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207. Breaking Old Patterns: Why Divorce Is Just a Symptom 🤧 · Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce

• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Have you ever said I knew it?
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: Or why is she better?
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: Or is God punishing me?
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: If these are words you have thought, felt or spoken, this episode is for you.
• 1:07
  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.
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: I'm your host, dawn Wiggins, a therapist, coach, integrative healer and divorcee.
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: Join me for a fresh approach to healing grief and building your confidence after divorce.
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: An obvious part of a disorienting experience like divorce is to do a postmortem right, to do an autopsy on everything you just experienced and to try to find your orientation when am I in time and space, what was real, what isn't real and how the heck did I get here?
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: This episode is all about understanding how you got here and that, ultimately, divorce is a symptom of something you didn't realize was activated all that time.
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: A symptom of something you didn't realize was activated all that time.
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: And I think that one of the things that I really try to impress upon people when they're in couples counseling or they're in the early stages of the divorce process is listen, I know that this divorce is going to take up a massive space in your body, mind, but I need you to not get so distracted by that you lose track of like, hey, this is actually a symptom.
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: We have to treat the underlying cause or you're going to find yourself back in this same pattern.
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: It's very normal in human.
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: We all have our patterns that we will operate from throughout the course of our lifetime and ideally we get to healthier and healthier levels and we do what we can intervene on that pattern so that we can create better outcomes.
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: So this episode is about hey, I don't want you to go through this again.
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: I want you to experience an amazing life.
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: I want this to be the launchpad from which you experience bigger, better, brighter, bolder seasons.
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: But we have to treat the right thing, and if all we do is treat and recover from the divorce man, we missed the boat.
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: On the bigger issue, in today's episode we're going to unpack something I see happen all the time in my private practice, right?
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: Which is this kind of concept?
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: I didn't know what.
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: I didn't know.
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: It's like I had no idea that XYZ was going on either inside of me or inside of him.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: So we're going to unpack what that ends up looking like in therapy.
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: We are going to look at what divorce could be a symptom of.
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: There are a number of things, and some of them might not be what you're expecting.
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: There are obvious ones like, oh, attachment style issues, right, but there are some that you might not realize.
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: And then we're going to really look at the tendency, as humans, for us to go to the assumption that we are being punished for something in our lives.
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: All right, let's dig in Now.
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: I think that there are sort of two different groups of women.
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: I'm probably overgeneralizing, right, but I think there are two different groups of women that are going through divorce.
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: And one group is like the oh gosh, I knew from the beginning there were signs and I ignored them.
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: I didn't have the capacity to confront them or to end the relationship or to move on or whatever.
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: It is right, but there were signs and I ignored them or didn't know what to do about it, right, and so felt helpless or hopeless or whatever it is, or just was like hopeful, maybe.
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: Maybe, instead of hopeless, it's like no, I was hopeful that it would change.
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: And then there's another group of women who genuinely thought that they were headed for happily ever after, right, that divorce was just genuinely never going to happen to them.
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: Now, I had made a deal with myself that I wasn't going to get divorced, but I fall into that first camp right when there were signs and I ignored them and I just did not have the capacity to deal with them in a healthy way.
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: That said, I cannot tell you how much I did not know about myself and the decisions I was making until I was in therapy, doing that postmortem on how I got here, and so what I very often see as a therapist sitting with people as you know, a huge chunk of therapy is psychoeducation.
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: Right Is teaching folks about like, hey, this pattern that you do, that's what this means X, y or Z.
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: Right, this is avoidant attachment behavior, or this is anxiety, or this is dissociation, or this is a sign of right.
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: It's like there's such a massive process in therapy about learning, like really educating oneself about the patterns that live inside of us, and what I hear so often from people whether you were in the camp where you saw signs and you couldn't handle them, or you genuinely did not see this coming is that you didn't know what you didn't know love, and you've got to be willing to take a deep breath and cut yourself and your ex some slack for that.
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: I really believe that when these hardships and painful things happen in life, that these are the moments that are meant to wake us up and shake us loose.
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: And beating yourself up for not knowing what you didn't know, that feeling, that thing where you beat yourself up or you beat him up or whatever it is right.
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: You're trying to escape shame.
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: And gosh, shame is just so like toxic levels of shame, right, they become so entrenched in how we function and we don't even realize it.
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: But it is so, so, so common for people in therapy to say no one taught me that, no one explained that to me.
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: I didn't know, I didn't understand.
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: If I had only known then I would have Crap.
