Latest / Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce / 323. There Is No Meal Train for Divorce Grief: Grieving Someone Who’s Still Alive

Transcript

323. There Is No Meal Train for Divorce Grief: Grieving Someone Who’s Still Alive · Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce

• 0:49
  SPEAKER_03: When someone dies, there's a script.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_03: There are casseroles.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_03: There are flowers.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_03: There is a funeral.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_03: There's a defined role.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_03: Widow, widower, orphan, you name it.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_03: But when you get divorced, there's no meal train, there's no public ritual, there's no socially approved identity for you, the woman who is grieving, someone who is still alive.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_03: And in some ways, that makes divorce grief far more disorienting than death.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_03: Because you're not just mourning a person, you're mourning a future, a version of yourself, and you're doing it all while answering emails, splitting custody, and pretending you're fine.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_03: So if you have felt this before, you are responding to a loss that our culture does not know how to hold.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_03: So we must do it together.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_03: Hi, love.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_03: 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_03: I'm your host, Don Wiggins, a therapist, coach, integrative healer, and divorcee.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_03: Join me for a fresh approach to healing grief and building your confidence after divorce.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_03: This episode is massive.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_03: First of all, we are gonna walk you through the three ways divorced grief is neurologically and socially different from death.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_03: And what why that difference is the reason you often feel stuck and that many women are stuck years later.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_03: Then we're gonna talk about the difficulty with divorce support groups and why so many of those spaces feel heavy, maybe performative, and that you sometimes leave maybe feeling worse instead of better, and what that tells us about the kind of grief that you or other people may be carrying in the middle of divorce.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_03: And then we're gonna get into something that we have been just dying to be able to talk about in a more specific way.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_03: But at the end of the episode, we're gonna dig into how divorce grief doesn't actually move in stages.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_03: It moves in waves, it moves in identity rupt, innervous system spikes and collapses.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_03: You can feel fine at 9 a.m.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_03: and be grieving a completely different version of yourself by 2 p.m.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_03: That isn't instability, it's nonlinear healing.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_03: Most divorce advice is linear.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_03: Process the paperwork, process the feelings, move on.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_03: But grief after divorce isn't linear, it's quantum.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_03: It touches your past, your body, your future identity all at once.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_03: And when someone dies, it does appear to be more linear, whether it is or it isn't.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_03: But you move through rituals and there's an ending.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_03: But divorce grief is different.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_03: The person is still alive, the timeline overlaps, and your nervous system doesn't know what reality it's in.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_03: That is what we're gonna talk about towards the end of the episode.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_03: Let's dig in.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_03: Ladies, good morning.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_03: Good morning.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_03: What a morning we've had already.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_03: Hot damn.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_03: We are very productive today.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_03: We did not plan our bullshit.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_03: So can we can we do that right here?
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_03: What bullshit are we bullshitting?
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, let's dig into there is no freaking meal train after divorce.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_03: How much that actually really sucks for our women.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, let's let's definitely dig into the three ways divorce grief is different than, and there's lots of ways divorce grief is different, right?
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_03: We're gonna oversimplify it by saying three ways it's neurologically and socially different.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_03: But yeah, let's just unpack how weird it is to grieve something that is so not wildly like accepted or ritualized the way that other types of grief are.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_03: Um and the first thing I want to mention is when we have grief related with death, what I see in my clients, especially for clients who have lost children, let alone spouses, but especially children, right?
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_03: What the brain is eventually able to do is find some level of acceptance in the physical finality of death, right?
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_03: Joy said this phrase earlier, and I love it.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_03: We are spiritual beings having a human experience, a physical human experience, right?
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_03: So when there is a physical death, it's the end of a physical aspect of a relationship, right?
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_03: But there is a finality to that physicality, and in divorce that doesn't exist.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_03: So the brain grapples with searching for acceptance or an end point or a closing of a tab, right?
