353. Why Do I Need Wine to Turn My Brain Off After Divorce?

You finally have a quiet night.

The kids are gone.
The house is calm.
Nobody needs anything from you.

So why can't you relax?

Why does your mind keep racing?
Why does the silence feel uncomfortable?
And why does that glass of wine suddenly feel like the only way to take the edge off?

In this episode, Dawn, Tiffini, and Joy explore the deeper reasons so many women find themselves reaching for wine after divorce—not because they're weak, broken, or lacking willpower, but because they're carrying years of overwhelm, responsibility, grief, loneliness, stress, and nervous system overload.

Together, they unpack:

• Why divorce often amplifies coping patterns that existed long before the marriage ended
• The difference between drinking for enjoyment and drinking for relief
• Why so many women struggle to relax, even when they finally have time to themselves
• The connection between wine, emotional overwhelm, and the need to "turn your brain off"
• How loneliness, stillness, and unprocessed grief can make alcohol feel like a lifeline
• What withdrawal really looks like—and why it extends far beyond alcohol
• How to start identifying what you're actually trying to escape when you reach for a drink

This isn't an episode about judgment.

It's an episode about understanding.

Because the question isn't simply:

"Why am I drinking?"

The deeper question is:

"What feels so overwhelming that I don't know how to be with it without wine?"

If you've ever found yourself saying:

"I just need something to help me relax."

"I just want to turn my brain off."

"Wine is the only thing I look forward to at the end of the day."

This conversation is for you.

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Transcript

Magic Drop And Email Glitches

SPEAKER_03 1:39

Morning, Sunshines. Hey. Good morning. We just got done planning what our next magic drop is. If you're not on our email list or in Cocoon, you might not know what the magic drop is, but we do like a monthly giveaway. We give away all sorts of stuff. So we just plan that. Pretty excited. If you're not on our email list, we would love you to be. But also, if you are on our email list, have you been getting our emails? Because Google did some updates to um, I don't know, Googly things. If you haven't whitelisted us, we might be in your spam and it's hard to breathe in there. We don't like it. Get us out. Okay, darlings. We are like sort of on a I don't know, we're having like a mini-series. Last week we talked about why did I text him back? This week we're talking about why am I drinking too much? Next week we're gonna talk about food. So we're like on this little like, I'm trying to run away from how overwhelmed I feel series. But I think for most of us, whatever our habits are, probably pre-dated divorce. And then divorce like was like pouring gasoline on a fire with regards to whatever our coping skills have been.

SPEAKER_00 3:00

Totally agree with that. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 3:02

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, and that's why we're breaking it down into vices, if you will, because not everybody has the same primary vice.

SPEAKER_02 3:14

Hi, love. Welcome to Dear Divorce Diary, the podcast helping divorcees go beyond talk therapy to

The Vice Mini-Series Theme

SPEAKER_02 3:21

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.

Judgment Around Drinking Or Not Drinking

SPEAKER_03 3:45

What do y'all think women are afraid we're gonna say about when they hear that we're doing an episode about drinking, right? What do you think women are right now like, oh, they're gonna say blah?

SPEAKER_01 4:00

I think women fear the judgment that comes along with drinking or this the What about the judgment that comes along with not drinking too? Right, right, there we go. Like it's socially acceptable and it's socially cute to have a glass of wine with your, you know, it's self-care, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:19

I lost more friends when I wasn't drinking, let's be honest. Yeah, when I went through my sober period. And I think that a lot of women are gonna listen to this and be like, well shit, like my glass of wine at the end of the night is the only thing I look forward to in the course of my day. Please don't take that away from me.

SPEAKER_01 4:36

I deserve it. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 4:39

Well, but I I think it's beyond. I mean, yes, deserve for sure. 100%. That's a voice that lives in my head. But I think it's even beyond that. Like there are certain things, if you tried to take them away from me at certain junctures in my journey, I would feel like I couldn't survive. Like that sounds really extreme, but as an anxious attacher, very often I've and this this especially was going on when I was getting divorced, but I would watch certain movies on repeat or TV shows, and it was like very soothing to me, like these familiar characters. I probably like you know, was bonding with them or whatever. And if you told me I had to fall asleep at the end of the night without television, I probably would like freak out because these things that we use to soothe not just our nervous systems. It's be it yes, nervous system language is so kitschy, right? And that is the the biology of what we're soothing, but it's these uh subconscious parts of our psychology that feel very afraid, very out of control, very unsettled, very uncertain, very abandoned, very alone, what uh you know, fill in the blank, right? And when until because it's not like a light switch you can flip, until we develop this ability to soothe ourselves, all the parts of ourselves, which is such a journey for some of our best friends out there in podcast land, alcohol is gonna be the thing that provides that soothing. So if you're worried we're gonna like I don't know, call you out in some type of way today, like we are gonna not do it in a way that's judgmental or attacking because we understand that deep in there is this um big scary, big shame, big mad, big alone, right? All these wobbly things in there.

