Latest / Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce / 119. Shadow Work: A Path to Facing your Dark and Twisty Divorce Grief

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119. Shadow Work: A Path to Facing your Dark and Twisty Divorce Grief · Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce

• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Hi love, we all have what Meredith Gray would call dark twisty parts, some of us more than others, but it's there, and in my opinion, we could do a lot better at acknowledging and honoring each other's dark twisty parts in a way that improves our mental health rather than damages it.
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: And in this episode, we are exploring how, when we have not made peace with our dark twisty parts and for those of us who were raised in a church, we probably did not make peace with our dark twisty parts, I will speak from experience probably did not make peace with our dark twisty parts.
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: I will speak from experience.
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: I hid them under a bushel and therefore didn't have a healthy relationship with those pieces of myself.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: And so this episode explores when we have not made peace with our dark twisty parts.
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: It leads to destructive outcomes, and today is an invitation to really take a look at the intersection of your dark twisty parts, your church upbringing and your divorce, because it's a key place to see some interconnectivity, some cause and effect and a path forward.
• 2:16
  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.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: I'm your host, dawn Wiggins, a therapist, coach, integrative healer and divorcee, join me for a fresh approach to healing grief and building your confidence after divorce.
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: Some key things we're going to discuss in today's episode is what is religious trauma and what does it have to do with dark twisty parts and divorce, how your difficulty feeling unworthy or unlovable or unwantable in this season of your life is tied to this lack of integration, understanding, acceptance of your dark twisty parts and is related to any religious trauma you may have experienced.
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: And, finally, how to start shifting your relationship with your dark twisty parts so that you can view yourself in a more positive, loving and accepting light.
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: So we will hit on all those points, but first, probably a long twisty story.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: So this episode has been bubbling inside of me over the course of the last few weeks, and one of the things that inspired it is a book that I have been reading, which is called Trauma in the Pews, and this book you'll hear me talk about it in a different episode, but it is creating a state change inside of me, right, it is helping shed a layer of shame or disintegration or pain that maybe I don't even think I understood was still present in the way that it was.
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: And with each kind of chapter can I also make a confession here?
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: I don't often finish books because, like in the first handful of chapters, I'm like okay, got it next.
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: You know, when I finish a book like holy crap, it means this book made a massive impact on my life, and this book is one of those.
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: And so reading this book Trauma in the Pews it's a book about how the church lacks a trauma-informed approach and the way that the church speaks often reinforces trauma rather than heals it.
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: And it gets into all the various facets of how that ends up playing out in a person's life.
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: And it gets into all the various facets of how that ends up playing out in a person's life.
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: But, that said, this episode has been bubbling inside of me because I am someone who experienced a lot of religious trauma in my young life and when I got divorced at 30, it was the moment in time where, because my whole life had kind of burned down in the way that I knew it, I finally felt a freedom or a permission to start exploring into spaces that I had not previously felt comfortable exploring.
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: In fact, one of the very minor but probably not so minor things that contributed to my divorce was the fact that I had agreed pre-marriage to convert to Catholicism and when it came down to it, I couldn't pull the trigger and that was like it was a rule what's it called?
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: Not a rule breaker?
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: Oh, producer, joy, what I'm trying to say like a red line, yeah, for my ex right.
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: And so that was by no means like the massive thing.
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: That was like, oh, we can't work through this right, but it's certainly a contributing factor.
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: And the reality is is that, as someone who had experienced religious trauma, one of the reasons I couldn't pull the trigger on converting to Catholicism is because I had a unhealthy relationship with church.
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: I did not want to be in church every Sunday.
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: I did not want to organize my life around church or churchy things.
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: I was still very much triggered by most things you would experience in a church.
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: I loved my little jaunt with Catholicism because there were so many beautiful traditions and ways of worshiping that were new to me, that felt very reverent and were less triggering to me than the things that I had grown up with right.
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: So in a sense, it's probably why I was drawn to my ex and his Catholic experience, because it was less triggering in that it was a fresh take on how to worship.
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: But when I got divorced and started working a 12-step program in Al-Anon, I got a Jewish sponsor and I started to develop such a close relationship with my sponsor, who was this amazing Jewish woman and quite frankly, I was living in Boca Raton, florida at the time.
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: Right had a lot of Jewish friends at the time Started leaning into exploring these other religious spaces.
