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391. How to Cope With Stress After Divorce When You’re Always in Survival Mode · Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: You open your eyes and you are already calculating money, worrying about work, embracing for the next thing, maybe with the kids.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: But then something small happens and it's all way too much.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: How do you cope with stress after divorce when you're already at your limit before the day even starts?
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Tiffany and I both know that feeling well.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: And today we're sharing what helped, what was still missing in our healing journey, and what finally started to feel different.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Don Wiggins, a therapist, coach, integrative healer, and divorcee.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Join me for a fresh approach to healing grief and building your confidence after divorce.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Tiffany, do you remember opening your eyes post-divorce in the morning?
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that feeling when you like wake up in the morning, spoiler alert, and your body is already feeling anxious.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: But when you were post-divorce and you would wake up in the morning and your eyes would open, what was already going through your head most of the time?
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_02: It was the millions of things I had to get accomplished that day.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_02: It was things with my daughter, it was work, in an unreasonable number of things, right?
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my God.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, like ridiculous, like not enough hours in the day type of shit.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: What about what about, you know, a thing that I did was I would constantly calculate how many dollars were in the bank and like which day, payroll, you know, like the paycheck.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Like there was this constant like calculating I was doing.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that it was a like a controller manager that was trying to create some sort of regulation or stress relief.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: But I would often wake up and go to sleep, like calculating dollars.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_02: Well, and I never knew when to expect child support because we never went through the courts for that.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_02: We just kind of did it on our own.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_02: And so every it was like I was holding my breath every time around that time of the month because I didn't want to have to go through the courts and I didn't want to have to go through the legal system.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_02: But there was a part of me that's like, shit, if he doesn't pay me this month, what does that mean?
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_02: And where am I gonna have to steal from to do this and this and this?
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_02: And oh God, it was constant, just constant in my head.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: I also often would because I was pretty chronically ill.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so I would also often, when I would wake up or go to sleep, be like double checking how my prescriptions, like what was left with my prescriptions, or like if I had doctor's appointments, or how I was gonna handle insurance stuff.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: That was back before, like where there was pre-existing conditions and you know, I was self-employed, and there was all this stuff around medical for me.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: And gosh, I I just it was consuming at that time.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: It felt like chronic fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_02: So like all the big things were crazy, but it's like, what do you feel like were those small things that would just like send you over the edge?
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: Ooh, um, if I came home and the cat had thrown up or peed on the carpet, you know what I mean?
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: Like yeah, or yeah, yeah.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: Or like one day I was walking the dog.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: I swear I still have this injury.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: I was walking the dog and um she decided she, you know, she was on a leash, but she decided she was gonna like go play with another dog and like pulled my arm out of the socket.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: But like, I don't know.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: I I do think like pet care.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, what else?
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, needing to get gas.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh-huh.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: Like, it sounds so silly, right?
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: But it's like when you were at your absolute limit, um probably trying to figure out even small things like meals, right?
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: Or like um getting my makeup on in the morning, I would always do this.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: It was classic me doing my makeup in the car on the way to work.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: And then trying to figure out if I had enough time to make coffee before I left or grab it or if the whole thing was gonna make me late.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: But it was like not having coffee could send me over the edge.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_02: Mm-hmm.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_02: And I've said this before, but I remember like feeding my kid in the car, like she would eat a bowl of cereal in the car, in the car line, on the way to school.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_02: Because I didn't have time.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_02: Like, I just didn't have time.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_02: I felt like everything was so scarce.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_02: And I totally resonate with the pet care because we had this freaking teacup chihuahua that I got in the divorce, and she was very much a diva, and she was used to me being a stay-at-home mom.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_02: And so she was pissed, like when I had to go to work, and I would come home and there would just be pee everywhere, and she would shred things.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, I I can't handle it.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_02: I can't handle it.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: Can't handle it.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, those were often the things that would leave me crying on the kitchen floor.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I came home and found something, right?
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I can remember both before I moved out of our marital home and the home that I moved into that often being the case.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: But also things like, again, chronically ill, right?
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: So, like needing someone to take me to the hospital and not having anybody around.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I don't know, it was just also overwhelming.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: Anyways, yeah.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: If someone watched us go through our days back then, do you think they would have known how much we were struggling?
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_02: No, absolutely not.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: You don't think so?
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_02: Mm-mm.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: I think what if we were fooling ourselves about how well we were converting?
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what if we go back and we like what we notice about our journey is that we were hustling to hide it all, but what if we weren't actually doing a great job?