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_03: That's just never available.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_03: There's this ongoing contact, right?
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_03: The second thing that is profoundly different is how different our culture responds to divorce versus death.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm not saying our culture handles death well.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_03: I am I am in no way arguing that for people who have lost a spouse through death, that it's easy for them.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_03: That is not what I'm saying.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_03: I'm just saying it's even less easy when you lose someone through divorce because it's a dissolving of your entire existence.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and maybe by choice and maybe not.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_03: I think half of our women chose divorce and half of our women did not, and they got blindsided, and that's a whole nother element of grief, right?
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_03: When you get blindsided by it.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_03: But there is just not the same container for women to grieve in an ongoing basis and process what they're feeling and make sense of it.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_03: It's just not a thing.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_03: The third thing I want to call out that's very, very different in divorce grief versus death grief is that there's a component of self-esteem that has to be addressed during divorce grief that I don't believe gets stirred up in the same way that death grief does, right?
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_03: We have a shift in identity when someone dies.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_03: We have a shift in identity when you get divorced, right?
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_03: That identity diffusion or that difficulty, like knowing who am I, where do I fit, where do I belong, that happens in both to an extent, right?
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_03: But in divorce grief, there's this self-esteem piece where I'm grappling with why wasn't I enough?
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_03: And that doesn't happen in death grief, right?
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_03: It's like, and maybe a little bit like if someone dies from drug abuse, we might, you know, that kind of thing, or suicide, we may ask, like why, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_03: Why, why wasn't I enough for this person to like fight or stay, or that kind of thing.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_03: But I think it's a profound part of divorce grief to have to grapple with why wasn't I enough?
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_03: Why did I not do enough?
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_03: Like, how did I fail in some element, right?
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_03: With divorce grief.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_03: So these are three of the big differences that I see, like difficulty with acceptance because there's not the same type of finality.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_03: Though we do see across the board, right?
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_03: We see when our women are done with the litigation portion, it does get easier, right?
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_03: When there's finality to the legal piece.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_03: And I think we see that over and over again as women are still in the midst of the actual litigation part.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_03: It is very hard for them to be grounded in their bodies, right?
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_03: It's like they're getting triggered like left, right, and center all the time.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_03: And then the real sort of healing work can begin after that litigation piece is final.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_03: The lack of the social support, right?
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_03: The lack of the meal train and then the self-esteem piece.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_03: What would you ladies say?
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_03: What stands out to you?
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_03: Do you have any that you would add or any that you would that really like stick in your craw?
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: My experience was compounded by the fact that I left a military community.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: So I couldn't reach out to my community because that's not what they do in that time frame.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone kind of does the opposite, correct?
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: And so being thrown into that where your entire existence, I mean, everything from the doctors you see to the grocery store that you shop at to everything revolves around this community.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so when I no longer had that, it was almost like, how do I rebuild everything?
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so I chose to move away to a place where I didn't know anybody.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I oftentimes think that it's because for me, accepting any sort of help would have felt like I was coming to terms with the end of it.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't think I was quite ready to feel it.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: Like I just wanted to dive in and go into hyperdrive instead of being able to receive it, but then I was almost pissed off that people weren't supporting me or they weren't there for me.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like I wanted it both.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted both.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_02: I can see that.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted people to step up and support me and check on me and ask if I was okay.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: There was also a part of me, and I know a lot of the women out there resonate with this who are the ones who made the decision to leave the divorce, that they don't get to grieve.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: They're not allowed to grieve.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you made the decision, you caused this, so now you have to boss up and go into this next thing in your life, and we don't want to hear about how hard it is to be a single mom or how you can't pay your bills, or how you're scared or you're lonely.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so there was a lot of that that I kept hidden from a lot of my friends because again, I made this decision to leave my marriage, and I just felt like I didn't I didn't have permission to be sad about it.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_03: That really highlights right there, right, the differences in these types of grief.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_03: What woman would say she doesn't feel permission to grieve someone who died?
