53: How to SPEAK Up: A Post-Divorce Power Move

We open the door to one of the most courageous and uncomfortable topics in the glow-up journey: standing up for yourself. From setting legal boundaries to confronting entitlement, Quinn introduces a bold framework to help women move from silence to strength.

🧨 Highlights include:

• A hair transformation and what it sparked internally
• The SPEAK framework for setting and keeping boundaries
• Real-life stories from clients (and Quinn’s own life) who took courageous action
• The emotional cost of silence vs. the power of self-respect
• Why self-betrayal is a form of harm we can stop

SPEAK Framework

• Spot the violation
• Pause and process
• Evaluate your options
• Act strategically
• Keep your commitment

🔑 Quotes to remember:

• “Your silence will not protect you.” – Audre Lorde
• “If speaking up costs you a relationship, that relationship was already too expensive.”

✨ If you’re ready to reclaim your power and peace after divorce, this episode will give you tools, strength, and sisterhood.

PostDivorceGlowUp.com

Email: quinn@postdivorceglowup.com

Transcript

0:50

Hello my friends. Welcome back to the podcast. I did a thing this last weekend. My hairdressers are always wanting to give me highlights, like make me more blonde. I naturally have a dark blonde shade of hair and I have very little gray, And last week I decided to dye my hair dark as in a deep, rich, mahogany dark. I kind of freaked out when I rinsed it out and saw it, but now I am in love with it. I am in love with my hair, with myself. I decided to embrace it. It did take me a minute. It took me a few days to embrace it, but I've decided I have entered my dark feminine, my Lilith path, my shadow side, this dark, rich, textured side of my psyche. I think it's super sexy. A little bit bitchy, passionate, and just so much fun. And plus, when you have dark hair, those of you that have dark hair, your earrings really pop when you have blonde hair, like gold earrings. It just feels like it fades all together. But now that I have this dark hair, mm, so that's one of the fun things I'm doing. I am also committed to getting my website and email working again, I promise those of you who have hunted me down on Facebook and Instagram to send me messages. Thank you. I have not made it easy to find me, I am aware of that and I apologize. I want to be able to support you in all the beautiful ways, and I am committed to doing just that. After I finish recording and uploading this podcast today, I'm going to work on solving that very challenge. I am up for it. It is important, and I wanna do that for you. So today I want to talk to you about something that. Might make your stomach flip out a little bit, and that is standing up for yourself, speaking up, saying no more. Creating a strong boundary, which may mean hiring an attorney, getting a protective order or something else, but Drawing that hard line and saying, I will not put up with this behavior anymore. Audra Lorde famously said, your silence will not protect you. And boy did that hit home when I read that line. This is true in our relationships as well as the violations we're seeing in my country right now. Your silence will not protect you If the thought of standing up for yourself saying, no more feel scary, I want to assure you, you are not broken. You are not weak. You are simply feeling the echoes of generations of women who were taught to be small, to stay safe, I don't want us to be naive about the fact that. Women do get hurt sometimes when they stand up for themselves. So I'm not saying this is without risk. I am saying that sometimes it's worth the risk and that the peace on the other side of setting a boundary and sticking to it is a beautiful place to be. these echoes from the past where it was increasingly dangerous to speak out, to demand your rights to vote, or economic security, the right to get a divorce, which is such a new right for Womenkind to even have the option to get divorced and something I hope I never take for granted. I want you to be smart about what I'm going to teach you today, but I also want you to know that there is power and there is strength for you to claim in speaking up for yourself. We know that historically women's voices have been silenced. there has been this fear of backlash and loss. Being labeled as difficult or bitchy, or even real world consequences. It's not imagined, but many of our stories are not even our own. We take on other women's stories and we take inherited stories, stories from our grandmothers and mothers, and I want you to start looking at the facts of your life and deciding what you need and how you can stand up for yourself. I know it may not be comfortable. In fact, it may bring up a lot of discomfort to speak up for yourself, but that is the price of admission to the life that you actually want to live. I had to learn to speak up for myself. Throughout my marriage, My husband would lie, and I would forgive. I saw a marriage as an exercise in betrayal and forgiveness, and I remember telling that to a girlfriend once and she was like, what are you talking about? But when I decided to do the work of leaving instead of. The work that I had been doing, which had been decades long work in staying a big part of what was before me, was teaching my ex a new way of relating to me. for me, this has included having an attorney filing police reports when my husband has been violent, always, always recording our interactions, and now twice having to seek and being granted orders of protection