Latest / Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce / 61. Embrace Your Anger, Embrace Your Healing: Unleash Your Potential After Divorce

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61. Embrace Your Anger, Embrace Your Healing: Unleash Your Potential After Divorce · 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 you've been longing to have about this new life.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: Hi, love, how's your day?
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: Need a hug?
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: I am so happy to be sitting with you today.
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: We are talking about anger, and not just anger, but outrage or rage, and I am really into this topic right now for so many reasons that we're going to unpack.
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: But one of the biggest issues for people to work through as a result of their marriage struggles and subsequent divorce is anger, resentment and rage, and there are some key issues with how we treat anger, resentment and rage in our current constructs of therapy, healing, energy work you name it right.
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: The most common treatments that you'll find, i think, in many therapist's office, for instance, don't go far enough to addressing anger.
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: And so I'm here today to say enough of all that.
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: Let's understand better and let's do better and let's dig deeper.
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: Now I'm not going to say anything today.
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: That is like new thought.
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: You can find a lot of what I'm going to talk about today out there, but I think it's not all common knowledge, so let's make it more common.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: Okay, think about the depths of your anger and think about how you respond to yourself when you're feeling that level of anger, aggression, rage name it, even if it's just resentment, right, resentment is kind of like anger light or like anger repetitive.
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: That's it.
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: Resentment is anger repetitive.
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: But what do you do with that anger and how often do you feel relief from it in a truly meaningful, sustainable way?
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: I would argue not very often.
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: I would argue that the reason resentment exists is because we don't fully process our anger, and I think that is the case for women especially, because I think for women there are very few socially acceptable places for us to really touch the depths of our anger.
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: And so where do we end up doing it?
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: We end up doing it in our kids' bedrooms and in the kitchen.
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: You know what I mean.
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: We work so hard to intellectualize our anger and to spiritually bypass our anger.
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: Personally, i know that when I get angry and or ragey, i often try to coach myself out of it by saying I shouldn't be feeling this way.
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: It's low vibe It's going to take away from my intentional manifesting.
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: It is not what.
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: It's not spiritually aligned.
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: It's not what God wants for me, right?
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: Like all this kind of good girl stuff around rage And man.
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: Over the years have I had a lot of it, and ultimately in my own story, the thing that released all that rage from my mind body was a well-prescribed homeopathic remedy.
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: It wasn't EMDR therapy.
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: Emdr therapy helped a lot.
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: So let me put that in context, right, emdr therapy greatly reduced the amount of anger or rage or resentment that I felt over the years about a great many things, and really it was just left in a couple specific lanes.
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: So, but what ultimately got the rest of it out of my body was a well-prescribed homeopathic remedy.
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: But why, right?
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: That's what I always sit with is why is this emotion so hard to get out?
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: And so I think about that.
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: We understand on an energetic level that to really fully process emotion we have to express it fully.
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: That when we are repressing and we're suppressing and we're bypassing or intellectualizing, it's not getting fully expressed.
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: So it leaves little stuck piles of it in our cellular memory, right, little stuck energy pockets of this emotion.
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: Well, how do we fully process it if we feel resistance to going there?
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: Now, one of the things that I've observed in my therapy practice with my clients is it is not common for folks to show up to therapy fully expressing rage in their therapy session.
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: In fact, i would argue that if you think about going to your therapist's office, that if you got rage in your therapist's office you would start apologizing, and that's not effective for you to feel rage, express it to a healer whose job it is to help you transmute it and then apologize for going there.
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: Now I've really seen this trend a lot in my practice just in the last month, and it's probably because I'm tuned into it, so I'm seeing it even more but that we don't go to our therapist's office expressing rage.
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: And so, while EMDR is a treatment approach that's experiential, it functions best when we are embodying the emotion that we are trying to process.
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: And so how comfortable are you willing to get going to your therapist's office and feeling rage?
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: Now, i think that's easier said than done because, even knowing all of this, if you asked me to go to my therapist's office and try to get rage, i would have a hard time Now you could get me there, because you know who gets me there is my homeopath.
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: My homeopath.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: She just can keep poking and poking and poking and she gets me to that place where I'm wound up.
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: And so it's an interesting idea to intentionally get wound up in a therapy session for the express purpose of them being able to express it and getting out of your body.
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: I want you to think about when a little kid has a temper tantrum, how that is an inborn thing.
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: Nobody teaches little kids to have temper tantrums.
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: It's a temper anger tantrum, right?
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: This full blown, embodied expression of this larger than life emotion.
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: Now, i don't know about you, but I got, i caught on to this thing that you know.
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: Our parents dismissed our feelings, so I don't dismiss my kids feelings, and so I never really talked to my kid out of having temper tantrums.
