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66. Self love & self care - what the hell are they and how do you do it? · Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce

• 0:53
  Speaker 1: Hi, love.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: This is Dawn and you're listening to Dear Divorce Diary with my coach, dawn, where we explore the post-divorce life and you, the woman who lives it.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: We cover everything from trauma during and after divorce to feeling like a stranger in your own life and the new frontier of life as a single woman.
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: We're cozy in for the conversations we've been longing to have about this new life.
• 1:24
  Speaker 2: Hi, love.
• 1:24
  Speaker 2: Today we are going back to basics and it is what the hell is self-care and what the hell is self-love.
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: And this is like such an epic topic for a very particular reason, and that reason is highlighted by the Barbie movie.
• 1:46
  Speaker 2: Have you seen it?
• 1:46
  Speaker 2: Do you love it?
• 1:47
  Speaker 2: Do you hate it?
• 1:47
  Speaker 2: What do you think?
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: I took my eight-year-old to see it.
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: Don't come for me.
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: Okay, don't come for me.
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: I took my eight-year-old to go see it.
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: Obviously, super over her head had a really lovely time explaining what a Jezebel is, and I loved it.
• 2:04
  Speaker 2: Like you know, I'm not saying it's right or it's wrong, but I think they did a great job of capturing a moment.
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: Let's talk a moment in time, right?
• 2:10
  Speaker 2: Let's talk about what that has to do with self-love and self-care and you and I in divorce.
• 2:16
  Speaker 2: Okay, well, when we were getting married, what was going on culturally was that we were expected to love our husbands well, and we were expected to do it while looking really cute and putting out and having jobs or growing careers or having children or going to school or whatever it was right, and we were expected to juggle all the things and we were expected to pour a whole lot of love into them and into our families and into our careers all at once again, while looking cute doing it and hope that in exchange we received love back.
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: And that happened to kind of intersect with, I think, the good girl programming, some religious tendencies that were, you know like, be Christ-like, all of that kind of thing, which we'll dig into a little bit later in the pod.
• 3:09
  Speaker 2: But and what that created was an entire generation, probably many generations of women, honestly like our parents' generation and the generations before that, who when we became divorced, did not have the skill set to love ourselves well or to care for ourselves well, and we had, for whatever reason, gotten to a place in our marriages where we were no longer being loved well either and then came out of that scenario kind of not knowing how to do it and feeling kind of empty and broken.
• 3:46
  Speaker 2: And I don't know if you relate to this or not, but when I was coming out of being married, I remember the concept of self-love more than the concept of self-care, but the concept of self-love feeling like something I couldn't quite grasp, like I understood that I was supposed to love myself, but it felt so foreign, literally like a foreign language, I couldn't quite compute what it meant.
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: And so this got reinforced for me just in these last couple of weeks, because I've been working with this amazing client whom I love to death and she is divorced and she's a mom and we're about the same age and she's in the personal development world, right, she's been to therapy and she has family members who are clinicians and she has done personal development workshops and she told me in our first couple of sessions that she had to Google what is self-care, what is self-love.
• 4:46
  Speaker 2: And I said, oh man, we are missing something on the pod, because I sometimes take for granted that what's on my Instagram feed is what's on your Instagram feed.
• 4:56
  Speaker 2: And you know, what's on my Instagram feed is just like kind of a whole lot of like therapy stuff and yoga stuff and homeopathy and internal family systems parts work, right, it's all these healing modalities, and I sometimes lose touch with where we as a collective group of women are right.
• 5:15
  Speaker 2: And so when she said to me, don, I had to Google what is self-love, I said, okay, we're going to have this conversation on the pod, right?
• 5:22
  Speaker 2: So first things first.
• 5:25
  Speaker 2: If self-love feels hard to you great, you're not crazy that is as a result of many, many, many, many decades, if not centuries, of that was the cultural emphasis was on loving other people Well, not on loving yourself well.
• 5:42
  Speaker 2: So congratulations, you're not crazy and it's literally a skill set, right?
• 5:49
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of talk in the healing spaces about subconscious negative beliefs, right?
• 5:55
  Speaker 2: This tendency to struggle to believe that I'm worth it or I'm lovable, and that's also a very real contributing factor.
