Divorce Diaries: Lessons From the Trenches
Welcome to Divorce Diaries, where host Cary Jacobson, attorney and mediator brings you real stories, hard truths, and practical advice on navigating divorce and family law. Whether you're going through it, considering it, or just curious, this is your place for clarity, confidence, and resilience.
Divorce Diaries: Lessons From the Trenches
EP #27: Healing After Divorce: A Path to Rebuilding and Rediscovery with Guest Danielle Bird
The deepest wounds in our relationships often trace back to our earliest experiences. When divorce happens, these hidden patterns suddenly emerge, demanding our attention. In this transformative episode of Divorce Diaries, host Cary Jacobson, attorney and mediator with Jacobson Family Law, is joined by somatic trauma recovery guide Danielle Bird as she reveals why divorce acts as a powerful catalyst for exposing attachment wounds we've carried since childhood.
For anyone finding themselves repeating painful relationship patterns even after divorce, this episode offers both compassionate understanding and concrete tools for change. It's not about fixing something broken—it's about reconnecting with your body's original blueprint for love and security that's been there all along.
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When we experience divorce, all of our wounds, anything that's unprocessed, anything that hasn't been looked at comes up to the surface Because it might be for the first time in a long time, depending on how long you were together in that marriage the first time you're really alone and really seeing yourself and only hearing yourself, and there's complicated grief to that as well.
Intro/Close:Welcome to Divorce Diaries, where attorney Cary Jacobson brings you real stories, hard truths and practical advice on navigating divorce and family law. Whether you're going through it, considering it or just curious, this is your place for clarity, confidence and resilience.
Cary Jacobson:Welcome back to another episode of Divorce Diaries Lessons from the Trenches where we talk about the mess, the meaning and the moments of clarity that come with life after divorce. I'm your host, Cary Jacobson, family law attorney, mediator and passionate about helping people through the process in the most peaceful manner possible. Today, we're exploring something that often hides behind the surface of our breakups insecure attachment, why we chase, why we may shut down and why it often feels like love may never feel safe. Our guest, danielle Bird, a somatic trauma recovery guide who works at the intersection of neuroscience, attachment repair and nervous system regulation. Danielle helps individuals and couples unlearn old survival patterns and root back into their body's original blueprint for love and connection. She's also the creator of the no Matter what who's Watching Circle, a space devoted to embodied healing and authentic expression. Danielle, thank you so much for being here. I appreciate it.
Danielle Bird:Yeah, thank you so much for having me. What a beautiful introduction, thank you.
Cary Jacobson:Can you please explain to our listeners how insecure attachment may shape our relationships, especially in the context of divorce?
Danielle Bird:Absolutely. That is such a good question, and one of the main things I like to bring forward when we talk about attachment in general is that there can often be a lot of shame felt as an adult in the recognition of oh, I do feel insecure, as maybe you're in your 50s right, you're in your 60s, you're've lived quite a life, and so you can kind of feel behind in that way. But in reality, in the body, in the nervous system, in our neurology, the way that our attachment is seeded is so early on in our experience of life. Oftentimes the foundation is created between the ages of zero and two, and you don't have a say with how you're being seeded, anchored in to which attachment style at that time, and so it is one of the almost only things that you actually haven't chosen for yourself. It is entirely reliant on how other people responded to you in your early years, and so oftentimes what happens is that in moments where we have crisis whether that is a divorce, whether that is any type of traumatic experience that is shocking or unexpected, can also be what we don't receive too.
Danielle Bird:These wounds come up and they could have been hidden for the majority of your life. You may not have been aware A lot of the times. They can seem like they are part of our personality. In actuality, they are wounds stuck in our body, and so the different types of attachment will show up at different times for different people, for lack of a better word. That is, feeling anxiously attached, so needing that close proximity and suffocating the other partner, without intentionally doing so and not really understanding what's happening inside of the body that leads us to do that, or being on the opposite side where we aren't paying attention to them.
