Latest / Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce / 117. Do This to Reclaim Your Identity and Intuition from Divorce Grief and Depression

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117. Do This to Reclaim Your Identity and Intuition from Divorce Grief and Depression · Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce

• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Hi, love, how many women have you talked to going through this divorce process?
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: In the Facebook groups, in the I don't know wherever?
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: Women, wherever we go, in the waiting room at the yoga, right that when they get out of a marriage and they're going through the process of divorce, they're so keenly aware that you lost yourself.
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: It's like how did I go from being alive and vibrant and planning my life with this man and building a family to like, having little to no remembrance of who I was and what I loved and how I wanted my life to go?
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: In today's episode, love, we are talking about the root cause, the very specific root cause that led to you losing yourself.
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: Hi, love, 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.
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: I'm your host, dawn Wiggins, a therapist, coach, integrative healer and divorcee.
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: Join me for a fresh approach to healing grief and building your confidence after divorce.
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: All right, so here you are, you've lost yourself and you are doing everything you know to do to kind of get back to who you are and what you love about life, and in today's episode, we are going to unpack with great specificity how this happened exactly right, because when we know how it happened, then we know how to unwind it right and faster, more efficiently than kind of like hunting and pecking right, like you're a typist and you know how to type right, like you could type a document so much more faster than hunting and pecking.
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: So in this episode, we're going to talk about how it happened, very specifically, that you lost yourself.
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: We're going to talk about how you actually, as a woman moving through divorce, how you are uniquely positioned more so than most other women to actually make this a season of your greatest manifestation, how you have an actually better position to manifest an amazing life than the woman next to you who's married and in this particular season.
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: And then, finally, we're going to talk about how to reverse this kind of having lost yourself situation and the very specific steps that you could take not only to recover yourself but then to make sure that it doesn't happen again.
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: This is such a powerful conversation, all right.
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: So, dawn, what is it, how?
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: What is this very specific root cause that you're talking about?
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: So interesting, love, it is the function of emotional suppression Suppressing or repressing the nuanced and beautiful emotions that you experience day in and day out and may not even know it.
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: The suppression of those emotions is what has led to you losing yourself.
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: How do I know that?
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: Well, of the trauma-based researchers and doctors and thought leaders that I have studied under, one of them is Gabor Mate, and he is such an interesting man with an interesting story.
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: He was born in 1944.
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: He turned 80 this year.
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: He was born in Budapest, hungary, and his grandparents died in Auschwitz and his parents were greatly affected and he was sent away to live with a stranger for a number of weeks in order to ensure his survival, at a very young age, I think infancy.
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: And so, as he grew up, he made sense of the world by identifying that that separation trauma, which beautifully dovetails with our attachment series, is what drove a lot of mental illness and illness and addiction.
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: And so, as he grew up, he became fascinated with attachment, psychology, addiction treatment, all these things, and in 1977, he became a medical doctor, a general practitioner, and he had a family practice for many, many years in Canada and researched trauma and its effects on the body.
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: He's written five books and loves.
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: He didn't write his first book until he was in his 50s.
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: So just there.
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: It's never too late, right to pour yourself into something you love.
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: And so Gabor Monte explains to us in his research and listen, his research isn't 100% of the story, right, there is genetic predisposition to things but a lot of what he researches is beautifully valuable and very much impacts how this divorce happened, how you lost yourself and how you can refine it all.
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: And so Gabor Monte teaches us that emotion is one of the keys to creating attachment and connection.
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: And when we suppress emotion in order to preserve attachment.
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: So what do I mean by that?
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: I mean if you suppress what you're feeling and don't tell your parents, because if you tell your parents, then they're going to reject you, you or just ignore you.
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: Right, it's not always just about what people do.
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: Sometimes it's about what they don't do, right?
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: So if you expressed your emotion so long to your husband and he never was responsive in a meaningful way and you learned to just not even go there anymore because it hurts so much to pour your heart out and to have zero response, that leads, over time, to the function of emotional suppression.
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: Now, emotional suppression also leads to inauthenticity Inauthenticity Think about that.
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: Vulnerability and authenticity require us to have self-awareness about what we're feeling and how we feel it.
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: What do I mean by how I feel it?
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: I mean, how do you experience sadness?
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: How do you experience fear?
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: How, as in where in your body, do you experience anger, or joy, or excitement or curiosity?
