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
303. Day 9: Divorce & the Holidays | Why Asking For Help Feels So Threatening
The holidays after divorce don’t hurt because you’re single.
They hurt because they force you to confront how unsafe it feels to need support.
In this Day 9 episode of 12 Days of Divorce Christmas, we talk about the hidden, hardest part of life after divorce—asking for help. Not logistically, but emotionally. Not politely, but vulnerably.
If feeling safe, seen, and supported came naturally to you, this wouldn’t be the relationship you ended up in—and it wouldn’t be how it ended. So when the holidays raise the volume on need, asking for support can feel threatening, activating, or even shame-inducing.
Producer Joy joins me to explore what keeps so many women stuck in invisibility—especially during the holidays and heading into the New Year. We talk about worthiness, vulnerability, and the very real fear that comes with letting yourself be witnessed after divorce.
This episode invites you to slow down and ask:
– What do I actually need right now?
– Who has shown me they’re safe enough to ask?
– What would it look like to make one honest, aligned request?
This isn’t about forcing vulnerability or asking people to give what they’ve never shown they can.
It’s about reclaiming your right to matter—and letting it begin with you.
If the holidays after divorce are making it painfully clear how hard it is to need support, this episode will help you understand why—without judgment, pressure, or pretending you’re ready for more than you are.
You’re allowed to feel the fear.
And you’re allowed to ask anyway.
Hi, love. Welcome to day nine of the 12 days of divorce Christmas, the 12 days of becoming her. Today we are gonna work on maybe the hardest part, honestly, of the 12 days of Christmas, but like not if you ask someone what's the hardest part, this is not what they would say. But this honest to goodness is probably the hidden hardest part, and that is asking for help. Asking for what you need, asking for help, being vulnerable, and feeling worth it enough, feeling safe enough to ask for what you need. And listen, love, you wouldn't be here if feeling vulnerable and safe came naturally to you. This is not the relationship you would have ended up in. This is not the way the relationship would have ended, right? So it is such a legit, scary, intimidating, vulnerable, hard thing to feel worthy enough, valued enough, like you matter enough, and like you're safe enough to express vulnerability. So we are going to ask you to do a very hard thing today, but it is a very intentional part of shifting how you experience these holidays. And so Producer Joy is gonna dive in here and talk a little bit about how to shift out of invisibility and shift into worthiness by rolling your shoulders back. I love how she cued you a couple of days ago in that wave breath, rolling your shoulders back, being able to take in a breath and ask for help in one space today, this week, now. 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. Go for it, Joyce.
SPEAKER_00:I think the hardest part of honoring myself is acknowledging that I am worthy of being witnessed and being like the people in my life want to love me and love me well. And they might not know how to do that in a way that is both honoring and serving me. I feel like there has been a lot of religious trauma, a lot of narcissistic mother trauma, in which I feel like it's safe, I feel like I'm selfish if I were to have a desire that isn't serving the whole community. Or this is something I'm I'm in the weeds in currently, like in my current life, I struggle so hard with vocalizing and standing true to what I need or what I want. And so I really want you to visualize, like hit close your eyes and picture what would a good ask be, whether it is going asking your friend to spend Christmas with them, um, asking your your parents not to participate in a certain activity, um, asking your children to let you sleep in until 8 a.m. I mean what is that ask that is aligned and what you feels good and feels honoring to yourself. So close your eyes and I want you to visualize what that would be and what that would feel like to attain it. So, you know, asking for a uh, you know, like a as one of the one of my my personal asks this holiday season is that nobody that comes into my home beyond their electronic. I feel like I want intentional time, I want grounding time, I want to be able to enjoy and be present, and I want the people in my home to be present as well. So I am activated just at the thought of asking for that. So, but I also when I close my eyes, I visualize what it could be if we weren't so dissociated and plugged in. And there's gonna be structure and there's gonna be a game, and there's gonna be things in place because that awkward silence is too hard for some to bear, right? But like asking and knowing that you are worth being brave enough to stand in your truth and what feels good for you, no matter how big or how small, if it's honoring, it will explode and it will multiply into an empowerment for you. Yes. Preach.
SPEAKER_02:So I love that you described how activating it is for you to even think about asking because that is what we're rewiring. And there's this saying in the 12-step room, specifically in Al-Anon, I spent a lot of time in there in a post-divorce moment in time. And there's a slogan in there that goes like this let it begin with me. Let it begin with me, right? And so in our recovery journeys, when we really focus on let it begin with me, because sometimes codependency, and Alan is a lot of work on codependency, right? Codependency wants everybody else to shift so that I don't have to feel that activation that you described, right? But when we know we are moving into alignment and we are reprogramming our minds around worthiness, let it begin with me. And when we start to cue to our minds and to our in to our inner child parts, right, that we are worthy, that is the birthplace of a new neural pathway. That is the birthplace of empowerment, as you described. And I love it. So this is a call to action, right? To join us in doing our own vulnerability work over here, right? We are doing it with you, we are doing it alongside of you, claiming worthiness for ourselves and with you. So, what is the vulnerable ask you need to make? What is the thing you need to ask for help around? We would love to hear about it. We would love to pray for you around it. We would love to send you a positive word. Tell me, Joyce.
SPEAKER_00:No, I just I love I love um tomorrow's episode and how it ties into this and being and being intentional and empowered.
SPEAKER_01:So I was smiling at the thought of these women and their listeners having them right and knowing what's coming next.
SPEAKER_02:Okay, so you're gonna have to check us out tomorrow, right? Awesome. All right, so let us know what it is that you're asking for, that what you're envisioning, what you want to claim for yourself. You're gonna feel the fear, you're gonna do it anyway. Now, one caveat. Do not ask someone who is not capable of doing a thing to do a thing they're not capable of doing. So that's the one caution I would give is right, be clear about does this person have that capacity? Have they ever shown you consistent evidence of this capacity? They've never shown you consistent evidence of the capacity. Do not set yourself up for failure. If there is consistent evidence, great. Make your ask, right? Otherwise, you gotta revamp your ask. So if you need help noodling that out, send us a DM at Dawn Wiggins on Instagram or hello at mycoachdawn.com. All right, we love you so much. Peace.com.