• 6:01
  Speaker 2: You may have some of these.
• 6:03
  Speaker 2: It's probably goes without saying that you have some of these negative beliefs that you struggle to release.
• 6:08
  Speaker 2: That's really normal too, right?
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: And it's a combination of kind of being told these things consciously, subconsciously, and then having a lot of painful, negative experiences.
• 6:17
  Speaker 2: These thoughts end up kind of crawling into us and becoming low-key beliefs, and so in this podcast, we're going to talk a lot about the strategies that can be used.
• 6:30
  Speaker 2: They are certainly strategies that I used.
• 6:32
  Speaker 2: They're strategies I use with my clients and they may be great strategies for you.
• 6:36
  Speaker 2: So you can sift and sort through them today and decide okay, is that something I want to try to cultivate the skill of loving yourself?
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: Well, all right.
• 6:48
  Speaker 2: So let's start with the easy one what is self-care?
• 6:51
  Speaker 2: Because once we kind of understand what self-care is and we understand that self-care leads to self-love okay, cool.
• 6:57
  Speaker 2: So self-care is literally anything, absolutely anything that is a caring act towards yourself, right?
• 7:09
  Speaker 2: And I think a lot of times, in a lot of spaces, self-care gets the reputation for being like so get the manicure, buy the thing from Sephora, do the face mask, right.
• 7:19
  Speaker 2: Like have brunch with the girls and drink a bottle of champagne, and yes, those things are absolutely all self-care.
• 7:25
  Speaker 2: But when we talk about deep healing work, that's only scratching the surface, right?
• 7:32
  Speaker 2: One of my favorite things to call out as an act of self-care is peeing when you have to pee.
• 7:36
  Speaker 2: And I know you, I know that you were just like oh, how did she know?
• 7:42
  Speaker 2: Because as women, we are so used to deferring our needs for those of the people around us, and not just our families or our children.
• 7:52
  Speaker 2: Do you know how many years I worked as a therapist, sitting in my chair doing therapy, not getting up to pee in between sessions because I didn't want to disturb anybody else's time?
• 8:03
  Speaker 2: And so literally one of the most righteous acts of self-care you can do love is pee when you have to pee.
• 8:11
  Speaker 2: Delay, never, I don't care who you have to inconvenience.
• 8:15
  Speaker 2: Pea when you have to pee.
• 8:16
  Speaker 2: And actually there's this really crazy story.
• 8:19
  Speaker 2: I cannot believe.
• 8:20
  Speaker 2: I'm about to tell this out loud, spoiler alert.
• 8:25
  Speaker 2: So when I was dating, my now husband and I was doing, I was in therapy and I was certainly processing traumas, right One night when we decided to have sex.
• 8:37
  Speaker 2: Oh God, we're having sex, right, we're doing a thing, it's a great night and all of a sudden I have to pee and this is going to tell you how traumatized I've been in my life.
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: Right, and all of a sudden, this is good girl programming at its finest.
• 8:53
  Speaker 2: All of a sudden, it occurred to me exactly what I'm telling you that I had to pee and I had two choices.
• 8:59
  Speaker 2: I could do what I'd always done 30 plus years at that point I was probably 33.
• 9:04
  Speaker 2: Do what I had always done and just suffer through it and probably end up with a UTI or whatever and not enjoying myself and all the things right, and just sacrificing myself.
• 9:14
  Speaker 2: Or I could interrupt and I could go pee.
• 9:17
  Speaker 2: So I ended up choosing the right choice, which was to interrupt and go pee.
• 9:22
  Speaker 2: But it was so hard for me to do that that I ended up bursting into tears, getting in the shower and not being able to communicate to him what was going on for me.
• 9:35
  Speaker 2: So hear me in this episode that that singular act of self care and self love, of peeing when you have to pee, if it triggers big uncomfortable feelings for you, great, it means you're doing it right.
• 9:51
  Speaker 2: That was one of the most powerful turns for me and poor Brian he was so confused, had no idea what was going on.
• 10:05
  Speaker 2: I was hysterical, I couldn't communicate and you know he's particularly sensitive to, especially when it comes to sex being absolutely, extremely respectful and so like the idea that he had done something to hurt me or cross some boundary, like, oh, the poor guy, anyways.