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: I was sitting in a meeting this morning with Coach Tiffany and Producer Joy and we use a lot of internal family systems in our small group coaching program and Coach Tiffany is so excited about, she's just so on fire about IFS and helping women understand their parts of self and she was like if I had had IFS, I wouldn't have gone through a fraction of what I went through and it's like that's that thing that I didn't know, what I didn't know.
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: And so there's something about trusting that process, right.
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: That divorce is a symptom of all of that shit.
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: You didn't know, you didn't know, and gosh what a painful symptom or side effect, right.
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: But love, it's going to be all right.
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: Now that you're knowing it all, and now that you're understanding it all, it's time to integrate those awarenesses and those understandings and implement them.
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: And when you catch yourself beating yourself up about what you didn't know, or analyzing, analyzing, analyzing, I want you to interrupt that analysis, paralysis, get into your body and take an action or feel a feeling, right, grieve, feel, express and then take action, rather than doing the analysis paralysis thing, because it's keeping you stuck or blocked or disempowered or you know, sort of like not in active healing phase, right?
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: So active healing phase doesn't look like overwhelming analysis or shaming yourself, right?
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: So I see women get stuck in that a lot about what they did wrong or comparing themselves to the woman that he moved on for what makes her better?
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: Why wasn't I good enough?
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: I see women get so stuck in why wasn't I enough?
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: And when you get stuck in that spot, it's really ignoring the fact that divorce was a symptom and not the actual root issue.
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: And so I want you to really catch yourself when you're doing that and saying like, okay, I need to refocus on what is the root cause, because I'm getting hung up in a symptom and not actually addressing the core issue that I need to learn, grow, break free from or heal inside of me.
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, all right.
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: Second thing, let's talk about what it could be a symptom of.
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: I think that it's a very exciting time to be alive in that well, for so many reasons, but in that we have never been so aware as a society of things like how nutrition in pregnancy or the mother's energetic patterns in pregnancy affects the developing baby, and we've never been so aware of how trauma impacts our relationships or attachment styles, or what high-functioning, overachieving women are actually suffering from, or what ADHD or autism looks like inside of women.
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: Like we see PTSD and how that's its own firm of neurodivergence.
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: Like, holy crap, the conversations we're having on TikTok and Instagram.
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: They're so exciting, right and these are the things that we really need to be looking at as divorce is a symptom of these things.
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: Divorce is a symptom of untreated neurodivergence, untreated attachment style issues, untreated CPTSD.
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: I'm going to tell you what some very or untreated low self-esteem, right, untreated, toxic shame.
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: So super interesting how divorce is very, very or untreated.
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: Low self-esteem, right, untreated, toxic shame.
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: So super interesting how divorce is very, very, very often a symptom of toxic shame inside of oneself and it so profoundly affects your self-esteem that you end up settling or picking someone that is going to be harmful, right?
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: But one of the things that divorce is often a symptom of, that people just I don't think talk about at least I haven't heard it talked about a lot.
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: That doesn't mean it's not happening.
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: So if you've heard this talked about, send me your content.
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: I want to know.
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: Right, but divorce is often a symptom of chronic dissociation.
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: Now, we know dissociation is a symptom of trauma.
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: So aren't I just saying that divorce is often a symptom or a side effect of trauma, like chronic CPTSD or that kind of thing, like yes, that's what I'm saying, but trauma is like a big that's a big chapter book, right?
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: I'm just talking about just this piece about dissociation.
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: So, for instance, you know, I recently had someone say this person I'm divorcing.
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: I don't know him.
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: He didn't act like this when we were dating or when we were married, like this is not who.
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: I understood, we didn't fight that much.
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: He never told me any of this.
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: I didn't know any of this.
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: This is just not who I married.
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: And when I lay it out for them, for her, and say, well, actually, friend, all of your trauma caused you to have, you know, parts and dissociation and for you to avoid feeling, right, intending to think, intending to boss babe and telling, tending to analyze and problem solve and codependent, um, you know to do all these behaviors that are not emotionally nuanced or emotionally attuned or really vulnerable, right, and so it was very easy then, from this dissociative place where you're not necessarily knowing how to feel or process your feelings, you're not in touch with your feelings, because you're bypassing vulnerable emotions, bypassing real vulnerability and intimacy in exchange for we get along, we have so much fun, we do the same things, we love raising our kids, we had plans for our careers and for our travel and for our home, and you know, like that's all beautiful stuff but it's lacking emotional intelligence and intimacy.
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: And then you don't realize you have a blind spot around.