The Good Drink Versus Bad Drink

unknown 6:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 6:36

So this question is for both of you. We talk sometimes, and I hear Tiffany talk about this a lot, just even personally, I think. Like, talk about the difference between a good drink and a bad drink. Or yeah, yeah, or like a drink that is truly to just like enhance your life versus like I need a drink.

SPEAKER_00 6:56

For me, it's drinking out of that place of urgency when I already know that I'm dysregulated. So if I get up and I start feeling off, if I've had a bad day and I'm super activated, I'm anxious. For me, my anxiety is a telltale sign that I should not pair that with alcohol. So if I'm anxious, um, that's gonna be a bad drinking night. So, and in other words, I can't explain what happens biologically inside of me, but if I go out and I have a drink, for me it was always vodka too. I'm a vodka girl and shit gets wild on vodka for me. So I had to stop drinking it for a very long time, like years and years. But coming back into that, it's like if I go out and I'm in a calm space and I'm feeling super regulated and I just want to socially indulge, like I'll have a drink and I will have this beautiful buzz. It's wonderful. When I go out and it is a bad drink situation, your girl wants to fight, my anxiety goes from 10 to a thousand, like it it activates and amplifies everything that I'm already feeling in my body, and it almost adds to it to the point where I want to jump out of my skin. Unless I can get completely annihilated. And back in the day, what my routine used to be is that I would drink to the point where I felt like I was gonna get sick, and then I would get high. Because then in the morning there was no real hangover. Um, I wasn't really feeling nauseous or sick or anything like that. And that was the thing that was like my nightcap. So I literally stayed like that for quite a while for years, I would say, before I decided to get completely sober. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 8:37

So were you in those moments, were you numbing this is sort of a dumb question, but were you numbing overwhelm, uncertainty, grief, overload?

What We’re Numbing With Alcohol

SPEAKER_03 8:57

What were you mostly numbing? And this could be different for many women, or it could be all the things also for many women.

SPEAKER_00 9:06

For me personally, I was rebelling. So, in other words, and I've said this before, when my daughter would go to her dad's for a week, because we did a week on and a week off, I live like a college kid. I was pissed. I was very angry and resentful about all of the responsibility that I had. I was angry about all the decisions I had to make. I was angry about having to pay all the bills by myself, getting no help. And so, yeah, when she was gone, all I wanted to do was put on a cute dress and heels, go to a nightclub, get completely inebriated, and meet people. That's what I wanted to do. I wanted to hook up, I wanted to get drunk, I wanted to get high. And that's literally how I dealt with my life. And I know a lot of women in this age, but they'll say, Yeah, but Tiffany, you did that in your 20s. And now I'm in my 40s. Should I still be feeling like that? Yeah. There is no rhyme or reason, especially if you're somebody that was married for 20 years and you never really got that period of time to yourself where you got to experience some of those things. That's why we have clients who are in their 40s who are now getting into their club days or their hoe days, quote unquote, or they're going out and drinking a lot, or they're experimenting with drugs, like Xanaxes. That's all very normal. Like it's all a normal part of healing. Push back to explore. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 10:19

Yeah. Like you feel like that's about exploring the thing you never experienced.

SPEAKER_00 10:24

Yeah, I think rebellion in general. You think it's about to be able to do that. And rebellion in general. It's all of anger. It's about anger. Yeah.

unknown 10:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:31

Like I had to be a good wife for so long. So now I'm gonna go out and be the party girl. Like that was me.

SPEAKER_03 10:36

There are yeah, there are sort of these, like we see this through the lens in homeopathy too, right? That there are sort of these like archetypes or whatever of why women drink. Like maybe drink out of loneliness or drink out of anger or drink out of grief or drinking out of mine, would be an overdeveloped sense of responsibility, right? Like that I was so responsible, so serious, and you give me a drink, and all of a sudden I get silly. It like allows me to unhook the thing that feels so serious. Like if I don't manage everything all the time, then you know, the world is gonna come to an end. Yeah. So there are these different edges, right, that different women have that I think drive drinking or the urge to drink.

