Latest / Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce / 53. Building Confidence after Divorce: Shifting from Needing Reassurance to Self-Love

Transcript

53. Building Confidence after Divorce: Shifting from Needing Reassurance to Self-Love · Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce

• 0:53
  Speaker 1: Hi, love, this is Dawn and you're listening to Dear Divorce Diary with my coach, dawn, where we explore the post-divorce life and you, the woman who lives it.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: We cover everything from trauma during and after divorce to feeling like a stranger in your own life and the new frontier of life as a single woman.
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: We're cozy in for the conversations we've been longing to have about this new life.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: Hi, love, today I'm going to get all up in your business to do with the need for external validation while you're going through this really painful, insecure post-divorce situation.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: And oh gosh, golly, do I just get how much you crave, how desperate you feel, to have some folks validate you.
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: Validate you that you are not crazy, validate you that you are lovable, that you're desirable, that your heart matters, that the things that you've been asking for are reasonable, like there are so many things that you crave right now from other people, and I get it, in fact, in very full, transparent disclosure.
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: This was how I exited my marriage was via hooking up with somebody else, because of that depth of desire that I, at the time, did not have the skills to self soothe and to feel grounded in my sense of enoughness.
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: I didn't have.
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: So the things we're going to talk about today.
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: Let me be very clear.
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: I did not have these skills when I was going through this, so any comparing you might have been wanting to do just now, oh Don wants me to not need external validation.
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: Let me be super clear.
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: I was full blown hot mess express at the time.
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: So the things I'm going to share with you today are things that I have learned over the course of a decade, things that I have internalized over the course of a decade, and I would like it to not take you a decade, that's all Right.
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: I'm going to share these things with you because I want you to have the benefit of the information age that we're in.
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: You know, fun fact also, i was just saying to producer Joy, just before she hit record you know, what makes me a little different is just that I take action faster, right?
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: So when you want to compare yourselves to other people and you want to find yourself lacking, i want you to know that my secret sauce, more often than not, is just taking action, because love we learn by doing So.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: Even though the way I exited my marriage was via hooking up with this other person, like great, you know how quickly I learned that that didn't solve my problem right.
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: Too often we get bogged down in the oh I made the wrong choice And then we like hang out there in the self pity and the wallowing of it all.
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: But the faster that we can kind of re-roll and take another action, the faster we learn, and the more we learn by doing, the faster we internalize the lesson.
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: So bear in mind that, as you're hearing me teach you these things that you know, i know as a therapist or as a healer, as an integrative healer or as a student of life, that you're gonna you're gonna do things where you don't like the feedback.
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: I don't even want to call it a mistake, because it's not.
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: It's a process of learning.
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: You're gonna do processes of learning that are gonna be painful as fuck.
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: Congratulations.
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: That's exactly what I want you to do, right?
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: I don't want you to go out and intentionally hurt people while you're doing that.
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: So do no harm, right, but go do things and learn while you're doing it.
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: Okay, more specifically, the need for validation.
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: Now, the reason you need validation is because, deep down, you are literally terrified that you are not good enough, that you are not lovable and that you are doing it wrong and that you are not a good girl and that people do not approve of you and that by they're not approving of you are going to die alone and without your dreams fulfilled.
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: That might be a slightly dramatized version of it, but I don't think so.
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: And and all of that self doubt and all of that insecurity, you feel it on a physical, cellular level, like pain in your chest or thickness in your brain or butterflies in your stomach not the good kind of butterflies, that like creepy moth ones.
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: So so all that is real And you have a hard time sleeping because of it, and you tend to focus on things like why all of this is happening, and you tend to focus on how much you miss him and hate him at the same time, and you tend to focus on how your kids are experiencing this or what you know your social circle is saying or not saying.
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: But love, at the end of the day, the reason you're struggling is because you don't believe you're a badass.
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: You don't believe that you're powerful enough to manifest your dreams.
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: You do not believe that the Disney stories of Cinderella are available to you And no, maybe they're not available in the way that Disney portrayed some of the older versions of fairy tales, but some of the newer versions, yeah, they absolutely all of that.
