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
300. Day 6: Feeling Like an Outsider After Divorce | Christmas Cards & Comparison
This episode is only available to subscribers.
Dear Divorce Diary: Dedicated to Healing
Exclusive access to premium content!Today's convo is about a specific kind of holiday pain after divorce...
the Christmas cards knowing exactly how to **send you.
The smiling families.
The matching outfits.
The quiet comparison that starts to creep in and makes you feel like you no longer belong to the world you used to be part of.
In this episode, Joy and I talk about:
- Why Christmas cards trigger comparison so deeply after divorce
- How performance culture keeps women disconnected from themselves
- The grief of rebuilding your life in truth while others appear “settled”
- Why comparison pulls you off your own healing path
- What it means to shift from me vs. them to me vs. me
- Why becoming yourself can feel lonelier before it feels better
We also offer a simple, creative practice for working with the cards themselves...not from bitterness, but from transformation (well maybe a little from bitterness) as a way to reclaim your power and your perspective.
This episode isn’t about pretending the comparison doesn’t hurt.
It’s about choosing not to let it delay your becoming.
If the Christmas cards have been making you feel like an outsider this season, come hang with us!
Join Dear Divorce Diary Premium to access the full 12 Days of Divorce Christmas.
Or stay with us here today — and come back tomorrow.
Capacity builds in connection. Hugs ❤️
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.
Welcome to day six of the 12 days of divorce Christmas or the 12 days of becoming her again. Today we are talking about the Christmas card spiral, where you see everybody's curated performance-based posturing, and they're all smiling in their cute coordinated outfits, and you are feeling like crap because that is not how your life looks today, and it feels completely out of your control, and you feel like you don't know where you belong, and like an outsider in the world of like normal family life. 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. So, Joy, we've been talking about this morning the difference between authenticity and vulnerability versus performance culture, which I think is so hard on women, especially. Performance culture. We all want to be liked, loved, admired, accepted. Like that's just human condition, right? But we've really taken that to the next level where we're not in touch with our true selves or our marriage partners and sometimes even our children, right? Because we're living into the performance-based culture. And then I think in the holidays, when the Christmas cards come out, it's so painful because it's unavoidable, right? You can't escape it or run away from it. There's no, there's no divorced woman Christmas card that can compensate. Can you imagine? Although we should start that trend. Compensatory divorced woman's Christmas card. Man. Yeah. So for today, loves, we want to talk about the behavior of comparison, right? Because that's what's activated when the Christmas cards come in. And the reality is you're in a process of rebuilding your life in truth and authenticity and not performance. And when you're in the thick of that, it's very hard to value the mess of that process versus outcomes, right? We just want the outcome so bad. If we could fast forward and just get to the outcome, right? But the transformation happens in the mess. It's like in the becoming, you know, when we study the law of attraction and we want to tip up on the vibrational scale and we want to become a vibrational match for our new lives. It's it's there's no fast-forwarding that. There is this process of shedding old vibrational patterns and building new ones. And this moment where you are comparing yourself to other families is one of those vibrational habits or patterns that has to get shed, right? So I am competitive. I think Joy is fairly competitive too. Would you agree with that, Joy? Do you see yourself as a I would absolutely agree with that? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. We are real Smack Talk. Yeah. It's funny when we talk about remedy profiles, right? It's like, well, oh, yep, she's a Wiggins. Yep. Yeah. So coming from compet from two competitive women, right? We really today want to help you refocus on being in comparison or competition with yourself, you with you, and not you with anyone else. And I know that the words we're gonna speak into you today are gonna have a hard time landing or taking root, but please allow one little root to take like take hold, right? You were born pure magic, you were born to be a particular woman, and right now it's hard to see her or feel her or know what her destiny is. That's largely because your liver is clogged and because you've been disassociated for so long, but no worries, that's in process. But you were born for pure magic, and when you compare yourself to other women, you are literally taking yourself off the path of self and putting yourself on somebody else's path. And that is delaying your manifestations, it is delaying the outcomes you seek, it is muting your power. So the alternative must be that you are in touch with where you were yesterday, today, where you want to be tomorrow, and you purely are in touch with have you done everything you can do today in order for tomorrow you to be one percent better. And I fully want to talk about the fact that 1% better sometimes looks 100% worse. Like the part where it gets worse before it gets better, it gets uglier, probably, right? It feels more before it gets better is real. So sometimes we have to measure 1% better as I actually came more unglued today.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's because you felt more today than you did. You were present more today, which sometimes very hard and very messy.