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_03: You know, like that's like we we are generous, I think, that way, at least at first.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_03: When people pass away, we're generous with people, right?
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_03: We think that we understand that they need time and space.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_02: In the in the early days for me, like because I was so blindsided, there was a lot of grief for me of who I thought like it was so much easier to keep my head in the sand and ignore all than it was to actually see my marriage.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_02: And so I I had a layer of grief of grieving not only the marriage that I thought I had, the marriage that I didn't get to have, the future I didn't get to have, the father my girls don't get to get, that you know, like all of those layers.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_03: But then I also do an entire episode on that alone, right?
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_03: Like that, right?
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, grieving that.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_02: My experience was different.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_02: Tiffany immediately lost all of her community because of her situation of her military community.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_02: I had the opposite in which my community kept my kids fed.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_02: You know, like to be fair, I did my best, but I checked out pretty much.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_02: And so they showed up with food and delivered me coffee and uh and they're still my community to this day.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_02: But at some point I think there's something unique about that though.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_03: They right I think that's and because they saw you as someone who had been wounded, who had been injured, right?
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_02: So they were like Well, yeah, but they didn't get it, they didn't understand because nobody in my circle had been through divorce, and so I was isolated in my grief.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_02: Like nobody got it, nobody understood what I was going through, and they loved me and loved me well, but they didn't meet me in my grief and in that moment in that season.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_03: And how long did they keep going like that?
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_02: Until you know, probably pretty pretty decently until I got my bearings.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_02: Feet under you.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_02: And I right, and when I figured out that I was in charge of my own life.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_02: Like I didn't have to stay in this moment that I actually got to.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_02: I had done some by that point, I had you know done some tapping and done some deep work and tried to move forward of recognizing and move through the stages of grief.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_02: And like I don't, I don't love that, the stages of grief.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_02: I know that it's a theme, like I'm not saying it's wrong, but it's it's almost like a checklist to me.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_02: So if you hear the stages of grief, it's like a you have to do this, this, this.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_02: And once you do this, that cloth that tab closes.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't think I don't believe healing is linear.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_03: The anger, the depression, the bargaining, the whatever, right?
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_03: It doesn't get at the identity ruptures, it doesn't get at the nervous system dysregulation, it doesn't get at the early childhood patterns, it doesn't get at the yeah, uh-huh.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_02: So I do understand the thing, but also like you said, one moment at 8 a.m.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_02: I'm on fire, I'm killing it.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_02: It's gonna be the best, most exciting year of my life.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_02: And then by 2 p.m., I'm a puddle because it's a wave.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: And it's the women that are caught in this thing too.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: I I I hear a lot of my clients say that it's crazy because the one person they want comfort from is their ex.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: Because the brain is conditioned to go that way.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: The brain has said for so many years that when I'm hurting, this is the person I go to, and that's the one person you can't go to.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: Correct.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: Like the brain doesn't recognize that.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: Like, hey, we can still want comfort.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yes, because um, are we all watching this?
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, what's the name of the monkey?
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_03: Punch, punch the monkey.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, oh my god.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_03: Goes over and y'all have been hearing me talk about the Harlow monkey research for years.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_03: If you have been a therapy client of mine, you've heard me talk about the Harley Monk Harlow Monkey research.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_03: It's from the 50s in the University of Wisconsin.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_03: But this punch, the monkey, and him continuing to go back to the same monkeys who are abusing him and who are like that's what attachment theory is right there, right?
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_03: We keep back.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_03: Even if we're getting injured, even if we're getting wounded, we keep freaking going back to our mothers.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_03: Lol.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_03: Until we finally feel accepted, right?
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_03: That is sort of the crux of it.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_03: And until we learn to find, you know, a new monkey mother or whatever, which Punch, I think, finally was accepted by a new monkey mother.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_03: But and then, you know, he went back to his his stuffed animal or whatever, right?