SPEAKER_01 11:21

Yeah. I was a hundred percent the overwhelm. I deserved, like I survived another day. Cheers, you know what I mean? Like I um would drink, or when I would use it as a tool because I was so wound up at the end of the day with having to maintain everybody else's nervous system and having to do all the things that it was almost like how I would I would use it as a coping mechanism. I would use it as a tool to check out, right? Like I'm not half not have so much brain all the time, you know.

SPEAKER_03 12:00

I think that's a beautiful point to check out, right? So the this I think is such a common story for women, and maybe this is connecting the dots of what you were saying a few moments ago, Tiffany. Like when we are all in on managing our families, our jobs, our responsibilities, and then we haven't left enough space for ourselves to touch grass, to be well, to feel, to get support or whatever, right? Then it's like you need something in an instant that shuts it all down.

SPEAKER_00 12:32

And when the stillness feels too heavy, right? We talk about that all the time. For me, I couldn't sit with myself to touch grass in the beginning. Like I lived at the beach, you know, so it's like anytime I would go down and walk along the beach, I would get super emotional and I would get very uncomfortable because those were the times when I could be still with myself and when everything felt like it was too heavy. So it was like I couldn't even get through a 30-minute walk with myself, let alone sitting for an entire weekend without my kid. Like there was no way that I was gonna be able to get through that without some sort of coping mechanism. And what I want to tell women too is I love if you're gonna hit back and tell me, yeah, but I only have like one or two glasses of wine or one or two mixed drinks. For me, when I'm in an unregulated system, like with my nervous system is way out of whack. Two drinks can be way more destructive and dangerous than the five I have when I'm regulated, if that makes sense. And what are you doing when you're drinking? Let me ask you that. Are you scoping his social media? Are you thinking about texting him? Right. Like, come on, like what are we doing? Balls of steel happen when the violence is. All of the supreme stuff, right?

SPEAKER_03 13:38

Let's listen for sure.

SPEAKER_00 13:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 13:41

More or less likely to get arrested for stalking. Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 13:44

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Are you driving by its house? Like, tell them what are you doing?

SPEAKER_03 13:50

Or gonna all of a sudden like stack vices when you're under the influence.

SPEAKER_00 13:56

Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Come one, come all.

SPEAKER_03 14:00

But

Coffee Until Wine And Burnout

SPEAKER_03 14:00

just in general, right? Coffee until wine culture. I do think like that's sort of that's like a woman's manifesto, right? Like how many, like you could find all of it on Etsy and all the things like coffee until wine. Right. And it speaks to the level of burnout, I think, as women, and we defer healing and we defer healing and we defer healing or groundedness, or I don't know. What is it that we are deferring, friends, until we run into consequences that are like, mm, buck stops here. And I think for many of us, that's how for me, it was certainly health conditions and divorce, right? Where it was like, oh crap, I have not handled the things that I needed to handle because I've ended up here, right?

SPEAKER_01 14:50

I think Tiffany said it beautifully, is where she couldn't handle the stillness. So, like if you're reaching for that drink to calm the stillness or to to handle the stillness, to be able to sit with the the quiet, right? Um I think a women, especially our listeners, could relate to that in terms of the dad has the kids, the house is quiet, all of my girlfriends are busy, they're all with their families, they're all with, you know, living their best life. And I'm I'm here, right? I'm I'm lonely, I'm by myself. And so I'm going to self-care and draw a bath and grab a wine and grab my phone and punch it. Self-care.

SPEAKER_00 15:38

Yeah. Yeah. And I think when I was in that season too, the friends that I gravitated towards because I was in such that low vibe state of needing people to like validate my lifestyle because what I was doing was not okay. And any of my normal friends or family would have called me out on it, which is why I didn't share a lot about that time in my life and what I was doing, because I didn't want to be shamed or judged for it. So the friends that I chose, I mean, they were like the most wild of the wild girls. Like these girls were going out, you know, and we were going out until three or four o'clock in the morning, hitting multiple clubs, getting completely annihilated. Like these were people that when I started getting sober had no time for me. Like these girls were like, nope, sorry, fun party, Tiffany is gone. We don't want to go and get coffee with you. Yeah, we don't want to go hang out and go on a road trip with you. We don't want to, you know, and that was cool, but like it really taught me like how ashamed I was too of how I was living and the types of people I had around me that were okay with it and were kind of feeling the fire.

SPEAKER_01 16:37

Dawn, do you think most women are actually numbing grief or are they numbing the nervous system overload that grief creates?

