Latest / Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce / 136. How Divorce Can Be the Key to Conquering Anxiety and Codependency
Transcript
- 0:49Speaker 1: Hi love.
- 0:50Speaker 1: We are going to tackle anxiety and the way it's manifesting in your life as a result of this divorce, but what we're really going to talk about is how this divorce is going to help you finally get free from the anxiety that you've been dragging around with you most of your life, whether you knew it or not.
- 1:12Speaker 1: Most of your life, whether you knew it or not.
- 1:21Speaker 1: Hi love.
- 1:24Speaker 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.
- 1:29Speaker 1: I'm your host, dawn Wiggins, a therapist, coach, integrative healer and divorcee.
- 1:34Speaker 1: Join me for a fresh approach to healing grief and building your confidence after divorce.
- 1:39Speaker 1: By the end of today's episode, you will be able to give yourself an anxiety report card and have a sense about how you're doing with regards to not just coping with and managing anxiety in your day-to-day life, but how you're doing it, actually resolving it.
- 2:05Speaker 1: We are going to discuss the ways that you are currently being conditioned by popular culture and people in the wellness space, on social media and other places that you are being conditioned to think that anxiety is normal, when it's not, and we are going to hear from Isabel in our Getting Unstuck segment, where she writes in and talks about one of the biggest triggers that women experience when they are processing divorce one of the biggest anxiety triggers and how to actually use that anxiety trigger as a way to go back and resolve the roots of anxiety.
- 2:41Speaker 1: And then I want you to be sure to listen to the end of the episode, because you're going to be able to hear how 20 people are going to be able to get a gift box from yours truly, and I can't wait to tell you what's in the box and how you can have me send it to you.
- 2:58Speaker 1: Let's dig in.
- 3:00Speaker 1: All right, so we're tackling anxiety.
- 3:07Speaker 1: What is anxiety, anyways?
- 3:09Speaker 1: Well, I'm not going to give you, you know, like a diagnostic definition, right?
- 3:13Speaker 1: I'm just going to give you a practical kind of overview of anxiety.
- 3:17Speaker 1: It's a heightened sense in your body and your mind that there is the possibility of a threat in your environment, right, that you perceive some sort of threat in your environment.
- 3:29Speaker 1: And this is unperceived because so often we're perceiving threat when it's not actually there.
- 3:35Speaker 1: But we've rehearsed it so many times.
- 3:37Speaker 1: There's such a brain map, we have so many repetitive thoughts that are anxious in nature, that you know we're cuing our nervous systems to perceive threat, and so it's this idea that we're perceiving some threat in the environment and then our nervous system gets a little activated, right, it's like heightened, and we have repetitive thoughts or body sensations that are indicative that you might be unsafe.
- 4:04Speaker 1: And so, lately, some of the things that have probably been triggering you to feel anxious and hey, maybe you're listening to this and you don't even think you experience anxiety, but you'll be really, really clear about that by the end of this episode, right but some of the things that I think commonly trigger anxiety at this season of life are feelings of insecurity or uncertainty about whether or not you're making the right decision.
- 4:31Speaker 1: So often, just having to even make a decision right now in this post-divorce situation, triggers a perceived threat.
- 4:38Speaker 1: Because what if I?
- 4:39Speaker 1: What if I make the wrong decision?
- 4:41Speaker 1: And so maybe your heart races a little, maybe you, your mind starts to spin right.
- 4:46Speaker 1: So making decisions the house being dark and sounds in the night, right Triggers this heightened sense of perceived threat If the car breaks down or something goes wrong with it and you know.
- 4:58Speaker 1: Or, similarly, the house right, if something breaks down and you have to do something or you have to lift something or move something that's too big and you know you don't have the strength or the vehicle or the boys club to help you do the thing.
- 5:14Speaker 1: Right.
- 5:14Speaker 1: Like, oh gosh, how am I going to get this done?
- 5:16Speaker 1: Being late to something, right?
