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172. When You Can’t Let Go—The Emotional Cling That Keeps Divorce Pain Alive · Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce

• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Hi love.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: There are two things about letting go that our coaching students understand that you desperately need to know about.
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: Hi love.
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: Welcome to Dear Divorce Diary, the podcast helping divorcees go beyond talk therapy to process your grief, find the healing you crave and build back your confidence.
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: I'm your host, dawn Wiggins, a therapist, coach, integrative healer and divorcee.
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: Join me for a fresh approach to healing grief and building your confidence after divorce.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: So you know, we launched our small group coaching program for women and you know we've been in there and and really getting to know each other and starting to do this amazing work together.
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: And in one of our recent meetings, this piece came up about letting go and how deep that thread runs, and the conversation was around not feeling wanted, not feeling worth it, not believing in yourself enough.
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: The tendency for many of the women and certainly this was my experience right, wanting to circle back and still and feeling ashamed of, still wanting to reach out to your ex, feeling ashamed of even if there was abuse or there were kind of horrible things.
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: Right, struggling to let go and struggling to feel fulfilled, spending time with yourself or spending time with loved ones and still having that kind of craving to go back to talk to the ex or get some sort of validation from him, right?
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: And so in this difficulty of letting go, it was such a rich, rich conversation and there are a couple of things that really came out of that that I just knew I had to talk with you about.
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: So in today's session, in today's session, in today's episode, we're going to talk about the top two reasons that letting go is so hard, and then we're going to get into some very specific solutions that the women are implementing in our program that you can certainly implement at home as well.
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: All right, so the first thing to know is so much of the difficulty in letting go has to do with your attachment style.
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: But without turning this into an attachment style episode, right, what I want you to kind of think about is how you believe in him more than you believe in yourself, right?
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: You believe in his ability to take care of you and love you more than you believe in your ability to take care of yourself and love yourself, and so, in kind of deferring your personal power to him, it feels like you are safer if he loves you, safer if he takes care of you.
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: You're worth more.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: If he loves you.
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: You're worth more if he takes care of you, and that is rooted in this kind of early childhood experience right Of.
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: For whatever reason and not knowing your very, very specific story, we just know that that early child brain map is what primes us for the relationships we choose right.
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: And so somewhere in your early child brain map there was a lack of feeling safe and secure in your relationships and being able to translate that into feeling safe and secure in your own body mind.
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: There was a tendency to let go of your own self-expression in exchange for, probably your parents' self-expression, right.
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: So, for instance, some examples of that, certainly in my life, were, you know, if I expressed my own thoughts, feelings, especially if I expressed feelings right.
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: There was often that I was told that my feelings were not something that there was time or space for.
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: I was often yelled at for expressing feelings.
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: And certainly if the feelings that I expressed didn't align with my parents' moods or beliefs, right.
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: It was like we don't have time for that, it doesn't matter, it's not relevant, just do what I say, right.
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: In my early childhood it was like just do what I say, there's no conversation about it, there's no room to process how you feel about any of this.
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: Now, this does not mean I am advocating for being self-indulgent with children and their big, big feelings when they're manipulating and all that.
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: Yes, we did that, I did that right.
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: But there is when there's not enough space for kids to explore who they are and explore how they feel and make sense of how they feel in the context of a situation.
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: Right, then we don't know how to process our big feelings we don't know, then we're not taught how to manage emotional regulation, how to manage those feelings, and we're certainly not developing confidence in our ability to manage our feelings and our self-esteem.
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: And so I want you to know that this kind of lack of belief in yourself is because when we're told as kids, over and over again, just do what I say, just do what you're told, we're not cultivating a confidence in our ability to problem solve, our ability to think for ourselves, our ability to take good care of our feelings, to take good care of our needs, right, when we're told to defer to other people's needs and thoughts and beliefs, it's a process of becoming an individuated.
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: It's like sort of a psychology term of what it means to develop from a dependent young person into an independent adult.
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: That's supposed to be a process of evolving from dependency on parents into independency.
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: And when parents don't tolerate us thinking differently or feeling differently or believing differently, like, imagine, as a young person, if you had different political views than your parents, how would they have tolerated that?
