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
305. Day 11: After Divorce, New Year’s Resolutions Don’t Work — Here’s What Does
This episode is only available to subscribers.
Dear Divorce Diary: Dedicated to Healing
Exclusive access to premium content!If New Year’s resolutions have never worked for you...especially after divorce, it’s not because you lack discipline, motivation, or follow-through.
It’s because the version of you who survived divorce is not wired to safely become the woman you’re trying to create.
After divorce, most women try to change their lives by changing their behavior.
But behavior never sticks when the nervous system doesn’t feel safe expanding.
In this New Year’s Day episode, we break down why resolutions fail specifically after divorce—and what actually creates change instead.
We talk about:
- Why “New Year, New You” language backfires on a nervous system shaped by loss
- How inherited roles, survival strategies, and emotional suppression block capacity
- The real reason desire alone isn’t enough to create change
- Why your brain will offer a thousand excuses—and why that doesn’t mean you’re failing
- What permission has to do with confidence, worthiness, and follow-through
You’ll be guided through a powerful journaling exercise we call the New Year Permission Slip—not focused on what you want, but on who you’re willing to become to receive it.
Because the woman who calls in a fuller life after divorce:
- has more capacity
- feels safer being seen
- trusts herself more deeply
- and no longer abandons herself to stay comfortable
And she doesn’t arrive by accident.
🎯 Your Invitation
Ask yourself:
- What am I calling in this year?
- And what am I willing to put on the line to become the woman who can hold it?
We believe in you.
The real question is—will you give yourself permission to believe in you too?
Join Dear Divorce Diary Premium to access the full 12 Days of Divorce Christmas.
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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 11 of the 12 days of Divorce Christmas. We are getting down to it here. Happy New Year's Day. We are so excited to be kicking off a new year with you. We have exciting things planned for this year, and we are just like gangster about doing it with you, doing it together, being on the team together. Like you have no idea. We just are so excited. So happy New Year's. Let's dig in. Let's dig into New Year's New You bullshit, right? Like, let's just get on that.
SPEAKER_00:Get on the wagon. Let's go.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, get on or get out. 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. All right, loves. It is a new year. And so we're gonna, we're gonna become more of ourselves this year, right? That is, it's not a different you. It's we're gonna become more of you because there are so many layers of crap that have piled up on you. You were born with the sins of the father, right? You were born with energetic inheritance that was not yours that was piled on you, and then you lived your life in a way that more crap got piled on you, and then, you know, like we got to dust off all those layers. So we are gonna step in and we're gonna step in strong. So today's mission is for you to grab your journal and to write yourself a new year permission slip. Because very often, what women need to rise to stop playing small, to stop hiding, to stop not getting where they want to go is permission. I cannot tell you how many masterminds, coaching circles, women's groups, you name it, I have been in where the group leader said, You have my permission to do that thing differently, and you watch a woman's physiology, her state change, her body shift, that she just needed someone to tell her that it was okay for her to do that thing, and all of a sudden, boop, she starts taking action she's never taken before. That is today's mission. So I want you to pull out your journal and I want you to start writing the things you want to call into your life in 2026. What are the things you're calling in? And I want you to write them down. There is research, and I love quoting this research, it's not nearly as hype as I like to make it out to be, but there is research that was done in some Ivy League school once upon a time that said that people who write out their goals, which is like the same as writing out what you want to call in, are that much more likely to accomplish their goals. You're priming your subconscious and your conscious mind, your reticular activating system, that this is what we're up to. And you are so much more likely to follow through if you write it down than if you don't. But then it gets way spicier because there's a step two to this exercise that you really have to sit with and write into, lean into, feel into in your body in order to really get the results that you look for you are looking for in 2026. I can't tell you how many women submit inquiries with us. They fill out our little jot form about wanting to join a program of ours, and then get scared. They get scared. Something happens that scares them about stepping forward and stepping up. And there are infinite things that could be that thing that's scary, but this is part two of the journaling exercise of what you're calling in for 2026. Once you've written down all the things you want to call in, the next thing that you need to write out while being in touch with your body is what are you willing to do to become the woman who calls those things in? Because the woman who calls those things in is in a different vibrational place than you are in today. If you are not a vibrational match for those things you want to call in, they are not coming, sister. They're not coming, they're not coming, they're not coming, they cannot get in. So your capacity has to increase, your field has to open, you have to get more comfortable with vulnerability, you have to feel embodied around worthiness. You have to have a more stable sense of self. You have to feel more comfortable connecting with people, you have to feel more comfortable trusting yourself and others in order to have all those things you put on the top half of your piece of paper. So, what things are you willing to let go of this year? What things are you willing to lean into? What version of yourself are you willing to become in order to have the things you are calling in? It is not going to be, it is not going to be natural. It is not going to come naturally and it is not going to fall from the sky. So this is a little bit of tough love today on Jan 1, 2026. This year is going to be what you make it. And your brain is going to offer you a bajillion and one excuses as the year unfolds as to why it's not going the way you said you wanted it to go on Jan 1. And I promise those excuses are going to come from your subconscious programming, the years of neural pathways and the way that they have been. And so we have to reprogram that neurology. We have to reset the nervous system. You have to feel safer in order to have these things that you perceive will create safety for you. So, loves, this is the permission slip. The permission slip is writing out what you are willing to put on the line to have the things you say you want. And if you don't, I have this big smile on my face right now, right? If you do not give yourself permission to do the behaviors that will facilitate you calling these things in, it's not gonna happen. It's not gonna happen. So what permissions are you willing to give yourself this year to get out of your comfort zone and to upgrade your life in every way, shape, or form? Joyus Tifford Doodle, what encouragement do you want to speak into these ladies on January 1 of 2026 about the permissions and the intentions they need to have as they set the tone for this year of their lives?
SPEAKER_02:I want to really speak into the worthiness. And so when you can sit with the fact that, oh wait, I am in control of my own life, and I do get to thrive, and I do get to succeed, and I do get to have great things, then holy blink blink blink, like the world opens up, and this is your year. 2026 is gonna be the year that you get to step into who you were designed and created to be, not who the world has. Right, the the world has experienced. So, like I am I'm here for this, and I cannot wait, I cannot wait for our listeners to step into that truth.
SPEAKER_00:I would say to piggyback off of that is you are not what has happened to you. You're not who he says that you were, you're not who your family thinks that you are. I think that I want every single woman out there to remember what it was like to have dreams, to remember what it was like to be young, and if you cannot have compassion and self-love for this version of yourself today, find the compassion and self-love for that little girl that's inside of you that wants so badly to come out and live her life and to experience true love and freedom and friendship and authenticity. You're feeling a feeling. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Because I think that so many of our women forget who they are. And it's almost like when we start working with people, I can see who they're gonna be on the other side of this tree before they even know it, right? Before they even know it. And so it's like I get a sense of who they are energetically, you know, and and walking with them to untangle all of that shit and unbury themselves from everything. Oh god.
SPEAKER_01:It's intoxicating, it's intoxicating more than the best martini could ever be. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Mm-hmm. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. All right, loves, here's your mission. Join us, right? 2026. Let's do life together. But what are you willing to put on the line to receive everything you want to call in? We believe in you. Will you join us in believing in you? We love you so much. Peace.