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_03: But like, yeah, that is what the brain is trained to do is to go back.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_03: And it's so well said, Tiffany.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: That was a good one.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, because I can remember times when like, you know, we would be texting post-separation, you know, while we were in the thick of it.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: And there were times when like at 6 a.m.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: I would wake up and, you know, I would be really pissed off and I would hate him.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then by five o'clock, six o'clock, it's like he sends a text, and I'm like, oh God, like, am I making the right decision?
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's those those waves of emotions where it's constant.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I I feel like whoever made the one-year separation role in most states is so cruel because you sit there for an entire year and you play this dance with this person.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: And to those of us who just want to walk away, it was one of the worst years of my life from an emotional standpoint of having to tolerate so much bullshit until it was final.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_03: Well, right.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_03: It's really, really awful when there's situations to do with addiction and abuse, right?
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_03: It's you know, it's terrible.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_02: And and then go ahead.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_02: I was gonna say what's so funny is like I continuously went back to him for emotional regulation and he couldn't meet me emotionally.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_02: Like because I was I was searching for something that he couldn't do, but but I was just like it was a it was a attachment to the point of nobody else could understand what I was going through, even though he's the one that caused it, and couldn't emotionally meet me where I was.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_02: It was bananas.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_03: I think every woman goes to that moment where they and this is one of this is a massive difference between divorce grief and death grief, right?
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_03: That moment where they have to make the decision to stop going to their ex for emotional regulation.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_03: And when there's death grief, like it's not even an option.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I do think that women, you know, they use or people, right?
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_03: We use objects, the person's, you know, the person's clothes, the person's whatever, the person's picture.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_03: We do we do use objects, but it's like it's not even an option.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_03: You have to find other resources.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_03: So it's definitely makes it so complex with divorce grief because yeah, we have to choose, right?
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_03: It's like choosing to put down the bag of Cheetos.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_03: It's a horrible analogy, but it's like it's it's until it hurts so bad, until we recognize that we're like perpetuating our own pain.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like my friends and family didn't know how to show up for me either in the right way because um I kept everything hidden.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: So, and I've talked about this before that the only people who knew that there were problems in my marriage were my mom and my best friend.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone else didn't.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like when I make this grandiose announcement that I'm leaving, everybody else has to go through their own processing too, you know?
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's kind of like, and and because I was the one that chose to leave, his family completely just shut me out, which is fine.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: Relatable, yes.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, like my God, okay.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like I I'm having to justify this.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and it was like my friends and family, they just didn't know how to show up because they were also processing it, and they were also processing, well, how could you have keep this hidden from us um for years that this was happening?
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's such a difference, too, right?
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_03: Like, because when there's a death, of course, everybody's processing their own experience of the death, right?
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_03: For sure.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_03: Like every like it's happening to everyone, right?
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_03: And but with divorce, everyone's got an opinion, right?
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_03: Like, do they agree with your choice or not?
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_03: And for sure, like I definitely his family cut me off immediately.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_03: And my mom was very clear she didn't agree with my choice.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and that she was processing the loss of this other person as well.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, and then and that precluded her from being able to support me, right?
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_03: So, yeah, so interesting.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: I think that people are so uncomfortable too about knowing what to ask.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: Like, how much is too much?
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I always knew the people who were genuinely concerned about me versus the people who were just trying to be nosy and get information.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you know, and so it's hard to know who to trust too, which I think is another reason why it's less than grief because there isn't a safe container to process, right?
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: Like, yeah, everybody wants to know.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, let's let's transition into that, right?
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_03: Because I think that's part of what keeps women stuck in the grief process with divorce different from death, right?
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_03: They all have their own unique sort of stuck points.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_03: But I think that a lot of times the place for women to process divorce, and not just women, men also, right?
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_03: Because men deserve to grieve and heal from divorce.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_03: Like we all have to heal, or else we're not in a world that's getting better, right?