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: I became very involved in yoga and started studying a lot of Eastern spiritual traditions and started really getting into the principles of yoga and understanding their spiritual underpinnings and the intersections between certain Eastern faiths and Western faiths and started asking big, big questions.
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: Now, this was not a comfortable process for me.
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: In fact there were times where I would have kind of near panicked experiences just exploring these other spiritual and religious pieces, and the reason that that was so scary for me is because I had experienced so much religious trauma that just exploring other faiths felt like I might go to hell or something like that.
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: It was very like young, like deep in the lizard brain, like limbic system emotional response.
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: It wasn't like a smart brain response.
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: But lo and behold, I'm reading this book, trauma in the Pews, and she talks about the author Janine McConaughey talks about in the book, about how, when people who have experienced this type of trauma read non-conforming texts, right, it's scary for them, and so I saw myself in those pages, right.
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: So I'm post-divorce, right, and I am exploring all these things and I'm certainly feeling shame for having burnt my life down.
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: I'm certainly feeling shame for have gotten a divorce because, you know, biblically speaking, that wasn't supposed to be.
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: And here I had married this man, because he checked certain boxes right, was a Christian, a Bible-believing Christian, and then it didn't work out with us.
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: But I was finally able to acknowledge all the secrets that had piled up prior to us walking down the aisle and after us walking down the aisle, right, and there were, we both had a lot of secrets or a lot of dark twisty places.
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: What do I mean by dark twisty places?
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: Well, the Bible would call that sin, Meredith Gray would call it dark twisty parts.
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: In homeopathy there is an entire chunk of homeopathic text that talks about inner darkness or how, when, after original sin, let's say, garden of Eden, in the course of human history, there were certain sexually transmitted diseases that came into our lived human experience and energetically got into our energetic body and things that aren't transmuted become transmitted, and so in homeopathic literature there are certain dark energies that can be transmitted energetically from generation to generation.
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: Certainly, in the trauma world we talk about transmitted traumas of darkness, depression, suicidality, these types of things, right that get transmitted from generation to generation.
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: We can certainly see certain especially types of traumas, right.
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: We see, certainly people who struggle with addiction tend to have more of kind of this dark side, if you will.
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: But we all have it right To what degree, you know.
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: That, you know, is kind of case by case basis, but that's what I mean by darkness.
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: And so whether you call it sin or whether you call it shame, right, brene Brown would probably say oh, I know what you're talking about.
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: You're talking about shame.
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: Shame is the great disconnector, it's the thing that causes us to have secrets, it's the thing that causes us to hide and lie and to feel badly about ourselves, right?
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: So we can kind of call it, depending on what part of healing we're looking at, whether it's religious or spiritual, or mental or emotional.
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: It all has a name, no matter where you're looking in the world.
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: But I had inner darkness that I had not come to terms with, because I grew up in a home where sin was punished with rejection and, in worst case scenario, abandonment, and that anytime I wanted to explore into dark parts, it would just be like that's not okay and there's not this kind of response.
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: That would be what I would consider a Jesus response, right With grace.
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: It's like, oh nope, you can't have that right.
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: So when it came to, for instance, sex, right, there was no open dialogue about sex and love and being a teenager, young adult and how to handle those urges in a meaningful, modern way.
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: Or when it came to substances, whether it was alcohol or drugs, there was no meaningful conversation about how to handle peer pressure or just the desire, right, like, let me laser in here on the desire, because the darkness, it has a certain attractiveness to it.
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: Right, there is a desire that goes with drinking too much, using illicit substances, having unsafe sex, hurting someone, revenge.
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: There is a desire that we have inside of us, in those dark, twisty places, to lean in and enjoy the feeling of leaning in to the dark, twisty places.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: And I don't know about you, but there was not a safe place for me to talk about the desire to lean into darkness in my childhood.
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: And so then, what do you end up doing with that?
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: As Brene Brown would say right, it goes into the petri dish of shame, where it gets covered up and it grows in the dark place and until you shine a light on it it just proliferates.
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: And so there was darkness, certainly in my marriage, before we got married.
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: While we were getting married, there was certainly an understanding, as I was getting married, in those days and weeks we were preparing for that, this was off, but there was no safe place for me to explore into that or to know how to navigate that.
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: And certainly you've heard me tell this story from different angles before, whether it's around attachment theory or healthy boundaries or victim mentality or low self-esteem.
