for the sense of security, the sense of belonging, the sense of fulfillment, but it keeps doing it in the same context where the harm or the absence or the unmet need keeps happening over and over and over again. And so this is where we have to step in and train the brain, because I often say like an untrained brain is sort of like a drunken three-year-old running around the room with a pair of scissors. It can do more harm than good. Yeah. But if we train the brain, right, we can teach it to do to solve problems in new, new, healthier ways, which is what we do using all our tools over here, right? IFS and somatics and homeopathy. Yeah. So tell tell us a story, friends. Tell us a story about a time where you reached for the old thing, and all of a sudden we're like, oh wait, I can do it different. Like, what stands out to you about a time that you were able to catch yourself reaching for the thing that was painful, doing the repetition compulsion, doing the trauma bond thing, and then you realized, oh, this is my brain trying to solve this problem in the old way, and I need to give it a new way to do it.

SPEAKER_00:

I think that when you're post-divorce, the thing that was the hardest for me to acclimate to, and it sounds really stupid. It sounds really stupid because he was gone primarily all the time. Yeah, anyways, yeah. Because he was deployed. Okay. Yeah. So I should have been used to doing all of the things, and I was, but also I was used to having him in some capacity. He was providing financial security, he was providing, you know, I didn't work, I got to stay at home and and do everything I needed to do. And so post-divorce, everything felt really fucking hard. Like every time something would break around my condo, every time I had to make a decision on something, every time it was like every single day I was faced with all of these micro decisions.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, yes. Yes.

SPEAKER_00:

And I'm like, I can't, and even though he wasn't helping me make the decisions necessarily, because at the end of the day, when he would call, all the decisions were made and all the fixes had been done. It was just he was a sounding board of like reassurance or validation or whatever it was. I still post divorce was like, this is very overwhelming. It's very overwhelming. And I think for me, the thing that kept me, I didn't, I don't feel like I was stuck in the loop too often, right? I would have these moments where things would get overwhelming, and I'm like, maybe it would just be easier. You know, maybe I should just suck it up. Like maybe I should just go back. You know, he's willing to take me back, like all of this other crap that we tell ourselves. But I think that for me, I didn't understand at all in a relationship what a calm nervous system felt like. And so chaos was very normal for me. So when things were calm, I didn't know how to deal with that either. That was very scary for me because it was almost like waiting for the shitstorm to arrive. And so it's like, well, maybe I'll go back, right? Like all these things, financial security, I'll have all of that if I just go back and I can just deal with the fact that this is how it is, that our life is always gonna be chaos, our marriage is always gonna be chaos, and I'm never gonna find anyone that's gonna make me feel peaceful. I'm never gonna get that within myself either. And so that kind of kept me stuck there, like, you know, was it really that bad? And looking back now, yeah, it was. It was really that bad.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, but that moment you picked up the phone to to commit to doing EMDR therapy, right? Was like uh, oh no, I'm gonna change this pattern moment. It was like, no, I'm gonna do this differently. I'm gonna call in peace to my nervous system.

SPEAKER_00:

Or you know, there were lots of moments along the way where you reached for a new habit or pattern that ushered in a new solution that wasn't more of a well, and that's what I kept saying, and that's what I say all the time is that every dating relationship I had post-divorce, it was a different guy in the same situation. I reacted the same, I still had the same attachment style, I had a ton of anxiety, I never trusted anybody. Like it was just a cycle that I was stuck in and the things that I just kept reaching for because I could not find them within myself. Relationships were not peaceful for me. They were a place of chaos and anxiety and being in survival mode, needing to be chosen, needing the breadcrumbs, waiting for the text, getting anxious if you didn't text right back. I mean, I could go on and on. Like I was your typical anxious attacher when I was actively dating and interested in somebody. Yeah. Yeah. So I bounced between that and being avoidant, you know. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah. I think for me, I relate to what Tiffany said so much. I grew up in a very high drama home. I grew up with a um my mother who loved me to the best of her ability, but she was in constant fight or flight. She had too many. Um there there's so many reasons, why? And they're they're reasons, they're not excuses, they're reasons. But I went to what was familiar, right? I was never really chosen in my childhood, and so I latched on to a man who didn't really like he wasn't great. He wasn't a good boyfriend, he wasn't a good like he wasn't great, but he was familiar, right? That that distance, that avoidant attachment was familiar, and that's why it made me feel comfortable, the comfortable and the familiar thing. Right. And so as we when we separated and my world completely crashed, and I had to really kind of like learn. I had to learn my nervous system because I didn't know what a nervous system was. I had to learn my attachment style, I had to learn all these things, and when you see it and you kind of scope out of like, oh, this is what I did to contribute to the fall of my marriage. This is the things that I would do. It's like that movie Ten 10 Ways to Lose a Guy with um Kate Hudson, you know, like all those little things that that um I would I would do. I didn't give him a love fern, but there was definitely attachment things that I did. But it's the kind of recognizing those micro things that you do and healing those, and then all of the ripples that come from doing you know, stepping outside of setting boundaries for yourself, for your family, for your friends, um, having yourself be held accountable, like hold yourself accountable for your actions and your and your decisions and having to retrain your body to not be what I would what I would consider addicted to the drama, right? Like I would I would text him creating drama, like I am sick, or like I I think I have a lump or whatever it was, like Hattie has one of my children has uh needs to go to the hospital or whatever, like I would create and they were real to me. It wasn't like I was I wasn't um No, you were feeling very real panic, yes, right, right. It was a nervous system where I would need him to be present, even though I hated him being present. Um that breaking that right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So while you're sitting here talking about your addictions, yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