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: Right, and so there's a mind-body, a body-mind connection between what we think and feel.
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: And when all of that has become shut off, what happens is we start to experience disease processes in our body, we start to experience mental illnesses, a lot of dissociation, and by bypassing all of these things, we literally lose track of our authentic selves, because our authentic selves are directly correlated to what we think and feel, and if we've shut off what we feel the majority of the day, we've now lost ourselves.
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: And so I want you to think through this.
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: Like, are you able to pinpoint in your body I don't mean in your mind I am someone, ooh, I can.
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: This is.
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: You spot it, you spot it, you got it.
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: I can spot someone who thinks their feelings.
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: I have been doing that for decades, loves.
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: If I ask you, when do you feel sadness?
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: When do you feel anger?
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: When do you feel joy?
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: When do you feel empowered?
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: When do you feel grief?
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: When do you feel anxious If you can't answer those feelings from a body awareness perspective?
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: There's work to do there around suppression and repression, and so all day long we have these kind of complex processes happening in our minds and our bodies.
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: The first thing that happens is a thought pops into our mind.
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: You are not responsible for the thought that pops in.
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: Let that be a great relief to you, praise.
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: Thoughts are going to pop in.
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: Maybe they're your thoughts, maybe they're somebody else's thoughts, maybe it's like a vibe that you literally walked through and a thought popped in your mind.
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: You're not accountable for that.
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: So if you've got weird, dark, twisty thoughts that pop into your mind love, not your fault, right, but it is your responsibility Then, based on the thought that pops in the body, the brain, the amygdala and the limbic system pumps out an emotion that correlates to your perception of that thought.
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: Now, if you don't intervene on that thought quickly, then you are going to start a cascade of emotion that is going to create momentum.
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: Law of Attraction, esther Hicks.
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: She tells us that I think it's like every six point, something seconds, right, a thought and an emotion gains momentum and after so many seconds like after around a minute, I believe, right, you can experience a vibrational shift and so, let's say, the thought that popped in was negative, or it was dark, or it was painful, and you didn't intervene on it.
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: And then you catch a feeling, and then you're sitting in that feeling and then that thought and feeling calls to another thought and feeling and now, before you know it, right, you are in a very sad place.
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: Now, let's say, that's been going on for years and years and years.
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: You have a stockpile of really painful emotions stored in your body because you probably haven't been expressing them, processing them somatically, processing them out of your body, right, so this ends up being like an episode of Hoarders.
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: Have you ever seen that show I think of?
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: As I was putting this episode together, I was thinking like gosh, like when I get a new client into the practice, right, it's like almost like an episode of emotional hoarders, right, if you could picture it that you're like coming to me because you have this years and years and years of just stuff, right, piled up in the houses of your body, mind, and, over time, what we're doing, really probably the first eight to 12 weeks is the process of gutting that, all the garbage out of the house right Gutting it, pulling up the dumpster, getting it all out of there, sifting, sorting through it, reorganizing things, freshening things right Somewhere in there.
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: We're also certainly freshening things right.
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: We're cleaning things, we're disinfecting them.
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: We are creating brightness.
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: When we do things like EMDR, we are not just desensitizing and reprocessing painful things.
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: We're also building in beautiful resources to help you feel lighter and brighter along the way.
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: But then what do we know, often happens in those episodes of hoarders if there's not a fundamental shift that happens inside of us.
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: Well, keeping it maintained, keeping the house maintained and somewhat orderly, becomes a struggle, right, and so there has to be not only this process of clearing things out, but there also has to be this process of maintaining, which means you have to know how this works.
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: Now let's talk for a moment about why you are uniquely positioned in this stage of horrible grief, feeling like everything's a shit show, right To manifest for this to be the greatest season of your greatest manifestation.
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: Why is this season better?
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: Well, love, because so many of us in the world today are numb, we are emotionally suppressed and repressed, and we're going to talk about all the ways we do that, some interesting ways we do that right, and because you are in a place of deep vulnerability and feeling right now, you are actually much better positioned to be in touch with what you're feeling.
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: To be in touch with.
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: Well, screw it, I already lost so much.
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: I might as well go for it right and to really lean into this season of regaining yourself and building a life that was better than the one that you ever originally built.