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: You know you can look at this moment in time through so many lenses, but the reality is is that when you grow up in a religious institution where sin is shamed rather than explored with grace, when you end up with a lived experience where sin is treated with rejection and not through the way that Jesus would see us right, jesus doesn't say oh, you sinful creature, I don't want anything to do with you.
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: Quite the opposite.
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: He's the man who had dinner with the tax collectors and the prostitutes.
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: And it's exactly why God would say of course you're sinful.
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: That's why I sent my son to die on the cross, right, no big deal.
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: And if you keep leaning into sin, also no big deal.
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: I'll be here when you get back, when you get back right.
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: And I'm not trying to make light of serious behaviors or heavy mistakes that we've all made, but I am trying to say that so much of why we feel unworthy is because we see ourselves through the eyes of repressed shame and not through the lens of unconditional love and so the things that I was exploring into in a post-divorce world.
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: Of course I went back to church, but that was triggering.
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: Of course I wanted to have faith that all was going to be well, but I felt anxious and panicky a lot.
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: Of course I wanted to build a new magical life where I could find love and of course I tried new illicit substances and had unsafe sex, right Like.
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: It was a whole mixed bag for me and I hope you can relate to that right that through my divorce healing journey while I sit here before you today recording a podcast about light and love and high vibes and healthy boundaries and secure attachment styles and all the things that, my friend, I have leaned into the dark spaces and I have done destructive things in my life and now I sit here before you far more light and love.
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: But one of the key pieces that allowed me to get there was giving myself permission to explore redemption in places that weren't the Christian church.
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: It was allowing myself to find safe places where I could talk about all of my dark twisty parts and be received with love and acceptance from other people, and that typically wasn't the church.
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: And while I am in my great going back to church era right now and you may hear me talking more about words like God and sin and Jesus and redemption and whatever, trust you me, those phrases are all still very triggering for me.
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: When I go to church, I feel triggered when I hear certain songs and, like, just the word Jesus itself in certain contexts can be very triggering for me.
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: So I have, as a result of, as a silver lining of my divorce, been able to carve out a spiritual practice for myself that includes, yes, tarot cards and astrology and law of attraction and intentional manifestation.
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: Ooh, we've got a manifestation series coming soon and sounds a lot different than traditional Christianity, but I have actually never given up on my Christian roots and I am coming to you today kind of pulling together all of these pieces of religious trauma, repressed shame, and building a spirituality and a faith that is very much biblical and is very much God-loving and is very much graceful, because I have come to believe how forgiven, how saved, how loved, how accepted, how wanted I am, first by God, then by myself and then by the people I choose to surround myself, and that has come as a result of a lot of healing and honoring of my darkness, love and not looking at myself through the eyes of those who have judged me or rejected me as a result of the darkness that I have leaned into.
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: It is a gift as a therapist to be able to sit with people and dig into their darkness and not shame them or judge them for it and say no, kidding, I agree, I understand, because I've done it, because I've been there, and it makes sense and it feels good, doesn't it?
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: It feels good to fill in the blank hurt someone, do drugs, have unsafe sex?
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: You name it right.
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: It feels good and I will never shame you for doing those things that feel good.
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: I may ask you?
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: Was it sustainable?
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: Did it bring you lasting peace?
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: Did it bring you lasting love?
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: Peace Did it bring you lasting love?
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: Did it bring you light and joy?
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: And did you still feel good about it the next morning?
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: Right, I may ask you, are there other things in life that have brought you deeper peace?
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: Because that's the transformation right there.
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: Right Is not to shame you for having hooked up with that guy last weekend because you caved, because you were feeling so lonely.
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah, no, kidding you did Makes sense to me.
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: We got to build a bridge out of that love.
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: It's not a magical light switch, right, and we can't heal these places unless we talk about them.
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: And we can't talk about them if we still feel so ashamed about them that it's intolerable.
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: And so, circling back, my dark side, my shadow self, didn't feel safe to do that healing work in church because of the religious trauma.
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: And in fact, the fact that I hadn't resolved those things on the front end is what attracted me to my particular husband in the first place, like calls to like Darkness.
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: Calls to darkness and even though you've suppressed it, or even though you've done your best to be a good girl, if you haven't faced it and you haven't learned how to love yourself well, through it, you are going to continue to attract darkness because you haven't made peace with it.
