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
Ep. 308 Divorce Panel Rant: If You Tell Her to Calm Down… You’ve Missed the Point
If someone has ever told you to calm down after divorce—and it made everything inside you feel louder, sharper, or more volatile—you’re not broken.
You’re responding to a loss of connection.
In this Thursday Panel Rant, Dawn and the crew get cheeky, honest, and deeply real about why “calm down” is one of the fastest ways to shut a woman down—and why it so often backfires in relationships after divorce.
This episode explores:
- Why being told to calm down often feels like being told your feelings are inconvenient
- How emotional suppression turns into explosive anger later
- The link between anxiety, anger, and broken trust after divorce
- How gaslighting and dismissal train women to doubt their own reality
- The difference between nervous system discomfort from growth vs. true emotional unsafety
- Why anger isn’t the problem—it’s information
The panel also weaves in the concept of Martin Buber’s I–Thou relationship dynamic—reminding us that real connection requires honoring both people’s lived experience, not just managing the loudest discomfort in the room.
Because here’s the truth:
Women don’t need to calm down.
They need to feel seen, understood, and safe enough to tell the truth.
Instead of asking yourself to be quieter, smaller, or easier to handle, this episode invites a different question:
What feels unsafe right now—for me, or for them?
That question—asked with honesty instead of judgment—is often where regulation actually begins.
This is not a polished episode.
It’s a lived one.
A little ranty.
A little funny.
And deeply validating for any woman who was taught to silence herself to survive.
Welcome to Panel Rant Thursday.
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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.
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. Because I think that's what we're talking about today. Someone saying you need to calm down as like, oh, I need to act different to make you feel comfortable, right? Maybe there's some truth to that. And also, maybe, you know, maybe there's some truth in what I'm expressing, also. And I think that's the I thou, right? Martin Buber is a philosopher from like 1930, 40, something, 20, I don't know, shame on me. But like he's like one of the early, like pre-Freud um philosophers that led to the development of like what we call modern day therapy, right? And it's the acknowledgement of the I and the thou in relationship. And so whether we're checking out at the grocery store or we're sitting in a therapy therapist's office, or like we're on Facebook in the comments with someone, or we're in, you know, I don't know, friendships, family relationships, you name it, right? There's an I and there's a thou. And in order for there to be connection, which is where we all feel safe. We all feel safe when there's connection, right? Right. There has to be an acknowledgement of the I and the thou. And that takes. 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
