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 for women navigating life after divorce. Dear Divorce Diary is a podcast for women dealing with grief, loneliness, anxiety, anxious or avoidant attachment, and identity loss after divorce — especially when quick fixes, positivity, and spiritual fluff no longer work.
I’m Dawn Wiggins, therapist, coach, and homeopath, and this show goes where most divorce advice won’t: into your nervous system, your unspoken grief, your buried rage, and the parts of you that shut down just to survive.
Through honest conversation, somatic tools, EMDR- and IFS-informed work, and nervous-system support, each episode helps you feel instead of perform healing — and rebuild safety, confidence, and self-trust from the inside out.
You’ll hear raw solo episodes, real voice notes from women in the trenches, and intimate conversations with experts who don’t just talk about healing — they embody it.
If you’re tired of being told to “move on” while your body is still bracing, this podcast is your place to land. Your nervous system already knows the truth — it just needs a space that can hold it.
Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce
297.Day 3: Going to the Holiday Party Alone After Divorce | How to Prepare Without Losing Yourself
This episode is only available to subscribers.
Dear Divorce Diary: Dedicated to Healing
Exclusive access to premium content!Welcome to Day 3 of the 12 Days of Divorce Christmas...also known as the 12 Days of Becoming Her Again.
Today we’re talking about one of the hardest moments after divorce: going to the holiday party alone.
The explaining.
The questions you don’t want to answer.
The way your body tightens when you walk into a room where you used to belong as part of a couple.
For many women, this isn’t just social anxiety — it’s identity grief.
You were someone’s wife.
You had a role.
You had a place.
And now you’re figuring out who you are without rehearsing strength or pretending you’re fine.
In this episode, Joy and I walk you through how to prepare for being single at the holiday party in a way that actually supports your nervous system — instead of leaving you depleted before you even arrive.
We talk about:
- Why your brain naturally rehearses what you don’t want to happen
- How that rehearsal increases anxiety and self-protection
- A simple journaling practice to shift from fear to preference
- How to decide how you want to feel — without trying to change other people
- Practical grounding tools you can use before and during the event
- What to reach for when you feel yourself starting to disappear
This episode isn’t about performing confidence.
It’s about staying in Self.
You don’t need the night to go perfectly.
You just need a way to stay connected to you while you’re there.
And we’ll walk you through that — step by step.
🎄 ABOUT THE 12 DAYS OF DIVORCE CHRISTMAS (WITH CTA)
The 12 Days of Divorce Christmas is a daily, nervous-system-first series created to support you through one of the hardest seasons after divorce.
✨ Days 1, 2, and 9 are available on the public feed.
✨ The remaining days — including deeper grounding tools and preparation practices — are available inside Dear Divorce Diary Premium.
Inside Premium, you’ll get:
- Full access to all 12 days of this series
- Episodes that help you regulate in real time (bathroom breaks, car moments, before-you-walk-in tools)
- Monthly premium workshops for grief, anxiety, loneliness, and identity rebuilding after divorce
If this episode helped you feel more prepared, more steady, or less alone — the rest of the series is there to keep supporting you through the moments that don’t get talked about out loud.
Join Dear Divorce Diary Premium to access the full 12 Days of Divorce Christmas.
Or stay with us here today — and know you’re not doing this wrong.
You’re learning how to do it as you.
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Instagram: (@dawnwiggins)
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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.
Welcome to day three of the 12 Days of Divorced Christmas, aka the 12 Days of Becoming Her again. Today we are addressing what to do when you have to go single to the holiday party. Oh lordy be, there that whole scenario is fraught, right? Like maybe it's the first time you're out on the scene single, and there's feels like there's so much explaining to do. And maybe you already had social anxiety, but it was easier when you had a person. And maybe you just are feeling all the feelings, and it's just really hard to be in the holiday spirit. Like maybe there's a million reasons why being single at the holiday party is hard. And today we're gonna walk you through how to prepare for that. Hi, love. Welcome to Dear Divorce Diary, the podcast helping divorce A's 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 divorce day. Join me for a fresh approach to healing grief and building your confidence after divorce.
SPEAKER_01:I did. Post-separation vibes.