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: And I've seen it over and over and over again and that is hard for people to believe, but when people sit in this post-divorce life and they struggle for a very long time or they struggle to build the life that they really, really want, it's often because they're not mastering kind of these tools of emotional suppression and processing.
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: So let's talk about it.
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: How did this happen?
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: Well, we talked about how emotional suppression happened, but let's talk about the ways that you have stayed numb and maintained suppression and repression over the years.
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: Okay, so the obvious ones, right, gosh, these are so tired.
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: Food and drinks so like food, drugs, any substance right that you're putting in your mouth or inhaling or whatever that kind of thing, right, whether it's alcohol or pot or I don't care what it is.
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: Even prescription meds love antidepressants are a way of numbing, they are a way of and I'm not anti-medication, that is not what I'm saying but pharmaceuticals were never intended to be prescribed without therapy.
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: Even when pharmaceutical antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds came on the scene, they were never meant to be the solution.
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: They were always meant to be a bridge while treatment was going on.
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: And so medication is one of the ways that we keep emotionally suppressed and repressed.
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: All right, staying super busy, right, staying super, super busy so you don't have time to think or feel.
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: Some sexier ways oh, shopping, that one's a really common one.
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: Like, how often do you, you know, throw stuff in your Amazon cart and then, and then it shows up Right, and every time you throw something in you get a little hit.
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: And then, every time a box arrives, you get a little hit Right, and all that stuff keeps you suppressed.
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: So overthinking keeps you emotionally suppressed.
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: Talking a lot of times not always, but a lot of times when we're just kind of talking, talking, talking with our friends, even when we're venting right, venting is not the same as radical vulnerability, and venting keeps us emotionally suppressed.
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: Trying to be perfect keeps us emotionally suppressed.
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: Right, because if we can outrun judgment, our perception of judgment from other people.
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: It's like, oh, I can feel okay.
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: And another way that we do this in society, in our society, especially in the West, that is so toxic, is an obsession with our appearance.
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: And I say this to you like, obviously guilty of it, and it's something that I'm actively working on, right, like you've probably heard me talking about weaning off my Sephora addiction a couple of years ago and you know I've given up Botox in the last year and just really trying to kind of reorganize my priorities and understanding how brainwashed I've been around, being obsessed over my appearance, because meanwhile we're over here, worried so much about how we look, but like, look at the suffering that's happening in the world and it's one of the ways that we avoid grieving seasons of life.
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: Right, we resist aging with such vigor and then we never learn to grieve certain phases of life.
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: We never learn to accept the aging process and PS, to get to acceptance in anything love, right, whether it's the loss of this marriage or your kiddos growing up or your aging process, we have to feel you can't find acceptance or peace.
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: So, like so many women tell me that what they want at the end of this rainbow, this divorce rainbow is peace.
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: It is impossible to get to peace without processing the feelings.
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: It is impossible to get to acceptance of your body or your appearance without processing the feelings.
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: It is impossible to get to acceptance of your body or your appearance without processing your feelings and coming to find acceptance as a result of grieving.
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: And so that kind of attempt to be perfect and obsession with our appearance is one of the ways we repress emotion.
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: Blaming other people, staying focused on what everybody else did wrong, is one of the ways we avoid having to face ourselves and feel, and, in that vein, is seeking approval from other people.
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: How often do I, you know, have a disagreement with somebody that I love, and after I have that disagreement, the first thing I want to do is call producer joy and have her tell me I was right.
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: Now I don't do that.
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: But, man, that urge is strong, right, and producer joy, man, she can.
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: You know she is someone who gets like really passionate about having your back, like she is someone you want on your team because she is going to, she will go to that mat for you and she's going to have your back and she is just going to, and so, right, I have to actively resist doing that, because I know I'm suppressing emotion.
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: So how many of those do you do?
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: Food, alcohol, screens, you know, talking, inventing, um, staying too busy shopping, focusing on your appearance?
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: Oh, here's another one.
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: I didn't say Avoidance, avoidance, right, you know, for me that's so much of why I avoid fitness is because, other than walking, right, but lifting weights, getting on the Peloton, it's physically uncomfortable.
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: I don't want to feel that uncomfortable.
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: I'll go for a walk, that's easy, right?
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: I don't want to feel uncomfortable.
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: So how many things do you avoid?
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: Because you're going to feel something uncomfortable and then you're not actually working towards your goals, and then we just blame other people for the things that are going wrong in our lives, and then we can kind of, you know, make a little cozy bed of self-pity for us to lay in.
