Latest / Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce / 239. Signs Your Divorce Might Be Traumatic & Why You Need a Trauma Approach To Reclaim Your Identity

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239. Signs Your Divorce Might Be Traumatic & Why You Need a Trauma Approach To Reclaim Your Identity · Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce

• 0:49
  Speaker 1: If you've ever been told to just move on or focus on your co-parenting, but your body feels frozen while your mind can't stop spiraling, you're not crazy.
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: You're likely experiencing trauma from this divorce.
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: Divorce may be common, but that doesn't mean it's not traumatic, and today we're talking about why your healing requires more than coping with the divorce, but it's calling for trauma-informed care.
• 1:15
  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.
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: I'm your host, dawn Wiggins, a therapist, coach, integrative healer and divorcee.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: Join me for a fresh approach to healing grief and building your confidence after divorce.
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: Okay, let's take a pause here, because I know not everyone is comfortable with the word trauma.
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: Maybe you were taught to be tough, or maybe you think trauma means something dramatic, like abuse or war or tragedy.
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: Maybe it feels weak or, as women often tell me, indulgent, to apply that word to your divorce.
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: And I want to take a moment to lovingly challenge that before we get into our three main elements of the episode today, because trauma isn't defined by the event.
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: It's defined by the impact that it has on your nervous system, and it's not about necessarily what happened, but it's about how the thing that happened landed inside of you.
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: And if your system couldn't fully process or integrate the experience, then it stores it, saves it for later.
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: And even if the world told you that it was just a phase or you should be over it by now, your nervous system and your mind may not agree.
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: And if part of you is still resisting the label of trauma, that's okay.
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: Denial is also a protective response and it keeps you from touching the pain until you're ready.
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: But if you're listening to this, you're probably more ready than you realize.
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: You can acknowledge your pain without becoming a victim of it.
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: You can name trauma and still be empowered, and you deserve healing that honors the depth of what you've been through.
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: Let's talk about the three things we're going to dig into in today's episode.
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: That will help you understand and identify whether or not we're talking about you specifically.
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: Right, we're going to talk about very specifically what makes divorce a trauma.
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: We're going to look at the specific signs that you are experiencing it as a trauma and we're going to look at what trauma-oriented treatment looks like, so you can kind of compare and contrast.
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: Is the steps that you're taking to recover.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: Do they currently fall under the trauma-informed approach.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: All right, let's do it.
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: What makes divorce a trauma?
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: I think, as women, we are so naturally like caretakers and dismissers of our own needs and suffering very often right.
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: And I think that we live in a world right now where we are bombarded with information about the real traumas that are going all over the world, and it is very easy, as women, for us to say like I am not in Gaza right now, therefore my trauma does not qualify right.
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: Or I have not had, I'm not an illegal immigrant who's had her child separated from her, or you know, I still my children are a lot, whatever, it is right.
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: But we compare our traumas and we say, therefore, mine wasn't as bad as this and I don't deserve to have this label.
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: And I think that's a really important thing to just notice that we do as women.
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: That is going to come up as you listen to this episode.
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: Okay, so what makes divorce a trauma?
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: Well, divorce was not just the grief or loss of a person or a relationship, right, it was the collapse of an entire future that you built your identity around.
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: Just take a moment to let that sink in.
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: So, yes, there was the loss of the relationship.
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: Yes, there was the loss or the collapse of the future that you had planned for, but this third piece is the piece that is probably so profoundly traumatic.
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: You built your identity around that relationship, that future you envisioned, and that family in that particular constellation as it was, and when we look at identity collapse, that is one of the core elements of trauma.
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: Then we have the legal system you had to engage with, and now I know that there is a whole spectrum of legal experiences in divorce.
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: Right, there's the beautiful woman I talked to recently who's experiencing parental alienation and is going to trial over divorce.
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: That's one end of the spectrum and for those of you that experience are experiencing that level of legal involvement, like you especially, need to be really sort of considering right trauma as an element of this and trauma-informed care right now.
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: Right, and then there's the other end of the legal spectrum where you know, you and your ex and this is really what my ex and I legally went through is we just sort of decided it right and we completed most of the paperwork ourselves and then I had someone sort of push it through and then, just like you know, go through it with a fine-tooth comb to make sure we weren't missing anything.
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: So I didn't experience the legal system as a trauma, but most people the legal system mimics a conflict model where there's a winner and a loser, where there is somebody bigger and somebody smaller, winner and a loser, where there is somebody bigger and somebody smaller and there is a true sense of, I think, helplessness and general insecurity.
