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182. How To Know If You Are In a Codependent Relationship With Your Divorce Grief (and sabotaging your happiness) · Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce

• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Do you know whether or not you are unconsciously self-sabotaging your own joy?
• 0:54
  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.
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: I'm your host, dawn Wiggins, a therapist, coach, integrative healer and divorcee.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: Join me for a fresh approach to healing grief and building your confidence after divorce.
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: I want to take a moment to shout out Ashley.
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: She is one of our premium subscribers.
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: Ashley, thank you so much for being a part of our community and one of our subscribers.
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: I would love, love, love, to know which premium track you love most.
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: Is it an EFT track?
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: Is it a heal while you sleep guided meditation track?
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: Is it a behind the scenes interview track?
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: Is it the quantum healing track we're just listening to?
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: It actually creates healing for you.
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: I want to know.
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: Anyways, ashley, thank you so much for being one of the best parts of what makes this community fantastic.
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: In today's episode, we are going to talk about the difference between feeling about our pain and thinking about our pain.
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: Can you tell that you do both?
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: We are going to talk about the fact that you cannot selectively numb your emotion, and that is part of the reason why you might be sabotaging your own joy.
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: We are going to talk about the strategy of circling back from when you maybe have used the tool of dissociation and you know that that's the tool that's needed at the time.
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: But we're going to talk about the tool of circling back and we are also going to unpack the difference, the healthiest way to validate emotion.
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: So, to really unpack our concept for today, the idea that you may be sabotaging your own joy by being in a codependent relationship with divorce, grief Ooh, there are a lot of really beautiful, beautiful, beautiful topics within this larger topic, right?
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: So first let's just take a moment to recap what is codependency and what does that have to do with sabotaging joy?
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: So codependency is the idea of relying on something outside of me to solve what I am feeling inside of me.
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: And, if you were me right, my first marriage, I was using my marriage to solve all of my sort of scarcity, mindset and attachment wounding and all of my victim consciousness and ways in which I was afraid that it wasn't safe to feel my feelings, that I didn't matter, that I couldn't succeed without you know, my ex facilitating certain things for me.
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: Now, I was not aware of that when it was happening.
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: Right, that was the postmortem, that was the you know, armchair quarterback after the fact, right.
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: But codependency is the idea of becoming dependent or reliant on someone or something or you know else to solve for me, to emotionally labor for me, rather than me finding making friends with, becoming at peace with my own emotional processes and being able to facilitate getting my own emotional needs met, you know, via the infinite amount of resources that exist in the universe.
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: And so codependency is typically something that develops very, very, very early and, I find, has its underpinnings in attachment theory.
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: And when we're very young we develop emotional habits around emotional hygiene and well-being, mental health, spiritual health, emotional health and all of those things impact our physical health and whatever those habits are in the beginning tend to be the place from which we live life, right.
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: And in addition to those habits are the negative beliefs.
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: And if we have negative beliefs about I can't or I am not, then of course we're going to have to sort of compensate somewhere, right.
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: And so very often, rather than rooting out those negative beliefs we're carrying about ourselves and the world around us, we compensate by trying to get other people to, you know, pour into us things that we are capable of manifesting for ourselves.
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: But it's like we've forgotten, right, we've forgotten that we can co-create with God and that there are infinite resources all around for us to be the co-creators of our lives, with an infinite intelligence, and so we start to believe that we have to outsource those things.
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: Right, I need somebody else to do the things from our own infinite source of power when we are tapped in to that deep well of sort of you know, infinite energy and infinite spirituality.
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: Now, that is a lot right there.
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: Right, that's like multiple podcast episodes right there.
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: But for today, we want to talk about how that is impacts our ability to feel joy.
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: Now, it's so interesting when we think about healing, we often think about healing being a process by which we feel less pain.
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: Right, that is how we I believe we have sort of been programmed to consider healing.
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: I feel pain and I go to the doctor and the doctor says here is a treatment plan for you to feel less pain.
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: But what we actually know to be true is that that is the process of often suppressing pain or suppressing symptoms, and it's not actually healing.
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: Healing and Gabor Mate has some amazing quotes he has.