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: And so let's go back and circle to our key pieces that I wanted to hit today.
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: Religious trauma is something that you may have experienced, if any of this has resonated with you.
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: But religious trauma to define it is when stressful, degrading, dangerous, abusive or damaging.
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: And so if you're someone who thinks about church and feels resistance, well up, there is a good chance that you have experienced some form of religious trauma and have some repressed shame to do with that.
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: And I don't believe that that's what God meant to have happen in the church.
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: I think that church is flawed because humans run it and humans have created this, you know, kind of patriarchal, using religion to control and social control, and I think through the course of history, women have had to pay the price for the sins of literal, actual men, right, like you know the modesty revolution where women in church are told you have to cover everything because men can't control their own dark side, their own urges, right.
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: And so religious trauma is when your religious experience has felt stressful, degrading, dangerous, abusive or damaging.
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: Right, I relate to that so much.
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: And when there is religious trauma, love going to church and feeling stressed or, like you are seen as a sinner and not as someone who is redeemed guarantees that there are things that you have done or thought or wanted in your life that you feel ashamed of and you feel ashamed to talk about and you feel ashamed to face, and that might even be wired into your mind in a way that you have a hard time turning towards and reconciling or making sense of your dark, twisty places, because you know you're a good woman, because you know you are a good wife, because you know you have a good heart, because you know you're a good person and you can't quite reconcile the parts of you that you have been told are bad or dark or that you should be ashamed of, because you can't quite reconcile how you have so much love to give but you sabotage yourself at so many turns right.
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: And I'm here to tell you that this is very much related to suppressed shame and could very much be related to religious trauma.
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: Religious trauma affects the way we relate to God, the way we relate to being mentored by religious leaders, the way we relate to the Bible or God's word, or the way we relate to being mentored by religious leaders, the way we relate to the Bible or God's word, or the way we relate to all kinds of spiritual practices, the way we relate to meditation, goodness, producer joy and I talk about this all the time, but I have a tendency to relate, to refer to God as a woman because it's less threatening to me.
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: And producer joy like, look at me, like I've got three heads Right and she's like that's not biblically sound, dawn.
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: But it's what I have to do to work around the resistance that I have experienced to do with religion, right, which allows me to approach healing from things like a failed marriage, mistakes that I've made, dark places I've gone to in the light, right.
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: I need to work those things out with God, with the people I love, with inside of myself, and you can't do those things in silos, you can't do them in isolation from themselves, right, and so part of the reason you feel unworthy and unlovable love is because you haven't faced your shame.
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: So let's talk about how to start shifting your relationship with your dark twist's.
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: Talk about how to start shifting your relationship with your dark, twisty places, how to start relating to yourself and those dark urges differently.
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: First of all, they are normal, so normal.
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: And if you think that you are only a handful of people, like, first of all, how many boozy betch memes have you read and like, cackled at right, like, how many like Instagram memes or TikTok, whatever, right, what is your dark twisty TikTok thing that you right, like?
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: Dark twisty places are popular, especially in popular culture.
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: You are not alone, right, and I don't want you to continue to judge yourself or shame yourself for those things.
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: Okay, so how do you start turning towards and owning the darkness that you have embodied in your life in a gentler way?
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: Well, let's just normalize that it feels good.
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: Let's just normalize that it feels good.
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: Let's just normalize how human that is.
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: Let's just normalize that God already knows and does not care.
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: Not that he doesn't care, right, but like, does not have a negative response to your dark twisty places.
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: Zero, zip, zilch.
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: Negative response.
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: Does he have things that he wants for you that are bigger than that, that are better than that?
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: Yes, but no shame, no blame, none.
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: Now there are people in the world that are going to shame and blame you for those dark twisty things, right?
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: You know that time that you, you know, said that thing to your kids about their dad and you knew it was the wrong thing to do, but it felt so freaking good because for once, you want them to actually know what a grouchy he is and why do you always have to take the high road and all the things right.
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: That crap feels good.
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: It feels good to punish him.
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: It feels good to why do we all love that Carrie Underwood song right?
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: Next time he cheats like gosh, it feels good and okay.
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: So I want you to start turning towards those dark.
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: I want you to make a list of the darkest, dark, dark, dark things you have thought, felt, said and done and I want you to light that list on fire.