Danielle Bird:We're quite spacious in our interaction, which is called a dismissive avoidant. There's also a type where we oscillate between the two, kind of like a roller coaster that we're not really sure what way it's about to turn, and that's called the fearful avoidant, and that is a mix of both. It's also what is known as the disorganized attachment of our wounds. Anything that's unprocessed, anything that hasn't been looked at, comes up to the surface because it might be for the first time in a long time depending on how long you were together in that marriage the first time you're really alone and really seeing yourself and only hearing yourself, and there's complicated grief to that as well right.
Cary Jacobson:How does someone find out what type of attachment personality they may have?
Danielle Bird:I love this question. There's a lot of different ways you can actually do that, but one of the easiest ways I find is just introspecting on how do you respond to conflict specifically, and it doesn't only need to be in a romantic setting. It doesn't have to be that way. It can also be with your family, with your coworkers, with your boss, with your neighbors, because attachment style isn't just romantic, it's literally how we relate to anything, your own body included. So there's lots of layers to this, but if you experience conflict by wanting to really cling and feeling like I'm going to be abandoned, right, let me become what I think this other person really desires of me so that they'll stay with me.
Danielle Bird:And then you stay really close to them so that they'll stay with me, and then you stay really close to them so that you can monitor it's called hyper vigilantly, like scanning every nuance of them to confirm that that we're okay right, that they're not gonna believe me, that they want me, that they're gonna choose me. We become very preoccupied with that, almost like when horses are running races and they have those blinders on or just tunnel vision on them and we lose our sense of self in that. This is because growing up there was inconsistency in the parenting. So parents were there sometimes. There weren't other times and we weren't really sure what was happening. There was lots of inconsistency. Maybe you actually were abandoned or there was just perceived abandonment. That shows up a lot of the times for a parent who might physically be there but they're not actually present, right. So there's that felt sense of abandonment, really waiting for for the shoe to drop, that sensation Like I can't relax. I need to constantly be, be on if you really feel like you have to show up perfectly or else your partner will leave you. So you stay close and then in that you really push them away. That if that resonates with you, that's an anxious, preoccupied attachment, okay.
Danielle Bird:And then if you are a dismissive avoidant and conflict occurs, your inner world probably looks like this isn't my responsibility, why is Cary so upset? Why is she making me deal with her feelings? These are not mine to soothe, it's not my responsibility. I even feel overwhelmed by your expression and desire for closeness, especially when it's in the form of accountability. But this is because, actually, dismissive avoidance parents profoundly neglected them emotionally. And so if you're a dismissive avoidant as an adult, the other partner's desire for closeness, especially emotionally, it triggers in them this unprocessed shame wound of overwhelm. And so what happens is that in a dismissive avoidant they go. This inner awareness of my overwhelm, of you asking me to hold your feelings, makes me feel like I'm not good enough and so I can't express that because I'm overwhelmed with that shame and I'm flooded with that and so I shut down. And so what happens on the surface is that we see dismissive, avoided partners pull away. They might even look like they're cold or they don't care. That is not the reality of what's happening inside of their body. They really care. They don't know what to do with that. They don't know, they don't have the emotional literature to be able to understand what's happening inside and express that, because there's so much shame, and shame as an emotion.
Danielle Bird:Yes, the antidote is to express it, but it takes a lot of bravery and it takes a lot of nervous system capacity to hold, because it's so debilitating to our system. It moves us very quickly into a freeze response, and so if you grew up very neglected, then that pattern repeats, not only to yourself right, I'm not expressing my needs, I'm pushing them down but also to the partner in front of me, so I will neglect you as well. So the dismissive really pulls away, the anxious really pulls towards, and then the fearful avoidant is a mix of the two. And with the disorganized attachment, the fearful avoidant, this is where you have the highest amount of what are known as the trauma responses. Right, we talk about survival patterns. We're really talking about the fight nervous system state, the flight, the freeze, the fawning, which is the people pleasing or appeasing, and the shutdown nervous system, trauma response. And so this, this pattern of attachment, will oscillate between the two, so there will be perhaps a very strong reactive blowing up.
