The Post-Divorce Glow-Up Show

75: Reclaiming the Divorced Body Part 1: Why You Feel Numb — and How to Come Back to Life

• Quinn Otrera • Episode 75

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Quinn kicks off a month-long series on embodiment—the practice of living in your body with safety, honesty, and aliveness—especially after divorce. We explore why so many of us disconnect (hello, codependency, fawn, freeze, dissociation), why that was smart survival, and how to start coming home to yourself with gentle, doable steps. This is about belonging to you—not performing for anyone else.

What You’ll Learn

  • Embodiment 101: It’s awareness and presence—treating your body as your home, not a problem to fix.
  • Why we disconnect: Trauma responses (fawn/freeze/flight), cultural conditioning, and the “read-the-room” life.
  • Trauma in the body: “We can’t think our way out; the body needs to metabolize it.”
  • A kinder story: Your nervous system wasn’t weak; it was wise. Now we help it feel safe.

Three Gentle Practices (Try This Week)

  1. 60-second Grounding: Feel your feet, drop your shoulders, slow breath, whisper: “I’m here.”
  2. Journal Prompt: When do I feel most alive in my body? (Don’t overthink—notice.)
  3. One-Minute Presence: Choose a daily task (coffee, shower, walk) and do it with all five senses.

Favorite Lines to Remember

  • “Clear is kind.” — Brené Brown
  • “Your body is not your enemy. She is your home, your compass, and your connection to the divine.” — Quinn

Resources Mentioned

Content Note

We touch on trauma, spiritual conditioning, sexual coercion, and medical ER anecdotes. Take breaks as needed; go at the pace of safety.

Series Roadmap (What’s Coming)

  • Part 2: The nervous system—reading your body’s language of safety & simple regulation tools.
  • Part 3: Reclaiming touch, pleasure, and boundaries—sensuality without fear.
  • Part 4: Embodiment as a spiritual practice—living grounded, intuitive, and fully alive.


“Embodiment after divorce isn’t a makeover; it’s a homecoming. One breath, one heartbeat, one gentle moment at a time. #PostDivorceGlowUp #EmbodiedHealing”

Call to Action

If this episode helped you exhale, share it with a sister who’s ready to come home to herself.