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: It's like, oh, you know, it's, I didn't help myself and it's not my fault, you know.
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: So those are all the things that we do to keep ourselves suppressed and repressed because, a, we're avoiding rejection of our loved ones and B, you know, then we're like the episode of the hoarders, right, and it just we look at it and it looks so overwhelming that we're like not today, maybe tomorrow, right, and then we just keep doing all these toxic behaviors.
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: So you, love, though, are uniquely positioned to tackle this episode of Hoarders right now, because if you don't, you are going to repeat the same history over and over and over again.
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: Love, and you are uniquely positioned to.
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: You know, create that euphemistic vision board, right, whether it's a vision board or not, right, but to really identify, to dig into what is it that you really want and to build that life today.
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: But what are some of the things that you would need to do in order to have that authentic, in touch with your gut feeling, in touch with your intuition, so that you can manifest?
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: You know, with your intuition, so that you can manifest.
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: You know you can't hide a vibration, right, you can't.
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: So our vibration, which is what dictates our manifestation, is very much driven by our emotional processes, and you can suppress and repress emotion, but it's still in there, vibrating love, right.
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: So you can't fake a vibration, can't, can't, can't fake a vibration.
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: And so how often have you said that you had a gut feeling and you suppressed it or you denied it?
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: Right, and that's because honoring our gut feelings, honoring our intuitions, as Gabor Mate says, has become second nature instead of first nature, and that is a flaw of modern living.
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: Right that our intuition is something that we push away rather than welcome in.
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: And it's because we want to stay part of the club we want to be on the inside we want to be a part of, and what that means these days in modern culture, right is to look a certain way and act a certain way and think a certain way and believe a certain way, and we stay in our little tribes and we're afraid to function outside of that.
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: But that is where all the magic happens.
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: Right Is in embracing our unique voice inside of us and accepting other people's unique voice inside of them.
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: So what are some of the things that we need to make habits in order to A find ourselves after divorce and B not repeat the past.
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: And you know where I see people lose this again is when they start dating.
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: Right, when it's post-divorce life and you start dating.
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: Because what that does is it switches on all that approval shit, all that like I don't wanna be rejected stuff, and that's where, if you haven't made these things a habit, where it's insidious, how it sneaks in, where you just give up little pieces of yourself here and there to not be rejected.
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: And so if you haven't laid these groundworks and these foundations, the dating piece is where you're right away going to kind of fall back to the old way.
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: So here we're going to start with the basic things that you need to do to unwind this emotional suppression or repression, and then we're going to get into the deeper level of things that are essential.
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: So move your body, right.
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: So walk, stretch yoga, like just movement, right?
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: There was a phrase in when I worked in rehab move a muscle, change a thought, right.
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: When you're having a craving, when you're having a negative thought, when you're having a resentment, when you're wanting to, like you know, slash a hole in all four of his tires, wanting to, like you know, slash a hole in all four of his tires.
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: Move, move your body and that will start to shift.
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: Be in nature, and if you know, it's like we have this beautiful springtime, so it's easy now, right.
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: But if it's winter and you can't be in nature, which is not the situation now, but planning ahead, right is to sit quietly without stimulation.
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: So this is so key, right, and I don't care how much single momming you're doing, love Like, you, have time to sit quietly without stimulation.
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: How many of us take our phones to the bathroom, you know, and it's such a bad habit.
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: We have to get comfortable with finding pockets of time and it does not have to be.
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: It would be ideal if it could be more than 10 minutes.
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: But I guarantee you, if you sit quietly in a room with zero stimulation, with your phone in the other room for 10 minutes and you don't fall asleep that's the trick, right you will feel some stuff come up, you will feel things if you sit still for 10 minutes and breathe, and so the longer you can sit quietly without stimulation, probably the better mental health you have.
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: Love Doing art, right, and I don't mean like making beautiful pieces of art, like if you do that and that's your thing wonderful producer Joy, she's a beautiful artist but I just mean like scribbling and sketching and just grabbing your kids' crayons and just, you know, fussing around.
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: That's, you know, it's a beautiful way to process emotion and just kind of get in touch with what you're feeling.
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: There's so much of that that's become popular, right.
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: Crafting has had such a resurgence, and there's a reason that it's so popular, because it helps us to feel grounded and to have better mental health.