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just curious.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I just want to play with that.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I feel like trying to hide it all.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that's how I ended up in a city where nobody knew me.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_02: Like I had the people that I worked with, but I didn't have any friends there.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_02: And so there was no one that I was letting in who was close enough to see the messy parts.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_02: It was like, no, no, no, I'm fine.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_02: And like I said, until my boss called me out that day, like people could see with my actions how I was showing up at work sometimes that I wasn't okay.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_02: But my acquaintances that I had met through like other moms through dance and like Bible study in church and things like that, I did not let them close enough to see how much I was really, really struggling.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: So I made a lot of friends through Al-Anon at the time.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I also had a women's therapy group.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so those people definitely knew how much of a mess I was or how much I was struggling.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: But those were spaces intended for that, right?
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: Which was such a messy to have places where I could go.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: But I do know that being a therapist and getting divorced, which y'all have heard me talk about already, but I wanted to always sound smart, even in the Al-Anon room.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I was inspired by the literature and what I was learning about myself and relationships and wellness and mental health.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I was, I was expi inspired and excited.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: But also I remember feeling like gosh, I cannot let these people know just how dark it is.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: I have to come across as smart and put together on some level.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_02: Did you think back then that you knew how checked out you were, or did you just think like this is just how I am now?
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: I think I soothed myself by just inhaling therapy content and wellness content and joining healing groups.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so it allowed me to, when I felt shame about how much of a mess I was or how checked out I was or how much on the struggle bus I was, all the ways in which I threw myself into healing allowed me to soothe that shame and insecurity.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: And then I also was properly delusional about I'm gonna heal all of this, like come hella high water.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: I will not stop until I have reached the pinnacle.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: Until you did it perfectly.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_02: How about you?
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: Did you I yeah?
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_02: I was very checked out.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_02: And so I feel like I was very much in on the joke, but I was not willing to do the work that it was gonna take me to get well.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_02: And so I went to the other end where again I was self-soothing through alcohol and partying and men and things like that.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_02: And um, even the stillness took it.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_02: The idea that you can outrun yourself, right?
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, like, yeah, like I'll just, you know, whatever.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_02: I'll meet the one eventually, right?
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_02: Like I'll meet the man in shining armor that's gonna pull me out of this shit where I don't have to do my own healing.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_02: I don't have to face all my demons, right?
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_02: Like I hear so many women say that, and it's so true.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_02: We just want somebody to fix it for us.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_02: And so for me, it was like if I could just get enough hits during the week to keep me moving, eventually I felt like I was gonna find the thing that was gonna make me magically well without having to do the work.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: I relate to that very much, even inside of the work, feeling like, oh, it's gonna be this one thing and then it all clicks and then I won't have problems.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: That that is particularly delusional.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_02: Are we there yet?
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_02: Like, yeah, exactly.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: Are we there yet?
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: So, what was your tendency when it all got too much?
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: Get busy, get angry, shut down, make it people please.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what were some of your go-to maneuvers when you were in complete overwhelm?
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_02: It depends on where I was at work.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_02: I definitely got angry because I felt like it was a safe space for me to get angry.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_02: I was a corporate girl.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_02: It was very much embraced.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_02: And so when things got overwhelming, interesting, I just got really pissed off.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_02: And so people kind of knew me as a very reactive person in the workplace.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_02: This was before I was running companies.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_02: Obviously, I learned enough to wear when I was running companies, I wasn't that reactive anymore.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_02: Not towards my team, anyway, towards outside people.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um, in my personal life, I would really just get busy.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_02: Like I would want to pile on and pile on because the the stillness again, when I didn't have plans when my daughter was away, I could not sit with myself.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_02: And so I had to be doing something all the time.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_02: What about you?
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I was the person who would be on the phone rehearsing and rehashing and trying to get all of my friends or Alanon, like whoever it was, like the women from group therapy, the women from Alanon, my girlfriends, to get them all on board with um all the ways, like poor me, right?
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: All the ways in which my life was unfair.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so being on the phone a lot, like talking, like verbal processing, you know, have you heard people, patients say to you, like, oh, I'm just a verbal processor, but you know that's a dissociative part.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: That was me.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just a verbal processor.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um like it was really venting and ranting a lot.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I also had the TV on a lot.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: So during the day, at night, you know, to fall asleep, like all the time, right?
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: I would just like fall into certain TV series or things like that.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: And because I couldn't tolerate feeling alone or quietness.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so like Downtown Abbey is a really good example, just like immersed myself in that TV show and the characters, and there were so many seasons, and I don't know, or certain movies, right, that I would just rewatch over and over again.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: Fifty First Dates was one of them, which is really interesting.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: Oh when you think about it, yeah.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: But the Adam Sandler and what's her name?