PostDivorceGlowUp.com

Email: quinn@postdivorceglowup.com

Hello, lover. How are you? Oh, do you just love being divorced or is it just me? I know, I know. I get so excited when I get to talk to my divorced girlies because I just love it. Love it, love it. and I'm hoping to walk you into a place of loving yourself, even if you don't love being divorced. Divorce has provided me with such a reconnection. With the relationship with myself and with others, I must say I have become more honest and bold and kind and probably mean because I really love the person that I'm becoming. And I say mean because speaking the truth, as a codependent, it feels mean, but I keep telling myself it's the kindest thing I can do. Clear is kind. Clear is kind. Thank you. Brene Clear is kind. I wanna share with you an experience that really struck me because it showed me how differently. I am experienced by other people. So last week I was doing my volunteer work in the emergency room And I was sitting in what's called the internal waiting room. This is the place inside the hospital. It's not open to the public. This is where the patients are sitting. They've already been seen by a doctor, but they're getting saline solution or other medications through an iv. And I was caring for a young woman who was very sick and I think she had a fever and struggling to keep down medicine. And I was also taking care of an older man, and by older I mean like boomer. So not that much older than me, but older. And when I say I was taking care of them, I mean I was trying to make them comfortable. I was offering blankets and reassurance and vomit bags. I was also escorting visitors to other parts of the er. And there was point when the man that I was taking care of learned that I was a volunteer, and he said, so it's your job to sit there and look pretty. And the girl started to cry and said, I can't believe you're a volunteer. I've never felt so cared for in my entire life. Whew. Now both of them are watching me work. They, they are seeing me physically work and they're both receiving care from me and experiencing my attention, but the dude didn't seem to register my labor as anything of value. I'm just there to sit and look pretty. And the girl on the other hand, she didn't mention all of the physical things I did, but it was certainly part of the care that I gave her. But she mentioned how she felt by receiving the care I was offering her. And to the man you can fuck right off. And yes, I did have a few things to say to him, to his face. I did not say fuck off, but I did say it has literally never been a woman's job just to sit and look pretty. Do you know how much fucking labor it takes to sit and look pretty? Like, ugh. And to the girl. And to all of you listening to me, you deserve to feel safe and cared for. I've got you. I really want you to hear that you deserve to feel safe and cared for. Last week, I talked about the power of connection with Brita Joe on the. Podcast wasn't that fun, but just the way that women heal in community and being witnessed by other women can bring us back to life. And today I want to talk to you about another kind of connection, the one that starts right here, the connection to your own body. And I know I've talked about this. Before on the podcast, and I want to dive in deeper because I've noticed that sometimes, especially after talking about community, sometimes we use community to avoid being with ourselves or we use community to feel less than when we are alone. I only get to be with you in community for a few minutes each week, and I wanna give you a map and some tools to help you in all of the other hours of the week. So this is going to be the first episode in what I'm planning is a four-part series about reclaiming the body after divorce. You have some opportunities post-divorce to heal and to come in contact with a deeper truth of you by facing what you've come through. and you are facing some specific challenges with this work of embodiment. Many of you are unpacking the trauma from. Your marriage, sexual coercion, emotional manipulation, financial abuse, codependency. Many of us have trauma responses that help us easily disassociate. Even when we are in situations now where we want to be fully present, and some of us have developed a fawn response to triggers in order to survive, and so we're fawning when we want to be setting boundaries. We're also facing a different type of loneliness by not being married. I mean there is that, that very specific kind of loneliness of being in a marriage and feeling so alone. But now you're having the loneliness of getting to know you, and some of us may find it intolerable to be alone with ourselves. So I'm hoping in this series to help relieve some of this pain and walk you into love with yourself maybe for the first time in your life. Over the next month, we're going to take this journey together step by step. We're not gonna take big giant steps. We get to slow down. We don't need to be anywhere but here, but step by step together. Through what it means to become embodied, to live inside yourself, to feel safe, to feel alive, and eventually to feel pleasure and joy again fully within your body, so that when you come to Tucson. We can go dancing. So here's what's coming. Next week, we're going to talk about the nervous system, how it speaks to you, and how you can help your nervous system to stay regulated in the next week. Week three, we'll explore healing, touch, pleasure, and boundaries, and how to reclaim your sensuality while. Offloading fear. And our final week, we're going to look at embodiment as a practice, the, the art of living each day fully alive, grounded, and connected. But first, today we start at the beginning, the call back to your body. Divorce has a way of shaking us loose from everything we thought we knew. It shakes us loose from our identity, our roles, and sometimes our sanity. Sometimes it shakes us out of the complacency about where we live or our career. There's a lot of shaking loose for years. Maybe for decades, for many of us, we were reading the emotional weather in someone else's eyes. We were managing someone else's moods, walking on eggshells and pushing our own needs so far down that we forgot that we had them. And then when the marriage ends, it's like waking up in this unfamiliar house, your body, and realizing you've been living in the guest room all along when you had this whole house to live in, but the whole house didn't feel safe, so you only feel safe in a very small part of it. Gabor Mate wrote this beautiful book called The Myth of Normal, and he's got a lot