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: Whatever it is that you dream to have in your life love, it is available to you, and it may be really hard to manifest it, but you can.
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: And anytime you're doubting that, i want you to think of me saying girlfriend, you are powerful as fuck.
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: Get up, you've got this.
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: Because those moments of self doubt where you need to phone a friend and say tell me I'm pretty, I do that.
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: I have one friend who I asked to tell me I'm pretty.
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: And then I have someone I asked to tell me I'm a good girl.
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: Right, these are in my wobbly moments where I feel insecure.
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: But but in the meantime, i want you to be tackling some bigger, deeper strategies than the needing the dating app, then needing the hookup, then needing the girlfriend to tell you what's up, then needing someone to talk you out of some cockamamie scheme you're hatching about how you can solve all of this using, you know, a bottle of wine and some great lingerie.
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: It's not going to solve it, but by all means, you know, go figure that out for yourself.
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: I'll be here waiting.
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: So the deeper, more meaningful strategy I need you to be employing is one where you tap into, at the deepest levels of knowingness, how magical you are, and I would call that a spiritual strategy.
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: If you prefer the scientific version, we could call that a quantum mechanics strategy, but but I prefer the spiritual conversation.
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: So, at his deep spiritual level, you are a child of God.
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: You are a child of the universe.
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: You are a spiritual being having a human experience.
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: Whatever version of that you need to help you feel in flow, in tune, seen, heard, understood.
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: I am here for right.
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: You are a child of the trees, whatever, whatever you need, right.
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: But we are spiritual beings having a human experience.
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: If you boil it down to the cellular level, love at a subatomic particle level.
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: You are energy.
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: I am energy, trees are energy, god is energy, whatever you want to call it.
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: I'm not talking about a particular image, right, or religion.
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: That's not what I mean.
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: But at our core, we are energy and that energy happens to look like this lovely meat suit that your soul is packed into.
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: But when we get hyper focused on why this is happening and when we get hyper focused on what an asshole he is, and when we get hyper focused on this wrinkle on my forehead what?
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: what you're doing there?
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: what I'm doing there, is getting bogged down in self absorption There I said it right AKA narcissism.
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: No, that doesn't mean you're a narcissist.
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: I'm just kind of tying together the things we hear on social media and in right, but we are getting bogged down in being too caught up in small things that are not the big picture of I am energy, you are energy, god is energy and that shit.
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: It's all connected And the only thing that stops us from fulfilling our dreams is not being tapped in to the energy that is the universal life force, right?
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: So there are many places we can get tapped into that.
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: I love to do it through law of attraction stuff.
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: Like you know, abraham Hicks, law of attraction, that is the secret, that's my current favorite way to do it.
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: But also I can find it in scripture, in the Bible.
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: I can find it in Sanskrit, in uh, when I'm reviewing yogic principles.
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: I can find it in the pages of alcoholics anonymous big book, um.
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: I can find it in Al-Anon literature.
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: I can find it in a lot of places.
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: Now, it's not the language that tells you you're doing a bad job, because you will find all of that language in the Bible or the big book or where, right in places, you will find language that tells you you need to be a good girl first, right.
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: That's not what I'm talking about.
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: I'm talking about the language that says at your core, you are pure positive energy And you're going to go through some shit experiences in life that are going to be heavy and hard and painful and they are going to stretch you and challenge you And they're going to make you question everything And by moving through those things and staying tapped into the truth that you are pure positive energy and that joy and gratitude are the keys to growth and that what you focus on is what you will get more of.
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: So when you are focused on hating him, you're going to get more hate.
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: When you are focused on missing him, you are going to get more loneliness.
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: When you are focused on you not being good enough, you are going to get more self doubt.
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: When you are focused on not understanding why, you are going to get more confusion and more stuckness.
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: And when you focus on Don says I'm a badass.
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: Jesus says I'm a badass.
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: Buddha says I'm a badass.
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: Some of my girlfriends say I'm a badass.
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: Maybe that's true, maybe, just maybe, they're right, maybe I'm a badass.
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: When you focus on that, you are going to get more badassery, you're going to get more courage And that courage is going to lead you to doing more, which is going to lead you to learning more, which is going to right.
