Latest / Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce / 168. Did Our Marriage Even Matter? The Question That Haunts Us After Divorce

Transcript

168. Did Our Marriage Even Matter? The Question That Haunts Us After Divorce · Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce

• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Hi love.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: So you're afraid none of it mattered to him.
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: Well, it didn't, unless you make this one shift Hi love.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: 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.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: I'm your host, dawn Wiggins, a therapist, coach, integrative healer and divorcee.
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: Join me for a fresh approach to healing grief and building your confidence after divorce.
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: I think one of the hardest things I watch women walk through as they're healing from divorce whether you wanted the divorce or you didn't want the divorce, right I think one of the hardest things for women to walk through, especially when they see their ex move on, is did it matter?
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: Did I matter?
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: Was any of this real?
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: And I've seen this come up in a really big way in a different D Word our small group coaching program that launched this year.
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: One of the women, very specifically, is really struggling with this this week.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: But I think, when I look at it, all of us have struggled with this idea in some way or another, and probably not just with the ex that you are divorcing right now.
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: I think that if we peel back the layers of life, we often ask ourselves this question did I matter to them him, her, you name it, whoever the meaningful people are in your life do I matter?
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: And you know, the story kind of came up this weekend where she was attending a family event where the ex was there with the new wife and it's like the whole family was not acknowledging how weird this is, that you know he just left her and married this one and then brings them to that they have some mutual family members and right, and that it's weird and gee love, are you okay?
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: How are you handling this?
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: Right, like everybody's just pretending like it's not happening.
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: How many times have you experienced that in life where you went through something so deeply painful and someone, some people that mattered to you, acted like it wasn't even happening?
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: I think that as women, we experience that so much with sexual abuse, with various forms of emotional abuse, I know as a kid I remember I have this very clear memory of my grandmother defending me really loudly to some family members and saying she's only a child, and it sticks in my memory because I think I felt like I wasn't defended a lot when I was growing up, that nobody was talking about what was happening right, and so did I matter.
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: So in today's episode, we're going to dig deep into the do I matter, did I matter, did it matter?
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: Piece, and we're going to do it by talking about these three things.
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: I want you to understand more about what you have in common with tumbleweed.
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: I want you to get really clear about what you need to learn from your healing process.
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: From 10 Second Tom, do you remember him?
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: From 50 First Dates.
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: That's one of my favorite movies.
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: I went through a phase where I would watch that movie every night to fall asleep.
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: It was very soothing to me.
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: I don't know, loved it.
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: So 10 Second Tom, he has a lot to teach you and really understanding how you can leverage your habits in order to really get clear about whether or not you mattered or it mattered.
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: All right, let's dig in First things first, what you have in common with tumbleweed.
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: Well, I think that for those of us that didn't grow up in utopia meaning you know you didn't have and some of you did have this beautiful kind of upbringing right, where you were taught that you mattered and that you are you have the capacity to love and you have the capacity to grieve and you have the capacity to recover from anything and that you are magical and you have this beautiful life purpose and that when you experience pain or something unwanted it's just temporary and it will pass, as long as you allow yourself to process it and find the silver lining right.
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: So if you weren't taught all of that and not just in language right?
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: Many of us were taught things in language, but then what actually happened or what actually got lived out in our family life didn't match what we were taught right Do as I say, not as I do.
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: So if you weren't taught to be really grounded and rooted in love, in self-respect, in finding the silver lining to all things, in turning unwanted events into really powerful growth processes, if you weren't grounded in the understanding that there is a divine creator that you are connected to and a part of, and that being in spiritual alignment and being really grounded in your heart center and in your root chakra, in love and having a deep personal relationship with yourself and your higher power.
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: Like if you weren't grounded in all of that love, you are more like tumbleweed than you realize and I was taught a lot of those things that I just said to you.
