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150. Why People Pleasing (Codependency) Feels Better Than Self Care During Divorce · Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce

• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Hi love, one of the most annoying compliments you can get during a divorce is you are so strong, you are going to get through this, and it just makes you want to kind of punch someone right?
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: Because the reality is is you are tired of being strong and in today's episode we're going to unpack how you keep kind of perpetuating that problem.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: Let's change it.
• 1:15
  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.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: I'm your host, dawn Wiggins, a therapist, coach, integrative healer and divorcee.
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: Join me for a fresh approach to healing grief and building your confidence after divorce.
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: In the people-pleasing-feels-better-than-self-care-dawn conversation, we are going to talk about three specific reasons why we tend to reach for people-pleasing over self-care.
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: We are going to talk about my number one strategy, not just that I recommend to clients Of course I recommend it to clients but the one that has most consistently paid off in my life that I have utilized over and over and over again.
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: And then we're going to hear in our Getting Unstuck segment Francesca, who is working really, really hard in divorce recovery, but she wrote in telling her story about where she's getting stuck in this, knowing she needs more help but feels so tired and not strong enough and doesn't have a solution.
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: Right, we're going to help her find her answers in this why people-pleasing feels better than self-care.
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: Sitch, all, right, let's dig in.
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: So we all are kind of hip to people pleasing and how it is part of a codependent pattern, right?
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: And that we've heard that it has to do with the patriarchy, you know, meaning that as women we're socialized to really be self-sacrificing and to take care of other people's needs first.
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: There are roots of that, certainly, in many, many religions and cultures around the world.
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: But that's not what we're digging into today, right, we're going to dig into the kind of more here and now reasons that you keep perpetuating this on a day-to-day basis where, rather than sit down and actually embody the discipline of taking good, primarily emotional care of yourself right, certainly physical care also, but really doing the disciplined work of taking good emotional care of yourself, why that's so hard and what you're doing to kind of perpetuate that right Now.
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: Let me tell you I get it Meaning very early in my divorce recovery journey where I started doing inner child work, which I now more refer to as parts work or internal family systems work.
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: But back then you know, 2010-ish inner child work was more popular in the therapeutic circles I was hanging in.
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: And so when I was doing that inner child work, very often when I would go in inside, go within and take a look at my little girl within, or the angry teenager within those parts of me would be like nope, we don't want to take care, we do not want to be responsible, we do not want to be accountable, we want somebody to solve it for us.
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: And that was a very difficult piece to overcome for me and it happened in layers over time.
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: But when I tell you internal brat attacks around having to be responsible for my own emotional well-being and not just being able to have person A, b or C if you're a longtime listener you probably know who those A, bs and Cs are Like that was hard right.
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: And so just to say I get it, I know you, I see you, I love you.
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: So, first things first.
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: When we are too tired of being strong and it feels too hard to take care of self, it feels like a burden to take care of your own emotional needs, but you are eager to support somebody else's emotional needs.
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: The reasons for that are when you help someone else, there is an immediate gratification.
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: That does not happen when you take care of your own emotional needs.
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: You get a hit of dopamine from having, you know, helped someone else.
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: You get typically validated by that person.
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: You may even get credit from people who watched you or observed you.
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: Do you ever see that episode of Friends where Joey and Phoebe are in a debate about whether or not there's actually a selfless deed?
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: It's kind of like that right when it feels so much better in the immediate, instant moment to help someone else.
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: And so when you tally all that up, right that hey, I'm taking that quick fix, that short-acting quick fix, over.
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: If I were to go within and take care of my own emotional needs, if I had to go in and talk to my inner child, my angry teenager, the you know deal with the resentment with my ex.
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: I had to figure out how to take responsibility for those feelings I would be feeling probably frustration and shame and grief, right.
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: So it's like in a blink of an eye I could either help this person they could tell me I'm good or I could go inside and look at the pile of shit I have not yet combed through and feel that Now, in that immediate choice, yes, you feel temporarily better, but then in the long run, right?
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: We have this result where it chronically feels like a burden to take care of your own emotional needs.
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: So what do we do about that pattern, love?
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: So the second reason it feels better to people please and to take care of yourself is because it doesn't really require much discipline to help out someone else, to be people pleasing, right?
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: It's kind of just like someone asks something of you and you say yes, right, and you may feel resentment or you may feel tired or you may feel whatever, right?
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: But it's not like you had to make a commitment to yourself and set an alarm to get up every morning to meal prep and take a walk and write in your journal every day, day in and day out, even when you don't feel like doing it.
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: It's something about when someone asks something of us whether it's guilt or an overdeveloped sense of responsibility or whatever it is that's more powerful emotionally to us than our self-discipline, right?
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: Those emotional hooks are more powerful than our self-discipline practices.
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: And so discipline, self-discipline is really very, very often the key to most success.
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: I was telling producer Joy earlier today that one of the things I tend to crave most these days and really probably am low-key, manifesting most of the time is freedom, and it's so interesting that the key to freedom really is discipline and we're going to talk about that in a different episode.
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: But when you are taking care of yourself versus somebody else, less discipline is required and we have an uncomfortable relationship with discipline.
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: The other reason that it's easier to people-please is because the emotions are less intense.
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: Right, you may feel uncomfortable holding space for someone else's painful emotions, it may feel awkward, but it's not the same intensity as your own deep wounds, right, and so it just kind of doesn't take as much out of you as it does to face your own stuff, right.
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: So, all in all, it's just far more uncomfortable, but the only way to really shift that is to really see, kind of take a look at the topography of your life, right, look at the map, the emotional map here, and just see, if you keep choosing to do this other instant gratification thing, that ultimately you're not going to get the results that you're looking for in terms of emotional freedom and wellness and whatnot.