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: Breathwork is a beautiful key to being more embodied and to processing, if you are doing some, even if it's just box breathing.
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: I have lots of clients, though, who come to me with anxiety disorders and they're like I was taught to box breathe and it doesn't fix it, dawn.
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: And if that's you, if you relate to that I do breathwork, dawn and I still have panic attacks.
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: I still have meltdowns.
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: That's because episode of hoarders right, it's like if you were to send cleaning people to a home that has had hoarders in it, like the cleaning people are going to show up and they're going to be like I can't make a dent in this, and that's kind of what box breathing is like.
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: When you have a history of suppressed and repressed emotion, it's like it's not enough.
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: It's like a bandaid on a gunshot wound.
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: So if any of these things you feel like they just don't move the needle enough, it's just a sign that you need deeper level work, which we're going to get into next.
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: Journaling is a really beautiful tool to help relieve suppression and repression.
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: And then body scanning, so like, let's say, we go back to the sitting quietly right scan, where you're just observing what it feels like to be in your body from the top of your head down, you know, through your face, your jaw, your throat, your shoulders, your core, your stomach, your pelvis, your hips, your legs, your knees, your ankles, your feet, the bottoms of your feet, the tops of your feet, right, we just went through that super fast.
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: But for you to be able to do that and note where you feel stuck, emotion, that's a skill that takes practice.
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: But, again, that's the key to everything, because emotional suppression and repression is the number one thing that is keeping us I can't say that rewind, that onramatic.
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: It is one of the top things that is keeping us sick in this country, mentally and emotionally and physically.
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: It is one of the things that is compromising our relationships, our sense of well-being, and it is driving all sorts of unhealth processes, whether it's mental or physical.
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: Now, these things that I said, move your body, sit in nature, sit physical.
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: Now, these things that I said, move your body, sit in nature, sit quietly, without stimulation, they're not enough in order to handle the hoarder situation right.
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: There's so many times where folks have come to me and said I work out, I have friends, I do what you know, I have all these things?
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: Why am I still so unwell?
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: Right, I've had yogis like people who have strong yoga practices come to me with traumas and you know, for me yoga wasn't enough to deal with the traumas or the backlog, the hoarder situation either.
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: I don't you're all tracking that.
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: I don't actually mean hoarding right, like yes, that can happen.
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: But I'm just using that as like a visual Because I think if we could all see inside of our body, minds, if we could see the energetic hoarding we've been doing, we would understand why our lives are in the places that they are.
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: But we can't see it inside of ourselves.
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: When we see an episode of hoarders it's like, oh, you get it, like these folks are not well, right.
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: But if you could see inside of your body, mind, love right now, the energy you've been hoarding, you would see it and it would all click.
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: So just the visual I'm using.
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: So going deeper, once you've got some body awareness and you're able to do a body scan, you're able to reconnect, and that's so much of what I do in my practice, day in and day out, is helping people get out of their heads and drop into their bodies.
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: We can go deeper and we can start processing, we can start cleaning house right.
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: But something that I have to teach folks before we go into processing and clearing out all those energetic rooms of their emotional house is understanding the window of tolerance.
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: The window of tolerance is something where in order to truly effectively process emotion, a you have to feel it enough to.
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: It has to be activated enough for you to actually process it.
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: So if you're too low in the window of tolerance and it's not activated enough, we're just kind of regurgitating it intellectually, we're not actually getting it out of your body.
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: But also if you're too activated and you're above your window of tolerance and you're in panic, fight, flight, freeze collapse, dorsal, vagal collapse if you have been a student of nervous system regulation at all or just nervous system function right, if you know a little bit about collapse or freeze response, we can't process emotion effectively from those places either.
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: So we have to get into the window of tolerance.
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: Where we're stable enough, we're resourced enough, we feel a great enough sense of security Maslow's hierarchy of needs that food, clothing, shelter are covered, then we can process.
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: So first things first, we start with just reconnecting our mind to our body and getting more aware.
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: Then we got to get a sense for am I in my window of tolerance?
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: Am I in an appropriate season of my life?
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: Am I able to process in a place where I have a great enough sense of security that it is safe for me to reaccess these feelings and to move them through my body into the dumpster?
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: And then, if your answers to those questions are yes, double yes, then we go deeper to use tools like EMDR, homeopathy, reorganizing your community.