Danielle Bird:Right, the dismissive avoid, or sorry, not the dismissive avoid, but the disorganized attachment is not afraid of conflict. They actually will move into it. However, it's very chaotic, it's very this is the pattern that is actually the most misunderstood as narcissistic. But it's not narcissistic because they actually care and narcissists real, true narcissists don't. They're not having that introspective moment but on the surface it can seem very self-centered because it's so argumentative, and so they oscillate really between blowing up in that fight way, especially cutting with words, to fully shutting down their nervous system states, not sharing their inner experience and really reactively setting boundaries or sharing about their needs, and then dismissing their own inner experience in that. So inside of a disorganized attachment is this yearning almost incessantly, almost obsessively, to have closeness but simultaneously not sharing, not coming forward, not bringing anything to the other person.
Cary Jacobson:Got it, so that's very interesting, and all of that is based on things that may have happened to someone when they were very young and didn't even really know that these things were impacting them.
Danielle Bird:Absolutely.
Cary Jacobson:Yeah, can you explain the link between the attachment trauma and the nervous system dysregulation?
Danielle Bird:Absolutely so. When someone has an attachment wound, what that looks like in the body is imprinting, sort of like if you step on cement before it's solidified, right, there's imprinting there of both unprocessed primary emotions. So, whether it is overwhelm, whether it is devastation, whether it is panic, whether it is confusion, right, because imagine a child is born and they're not receiving what they need as basic necessities, but they don't have the language or even the neurology to understand what's happening. They don't have the ability to go hmm, this isn't about me, right? So they internalize it, they imprint it into themselves, and so what that looks like is stuckness, and that's another word to say trauma. Trauma isn't an experience outside of us, it's actually the imprinting of it in us. It's the clenching, it's the bracing, it's the holding of that in our body system, and so, on one piece, it is unprocessed primary emotion that gets stuck. But then we also have the adrenalized nervous system response that gets uncompleted, because to not receive your needs means that, especially at a very young age, when we can't externalize as adults it's a little different, but it still works. Similarly we become the threat because we hold that imprinting in our body and so the nervous system.
Danielle Bird:In the most simple terms, what it does is it goes am I safe or am I not? All day, in many different ways, constantly right, automatically. Whether that's a social interaction, a thought form that you have, an emotional response you're experiencing, whatever it is, it's constantly just going am I safe or am I not? Am I safe or am I not? And when you hold belief wounds right let's say, the parent never checked in on you and emotionally neglected you you are going to have a belief wound of, because it makes sense to believe that that would be the reason why they're not showing up. It must be me. And so when you have belief wounds and they get housed in your unconscious, in your subconscious, in your body, because you're so young, you're not even consciously engaging yet. It stays there until you rewire it.
Danielle Bird:And so, as an adult, you hold all of these different wounds in your body and you're like why am I getting so triggered during the day? Why am I so activated? Why does this irritate me so much? Why do I just feel so sad, so depressed, so anxious? It's because you have kind of like a smorgasbord of different wounds that are still in your body and they'll stay there. And so what happens is all all through the day. You have certain cues in your mind with this part of your brain that's called the amygdala. I like to think of it like the red flag center and it holds all of those red flags and anytime you come close to any sensory cue that looks like that red flag, it immediately speaks to your nervous system. Your nervous system says, okay, there's an attack on guard. Okay, but there's nothing happening outside of you. The attack is inside the system.
Danielle Bird:And so those survival patterns of fight, flight, freeze, fun and shutdown are constantly pumping cortisol stress hormones through your body. And so you start to brace. But you're not bracing from life, you're bracing from your own inner experience. And what happens is that the neurology that you have, the system of how the nervous system works, keeps it in place, and this is by what we call the reticular activating system. And this is by what we call the reticular activating system. You can, I like to call it the razzle dazzle, but it's this filter between the subconscious so the subconscious is in the body and then the conscious mind, like we're talking right now, and what it does is that it programs this part of your brain that's called the default mode network. So let's say what the system does when it's just on automatic, right, so defaulted. What is it just doing in the background, right?