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: She's so great.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: Drew Barrymore.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: Drew Barrymore, yeah.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I love her.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, mine was of course Gilmore Girls.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_02: Like that was my thing I could watch over and over and over.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_02: And then I gravitated towards kids' movies.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, okay.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_02: Animated films.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: SpongeBob, what else?
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, stuff I watched back in the day, like um The Goonies, Charlie Brown, Home Alone.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_02: Comfort movies.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: That makes so much sense, right?
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, let's give credit to the things that did help us at some point in our journeys.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the timelines of our journeys are different, but there are things, you know, like before we added homeopathy, before we added IFS, what was the sort of incremental getting better that helped you be less in the full-on stress of it all?
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_02: I started creating a life outside of myself.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_02: And I remember it was after my second marriage ended and he had left and I was devastated because I really, really thought he was my person.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_02: And it wasn't even my first one.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_02: And that was your solution that you envisioned after the first one, right?
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_02: Which is like, oh, the I'll meet the guy and it'll solve everything.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_02: And then yeah, your solution.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_02: He was the thing, right?
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_02: He was like the knight in shining armor that came in.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_02: And so when he wasn't, it was like, oh shit.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so for me, I still wasn't ready to do the hard work on myself, ironically.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_02: But what I was willing to do is say, okay, I no longer want to wait to meet a partner to start living my life, especially with my daughter.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_02: And so I started planning vacations with her every year.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I did all the hobbies, right?
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_02: I started volunteering at the animal shelters and I started leading girls' groups and I was the cookie mom for Girl Scouts.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_02: And um, so whatever my daughter was doing, like I was the dugout mom during baseball.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_02: I always volunteered and I started finding purpose in my life through that.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_02: And it started making me connect to myself and realizing that I was much more than just the girl who was partying at the club who was waiting for the next guy to come along.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's beautiful, like just engaging in your own life and finding purpose.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it helped myself worth so much.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's amazing.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: What about you?
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: I spent a lot of time walking the beach, a lot of time journaling.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: Those things were very, very grounding.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: I started doing inner child work and found that very, very helpful.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's like the precursor to IFS, right?
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's not not IFS, it's just not as robust as IFS, but really started connecting with those parts of me that had gotten me into that position and definitely started taking better care of myself in general, like massages and yoga, and started really teaching myself how to slow down and get into my body.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: Now, it didn't accomplish nearly what some of the later, you know, modalities unlocked.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: Leveling up yoga.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: I fell in love with yoga really in the year post-divorce, and it changed my life.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_02: That's incredible.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_02: What do you feel like because of all of that stuff you were handling better?
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_02: And then what was some of the stuff that was still like knocking you on your ass daily?
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: So I was able to pull together a year being single, and that was like a big deal because I had never really been single in my life.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: Mm-hmm.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so cobbling together that year, now the wheels still fell off, right?
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: This was pre-EMDR, pre-IFS, pre-like it was where talk therapy was still like the popular thing, right?
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: Still like the idea that this was gonna fix.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not saying EMDR didn't exist, but it I hadn't found my way to it yet.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so I don't think that there was enough healing that cut through the dissociation to really change my vibration or my negative beliefs about myself and relationships and all that.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: So I ended up relapsing into dating and picking someone horrible, anyways.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: But in that year of really focusing on myself, spending a year by myself, it was incredibly confidence-building.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: I got so much in touch with who I was and had such healthier boundaries.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I could just feel there was so much less codependency because I wasn't caretaking anyone or like orient, I wasn't organizing my life around another person.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine that.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_02: I was gonna say, I was not feeling okay.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: What about you?
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: When you uh started, you know, investing in yourself in that way, finding purpose.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: What what were you handling better?
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_02: I'd piggyback off of you and say that for you it was dating.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_02: For me, it was celibacy, right?
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_02: So um it was kind of like daring myself, okay.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna go a week.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_02: Well, now I'm gonna go a month.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_02: Well, now I'm gonna go two months, and that all turned into six years.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_02: And I think what those six years taught me was um I dated way more intentionally.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_02: I was able to really see people for who they were when I chose to go out on dates.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_02: There was no longer fear of like having this immense, intense physical connection with somebody in this chemistry.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_02: I was really vetting them for who they were as a person and how they made me feel in my body before I was like sleeping with anybody, which was freaking great.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but again, like you, the things that were knocking me sideways is looking back, it's like I I put myself in a box and put a cute bow on it, and I was like, oh, I'm healed.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_02: It was like it was like really from an IFS perspective, I was controlling every aspect of my life.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_02: Who was that?