- 5:18Speaker 1: You're juggling more things, so many more things right now, and the moment you realize, oh gosh, I might be late to school, I might be late to work, I might be late to this meeting, you're going to have this heightened sense of distress Having to fill out an emergency contact on a form because it's no longer him, it's now somebody else.
- 5:37Speaker 1: When your kids leave, right, how about that moment every parent dreads, whether they're married or divorced when their kid gets a driver's license for the first time or starts middle school or starts high school, right, things where your kids are possibly going to feel anxious, all of a sudden you feel anxious too.
- 5:54Speaker 1: Or just having them be away, right and not knowing if they're okay or not.
- 5:58Speaker 1: Looking at your phone screen and seeing that either your attorney or your ex has texted you, or your mother-in-law maybe right, like any of those people, like, just looking at your phone screen, all of a sudden your heart skips a beat or your stomach drops, right.
- 6:12Speaker 1: That's all signs of anxiety.
- 6:15Speaker 1: A lot of things to do with money, right, or health, might be triggering anxiety.
- 6:20Speaker 1: Or your kid's health is a massive anxiety trigger.
- 6:23Speaker 1: And so what do I mean by so?
- 6:25Speaker 1: These are all very, very common triggers that you're experiencing these days.
- 6:28Speaker 1: What do I mean when I say anxiety is being triggered?
- 6:33Speaker 1: I'm going to give you a list of symptoms that can be pooled in the heading of anxiety and you can kind of track how many of these you're feeling or not feeling on a given day, right?
- 6:46Speaker 1: But let's say you know you look down at your phone screen and your attorney and your ex both reached out and you see those notifications on your phone.
- 6:55Speaker 1: What do you notice in your body in that moment?
- 6:58Speaker 1: Is there tingling?
- 7:00Speaker 1: Is there tightness?
- 7:02Speaker 1: Is there clamminess?
- 7:05Speaker 1: Do your armpits start sweating?
- 7:09Speaker 1: Does your face get flushed or hot?
- 7:12Speaker 1: Is there any heat?
- 7:13Speaker 1: Does your heart start racing?
- 7:16Speaker 1: What happens to your breathing?
- 7:19Speaker 1: Do you fidget?
- 7:23Speaker 1: Does your mind race?
- 7:25Speaker 1: Do you notice worrisome thoughts, where you're having repetitive thoughts about what could go wrong, for instance, like negatively predicting an outcome?
- 7:35Speaker 1: Do you sometimes talk faster?
- 7:41Speaker 1: Do you have a hard time sitting still?
- 7:46Speaker 1: This is like a broad question, right?
- 7:48Speaker 1: So, not just when these things happen, but in general in your life Do you have a hard time sitting still?
- 7:53Speaker 1: Do you have a hard time making decisions?
- 7:58Speaker 1: Do you ask a lot of people to validate your decisions?
- 8:53Speaker 1: Do you run by them?
- 8:54Speaker 1: This is what I was thinking, this is what I said, and then this is what I said, and then this is what I decided.
- 8:58Speaker 1: How did I do?
- 8:59Speaker 1: Was it okay?
- 9:01Speaker 1: Do you rewrite text messages a lot, right Like delete, rewrite, delete, rewrite classic sign of anxiety.
- 9:07Speaker 1: Are you overly self-conscious, right when you're having a conversation with someone and you're looking at them and you're talking to them but you're actually kind of behind your eyes analyzing what they're thinking about, what you're saying or how you look right, that kind of self-conscious inner dialogue about am I okay?
- 9:25Speaker 1: Do they think I'm okay?
- 9:26Speaker 1: Are they judging me?
- 9:26Speaker 1: Oh gosh, did I say the right thing?
- 9:28Speaker 1: Did I say the wrong thing?
- 9:29Speaker 1: Do you have a difficult time thinking straight?
- 9:32Speaker 1: Are you preoccupied with your health or symptoms?
- 9:37Speaker 1: Do you have a difficult time sleeping?
- 9:40Speaker 1: Do you try to read people's minds?
- 9:44Speaker 1: Do you repetitively check your phone for updated messages?
- 9:50Speaker 1: Or, you know, could be dating apps, could be, email, could be.