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: I want you to imagine me saying to you like I see your list.
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: There is nothing on your list love that someone else hasn't told me or that I have not already done.
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: Like you would not believe how many things on that list that I have already done.
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: And all right, maybe some of them I haven't, but I guarantee you someone I've treated has and I love you the same and I am not afraid of you and I am not going to run away from it and I am not afraid of you and I am not going to run away from it and I do not judge you for it.
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: You make sense to me because you are human and because you are looking for places to be able to talk about those things and heal from them and to make better choices.
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: And I know you are.
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: I know you are.
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: I know that you want to love yourself well and I know you want to love others well.
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: I know how much resentment you have and how much you would love to get rid of that resentment.
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: No one can get rid of resentment if they have not walked the path of facing their own shame and learning to love themselves well.
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: Resentment is a function of judgment and blame and victim consciousness and all of that stuff is directly related to repressed shame, to a denial of facing how dark and twisty my places can get and recognizing that the things that I blame and judge others for I have probably done or considered or would have liked to have done and just didn't and just judge the crap out of other people right.
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: I think that one of the things that I have come to understand is that because I have owned this darkness that exists inside of me.
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: I can look around and see the people who I'm closest to and I can see the dark, twisty places inside of them too, and I can know that they're going to love and accept me, no matter what I'm closest to.
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: And I can see the dark, twisty places inside of them too, and I can know that they're going to love and accept me, no matter what I'm going to show them.
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: And it's because they know the darkness well themselves.
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: Right, and we can talk about these things and not encourage each other to lean into the darkness, right, encourage each other to rise above the darkness, but then also crack jokes.
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: Other to rise above the darkness but then also crack jokes about hiding the body.
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: Together, you know.
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: But there's an ease around being able to discuss the darkness and there's an encouragement of one another to do better, but not in a shamey and blamey way.
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: Not in a do better or I can't be friends with you.
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: Way.
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: Not in a do better or I'm going to have to distance myself from you.
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: Way Like in a do better.
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: How can I support you while you're doing better with this really hard thing?
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: Because it'd be a lot easier to just freaking, slash his tires, kind of thing right.
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: So this is your call to start looking at that list of dark, twisty things through loving eyes.
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: You know those eyes that you use to look at your dog or your children when they're doing cute things.
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: Gosh, I hope you're a dog person or a good person.
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: If you're not, your house plant your orchid that you got to bloom your I don't know.
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: You know what I mean loving eyes.
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: You know what loving eyes feels like in your body.
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: Can you take a moment to like, take a breath and notice when you have soft loving eyes and what that feels like in the body?
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: Now I want you to practice seeing your dark, twisty parts and looking at them through loving eyes.
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: That's the way I look at them.
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: That's the way God looks at them, and if, when I say God or Jesus or church or sin, it triggers you, I am so sorry.
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: Love.
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: That's why I say all the other things all the time and I want you to practice saying I love you anyway.
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: I love you anyway, it's okay, it's okay.
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: The dark, twisty places are okay, they're wonderful, they're part of God's creation, they're part of this earth.
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: How can you experience the light unless you've experienced the dark?
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: Contrast is built into the experience, love.
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: It's intentional, it's purposeful, it's okay, it's your human nature.
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: Please don't fight it, please accept it, please love yourself for it and then practice leaning into the light.
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: That's it right.
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: So I hope this episode gives you some clues for where you can look next to your healing.
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: So much of this podcast is about me sharing my lived experience and the things that inspire me or light me up, and a handful of things light me up more than anything else, right, and you standing in your power is one of them.
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: A deep, meaningful relationship with God mine and yours and being able to share that with one another is another.
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: And healing, transmutation, right, taking what was old and making it new that is something that lights me up, and I'm definitely in a process of transmuting myself, some things for myself right now through this lens of religious trauma, and this just helped me go deeper with it, and so I hope you can just feel in this episode how inspired I was to share some very, very inspirational things with you, and with that we are moving into our segment Getting Unstuck.
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: Getting unstuck this week, jill wrote in saying Dawn, it's been spring break and the spring break has been completely different for my kids than in the past.
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: There's not the same money or time or family being together in the way that they were used to, and I feel completely helpless to provide for them in the way that we used to be able to do things.
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: And this has been so hard and I am so angry and I just don't know what to do with these feelings.