SPEAKER_03 16:48

I think it's all of it. I think if I could list one thing that we're numbing, it's the function of having too much of everything and not enough support. And by support, I mean like decades, like chronic decades of feeling under-supported. So for whatever reason, um, as probably most of our ladies in some way, shape, or form felt undersupported as young people and got into a habit of overfunctioning in some way, compensating, without um really understanding their worth or their value, and then got married in that and then felt chronically undersupported. And then as women, most most of us, not all of us, but like we either overproduce by working and parenting and housekeeping, or like doing all of the stay-at-home momming, like every aspect of stay-at-home moming without having a partner that is engaged with us. And we've managed, even as stay-at-home moms, to overcommit ourselves by throwing parties that are over the top for our two-year-old's birthdays, or you know what I mean? Like we found ways to like overproduce, even if it's at home. Does that make any sense? Because we've gotten the habit of um, I think comparing ourselves to what every other woman is doing and feeling like we have to look as good. So we're chasing beauty standards and we're chasing mom standards and we're chasing wife standards, we're chasing all these standards rather than really being grounded in what we need. So I think by the time we're getting divorced and reaching for that second and third glass of wine in particular, we're numbing, we're like drinking away this decades-long existence of being ridiculously out of balanced and not having enough support, not supporting ourselves well enough, not welcoming in support from our communities and our partners and our friends, you know what I mean, and hiding, hiding our true feelings and masking it all, you know what I mean? And then feeling like the only thing that will support me in this moment without me cracking wide open is this drink. If I don't have this drink, I'm gonna cry and I'm never gonna stop and everyone's gonna see me and I'll lose my fill in the blank.

SPEAKER_00 20:37

To me, I love how the clients too that I first start working with when I start asking them about these things, how casual they are when they say it. And I'm like, well, what's your drinking like? And they're like, well, you know, I'll have like two glasses of wine and a Xanax at night. And that's just like a normal thing.

Skills First: Name What You Avoid

SPEAKER_00 20:51

And I'm like, that is not normal. You know what I mean? So if you're needing that wine to even relax at the end of the night, that is not normal. And again, this is somebody coming from the other side of like ice cream from a very young age. Yes, it is. And again, if you were somebody like myself that started drinking at a very young age, like you're gonna have an even harder time using it because it's like going back to an old friend. Like alcohol was always a comfort for me. Like I was an addict from a very young age. And, you know, having to actually be sober for me, like when I decided to be sober for six years until I could reevaluate myself and and create a new relationship with alcohol moving forward where I wasn't using it as a coping mechanism, but where I could actually just use it to be social, it's difficult. It's very difficult.

SPEAKER_03 21:43

And would you, this is like this is what I'm gonna ask next, is hotly debated in the recovery world, but would you argue that the next step for the women listening is to stop drinking or to drink less or to focus on building skills or drinking less or not, like what do you often advocate for when you're working with women?

SPEAKER_00 22:07

If you're identifying that you're drinking is a firefighter part in IFS, which is that again, that part that comes in and saves the system. What I try to tell women is like, I want you to start every time you feel the urge to drink, at least identify what am I ignoring or avoiding right now. If you still reach for the drink after, right, that's okay.

SPEAKER_04 22:27

But correct.

SPEAKER_00 22:29

And it's like when we're working with addicts, right? It's kind of like replacement addiction at first. It's like, hey, instead of going and snorting coke, let's reach for ice cream. You know what I mean? Like just something. Like, let's start just replacing, or even women that overeat. Like, hey, if you're reaching for food and you're not hungry, what are you ignoring or avoiding? And it doesn't matter if you write it down and then still go reach for the food, that's okay. But let's at least figure out why we're doing it.

unknown 22:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:55

So I would tell women, like, don't go too hog wild crazy. Like when I first started getting sober, when I went sober for the first time, I was 18 years old. I think I was sober or 17. I was sober for maybe like a year and a half, two years. And I went through very violent physical reactions. Like that's how much of addiction I had. Second time wasn't that bad. So I would tell women, like, certainly, if you're feeling like you're somebody that has addictive tendencies like that, and it's that level, like to scale down quickly so you don't have such a shock to your system. But at least start getting behind the why of why you're doing it.