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: You see how that cycle reinforces itself.
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: Now this gets a little confusing when people therapists say well, you need to do, you need to come to therapy and you need to face your feelings and you need to really unpack that and you need to exercise yourself from the pain, right, you need to desensitize and reprocess your pain.
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: That's confusing, don, because on the one hand, you're telling me that I need to focus on being a badass And, on the other hand, you're telling me I need to get my butt to therapy to focus on the pain.
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: How do you know when to use which strategy?
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: Great question, so glad you asked.
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: So there are times when, no matter how many tools we use to switch our focus, it keeps coming back The painful thoughts, the negative spiral, the falling into the rabbit hole of disbelief.
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: And when you've used every tool you know to use you've journaled, you've EFT tapped, you've meditated, you've sat with a tree, you've phoned a friend.
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: When those things are not working and you can't shake a thing, then the path of least resistance is to desensitize and reprocess, is to give the brain the thing it needs so that it can let the traumatizing event go back into a place where it's not begging for your attention so much, right?
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: So the key to know when do I need to do a little therapy around this thing or when do I need to do a little subconscious work with a coach, a healer, a something right Right Is when you've tried distracting yourself.
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: You've tried a gratitude list, you've tried journaling with a positive bent, right, with a like cause.
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: Journaling just to go to the depths of the thing isn't necessarily the trick.
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: It's it's it's journaling to refocus yourself on positivity, right When those things are not working and you can't shake it.
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: That's when we go deeper into the pain, but only for short bits of time, for the purpose of ridding yourself of the pain.
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: So this is why I fell so heavily into EMDR therapy, eft, tapping journaling, as opposed to talk therapy, because talk therapy activates all the pain and then it leaves you sitting with it and then you're attracting more negativity.
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: So love when you have these triggers where the only it feels like the only thing that's going to soothe you is a man loving on you.
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: I want you to know that what actually you need to do is to tap into some spirituality.
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: You need to schedule an EMDR session to desensitize and reprocess those negative beliefs that have you believing you're not worth it, and then you probably need a homeopathic remedy to help you shift energetically, because PS homeopathy goes deeper than even EMDR does.
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: So, and there's many, many, many, many, many tools.
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: Love to get healthy.
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: I am not saying that the tools I talk about are the only ones.
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: There are so, so many tools, but I'm giving you the ones that, because I'm an action taker right, there are so many and and some of the greatest ones are the ones that are the most misunderstood right, like one of my favorite ones from last year that you've heard me mention is Silicite and Magic Mushrooms.
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: Right, i did a guided magic mushroom trip with a, with a shaman.
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: That really helped me get deeper into spirituality, feel more grounded in my sense of worth and worthiness, and it helped me shake a lot of the energetic emotional pain that was still kind of hanging on right, And so that is a really misunderstood healing healing approach, homeopathy really misunderstood healing approach, but one of the most valuable, one of the most fast acting healing approaches I have experienced.
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: We're going to have um before too long.
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: We'll have more, a deeper dive on the pod about homeopathy to help talk more and enrich, uh, that conversation about how we can get the benefits of that super quick healing.
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: Also, i'm going to add some homeopathic remedy recommendations to the 21 day, the free 21 day drilling program I offer I'm going to add that in to make it a little sexier coming up soon You can be looking out for that Um.
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: But love, when you feel like the only thing that will help you is validation from someone else, the true that's.
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: Getting validation from someone else is like what I like to call weed whacking.
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: You, you know and and we know about weed whacking now, because in a post-divorce situation, right, he's not, he's not doing the long care anymore.
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: Either you've had to take it over or you've had to hire someone, right.
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: So there's rooting things out, there's digging it out from the root, and then there's weed whacking right.
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: So weed whacking is like a top down approach.
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: It's like, okay, i can pull the weed whacker out and I can whack these weeds down and they're going to be shorter and it's going to work for a period of time, but they're going to grow back, yeah, okay.
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: So asking someone to tell you you're pretty is weed whacking.
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: Asking a man to hug you and to take you on a date and to tell you you're fantastic, it's weed whacking.
