Latest / Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce / 73. Healing from Divorce by Letting go of Anger and Finding Peace

Transcript

73. Healing from Divorce by Letting go of Anger and Finding Peace · Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce

• 0:53
  Dawn Wiggins: 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
  Dawn Wiggins: 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
  Dawn Wiggins: Cozy in for the conversations you've been longing to have about this new life.
• 1:18
  Dawn Wiggins: Hi, love, today we're revisiting anger, because our previous chats about anger have been some of your favorite and from my own journey with anger, I know that it's one of the trickiest emotions to let go of, and so one conversation about it is typically not enough.
• 1:47
  Dawn Wiggins: So we're gonna revisit it a bit today and kind of go through this step-by-step understanding of what you're experiencing and what your choices are about, how to move through it and not hang out there too long.
• 2:05
  Dawn Wiggins: You know there are a lot of health consequences for holding on to anger and and one of them is certainly heart disease.
• 2:15
  Dawn Wiggins: There is there are a lot of diseases associated with chronic anger, but certainly heart disease is one of them, and they're usually the big scary ones.
• 2:26
  Dawn Wiggins: The big scary diseases rate that are driven by some of our more toxic, persistent emotions.
• 2:32
  Dawn Wiggins: So just know that there's a big, big payoff in terms of your overall wellness and longevity and health care, and not just longevity, but like how you age.
• 2:45
  Dawn Wiggins: You know I often talk about that.
• 2:48
  Dawn Wiggins: A lot of the reasons I run my life and my lifestyle the way I do is because when I'm 70, I want to be like with it and like feel easy to adventure and don't don't want to feel like trapped by choices that I made in my past.
• 3:07
  Dawn Wiggins: I am often thinking of my future self when I'm making lifestyle choices and doing this healing work, because I think also when you're coming through a divorce, it's like, oh shit, did I just?
• 3:20
  Dawn Wiggins: I don't want to say waste, right, because nothing is a waste.
• 3:23
  Dawn Wiggins: All my life is always happening.
• 3:24
  Dawn Wiggins: This is my life.
• 3:25
  Dawn Wiggins: I always want to learn from and integrate and celebrate all the aspects of my lived existence.
• 3:29
  Dawn Wiggins: But I think there is often, as part of the grief process or the healing process, this feeling like I wasted so many years and I want to really make the most out of the rest of the years.
• 3:41
  Dawn Wiggins: And so when we have conversations like this about chronic emotional patterns, it's really because we want to set ourselves up to have beautiful, abundant futures where we get to make the most of it and not feel regret for how you know, for some of the choices we made in the past.
• 4:00
  Dawn Wiggins: So alright, let's dig into anger.
• 4:03
  Dawn Wiggins: So y'all know I've been chatting about the emotional guidance scale from Law of Attraction, from the book actually asking.
• 4:09
  Dawn Wiggins: It is given by Jerry and Esther Hicks.
• 4:11
  Dawn Wiggins: Esther Hicks uses this in the Law of Attraction seminars that she gives.
• 4:16
  Dawn Wiggins: She'll give out these emotional guidance scales.
• 4:18
  Dawn Wiggins: I'll definitely stick it in the show notes for you to take a look at it.
• 4:22
  Dawn Wiggins: But on the emotional guidance scale there are a couple of brands of anger and it's really important for us to look at these different brands of anger to really get into the nuances of how to identify what we're feeling and then how to move on from it.
• 4:35
  Dawn Wiggins: So lowest on the emotional guidance scale that is like anger-adjacent, is jealousy.
• 4:42
  Dawn Wiggins: It's a very low-vibre emotion, jealousy and then just up from that is hatred or rage, and then just up from that is revenge, then just up from that is plain old fashion anger.
• 4:54
  Dawn Wiggins: And then we skip through discouragement, which is like maybe anger-light, like super anger-light or like anger-adjacent, and then 15 is blame.
• 5:03
  Dawn Wiggins: So for the purpose of this conversation today about anger, I need you to really set the intention of teasing out blame from good old fashioned anger, and I think that in all the lower vibe brands of anger, revenge, hatred, rage and jealousy, they all have a component of blame woven into them, and so it's not just straight up and down anger.