So yeah, like while you're sitting here talking, I'm sitting here thinking to myself, like in childhood and growing up, I had a lot of themes of like control equals love. And so it's kind of one of those things where I remember one of the first times that me and my ex-husband were gonna start dating, or he came back to visit, or something like that. And I was I had been dating somebody else at the time, and I remember I had like a bruise on my arm, and I don't know, I hit something like it was stupid, right? But he looked at me and he was like, Look, if this guy's touching you, I'm gonna kill him type of a thing, right? So it was like that protective, like I'll do anything for you type of a thing that really drew it. That felt like love. Yeah, it felt like love. Um, and it was, you know, and then the control started and that felt safe. So for me, then I didn't know how to feel safe in a relationship with somebody who wasn't controlling. Domineering. Yeah, like that it was that was the retraining for me. And so I felt like if they weren't checking on me, if they weren't saying, Where are you? you know, or who are you with, or things like that.

SPEAKER_01:

They didn't love you.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. That they were out doing something that they shouldn't be because they weren't paying enough attention.

SPEAKER_01:

Now let's go a layer deeper and um challenge us to go even more vulnerable. So when it's time to actually choose a healthy nervous system pattern, right? To choose to see our own needs, to get our own needs met, to let the love come from lots of appropriate places, right? Because it often isn't gonna come from the places we've been pursuing it. It's gonna come from new and different places that we don't even see coming, right? We don't even realize all of the infinite places that all of our needs can be met from. All we know is we look out at our current reality and we're like, ain't nobody there, but like it's out there, right? You're just not attuned to it. And so let's talk about as it's time to call in the new, how hard that is. So, for instance, when we're enrolling a different D-word, our 12-month program, how many women have trouble choosing the thing that's actually going to usher in the full recovery, the rehabilitation of the nervous system? But let's talk about what that's looked like on our very own team, the three of us. So, like, for instance, Joy write, like, I moved, I I maximally chose you, right? Moved my entire family to live in the same town. But how many years did it take us to like rebuild this new thing where that where you could trust that me choosing you felt good because even though I chose you maximally, it didn't feel like that to you. But I did. For sure, for sure, right? Isn't that weird? Like the thing that we think we want, right? Talk a little bit about that. Like we're in our own lives or in the lives of women who want this thing so desperately, but then struggle to receive it because the good thing actually feels like the threat, and the threatening thing feels good. The good thing feels like a threat, and the threatening thing feels good. That's what we're talking about interrupting here, right? And it is freaking hard.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, absolutely. Like uh Brene Brown, what's this what's the scariest emotion and this joy, right? Like being able to trust, being able to trust feeling good good things because we're as a society, as a woman, as a child, as a parent, as a wife, as a as a friend, as a as an ex-wife, like all the pain in the familiar, right? It's the um that is the devil you know, and the devil you know, and so yes, it was incredibly hard. And I think I mean I would say it took years after you move, you moved your family to be with me. It took me years to actually trust that, and it was a lot of work, and it was a lot of like there were times where we did not like each other, right? Like it was hard to kind of we're gonna we're gonna do this hard work and we're going to choose joy. I think a lot of times it's a choice. You have a fork in the road every day, all day, forks of you can choose to believe the worst about somebody, or you can choose the best, but it's retraining your brain, it's retraining your actions, your nervous system to be able to identify okay, I could believe what my body and my the stories I'm telling myself are saying, or I can believe that that's not actually true, that my emotions are or brain is lying to me because let's be honest, our brains lie to us all day, every day. So, like having the choice to assume good intent in a someone and choose to believe that they are without factual data, right? Like, I'm not saying, I'm not saying believe that this man who is abusing you really means well. If if if there's a truth, that's true. Yeah, that's the trick.