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: He's an MD who has done a lot of research and writing in the world of addiction and trauma and somatic healing, and he talks about how most of Western medicine aims at suppressing and numbing, but that's not actually healing, and what healing is is actually increasing our capacity to feel everything.
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: Now, what I love about that is when we add to it Brene Brown's work, which has just transformed entire generations of people's understanding about what it is to live and learn and love and parent from a place of vulnerability.
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: Brene Brown has said to us and it's funny, even though I know these things, like I know them, I quote them, I think them, I feel them, I say them, but I still do them is that you cannot selectively numb emotion, and so that means love that if you are not feeling a lot of joy in your life, it's probably because you're avoiding feeling a lot of other feelings as well.
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: And again, per Brene Brown's research, she has shown us that you cannot engineer the discomfort out of vulnerability.
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: So it's like no matter how many times we try to figure out how to feel joy without feeling our pain, it's like well, I can come up with a lot of ways to do it, friend.
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: Like, let me count the ways I have tried to figure out how to bypass feeling and still get to joy, and it's just not a thing, right, like it's just.
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: That's just not how it works.
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: You can't selectively numb emotion.
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: So what then ends up happening?
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: Well, we start to depend on, codependently, rely upon things like dissociation numbing.
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: Rely upon things like dissociation numbing, bypassing and suppressing in order to avoid actually feeling the grief of divorce and of loss, and we end up thinking a lot about our grief and our loss, but not actually feeling it.
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: And that is an important distinction we need to have today.
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: What is the difference between feeling and thinking?
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: There's feeling your pain and being in the body, being able to drop into the body, do a body scan and be aware of where you're feeling insecurity, grief, loss, anxiety, scarcity, anger, pain, rejection, joy, optimism, hope, faith and Right and being able to tap into those things in the body and not just think them.
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: And that is, I think, something that a lot of us miss, right, we think about our problems a lot, we think about our pain a lot, but we don't realize that we're not actually in our body feeling and processing them a lot, and so this is where we have somatic techniques to help us really discern the difference between feeling and thinking.
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: We did a breathwork session in the cocoon, in our healing cocoon, with the women this last month and in that breathwork session it was so amazing to notice how emotion wanted to move through my body.
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: It's a very.
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: It was so amazing to notice how emotion wanted to move through my body.
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: It's a very.
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: Breathwork is a very active process.
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: It is a very somatic process and, gosh, being able to observe how my body was asking to move, the emotion was so powerful.
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: And so can you sense, as we're having this conversation today, how much you might be using numbness like scrolling, drinking, overthinking, to avoid feeling, dissociation, compartmentalization, right, like, can you sense how often in a day you are using all of those things in lieu of actually feeling, processing and releasing all of those things in lieu of actually feeling, processing and releasing.
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: And so, if the goal is to get to peace, so many times people say they want to feel peace, they want to feel joy, they want to feel abundance.
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: But in order to feel those things, your capacity to feel joy and abundance and peace is going to match your capacity to feel your grief, and I think a lot of us have used a lot of anger and bitterness and resentment to avoid feeling the grief of loss.
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: So I want you to notice where you're selectively numbing.
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: I do not want you to force yourself to feel all the time.
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: The tools of dissociation, the tools of compartmentalization, those are tools and they're valuable.
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: The tool of sort of rationalizing emotion.
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: Right, being able to think somewhat somewhat, I say objectively about what you're feeling is valuable.
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: It is useful.
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: What I say objectively about what you're feeling is valuable, it is useful.
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: Very, very often I will use the tool of intellectualization, thinking in order to soothe something I'm feeling, but the key is love.
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: I just did it earlier.
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: In fact, as producer Joy and I were preparing this episode, I was feeling a lot of feelings.
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: On purpose, right, I created this premium track for dropping into your body and being able to process somatically, and so when I made the track, I was feeling feelings.
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: It was fantastic, it was uncomfortable, as all get out right.
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: And then she immediately said something to me afterwards about oh no, I watched her digging in her little travel kit for homeopathy and I immediately went to what are you feeling?