- 9:53Speaker 1: You know, just waiting for some sort of communication.
- 9:56Speaker 1: Do you check your phone a lot?
- 9:57Speaker 1: So I want you to take a deep breath and notice how your body feels right now.
- 10:02Speaker 1: Do a body scan, check your breathing.
- 10:06Speaker 1: How does your stomach feel, right?
- 10:09Speaker 1: Do you ever get butterflies in your stomach Not in the good way, right or a pit in your stomach?
- 10:14Speaker 1: These are all signs of anxiety or a sensation of a perceived threat.
- 10:24Speaker 1: Now we're talking about the kind of basic anxiety, right, Because anxiety, the experience of anxiety, is a precursor to more significant nervous system activation, right.
- 10:36Speaker 1: So when you feel anxious, I want you to know that your nervous system is on, is in a heightened place, right, there's more vigilance, it's more activated, it's not exactly in its calm state, but we're not full-blown panic attack, right, when we're talking about anxiety, we're not full-blown panic attack.
- 10:56Speaker 1: We're not in fight, flight, freeze or fawn yet.
- 10:59Speaker 1: So we're talking about kind of a yellow light place, right, where a lot of people tend to hang out a lot.
- 11:06Speaker 1: We all in my experience, most humans spend a lot of time in this yellow light place of chronic, repetitive anxiety, and many, many people would qualify for for a diagnosis of anxiety, and that's not normal, right.
- 11:28Speaker 1: So we're going to talk about that more and more today, but I think there are a lot of people out there who don't realize how much of their time they spend in an anxious state.
- 11:37Speaker 1: And then, when your nervous system is chronically in this anxious state, what happens is you're just a hair's breadth away at any given moment from shifting into more of a extreme nervous system spot where you're in fight, flight, freeze or fawn.
- 11:55Speaker 1: That's when we know that there's a bit of panic going on.
- 11:58Speaker 1: There's a trauma response brewing, if you will right.
- 12:03Speaker 1: And so I want you to kind of visualize this spectrum of intensity where anxiety is in the beginning and then we have this heightened state where we get towards panic.
- 12:15Speaker 1: And then, if you've ever felt so chronically anxious and tended to fight, flight, freeze, fawn, then eventually a step beyond that is this level of exhaustion that can take over, this level of shutdown that can take over.
- 12:31Speaker 1: And this is when your nervous system goes into a collapsed state and you can't really think or feel or hardly do anything anymore, but you feel completely collapsed and unable to function in a meaningful way.
- 12:45Speaker 1: And so this is a spectrum of nervous system activation that begins with becoming aware of how often and how chronically you experience anxiety.
- 12:58Speaker 1: So when you think about that list of things that I gave you, these common triggers when you're going through a divorce and these symptoms that are associated with anxiety, what do you do when you experience those things?
- 13:09Speaker 1: Do you know?
- 13:10Speaker 1: Do you feel like you know what to do?
- 13:12Speaker 1: Do you know what tool to reach for?
- 13:14Speaker 1: Do you have a toolkit of things that you grab for?
- 13:17Speaker 1: And how often, would you say, you implement those tools?
- 13:21Speaker 1: So we talk about a lot of them here on the podcast.
- 13:23Speaker 1: It could be vagal breathing or a great homeopathic remedy.
- 13:31Speaker 1: It could be EFT tapping.
- 13:33Speaker 1: It could be immersive journaling, it could be some essential oils with some stretching.
- 13:39Speaker 1: It could be butterfly tapping.
- 13:42Speaker 1: It could be so many things tapping.
- 13:52Speaker 1: It could be so many things.
- 13:53Speaker 1: But can you take a look at how often you feel anxious and how often you respond to those anxious feelings with the right or good, reliable tool?
- 13:58Speaker 1: Now you can start to get a sense of how you're doing on your anxiety report card, because when we don't address these things and they're happening habitually all day long, every day we can now see why the nervous system eventually heads into fight, flight, freeze or, even worse, collapse mode, and why it can be so hard to recover from or feel like it takes so long to recover from something like divorce.