of YouTube videos about trauma you could check out, but he says Trauma is not what happens to you. It is what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you. That's why Two people can experience virtually the same event and interpret it differently, and one can end up with trauma and the other person may not because it's not what happens. It's what happens inside of you. And I want to remind you that trauma is not a contest. Your trauma is not up for debate. So if you said. To your ex. I. Felt a lot of trauma in our relationship. The way you spoke to me, the coercion for sex, the way you didn't trust me, they don't get to say no, you don't get to have that experience. But the thing is, we can't. Talk our way out of trauma. In my experience, trauma is a lived experience. It happens to us in our bodies and our minds are a part of it, but it's our body that needs to metabolize it and process it. And when you've been hurt emotionally, sexually, spiritually, your body learns how to protect you. It learned how to go numb, how to disassociate, how to fawn, how to freeze, how to leave, how to escape. But you disassociated, not because you're weak, but because your body is wise. She was trying to keep you safe, and you fawn, not because you're weak, but because your body is wise. She was trying to keep you safe. You freeze, not because you're weak, but because your body is wise. She was trying to keep you safe. Are you seeing the pattern? You flee or leave tense situations? Not because you are weak, but because your body is wise and she is trying to keep you safe. All of these. Responses are normal for trauma survivors. Last week I read the book, the House of My Mother, by Sherry Frankie, and for those of you who don't know the backstory, Sherry's mother Ruby, created a popular YouTube channel and showed her amazing Mormon family life featuring herself and her husband and her six children. And Sherry is her oldest daughter. And this book is the story of Ruby's descent into what? I can only describe as spiritual psychosis, which unfortunately is not all that rare within Mormonism, and her reign of terror over her children ended when one of her youngest children escaped and was able to get the police involved. Sherry is a family friend and several of my children knew several of her siblings. They all went to the same school. The way this book was helpful to me was to read how her strong, fond response helped her survive. Absolutely survive an intense and insane home life, but how it also played out after she left home, after she was a legal adult after. She should have known better, You know, quote unquote, should have known better. Those patterns followed her into other relationships. She didn't leave her sick family home and suddenly become, well, she left and she took her survival skills with her. What survival skills have you honed in your life? Did you learn to disassociate during sex? Did you become hypervigilant when your spouse was around or when he wasn't? Did you learn to freeze in the middle of a fight and could not think of anything to say? Until hours or maybe days later, did you learn to get the hell out in order to have space to calm yourself and feel safe. Now, I'm asking you this because it's time to get honest with yourself about a. How you learned to survive in your body and question. Just get curious if you want to continue that pattern. There is wisdom in that pattern, but we can also bring some wisdom in deciding if that's a pattern that serves you or if that's something you want to let go of. I know it can feel overwhelming. And even scary to look at how we've had to learn to survive. And that's okay. We can do this together. We can do this. I got you. Because healing. True healing is available to you. It is slow or it can be slow. It is brave work. It is unlocking a cage and walking back to yourself. Bessel VanDerKolk, he wrote the book, the Body Keeps the Score. We know not only from his work, but from the work of many other researchers that your body remembers the pain, even when your brain logically thinks you should get over it. If you're not living with your ex and you're with your new lover, why do you disassociate still? I had that exact experience. Presented by one of my clients, it sent her into this whole C-P-T-S-D Rabbit Hole because she couldn't understand why she would have this response to someone that she felt absolutely safe with, but it was just her body remembering. But guess what? Your body, she also remembers joy and that's the score. When we say the body keeps the score, it's not, the body trauma is a hundred million and joy is zero. We get to learn how to experience joy and pleasure in the moment. That's the score we're going to rewrite together in this series. So let's break this down. What does it mean to be embodied? Because it's not just yoga poses or green juice, or having a perfect morning routine. Embodiment is awareness. Presence. It's living as if your body is your home, not your enemy or your project. You may not even recall a time in your life when your body didn't feel like it was your enemy or your project. I took my girls shopping this weekend and watched a couple of them just absolutely spin out as they struggled with body dysmorphia. Not even being able to stand trying on clothes, and it made my postmenopausal brain want to rage at the world in which strong, brave, beautiful girls are being fed. The poison that their body is a project, their body is an enemy. It's never quite right or good enough or worthy of being adored just as it is. And if that's you, I am so sorry. It is time we stop fighting ourselves. And our bodies, and instead broker a piece where you notice your heartbeat and you think, oh, here I am. Where you feel that lump in your throat in a difficult conversation and you ask what wants to be said. What are the words that need to be spoken? Embodiment is when you sit. With loneliness without it making it mean that you are unlovable or unworthy. Dr. Hillary McBride, she wrote a beautiful book called The Wisdom of Your Body, and she teaches that embodiment is the practice of coming home to ourselves again and again, even when home has not always felt safe. And for divorced women, especially those healing from codependency, coercion, or trauma, this work is revolutionary because for years someone else claimed space in your body, their moods, their needs, their words. Even before you were married, you may have not felt like your body was your own, but this body right here, it belongs to you. It belongs to you. It always has. And if you have some spiritual trauma like I do, where you