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_03: We're in a world that's getting worse.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_03: So I think that men and women are often left to, well, I think men often move on.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_03: That's how they deal with their feelings.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_03: And I sort of am overgeneralizing, but I do think that is the trend.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_03: And I think then there's support groups, right?
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_03: Because where do we grieve divorce?
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_03: There's, I think it's just not as commonly talked about openly.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_03: Openly, right?
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_03: Whereas we can talk about grief more openly.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think divorce is as open a conversation.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_03: So we end up with support groups.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_03: I went to Al-Anon, I went to group therapy.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of people I know have gone to like Codependence Anonymous, divorce care, right, is often a faith-based divorce support group.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_03: There are so many Facebook groups, so many Facebook groups for women going through divorce.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and yet a lot of the feedback we get, a lot of my own lived experience, is a lot of these groups are heavy, triggering.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_03: They lack maybe guardrails, right?
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_03: Like emotional safety guardrails.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_03: And there's a there's an insecurity or a fear in going, first of all, like to things like maybe Al-Anon or Codependence Anonymous or whatever.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but then when you leave, do you feel better or worse?
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm not here to argue that we're always supposed to feel better when we leave a healing ritual.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_03: Like I don't think that's the case.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_03: We're supposed to be feeling, right?
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_03: We're supposed to be feeling.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_03: And feeling doesn't, it's not always um the most delicious experience, but crying is a pain reliever, literally.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_03: That's how the neurobiology experiences it as a pain reliever.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_03: So if we're leaving support groups feeling threatened or uncomfortable in ways that are not, oh, I've had a good cry and I've had a good catharsis, that says to me that there's not a level of containment to support the nervous system to feel safe in a window of tolerance to be able to truly release, right?
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_03: So, how do we as women do it differently if we acknowledge, like, man, there's no meal train for divorce?
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_03: And support groups are a good start, right?
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_03: They're a good place for there to at least be somewhere to relate to people, to say, like, wow, your experience is my experience.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_03: Wow, I'm not alone.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_03: What you're saying is relatable, maybe even to um help.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_03: Me feel justified or validated at first, right?
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_03: Uh sure.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_03: We love, yeah, we love a you know, like build my case for me, like yeah, yeah.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, like pile on with my resentment, right?
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_03: Like, I'm the victim, I'm the victim.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_03: So yeah, I think we love a good support group for those types of things sometimes, but then to do the actual pull your sleeves up and get better and process your grief and release your grief, right?
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_03: We mean release your grief, like put go through the process, the waves, the the identity ruptures, the the attachment disturb, you know, the attachment theory issues, the stuck emotions, the identity collapse.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_03: Like, where do we go for those things?
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_03: And that's where I think we've ended up in our therapists, one-on-one all these years, trying to talk our way out of it.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_03: And then that's when women come to us.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_02: Same thing, same issues.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and then that's when women come to us.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's about, to me, processing shame.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: I don't feel like any divorce group is gonna go deep enough to do the vulnerability, correct the property.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm gonna Yeah, right.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_00: Like for me personally, there were things that I would share with people and there were things that I would never say out loud.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: And those are the things that need to be said out loud in a group, not to an individual therapist, to be able to work through those feelings.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_03: Well, that's where our identity starts to come back online and become more clarified, more coherent, more cohesive when we start to shed the layers of shame.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_03: That's when our identity is able to recalibrate or reorganize itself around something other than our shame.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_03: Because typically that's what's happening coming out of a divorce, right?
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_03: Is our identity has become, and this is what I was talking about in the beginning of the episode, the self-esteem issues, right?
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_03: Typically coming out of our divorce, our identity ended up getting reorganized around shame or inadequacy or insecurity, right?
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_03: And healing or recovery is really an identity reorganized around how our intelligent creator designed us, right?
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_03: Like our it's it's an I it becomes an identity created around our magic, our unique gifts and abilities, our unique purposes, our unique aligned gifting in this world, right?