- 14:28Speaker 1: I would even venture to say that there are a lot of times that you confuse grief and anxiety.
- 14:33Speaker 1: Do you know how many times a client tells me about how they feel so sad missing their ex?
- 14:41Speaker 1: And then, when they give me all the reasons they're missing their ex, it's really they're telling me stories about times that they had to do hard things or things they were uncertain or anxious about, and what they really were experiencing was anxiety about having to go new places, do new things, figure out stuff that they didn't have the answers to.
- 15:03Speaker 1: It was like a boatload of uncertainty that they were experiencing, and not actually anything to do with who their ex was.
- 15:10Speaker 1: At the core, right, it wasn't to do with, like grieving this specific person.
- 15:14Speaker 1: It was more like anxiety about not having the support that they needed in the moment to solve the problem that they had.
- 15:23Speaker 1: And that's super interesting to me, right, how we maybe mix up the feelings we're feeling and then what happens is we're not using the best tool for the job, right?
- 15:33Speaker 1: And so I want you to really notice how often do you feel like you're experiencing anxiety, the intensity of the symptoms, so like you know, if you have a hard time sleeping, you get tightness in your chest, you have a pit in your stomach like how intense is that?
- 15:50Speaker 1: How much of your quality of life does that steal, right?
- 15:55Speaker 1: Has it gotten so normal to you that you're just like, ah, you're joined kind of this popular culture club of like you're not cool if you're not anxious?
- 16:04Speaker 1: Because I feel like in a post-COVID world, that's kind of where we landed right.
- 16:08Speaker 1: I feel like we learned so much about mental health during COVID and the years after that and so many platforms like TikTok and Instagram have helped us learn so much.
- 16:20Speaker 1: But then what also happened is we accidentally got conditioned to think that it's normal to have this much anxiety.
- 16:29Speaker 1: And it's not.
- 16:30Speaker 1: It's common, it's incredibly, incredibly common, but it's not normal.
- 16:35Speaker 1: We were designed to be peaceful creatures, right, who are able to love and be loved, and that when we're feeling dysregulated or distressed or anxious, that we take some care and we get back to like a green light right, and we get back to a sense of safety and security in our bodies.
- 16:53Speaker 1: And I feel like we're just kind of throttling further and further into these places of heightened distress and it's being normalized, right.
- 17:02Speaker 1: So I love that we are having this conversation about how common chronic anxiety is.
- 17:12Speaker 1: I don't love if you can notice how, in your body-mind, you have subtly started to accept that that's just a part of life, because chronic anxiety, love is not just a part of life.
- 17:24Speaker 1: It's a collective choice we've been making as a consciousness, as a people, to not take good care of ourselves, to not have honest conversations about what needs to happen next in order to heal or recover.
- 17:37Speaker 1: It's a cultural issue about do more, spend more, buy more, go more, have more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more.
- 17:44Speaker 1: And when it's a common focus on more, how do we ever pivot to less so we can get back into that green zone of a sense of well-being?
- 17:55Speaker 1: Right, we can only pile on so much more before the system is like whoa, too much overload, right and.
- 18:01Speaker 1: So who are some of your favorite mental health people that you, you know, listen to on Instagram or TikTok, for instance, right and?
- 18:12Speaker 1: Or in your favorite podcasts?
- 18:14Speaker 1: And do you notice?
- 18:16Speaker 1: Are they telling you that it's normal or are they telling you that it's common?
- 18:21Speaker 1: I want you to start to get really, really discerning about the content that you're downloading, because the more we talk about and reaffirm that this is normal, the further we're getting from actually resolving it, and I believe, I believe very, very strongly that this divorce is actually helping you finally address the anxiety you've been carrying around for a very, very long time.
- 18:46Speaker 1: I know you experienced anxiety before you got married because you wouldn't have picked the partner you picked.
- 18:51Speaker 1: It wouldn't have been a good fit, right.
- 18:53Speaker 1: If you attracted this partner from a calm state, from a sense of that green place, a sense of well-being, you wouldn't have picked this partner where it all went to shit.