SPEAKER_03 23:32

So I have questions, spider webbing in my mind. Um, let me see if I could say them both out out loud so I don't lose them. So one I wanted to talk about withdrawal across substances. So it's a little bit of a left turn, but and then also the lies we tell ourselves about um like justifying, justifying the pattern, right? So those are the two things. Don't let me forget them. So I just want to touch on withdrawal. When we talk about certain things like alcohol, benzos, it's dangerous and intense and

Withdrawal Is Bigger Than Substances

SPEAKER_03 24:04

can be uh long lasting. But you may not realize this there is withdrawal symptoms from uh changing how you eat, from changing your relationship status, from uh breaking your phone, because uh what addiction is doing is changing your neurochemistry, right? Like there are very real chemical behaviors going on in your brain from scrolling, uh, from shopping, from eating, uh, from drinking, from you name it. And and that's part of why divorce is so hard in the early days, too, right? Because when you go from one relationship status to a different relationship status, it changes uh the chemistry in your brain, and withdrawal is a very Real thing. What do we mean by withdrawal? We mean not having the chemicals pumping through your brain that were pumping through them. You are used to how it feels to have the chemicals there. You know how to work with it. You know how to move through it. You know what it feels like. And when the chemicals are not there, neurotransmitters, right? It feels like something is missing and you have an urge to fill it or replace it. An urge to fill it or replace it. So and it's it it is a complex neurochemical picture, depending on what the substance is, depending on your particular neurobiology. But that is so much of what's going on. There is a very real withdrawal experience. And then there's something called post-acute withdrawal, which can last for up to 18 months sometimes, where there's this urge to fill the void where the chemical hit used to be. So, Joy, you've often referenced being addicted to drama, but that is the thing, right? It's like it's too quiet in here. I'm used to there being some chemical spike in my brain, and I'm now going to do a behavior subconsciously that creates that chemical spike, whether it's pick a fight or, you know, um whatever. You know, whatever. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Right. So yeah, I just want, and this is sort of piggybacking off what you said, Tiffany. Like when you have an urge to do any of these things that at the end of the day are probably going to do more harm than good, if you could start to connect the dots of what you're missing, now you're under starting to understand your withdrawal picture. There's an urge to fill something, but literally actually a chemical receptor in your brain.

SPEAKER_00 26:29

And I I did this twice without any sort of therapy, with without any sort of homeopathy. Um zero stars. Do not recommend. Oh, scary as hell. And I I can still feel it in my body. Like my body still remembers what it felt like to crave that substance so intensely that I just could not, like, something had to fill the void, and it was so anxiety-inducing. I want to say something quickly because this blew my fucking mind this week. I was watching the Today Show and they had a guy on there that was taking either Ozempic or Wagovi or whatever the shots were.

SPEAKER_04 27:03

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 27:03

And they started talking about the fact that when people are taking those shots because they're overeating for reward, it blocks the receptors. So then eventually, if they're on too high of a dose of the Wagovi or Ozempic, they stop finding joy in anything. Anything. And it's causing intense depression in these people. They don't want to have sex anymore. They get no joy out of eating, no joy out of hobbies, nothing. So they talked about this massive depressive state that starts taking place, right? And I was like, whoa. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 27:35

Well, and then when you go off of it, right, then you're gonna have cravings though, when you when that is missing and you start to feel the patterns creep back in. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:47

So here's what I will say to answer your original question, because yes, I've worked with clients before too. I worked with a gentleman who had a very intense benzoaddiction for 17 years, and he was trying to come off of them completely. And it was literally the process of us working together with his PCP for about a year to get the dosage to go down and down and down. You know, and he had some scary shit happen in that time frame, you know. Like one time he tried to just say, Well, you know what? I'm feeling great. I'm just gonna go completely off of it. And he ended up having a seizure. Like these are very serious things that this drug dependency and alcohol can do to you. And there's other people that I've worked with that have alcohol issues that have tried to come off too quickly, and you know, they've really had problems as well. So I would say it's definitely gonna be a combination of you tapering down and working with a primary care provider, a mental health practitioner, like somebody that can help assist you because it it's it can get away. If there's dependency, yeah. If there's dependency. Correct.

SPEAKER_01 28:45

So can I um I just want to speak into the dependency part a little bit because you know, sitting here, like uh I can see people that I know or whatever thinking, oh, I don't have a drinking problem, I just enjoy it. So what would you say to the women who you know, like how would you distinct distinguish not having a drinking problem but just enjoying it every night? Like how would they kind of noodle out if it's an addiction or a chemical reaction to just more of a habit?

SPEAKER_03 29:20

Well, there's a one-liner. Uh and I'm sure Tiffany's gonna have something beautiful to say, right? But if you continue to use something and it's creating negative consequences in your life, continuing to use something.