• 10:25
  Speaker 2: So I want you to hear that this transformation into self care and self love, it's not going to always feel good.
• 10:33
  Speaker 2: Right, and I think that's one of the things we have to acknowledge is that it's so easy to talk about the manicure and the Sephora binge because those things feel good, but the most powerful places, where we have to take our power back, they're not going to feel good because they're going to go against what you've been programmed to do.
• 10:52
  Speaker 2: So self care, peeing when you have to pee, drinking enough water or green juice or whatever it is moving your body at least a bit right, and that could be just walking right, like just 15, 20 minutes of walking a day or several days.
• 11:09
  Speaker 2: It doesn't even have to be every day, right, but like making sure you're moving your body, making sure you have seven hours of sleep each night, and that one needs to be fairly non-negotiable, like within the.
• 11:18
  Speaker 2: You know, every now and then obviously stuff happens, right, but these are all acts of self care and you're going to know, and we have a self care checklist that's part of the post divorce roadmap, the immersive journaling experience, and maybe we'll link that self care checklist in this podcast episode so you can grab that if you want, and it's something that you know.
• 11:39
  Speaker 2: I would hang on my bathroom mirror so that.
• 11:42
  Speaker 2: But then after a couple of weeks of being on the bathroom mirror, you should probably hang it on your refrigerator, because we stopped seeing things after a while, right?
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: So it's one of those things I would say hang it somewhere and glance at it and, you know, make sure you've done a number of those each day, right, and then notice the ones that are the most uncomfortable, because those are the ones that are gonna lead to the biggest transformation and the biggest breakthroughs, and too often we shy away from the hard things, we avoid those hard things, and it's because our nervous system isn't conditioned to do those hard things, it's because we're breaking out of, you know, our old conditioning, and there's a whole bunch of reasons why.
• 12:18
  Speaker 2: But you're gonna be okay, right, and we make the most progress when we take typically the harder path, right?
• 12:26
  Speaker 2: So, all right, self care there, acts of kindness, of care towards yourself, and the hard ones are gonna be the juicier ones.
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: All right, now let's get into what is self love, cause that one is, whew, complicated.
• 12:40
  Speaker 2: Now, I don't wanna pretend that I am smarter than the thought leaders or the visionaries, or the scientists or the therapists or the philosophers that have come before me.
• 12:49
  Speaker 2: Right, I am accumulation.
• 12:50
  Speaker 2: I am an accumulation of all of those things, of all of these historical moments that have led to this moment.
• 12:58
  Speaker 2: But in my experience right, we talk a lot about vibration on this podcast everything has a vibration.
• 13:06
  Speaker 2: So what is love?
• 13:08
  Speaker 2: Right, if we simplify it way over, simplify it today, and say, well, love probably has a vibration and maybe it even has a range of vibrations, right, but everything in life has a memorable, measurable vibration, we say, okay, if love has a vibration.
• 13:27
  Speaker 2: What is it?
• 13:28
  Speaker 2: Well, if you Google it, you're gonna get two answers, but the most common answer is it's 528 Hertz.
• 13:36
  Speaker 2: It's like literally a measurable sound that has a vibration to it, right, and 528 Hertz can be found in every part of nature.
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: It can be found in our DNA, can be found in plants, it can be found in right, like all the various layers of the natural world.
• 13:55
  Speaker 2: And it is said that if we are vibrating at 528 Hertz, we are abundant, we are full of life.
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: It is the vibration that connects us all, right, and so when we talk about feeling vibrant, full of life and connected, we're starting to get the essence of what is love right Now.
• 14:16
  Speaker 2: As humans, the way we interpret vibration is through emotion and sensation, right?
• 14:24
  Speaker 2: So a lot of people talk about why do I have to feel my feelings, dawn?
• 14:28
  Speaker 2: Why do I have to feel it to heal it?
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: What is the point of an emotion?
• 14:31
  Speaker 2: Anyways, I don't need to address those things.
• 14:33
  Speaker 2: Well, our emotions are actually an intricate and intentional part of how we interpret the world around us, and so, if love is a vibration that we experience through interpreting, interpreting, interpreting that vibration through our emotions and through our senses, cool right.
• 14:55
  Speaker 2: 528 Hertz you can.