SPEAKER_00:Um I did because I felt like so many of our friends. I I was the quintessential right. I was the quintessential woman who kind of put my friends to the side and kind of adapted his friends. So in reality, most of the people we hung out with at the time were his friends. And so, you know, like I felt a little disconnected of what was what was actually because so much of my identity was in his him, right? Like his wife, his like was your community. Right, right. And so I did struggle with that because now I was so good at being his wife. Now I'm going to events and kind of digging into my because I had I mean I had friends and I had um we had a life group who is actually still our life group to this day, but but going to things alone and trying to dodge the questions because I still was in the protection mode of him, but dodge questions, but also like that little dance that was going on. So it's it's hard. It's hard to pull apart what's who you are, what's real, what's right, and the grief that my MO was always to like oh yeah, it's hard, but like I'm doing so well.
SPEAKER_02:Like I would be that person who would like tell you all the silver linings and all, and I still do that to this day. It's like my you know, going through a hard thing, like and um well, I think there's a lot of value in being able to see the silver lining and like focus on the positive, and there's a lot of like hiding vulnerability in there. That's so that would always be my MO at the the single at the holiday party would be like, uh this is what I'm doing, this is how I'm rebranding like you know, it would be very like yeah, focusing on the good and not not being seen in the in the pain at all. All right, so here's your strategy, okay. For this one, you need your journal. I should have said that at the top of the session. You need your journal. So either phone notes your app if you have no other choice, but preferably, preferably, like paper and pen. So grab your journal and as I'm sort of talking you through it, like this is what we're gonna do in the journal, okay? Very, very often when we're about to do a hard thing, we accidentally rehearse over and over again what we don't want to have happen, right? Like it's just human nature. We keep thinking about I don't want to go because I don't want to feel anxious and I don't want to feel uncomfortable and I don't know, and we just keep thinking about what we don't want, right? That is our human nature. And so in our journal, what we're gonna do is establish and then practice the skill of focusing on what we would prefer. How would you like it to go? So this is like, okay, day three of the 12 days of Christmas, but actually what we're introducing here is a very, very, very important skill that if you don't have the skill, you're not manifesting with intention or the way that you want to, and you're actually sabotaging a lot of the things that you really want to go differently because you keep accidentally rehearsing the wrong thing. So we're gonna sit here with you, Joy and I both. She's gonna journal in the notes app of her phone. I'm gonna journal in a journal, and we're gonna write out some scenario this holiday season. How would you prefer it to go? I think she and I both have one in mind, even her and I, right? Like Joy, like let's talk about this, right? We have we're recording this the week of Thanksgiving. You and I both are guilty of doing this exact thing. We focus on how we don't want it to go when we're with our family on the holidays. So we're gonna use this time, friends, to co-journal with you. This is a co-working space, like no excuses, no, like, oh, do it later. Like, no, we're all gonna do this work together right now. There's so much power. You know where two or more are gathered. We are healing with you right now, right? So we're all gonna sit down and write out, think of that one thing that you know you have to do and you know it's gonna be hard. And I want you to write out how you would prefer it to go. And I'm gonna give you some prompts and some ideas as I'm journaling. So, for instance, I would prefer to feel grounded, confident, seen, valued, loved. I would prefer I've been saying this for years now, to play minute to win it games and laugh. I would prefer for fun to be louder than the noise of the trauma or the pain, like the ancestral, just the shit that baggage that family carries, right? I prefer for the fun to be louder than the pain. Okay, so is it starting to connect, right? You can't prefer for other people to be different than they are, right? When we practice this skill, it's preferring how we would prefer to feel and think and comport ourselves and be in the moment, how we would prefer to experience the moment because we cannot change other people. So I gave you some cues here so you can get in the realm of how this actually works. You can't prefer people to be different, you can prefer for you to experience life differently. So I'm gonna give you a couple more minutes here, and we're gonna keep writing about how you would prefer it to feel. I'm gonna get in the weeds. Like when they arrive, I feel welcoming and loving. I feel welcoming and loving. Ooh, see, like really get in the weeds about how it could go. How right? Okay, here we go. To know what I want to say, to speak my truth, maybe. Oh, here's a good one. I prefer to stay in self-energy and not drop into an ego state or a protector of it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I prefer to not need, not to feel like I need the validation and acceptance of the family.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so I prefer to feel safe in who I am in.
