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
366 - Why Can't I Hear What I Really Need After Divorce? (A Guided Journaling Exercise)
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Dear Divorce Diary: Dedicated to Healing
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Have you ever asked yourself what you really need... and drawn a complete blank?
After divorce, many women become experts at anticipating everyone else's needs while slowly losing touch with their own. The voice that plans, solves problems, overthinks, and keeps everything together gets so loud that the quieter parts of us barely get a chance to speak.
In today's VIP episode, I'm guiding you through a powerful non-dominant hand journaling exercise that helps you access those quieter parts of yourself.
Don't worry—you don't need to be artistic or have good handwriting. You just need:
- A journal
- A pen
- A crayon, colored pencil, or marker for your non-dominant hand
Together, we'll explore prompts like:
- What has been keeping me up at night?
- What do I really feel about that?
- What haven't I said yet?
- What do you need me to understand?
- What have you been missing?
- If I didn't have to hold everything together... what would I want?
This isn't about finding the "right" answers.
It's about slowing down long enough to hear the parts of yourself that may have been overlooked, silenced, or carrying more than you realized.
If today's practice brings up big emotions, I encourage you to follow it with our recent VIP Yoga Nidra episode. It's a beautiful way to help your nervous system settle and integrate whatever surfaced.
The wisdom you've been searching for may not be somewhere outside of you.
It may simply be waiting for you to listen.
You can't think your way into healing 🥵 You have to practice your way there 👭If you're ready for the next step, learn more about A Different D Word and apply here ✨
Okay, general things for today's episode. I need you to have two things to write with and one journal to write in. So bonus points if you can have a pen and a pencil or a pen and a crayon. Most bonus points for a pen and a crayon. You could submit um a colored pencil or a marker, but the idea is to have something maybe that feels like an adult would use it and to have something that maybe feels like somebody younger would use it. Although I think adults should use crayons too. Today we're gonna do some non-dominant hand journaling. We did an episode like this way back in season one or season two, and it's about time for us to give it a go again. Non-dominant hand journaling is an awesome tool to get parts of us that don't always have a voice. Most of us spend our days thinking from the same parts of ourselves. The parts that solve problems are responsible to get things done over things, over these plans, tries to hold everything together. And when we write it with a non-dominant hand, it can interrupt that pattern. And that's mostly because it feels slower, clumsier, unfamiliar, and so it becomes harder to stay in your usual mental loops. So many people find that when they do this type of journaling, they have lots of feelings and truths that they didn't realize were there or they couldn't tap into or feel, and they start to emerge on the page. So today's exercise is to help you hear from a part of you that doesn't usually get a voice.
Tools And Why Two Hands
SPEAKER_00About halfway through, I'm going to start asking you to write the prompts down with your dominant hand, and then primarily your non-dominant hand respond. Don't worry, I'll explain it all as we go. If at some point it feels like you could have a conversation between these two hands, excellent. Go with that. I want you to lean into what starts to flow for you. And if it's just sticking with the prompt, that's okay too. Hi, love. Welcome to Dear Divorce Diary, the podcast helping divorce days 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 divorce day. Join me for a fresh approach to healing grief and building your confidence after divorce. All right, in your dominant hand. Let's begin. Here's your first prompt. And these will be in the show notes. What has been keeping me up at night? And now I want you to answer with your crayon what has been keeping me up at night? The next question, you're gonna go back to your dominant hand. What do I feel about that? What emotions do I have? What's my body saying? What do I feel about that? Answering with your pen in your dominant hand?
Prompt One What Keeps You Up
SPEAKER_00What do I feel about that? What emotions or body sensations am I having about this thing? Is what else, what is there that I haven't said yet? What have I been withholding, holding in, not able to be emotionally honest about with this person or some people in my life? What
Emotions Body Signals And What Else
SPEAKER_00else haven't I said? I want you to write this next prompt down with your dominant hand and your pen. You're gonna write the words, What do you need me to understand? What do you need me to understand? You're gonna write that in your pen with your dominant hand, and then you're gonna respond with your crayon in your non-dominant hand. What have you been missing?
What You Need Underneath It All
SPEAKER_00In your dominant hand with your pen, I want you to ask, if I didn't have to hold everything together, what would I want to do, beautifully done. Now I want you to take a breath and take both hands and cross them across your chest, holding your heart, just really connecting with your heart space. Those two hands stacked one on top of the other, and I just want you to find a breath. These two hands, these two sets of answers, they are not separate. They are both part of you, they are teammates. I think very often they don't function as teammates, and that's part of the problem, right? One gets suppressed in deference to the other, and then we don't feel whole or integrated. And so you don't have to leave this practice today with answers. You don't need to know exactly what to do next. You don't need certainty. I just want you in this moment with your hands on your heart, taking a breath, being in your body, to notice what happened when you slowed down long enough to let another part of you have a turn. Whatever came up was perfect. Maybe there was something, maybe there was nothing. This is a practice. And no matter what, thank you for listening to these pieces of you. After divorce, so many women spend years asking what everyone else thinks. Tonight, you asked yourself.
Hands On Heart Integration And Closing
SPEAKER_00Inside of you, you have so much wisdom, truth, and healing inside of you already. We love you so much. Peace out. You can find more at mycoachon dot com.