• 14:57
  Speaker 2: There are a lot of meditation tracks and I love jumping on insight timer and grabbing 528 Hertz tracks just to play in the background of my life while I'm doing things right and just helps keep me grounded and kind of open and feeling good.
• 15:10
  Speaker 2: These are like little hacks that I like to do because I don't want healing to always be hard work, like that night I was having sex with Brian, right.
• 15:16
  Speaker 2: I want a lot of times I want healing to just be kind of happening in the background, supporting me as I go right.
• 15:21
  Speaker 2: So all right, if self love is taking that 528 Hertz vibration that I am so good at feeling for other people, for Lilliput the puppy, for my kid, for my husband, for my besties, for my team, who makes all of this possible right.
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: It's so easy for me to feel that and be aware of it and experience it for them.
• 16:34
  Speaker 2: I gotta figure out how to bridge that gap and project that 528 Hertz towards myself, with myself, within myself.
• 16:43
  Speaker 2: How do we do that?
• 16:46
  Speaker 2: It's a very good question.
• 16:50
  Speaker 2: So I think that for me, I was very, very blessed that having my daughter helped me with that, and I'm gonna dig into that more and more as we unpack all of this.
• 17:02
  Speaker 2: But I was blessed.
• 17:06
  Speaker 2: I was very, very sick after I had her, very, very, very sick and could not function very well.
• 17:12
  Speaker 2: But even through that, even with the level of depression and illness that I was experiencing, I was able to feel immense amounts of joy and attachment and love for her, and I know that not every mom has that experience.
• 17:24
  Speaker 2: So I am acknowledging that I was very blessed to have that, and the amount and intensity of love that I felt for her, towards her, helped me down the road as I continued to do my own self-love healing journey to understand what that meant, to point that love towards myself.
• 17:41
  Speaker 2: It was a very valuable object lesson in the depth of love.
• 17:47
  Speaker 2: I had never felt love that intense when I had my daughter right, it was completely life-changing for me, and so there was a depth of love I suddenly had access to that I didn't previously have access to that.
• 18:00
  Speaker 2: I was able to then turn towards myself.
• 18:01
  Speaker 2: That was very, very powerful, and so I acknowledge that.
• 18:06
  Speaker 2: You know, in the years leading up to her, her where I had been diagnosed infertile and had made my peace with I was never going to have children, right?
• 18:15
  Speaker 2: I acknowledge that there are so many people out there that maybe have not had these experiences, that have it feels that much more daunting to access deep self-love, and so I get that.
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: I still know in my heart of hearts that there are solutions and I know I've started talking about homeopathy a bit here and there.
• 18:37
  Speaker 2: I believe that a well-paired constitutional remedy can also help open, open, open to have access of that level of self-love, that depth.
• 18:47
  Speaker 2: So know that, even if that isn't your lived experience, that there are options out there Now, as I was thinking about.
• 18:54
  Speaker 2: Okay, so besides grace, what else has, like structurally, like functionally, helped me learn how to love myself well, over the years?
• 19:03
  Speaker 2: Initially, something popped into my head and it was one of the 12 steps from Alcoholics Anonymous, and it's step two specifically.
• 19:12
  Speaker 2: And step two in AA is I came to believe that a power greater than myself could return me to sanity.
• 19:20
  Speaker 2: Why do I know the 12 steps, you may ask?
• 19:23
  Speaker 2: It's because I worked the steps in Al-Anon in my divorce recovery period and I also worked in multiple rehabs in early in my career and while I was in grad school.
• 19:34
  Speaker 2: So I've had a lot of exposure to the steps in the program and I have just always really appreciated.
• 19:39
  Speaker 2: You know, I know a lot of opinions out there, it's a cult, it's this, it's that, whatever.
• 19:42
  Speaker 2: But I think it has huge amounts of value.
• 19:45
  Speaker 2: It taught me a lot and it really was integral to my healing process.
• 19:48
  Speaker 2: So, step two I came to believe that a power greater than myself could return me to sanity.
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: When you've been to enough meetings, you'll hear an old timer breakdown.
• 19:56
  Speaker 2: Step two just the first few words of it I came to believe.
• 20:00
  Speaker 2: So first they'll break it down to, first I came, then I came to, and then I came to believe.