SPEAKER_01 29:34

But I'm just enjoying it with a bath.

SPEAKER_03 29:36

I'm not like negative consequences. That's how you know it's crossed a line.

SPEAKER_01 29:44

Okay, but what if they can't see the negative consequences?

SPEAKER_03 29:47

Yeah, that may be. I think I think people move at the point at the pace of boundaries or consequences, right? And sometimes the consequences have to really stack up because you might not see, you know, a hangover as a consequence. You might not see reduced productivity, you may not see weight gain. You, you know, there may be certain things that you just don't either connect the dots or you don't see as real consequences, or they're consequences you could tolerate, you know.

SPEAKER_00 30:11

And so sometimes, yeah, we have to hit a wall of consequences before we and you're gonna have the most really hard time convincing me that something that you do every single night is not a way to soothe. Like women are gonna have a really hard time, and I will go online and say that. I'm sorry, I'm call bullshit. I don't believe that somebody can drink every day and they're not trying to avoid or ignore something.

SPEAKER_03 30:39

And I can point to this with regards to like how my family today operates. Uh, my husband was always fascinated for this is not anymore this year, but over the last few years, we sort of have habits and patterns as a family where how our night unfolds, right? Where work ends, where extracurricular activities for our kiddo ends, and then what initiates what we call family time and moving through a bedtime routine and all of that, right? And for a very long time, if it didn't move through a certain pattern, our kid had a really hard time feeling like she had spent family time and it needed to look a particular way. And when that didn't happen, she had trouble

Dependency And The Consequence Line

SPEAKER_03 31:23

settling at night. And so already there we can see, oh, do we call that OCD-ish? Do we call what do we call that, right? But it's resolved to the point now that we could sort of do anything, and it Tuesday could look different from Thursday, could look different from Saturday, and she'd be fine. Um, as evidenced by, right? She went and traveled with you this week, Joy, and she was away from it, right? And like she did great. Yeah, my it's it's certainly a sign that we need certain things to soothe us. And if left untreated, right, we treated her using homeopathy and all the tools that we talk about. There's an episode where we talk about all the ways that we help our kids move through things, right? But untreated, what would that probably look like for someone who then moves into teenage status and starts having a couple drinks on the weekend with their friends and then moves into adult status, right? And then you don't even realize that. But the the soil was already rich, right? For there being this one or two ways that you get your emotional or your soothing, I don't want to say emotional, but like your soothing needs met because there's a rigidity around how you experience okayness or a sense of security or well-being, right? She felt a sense of security and well-being if we did it a particular way. That's that ground is rife for addiction. And I would guess that if we went back and looked at our early lives, we could probably find similar, similar awarenesses. And I would argue that that's what I was saying about TV in the beginning, that if I didn't have these familiar characters playing on the TV and this distraction of the noise, my mind would have raced. I would have been so then I would have started getting afraid that I wasn't gonna sleep, and then I would have been anxious about not the idea that I wasn't gonna sleep, and then I wouldn't have slept, and then insomnia, and then there's this whole cycle, right? And I think it's probably very similar for women who struggle with fill in the blank, whether it's food or it's alcohol or I find a really fascinating connection while you're saying that, because when I was working in corporate, I was often working in an office most of the day.

SPEAKER_00 33:25

And so I would always have the same movies playing in the background, like the same mindless noise playing in the background to help me regulate. But I already knew the lines, I already knew the characters, I already knew it, but there was something about putting that on that made me calm at work so that I didn't lose my shit. And it was a way that I would regulate at work because or numb at work, however you want to say that, because I was so dysregulated when I was there. Wow.

SPEAKER_03 33:50

So, and then, you know, when we see how deep these roots go, just in general, for how much we numb as a society, you know, CBD has become one of the most popular tools to regulate a nervous system, right? And what's interesting about that is it does actually help regulate your nervous system in that our um part of the chemistry, the neurochemistry. We have endocannaminoid receptors in our nervous systems. So let's say those receptors, let's say they're like, it's like a parking lot, and the receptors don't have anything to bind to. There's no cars parked in the parking lot, right? You take that CBD and it parks a car at that receptor and it feels satiated, right? But what causes those systems to be so depleted, depleted, depleted, depleted. And then we keep trying to supplement or hustle our way into um calm state when underneath there's a storm brewing, and then it looks like, oh, my bladder is overreactive, or my periods are weird, or I'm having horrible hot flashes or perimenopause early, or I have a chronic anxiety disorder, or I'm chronically depressed, or I'm losing track of time, or um, I don't know, any number of things, right? And it's because we haven't actually dealt with the root issue. So yeah, and I think that, you know, I started to ask this question earlier before I got on the rabbit hole of withdrawal, but we do, we tell ourselves stories about why we can't tackle this thing yet. I can't all have time to tackle it when. What else do we say? If I, you know, I can't tackle it now. I don't have time, I don't have the money, I don't know where to start. I don't know. What else do we say?