• 5:32
  Dawn Wiggins: Anger is such a valuable emotion.
• 5:34
  Dawn Wiggins: It helps us understand when some action needs to be taken.
• 5:37
  Dawn Wiggins: It's powerful, it motivates us, it helps us know when movement is called for right, like where maybe we're being treated very poorly, or where there's not a healthy boundary in place, or where we've given up on ourselves.
• 5:51
  Dawn Wiggins: In certain ways, we'll feel anger and it feels like an action and it feels like, okay, I can do something about this thing that I don't like, right, so it has its value.
• 6:01
  Dawn Wiggins: It's certainly higher on the emotional scale than despair and hopelessness and all that.
• 6:06
  Dawn Wiggins: The last podcast conversation we had about anger was me recommending that you embrace it.
• 6:12
  Dawn Wiggins: Embrace your anger in order to release it, and that is I stand by that.
• 6:18
  Dawn Wiggins: It's super, super valuable, because so often the reason emotion becomes chronic, something that we can't get free of, we can't figure out how to let go of, is because we haven't allowed ourselves the fullest expression of the emotion, because it's in that full expression that the mind, body is like oh okay, I feel validated, even self with self.
• 6:42
  Dawn Wiggins: Right, think about it.
• 6:43
  Dawn Wiggins: So often with ourselves we're not willing to fully experience and validate our own emotional experience.
• 6:52
  Dawn Wiggins: We case build right, we call our best girlfriend, we call our mom, we call the lawyer, we call whoever, we tell our kids what a dick so and so was, so that we feel validated by someone else.
• 7:06
  Dawn Wiggins: But that is not a full expression and full validation.
• 7:09
  Dawn Wiggins: That is not.
• 7:10
  Dawn Wiggins: We often talk about how good it feels to feel truly seen, validated and heard by other, by someone else, and that's true, right.
• 7:17
  Dawn Wiggins: But often it's because we are not willing to go to the depths of what we see, think, feel, hear, know and believe, get to know that, validate it, feel it, express it like, be it, embody it right, because it's so deep, dark and scary.
• 7:34
  Dawn Wiggins: So many times I've had clients say I'm afraid if I fully go there I'll never come out, I'll get stuck there.
• 7:39
  Dawn Wiggins: And actually the opposite is true.
• 7:41
  Dawn Wiggins: Loves, when we avoid, when we suppress, when we bypass, that's when we get stuck.
• 7:46
  Dawn Wiggins: So interesting, we're afraid of those places.
• 7:50
  Dawn Wiggins: But what I see people doing in society and certainly in my practice is that we go to these deep places of anger but we take blame with us, and when we take blame with us, blame blocks letting go and blame blocks us integrating the lessons we're learning from walking these paths and so really being able to pinpoint where blame is contaminating your healing journey, because that is where it's interrupting your progress.
• 8:26
  Dawn Wiggins: Right, emotions are meant to be like an ocean tide.
• 8:28
  Dawn Wiggins: They're meant to come in and to go out.
• 8:30
  Dawn Wiggins: They're meant to be signals to help us understand what we like and what we don't like.
• 8:34
  Dawn Wiggins: They're meant to be signals that help us really enrich our lived experience.
• 8:39
  Dawn Wiggins: So, when the tide comes in and it doesn't go out, something got in the way, right, something major got in the way, and what I really want you to hear today is, more often than not, what got in the way is blame.
• 8:53
  Dawn Wiggins: Now, if you listen to the noodle session that producer Joy and I did on this topic, preparing for this episode, we go really deep into how to decontaminate blame from our feelings process.
• 9:07
  Dawn Wiggins: So deep we get into the dialogue about whether or not your path, your kid's path, your parent's path the most heinous story you've ever heard whether those paths were predestined or whether, and the butterfly effect to do with that, or whether or not it could have gone another way, because the idea that it could have gone another way is basically blame.
• 9:35
  Dawn Wiggins: It's blaming ourselves for our mistakes, it's blaming our forefathers for their mistakes and, in my experience, love, anywhere blame is activated, we cannot fully heal.