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: Okay, it's going to work for a short period of time, but you want to be simultaneously imploding, employing a dig it out at the root strategy, which is how we keep it from coming back right, which is getting really in touch with the depth of your energetic self that is directly connected to source energy.
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: Source energy sees you only as pure positive energy.
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: It is your ego, it is your wounded sense of pride that keeps telling you you suck, and those are all lies, right, because at your core level, you're pure positive energy and source knows that.
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: And and I only see you as pure positive energy And I only talk to you about these things to get all that wounded pride stuff out of the way so that you could see yourself the way I see you.
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: God only sees you as pure positive energy.
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: Your bestie sees you as pure positive energy, right?
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: So get on board love.
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: So rooting it out means staying in touch with the truth of who you are, which is pure, positive energy.
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: Rooting it out means giving your brain the tools it needs to get the traumas out of its way from the way that your brain functions right, the structure of the brain, the neuronal pathways that have been forged in your brain, the paired stimulus, the.
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: Did you ever hear about Pavlov and his dogs, how he rang the bell and gave them their food and they salivated?
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: because that's what dogs do when you feed them, they start to drool, right, and eventually, just from ringing the bell, the dogs would salivate.
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: That's a paired stimulus, right?
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: So you have a paired stimulus in your mind about your worth and people's acceptance of you, right.
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: When I'm a good girl, people accept me.
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: That's become a paired stimulus in your mind.
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: So we have to break that stimulus down because it's not true, right?
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: You are pure, positive energy and you have associated people rejecting you with your worth, and it's a faulty belief, it's a faulty pattern, and so we have to weaken that stimulus.
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: And how do we do that?
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: We do that by when you feel triggered that you need to be validated.
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: You go back to visiting the truth.
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: You tap into something that feels deeper and more grounding and you do healing activities that break the stimulus.
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: Eft tapping breaks that negatively paired stimulus.
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: Emdr breaks that stimulus.
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: Taking deep breaths You know, i was reading all of your comments in the 21 day journaling program recently and when you were on the journal prompts about breathing deeply and getting still while you were scribbling and listening to the playlist the musical playlist I provided you you felt more grounded.
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: In that moment, you felt clearer.
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: You felt.
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: Now a handful of you didn't a handful of you felt really, really upset.
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: You were tuned into how upset you felt.
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: Generally speaking, just by accessing that little bit of journaling and that deep breathing and that music, you were able to feel what I'm talking about that pure positive energy.
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: You were at least able to sense it.
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: Maybe you also felt some pain, right.
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: But so when you feel this deep, desperate craving for external validation, you may use a weed whacking strategy.
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: You may open a dating app and you may phone a friend and ask her to tell you you're pretty and you may hook up.
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: But promise me, thank you, promise You will also use a rooting out strategy of getting connected with the truth, of doing some EFT tapping, some journals, some deep breathing, some box breathing, some diaphragmatic breathing, while really sinking into some positive messaging from your favorite, your favorite motivational people, right?
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: Whether that's me or Glen and Doyle, or Brené Brown, or Abraham Hicks or whomever your favorite motivational person is.
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: That gets you back into the truth of yourself, reminds you of the truth of who you are Right.
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: Okay, i feel like you have a strategy now for when you feel that craving for validation, you have some strategies to employ.
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: Now I don't want you to get bogged down.
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: And which one should I use?
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: just pick one, right, because sometimes we get, you know, when we look at a menu and you're like, oh, there's too many good choices, which one, i don't care, just pick one.
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: Just pick one and go and do it And eventually, love, you will reach a tipping point, and that's what we're looking for here.
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: Eventually, you will reach a tipping point where you feel more benefit from doing the rooting out strategy than you do from the weed whacking strategy.
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: And if you haven't reached that tipping point yet, it doesn't mean you're doing it wrong.
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: It just means you got to get some more more momentum going with this rooting it out strategy And eventually you will hit that tipping point.
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: It's coming, i know it.
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: I love you so much.
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: Peace Deer.
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: Divorce Diary is a podcast by My Coach Dawn.
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: You can find more at MyCoachDawingcom.