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: When we are approaching the legal system and when you look at the emotional guidance scale or emotion as a vibration, and where we're vibrating is what we're attracting to us, one of the lowest vibrational emotional states we can be in is sort of this helpless, hopeless, despairing thing and I think most of us, when we feel like we have to approach the legal system about anything, automatically it triggers into that low, low, low vibe state and when you're just embodying that for any period of time, right, that is absolutely a trauma.
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: Then we have financial insecurity, right, and all of the things that come with that, because we very much associate financial insecurity with a threat to our survival, right, maslow's hierarchy of needs food, clothing, shelter and when we feel like those things are threatened, we go into an automatic trauma state fight, flight, freeze, fawn around financial insecurity and survival.
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: And then we have the social isolation piece how friends choose sides, our community thins out.
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: We automatically just end up losing people somehow some way through divorce.
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: There's a recalibration of our social circles and isolation is directly associated with a sense of trauma, with chronic depression, with shame, with all those things.
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: Isolation is fundamentally what ultimately is causing trauma, is a sense of I didn't have enough support, I didn't have enough resource to process what I was going through and what is isolation but a reduction in resources?
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: And then we have sort of this lack of like, familiarity or ritual or cultural support around grief.
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: Right, grief is just not something that we thrive in processing.
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: I think in a Western culture we are not good at ritualizing grief and allowing space for us to sit in it and share it with each other.
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: We're a very hustle culture country if you're listening to this podcast in the West in particular and we're really good at holding space for people who are grieving for about a week and then we all move on and the people who are grieving are still very much in their grief and that is a very, very real phenomenon.
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: I have watched clients go through all the time and then here is the icing on the cake, and you may or may not be in on this what I'm going to call joke.
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: Right, it's not a joke, but I like that phrase in on the joke.
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: Are you in on the joke that if you already had childhood trauma in your nervous system, divorce reactivates it?
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: And so then you have all of the childhood trauma reactivated while experiencing this divorce trauma piece?
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: Now, not everybody is aware that they had childhood trauma in their nervous system, and I'm going to add to that you may not be aware that you had childhood trauma in your ancestral nervous system, right?
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: Because some people genuinely did not experience profound traumas in their childhoods, but somewhere in their ancestral line there was, and that absolutely can be activated by a trauma like this.
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: So this is less common, right?
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: But you've often heard me reference my dear friend and strength trainer.
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: She's had certainly some traumas in her childhood, but not like profound traumas, and so she and I often talk about like wow, why does she have so many certain struggles?
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: Right, but when we talk about the generations that came before her, there were profound traumas in her ancestral transgenerational lines, right?
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: And so very often when we're looking at therapeutic strategies, I'm not her therapist.
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: She has an amazing therapist.
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: Shout out to her amazing therapist.
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: When we do parts work and these types of things, we come at it from a transgenerational perspective and we often talk about, when I am selecting homeopathic remedies for her what was her grandmother's presentation, her great-grandmother's presentation on her mom's side and her dad's side, and that's how we pick remedies.
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: So absolutely these things can get activated, even if they weren't your traumas.
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: Isn't that interesting?
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: Now let's look at signs.
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: You may be experiencing this divorce as a trauma.
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: You find yourself feeling emotionally numb.
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: Are you experiencing rage, panic, despair.
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: Are you experiencing sleep disruption, brain fog, chronic illness like chronic headaches?
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: Are you seeing a disruption in your hormonal cycles?
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: Are you finding that you're getting sick more often and just can't quite shake it?
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: Are you noticing behavior changes like do you have certain compulsive behaviors, like compulsive phone checking or compulsive phone scrolling or compulsive eating or compulsive thought patterns, where you're maybe trying to finish conversations in your mind or plan out conversations in your mind?
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: Are you noticing yourself self-sabotaging in ways where you start to make progress and then you collapse?
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: Do you notice that you are functioning from a place of high functioning shutdown?
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: That's like a jumbo shrimp thing that I just said.
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: Right there, where you're functioning, you're checking boxes, you're going through the motions, you're doing everything you need to do, but you're actually doing that from a place of shutdown, frozenness or numbness, or going through the potions.
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: You're not actually feeling a sense of satisfaction in the things you're doing throughout your day.
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: You're doing them because they have to be done and you're getting them done and, man, you're nailing it, but it doesn't actually feel good to be nailing it.
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: Do you relate to the phrase dissociation?
