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

Ep. 299 Day 5: Missing My Kids During the Holidays After Divorce

My Coach Dawn Season 4

If you’re here today, it means your kids aren’t with you...and that absence lands in the body, not just the heart.

This episode is for the moms navigating holidays, weekends, or long stretches without their children after divorce. The quiet. The ache. The way your nervous system doesn’t know where to settle when the people you’re bonded to aren’t home.

Joy shares from lived experience what it’s like to be deeply, trauma-bonded to your children — through pregnancy, birth, illness, caregiving, and survival — and then suddenly have to function without them physically present.

In this conversation, we talk about:

  • Why missing your kids after divorce can feel physically destabilizing
  • How maternal bonding and trauma bonding affect the nervous system
  • The urge to stay busy, numb out, or dissociate — and why that makes sense
  • What actually helped during the hardest hours (movement, EFT tapping, nature, structure)
  • Why “doing nothing” can feel unbearable — and what to do instead
  • A simple candle ritual to honor the bond when your kids aren’t with you
  • How to stay connected without collapsing or abandoning yourself

This episode is not about fixing the grief or rushing you through it.
 It’s about staying present with the truth that their bodies may be absent — but their love is not.

If you’re missing your kids today, you don’t have to disappear to survive it.
 You’re allowed to grieve and stay with yourself.

🎄 About the 12 Days of Divorce Christmas

The 12 Days of Divorce Christmas is a daily, nervous-system-first series created to support women through the holidays after divorce.

Days 1, 2, and 9 are available on the public feed.
✨ The remaining days — including deeper support for grief, loneliness, and identity after divorce — are available inside Dear Divorce Diary Premium.

If this episode helped you feel less alone, the rest of the series is there to hold you through the days that follow.

Join Dear Divorce Diary Premium to access the full 12 Days of Divorce Christmas.

Their love is not absent.
And neither are you.

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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_00:

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. Welcome to day five of the 12 days of divorce Christmas. If you are here with us on day five, like, congratulations, girl. You are getting it this holiday season and you are doing better than most because this is the 12 days of becoming her again. I guarantee that anyone who does these 12 days and really does them, full out, no dress rehearsal, is going to have a transformation at the end of these 12 days. You are going to feel better, stronger, more grounded, more embodied, less anxious, less insecure. Amazing. Today we are talking about when your kids aren't with you. And producer Joy is going to carry us for this one because this was a very real challenge for her then, and maybe even to an extent still sometimes now. And I think that when we can speak from the heart of our truth, right, that's where we connect and we break through most. You can access the full episode by becoming a premium subscriber, which is just five dollars a month. Scroll down to the show notes and click the link where you'll get your very own individualized RSS feed for your podcast app. You can find more at mycoachdawn.com