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: I was taught them in concept, but then what was lived in my family was chaotic and violent and tumultuous and dark, and was more fear than love, right, and so I was tumbleweed for a huge chunk of my life.
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: I could know some things, but the second I had a really big, painful emotion.
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: I would blow in a new direction and the moment something unwanted happened that felt outside of my control, I would get tumbled in another direction.
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: And so, unless we are really because tumbleweed doesn't have roots, right, it just blows where the wind blows.
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: And so when our minds and our bodies are disconnected, when we are not in flow, when we are not truly grounded in these principles, then anytime something unwanted happens, it's going to blow you away and you're not going to feel like you have command of your life or the circumstance when that's not actually true.
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: You have command of your life and your circumstance, but you're not utilizing it, you're not leveraging it, which is why you want him to decide for you whether or not it mattered, because you want to outsource your interpretation of the circumstance to somebody else's perception.
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: You have command, love, but in order to know that you have command, in order to feel embodied in your command of your life and your circumstances, you've got to get grounded, and that can be really hard.
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: And 10 Second Tom can show us why.
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: Now, if you remember back to the movie, 10-second Tom, he could only remember for 10 seconds, right, and then he would circle right back around to like hi, I'm Tom, who are you, what's your name, or whatever.
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: His inquiry was right.
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: And so if I were to say to you tell me about Tom's personality, what do you know about Tom's personality and the nuances?
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: Right, you could tell me about Tom's personality.
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: What do you know about Tom's personality and the nuances?
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: Right, you could tell me about the personalities of the other characters, but what can you tell me about Tom's personality?
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: We could maybe say that he was upbeat, right, he was a positive guy, he had positive energy, right, but what else could you say about his personality other than he was really positive?
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: I can't really point to anything.
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: Which is really really fascinating, because so much of how your personality is formed.
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: Love is informed by your emotional memory.
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: Now you start to encode memory from conception, from the moment that that egg and that sperm meet and you become a sentient being right, you have cells that are starting to divide and your heart cells know to go to the heart center and the foot cell knows to be a foot and the brain cell knows to be a brain.
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: Each cell in the body has a brain that tells it where to go and what its function is and how to do it.
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: Right From the moment of conception, your cells have memory and then you have this whole host of lived experiences from then to now.
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: But so often the memory in those cells is paired with negative emotion and then that becomes your personality.
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: All the things that you've experienced, and certainly the things you inherited, right, that egg and that sperm, those inherited energies those also become part of your personality and memory.
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: And so, 10 second Tom, he didn't have more than 10 seconds of memory.
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: So look at that.
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: He was happy all the time because he didn't have all that negative emotion fused into his memory experiences, right, what he knew was hey, it's a great day and I want to know who you are.
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: And so there are so many beautiful things you can do to help shape your future and to influence and manifest and recover from codependency.
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: But as long as you have painful, negative emotion paired with your cells in your memory experience, which is not just things that happened to you, it's just how it felt to be in your body in those moments.
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: So how it felt to be in your body when you were in utero, how it felt to be in your body when you were first born, how it felt to be in your body when you laid in your crib or your bed or whatever it was.
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: As an infant, how did it feel to be in your body.
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: That's also memory.
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: How did it feel to be in your family?
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: How did it feel to be in your classrooms and school?
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: How did it feel to learn?
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: How did it feel to grow?
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: How did it feel?
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: I know for me, as an infant, I was colicky.
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: I think for me to be in my body at a very young age felt awful, and I think that dissociation started early.
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: And so unless you're using tools that can get to the heart of that, that can help cleanse those cells of negative emotion that's become paired with your cells, right?
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: Unless the tools that you are using go that deep love, then what comes next?
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: Habits?
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: You are going to have mental and emotional habits and patterns that you are going to be fighting against your entire life, and so then you know it doesn't matter to you at that point that you and your ex had this beautiful lived experience together.
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: You met, you fell in love, you pinched each other's butts, you planned vacations, you argued over money, you had coffee together.