• 20:08
  Speaker 2: And I love it when you take something really kind of deep and you break it down into a few words, that can create such powerful meaning, right.
• 20:17
  Speaker 2: And so I think that in this self-love conversation that we just start with, well, first I'm going to come, I'm going to show up, I'm going to acknowledge that this conversation is integral to long-term happiness, sustainable joy, into attracting and having a kind of love in a relationship that maybe you've never had before, to feeling peaceful, to sleeping well, to write that.
• 20:45
  Speaker 2: Okay, if self-love is integral to a peaceful, abundant life, then I might at least show up to the conversation and eventually I'm going to come to.
• 20:55
  Speaker 2: I'm going to.
• 20:56
  Speaker 2: Things are going to start to click.
• 20:58
  Speaker 2: Right, I'm going to listen to people talk, I'm going to practice, I'm going to do the things, I'm going to learn the things and eventually I'm going to.
• 21:03
  Speaker 2: Things are going to click in like, oh right, I'm going to become aware, the veil is going to fall from my eyes and I'm going to start.
• 21:11
  Speaker 2: It's going to start clicking in.
• 21:12
  Speaker 2: I'm going to connect the dots, right, I'm going to come to and then eventually, over time, as you practice and practice and practice, you come to believe, right.
• 21:20
  Speaker 2: And that is the beauty of this conversation it's not going to happen overnight, it's going to be a process, and I think it's going to happen way faster for you than it did for me, because I got divorced in a season where this conversation wasn't happening as often or as publicly as it's happening now, and so there is such a permission happening right now.
• 21:41
  Speaker 2: That is different.
• 21:42
  Speaker 2: And how exciting is that for you to be able to leverage that for yourself and say, screw the old way, I'm doing it, the new way, I'm with Barbie, or whatever, right?
• 21:53
  Speaker 2: So then, in addition to just saying, okay, I'm going to come, I'm going to come to and then I'm going to come to believe what else is involved in really being able to feel the sensation of love towards oneself.
• 22:07
  Speaker 2: Well, let's talk for a moment about the good girl programming that has to be acknowledged and has to be deprogrammed or let go of right.
• 22:17
  Speaker 2: So you may have heard me tell this story vaguely before, but the days before my first wedding it was.
• 22:29
  Speaker 2: It was not a huge, massively, overly expensive wedding, right Especially for a wedding in the early 2000s, where what it was very you know it's still it's growing popularity to have these massive weddings, but it was not one of those.
• 22:41
  Speaker 2: I was not a bridezilla.
• 22:42
  Speaker 2: I did not have the budget to be a bridezilla.
• 22:44
  Speaker 2: I didn't have the cojones to be a bridezilla.
• 22:45
  Speaker 2: Like I was not a bridezilla, but my mom was steadily telling me that I was being a bridezilla for delegating tasks to family and friends, for wanting things to look a certain way or be a certain way, and that I was supposed to be a Jesus bride and that I was supposed to be serving my loved ones who are attending the wedding and not making my wedding day about me and I.
• 23:13
  Speaker 2: The story of how that escalated is a story for another podcast, but but that was the level at that point.
• 23:20
  Speaker 2: I was 22 years old.
• 23:21
  Speaker 2: At that point, for 22 years, that was the narrative that existed in my psyche, that I was supposed to be that level of servant, that I was supposed to love others and not myself.
• 23:32
  Speaker 2: And that's not Christ's message in any way, shape or form.
• 23:35
  Speaker 2: And I don't even necessarily know that that was my mom's message.
• 23:38
  Speaker 2: But because it was so confusing, because it was so emphatically that that even on my wedding day it wasn't supposed to be about me, right, that's pretty extreme that I think I had to really break through those layers of programming in order to feel like I was allowed to love myself, that I was allowed to practice self care.
• 24:06
  Speaker 2: And I think that that got particularly confusing because I also was aware of the expectation to care for myself.
• 24:14
  Speaker 2: Well, the expectation to be skinny but not say I wanted to be skinny, but I wanted to be healthy and be healthy, right, like not whole.
• 24:21
  Speaker 2: Right and so.
• 24:23
  Speaker 2: But it's like it doesn't all fit into a day.