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: Reorganizing your community is like a right.
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: We talked about this in the boundary series.
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: That that is one of the tools that you use so that you can go deeper is really clarifying who is in your inner circle.
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: Who is a safe trauma processing place where you can talk about your most radically vulnerable places, your scariest, darkest shadow work spaces, and to feel loved and accepted.
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: That's the circle reorganization we're looking for, where those are the people who get to be in the inner sanctum and the other people who have less favorable responses to you doing shadow work and to sharing your deepest, darkest places.
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: So just think about if you were to share mad, sad, glad, afraid, ashamed.
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: It's like the basics that I encourage people to identify mad, sad, glad, afraid, ashamed with all the people that you tend to talk to day in and day out, those who respond most favorably to all of those emotions that's your inner circle, love and people who do not respond favorably to those you gotta like, rethink it, like, maybe at least explore.
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: Does this person you know, can I work on this with this person?
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: Or do they need to be reorganized to an outer circle?
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: So, reorganizing your community, embracing radical vulnerability, deep, deep, like love, digging out the stuff that you have never dug out before, saying the innermost secret scaries right to some safe people, that's how we go deeper and we process the suppressed, repressed emotion.
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: And then emdr, eft, tapping, homeopathy these are emdr and eft.
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: They use stimulate, like emdr uses bilateral stimulation, either eye movement or or tapping on the body or auditory tapping.
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: But it's this experiential technique right that helps process, reprocess and desensitize stuff in the body.
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: And so much of what we learn as EMDR practitioners is how to help people do body scans.
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: Body scan in the in the basic delivery of the basic EMDR model.
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: Body scan is literally one of the steps in the most basic delivery of EMDR therapy, teaching you to do a body scan and to be able to identify body sensations.
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: So there are.
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: A lot of times I've heard people in especially like Facebook communities say EMDR didn't work for them.
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: And when EMDR doesn't quote unquote work for you, it's probably because probably this is not an exhaustive list but because you've got enough emotional suppression and repression, dissociation, that you're not connected.
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: Your body and mind aren't connected.
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: You don't feel a great enough sense of security in your body or in your mind to go there and so it quote unquote doesn't work.
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: It can work, but it requires more prep work.
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: On the front right, eft tapping uses the idea of tapping on various meridians that go through your upper body in order to help release stored emotion, deeper levels of breath work.
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: There are some beautiful experiences of breath work.
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: And then, have you ever heard of myofascial release?
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: Myofascial release is a way of getting into, like moving the body in certain places that it unsticks stuck energy.
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: We're going to have a guest on the podcast in the next couple of months that's going to get into some of this stuff with us and I'm very excited about it.
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: Somatic releasing of stuck emotion, of stuck clogged energy that is keeping you trapped in resentment, trapped in overthinking, trapped in obsessing about your ex, trapped in you know, just kind of feeling stuck in this season, right?
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: So, love, this is your call.
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: If you're highly dissociative and you know that and you know it's just you're too scared to even look at the pile of stuff, really really work on creating, prioritizing safe relationships.
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: Really really work on sitting in stillness more often so you can just feel into spaces in your body.
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: You know, I really really resonate with not feeling safe in my own body.
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: For me that's certainly linked to traumas from the past, but has more to do with because I somaticized so much of the traumas I experienced, both in my childhood and in marriage, that I ended up with a lot of chronic disease that was so painful that my body was no longer a safe place to be in, and so I ended up, you know, very dissociative into my mind a lot because of chronic pain, and I know many of you can resonate with that as well, chronic pain being something that keeps you out of your body, and so it's just one of those things, love, where we have to say, okay, we're going to tackle it one day at a time, one action at a time.
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: Those are just the habits to just start building in like, oh, my tendency is to feel this, get overwhelmed and turn away from it and avoid.
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: That's suppression or repression.
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: Oh, I feel this.
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: My body talk, my emotional talk, it's trying to say something.
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: What does it need in providing care?
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: You got it love.
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: Emotional suppression is how you got here.
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: Emotional expression is going to get you out.
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: Okay, today's getting unstuck is epic, rebecca writes in.
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: She says from the day he left until now almost two months I've really invested in healing.
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: I let myself cry, feel, remember.
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: I do things that make me feel better Gym, walk, journal, bed early podcasts.