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: Now let's talk about the strategy that I've used my whole life to kind of work with this right and there are certainly more than one, but one of the most powerful ones that I've used and prioritized and that doesn't mean it's been easy right, but has been to hire a helper.
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: What do I mean by that?
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: Well, if I get and this is also part of my human design strategy, so know that you know human design nerd.
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: We had a recent episode on that right With Healthy Madeline but if I get energy from doing certain tasks, I want to do as much of those tasks as possible.
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: Right, I'm going to throw myself into those tasks that give me energy, give me life.
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: So, way back in the day, when I was getting divorced and I was super chronically ill, I had tachycardia.
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: My heart rate, my resting heart rate was like in the 120s.
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: It was really disturbing.
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: I was wearing a heart monitor for a period of time while they were doing this whole cardiac workup, but it was really just unhealed trauma, right.
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: So I'm wearing this heart monitor, chronic tachycardia, very distressing.
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: What I started to correlate is that when I went into my office and started doing therapy, my heart rate would immediately drop to a healthy, normal level.
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: It was fascinating, right, but actually doing therapy gives me life.
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: It literally like I go to this happy zone where I feel better, even when I had cluster headaches or you name it, or my daughter was postpartum and I felt so unwell, like inevitably.
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: I love what I do so much that that's where I get a lot of energy.
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: But there are other areas of my life that feel very, very hard and very, very exhausting.
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: So when you hear me tell stories of when I was healing from divorce and I went to therapy and I went to group therapy and I went to Al-Anon and I went to yoga and I went to personal development workshops, right, that was me outsourcing the things that were hard.
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: I was so tired of being strong, from being chronically ill, from having unresolved trauma, so tired of being strong that I just went to all those healing spaces and many of them were not expensive, some of them free, many of them not expensive or free, and let those people kind of shore me up.
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: Right, I hired helpers, I hired a therapist, I used the phone list in Al-Anon because I didn't have the strength or the discipline to always kind of do that internal work, but if I put myself in relationships with people and in places where that work was automatically happening, then it was going to be done right, and so, as that carried on throughout my life, I would hire healers, even if it was functional medicine and it wasn't paid for by insurance, or it was the best therapist, or it was the best business coach, or it was the best podcast coach, or it was the best personal assistant, or it was the best you name it at various stages of my life.
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: Today, I have had amazing results in the gym by hiring Colleen.
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: She was our very first guest on the podcast in season one.
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: I do not have the discipline to pick heavy things up and put them down again, but when I go to the gym and she tells me what to do, I'll do it, which is this fascinating combination of I want to please her, so I do the thing, but I get the long term result.
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: So I think that a lot of people, when it comes to spending money on themselves, this is where you kind of get it wrong.
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: Right, where God guides, god provides, and if there's somewhere where you need extra support, do not shy away from being able to pay for it.
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: You will find a way if you choose to prioritize that right.
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: It is a strategy that has grown my revenue year after year after year.
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: It has made me a healthier version of myself, it has increased my capacity.
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: It has led to massive abundance in my life is to take that stretch.
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: This leads me right into our getting unstuck segment, where Francesca wrote in.
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: This was a couple of weeks ago and Francesca and I have been in conversation.
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: It's been a beautiful dialogue.
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: I know she's listening right now and names have been changed to protect the innocent.
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: But Francesca wanted so badly to be one of the 12 women we are enrolling now right in our group healing program.
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: Francesca wanted so badly to be one of the 12 women and she knew she needed extra support and she knew she is really experiencing this very tired of being strong thing, right.
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: But she genuinely could not figure out how to afford the program.
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: And so, rather than kind of shrugging her shoulders and giving up and saying, well, I guess I can't do that, I guess I have to find something else.
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: And staying in the same patterns, she approached me on multiple occasions from various angles, right, and said, can you help me figure this out?
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: And sure enough, she and I figured it out.
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: And so I want to say to you that your habit, your hardwired neurobiological habit, is going to be to help someone else before it is to have the self-discipline to help yourself.
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: But, love, this is the moment to seize that opportunity to employ self-discipline, to find a way to ask for help, to receive the support that you need, to help shore up the places of you where you genuinely do not feel strong enough yet.
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: That's real.
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: There are many places in your life where you are not strong enough yet, and that's okay, and let's have someone come alongside you, whatever that needs to look like for you, and don't shy away from that because you cannot.
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: I know you've heard this time and time again.
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: Right, but you cannot give from an empty cup before eventually you crash and burn, and I think very many of us in this post-divorce phase are like a hair's breadth away from crashing and burning and it's devastating when it happens and I love you way too much and there are way too many solutions.
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: It doesn't need to go like that.
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: All right, In today's episode we talked all about why people-pleasing feels better than self-care.
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: We talked about why you're so tired of being so strong, how that's a crappy compliment, right.
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: We talked about the three specific reasons that this is just a pattern that keeps reinforcing itself.
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: We talked about my top strategy for overcoming this.
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: We heard how Francesca's approach to overcoming this was to put aside people pleasing and to make the choice to actively prioritize herself and ask for help in achieving her goal.
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: Get creative with me, dawn.
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: Help me solve this problem.
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: I want the same thing for you.
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: Do not hesitate to reach out to me in a DM or an email.
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: Ask me how you can become one of the 12 women we are enrolling now.
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: We are going to soft start in August.
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: Hard start September 1.
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: The events are mapped out for the year.
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: Did I tell you we added a three-night retreat in Myrtle Beach next July 2025?
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: We added a three-night retreat in Myrtle Beach.
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: That is a ticket that is part of you joining the program of 12 Women.
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: Can't wait to tell you more all about that.
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: I love you so much.
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: Peace, peace.