• 24:25
  Speaker 2: Right To be, to be self caring but to also care for everybody else, right, and to do these crazy gymnastics that that were historically expected of women and still are to in many spaces and places right, and so I had to really look at when a voice in my mind would tell me that I needed to take care of somebody else first.
• 24:48
  Speaker 2: I had to really catch it and interrupt it.
• 24:51
  Speaker 2: And, much like that night having sex with my now husband, I had to be willing to do it different and maybe it was going to feel horribly uncomfortable, but I had to do it anyway because I understood that I was changing a belief system.
• 25:03
  Speaker 2: And let me tell you what.
• 25:06
  Speaker 2: Changing a belief system is not an easy process, because we are used to a belief system creating a sense of security and wellbeing and guiding our lives, and when we exchange one belief system for another belief system, there are a lot of days where it feels like our lives are not guided, where it feels like the net that used to be the thing that was going to catch us when we fell is no longer there.
• 25:29
  Speaker 2: As we are constructing and living into and leaning into a new belief system.
• 25:32
  Speaker 2: It's a very scary process that often feels like there's not a net under us.
• 25:36
  Speaker 2: Now, there is always a net under us, always, always, always, always, always, always.
• 25:40
  Speaker 2: Everything in nature is connected, and just because I say that there's a net under us does not mean that nothing bad ever happens or that death isn't a real part of living.
• 25:49
  Speaker 2: That's not what I'm saying.
• 25:50
  Speaker 2: But there's always an essential framework, spiritual connectivity, vibrational framework that is supporting us all along as long as we are, not even as long.
• 26:03
  Speaker 2: It's just always there, love.
• 26:06
  Speaker 2: Whether we acknowledge it or not, it's always there, right so?
• 26:09
  Speaker 2: But sometimes we forget and we don't feel it, and then we are afraid it's not, and so on and so forth, right Okay?
• 26:16
  Speaker 2: So the next thing that really helped me practice self love is in that post divorce world where I had a therapist and group therapy and I was doing professional development not professional personal development work and I was going to Allen on.
• 26:30
  Speaker 2: I was doing it all at once.
• 26:30
  Speaker 2: You've heard me tell that story before, but my therapist practiced a lot of inner child work and in the personal development course I was taking, they did a lot of inner child work and at the time it felt new, like maybe I had heard it before, but it felt like a very new concept to me at the time.
• 26:48
  Speaker 2: Now, since then, inner child work has gained a lot of popularity and something that I learned to do in those early days post divorce was to have pictures of my younger self around the house and in my journal and on my bathroom mirror and all that stuff that I learned way back then.
• 27:03
  Speaker 2: It has since gained so much popularity because I have heard Kardashians talk about this in public on podcasts and whatnot.
• 27:10
  Speaker 2: And so if the Kardashians are talking about having a picture of your young self on your bathroom mirror, we know that inner child work has gained a lot of traction and that it is a very real part of healing the places and spaces where we didn't feel worthy or good enough or a part of, or you know just good about ourselves.
• 27:29
  Speaker 2: And so I did that.
• 27:31
  Speaker 2: Right, I had pictures of my younger self on my mirror and I would do meditations and I would journal with her, and I would actually and I do this with my clients where I say, okay, now pick up that pillow next to you and hold it, like if you're on YouTube, you can see this happening right now.
• 27:44
  Speaker 2: If you're not, I'm sorry.
• 27:45
  Speaker 2: I'm hugging a pillow on the sofa with a little put snoring in my lap.
• 27:47
  Speaker 2: Okay, so I have clients hold this pillow and pretend it's their younger self and pour all the love into those younger versions of self, and that really was a place and a way that I could start, and it felt easier than trying to pour love into my adult self right.
• 28:07
  Speaker 2: It felt like she deserved it and so I was willing to give it to her right, and so that was very, very valuable.
• 28:14
  Speaker 2: Now, since then, as a clinician, as a therapist, I have learned richer, just even deeper, ways to work with various parts of self and through internal family system or through what is called parts work or the concept of dissociative identity right or dissociative parts.
• 28:36
  Speaker 2: And so even this conversation about dissociation and parts of self is gaining traction in this moment in time and it's so freaking exciting because this is a huge part of how I help people heal in my therapeutic practice and it's a huge part of how I healed right, right Beyond just doing inner child work.