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: Right, because by asking her a series of questions and analyzing what she was feeling and what she needed or not needing allowed me to check out of my body and to bypass some of what I was feeling, and it allowed me to step away from the intensity of whatever was moving through my body temporarily so that I could step back in.
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: And so this is by no means an episode that's saying dissociation is bad or bypassing is bad.
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: It is absolutely not.
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: It is a tool in the toolkit.
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: But the goal is to circle back right, and the goal is to increase your capacity to feel a little bit every day or every week and to carve out enough space to feel.
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: And the important thing here is to connect the dots.
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: That if you are feeling like you do not have enough joy in your life to start to connect the dots, that it is probably or peace, right, or abundance, that it is probably directly related to how much you are using the tools of dissociation, numbing or bypassing, and to just start to slowly, gently tip the scales.
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: Now, interestingly enough, as we were prepping this episode, I got into the idea of validating emotion.
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: Right, because very often when I feel feelings my sort of reflexive thing like big feelings, right, when I'm feeling feelings.
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: I want to look up at whomever it is right Producer Joy, or my husband or whomever it is and say like, is that okay?
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: Is what I'm feeling okay?
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: Now that right?
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: There is the codependent piece right Underneath all of this that we're talking about today.
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: Are these negative beliefs about it's not safe to feel what I'm feeling.
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: I have to be perfect, I don't matter, I can't succeed.
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: Whatever they are right, these negative beliefs that we all have sort of running behind the scenes in our programs, in our mental programs, right.
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: And so there's this habit of having a negative belief, having associated behaviors related to feeling or not feeling, bypassing or not bypassing, and so it's a habit.
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: It's a new, uncomfortable habit to feel feelings and to say, ah, by feeling them, I have validated them.
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: By feeling them, I have validated them.
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: I don't need producer joy to say that is a good, right feeling or that is a bad feeling.
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: Feelings don't need things so silly as labels of good or bad.
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: The validation is not to feel them and express them to the therapist and for the therapist to say that feeling is right, that feeling is wrong.
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: Them to the therapist and for the therapist to say that feeling is right, that feeling is wrong.
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: You love.
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: Creating the space to feel them is the validation they are requiring.
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: That's it.
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: The validation of feeling them is enough.
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: And then feeling them enough and moving them through enough to come to okay, now, based on these feelings, what do I need?
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: And am I willing to step into the uncomfortable unknown to ask for what I need?
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: And if I don't get it here, can I then go to the next place and ask for it there?
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: Because there is always a solution to your problem?
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: And that just sometimes means asking in a number of places and continuing to validate what you're feeling simply by feeling it and not needing it to be right or wrong.
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: You are worthy of all that you feel, love.
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: Don't let all of those feelings, you know, sort of lead you down the path of reinforcing your negative beliefs.
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: You know, sort of lead you down the path of reinforcing your negative beliefs.
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: Let the feelings be what they are and then reach for those positive beliefs that you are enough, you matter.
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: It is safe to feel your feelings.
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: You do not have to be perfect and you can get your needs met.
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: And those feelings are not evidence of anything.
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: To the contrary, they are simply the color and the texture to our lives, and they are the path to joy.
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: That sounds a little sadistic, doesn't it Like?
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: In order to feel joy, you must also be willing to feel your pain, and if this is hard for you, you're in good company.
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: I get it.
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: In today's episode, we have talked about the difference between feeling your feelings and thinking about your feelings.
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: We have talked about how you are probably blocking your own joy by bypassing and dissociating more than you realize.
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: We acknowledge Brene Brown's research that you cannot, in fact, selectively numb.
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: So if you want to feel more joy and more abundance, it means creating more space for you to feel all of the feelings and trusting that, if you allow yourself to drop into your body and feel your grief, that it will go.
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: And we highlighted the importance of circling back.
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: When you have days or weeks, that sort of call for you to bypass or dissociate more than usual, that you carve out intentional time to circle back and to feel those things that are asking for your attention, to give them a voice and validate them simply by feeling them love.
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: I'm so proud of you for being here and for alchemizing all of your pain and believing in yourself more today than you did yesterday.
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: I love you so much.
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: Peace, dear.
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: Divorce Diary is a podcast by my coach, dawn.
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: You can find more at mycoachdawncom.