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_02: I think I felt that too.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: That's why I went back to dating after the year.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, oh, I'm so much better.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: I can handle this now.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that is a very common refrain.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: The women we work with, it's like you you delete the codependency because you're not actively engaged in a relationship or dating or whatever, and everything gets quiet and you feel so much more stable.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: And that's actually the place from which to do the deeper work.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: But people mistake that for being healed or better and then, you know, drop back into the dating scene or whatever, and they find out that all that crap is still in there.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_02: Well, they slip back into dissociation, right?
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_02: And I know so many women ask me, like, well, what do you mean by dissociation?
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_02: So how would you describe it?
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_02: If it was like a random Tuesday, what did that look like for you to be dissociated?
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there are so many ways.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: I uh we've done an episode or two, I think, on disassociation, but like we could probably stand to do more.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so for me, I um had chronic headaches, specifically cluster headaches.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: But when I was not feeling my feelings, I could not feel feel it's not that I couldn't feel feelings because of course I sobbed, I raged, I felt feelings.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: But I hadn't connected the dots on how those feelings were really directly related to my childhood.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: And then eventually I connected the dots intellectually, but I still wasn't able to access the feelings from my childhood.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: So I still had all of these walls in my mind where I didn't feel safe enough to feel more than what was actually being triggered today, tomorrow, yesterday.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so I would feel all these feelings to do with my ex-husband or my family or my job, but I had all this old content locked in my body, in my energy field.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I had to stay very disconnected from many, many parts of myself in order to do that.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: So for sure, control, control, control, stay numb.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think I would sometimes I I would feel like time felt weird from time to time when I was walking from a room to another room.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: I would have that sort of weird time distortion sensation.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I was a sleepwalker and a sleep talker.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of that I think is dissociated content.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: I would have these horrible night terrors.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: So dissociation showed up like that for me often.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I could work for hours and claim to be fine.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: I could see so many patients back to back and not be affected a whole lot by really sad stories.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: Like that was a really good clue for me.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: That, you know, people's really horror stories were a very intellectual experience for me.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not that I didn't care, I cared so much, I wanted to help so much, but I received all of that content very intellectually.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: How about you?
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_02: Stayed in your logical brain.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um yeah.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_02: So for me, dissociation, oh God, I would lose hours.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I would put on a show and literally look up and it's already dark out and it's time for dinner.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_02: My daughter's asking me, hey, what's for dinner?
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I would scroll on my phone, you know, that's like a big one.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_02: Or just being able to get checked out, you know, I would use alcohol, numbing, I would be on the dating sites for hours, um, urgently trying to find someone to hang out with me that night because she wasn't there.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_02: Like, I need a date.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, I need someone's company tonight.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so yeah, it was all of that stuff.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_02: It was just, it felt like I was stuck and I was watching my life as a movie.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_02: It didn't feel real.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_02: Like nothing felt real.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_02: And like you said, I could cry, I could show emotion, but it didn't hit me in the core.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_02: It wasn't nothing was moving.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_02: I was having the same conversations in my head.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_02: I was just looping.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: The same conversations in my head.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: That that's a good one, right?
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't, yes, like looping conversations in your mind.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: That's such a positive thing.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: Did you ever leave therapy thinking, yes, this makes sense.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: I've had the greatest breakthrough today in therapy, and then find yourself right back in the same patterns of stress.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_02: No, no, because I quit therapy after my therapist told me that I should get divorced.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, there's my ticket, and I never went back.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um, until I don't have to do this anymore, I graduated.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, right.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_02: Like, yeah, I'm healed, I'm well, great.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_02: He's the problem.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_02: There's nothing wrong with me.
• 22:12
  unknown: Yeah.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_02: And so, no, the the answer to that is um I literally left therapy.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_02: I moved, and I never got therapy until over a decade later.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_02: What not to do?
• 22:26
  unknown: Yeah.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: Potentially.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: Potentially, what not to do.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so I think I left therapy feeling incredibly cared for by my therapist.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I would go there and I would get really brave to say things that would cause me to feel shame.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: So were you one of the ones that said the heavy thing in the last 15 minutes of the session?
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: No, I think I would try to get up the courage to say it in the very beginning.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: Because then I needed help soothing.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: Myself, right?
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: If I said it at the end and then left, I would be on fire.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: Does that make sense?
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_00: So I needed help co-regulating after saying the thing.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: Gotcha.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I feel like that's what I did in individual therapy a lot.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: I did this personal development workshop often, like maybe three or four times.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: And this was maybe a year post-divorce where I got into this.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: But I felt like I definitely had huge breakthroughs there.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: But then yes, still cluster headaches and still picked a terrible dating partner for um a long-term relationship, moved in the whole thing.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: It was so bad, so so so so bad.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, I would have these huge breakthroughs and then would still very much play out the same attachment style patterns.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so clearly there was still chronic stress that I was having to cope with, but wasn't actually moving with the needle.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: Both of us at some point realized different times separately together, right?