SPEAKER_01:I very much relate to though, I wonder what your experience is with this, Joy. Like feeling like I'm a very different kind of bird. And sometimes when I leave my house, I'm like, they're not ready for me out here. And I think I live, I say weird things, I talk about things that, you know, where we live are not popular or widely accepted, you know. And I think living in truth, and and in some ways, right, like that's still challenging for me. Vulnerability, authenticity in certain domains can still be very challenging for me. And I feel like a weird lady a lot of times in certain social circles. And I think that's it's real, right? As women, as we choose authenticity and vulnerability, there are gonna be a lot of circles where we don't feel like we belong as we begin to belong to ourselves.
SPEAKER_00:For sure. It's the the the feeling that or the thing that I pull up from is like, have you ever worn jeans to a wedding? You know, like you are still follow me, right? No, but follow me. Like that feeling of like I'm underdressed, I don't belong here, I don't, you know, like that's the feeling that we're talking about. Like when you walk into a room and you're at a wedding where oh, that's really good. Right? Like that is the feeling that we're trying to. So, like when you can wear jeans to a wedding and walk in and feel yourself in your skin, proud to be yourself, proud to own yourself, and just mingle. It's not about the jeans at the wedding, it's about the skin that you're wearing and being embodied in your person and yourself. That that's the magic, that's the blonding that we all should be striving towards.
SPEAKER_01:Can you imagine? Like, I can just hear my own mind right now. Can you imagine how much we would persecute someone for wearing jeans to a wedding? And I think that's the point, right? Wedding culture is some of the most performative culture.
SPEAKER_00:Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And it's like the dress, the you know, like the right dress, the right shoes, the right date, the right, all of it, right? And so I'm not advocating wearing jeans to a wedding. I'm advocating that feeling that you would get by that's the feeling we're trying to address.
SPEAKER_01:It's beautiful.
SPEAKER_00:It's beautiful. I would love for you to take those Christmas cards and just put your hand on them and pray for those people and thank them that they loved you enough to send you a card. Take out the lens of the comparison and just send love and blessings towards them because that would shift your lens of what you're how you're looking at the card. Instead of looking at this curated matching outfit in a field card.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I want you to cut them into tiny or rip them into tiny little pieces. We did one of our members in our group did this recently, right? Took all these pictures from her past life, right, and shredded them and she's turning them into a collage or something beautiful, right? Like, what if you shred it? I always feel guilty when I throw people's Christmas cards with their pictures away. It's a racket. It's like, and then how many boxes of other people's families' Christmas cards do I have laying around my house? It's it's unreal. Anyways, I would love for you to pray for the families as you rip up the cards, turn it into confetti, and then make something pretty from your colored card confetti. How does that feel? Right? Like it's not ripping it out of hate, it's ripping it out of transformation. It's I am deconstructing this performance-based culture, and I'm going to construct it into something else. Whether you turn it into paper mache or you turn it into a collage, or you turn it into, I don't know, some sort of confetti, or you whatever, right? So it's not just ripping it and throwing it in the garbage because that's more violent, right? It's can you deconstruct performance culture and reconstruct something pretty? It's like, what's that Japanese um trend using gold? Kinsugi. Is that what you were looking up? Were we on the same of turning something broken into something beautiful by putting it back together with gold, right? So here's your recommendation: pray for the family, shred their card and turn it into an art project and send us the picture of what you create. Like, oh, I'm excited. Man, I want to see what you create out of other people's Christmas cards. So this is a recommendation if the Christmas cards that you receive are insanely triggering or you're experiencing this type of pain around the cards that you've received, right? If the cards make you feel good, please like display the cards. Do the do the thing that feels yeah, that feels good, right? But if the cards trigger you, do not hesitate to transform it into something else this season, right? The point is to own the feelings that are coming up for you and to express them, not suppress them, not to shrink from them, not to do what you should do, quote unquote, when the reality is is you are in a very transformational grief process. So pray for the families, hang the cards, transform the cards. But at the end of the day, I would love for you to do, we would love for you to do some journaling around. I am going to commit to only being in comparison, me with me, me with me, me with me, me with me. Am I focused on what I can change, which is me, what I can transform, what I can do more accepting of, rather than pursuing someone else's acceptance. So that is your mission for today is to do something transformational with the cards, whether it's journaling, whether it's, you know, hanging them, whether it's transforming them into a new project, but it is to own your own transformation and what you can control. Beautifully said. And include us in your process, right? We want to see what you do. All right. We love you so much. Peace.