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: You knew, you know what his favorite dinner was and he knew you know, ideally, how you like to have an orgasm.
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: Right, there was this rich lived experience and then, because it didn't last, or because you had this negative emotion and he had this negative emotion paired with memory, and you didn't know how to heal that and you didn't know how to recover from it, you didn't know what to do about it, you didn't feel in command of the situation, he didn't feel in command of the situation and it didn't last.
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: You're asking if it mattered.
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: Of course it mattered.
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: It's your life.
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: It matters a lot.
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: Every lived experience that you shared with him mattered.
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: It is part of how you are experiencing this one life you get to live in this body.
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: It is part of how you are learning or growing or not learning or growing.
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: It all mattered.
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: It all mattered, but it won't matter unless you decide it matters, and from a codependent place.
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: As tumbleweed, you are so used to outsourcing your sense of self what you think, what you feel, what you believe.
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: You are so used to asking other people to tell you if you're okay, if it mattered, if you matter, and the time is now for you to decide.
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: But you have these habits.
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: You have these habits that have been going on since conception in the cells of your body and how it felt to be you.
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: And if so many of the thought patterns and habits and your emotional patterns and habits were ones that were uncomfortable, then it is going to be hard for you to believe and become grounded, rooted and no longer tumbleweed right in the idea that you matter.
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: And the thing is is you have to be the one that claims and owns that process.
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: There are healers like myself that can help guide you along that path.
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: I can teach you about EFT tapping.
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: I can teach you about EMDR therapy.
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: I can teach you about quantumFT tapping.
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: I can teach you about EMDR therapy.
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: I can teach you about quantum healing and homeopathy.
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: But you have to reach for them and then you have to do them habitually, because right now, what you're doing habitually is discounting yourself and discounting your experiences and discounting the power that you have in your life to overcome unwanted circumstances.
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: You're going to experience unwanted circumstances throughout your life, but your habit is to interpret them as bad instead of good.
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: Right Is to feel like I can't handle it versus I can.
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: To believe that you know you don't, you're not worth it or you're not good enough versus knowing that you can.
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: Now I sound really confident today.
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: I feel really confident saying all this stuff to you.
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: But this is not how it always was.
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: I was tumbleweed and more and more I strive to be 10-second Tom, not where it's like 10 seconds, right.
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: But I want to move through life where all of that cellular memory that I have has been transmuted into neutral, positive cellular memory so that I can come to each scenario confident that I can overcome it and confident that I can have fun doing it.
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: You have such an accumulation of pain, love that needs to be purged, transmuted from the cells of your body, and the thing is, is that it's not as hard as it has to be right Like?
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: I have a session today booked with Kate, whom you heard me talk about on the podcast a little while ago and right sitting with her.
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: Heard me talk about on the podcast a little while ago and right sitting with her.
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: It's a joy.
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: It's easy Taking a new remedy.
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: It's uncomfortable, maybe for a day or two, but then after that, like it just goes, the negative energy just goes.
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: We have an EFT tapping challenge.
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: That started this morning.
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: It was so fun.
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: We spent 18 minutes together on Zoom.
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: That was it 18 minutes together, room of 10 women.
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: So powerful, so fun.
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: Healing doesn't have to suck.
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: It can be so empowering and it can be so joyful.
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: It can be such a beautiful community experience where you stop being tumbleweed, you start creating healthier habits and you allow yourself to know deeply that it all mattered.
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: If you are ready to know this more deeply, I want you to head to Instagram at Dawn Wiggins, give me a follow and send me a DM.
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: I am ready to know that this mattered and I want to know what my next step needs to be.
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: Dawn, if you're not on Instagram, then just send me an email.
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: Hello at mycoachedawn.
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: Same thing I'm ready to know and I need to know what my next step needs to be.
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: I love you so much.
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: Peace, dear Divorce Diary is a podcast by my coach, john.
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: You can find more at mycoachjohncom.