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: Something is missing.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: There's like I need more, right?
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: And what was that moment for you where you were like, I need to try something else?
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: This stress is killing me and I need more support.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_02: For me, it was it was when I was with my current partner and realizing that there were things that were coming from me and from him, and I needed to fix my side of the street, if that made sense.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_02: Like I had to be able to make sure that what I was seeing was through a lens of actual facts instead of me just going back to old attachment, wounding, and old trauma.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_02: And I had been told since I was 16 that I needed EMDR and it terrified me and I didn't want to do it, and I went kicking and screaming.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so after EMDR, it was incredible how calm my nervous system started to feel.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_02: And then when I started combining that years later with homeopathy and IFS, it was so it was like I was a different person, but I was more me than I had ever been in my life.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: If that means it's really hard to explain.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_02: It is.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_02: It's, you know, it's like I always knew that I had this person inside of me.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_02: She was just never brave enough to come forward.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_02: And so all of these tools that I had learned over the years, it was like me coming forward and finally not being afraid.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_02: It was like all of these walls that I had built around myself coming down.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_02: It's beautiful.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_00: How about you?
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: I am one of those people who got, I don't want to say tired of therapy, but was like, all right, I don't know that there's anything else for me here.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I kept looking for stuff to help with the physical side of my suffering.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: So functional medicine and those types of things.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: And for a while, I just did status quo like yoga, functional medicine, you know, nature.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I was a therapist, so I would, you know, learn maybe a new technique or something, you know, to implement in session, but but no major breakthroughs until I learned and became trained in EMDR.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so just going to get trained was such a game changer and it was such an accident the way that it happened.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't like I learned about it and then was like, oh, I need to go find this.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: We literally were living somewhere where we experienced a category five hurricane.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: And there's this humanitarian aid program who, when there's a natural disaster or a mass shooting or something like that, they bring EMDR training to the local therapist so that the people who are impacted by the trauma in the area can become trained and then help that community recover from whatever the mass trauma was.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: So because we had this direct category five hit, this humanitarian aid program came and trained all of the local therapists and it ended up changing my life.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: And that is what like supercharged the next leg.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_02: Leveling up and career.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_02: That's amazing.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it unlocked so much for me personally, also that then I was like eat, sleeping, and breathing EMDR and somatics and then parts, right?
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: Because I, when I did advanced trainings, that's where IFS came in.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so it just like became, I don't know, a forest fire of recovery.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_02: Did you feel specifically talking about homeopathy, did it change what you could get out of the tools that you were already using?
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_02: Like how did you experience them differently?
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: That that piece is amazing, right?
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: When you add homeopathy to the tools, it's like, oh, I I don't know.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: It was like that's what they meant.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: But I don't even think that's true, Tiffany, because I don't even think most EMDR practitioners understand what they're seeing.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I I don't want to say this because it's not like I spend my days talking to other EMDR practitioners.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe I'm speaking out of turn.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_00: But I think a lot of EMDR therapists run into disassociation in practice and they seek to learn how to move through those blocks.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_00: But like a lot of people are really, really blocked and then end up saying EMDR doesn't work, or they only get like an intellectual processing out of it.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so, which is helpful, don't get me wrong.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's not that nothing reorganizes by any stretch of the imagination, but when you can add the other tools to it, even adding like a deepening of somatics, let's say, right?
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_00: Because I do think EMDR on its own uses some somatics, but a deepening of somatics, all of a sudden you're really shifting your attachment style or your negative beliefs and your nervous system is able to exhale.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: Huge.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: Did I answer your question?
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and I think it it changed like for me when I was working with you and learning to be a practitioner, and then I started coupling the homeopathy with it.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_02: It's like I hear clients talk in homeopathy presentations now.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_02: So when they say things to me, I'm like shotting down.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, because it's like, okay, these are the things that it's gonna take for me to unlock and level this client up to where they need to be.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_02: And so for me, it's it feels so much better to me as a practitioner to know that I have the tools to take you to the next level with, you know, therapy and also homeopathy.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that homeopathy changed everything for me as a practitioner.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, it changed my life personally because it healed, you know, so much disease and dissociation and all of that.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_00: But as a practitioner, to know that when I run into a wall with someone, that I have almost infinite tools, thousands of tools in my toolkit to help them move through something, it's an unbelievable feeling.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_00: And not that people who don't use EMDR don't, but I think then they end up having to refer out to and not that we don't refer out to bodyworkers, we believe in body work, we believe in energy work, we believe in all of that, right?