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: And we are going to, in our Thursday episode this week, which is our premium episode for premium subscribers, we are going to do a deep dive into dissociation, what it is, what it looks like, but do you know that you have been dissociating on some level?
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: These are signs you're experiencing divorce as trauma.
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: I think that there are a lot of ways we have come to, as a Western society, look at these things as normal, and just because they're common doesn't make them normal.
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: If I had a dollar for every time, a client said to me well, I think that's normal, dawn, and I'm like, no, no, ma'am, it is not normal.
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: It has become commonplace and it has become something we are told we have to just live with.
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: But that is not true.
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: And I think that when there's a narrative like that, we have to ask ourselves who benefits from that narrative.
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: And I think very often the people who benefit from that narrative are our bosses, the legal system, maybe even our exes or you know.
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: Just like, ask yourself who benefits from you telling yourself that these chronic signs of trauma are normal.
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: And it's probably not you, right, it's probably someone outside of you who relies on you over-functioning, to make their life continue without disruption.
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: I think the school system benefits from us minimizing these systems.
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: I think our workplaces, I think even our churches.
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: I'm going to say, right, like, since my husband and I have started serving at church, um, probably over a year ago now, I've noticed like, wow, even that service, right.
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: It then ends up on some level.
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: I'm not, it's not all or nothing.
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: I'm not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, right.
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: But when there's not enough people to serve in our particular service area in that week, it's like, oh well, we need you, you know.
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: And now am I going to church because I'm going to church or because I am functioning, to serve in this role so that the system can continue right.
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: I think it's really, really important to look at if you are minimizing these effects of trauma the intensity of emotion, the intensity of the numbness or the shutdown, the sleep disruption, the brain fog, the illness.
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: That's real and it needs a very specific set of treatments and it needs extra special care and attention.
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: And if someone in your world or you are in denial about the intensity of these symptoms, I want you to ask yourself why.
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: All right, finally, let's look at what trauma-oriented treatment looks like, because this is key, right?
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: I cannot say enough that talk therapy does not treat trauma.
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: Talk therapy, coaching, pastoral counseling does not treat trauma trauma.
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: Now, that does not mean that any of those things are wrong or bad.
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: I am not advocating against talk therapy, pastoral counseling or coaching.
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: I am saying that is the tip of the iceberg.
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: And if you are using those things and you are relying them prayer, prayer I'm going to go out on a limb and say something really freaking spicy here.
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: Prayer alone does not treat trauma.
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: Okay, so if you are relying on these things to treat versus those being tools you are using, listen, pray without ceasing is a very real scripture that I very, very, very much believe in, but prayer is not the thing I rely on.
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: I rely on the tools that God has taught me.
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: He built my body to be able to access.
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: God designed the body to heal itself.
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: Prayer is part of a conversation I have with my higher power.
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: It is not the totality of what God designed my body to be able to do.
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: God designed my body to have the capacity to treat trauma.
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: God designed the body to have the capacity to dissociate from trauma until there is a time for me to be able to treat it.
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: God's design for the body is so elite and we are not even scratching the surface of his design.
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: Well, we do here in this podcast.
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: Quite frankly, we actually reach into the depths of God's design.
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: Here at this podcast, I'm sort of saying globally right, we are not fully leveraging God's design in our body, but prayer is only part of it, and so, if those are some of the things you've been relying on, your treatment plan is sub par love and we need to really take a look at it.
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: So, first things first, trauma-oriented treatment looks like we need to validate the trauma response If you listen to Thursday's episode and you realize holy shit, dawn, I've been dissociating a lot.
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: We've got to first acknowledge that.
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: How can we treat something we're not even in tune with right?
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: So the first thing is being able to validate and identify the trauma response when it is coming up.
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: And then we have to heal at the level of the nervous system and not just the story.
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: And so we're really addressing the story in talk therapy, coaching and in our prayer lives and in our journals, but we have to be treating it at the level of the nervous system.
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: And that is a conversation we're having in a lot of episodes around here, right, and we love having that conversation.
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: But it often means slowing down and being really good stewards and listeners to our bodies.
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: And I think most of us say like, oh, I can't slow down until you become so chronically ill, you don't have a choice.
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: Oh, I can't take on that particular new treatment approach, dawn, I don't have the time, I don't have the money, I don't have the bandwidth, and you're going to stick with that story until you become so distressed at the results you're getting in your life over and over again you feel like you have no choice.
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: It's very interesting, right?