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: Jill, no kidding, you're angry, right Angry, and feeling helpless to provide for your kids in the way that you did.
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: And I'm sure there's mom guilt in there about wanting to do better for them and feeling like you took things from them that were not fair for them to lose.
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: And maybe that's true and maybe that's not.
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: And I think that there is a lot of advice that you would be given to focus on just loving them well and being present with them, and that that's what's most important, and that's all true.
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: And I know you know that right that them and that that's what's most important, and that's all true.
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: And I know you know that right, that you know you're planting seeds for today that will sprout in the future.
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: And you know get creative about how to spend spring break, right, like you, I'm sure every blog in the world has given you all the advice about how to turn lemons into lemonade.
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: Right, and that is not what you came here for.
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: I think very, very often what blocks us from really being able to move through these moments where there's just not a good solution or a good answer for today, right, for this season, there's just not a good answer.
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: What blocks us is not going to the depths of the emotional expression that needs to happen.
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: So you might have heard the word embodiment out there.
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: It's trending, as they would say.
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: It's a word I've been endeavoring to use more and more on the podcast because it's something that is not well enough understood in healing spaces.
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: But I want you to take that helplessness, that guilt, that resentment, and I want you to see how loud you can turn up the volume on those emotions.
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: I want you, jill, to get into your body to the depth of helplessness, to the depth of anger, the guilt, and I want you to stomp the floor and I want you to bang on your chest, not hurt yourself.
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: I'm not telling you to hurt yourself, but you know what I mean.
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: Like little Tarzan action, I want you to punch a pillow.
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: I want you to scream, not in front of your children, not when you have your children right, like, go to a private space, go to a forest and scream.
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: I want you to scream until you lose your voice.
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: I want you to cry until you can't cry anymore.
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: I want you to exhaust yourself from that emotion.
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: Because once you have exhausted yourself from that emotion, love, you will have clarity and you will have a moment of peace and you will see a way forward.
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: And it will be your way forward and not a way forward that one of us dumb divorce bloggers wrote on a blog to give you some Pollyanna light and love shit right.
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: So often we need to get our deepest forms of clarity, from our deepest levels of intuition and kind of God knowingness.
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: And what's blocking that is the muddy waters of unprocessed emotion.
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: And too often we skip straight to a solution without giving enough credence to the emotion, to getting it out of our system, to getting it fully processed.
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: And if I had a dollar for every patient who said, if I started crying, if I go to that place, I will never stop, I would have retired by now and I would just be releasing podcast episodes every day.
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: And so it's not only important to go to that emotion.
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: It is essential to exhaust yourself from feeling and expressing in a physical way, not, like me, in an intellectual way.
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: And that's probably why I'm so passionate about this right, because embodied emotion is something that has literally saved my life, because I was so intellectualized, so dissociative in the way that I experienced emotion.
• 35:11
  Speaker 1: It turned into disease in my body and so Jill, this sucks, that's it, and I need you to filter your emotional water, I need you to get it out and then, when you get clarity on your path forward, when you've exhausted yourself and you found that moment of peace, I'd love for you to tell me what your clear solution is.
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: It's one of those things.
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: Did you ever watch?
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: What's that movie with Atreyu?
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: The NeverEnding Story?
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: Right, that's so our generation Tell me you're a NeverEnding Story fan.
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: How many times?
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: I wonder how many times I've said that on the pod where the old crone witch lady, she says it's got to hurt to heal.
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: That's it right.
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: So often we avoid going to the hurt because we just don't have the bandwidth for it.
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: But we're really just avoiding it because it hurts and we don't freaking feel like it, right, and so go there, go there, go there, go there and if you need to DM me this, I would love this, right?
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: If you need to DM me and say, dawn, I'm going to go there now, I just need you to know.
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: You know, like when you're going to go on a date with a stranger and you text your friend and you're like I'm going this place and that place, if you haven't heard from me in three hours, send the police, right, it's like that.
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: If you want to DM me on Instagram and say, like, dawn, I'm going to go there, if you haven't heard from me in three hours, send help, right.
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: I got stuck in an emotion I couldn't get out, and I will be on.
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: I will be on.
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: I will be on call to help you get out of the emotion if you get stuck, right.
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: That's what.
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: I'm here for you, and so I love you so much.
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: Peace, dear.
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: Divorce Diary is a podcast by my coach.
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: You can find more at mycoachjohncom.