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_03: And that identity reorganization from shame and inadequacy to oh the mat the specific magic I'm here to bring, that's a freaking journey, right?
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_03: That typically isn't gonna happen in quickly or smoothly or in a support group.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_03: What's it taken for both of you, right?
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_03: I would argue that for all three of us, it's been layers and many different modalities and yeah, and a lot of safe spaces at the end of it, though, right?
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_03: Where people who would abide with us to shed and shed and shed and reorganize and shed and reorganize.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_02: And like re refocus, like a lot of people like redirecting, like maybe you're playing a little bit too victim, right?
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_02: Like focus over here, focus over here.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think it's those people over the years that have lovingly called me out in different ways to say, hey, like through your actions and behaviors, you know, you're like the wild party girl.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: Like back in my 20s, like I had a boss say to me, Look, if you don't get your shit together, you're gonna lose everything that you've ever worked for.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: Like you because I would, you know, on the weeks I didn't have my daughter, I would stay out partying at the clubs, and then I would literally sleep in my car at my lunch break or sleep in one of our couches in somebody's office because I was so hungover and so burnt out, you know, from the night before.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's like stillness to me felt so wrong that I could not slow down enough.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: So I've had these people that have lovingly stepped in along the way.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: And it's also being able to like people don't understand that telling your story releases that shame.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: Being able to be that vulnerable with a group as scary as it may feel, like it's different for me to sit here and say, hey, like I was the one that chose to end my marriage, and I could put that in a pretty bow, and that's what I hid behind, rather than getting to the real root of it, which is hey, I fell in love with somebody else while I was married, and I'm now grieving that person too.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: Like, how the f do you say that in a group?
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_00: Do you know what I mean?
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's like that's that's really where it goes for the rawness of it for women that are on that side of the fence is how do you go into a group and number one, admit it, number two, stand behind it, and then three, live in the reactions of other people because other people are gonna react to that.
• 28:20
  unknown: Yeah.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_00: I had to get very comfortable telling my story, and I realized that the more I can tell my story to women and make them feel seen and understood, it's like there's just a level of connection and a level of being seen that they've never experienced before.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm gonna nitpick your language there for a moment.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_03: Because you have truly stepped into that this year, like sharing your story to invite women into feel seen, right?
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_03: I never would have said these things out loud.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_03: I know it's like I never would have said these things out loud.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_03: But I'm gonna pick one word you used because you said make.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm saying invite.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that difference is important because there are those listeners who are listening right now who are gonna feel seen to an extent, but they are still in the back of their mind othering themselves.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_03: They're still not joining, they're still not um truly going to take the leap to reorganize their identity around authenticity and wellness versus shame, right?
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that's one of the most frustrating things for us as leaders in a healing space is watching women not choose, not truly see themselves and what they're capable of.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_03: And we can't make, right?
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_03: Like that is free will, and that's what we're grappling with in letting our exes go, is you know, that freedom of choice.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_03: And so to the women listening, right, this is like a challenge.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_03: Will you continue to organize your identity around shame and insecurity and limit yourself, right?
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_03: Because Tiffany can't make you see yourself the way she sees you, and she sees you as so freaking magical, right?
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_03: She is stepped into sharing your story, Tiffany, so beautifully to invite women to feel less shame and more safe.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_03: But will you heed the call, right?
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_03: Will you step towards safety?
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_00: And my favorite part in a session when I have the newer clients, you know, that have come in and they're they're building trust, right?
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: I I love the part where they they kind of look at me and they sit in silence for a little bit because I don't feel the silence.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna sit there and I'm gonna watch you out in your mind.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_00: And then they're finally gonna they're finally gonna look at me and they're gonna say, fine, I'm just gonna say it.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I love that because then out is coming this outpouring of whatever it is that's holding it back.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_00: And when they say it's bubbling such a release, right?
