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
302. Day 8 - Divorce, Holidays & New Years: Why Recreating Traditions After Divorce Backfires
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Dear Divorce Diary: Dedicated to Healing
Exclusive access to premium content!In this Day 8 episode of 12 Days of Divorce Christmas, Coach Tiffini joins me to unpack what actually happens inside your nervous system when you try to bring old traditions into a new life after divorce...especially in this in-between week between the holidays and the New Year.
Through an IFS (Internal Family Systems) lens, we talk about the protective parts that step in when traditions carry grief, memory, and expectation. Not because you’re doing it wrong—but because your system may not feel safe enough yet to repeat what once belonged to a different life.
This isn’t about mindset.
It’s not about trying harder.
And it’s not about forcing yourself to “make it meaningful.”
It’s about understanding why recreating traditions after divorce can backfire—and how to stop fighting the resistance long enough to listen to what your body is actually asking for.
If the holidays after divorce feel emotionally confusing, muted, or harder than you expected—especially as New Year approaches—this episode will help you make sense of that without judging yourself or rushing the process.
Your nervous system is doing exactly what it’s designed to do.
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 ❤️
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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.
Hi, love. Welcome to day eight of the 12 Days of Divorce Christmas. This episode is special because Coach Tifferdoodle is going to walk us through what is blocking us from rehabbing our holiday rituals. Today we are talking all about holiday rituals, rewriting them, and really making this holiday season your own in a new and different and special way based on who you are becoming, who you are stepping into. And so Tiffany has a very clear picture of what blocks us from being able to do that from an IFS perspective. And she is going to walk you through that. 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, Dawn Wiggins, a therapist, coach, integrative healer, and divorcee. Join me for a fresh approach to healing grief and building your confidence after divorce.
SPEAKER_00:Hey TiffTiff. Hey. So I love that you call me Tifferdoodle, by the way, because one of my favorite Christmas cookies is a Snickerdoodle. So I'm all about that. Oh yeah. The cinnamon, the crunchiness dunked in my coffee. Okay. So yeah, let's talk about rituals. Um, you know, a lot of the clients that I work with this time of year, they're struggling to find their new normal and they're struggling to figure out what fits for them. This is a very lonely time of year because I feel like people are just swallowed in memories and they just feel like they're not able to move past the things that they need to in order to be able to create this new pathway to Christmas. So what I usually encourage people to do is I love for you to do some journaling and using crayons or colored pencils because we are channeling this inner child. And I would love for people to do some artwork or just jot some ideas down of what are some things that you loved to do as a child for Christmas. You know, for me, it was baking Christmas cookies with my Graham in the kitchen. You know, I have very vivid memories of that. I have very vivid memories of Christmas movies that I love to watch. Like Home Alone was like my total favorite. Me too, for sure. Yeah. Hot cocoa, you know, all of that. And so when I was in my first year or two post-divorce, I started like going back to my childhood and saying, okay, what were some things that I absolutely love to do? So I would encourage you to do that and make a list, and then that's how you spend your Christmas. If you are somebody that has not so great Christmas memories growing up, and there are people like that out there that tell me, you know what, every Christmas that I had has been crap. You know, I've never had great Christmases with my family as a kid, you know. So what I would say is what does your inner child, what do they wish for every Christmas? What do they hope and dream that Christmas would be for them? And recreate that for yourself. So there's a couple different methods that you can use to kind of go through everything, but I feel like really getting in touch with what did that younger me find a joy in and go do those things.
SPEAKER_01:Love it. One of the things that I immediately started claiming post-divorce Christmas was a candlelight Christmas Eve service. I must have some core memory about some candlelight service in my childhood that felt good to me, and that has become a non-negotiable ever since then. I super love that Joy also loves doing candlelight service with me. So now we do it together. Non-negotiable. Non-negotiable, yeah. Also, a live tree for me is a non-negotiable like inner child Christmas thing. And so, first post-divorce Christmas, I also have a thing with a very large Christmas tree, and so I could not be stopped. Um, so I found a man to help me get my very oversized large live Christmas tree into my house post-divorce. And I've sort of never really wavered on that either. And so, yeah, it's like owning those things, right? That just feels so good. Yeah. Cannot say enough for journaling with the crayons or the colored pencils. This is one of the tools we use inside the post-divorce roadmap, the immersive journaling program, that is 21 days. And I think the getting in touch with what your inner child dreamed Christmas would be like. That is a masterful hack. We would love to hear some of your stories about what what was your fantasy. I think I over-identified with Macaulay Culkin for sure in um Home Alone. Also, uh, yeah. Uh also Joy was with me for the little theater production of Annie this weekend because my daughter was in the production of Annie. I also over-identify with Annie. So I definitely think I had some like Daddy Warbuck's Christmas fantasies, right? Because it's Christmas in that movie too. Anyways, yeah, good stuff. All right, so send us your Christmas fantasies and what you want to start implementing. My daughter and I started baking tompta cakes this Christmas. It's a new tradition because my daughter said she wanted new traditions. So rather than build a gingerbread house from the store, my Instagram feed offered me tompta cakes where we bake our own gingerbread inside of a mold, and I love it. It's sort of magical. And so there's always a new tradition that can be started, right? And then handed down generation to generation. So um, yeah, I can't wait to bake those with her kids one day. And it's gotta start somewhere, right? And today is a beautiful day to do it. We love you so much. Peace.