SPEAKER_01:

How do you tell the difference between how do you retrain your nervous system to trust someone who has your best intentions and clarify for your nervous system that the threatening thing is a threat? I think that's the trick that we endeavor to teach women. And it's tricky because I think at the end of the day, you and I would probably I think all three of us would agree that any of the static that has existed in our relationship as the three of us have gone deeper and deeper and gotten more and more intimate, and the trust between the three of us has gotten richer and richer and richer, that all that other shit before this moment was noise, right? Nervous system right static.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, right. Was it actually true? Did you actually say something that was hurtful, or did am I blocking your love from me? Right. And I think a lot there was a woman that that I'm working with a woman and she is struggling to find the noise. So I'm just having her, you know, just like write down in your day what is the truth about yourself, about the person that you're with, or about your friend, or about what like what's actually true. Um, because I think it if you can kind of sort through with a sieve and with words and writing it out and some somatics, you can kind of get some pillars that you can hang on to in the hard moments.

SPEAKER_01:

So let's run with that, right? Because we want our listeners to have this sentence that they can hang on to when they're in the spiral, when they're feeling that urge, that deep, deep, deep, deep urge, right? And so when they're in this, maybe I should text him back spiral. Riff on that, but is it true? Can It be proven, right? Like riff on that. What would you have women really ask themselves or tell themselves in that moment to interrupt the spiral?

SPEAKER_00:

Are you gonna get a new outcome? That's a good one. You know, and what if he does text back? Because every time mine would text me back, and and I'd get pulled into this shit storm for two days of texting back and forth, then all of a sudden he would say something, and I'm like, ah, there it is.

SPEAKER_03:

There it is.

SPEAKER_00:

There's who he is. You know, that's who I left. Um, so understanding that like people aren't changing overnight. There's a reason why you're separated, there's a reason why you're divorced, there's a reason why somebody stepped out or somebody had an affair or somebody did this. Like there was clearly a breakdown in the marriage that led to a lack of communication, which led to a lack of intimacy, right? We could go down the whole path, but my point is like, so go ahead, you know, test yourself too. You want to text him back, go for it. And I guarantee you, within 24 to 48 hours, he's gonna say something on that text thread that's gonna make you go, oh, that's why.

SPEAKER_01:

That's why yeah, are you gonna get a new outcome? You know what's interesting about what you just said, Teffre Doodle, is when I was married and hadn't done all this work yet, I wanted overnight change. That's what I wanted. And that to me was a sign that I was okay. But that's not real change, that's fake change, right? That's like first order change, that's faking it change to quiet the nervous system alarm in my body that is from layers of trauma, right? So anyone who does change quickly or overnight or in a blink, like it's not authentic real change. So yeah, wow. So are you gonna get a different outcome? Okay, so all of this is why like cutting the cord or going no contact doesn't really do the trick, right? It's a good place to start. We could do cord visual, like cord cutting visualizations. In our Thursday premium episode, actually, we're gonna do a nervous system guided visualization so that we can soften the cord and feel a deeper anchor within self. But that's a process, right? That clearly we've all identified takes time, like deep energetic work and time and clearing the noise from the nervous system. And that happens layer by layer. So, in the meanwhile, let's talk a little bit about how to help women spot is it trauma calling or is it truth calling? Is it trauma calling or is it truth calling? Trauma or truth, trauma or truth, trauma or truth. And I love joy that you talked about earlier, like writing down what's true, what's true, what's true. And looking at a person's body of work, right? If this is a relationship that I want to invest more time in, and I say this all the time, whether it's talking to my daughter about building friendships or talking to women about dating, what does this person's body of work say? Okay, they they we've all gotten baggage, right? We've all got baggage, we've all been through things. But what have we done to move the needle or to transform or to transmute or to become a clearer, cleaner, more grounded version of ourselves? And so if you're engaging with someone, what is the body of work that they've done that has been in the direction of truth versus just like um I don't know, like lip service?

SPEAKER_00:

I was gonna say that let's make sure we're talking about action body of work and not talking body of work. Because anybody can talk a good game. But to me, I felt like the difference when I was trying to choose partners or evaluate people or even friends in my life. I always looked at their actions over their words. That was always a thing. Like, that's great that you're telling me that you've done 20 years of therapy and you feel like a new person. But what in your life says that about you? So making sure that everything is aligned that way, you know. And then also when you meet somebody finally, you know, and and you want to start dating them, are they as committed to their own emotional wellness and growth as you are? Because healing is a lifetime process. We don't just do therapy for a year and then everything is magically okay. So consistently look for things in their life that they're continuing to do to work on themselves, whether that's new hobbies, meditation, yoga, you know, going to a therapist, um, you know, what things in their life.