- 19:03Speaker 1: And so I know that there's anxiety that predates this marriage, but I want you to notice how far back it went.
- 19:11Speaker 1: Is this a family issue?
- 19:12Speaker 1: Do you feel like this is a genetic issue that you inherited?
- 19:15Speaker 1: Do you feel like it came about as a result of lifestyle in your young years, zero to seven?
- 19:20Speaker 1: Do you feel like it came about as a result of childhood experiences, in school and adolescence and high school?
- 19:26Speaker 1: Do you feel like it got reinforced in your previous marriage?
- 19:30Speaker 1: I know that so often when we're exposed to things like rage or violence or anger or a lack of you know like, for me a latchkey kid, right, there wasn't a lot of supervision or structure, right.
- 19:45Speaker 1: That can leave a lot of anxious feelings.
- 19:47Speaker 1: You know, if your parents struggled with things or if they had to work a lot or if there was a lot of stress at home, right, that anxiety it's catchy, right.
- 19:55Speaker 1: It catches like it spreads like a virus, and so I want you to just kind of have a sense of when you can see anxiety starting to become more predominant in your life, because when it started to gain traction and momentum tells us a little bit about which tools need to be used.
- 20:14Speaker 1: So, for instance, if you were somebody who was born with a genetic predisposition to anxiety, we definitely know that we have to go to homeopathy as a tool, because homeopathy can address things that are genetically or energetically inherited.
- 20:28Speaker 1: If you can see that it just existed in your family culture or, you know, was a childhood experience or something that really came on in high school, then we know that EMDR is a really great choice.
- 20:43Speaker 1: Let's hear a little bit in our Getting Unstuck segment about Isabel's story.
- 20:47Speaker 1: She writes in.
- 20:48Speaker 1: Isabel writes in to us to tell us one of the places that she gets most triggered, and you can hear a little bit about how I address her concern.
- 20:57Speaker 1: So Isabel writes in and says I just needed to write about my feelings.
- 21:02Speaker 1: I'm out of town at a corporate event and we're at a bar and we're playing cornhole and my anxiety keeps creeping in and telling me that my ex would be throwing a conniption fit and accusing me of cheating on him because I was social with co-workers.
- 21:20Speaker 1: How do I move past these anxious thoughts that keep resurfacing when I'm out doing fun things and not doing anything wrong?
- 21:27Speaker 1: Isabel's question is so brilliant and it reinforces why I feel so powerfully that divorce is actually a vehicle for you to get to the root issue.
- 21:39Speaker 1: So Isabel's ex accused her of cheating when she was just being appropriately social, accused her of cheating when she was just being appropriately social.
- 21:53Speaker 1: So my recommendation, isabel, is that you get really quiet with how it felt to be accused by your ex.
- 21:55Speaker 1: You get into your body, right.
- 21:55Speaker 1: You get very clear about the body sensations that come up when you feel accused of something.
- 22:00Speaker 1: You get really clear about the negative beliefs that you kind of took on as a result of being accused like I should have done something different or I can't be myself or I'm not Worth it right.
- 22:14Speaker 1: Some negative belief, and maybe multiple negative beliefs, got in there and got collapsed with somebody else's accusation.
- 22:21Speaker 1: And then I want you to process those feelings and start to switch those negative beliefs.
- 22:26Speaker 1: So we can do that using EFT tapping or immersive journaling, butterfly tapping, emdr.
- 22:33Speaker 1: But then I want you to get really clever, isabel, and I want you to take a deep breath, do a body scan and I want you to float back to before you were married to your ex.
- 22:43Speaker 1: What other circumstances can you remember when you got accused of something and it felt in your body similar to how it felt when your ex accused you?
- 22:59Speaker 1: Because that's the real root of anxiety and that's the real root of why you picked your ex in the first place.
- 23:03Speaker 1: And so this is the magical key and lock for understanding how this divorce can help you break through to levels of health and well-being and healing that never existed even before you got married.
- 23:17Speaker 1: This is the magical portal that I believe divorce can be to help us finally claim true well-being.