or restraining orders. This was challenging for me to do. So if you are facing something similar where you feel like. I don't know if I can do this. This seems really scary. I know. I know I have been there. I really wanted my husband and I to get along. The first order of protection was after he was physically violent with my daughters On Christmas day in 2021. And I remember being so afraid of what he was going to do if the order of protection was granted, because in his mind, he was not at fault. It was my daughter's fault, who quote unquote, had it coming or got in his way, and in his words, it was nothing. It wasn't that bad. Now, luckily, the court saw it differently, and I tell you this because. If it had been an issue between just the two of us, between him and me, I don't know if at that point I would have tried to go get the order, but at this point it was slightly less than a year from our divorce. I decided to protect my children. And I did it and he contested it. So we had to go have a whole hearing, and the judge listened to all the evidence and he upheld the original protective order. Now, flash forward to last fall, my ex began sending threatening emails to me. And because I know how this man thinks and how he believes, and some of the darker, Mormon doctrines, I found these threats credible and very upsetting, and it sent me into a nervous system. Breakdown. I wasn't sleeping. I considered getting a gun and arming myself, even though he lives in another state. I was sick with the imaginings of my mind and what he was willing to do. I didn't reply to him, but after about 10 days of spinning my bestie, Britta asked if she could read the email and she talked me off the ledge. She has met my husband and she was not having it. Letting her read his words and laugh about it and rant about it because she was Mormon as well. So she understood the scriptural references and the crazy that is my husband, she helped me break out of that state of dysregulation that I was in, and I began to remember no one has the right to threaten me, not my husband, not my children, not people I work with. No one. I sent the email to my attorney who informed my husband that if he sent me anything like this again, that I would seek an order of protection. So of course, less than a week later, I got another email and I immediately went to the courthouse and was granted the order that is currently in place and will last for two years. I was mentioning to Britta just this morning how much peace I get to experience by having this legal boundary in place that I got from saying no more and standing up for myself. That being said, he isn't nice about it. He violated the order a couple of times within the first month, and I had to report those violations to the police, but now he knows. I'm not fucking around. No one gets to abuse me and he seems to have settled down, so good boy. Hopefully you are not dealing with a high conflict narcissist like I am. But there are lots of ways that boundaries can be violated or people can be treating you that does not feel good and is not right, and it's time for you to speak up and say no more and defend yourself. Defending yourself in this way by speaking up, setting boundaries, following through. This is one of the most pure and beautiful ways to show love for yourself and to learn self-trust. I am going to walk you through a framework that I think that you will find helpful. Then I'm going to give you several examples of women that I have helped do this exact process so that you can see how it can be applied to life in a variety of ways. This is called the speak. Framework, so that's an acronym. S-P-E-A-K-S stands for spot the violation. So this is when you notice, notice the disrespect. Notice what it feels like when you get the email Notice when you get ignored and you've made a request Notice when someone comes at you. P is for pause and process. This is where I want you to take a beat and not reply immediately. I want you to feel it, journal it, cry it out, honor your emotions without judgment. You get to have the emotional response that feels genuine to you. E stands for, evaluate your options. Take time to strategize. What are the possible ways to respond? You can ignore it, you can speak up. Do you need legal help? do you need to file a police report and to evaluate what is the desired outcome? And sometimes your desired outcome isn't even possible. For instance, in my case, I have this desire that my husband and I can just speak peacefully with each other, and sadly, I don't think that is even possible. So the next best thing for me is that he not have access to me if he cannot speak respectfully to me. Nonthreatening ly to me then he needs to not have access. A is act strategically. You can't just feel and think about what you're going to do. There's going to be some action required. You need to take the step, send the letter, set the boundary, hire the attorney, confront the issue. And then K is keep your commitment. You need to learn to stick with your decision even when it's uncomfortable, even when it's inconvenient, because that is where self-trust grows. You will survive the discomfort of speaking up. What is much more difficult to survive is. Self abandonment and self betrayal. So again, s spot the violation. P, pause and process. E, evaluate your options, A act strategically, and K, keep your commitment. Alright, I'm gonna walk you through several examples. I have a client right now who did some work for a company. And they owe her a commission it's several