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_00: But often it can take so many years to unfreeze association using typical therapy techniques and then even still maybe never.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so what are some of the things that really took time for them to click, for you to cope with stress differently, for you to really perceive your stressors differently?
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, because we don't want our listeners to think that they're supposed to have this delulu one breakthrough and then everything's fine, right?
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_00: So very often we get asked the question, like, how do I know I'm healing?
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_00: So while she's busy coping with her stress and can't tell if she's healing or not, what are the things that took you time to really be able to saw in your body, in your mind?
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_02: I think a good measure for me was dealing with those firefighting behaviors, those numbing behaviors.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_02: So the scrolling on my phone, the drinking alcohol, um, using weed, the dating, things like that.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_02: I think for me, when I started to see those things come down and my craving for those things get a lot less quiet, that's when I knew that I was starting to shift a little bit.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um, that did take time because again, when you're sitting at a crossroads, you always want to go towards the familiar.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_02: It was much easier for me to grab a shot of vodka or whatever the case was, or for me to get on the dating site and and text somebody and be like, come over.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_02: So easy, right?
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_02: Like those are the easy things.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_02: But then you wake up in the morning feeling like shit again, same results, you know.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_02: So it's like for me, I needed something that was going to shift me.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_02: So it was those firefighters.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_02: And then it was also those triggers, like when I started seeing myself in a new light and building the self-worth and some of that self-love where I'm like, wow, these destructive patterns that I keep putting myself in are only hurting me.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_02: Like hurting me and the people around me.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_02: They're taking away my ability to be present as a mom, to be really good at my job.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_02: Like, how much am I holding myself back by entertaining all of this shit that's just like getting in my way?
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_02: And that took time and it took a lot of grace.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_02: It took a lot of forgiveness for myself, but it was so worth it.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_02: And I have seen women in that messy in-between where they don't feel like they're healing because they keep getting triggered or they relapsed or something like that happened.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_02: But I tell people each relapse tells a story.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_02: It's just information.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_02: Like that's it.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_02: And it just tells us what we need to work on.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_02: So I would just encourage people to just continue to be very patient.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_02: Patient.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_02: And I didn't stand in that line.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_02: I'm just gonna say that right now.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_02: Whatever line that was in heaven before we came down here, I didn't stand in it.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_02: So my patience level with myself was not great.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_00: I love everything you said about that, right?
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_00: Like patience in terms of even showing up in the place where it's like, okay, I surrender, right?
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_00: I think that every woman can tell a story of the moment that she surrendered.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's not enough.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's enough.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but yeah, patience that, you know, that surrender point will come.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's I used to have this hanging on my refrigerator just post-divorce.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it was a butterfly.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_00: And it was that idea that um change happens when the pain of staying the same hurts more than the pain of change.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I love that quote.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, I know, right?
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I just really took that in early.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so, but it took time to build the tools.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_00: It took time to choose to use the tool when I got triggered versus pick up the phone and vent to someone.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_00: It took time to, and I got the luxury of immersing myself in it all in the sense that I was delivering it at work, right?
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_00: All day long.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_00: Every time I would learn some healing tool, I would take it to work to my clients and my patients.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so, like, I got that luxury to be immersed in a healing culture.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_00: And most people don't.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that it just takes longer and you have to be patient and trust that it's gonna build over time.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: As long as you're actually reaching for the things, the tools.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 34:20
  unknown: Yeah.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about what it would look like for the woman who's having to hold it all together as a single woman at work and she's trying to keep her career on track and uh manage really her image and her job and all of those things, right?
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_00: But then we have the woman who's trying to raise her kids and she's dealing with co-parenting and maybe having to go back to work at the same time, or the woman whose kids are grown and she's empty nesting and there's just way too much silence, right?
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_00: There's these sort of three different women sometimes that we're speaking to.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: What does shifting out of this chronic fight-flight freeze look like for those three different types of women from your perspective?
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_02: I think that the woman who is just holding down the corporate job, the women that don't have the quote unquote distraction of a child, right, who are also feeling very angry because they don't have a child, whatever the circumstances are, right?
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_02: Like she's stressed out about it.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_02: I think that there's a grief that that that woman experiences that the other groups don't, because when you don't share a child with somebody and you get divorced, you can just walk the fuck away.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_02: Like after that sign, you don't have to see that person again.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_02: If you don't share a business, if you don't live in the same town anymore, like there are things.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so for me, the stress for that woman comes in the grief of was that fucking real?
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_02: Because it's like when they leave and the last article of clothing is out of the house, you look around and you're just like, whoa.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_02: So I think like that woman's stress is coming from the grief, grieving the life.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_02: Was this real?