• 28:55
  Speaker 2: As I became EMDR trained and trained in dissociative parts, I got to apply that to my own growth process and as I became an EMDR patient and started doing deeper level trauma processing inside of me became more and more spacious and those parts of me that had historically had very different strategies about how to move through something painful started being a really cohesive team.
• 29:22
  Speaker 2: So if you think about moments in your life where you feel frozen or trapped or conflicted or confused.
• 29:29
  Speaker 2: I want you to think about what I'm saying here.
• 29:33
  Speaker 2: That there may be multiple parts of you does not make you crazy.
• 29:37
  Speaker 2: We all have these.
• 29:39
  Speaker 2: There may be multiple parts of you that have different strategies about how to solve something.
• 29:44
  Speaker 2: So like, for instance, let's take that night with Brian, like well, on the one hand, one part of me said, no, please him, keep him happy, hill, that's what matters is keep him happy, keep the peace.
• 29:56
  Speaker 2: But another part of me said, no, take good care of yourself, do it differently, get better, heal, love yourself.
• 30:03
  Speaker 2: Well, and those two parts right, the one part, one out over the other part.
• 30:07
  Speaker 2: But it wasn't a cohesive team effort and that's why I was sobbing hysterically in the shower later that night was because the part that was overpowered that said please him.
• 30:20
  Speaker 2: She lost that argument and she was devastated and she was terrified that what she did was wrong or bad.
• 30:27
  Speaker 2: And so when this is all going on, there is this deep, nuanced thing that's happening inside of you and when you can work with each of those parts in a deep, meaningful way, or taking in our child work to the next level right.
• 30:40
  Speaker 2: This is how we create a cohesive teamwork that allows you to move through these various experiences in more, in less painful ways.
• 30:49
  Speaker 2: So this was a huge part of how I Really came to love myself while was through inner child work and parts work.
• 30:57
  Speaker 2: Now, I didn't understand parts work to the level that I did that night with Brian, right.
• 31:01
  Speaker 2: So had I had I understood that, had I done processing on that level, that would have gone very differently, right, which is what my wish for you.
• 31:09
  Speaker 2: Okay, what else is integral to being able to love yourself?
• 31:13
  Speaker 2: Well, a strong ass support system.
• 31:16
  Speaker 2: And by strong support system, what do I mean?
• 31:18
  Speaker 2: Because I don't just mean people who will yes you to death, people who would tell you that, no matter what you do, they love you, right.
• 31:25
  Speaker 2: I want your support system to also have some level of accountability.
• 31:29
  Speaker 2: I want them to be willing to have hard conversations with you.
• 31:31
  Speaker 2: I want them to be able to call you on your shit, but I don't want them to shame you.
• 31:35
  Speaker 2: I want them to love you well, because a strong support system is gonna bridge the gap on the days where You're crying in the shower and you feel like you can't love yourself and you don't know how to love yourself or you don't have the energy to love yourself right.
• 31:47
  Speaker 2: A strong support system is super key to knowing and learning and experiencing self-love.
• 31:56
  Speaker 2: This, my friends, is the story of Self-love.
• 32:02
  Speaker 2: It's the acknowledgement that this divorce was devastating because Largely because of the culture that we came up in as women, and that it is going to be a journey To loving yourself well.
• 32:14
  Speaker 2: But that journey is going to be shorter today because of the powerful conversations we're having about loving ourselves well and the permission to love ourselves well, and and and because you have access to the information about those parts of you that are going to struggle to let go of the old way Before embracing the new way.
• 32:35
  Speaker 2: This is going to happen faster for you and it is so exciting that there is a path for you to get to this place of feeling 528 Hertz In your bones for yourself and with yourself, and not just for those around you whom you do such a Phenomenal job of loving well.
• 32:54
  Speaker 2: I am so proud of you.
• 32:56
  Speaker 2: Thank you for being here with me.
• 32:58
  Speaker 2: Thank you for holding space for my crazy stories.
• 33:01
  Speaker 2: I love you so much.
• 33:03
  Speaker 2: Peace.
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: Dear divorce diary is a podcast by my coach John.
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: You can find more at my coach John.