SPEAKER_01 35:37

I relate to that a lot. Like, I will I will handle my eating in June when I I just have to survive this month. I I say I've said that a lot lately. I just have to survive this month, right? I will handle this, I will tackle this. Right now I'm focusing on this, I will tackle this next. You know what I mean? Like I always that's a habit that I have of just like almost compartmentalizing things that I know I need to work on, but you know, like I just I just can't, I'm just on I'm just I just can't at this moment. I'm just too overwhelmed.

SPEAKER_03 36:09

Yeah, and spoiler alert when we talk about eating next week, right? Eating, emotional eating, it soothes cortisol. Soothes cortisol. So, like, right, like tackling eating means going way slower in life so you don't have cortisol spikes, right? But and then the same withdrawal thing, like if you don't eat the thing when you're used to managing your cortisol with the food, right? So it's all, yeah, it's like I we I think to tackle any of these things means such a radical change in how we're approaching living. And most of us aren't

Roots: Routines, Regulation, And The Body

SPEAKER_03 36:45

willing to do that until we hit a wall of consequences. I know that was certainly like divorce was sort of for me the consequence that I could no longer run away from. Like I had made a deal with myself. I had made a deal with my ex that we were not, I was not going to be someone who repeated my parents' mistakes. And I think when I hit that wall of consequences, I was like, oh, I have betrayed myself so profoundly. I have so lost the plot somehow. This is the consequence that woke me up to like, and it was the, you know, and I had the health problems on top of it, but I hadn't connected the dots yet. And that's the that's an interesting part about how we're programmed as women these days too, right? You we go to the doctor and the doctor says, like, oh, you need this prescription or whatever. Like, nobody ever explained to me when I got diagnosed with cluster headaches at 27, 28, 29 years old that I was actually already having symptoms of perimenopause, that those hot flashes in the night were such a sign that my HPAO access, meaning my hypothalamus, my pituitary, my adrenals, my ovaries were already shutting down from stress and trauma. Nobody ever explained that to me. Nobody ever explained that getting shingles at 19 was because my nervous system was already so jacked, right? Uh-huh. And that by the time I was getting divorced, like all of this was connected. And I did have one boss once try to help me connect the dots because he was really digging into no, but what was going on, Dawn, when the headache started? No, but what was really going on? No, but what was really going on, Don? Asked that question multiple times. And at the time I can tell you that there had been a couple of violent incidents and I could not, right? And that's how trauma works. That's how disassociation works. I could not connect those dots when he was asking those questions.

SPEAKER_04 38:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 38:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:43

Yeah. I think too, even this morning, I got a text message from one of our clients, and she was talking about physical symptoms that she was experiencing. And I've conditioned two people to literally Google, like whatever your physical symptom is, what is the emotional connection? Right. Oh, she showed me that. Yeah. So I sent it to her and she was like, she was like, What? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Because it's so true. Like it's the doctor isn't going to say it to you. You got it. Nice. Yeah. Correct.

SPEAKER_01 39:16

Well, I mean, the doc I I the doctor isn't going to um, you can cut this if you need to, but like the doctor isn't gonna say um it's emotional or uh on process or like something energetically. They're gonna say it's your hormones or it's you know, like they're gonna give you a plan, whether it be pharmaceutical or whatever, for the symptom, but never ask what's actually happening, like you're fosted, like right? Then there's never gonna be a main pinning.

SPEAKER_04 39:50

Yeah. Right.

SPEAKER_00 39:54

But it's interesting to all of how everything connects, right? And when you start working through the IFS and you start seeing, you know what? I'm feeling feelings of shame today. Well, guess what? It's also presenting in my body. You know what I mean? And it's like shit. Like when you realize that everything is connected, oh, like, but then it's you're your own advocate, right? Like, even for me, like changing the type of doctor that I'm seeing who now asks me, hey, like, what are your physical symptoms and like emotionally, like what could this mean for you? It blows my mind to have a doctor that's fully integrated now and asks about the whole system instead of just find you one of them.