- 23:26Speaker 1: Isabel, if you start doing some butterfly tapping with your awareness of how it felt in your body when you got accused and whatever memories just floated up for you ooh, girl, love, now you can really reprogram those negative beliefs that you inherited from a very young age.
- 23:39Speaker 1: And now you're going to start attracting very different circumstances.
- 23:42Speaker 1: Not only will cornhole with your coworkers feel better, but you will start shedding layers of smallness.
- 23:51Speaker 1: You know playing small rather than stepping into your empowerment.
- 23:54Speaker 1: Your life will start shifting on such dramatic levels into your empowerment.
- 24:00Speaker 1: Your life will start shifting on such dramatic levels.
- 24:02Speaker 1: This love is how you reclaim health and well-being and finally be done with chronic anxiety and not have to keep normalizing that.
- 24:10Speaker 1: This is just how we live, I promise you.
- 24:13Speaker 1: We are being lied to by so many people about needing to live with chronic illness and mental illness.
- 24:20Speaker 1: Love, you were built for healing and you are worthy and deserving of redemption.
- 24:29Speaker 1: So in this episode we talked about how divorce is finally going to help you get to the root of healing anxiety.
- 24:37Speaker 1: We talked about the specific triggers that you're experiencing at this time in your life and the symptoms that go along with it.
- 24:44Speaker 1: You got a sense of whether or not you're kind of chronically anxious and how destabilizing it is in your life, and you got a sense of how well you're addressing that in your day-to-day life.
- 24:55Speaker 1: You also heard about how you are be conditioned to think that anxiety chronic anxiety is normal rather than common.
- 25:03Speaker 1: And you heard through Isabel's story how we can float back to earlier times in our life to understand the actual root causes of anxiety, and you also got a bit of a sense of which tools you need more or most.
- 25:17Speaker 1: Do you need one that goes back to help address the fact that you might have been born predisposed to anxiety, or are these other subconscious tools like EFT, tapping and EMDR and immersive journaling the things you need today?
- 25:31Speaker 1: Love, I want you to know that every time you tackle one of these things and you heal, you are raising the vibration of our entire planet, that your healing matters so much.
- 25:40Speaker 1: It matters to you, it matters to your children, it matters to your future partner, it matters to me, and I could not be more proud of you.
- 25:46Speaker 1: That said, I told you at the beginning of the episode that I have a gift box that I want to send you, and I want to tell you more.
- 25:53Speaker 1: So in this gift box I have a Dear Divorce Diary pen, a journal and my favorite homeopathic remedy for stress and grief, and I want to send these things to you, to the first 20 people who go to Apple Podcasts or Spotify Podcasts and leave a written review.
- 26:13Speaker 1: If you leave a written review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and you email me a screenshot, you can send the screenshot to hello at mycoachdawncom and in that email, leave the screenshot of your review, your name and your address, and I will send you a gift box with a Dear Divorce Diary pen, a journal oh, the journals are so beautiful.
- 26:36Speaker 1: They're like bespoke for this season of life that you're in.
- 26:39Speaker 1: And my favorite remedy for stress and grief.
- 26:42Speaker 1: It's a nervous system remedy that helps you process grief.
- 26:45Speaker 1: It helps you just calm down.
- 26:48Speaker 1: It will help if you are chronically anxious, if you are having trouble sleeping, if you know that there's something you're going to head towards that's going to be particularly stressful.
- 26:56Speaker 1: I always use this remedy.
- 26:57Speaker 1: I use it for my kiddo, I use it for myself.
- 27:00Speaker 1: This remedy is such a game changer, and so I cannot wait to send you your gift box if you are one of the first 20 people to leave a written review.
- 27:09Speaker 1: Thank you so much for being here and being part of the community.
- 27:12Speaker 1: Without you, there is no Dear Divorce Diary.
- 27:15Speaker 1: I love you so much.
- 27:16Speaker 1: Peace.
- 27:17Speaker 1: Dear Divorce Diary is a podcast by my coach, dawn.
- 27:35Speaker 1: You can find more at mycoachdawncom.