were told your body is not your own, it was bought with a price and that price was the blood of Christ, that's all very convenient for the men that want to possess my body. But this body, this body, your body, it belongs to you. You are the most important person in your life. You deserve the most adoration and love from yourself, and it's okay if you aren't there yet. We're not in any hurry. Now. I know this can be scary work coming home to your body after trauma can feel like walking into a house where the rooms are trashed and there's one light bulb hanging from a thread and it flickers and there's a mattress with a weird stain in the corner. You might wanna close the door and leave, but. Sleeping on the street has not gotten you where you want to be. Every time you choose to come back to your body and stay to breathe, to feel, to soften, you are rewiring your story. Peter Levi, he wrote, um, the book, waking the Tiger, and he's the founder of Somatic Experiencing, and he teaches that trauma isn't just what happens to us, it's what happens inside of us, right? When the body can't complete a natural stress response. So stick with me as I briefly explain this. It's going to make your current struggle between your body and mind and trauma and embodiment, it just makes it so much clearer. So every living creature has an instinctive cycle for dealing with a threat and humans. The human animal that we are, we are part of nature. We are not separate. So this applies to us. So first, there's the sensation of danger and the body instantly prepares fight, flee, fawn, freeze, and adrenaline, floods and muscles, tighten and breath quickens. And then step two is the action or release. Once the threat passes, animals naturally shake, tremble, or take deep breaths. They discharge the survival energy stored in the body, and step three is that they return to calm. The nervous system resets and safety returns. Humans, though. We often get stuck between steps one and two. We experience something overwhelming, a fight with a partner, years of emotional neglect, a traumatic divorce, and our body wants to release that survival energy. But. Instead, we suppress it, we freeze, we smile, we stay polite. We fawn, we get safe in other ways, but we don't take the time to release. And when the stress cycle doesn't complete, that energy stays trapped in the body as tension, anxiety, panic. Or even numbness. It comes out sideways many times in a lot of the autoimmune diseases that women struggle with So completing the cycle does not mean relive the story, but it's about connecting with the body so the body can finish what is started through gentle awareness movement, breath. Shaking. We allow the nervous system to finally release that old energy and return to equilibrium. Trauma happens when the body can't finish. What it started and healing happens when we finally let it. You deserve to feel safe. You deserve to feel pleasure. You deserve to feel alive. So let's make this practical. Because, you know, I like real doable steps. So here's step one, babe. Grounding practice. I know it's, it's just a catchphrase, but let's talk about what that means right now. If you can. I want you to feel your feet on the floor. Just notice. The weight of your body in the chair, or if you're standing up or walking, let your shoulders drop. Take a slow breath in and whisper to yourself. I'm here. Just that. See that wasn't hard. Just that. That's embodiment. At Brita's retreat, she gave me a bracelet, one of the tiny word bracelets during one of the workshops, and so it has these words, you are here, which was perfect because I have become a pro at disassociation and always wanting to be somewhere else, a future fantasy or past nostalgia and. This bracelet reminds me. Just be right here. That's where you can be embodied. Not in the past, not in the future. Just right here. You are here with me. Just stay here and breathe with me for a minute and just notice how it feels. Just keep breathing. All right. Step two, we're going to take what's inside of you and bring it out, which means journaling. So ask yourself. An answer for yourself. When do I feel most alive in my body? Now, I don't want you to think too hard. Just notice. Maybe it's when there's some music on and you're dancing in the kitchen, you're just really feeling yourself or walking outside. Dusk or a good cry. For me, it's when I hike and I get to a pool or a waterfall and I get to sit and just be listening and being held by nature and sunshine in my breath. I love that. I also feel alive when I have some great music in the car and the windows are. Down, and I know the words so I can sing along. This is when my little girls want to die, especially at the stoplights, because if mom is singing, she's not stopping just because we're at a red light, but I feel alive. Okay, step three. This is going to be your daily presence practice. Just pick something you already do. Do you drink coffee? Do you shower? Do you walk a pet? And just for one minute, do it with all of your senses, awake, smell, touch, sound, sight. Just use. All of it. That's how you start coming home, one sensory doorway at a time. And if it still feels overwhelming, just remind yourself. You don't have to fix anything, you're just meeting yourself. Your body is not your enemy. She is your home, your compass, and your connection to the divine. Now, over the next few weeks, we're gonna keep building on this foundation. So next week we're gonna talk nervous system. How to listen to your body's language of safety and regulate it. Then we're gonna move into touch, pleasure, and boundaries because we love all of that. And then finally, exploring embodiment as a practice, because I want you experiencing connection to yourself and to your intuition, and to your joy. I think you will love that you got divorced and got to do this work. By the end of this series, you'll have both the tools and the felt sense of what it means to live from the inside out. Grounded, more confident, more whole, all. And just a reminder, you don't have to force yourself to be embodied. I'm just asking you to stop running from yourself. Come back. Just one breath, one heartbeat, one gentle moment at a time because the glow up isn't about looking better. And I know no matter how many times I say that, people are going to think it is, but damn girl, you just look better when you are feeling yourself. You don't need a haircut, you don't need to lose any weight. But when you are feeling yourself. Oh, life starts looking very good. Thank you. Thank you for spending time with me today. I'll talk to you next week.