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_02: Did I mean anything to him?
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_02: And now what happens?
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_02: Because now I'm X years old, still don't have children, still don't have the life I want.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_02: And what does that look like for me?
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_00: Will I ever have, will I ever have the life that I want to do?
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_00: Will I ever get what I want?
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_02: And then like talk about the women that are trying to co-parent or deal with their ex.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_02: Like, what does that look like?
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: The string of hell.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 36:31
  unknown: Yeah.
• 36:32
  unknown: Yeah.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_00: And they're not, one isn't more or less than the other, right?
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_00: They're just different.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_00: They're just different.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that the empty nester, wow, that is a whole different thing.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's like when you've been going, going, going and taking care of your family for decades.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_00: And now all of a sudden there's like quiet and there's silence, but the mind does not know what to do with that.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_00: The body doesn't know what to do with that.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like there's a lostness there.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_00: There's a stress.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_00: There's an insecurity about who am I?
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_00: Where do I fit?
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_00: What do I do with my hands?
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_00: I know.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_00: That is overwhelming.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_00: The silence can be absolutely deafening in those instances.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_02: And then I see women who are in the empty nest phase too that are older.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_02: They're grieving the opportunity that they feel like they've lost when it comes to how they look physically, how things feel sexually.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_02: Like there's all these different facets where they're like, is this too late?
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_02: Like, am I past my prime?
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_02: Am I actually going to meet someone that I'm still going to have this great, meaningful, intimate relationship with?
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_02: So like it's teasing out all of that grief that they're feeling too.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_02: So if you feel like any of these women messaged us in cocoon, right, in our free online community.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_02: And they told us, like, hey, I'm doing the work, right?
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_02: And some stuff's feeling better, but I'm still feeling overwhelmed all the time.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_02: Like, where do you feel like you would start with some of these women?
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_00: I want to know what she's already done.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_00: Like what tools has she already used and what tools has she not tried yet.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_00: And if she hasn't tried something like somatically driven EMDR, IFS or homeopathy, I would say join Cocoon and explore some of those opportunities.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_00: You know, when you're hosting workshops, you're digging into a lot of these concepts, you know, behind the healing tools that we recommend.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_00: We are often saying you have, you know, nothing changes if nothing changes.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_00: You have to reach for a different tool.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I would say you have to jump in and start asking questions and saying yes to new and different approaches.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_00: What would you say?
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I would agree.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_02: And I mean, look, like on this side of it, we're still doing the work on this side.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_02: So, like a couple of weeks ago, for the first time ever, I went and saw an energy healer and I had hypnotherapy and acting.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_02: You were so excited.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my God.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_02: And it was like one of the most amazing fucking experiences in my life.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_02: And this woman was like so deliciously energetic.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_02: Like it was a lot.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_02: I couldn't even look her in the face because I was like, she's so intense.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but even on this side, like we're still walking through this journey and discovering what works for us, which is beautiful, right?
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_00: And Abraham Hicks talks about that when you hear her talk about the law of attraction and teach about the law of attraction, right?
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_00: So if you've never heard of Abraham Hicks in the law of attraction, uh, when we're studying how to manifest and how to create abundance for our lives, so often we struggle to just feel abundant and present in our lives as they are.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: And we're like, no, I are we there yet, right?
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_00: I have to get there.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_00: When I have money in the bank, then I'll be happy.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_00: When I have the relationship, then I'll be happy.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_00: When my kids are stable, then I'll be happy, right?
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the big healing jump is to be able to be present and feel abundant in today's current set of circumstances because in every stop in your healing journey, every train stop along the way of your healing journey, you're gonna decide you want more of something.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I want more money in the bank.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_00: I want my relationship to be even better.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_00: I want to be able to travel to these places I haven't traveled before.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_00: I want to find a guy who adores me.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_00: I want to be able to enjoy certain things with my grandchildren.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_00: There's always gonna be more that's available to you if you're open to it.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think breaking through that illusion that, oh, why do I have to keep going?
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_00: Why do I have to keep doing this?
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, no, we actually get to keep getting to these beautiful places and then saying, like, oh, what do I want next?
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_00: And it not feeling like we're not doing good enough.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_00: It being like, no, actually, we get to level up and install a new upgraded, you know, operating system and then see what cool shit we can get into next.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_02: Because even if I look at my journey six months ago, 12 months ago, I would not have been in a place where I wanted to receive an energy healer, where I wanted to, you know.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_02: So it's it's crazy how when you reach these different levels of healing, how you attract different things and different people, which is Yes, different types of healers, different types of professionals.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_00: But the thing you need will always be right around the corner.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_00: We'd like to think that we're part of that, right?