• 9:48
  Dawn Wiggins: And so why does it matter, right?
• 9:51
  Dawn Wiggins: Why does it matter?
• 9:52
  Dawn Wiggins: Well, in my experience, all of that anger that I was trying to get free from all my years right, there was so much of it that, even though I actively tried to tip up on the emotional scale, even though I actively tried to take full responsibility for being on this timeline and this life experience and trusting that God had a plan and a path for me and that everything I was going through was meant to, meant for my sanctification, right, kind of tying all the concepts we've been talking about on the pod together lately, like even though I knew that intellectually I couldn't quite get it to shift or to release on this like deep, deep, deep level.
• 10:31
  Dawn Wiggins: And so what was happening for me is I still had chronic disease and I still had a lot of noise in my mind, even though we get less and less and less, less noise with each healing modality I used right.
• 10:43
  Dawn Wiggins: And so I think it's important to understand that who we are is dictated so much by our genetics, our inherited traumas, our soul, our unique soul that came into this body right, and how we experience life is determined by a lot of the lived experiences that have contaminated our hoonus right.
• 11:09
  Dawn Wiggins: And so a lot of times people come to this deep, deep work and they're like well, who am I going to be after EMDR?
• 11:16
  Dawn Wiggins: Who am I going to be after homeopathy is scary, I don't.
• 11:19
  Dawn Wiggins: I don't know if I'm going to recognize that person like, oh gosh, you're going to recognize her, like, yes, there's going to be some adjustment periods, but who you are has been constant.
• 11:27
  Dawn Wiggins: Who you are, I believe, was pre preordained right.
• 11:32
  Dawn Wiggins: And how you are is the part that you have control over, the part that you can redeem from what you have lived.
• 11:40
  Dawn Wiggins: And what I think is so cool is that we can even redeem the generational stuff right.
• 11:47
  Dawn Wiggins: And I have a client who I'm working with right now who has a very, a deeply, deeply painful story, so much generational sexual trauma and oppression, and she has said repeatedly to me I wanted to break the cycle.
• 12:02
  Dawn Wiggins: I wanted to break the cycle and at first I kept saying to her love, you are breaking the cycle.
• 12:06
  Dawn Wiggins: And she said she kept saying no with my mom.
• 12:09
  Dawn Wiggins: Right, it's like, no, I wanted to break the cycle for my mom also.
• 12:13
  Dawn Wiggins: I wanted to do it with her.
• 12:15
  Dawn Wiggins: I wanted our relationship to be healed and redeemed.
• 12:19
  Dawn Wiggins: And it's like, oh, by acknowledging that that is not an available choice for an individual to make.
• 12:26
  Dawn Wiggins: You can't choose for somebody else.
• 12:28
  Dawn Wiggins: That is where I see a lot of people get hung up.
• 12:31
  Dawn Wiggins: It's where I see people getting hung up in divorce recovery because so many people say but I wanted our marriage to be redeemed, I wanted my relationship with him to be redeemed, I wanted to do all the work so that I didn't have to start over and recover from this.
• 12:46
  Dawn Wiggins: I wanted him to do the work.
• 12:48
  Dawn Wiggins: And accepting that that wasn't meant to be for some reason, is very hard for people, very, very hard.
• 12:55
  Dawn Wiggins: And so being able to really go into the depths of your of yourself and noodle through what you believe about God, your journey, your relationships, your purpose, who you were meant to be and how you are being today that's why so often we talk about so much of the healing processes, about knowing yourself on a really deep level, because oftentimes, if we don't get to the root of the thing, it is always going to spring back.
• 13:27
  Dawn Wiggins: It's always going to grow back and and so these deep, deep conversations, they're intimidating and they're confusing and I love them.
• 13:41
  Dawn Wiggins: I know that not everybody does and that's okay so we can have like the conversation light.
• 13:49
  Dawn Wiggins: It's like hey, if you notice you have some chronic anger, you've got a handful of choices.
• 13:53
  Dawn Wiggins: You can do your best to feel into it so that it just releases it on hooks.