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I love when women in our program say the same thing.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just gonna come out with it.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just gonna say it.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_03: All right, let's dig into this piece about how divorce grief is quantum.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_03: There's this overlapping timeline between your past self, your present self, your future identity.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_03: There's these entangled particles between you and your ex, and how much of our job as a team is to help women literally disentangle their entangled particles with their ex, reclaim their identity, reclaim their nervous system patterns, and how the nervous system really struggles to choose wellness because of this overlapping, layered, wave-like nature that is a quantum grief.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_03: It happens in the body, the mind, and the spirit.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_03: There's not the same clear outline or path or groupthink, right?
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe groupthink around how to move through something like there is with death grief.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know, very often I think whether we're writing emails to our listeners or posting something on social media or getting ready to do an episode, we often talk about the transformation, right, that is being offered through divorce.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_03: Like it's a portal, divorce is a portal.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_03: And I think when we say something like that matters, because I think you say it too early in the conversation, it's like F off, Dawn, like divorce is a portal.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_03: I this is the greatest pain of my life.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_03: And but it's like in divorce grief, in one moment, you can be so clear that divorce is a portal.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_03: And then the next moment you can completely lose the plot and not know how to put your shoes on and get out of bed, you know.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_03: So we've been talking about as a team how one of the things we do very differently here is help women really recover body, mind, and spirit on a quantum level.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_03: This idea that we are spiritual beings having a human experience, and that so much of divorce recovery in mainstream is 2D or 3D, right?
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_03: Like finish your paperwork, name your feelings, feel your feelings, learn how to date, learn how to write a profile, know your attachment style, right?
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_03: But it's 2D, 3D healing, and we're talking about 8D over here.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_03: We are talking about identity reorganization.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_03: And it can be the most rewarding gift.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_03: And I think it's the thing that we need so much in the world, right?
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_03: We think we need policy reform and we think we need a different president, and we think we need a better partner, and we think we need more money.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_03: But what we really need is identity reorganization, right?
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_03: It's healing at a quantum level, it's healing in our field, our entire field, not just our minds.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_03: That's so much of what mainstream healing talks about is healing the mind.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_03: But that's not what we're doing over here.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_03: We're healing body, mind, and spirit to have a complete reorganization of identity.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_03: Did I take you to the crazy place, lady?
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_03: Ladies, bail me out.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_00: Bail me out.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_03: Bail me out.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_00: No, you're good.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_00: You're good.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I I think that it's it's about doing it on a different level.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_00: You know, having a having a client, a new client, that's never experienced IFS.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_00: And this woman is uber intelligent, uber intelligent.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_00: And she says to me after the first IFS session, I've never done anything like this.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_00: And this is a woman that has been in therapy for 20 plus years.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_00: She's done almost every modality, tried everything, done everything.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_00: There is a very different way that we approach healing where our society tells us that we have to rely on external things, but we're never feeling it in the body.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_00: There's never integrated change.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_00: We're staying stuck in cycles because we're not feeling it on an energetic level.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know how to sit with ourselves.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_00: If you cannot sit with yourself in silence without those thoughts becoming so intrusive, you're not healing.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_00: You're avoiding.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_00: Distracting.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_00: Distracting.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_00: And the way we do it over here is that we truly believe that everything you need to heal yourself is already inside of you.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_00: It just needs to be tapped into on anything.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_00: Well, lots of people say that.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_03: I've heard lots of gurus say that over the years.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_03: But none of the modalities that any of them ever did with me created the unlocking.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, they created some unlockings.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not saying it's all or nothing.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_03: Nothing, it's not like that, right?
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not saying it's all or nothing.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_02: It was a piece, right?
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_03: Like it was a right piece.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_03: A piece, yeah, small pieces.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_02: It's like uh it was being chipped away until energy, medicine, homeopathy was the often think everything unfolds for our highest good, right?
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_03: If we're willing to see it that way.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_03: And I do think that that's an intentional part of my, you know, my human design is life's information keeper, right?