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: I've always done my best job to hold space for her when she's having really big feelings, and I would guess that you could probably relate to that on some level.
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: But think about how ingrained it is in you and I to not have temper tantrums.
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: How much good girl programming goes in to us not slipping into the embodiment of our tempers.
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: We get intimidated by our own anger and rage and by other people's anger and rage because we have become so disconnected from a healthy expression from temper tantrums.
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: We've become so disconnected, we have such a hard time of accepting our own temper tantrums that the majority of our exposure to rage is when we're doing it with our kids and they're getting right.
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: They're getting all the piled up rage from all the other people to write the, all the other people that rubbed you the wrong way and did all the things, and then we end up losing it with our kids.
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: That's my lived experience.
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: But, um, but we relate to rage as being something we're ashamed of because we exploded on somebody we love very much, or shameful because we were taught better than that, or we're really deeply afraid of it because we see it from men, and specifically dangerous men or dangerous women, who do rage and they hurt people with it, right, and so because we don't have a good practice of it within ourselves, then the way that we end up observing it in society is in these dangerous ways, and so anger and rage and tempers become very intimidating.
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: I don't know about you, but even though I have a healthy amount of anger, i get very intimidated by other people when they're angry, and I think that that speaks to a missing link, a missing piece in our relationship with anger and how we relate to ourselves and how we relate to one another, that there's been something very organic or normal about an expression of a particular emotion that's been washed out of our natural kind of human relating.
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: And so this conversation we're having today is so that we can start to look at it and and start to reshape our relationship with it.
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: Well, what do I mean by that?
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: So there are a great deal of ways that we can start to get that piled up stuck temper inside of us and process it out of our bodies so that we don't have the same built up levels of it, and then we can start practicing, responding to it differently in real time as it comes.
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: Well, how do we get at those stockpiles?
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: Well, a lot of times you hear me talk about immersive journaling, you hear me talk about EFT tapping, you hear me talk about EMDR therapy, and those things are lovely, but I think that what I want to say today is, unless you're tapped in to the full expression of your anger when you're doing them, you're not going to get the full result.
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: And so, dawn, am I hearing you say that I should start becoming unhinged more often?
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: Why, yes, that's exactly what you're hearing me say.
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: So there are some very specific tools and ways.
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: So, if you're going to incorporate immersive journaling and you're creating a space specifically for yourself to process anger or rage, you would actually intentionally start journaling about the things that make you the most angry, the most triggered, and you would then start doing things like stomping your feet, pounding your chest.
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: There are many different ways, right, there are many embodiment practices that help us get it out right Stomping, pounding, groaning, wailing, screaming And at the end of a session like this, you would feel exhausted, your throat would feel raw, you would feel very depleted and much like a child who has just completed a temper tantrum, would be like, huh, i'm either gonna take a nap or go play now.
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: Right, you would feel either an exhaustion, probably initially more of an exhaustion, but down the road, after you became practiced at this, you would feel like, huh, okay, i can go play now, because how often is that what kids do?
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: right?
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: Sometimes they need to take some time to kind of go within and soothe afterwards and kind of rebuild and go back out into the world.
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: But very often you know that's the beauty of having a healthy flow with your emotion is that it doesn't get stuck or bogged down And then you just get to kind of carry on with life without it becoming a stored.
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: You know this trend of calling so many painful things traumas, like, do you ever get annoyed at how much the conversation has become about trauma and how much we accuse all of these various experiences in life of being either big T traumas or what's become a phrase little T traumas, like lowercase T traumas?
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: Well, so many of these things end up being experienced as traumas because we have this missing link about our emotional expression, our emotional processing, and because we don't fully express or process these things.
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: Then they get piled up and they get piled in the trauma basket and our responses to them look very traumatized.
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: Right, disregulated nervous systems fight flight, freeze, fawn.
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: Have you seen that meme on Instagram?
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: It's one of my favorites.
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: Right, where it's like something went wrong when I have a trauma response fight flight, freeze.
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: When my boss sends me an email.
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: Yes, that's what we're seeing.
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: Right Is that we have these huge emotional responses to vary what ideally would be small things And what we're talking about today is really about how, when we have not fully processed our emotion over this series of a lifetime, that it ends up piled up and then we become way more sensitive, way less regulated.
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: And so I am advocating for you losing your shit a little bit at home on a regular basis, but in a way that is planned so that when you get completely overwhelmed by co-parenting, single parenting, just being fully exhausted from having to deal with all the things you're dealing with, recovering from the things you're recovering from, you have more bandwidth because you've done some of this work, you've gotten ahead of it right.
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: So I want you to commit, as a result of listening to this episode today, i want you to commit to doing the crazy thing, and I recorded a video of my daughter and I doing this together.