SPEAKER_01:

And you know, you know what character trait or what um characteristic that speaks to, that sort of um being a student of life, what that speaks to is the capacity for vulnerability and humility, right? If we are able to practice the behavior of vulnerability or humility, we are able to keep coming to the table of I am a student of life, of this relationship, of this moment, I'm a student of this moment, right? And in in IFS, that is one of the eight C's is um curiosity, right? Or courage or compassion, right? There are a lot of C's that get at this. Can you be humble and a student of this moment kind of concept? And I find that a lot of people really struggle with what vulnerability means. And I had this just come up with a patient earlier this week because they're like, I don't know, I've told I've told them everything, right? There's someone you just started dating, and they're like, I don't know what you mean. Dawn, I've been vulnerable, I've told them everything. And I said, But how did it feel to tell them? And what have you not told them that still feels like a secret or something that you're hiding or something that you've guarded? Because it's not how much you share. I've shared boatloads of things on the internet, me, Dawn, right? But I've shared them very often after I've climbed that mountain, right? And I feel a sense of competency or confidence around it. And I'm not usually sharing it while I'm in the deep insecurity and vulnerability around it, right? I I once I once it hits the podcast, every now and then you'll hear me announce it like, oh, this feels awkward or hard to share. How hard something feels to share, that's a hallmark of vulnerability. And that's what you want to see in your relationships with people. Are they meeting you in the land of being a student of the moment or vulnerable in the moment? Are they willing to reveal places about themselves that leaves them unguarded? That's how you know. And I think too often as women, we fall for like the man sharing some element of their story, but that's not vulnerability.

SPEAKER_00:

No, because everybody, I call them victim stories or trauma stories. You know, it's like you can sit here and recite, this is what happened to me when I was a child, and this is what happened to me in my marriage, and yada yada. And you think that someone is sharing raw shit, but they're not. They've told this to 50 people before you. And really the thing that they need to tell you is something that, and and sometimes I find that the most vulnerable things we can share with people don't seem like big things. They don't seem like it at all. No, but it's like that moment where you sort of catch and you're like, should I say this? Because this feels scary. You know, that's the thing. You can rehearse a freaking production for anybody.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, yeah. And it's so trendy right now, right? Like being vulnerable and being crying on camera, self-awareness and self-yeah. It's I feel like it's having a movement, but is it really like at the end of the day, are they authentic in their in the in the quiet moments?

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, I just had a thought. Like, are people who film themselves crying on the internet is that a version of a trauma bond? Because I'm crying right into the void.

SPEAKER_03:

Like looking for the internet points, looking for the attachment of the internet points.

SPEAKER_01:

Anyways, because to do it in intimate spaces, right, is next level. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

That's the thing. Are they looking at you in the face? Like, can you tell somebody something while looking at them in the face? That's really hard.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Beautiful. Okay. So we want you to really take a look at your own urge to reach for the familiar pain, right? That's the loop we're looking at interrupting. And if you haven't really done a full like autopsy on your own childhood to understand where this urge comes from, highly recommend the book, The Betrayal Bond. The link is in the show notes. Check that out. And when you have an urge to text him or anyone else you catch yourself going to the familiar pain around, right? Ask yourself, am I gonna get a different outcome? And if not, we want you to get grounded into a healthier nervous system, truth-based um process. And so join us on Thursday for the Thursday episode where we're gonna take you through a guided visualization that is going to help retrain the nervous system. It's something you have to keep coming back to and back to and back to. And gentle reminder our Thursday premium episodes, there are so many you probably don't even know exist. We have subliminal um meditate guided meditations, we have 528 hertz meditations, we have so many EFT um tapping sequences, we have some manifestation episodes, we have some deep juicy episodes where the three of us talk about shit we would never talk about. That's not behind a paywall. Like if you haven't checked out premium, like going all the way back, like there are so many premium episodes that help you do healing, not just learn about healing. We can't, it's not enough to just have shelf-esteem, right? Where we read a book and we understand a concept. We have to, we learn by doing. We don't learn just by learning. The the real unlocking happens in the taking of the action, right? So join us on Thursday where we're gonna help you get grounded into breaking the cycle of going back to the thing that hurts you. We love you so much. Peace.

Contributor

Divorce Recovery Maven Dawn Wiggins

Host