Danielle Bird:So what happens is that, whatever belief wounds you hold in your body and your subconscious I'm not good enough the razzle dazzle, the reticular activating system, is going to confirm throughout your day that belief. And it does that because it's efficient, because it also does that for positive beliefs, right, so it does serve us. But when we hold that trauma, it really doesn't, because the nervous system is constantly getting threat cues right, and so science calls this right, the confirmation bias right. They call the placebo effect, spirituality calls it manifesting. Like it's all. We're all talking about the same thing in different industries, different fields, and it's that whatever you hold in your body subconsciously becomes the program that you seek out. And so your partner could do seven things in the day that disprove that belief wound, but you're not going to pay attention to that. You're only going to pay attention to the one moment that they confirmed a subconscious wound, until you actually get to rewire that subconsciously.
Cary Jacobson:And how do people go about rewiring?
Danielle Bird:Yes, I love that there's so many different ways to rewire. What I do with my clients is that we get to know what their senses are the most, as some people prefer to rewire the belief or the thought or the action or the emotion. But one of my favorite tools for this is not only the auto suggestion reprogramming, which I'll tell you about, but also what I like to call CPR for emotional processing, because what happens when we get activated into these survival responses is that we live in our head because the nervous system says I'm unsafe, but it's the body that's unsafe, so we won't live where the pain is. So we will basically be cut off at the neck and try to process our emotions in our mind and get overwhelmed by that, because we're only using our head as a spatial like. Our head is so small compared to the rest of our body, and so what I like to do with clients is that we get really good at metabolizing emotions and I can actually share that resource with you. If you want, for free, I'll give you the link for that. It's called CPR three really easy steps to emotionally process. It's beyond the scope of what we can dive into in this conversation, but I recommend anybody just take screenshots of it, keep it on your phone so that you can just have that in your pocket and you can try it anytime.
Danielle Bird:But for an easy rewiring tool is auto-suggestion, where you take any belief wound that you have. Right, it could be I am disconnected, I am not good enough, I am abandoned, and it can also be I will be so. I am or I will be. What you want to do is you want to start to utilize this when your subconscious is most active. So that's either an hour within waking up, an hour before going to bed. You know when you're kind of sleeping and you're loopy, you wake up, you're still loopy. That's actually an indication that your subconscious is more active. Where you kind of wake up, like in a dream, almost right, your subconscious is more active during those times. It can also happen after you get into a flow state. So maybe a flow state for you is like watching a movie that you really like, could be meditation, could be a walk outside. It looks different for everyone, but you don't want to do it during your work day because your conscious mind is more active.
Danielle Bird:So that's first, and then let's say we go with the example of I'm not good enough. We want to switch it to the positive, not because I want you to gaslight yourself or we're going with toxic positivity, but because the subconscious takes things literally. Because if I say, don't think of a pink flower, what are you thinking about Pink flower? Right, it just takes a literal. So it's not to gaslight yourself into. I believe that I'm beautiful, but like, just that's what you're really inputting into that program. So you want to go. I am good enough.
Danielle Bird:And you want to go because and what you want to do is you want to find experiential evidence across as many areas of your life as you can for moments where you actually have felt good enough, because the razzle, dazzle, the reticular activating system, there are moments where you have felt good enough, but you have not highlighted them because of the belief wound. So if you take a moment to really just okay, pause when was the last time I felt good enough? Or when, across my whole life, have I felt good enough, you can go in there and find those experiences that might look like oh, I felt good enough when I was driving in the coffee line and someone bought my coffee, right, it can be an experience just like that. So you put that experience down, you write that down. You can also say it in front of the mirror, you can do while you're dancing. There's many different ways you can do it. So you write that down I am good enough because the girl paid for my coffee the other day.
Danielle Bird:And then what you want to do, because you're utilizing your visualization through this, because you're revisiting memory, and the subconscious language isn't this type of language. That's quite why you saw the flower. It's actually visualization, sensation and emotion. And where do we see all of those in memory? Right, yeah, and so we bring in the memory. In that moment, I'm good enough because she bought me a coffee. And we want to drop into feeling. How did I feel in that moment? So, still revisiting the memory, I felt el, elated. I felt grateful, right yeah, grateful, exactly.