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: If you had different religious views than your parents, how would they have tolerated that?
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: If you had different, maybe, ways of seeing the world or you know?
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: Just think about, like, if you had chosen a different way of dressing or speaking, how would they have tolerated that?
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: And so just think about that, right.
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: And so just think about that, right.
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: How do you evolve from being dependent on one person's or people's way of thinking, feeling, believing and developing your own independent confidence without there being space for you to explore into that?
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: And so what ends up happening, right is you're just in the habit of believing in other people more than believing in yourself, and that certainly shows up in an attachment style, right?
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: Especially for anxious or disorganized attachers.
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: It's just easier to believe in other people rather than believing in yourself, and so that is a key piece to understand about why letting go is so hard because you've been taught to hold on tightly to a belief in somebody else's way.
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: And so what do we do about that, right?
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: Well, this brings us to the second reason why it's so hard to let go today.
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: That really has to be attended to in order to be able to choose yourself, right?
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: So, because this habit of believing in other people more than yourselves, letting go of yourself, right, rather than letting go of other people, because it's happened from such an early age that it's just a habit that it's existed since you were so, so, so young, we have to heal that at many ages and stages, right.
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: So we have to go back and think about when you were a toddler, when you were school-aged, when you were a middle schooler, a high schooler, when you were picking your partner to get married right.
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: We have to think about all those ages and stages and the difficulty that you had at those various stages of life.
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: We could call this inner child work, we could call this internal family systems work or IFS, if you've heard of that, right.
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: But we have to go back and really look at the places where we got hung up, struggling to believe in ourselves, struggling to choose ourselves at various ages and stages.
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: Now, how this played out in a recent group session for our coaching students was I encouraged them to pull out pictures of their young selves.
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: I asked them to pull out pictures of their infant selves, their sort of seven to nine year old selves, and their high school selves, right.
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: But then what I asked them to do in the session is to pick up a pillow right, we all picked up pillows and really feel what that would feel like to hold their younger selves it feels so awkward at first and to be validating to that younger version of self, to become the affirming and to be validating to that younger version of self to become the affirming, validating parent that you needed, right, and many of our parents were validating or affirming, right.
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: There are many parents who say, oh, you know you could do anything, or you're beautiful in God's eyes, or I love you so much right, and those are beautiful affirming things.
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: But what's it feel like to hold a pillow of your young self, right, and say, like it's okay to believe something different than I believe.
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: It's okay to feel something different than I feel.
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: It's okay that we don't agree.
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: Ooh, I think that would open up a lot of anxious loops inside of most of us, right, if you haven't done this work already.
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: How did your ex feel when you believed differently than he believed, when you thought differently, when you felt differently?
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: How did it go when you had different opinions inside of arguments?
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: Did he listen, was he curious or was he judgmental?
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: What about you?
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: Were you curious about different beliefs your ex had, or were you judgmental?
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: And so it's interesting, right, flexibility of thought, codependency is like.
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: We must believe the same thing, we must feel the same thing.
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: Codependency is rife with judgment and it's devoid of curiosity, right.
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: And so I want you to really look at how much flexibility of thought and belief, how much curiosity existed in your marriage and then in those earlier stages of life, to really be able to let go.
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: You have to do these handful of things right.
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: You have to believe in yourself more, and believe in yourself enough to know that you can be successful without your ex or without any man propping you up.
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: Now, we're hardwired for love and belonging, and I do believe that we're built for partnership.
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: So this is not a pitch for you to have to live life solo.
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: That's not it at all.
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: But it's about living life collaboratively rather than dependently, right.
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: The reason it feels so scary is because it feels like you can't, right?
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: And so we want to move in the direction away from dependency and into collaboratively living life with people, with community, and really believing in yourself and being with yourself and loving yourself, feeling as satiating, right?
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: You know, when you take a bite, I'm going to like I don't know you may not relate to this, but like when you take a bite of the most delicious cheeseburger, how it just immediately satiates hunger.
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: Or like maybe the best donut, right?
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: Or like, ooh, a chocolate croissant.
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: You know how that would like immediately just feel so warm and delicious.