SPEAKER_03 40:32

Find you one of them for sure. I had this viral thing the last couple of weeks, right? With a cough that got stuck. And I can tell you that was my chronic presentation all through. I would say my adult life, I would get sick, I would get a cough, and I'd be like, I can't do this. I'm a therapist, I have to be able to talk. And I would just suppress and suppress and suppress, and I would take more cough medicine than is reasonable. And so this last couple of weeks, this was my season to really help my body support my body through that and not suppress it at all. And it was tricky. But as I started observing what my body talk was saying the last couple of weeks, like I had this little bit of pain and heat in my thumbs and in my right foot at the ball of the foot, it's all of that is lungs and grief and lungs and grief and right. So just gently supporting my lungs these last couple of weeks while all of this unfreezes and it's uncomfortable. But man, the clarity that I have this week, the I can feel in my bones that it is easier for me to connect with myself, with other people this week. It's wild, like that. I would have thought that there were still deeper layers that were available to me around the capacity for connection. It's wild, but it's clearing this stuff out of my lungs. It's been so frozen. So yeah, I think the change that, you know, any of us are facing when we've been, you know, managing air quotes, our lives, using our vices, we know it's radical and it's overwhelming and we don't know where to start.

SPEAKER_00 42:01

And I want to gently tell women too, like, please really think about what it means to be dependent on something. It doesn't mean that you're the alcoholic pawning off all of her shit for money for liquor. Like it doesn't always look like sitting in a bar every day. It literally just looks like the thing that you keep reaching for to soothe and to calm and to be able to again, and something that's been incorporated into your routine that is a self-soothing or numbing thing.

SPEAKER_03 42:31

It if you didn't have it, you would not feel okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. And all of this, how how complex and faceted, multifaceted it is, is why we created our signature program to function the way it does. It's 12 months long because we know from all of this experience that it takes multiple providers and it takes many months to get from one end of this experience to the other. It is not single provider uh shit to tackle. It's not single modality shit to tackle, it's it's a community, a team, you know, a systems approach to moving through stages of wellness. And we love it.

SPEAKER_04 43:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 43:24

Anything either of you want to add about drinking in particular? I've never been very good at it.

Alcohol And Why Sleep Gets Worse

SPEAKER_01 43:34

Just from my experience, I would use I was probably 13 years old when my medical doctor told my mom to give me a glass of wine to rest, to sleep, because I didn't sleep. I would name his name, but that's probably not the problem. But like uh, so there is a um correlation between having a glass of wine to downshift to sleep better, but in reality, when you when you actually um watch it, so uh one of our one of our women have a have a Garmin. Fancy dancing watch it. Yeah, right. And so when she has a drink and then sleeps versus the nights that she doesn't have a drink and sleeps, the matrix matrix are bananas crazy. So like it actually doesn't help you sleep. You might fall asleep easier, but you're not gonna get that rejuvenated, rejuvenative, deep sleep that your body needs to restore and actually be productive sleep for you.

SPEAKER_03 44:45

Right. No, your body isn't gonna be able to get to the stages of detox, your brain can't detox, your nervous system can't actually settle. No, none of it.

SPEAKER_01 44:54

So there is, I did want to just throw that in there because I think there are is there are a sub women out there that think, oh, it helps me sleep. It might help you fall asleep, but is that not actually helping?

SPEAKER_03 45:09

No, it inhibits your brain's ability to process and consolidate and heal and recover. Yeah, it's like probably one of the single most self-sabotaging things we can do actually when we're experiencing any sort of trauma or overwhelming life experience is to drink on it. And I understand also how hard it feels to put it down. So, which is why I know you know, in that moment, if for any of my Star Trek fans feels like a Kobayashi Maru, like I know I this thing is hurting me and I don't know how to do life without it. Yeah, that's why it takes a team. Yeah. The support is here for you. All right, if any of this is resonated and you wish you had a community of women

Free Community Invite And Closing

SPEAKER_03 45:56

like us, well, we're here. Just come be with us inside the cocoon. It is totally free. There is a link in the show notes for you to just jump in. You can find out what our next magic drop is this month, what we could be sending you if you are our lucky winner. Uh, you could be cropping up in one of our monthly workshops or cocoon connect, rather. You know, we just want to be with you. We want to get to know you. We want you to come find the answers and be on the path and be with the people that are doing the things you're doing. Because we love you so much. Peace.

SPEAKER_02 46:37

Dear Divorce Diary is a podcast by MyCoach Dawn. You can find more at mycoachdawn.com