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: Well, if you're not actually connected on this deep emotional level, you're going to miss all sorts of signs and symptoms, right?
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: So when he was withdrawn, you know.
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: When you were postpartum when he, you know, started doing more with the guys and didn't want to include you.
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: When he started distancing himself and you didn't, you weren't in touch with how that felt for you and you just sort of started maybe bickering about it or this or that, but there wasn't this intimate connection.
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: It's like you've got blind spots around.
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: Oh well, actually that behavior is a sign of something else and it's deeper and it means more.
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: And just because you're not having conflict around it doesn't mean it's not a massive issue going on, right?
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: So when you've got folks who are highly dissociative or bypass emotional expression, vulnerability or intimacy, man that is driving so much of divorce.
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: And so when you're moving through the process of grieving what could have been this life that you envisioned and you're moving through the process of anger and sadness and insecurity to do with the divorce process I want you to keep coming back to.
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: But what is underneath there that got me here in the first place?
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: Is it a tendency towards codependency?
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: What do I mean by that?
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: I mean a tendency to people please and suppress your own thoughts, feelings, opinions and beliefs in order to keep the peace or to keep things copacetic.
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: Is it an attachment style issue right?
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: Do you tend to have an avoidant attachment style, that when there's conflict you withdraw, or an anxious attachment style, that when there's conflict you drive forward and you can't handle it if it's not resolved right away?
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: Or do you know that you have a tendency to dissociate that feeling?
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: Feelings at all is very difficult for you and you suppress and shut down and intellectualize, or sort of float outside of your body and detach from the situation until it blows over, like do you know that you tend to do that?
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: Do you know that you have trauma that you haven't fully recovered from or addressed?
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: I want you to keep coming back to what is it that happened long before?
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: And PS, another one thatI haven't mentioned until just now is it could be just inherited energetic patterns from your ancestors, right, there can just be inherited generational traumas that are contributing to divorce.
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: And so do you keep bringing yourself back to?
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: Actually, I have to not just recover from this divorce, I have to treat the thing that caused the divorce in the first place.
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: And do you feel like you have the right treatment plan, the right approach to help you heal that thing that happened first, or the things that happened first?
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: Right, I want you to keep your eye on that because the divorce piece, like man, it's so painful and it's so destabilizing.
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: But he you know when you have conflict in divorce and when you keep overanalyzing and getting caught up in conflict and the next text message and the lawyer said this and can you believe his mom did that and you know what he's doing with the kids or not?
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: The kids, like you, will just so powerfully impact your children and your life if you can stay focused on what's the thing that caused this problem in the first place.
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: I think one of the things we do exceptionally well as a team over here at Dear Divorce Diary is the coaching program that we have developed is aimed at certainly helping you recover from divorce, but it's really aimed at recovering you from the thing that caused the divorce.
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: And I think that's the thing that really sets us apart from other divorce coaching programs and solutions is that our program is long enough to give you the opportunity to experience and break those patterns that cause divorce in the first place.
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: The tools that we use go deep enough to address the inherited energetic patterns from your ancestors early pre-verbal traumas and you know, like it's just, we have such a beautiful way of addressing the things that cause the problem in the first place.
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: So it's such a profound recovery from divorce and the things that led to it, and that's something we are really, really proud of over here.
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: Okay, let's tackle this third piece right, which is just.
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: It's a thought I hear people and women express like far too often, and it breaks my heart when I hear it.
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: But is God punishing me?
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: I was a good wife.
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: I am a good woman.
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: I, you know, did everything and he cheated on me, he betrayed me, he left me, he blindsided me, he did X, y, z, right?
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: I don't understand.
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: I don't deserve this.
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: I deserve better.
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: I did everything I was supposed to do to be a good person and a good wife and still this shit is happening.
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: Right, and I didn't cause this divorce.
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: He caused this divorce.
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: And is God punishing me?
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: Now?
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: Maybe you don't relate to this right, but I think most of us, at some point in our life, have had this thought about God being a punishing God or us really grappling with why bad things happen to good people.
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: That's what it's really about, right?
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: If I'm a good person, why is this horrible, bad thing happening to me?
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: I recently was sitting with a woman who was just sobbing asking this question I'm going to stick a little Easter egg here, right?
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: Also, my bestie has said this before in dark times of her life, like God must be punishing me.
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: What did I do to deserve this?
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: And I think that what I want you to hear is that very, very often those inquiries come from a place of feeling so profoundly lost, disempowered or helpless in your life stuck, trapped, dark, I might say, like nervous system red, like paralyzed or vagal shutdown, dorsal vagal shutdown or collapse.