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: That's how other people's love feels to you it feels warm and delicious, but the love for yourself doesn't feel warm and delicious.
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: There's a bridge that has to be crossed to get to you loving yourself, feeling warm and delicious, and that comes via a process of rewiring your subconscious mind If you ever heard me talk about your reticular activating system.
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: Right, because you find what you're looking for.
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: And so you have to start looking for self-love being delicious like a chocolate croissant, and then have to reinforce those positive experiences when it happens.
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: And so how do you actually do that?
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: Well, there are three ways I'm going to advocate for today, right, three ways that are tried and true ways of crossing that bridge from being dependent on other people's love to also feeling really, really secure in love for yourself.
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: The three ways that I'm going to talk about today are EFT tapping, which helps rewire that subconscious mind.
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: It helps clear out old, painful, negative emotions to do with it.
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: It helps prime your reticular activating system to see it this new and different way.
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: Positive affirmations, which are so, so powerful.
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: I'm a big fan of doing them as you're drifting off into sleep and in sleep, especially paired with binaural beats like 528 hertz music that primes your brain to be in this receiving mode of self-love, of love in general.
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: Right, 528 is the vibrational frequency of love, so I love a guided meditation at that 528 hertz frequency that has the right affirmations.
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: And don't be confused Affirmations are a skill because if you pick an affirmation that's too far beyond where you are, it's going to cause you to feel shut down rather than feeling like you can expand into it.
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: Mirror messages with positive affirmations this is a tool we use inside the group and you know there's resistance.
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: I ask them to change their mirror message and I give them a new mirror message every week.
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: It's like it's such an easy habit, but notice how lazy we get as humans.
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: Like I don't feel like it, I don't want to.
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: Oh, does it really matter that much?
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: Like?
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: The answer is hell yes, that what we do in life, we do in life.
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: So when we shrug off these tiny little habits, it's absolutely eroding.
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: At the momentum, we're building in the positive direction, right?
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: So affirmations in a guided sleep, meditation in our mirror messages and then doing this beautiful inner child work, which I'm going to walk you through a bit more in our next episode but but pulling out pictures of your young self and doing some of this inner child work, these are three ways of really building this strong, strong structure for being able to let go in a meaningful way and to choose yourself rather than letting go of yourself and choosing other people, right?
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: And so, for today, I want you to know that, because of these three steps that are, these three tools that are so, so powerful, I've got a next episode for you on how to do inner child work that you can do at home.
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: And then I created two premium tracks for you.
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: One is an EFT tapping video for letting go and one is a guided meditation track for you to fall asleep and be asleep to with that 528 hertz music that just allows you to start to internalize these positive beliefs about self so that you can believe in yourself more than you believe in other people.
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: It takes consistency and repetition over time.
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: I highly recommend using the guided sleep meditation every night for a month to really look at the results shifting right.
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: I really recommend using the EFT tapping video once or twice a day for a week before you really take a look at okay, what am I seeing shift in life.
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: And then, when we really write down, okay, what is concretely shifting, then we can start to see how those results build.
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: You know how you, when you go to the gym consistently for a period of time and you start to get results, then it's like intoxicating.
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: It's like, oh, I want more of this, right, but what we end up doing is we abandon ourselves, we abandon our healthy habits, we abandon consistency and we lean back into the old tools.
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: Right, just numbing out and just pretending like avoiding it.
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: Right, but at some point we have to acknowledge the gap between where we say we wanna be and what our daily habits are actually gonna deliver us, and we have to acknowledge the gap between that and decide what we're going to do about it, because your future self she is there cheering for you.
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: And your past self, your inner child, right these other wounded parts of yourself, they are waiting for you to rescue them rather than continuing to expect somebody else to rescue right.
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: And so these are the concrete tools that are absolutely going to move the needle so powerfully for you, and it's just about developing and cultivating those healthy habits that are going to bridge that gap between where you say you want to be and where you are today.
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: So I highly encourage you to check out the premium content and to get in the habit of using it on a consistent basis, and then definitely pull out those pictures of yourself and check out our next episode.
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: I love you so much.
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: Peace, dear Divorce Diary is a podcast by MyCoachDawn.
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: You can find more at Mycoachjohncom.