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: I have times where I accept that this is maybe for the best times where I miss him.
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: I thought I was making really good progress, but now I just feel stuck in this limbo stage.
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: I don't want to keep doing this and I just want to skip ahead.
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: How do I get unstuck?
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: I love this one right, because Rebecca is saying like I'm doing everything you've asked me to do, dawn, I am feeling my feelings and I'm doing the work and I'm not as far as I want, as fast as I want, and I think we can all really relate to that.
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: And so one of my initial thoughts was ah well, there could be spots where, rebecca, you're missing something right, where there is a call to go deeper.
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: You know, in the things that you shared, you shared two months of doing this, which is a really good track record.
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: Like that is an epic track record, but I would say it's not very long in the scope of healing journeys.
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: I hear you saying that you're letting yourself feel and remember.
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: I didn't hear where you were necessarily going deeper with a facilitator, right?
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: I didn't hear where there was maybe facilitated processing of older wounds that are probably linked up with this wound.
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: So my initial reaction is, as a trauma-informed therapist, to think like, oh, is there somewhere you could go deeper?
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: But also maybe not right.
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: Maybe not Because when we look at the vibrational, the emotional guidance scale, which is a list of emotions that starts at joy, knowledge, empowerment and goes down through 22.
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: This is borrowed from Abraham Hicks, goes down to fear, grief, depression, despair, powerlessness, which is 22.
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: So it ranges from one joy 22, despair right, and it's got like a good bit of emotional words from 1 to 22.
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: My second thing I said was where is impatience vibrationally on the emotional guidance scale?
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: Because we are manifesting according to our vibration and our vibration is dictated by our emotional processes.
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: So I said, ooh, let me check my emotional guidance scale and see where impatience is and in the scale of 1 to 22, it is number 10.
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: I'm going to read to you 1 through 10.
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: 1 is joy or appreciation, gratitude, love.
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: 2 is passion.
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: 3 is enthusiasm or eagerness.
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: 4 is positive expectation or belief.
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: 5 is optimism.
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: 6 is hopefulness, 7, contentment, 8, boredom See the tipping point between positive and painful.
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: There is between 7 and 8,.
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: See the tipping point between positive and painful.
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: There is between seven and eight.
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: Contentment eight.
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: Boredom nine.
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: Pessimism ten.
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: Frustration, irritation, impatience.
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: Sometimes, rebecca, we're just impatient.
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: Can I get an amen there?
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: And you know, something I've really been processing in my own personal life lately is manifestation takes time, healing takes time.
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: It really is a process.
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: You know, life is such an elegant tapestry of an interweaving, of every one's intersection, like when you think about how intricately crafted our world is, how things are intricately crafted to create growth and renewal and to make babies and to make sunsets and to create corals in the ocean.
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: Like the intricacy of it right.
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: So often in our own kind of egoic state we're like I should be better.
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: Now I want something different.
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: Now I am ready for a change which kind of denies the larger sexy nature of God and its complexities.
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: Right, and so our truth can be our truth.
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: This could be my truth, but that doesn't make it the truth, like meaning our creator's truth for our path or our collective lives, because we really are all in this together.
• 37:43
  Speaker 1: So a couple of thoughts, rebecca, is, there might be some places you could go a little deeper and you know I'd want to kind of poke around in there.
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: Two, you might just be being impatient, and three, you might be asking bigger questions about what else, god, am I meant to kind of excavate in this season?
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: What else am I missing?
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: What other things can I allow to surface to my conscious awareness so that I can have even more in the future, so that I can feel even more purposeful, so I can step into even more powerful places in my life?
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: But either which way, rebecca, I think you're on the right track and I think, even if you changed nothing and just kept doing exactly what you're doing for another month or two, it would pay off, because in my life I can see places where I've gotten impatient, but then now I'm seeing stuff come together in such a beautiful way, and it's because manifestations take time.
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: So sometimes, if you're doing all really powerful things, just keep going, unless you feel that little intuitive nudge that says you're doing all really powerful things, just keep going unless you feel that little intuitive nudge that says you're missing something.
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: And if there's a nudge that says you're missing something, then look for a facilitator that can help diagnose that wounded spot that could use a little extra TLC.
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: All right, I love you so much.
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: Have a beautiful week, peace, dear.
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: Divorce Diary is a podcast by my coach, dawn.
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: You can find more at mycoachdawncom.