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: We often, until we've backed ourselves into a corner, we're often not willing to listen to this advice, we're not willing to really tap into the depths of what our bodies can do to heal, we will tell ourselves so many stories about why we can't, until we're left with no freaking option.
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: That was my story, how often has that been your story?
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: And so giving yourself permission and holding yourself responsible to not wait until you have no other choice to heal the trauma.
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: And then, of course, we need modalities that can get into the depth of those subconscious patterns and that nervous system work.
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: And so that means somatics right Movement, trauma-informed movement that helps us dissociate less and get into the body more.
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: And then homeopathy to help address the dissociation, because if there's an amount of dissociation in the way, then EMDR therapy or EFT, tapping or journaling or somatics aren't going to work right.
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: So for all of those people out there who have heard people say like, oh, I used EMDR and it didn't work for me, it's because dissociation, it's all connected friends, and so we have to be using those modalities that are going to go to the depths of the healing that needs to happen, which means rehabbing your sleep, rehabbing your daily patterns, rehabbing your diet.
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: It means doing things like EFT, emdr, somatics and homeopathy.
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: And then it really, really requires us to look at timeline-based healing.
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: What do I mean by timeline-based healing?
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: It means where did this pattern start?
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: Did it start when the divorce proceedings started?
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: Or did it start before that in your marriage, when there were already signs of dissociation, distress and nervous system disruption in your marriage?
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: Or did it start long before that, when you suppressed patterns and awareness of patterns because there was childhood stuff going on and I don't know right, like that's what we got to take a look at?
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: In homeopathy, we look at when was your never well since?
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: I've never been well since, blank, when is that Right?
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: And for me, I really think I was born never well since.
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: But but um, we can, you know, not, that's not everybody's experience, you know.
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: I remember hearing a conversation between a couple of people in my life and one woman asked the other woman what's your never well since?
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: And she said, ah, since the birth of my first child.
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: I've really been never well since the birth of my first child.
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: And I was like, oh, that's interesting, tell me more.
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: And she's like yeah, I really was a high functioning kid.
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: I was the good kid that my parents always relied on to be the easy kid and already I had a little flag going off, right.
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: She was like I was high functioning, I got good grades, I was really really always on the ball, I handled my own shit.
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: I had an eating disorder and nobody ever even knew about it.
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: That's how high functioning and on point I was.
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: Well love, that's your never well since, never well since became high functioning and had a secret eating disorder, right.
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: So it's so interesting how the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: You know somebody I know recently.
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: I was watching their Instagram stories and they were bragging about their perfect child on Instagram about how her summer to-do list involved taking care of all these household chores for her mom.
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: And there was not a single thing on her summer to-do list that involved playing or doing kid things.
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: And this is a 10-year-old.
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: That's trauma showing up.
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: That's not normal, that's common, but that's a trauma response right there that that 10-year-old is going through something right now that she believes she has to over-function that well for her mother.
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: So, loves, we really have to start looking at this with some intellectual and emotional honesty.
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: Otherwise we are not interrupting these patterns for our children and our children's children.
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: So you'll really want to check out our Thursday episode for premium subscribers, where we are going to deep dive into dissociation what it looks like, how to know when you're doing it and how to, over time, stop doing it and interrupt the pattern.
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: I think most of us have been doing this a very, very long time dissociation and it's tricky to interrupt.
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: And, of course, my favorite answer is homeopathy.
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: Right, and yes, we have a homeopathic blend for dissociation that, absolutely.
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: If you want to get your hands on that, just send me a DM.
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: I need the blend for dissociation that, absolutely.
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: If you want to get your hands on that, just send me a DM.
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: I need the blend for dissociation.
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: But then, beyond that, it's not a total and complete cure-all.
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: It's almost that right, but we still have to catch it when we're doing it.
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: Even though I use homeopathy, there are still moments where I will drop into a dissociative state and I have to catch myself and I have to take some somatic steps in order to move out of that or take a dose of a remedy to move out of that.
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: So look forward to our Thursday episode.
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: If you are not a premium subscriber, highly, highly, highly recommend it is so worth it, not only because the content is worth it, but because you will get more out of this podcast having a little energetic investment in it, right, because where we pay, we pay attention.
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: Friend, it's $5 a month.
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: You will have your own unique RSS feed and if you need instructions on how to do that, they're in the show notes.
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: Scroll all the way to the bottom.
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: All right, I love you so much.
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: I will see you on Thursday.
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: Peace, dear.
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: Divorce Diary is a podcast by my coach, dawn.
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: You can find more at mycoachdawncom.