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_00: That that's how you found us.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, oh, for some reason, energetically, we're part of what you need right now.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_00: And many of many people often, tell me if you have experienced this, Tiffany, or not.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_00: But many people often will try to manifest the thing that they need and then they can't receive it when it arrives, right?
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_00: They're like, oh, um, I'm not ready.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_00: And that can look like um, I don't have time.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_00: It can look like I don't have I can't afford it.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_00: It can look like, I don't know, what would it have looked like for you with the energy healer?
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I don't need that.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_00: I don't need that.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'm fine.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_00: Probably, yeah.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_02: Like I'm fine right now.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_02: I don't, I don't really need to know anything that's behind the curtain at this point.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_02: Like everything looks good, so everything must be good, right?
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so it's like also having the courage to want to go a level deeper.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that it's, you know, it's hard for women to get to that point where you want to go a level deeper and it's not always comfortable.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_02: And I I always say this too in IFS work, you're peeling back layers.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_02: So it's like the more we go into IFS, the deeper and darker this exiled part gets.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_02: You know what I mean?
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_02: Like the ones that want to come out.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_02: And it's just about having the courage to face it and knowing that on the other side is something even more beautiful and even more palming.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_00: What is the point of all of this going deeper, right?
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_00: And it's so many women say, I just want peace.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_00: I just want peace.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the gift of all of this work is peace.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_00: And that doesn't mean not being human, but most women who are stuck in fight, fright, fight, flight, freeze, and fawn cannot describe what peace feels like.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_00: They cannot find it in their bodies, in their minds.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's so restless and so distressed all the time.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what using some of these different tools and unlocking all of that stuckness in the nervous system does.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_00: It literally delivers peace.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_02: What do you feel like you wish somebody would have told you back then?
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_02: And like, what do these women have to look forward to for Thursday?
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_02: What are we digging into on our Thursday episode this week?
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_00: I swear I wish someone had explained all of this to me back then, but I am positive that if they tried to, it would have sounded like noise.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_00: So that sort of goes back to when you were instructing us all to be patient with ourselves.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because we can only learn what we can learn in snippets at a time.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_00: And that's not to justify, you know, you maybe going slow in your healing journey.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_00: But what I wish someone had told me back then, I think, is maybe just more I'm doing a good job and I'm gonna get there, right?
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to get there.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_00: Like just reassurance that it was all gonna be worth it and that I was going to accomplish the goals that I had set for myself.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think that I could have maybe skipped out on a good bit of stress along the way if I had trusted that the decisions I was making was gonna lead to this moment sitting here with you in this podcast talking to our beautiful listeners.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_00: Would have been a relief.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_00: But I think for our listeners, I just want to tell them to keep going.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_00: For Thursday's episode, we're gonna get into a polyvagal exercise, like a vagus nerve exercise to help a little bit with uh that stress that she's carrying.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_00: So we're gonna give her a tangible task, something she can do when she's feeling overwhelmed, and to some extent, something she can do in public when she's feeling stressed or frozen and overwhelmed.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, so that is our Thursday gig.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_00: We always want to bring, you know, a combination of tools to dig into on Thursday.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_00: This is probably something she's seen on her Instagram and she's got a saved post on it, and she keeps forgetting to go do it when it matters.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_00: So we're gonna walk her through it.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_00: How about you?
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_00: What do you wish someone had told you back then?
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_02: Oh God, I wanted to know where the yellow brick road was gonna lead.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_02: Same thing, right?
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_02: I wanted to have all the answers back then.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_02: I wanted to know that what I was doing was making a difference, that I was gonna experience love and joy and peace again and this connection to myself that transcended anything that I had ever come close to feeling.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_02: But no one was around to tell me that back then and nobody could tell you.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_02: And on the other side of it, we can tell you that.
• 45:51
  unknown: Yeah.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_02: The beauty of working with clients, I can see who she will become before she can see it.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_00: 100% that I have chance.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_00: I can always see it.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_00: I can see it and I never have doubt.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_00: The only time doubt creeps in for me with clients is like when they start to stop showing up, right?
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_01: And then I'm like, ooh, yeah.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_00: But that's it.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_00: Like as long as she's showing up, I can see the next step and the next step and the next step, and I can just see her glow strengthening from the inside out.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_00: Mm-hmm.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 46:22
  unknown: Yeah.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_00: For your next opportunity to calm that vagus nerve the fuck down.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_00: So you can get a little more into your body and feel just a little less overwhelmed and stressed out while you're going through all of this.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_00: Find us Thursday in this VIP episode about how to cope with stress post-divorce.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_00: We love you so much.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_00: Peace.