thousand dollars. She wants to be paid. They agreed that they would pay her. They were supposed to pay her back in March, I believe it was. She reached out to them a few weeks ago and heard nothing. She messaged me a few nights ago and said, I really don't want to let this go, She feels like she's always trying to be the bigger person that will just let things go. She loves to have people get along. She's a very empathetic person, So let's start with S Spot. she noticed the breach of agreement. This was an agreement that was explicit. She was told she would receive a specific amount of money at a specific time, and she did not receive it. So notice spot. That breach of agreement. Then she took a step back to pause and process, and in that pausing and processing, she began to feel the difficulty of the story of I need to be the bigger person or forgive and forget and see what that was costing her. Next came evaluate. She had to evaluate what she wanted to do. So yes, there's an option of let's just let this go. It's not gonna be worth the money. It's not gonna be worth the headache. And then these scenarios of the stories her mind was making up, if the people that owed her the money got upset at her for wanting the money. But she also got to evaluate legal action. It's not so much money that she would hire an attorney, but it's definitely several thousand dollars that she could probably get back through small claims court. Then she decided how she wanted to act, which is reach out, Make another request that they fulfill their part of the contract and mention if this doesn't happen, my next step will be court, and then Kay, keep the commitment, which means she has to follow through. So being very clear on her actions by reaching out, setting a deadline. Reiterating what was agreed to and then following through no matter what. if you are one of those people who says, I don't know that I want to risk this relationship, if speaking up costs you a relationship, that relationship was already too expensive. You really need to take a step back and evaluate. Scenario number two. A woman has changed her name completely different name. It's such a beautiful name. I kind of wanna share it with you'cause it's such a beautiful name. But anyway, within her church, she changed her name. She's divorced and she changed her name completely from her birth name. But she lives in the same town that she grew up in. a lot of people know her by her birth name or her married name, not by her new chosen name. She went on Facebook and told people about her new name and most everyone has been supportive This was a very important decision to her. Well, she received a text on Sunday from a man in her church saying, I've changed your name on the church records, but as for me, I'm always going to call you by your old name and then put a little winky face. And that's when she reached out to me. By the time she reached out to me, she was literally shaking because the only people that are not respecting her decision on her name change are religious men in her church. it felt like such a violation of her, of her autonomy. Like they just feel so entitled to call her by a name that they want rather than the name that she has told them. To call her. So it was pretty easy to spot the violation in that moment. The first thing I told her was, you don't need to answer him right now. You get to take time to process this. So she. Went ahead and sat there shaking and crying because it really isn't about that one text. It's about so many times in this patriarchal religion that her children and was, are still a part of, that she has been dismissed and not heard. Her life has not been important, and she needed time to process that and then e evaluate. She had to decide, what are my options? What can I do? And I told her, you get to ignore this, or you get to speak up, you get to tell people, I will not answer to that name. You can tell them. He sounds like an entitled prick. You can tell him anything you want. You can address this however you want. Next step is to act, decide what action she wants to take. Does she want to text, does she want to involve other people? And this even goes beyond this particular person. She told me of a couple of other people in her life who are insisting on being incredibly disrespectful. Around her name as well. And so this is a lot of action and it may be different for each person. And then finally, she needs to keep her commitment, her commitment to herself by having her own back and not budging. she is not being too much, she is not being difficult. She is asking for the bare minimum, which is simply respect. Respect me when I say this is my name. This is the name you're to call me. Simple respect. third situation. I spoke with a woman a couple of weeks ago. She's living in the family house. The husband has moved out, but there's this large shed on the property that has all of his tools and his man cave. She has told him several times he needs to clean it out. He needs to get a storage unit, and he's always. Too busy. She wants to sell the house. So spot. So you spot that he is trying to either manipulate or obstruct or simply lie, not follow through on what needs to happen. Feels like a violation. He feels entitled to leave his things on the property. So the next step is pause and process. I. Process the exhaustion from being the strong one, the frustration of having to deal with it at all to constantly remind and ask and ask to deal with the fatigue of this lingering issue. Next is evaluate. Would it be most