SPEAKER_00:Um, I also prefer to feel peaceful, like I'm going to be around my family, and I want to feel peaceful. I want to be excited that my sister will be in my home. That my aunt is coming from Kansas. Like I want to feel excitement and not anxious on the stories that I'm telling myself. I prefer to feel joy. It is Christmas, and we're all together, and it's not perfect, and nobody's perfect, and there's a lot of strange and a lot of crap that along that comes along with that, but also that we are all present to the best of our abilities. What the gospel says about me, what I say about me, and what my husband and children say about me.
SPEAKER_02:We've done a couple of really great premium episodes this season on how to take good care. Like, let's say you're in the grocery store and you're having a meltdown, or let's say you're at the party and you need to go into the bathroom and ground, right? We've done a couple of great episodes really guiding through how to get grounded back in the nervous system, right? So, like, let's say either of us are in these party circumstances and we start to lose this thing that we've written for ourselves that we would prefer, right? There is a very handy tool available in premium to come back to self, right? Like skip away to the bathroom for a moment and I prefer to grab the tool I need. I guess that's what I'm saying, right? I prefer to reach for the tool that I need to get grounded again rather than lose myself in the moment.
SPEAKER_00:I love that. I feel like that is something I was trying to figure out what I was noodling out. Like I prefer to use a tool instead of a glass of wine. Disassociator. Mm-hmm. Or numb, right? I don't want to do either. There's time and place, time and place.
SPEAKER_02:So it would be like have the episode queued up when you go in, or like whatever the tool is that you're choosing to use, right?
SPEAKER_03:Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, like um, I what was that like butterfly tap in the car before you walk in? You know, like get grounded, get centered, you know.
SPEAKER_02:A couple of breaths, but also maybe a couple of growls. Like there's so much, like there's so much. Like sometimes we want to do the cute tools, right? We want to use the tools that are super cute, like quiet and meek, but sometimes we gotta like really gotta claim, right? Our power. Or the eye stance, doing the eye stance. You know, there's so much research on people who consistently do the eye stance, like standing up tall, arms stretched straight into the sky, like this eye pose, that pose and that posture literally cues your brain to see you differently when you walk into a room where your tendency is to shrink. So I prefer to do eye pose for several minutes before I, you know, you don't have to stand there for several minutes straight, but like you could do eye pose, you know, dance, move, whatever, and do eye pose again to really get that posture in my body so that then when I walk into the room, my brain has the message that I am safe, I am strong, I matter, I am powerful.
SPEAKER_00:It's very similar to our previous that stance is very similar to our previous episode where the the house is too quiet. It's like taking up space. Like I exist, I'm allowed to exist, I'm allowed to be me.
SPEAKER_02:Okay, so now you're single at the holiday party. Do you bring these journal pages in your pocket? Even if it's just even if you just rip off a chunk of it to put in your pocket, like you know that movie Inception, where they had to carry a little trinket in their pocket so they knew which reality they were in. Jeez, I never I never watched it. So the task here, like the skill that we're developing here for a single at the holiday party is preparing by getting really clear about how you want, how you would prefer to feel. But then how to stay grounded in that, right? Is to have a plan for getting and staying grounded in the moment. And maybe one of those things is bringing a shred of this journaling you did to help ground you in the reality, like you know, this is what we're moving towards. Yes, yeah, yes.
SPEAKER_00:I love that little tearing, either carrying the whole thing or like you know, women could tuck a little piece in their in their blouse, like carrying it with you so you rem you feel it, you remember it, you can ground yourself by touching.
SPEAKER_02:Little piece of groundedness, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, awesome. And this is a piece of how we work in EMDR, actually. We're just borrowing a little piece of EMDR processing and we're you know, using it outside of that context, but that's because it works because it's so powerful. Yeah. Right. This is also a manifestation tool, right? It's it's like this is the tool for getting in the habit of rehearsing the positive, not the negative. It's right, it's key to changing your life. Yeah. Chef's kiss. Love you so much. Peace.