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_03: It's like I literally was supposed to catalog, catalog, categorical catalog.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_03: Wow, why is that word so hard?
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_03: Catalog, like all these modalities.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_03: Like it's like my job to go first and sample it all, right?
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_03: And be like, well, this works.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_03: Like, you know, rank these in order of effectiveness from essential oils to homeopathy.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_03: You know what I mean?
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_03: Like everything has its place and its application, but dose and potency, you know?
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_03: And um, yeah, we are really dissociated, distracted, avoidant society.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_03: And the potency that we need in order to get embodied is far more profound now.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I think a hundred years ago, you could have a few chiropractic visits and it could cure your cancer, right?
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_03: Because that's all it took to get aligned, was like literal alignment in this in the structure would create alignment, right?
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_03: But we are so affected in this modern world now that to cure our cancer takes a much more significant intervention, though we have the tools to do it over here.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think we're allowed to say that.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_02: We're not allowed to make any claims.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_02: OTC am monographs.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_03: That's right.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, to the woman listening who's really grappling with this divorce grief piece, and she, you know, you're you're recognizing and maybe feeling really freaking angry about how what this is like.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_03: How hard it is to process this style of grief in our society.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_03: What are you gonna do about it?
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_03: What are you gonna do about it?
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_03: And when we invite you in, right?
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_03: This is gonna, this is a grief series, right?
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_03: So in the coming episodes about stages of divorce grief and the way we break it down, and in the coming weeks and months where we start to invite you in to go deeper, what are you gonna do about it?
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_03: And I think the well, I don't think.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_03: I freaking know that we're always looking for the path of least resistance.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_03: We always want the path of least resistance, and very often the greatest solutions are not that they're very intentional removing of obstacles and stretching of ourselves in ways that are deeply uncomfortable.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_03: But we do tend to get the women who have tried it all and then they come here or divorce twice and then they come here.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_03: Can you imagine if uh women just started choosing this because uh its resonance is so profound and didn't have to get divorced twice or didn't have to wait until the pain became so excruciating.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_03: What a world that would be if we just started choosing to see ourselves through Tiffany's eyes.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and that's part of my human design, right?
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because we did a human design workshop recently in our program.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, I I have found out that my life theme is to learn how to love myself and life and everything in it, and then teach other people to do the same.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_00: And that is probably why I love IFS so freaking much because that's what it does.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_00: It is the journey back to yourself, it is the journey back to yourself to remove the shame and the guilt and really embrace yourself.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_00: And it is powerful, it is something that is not of this world, and I think that that is why we do it really freaking well here because Joy, myself, and Dawn are truly creating this program to be able to lean into what our life's gifts are.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_00: This is not work to us, it is a privilege, it is a blessing.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, and to help you find your life's gifts and step into that fully.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_03: So our call to action for you today is if you are not in the Heartbeat app in our cocoon community, get in because you cannot heal from this style of grief.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, you know, singularly, you can't do it in a space that does not go to the depth that does not help you shed your shame, right?
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_03: So step into our safe space.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_03: If you are already in the Heartbeat app in our cocoon community, your job is to take a further step then.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_03: If you have been in there but you haven't engaged in the magic drop, engage in the magic drop.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_03: If you're in there and you haven't enrolled in premium and attended a live workshop, do that.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_03: If you are in there and you have not attended a Cocoon Connect, which is a completely free, you don't have to pay or subscribe to anything.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_03: You just come to Once a Month Cocoon Connect live meeting, do that.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_03: This is your call to action is take a next step.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_03: Take a next step deeper into your healing, into your reorganizing your identity, moving from shame and grief into your highest good.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_03: That's your mission for this week.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_03: And I would love a DM telling me which step you took.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_03: Like that's what we're here for, right?
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_03: Authenticity, authenticity, plus accountability, plus identity reorganization.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_03: That's what we're doing around here.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_03: We love you so much.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_03: Peace.