effective to go ahead and list the home for sale and if it sells, his things are part of the cell, or he has to have them out by a certain date? Do you need to create a legal notification system? What do I want to get out of this? Her next step is to act. Once she decides what she wants, what is the ultimate goal of taking action? Then she takes the action serves, notice, hires someone to clean it out or whatever it is, and then keep that commitment because protecting your peace. Protecting your financial future is really important, and it only has to be important to you for it to be important. That power that he has over her, it's not going to be given back to her. Like if he doesn't have to move his shit, he's not going to that power. It's going to be taken by the woman. Who is brave enough to stop asking for permission and simply telling him this is what's happening. Okay, next situation. I have a client whose children have begun to speak very disrespectfully to her in the last six to nine months, so disrespectfully that. it has become an unhealthy situation, not just for her and not just for the child who speaks this way to her most often, but for the other children in the house as well. It was pretty easy early on to spot the violation. a verbal boundary had been crossed as well as some deception and lying and hiding things. And so that was all part of this. So you spot the violation and then you pause and process, and she did so much of this. Slowing down, being there for herself, realizing that she was a part of what was going on in this relationship, trying to find her way through. She evaluated, what are my options? And she went through this process several times. So this isn't necessarily a one time through. So the first time she evaluated, Hey, I think we need to go to therapy. So went and did that, set up the, the therapy appointment, she, her husband and the child. And she kept that commitment, clear expectations, and then. When that didn't work and the husband started undermining her and wouldn't do the agreed upon actions, then she had to go back and spot that new boundary violation, pause and process that sense of betrayal that he felt entitled to not parent in a way that was helpful or what they had agreed upon. Evaluate. How does she want to go forward? Take new actions, keep new commitments, and she went through this process several times before she came to what is now her current situation, where the parenting time and the support that she receives and her child receives is different than what happened at first, but none of that would've happened unless she had. Really focused on spotting pausing and processing the hurt, evaluating what do I wanna get out of this? What's the ultimate goal here? Taking action and then keeping that commitment. I have one last example to tell you. A woman came to me and wanted help setting boundaries with her mother. She'd gotten married very young, had several children, and She needed to find a way to intentionally grow up and trust herself. But in this process, her mother was going to take care of her children for the weekend But the mom, it turns out, planned to take the kids with her to go out to this restaurant so she could drink and dance and that she would drive them home. And when my client told her, I don't feel good about that. About my kids going there watching you, drinking and dancing, and then you driving them home. I know what this looks like. I'm not comfortable with that. And her mom told her, well, when your kids are with me, you have no say about what I do. I will do whatever I want. And in that moment. My client recognized that a line had been crossed And this woman, there had been lots of of violations and e measurements in her relationship with her mother that were not okay, but at this point, when she saw that her children would be in danger, this is what gave her the strength to set a firm boundary. So she spotted the violation. She believed her mother when she said that she would do whatever she wanted when the kids were with her. Then my client had to pause and process. There was a lot of betrayal. She gave herself time to process in a way that felt supportive to her nervous system. She then had to evaluate. What was the consequence of setting new boundaries? Her mother provided the bulk of the childcare many times, and so she would have to make other plans for childcare. She had to act, so she canceled her childcare plans with her mom. Made other arrangements and she went forward with setting safe boundaries for future interactions with her mom. And then she had to keep that commitment. My client was so consistent in recognizing boundary violations, deciding what she was willing to do, what she was no longer willing to do, not using her children as pawns in this whole thing, but her ultimate goal was to keep everyone safe, including herself. Listen, your voice matters. Your boundaries matter. Your wellbeing matters. You being safe, it deeply matters, and there is no shame, none at all in fighting for your peace, your respect, your future standing up for yourself. It can be uncomfortable. but so is abandoning yourself. In fact, self betrayal is so deeply painful, so deeply painful. Stand up rather than betray yourself. And I promise you this, the more you honor your needs. The stronger, freer, and more radically joyful you become. don't forget, your silence will not protect you, but your courage, your courage will set you free. And that is the life that we want, a life of freedom. All right, babe. I'll talk to you next week.