Danielle Bird:And then you want to drop into, okay, and then physiology. What did I feel in my body? How did I experience those feelings in my body? So we want to go into that somatic language of I felt like my chest started to open up. I felt like I started to feel lighter. I wanted to, like, dance a little bit, I started to move my spine a bit more, and what we're doing there is we're speaking the language of the nervous system, because the nervous system is in our body right, it's the brain and the spinal cord but the majority of your information pathways in your nervous system actually go from your extremities and your organs to your brain. 80% of them are going from your muscles and the rest of your body up to your brain, versus 20% are going from your brain downwards.
Danielle Bird:This is why, if you feel unsafe, you can't gaslight yourself into feeling safe. Your body's saying I'm having a different experience, I don't know what you're talking about, but I don't feel good. Right, but we can show our mind that we're safe. We can show our mind that we can feel good, and that's what this auto-suggestion does. And so what you want to do is flip it to the positive. I am good enough Experiential evidence across as many areas of your life as you can. You want to go for anywhere between 5 to 15 per day. You don't have to do it morning and night. Just choose one and commit and be consistent, because the wounds were programmed through consistency, so they're going to be reprogrammed through consistency as well. And then the emotion, the body sensation, specifically, and that's that's what it does. That's how it works. That's one way to do that. That's awesome.
Cary Jacobson:So, as we're about to wrap up, what advice would you give someone who may feel stuck in the same like painful relationship loop, um, which I'm assuming has to do with their attachment style, um, even after they've gone through a divorce process?
Danielle Bird:Absolutely so. If you are stuck in the same painful loop, it is because there is a belief wound. Another way to say that is there is a part of your consciousness, there's a part of you inside that is stuck in that response. It's stuck in the memory, in a very embodied state of that experience. And so one the emotional processing PDF that I'll send a link to that get really good at doing that, because what it does is essentially, you connect with that experience of stuckness, you go into your body through some prompts that I have and you explore that and you move that energy naturally, because what happens is that people go, I feel shitty and I just want to move through it. But what happens is that people go, I feel shitty and I just want to move through it.
Danielle Bird:But what we want to do is I feel awful in my body, I actually create space for it and then, without forcing and allowing myself to be curious of it, it naturally is going to change, and then I'm not resisting something, because it's never the stuckness, it's the resistance of it that creates the perpetuation of it, and the stuckness is actually it could be a younger part of you that has no verbal language to it right, and so we want to repair that right. If, if the, the, the challenge is the disconnect, the stuckness is a representation of a disconnect somewhere in your inner system. And so we want to do is we want to repair that by experientially and embodied teaching that part, that to remember that your whole and that creates an embodied remembrance of that. So there's lots of different ways to do it. It kind of sounds paradoxical, but I promise it works.
Cary Jacobson:No, I appreciate that that's very helpful and we'll be sure to link that resource in our show notes. Well, daniel, thank you so much for helping us see that those secure attachments isn't just luck. It's something that we have to practice, and it starts with our nervous systems. For those listening, how can people find out more about you and your services?
Danielle Bird:Absolutely. You can find me across any social, usually TikTok or Instagram at the Danielle Bird, so T-H-E-D-A-N-I-E-L-L-E-B-I-R-D, or you can find me on my website, which is just wwwdaniellebirdcom. So, first, last name, and, yeah, check out the CPR resource that's going to support you in really getting beyond that stuckness into your body in a safe way so that you can complete emotional cycles, which is the number one thing that will regulate your nervous system is completing those emotional cycles Awesome.
Cary Jacobson:Thank you so much, and for our listeners, be sure to subscribe to Divorce Diaries, lessons from the Trenches and share with anyone who may find this as a great resource. I'm your host, Cary Jacobson, and until next time, stay grounded and take care of your heart.
Intro/Close:Thanks for joining us today on this episode of Divorce Diaries. Remember every journey is unique, but you don't have to navigate it alone. Visit jacobsonfamilylawcom or call 443-726-4912 for support and guidance.