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: I think that when we feel so profoundly shocked or rocked by something and we have tried so hard to be a good girl or a good person, I think it rattles our belief systems.
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: It rattles our sense of self and what we thought, we understood about how the world worked or what we were taught about how the world worked.
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: And so if you've thought to yourself, like am I being punished?
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: I want you to know that what you're really grappling with there is your belief system, your fundamental belief system about how life works and whether or not you feel safe believing the things you used to believe.
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: That's a big conversation, love, and it goes far deeper than just the impacts of this divorce, and I think those are the things that are so meaningful to address and get clarity on as you build this next chapter of your life, because we all know that when you build a house with a strong foundation on a strong ground, that then, right, your life can go to these amazing places, to these amazing heights.
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: But when we build shoddy homes on soft foundations shifting foundations, right, it's really hard to build this tall, glorious structure.
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: Very often when I hear people say is God punishing me?
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: That speaks to me about religious programming.
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: It speaks to me about women who didn't feel seen or celebrated or valued when they were girls.
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: Their relationship with source or God doesn't feel intimate or safe yet, and that that footwork hasn't been done to create an actual intimate relationship with a higher power.
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: There's this idea that many of us relate to God the way we related to our caregivers or early caregivers, like, aka parents, mothers, fathers, you know whomever.
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: And so if we say to ourselves is God punishing me?
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: Oh gosh, when we were in our most vulnerable places as children, did we feel guided?
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: Did we feel unconditionally accepted or loved, or did we feel punished?
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: And so there's really something there to unwind around how we related to our parents, how love has often especially in trauma-oriented early childhood experiences, how love has gotten tangled with anger or punishment, like I punish you because I love you, and how we experienced punishment so love.
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: It's a tricky thing to understand that, while your ex may have completely betrayed you and you are questioning whether or not God actually loves you or he's punishing you, that truly, truly, what needs to be addressed deep down inside of there is your identity, your belief system and your sense of worthiness, or lack of worthiness, and the process of rebuilding your sense of worth in God's eyes, in your own eyes and in the eyes of the people who matter to you.
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: That's a journey, friend, that I am so honored to be on with you, that you take your time to be here in this conversation with me is so deeply meaningful and rewarding, and I'm so honored that this is where you choose to spend your time really reorienting your sense of self and your worth in the world.
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: Thank you.
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: The way you think, the things you you feel, the things that you're grappling with, they matter so much and I want to reassure you that God is not punishing you, but I think that somewhere inside of there.
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: There's a part of you that's afraid that you deserve to be punished, or that you're going to get punished anyways, or that you're not worth more or different, or that you're not going to be chosen differently, and so you settled for someone who would ultimately betray you.
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: All of the way that we live life comes from beliefs that typically got into us before the age of seven.
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: And then the reticular activating system.
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: It's the part of the brain that scans the environment and sorts out all the enormous amount of data that our senses take in.
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: And it sorts out that data and it has a confirmation bias and it gives you all sorts of feedback that just confirms the belief systems that you act from.
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: So God is not punishing you, love, but somewhere deep inside of there you have beliefs that are not serving you and they may be hard for you to get in touch with, but that doesn't mean it's not possible.
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: There is such an abundant life waiting for you.
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: If you can expand your capacity, let it in.
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: If you've ever considered joining our small group coaching program we call it different D word Now is the time to jump on the wait list.
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: Right, there are these three awesome bonuses available to you A special breakthrough session with me, a special session, quantum healing session with Kate Mayer and 15% off the total program price.
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: I've noticed a lot of women have concerns about the cost.
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: So if that's you, if you're like, oh man, I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to afford it, like, just reach out, send me a message, let's talk about it.
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: But definitely put your name on the waitlist, scroll down to the show notes and you'll see a spot where you can just fill out the form and, if you've even thought about it, right, just put yourself on the waitlist.
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: It does not, it doesn't matter, it's neither here nor there.
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: Like, just put yourself on the wait list.
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: Then at least you have the option down the road if something happens or changes or you make a decision.
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: We would love to have you, we would love to talk with you about how to heal from this divorce, from the symptom, the cause that drove this symptom of divorce, and about, ultimately, how much you matter, how much you're worth, and how to build a life with a strong foundation built on that core belief system.
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: We love you so much.
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: Peace, dear Divorce Diary is a podcast by my coach Dawn.
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: You can find more at mycoachdawncom.