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: We were moaning and growling and moving our bodies and our arms in a way that was intentionally moving that intense emotion through My daughter.
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: She's eight.
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: She got such a kick out of doing this with me And I want you to think about and I know you know this because it's the intention that's woven into how you parent But when we teach our kids these tools, oh man, it's such a game changer, right?
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: So, that they end up having a very different lived experience.
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: So what actually happened for me one day is I was all up in my feels and I said to my family family, i need to process some emotion and I'd like you to do it with me rather than standing there and staring at me like I'm a freaking weirdo.
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: And because what I'm going to do is going to be very loud and it's going to sound very strange, even if you don't do it with me, you're going to hear me doing it and you're going to come ask me well, what am I doing?
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: So let's just do it together to shortcut all that, right?
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: So I highly recommend and listen, you probably still want to do some of this work when you're home by yourself, because I think that for anyone who's just starting out on this journey, doing it in front of other people, there's going to be a level of self-consciousness, right?
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: I was showing producer Joy some of it earlier and I literally knocked on accident because I was stomping so hard.
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: I knocked a picture frame off the shelf and Lilaput, the French Bulldog right, got freaked out, ran behind the chair and was like Bob, what the heck is going on right.
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: So there's a very real thing, that angry energy.
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: It is intimidating.
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: It's intimidating to Lilaput, it was intimidating to that picture frame.
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: So, and because we don't want to do harm to people, we do want to find spaces and ways to do it so that we can get it out.
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: So I'm telling you to embrace temper tantrums.
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: I'm telling you to catch yourself when you start intellectualizing your anger, when you start trying to spiritually bypass your anger, when you start coaching yourself out of it, telling yourself you shouldn't feel that angry.
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: You are designed to feel anger.
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: It is a normal, human, wonderful emotion that tells you that something is wrong in your environment and it needs action.
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: And so play with it, practice it.
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: If it feels uncomfortable, great, that means you're doing it.
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: If it doesn't feel uncomfortable, you probably aren't pushing into it hard enough, because we have worked so hard to suppress this kind of normal, healthy relationship within ourselves.
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: So lean into the temper tantrum, incorporate it in how you parent your kids.
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: You can absolutely add some butterfly tapping.
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: Right When you're, when you feel in this fully expressed, outraged, temper tantrumy way, you can just cross those arms over your chest and do a little light butterfly tapping.
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: It's going to help move it through.
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: It's going to help get it the deeper stuff that's way back there.
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: It's also going to help welcome in the healthier, refreshed information and energy in a natural, organic flow.
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: You can also add the EFT tapping sequence right Where you would start karate, chop on the back of your hand and then go through the you know, eyebrow, side of eye, top of mouth, chin, chest, top of head.
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: You could go through that EFT sequence once you're fully, fully activated.
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: Really, what I want you to kind of key in here is when you're using any of your tools, whether it's EFT, emdr, immersive journaling or these other embodiment practices notice where you are cutting yourself off before you fully get there.
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: And I hear people tell me from time to time I am afraid of what I'm capable of when I, if I were to let myself fully get there, i'm afraid of what I'm capable of.
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: I'm afraid of what I might do.
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: That is a common thing.
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: I hear people say Producer Joy was telling me she watched a show once that said, uh, everybody's a murderer, they just haven't met their person yet or gotten the right rate.
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: And that's the idea is, we all know that we had this deeply animalistic instinct inside of us And and we're afraid of it and we're intimidated by it.
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: But it's because we don't have a healthy relationship with it.
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: And I've been pondering on the idea lately is part of the reason we're so interested in and taken with true crime and crime TV shows, because I find that there are a lot of women who have very dysregulated nervous systems, who have a hard time sleeping at night, who are highly anxious, who have a lot of traumatic history, watch a lot of crime shows and listen to a lot of crime podcasts.
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: And I'm curious is part of that about our dysfunctional relationship with anger?
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: Is there this kind of?
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: is that a place where we have permission to be in touch with the darker sides of our soft?
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: I don't know, maybe right?
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: It's worth exploring?
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: I wonder if the more that we get into a healthy flow with our anger and get some of this old, stale, heavy, dark, intense energy out of us, are we more drawn to the light?
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: Probably right, i think that's what the law of attraction would state.
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: So here's your invitation to get a little nuts, to process the crap out of that anger and to start giving yourself more permission to do that in bigger doses, to have those temper tantrums to love yourself for feeling angry, not judge yourself for feeling angry and then message me and tell me how it's going.
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: I'm committed to posting some videos on Instagram about how I've been doing this, so definitely come follow me on Instagram so you can check it out And we'll talk soon.
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: I love you so much.
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: Peace, dear Divorce Diary is a podcast by MyCoachDawn.
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: You can find more at MyCoachDawncom.