• 13:59
  Dawn Wiggins: You can do your best to tease blame out of it.
• 14:02
  Dawn Wiggins: You can do your best to tip up from it, like, make the best of it right.
• 14:06
  Dawn Wiggins: Tipping up is just like saying, like, make the best of the situation.
• 14:09
  Dawn Wiggins: Find some things about this situation that I like, right?
• 14:12
  Dawn Wiggins: I have asked that question of a lot of people.
• 14:14
  Dawn Wiggins: What are the things you like about this new post of worse life?
• 14:17
  Dawn Wiggins: Right, like not sleeping next to someone who snores, or being able to control the remote, or like being able to have whatever you want for dinner.
• 14:25
  Dawn Wiggins: Right, there's certainly things about it that you don't like, but there are things about it that you do like and those things certainly help you tip up from anger when you focus on the things that you do like about this current set of circumstances, right?
• 14:37
  Dawn Wiggins: So if you've used all those tools and you still feel haunted by jealousy, rage, revenge, anger, blame, like well, let's use a different tool.
• 14:49
  Dawn Wiggins: You know, I mentioned to producer Joy that, like I never used a tool like going to a week long meditation retreat where I take a vow of silence and probably fasted quite a bit, right?
• 15:02
  Dawn Wiggins: Would that have worked for me?
• 15:03
  Dawn Wiggins: I don't know, because I didn't take that path.
• 15:06
  Dawn Wiggins: And I think that a lot of times we don't give ourselves enough time and space to fully collapse, to really follow our nervous systems, to really follow our emotional paths.
• 15:17
  Dawn Wiggins: And it's because we have too much responsibility, not enough community, right, we are overburdened with responsibility modern living, right.
• 15:25
  Dawn Wiggins: And then we feel like things that aren't really responsibilities.
• 15:29
  Dawn Wiggins: We turn them into responsibilities, right?
• 15:30
  Dawn Wiggins: Like having to free myself from wrinkles rather than free myself from rage.
• 15:34
  Dawn Wiggins: Like you know how much energy I've put into freeing myself from wrinkles, like as much as I've put into freeing myself from rage, maybe you know.
• 15:42
  Dawn Wiggins: But so we get kind of focused on the wrong stuff, you know, and then this stuff perpetuates.
• 15:48
  Dawn Wiggins: But if we don't uproot anger.
• 15:50
  Dawn Wiggins: What happens?
• 15:51
  Dawn Wiggins: Arthritis, heart disease, cancer, right, and I'm not predicting that you're gonna have these particular diseases, but I'm here to tell you that there is a link in the scientific literature.
• 16:02
  Dawn Wiggins: There is an undeniable link between chronic toxic emotions, and an emotion isn't toxic just because you experience it.
• 16:12
  Dawn Wiggins: Right, anger itself isn't toxic.
• 16:14
  Dawn Wiggins: It's when it becomes chronic love that it becomes toxic, right?
• 16:18
  Dawn Wiggins: So chronic toxic emotion absolutely negatively impacts our mental health and our physical health.
• 16:27
  Dawn Wiggins: And so it's just kind of like well, how free do you wanna feel?
• 16:32
  Dawn Wiggins: Because we often just get in our own way.
• 16:36
  Dawn Wiggins: Right, we just get in our own way because it's hard to say I don't have all the answers, and it's hard to say I need help, and we feel like help should be automatically provided for us.
• 16:51
  Dawn Wiggins: I see this a lot in life.
• 16:53
  Dawn Wiggins: Like people talk about the government should figure out a way to have healthcare be free or accessible to everyone, and that the government should figure out well, when's the last time the government actually I'm not railing on the government here but like, let's just be honest Like, what are we saying when we say that the government should solve our problems for us?
• 17:14
  Dawn Wiggins: Like, isn't that blame, right?
• 17:16
  Dawn Wiggins: So it's like well, I could say that somebody else should be responsible for my healing, or I could just get busy figuring out how to heal and maybe being willing to take the same amount of action that I would take to have my iPhone and my Botox and be willing to apply that same level of urgency or desire to my own healing process.
• 17:40
  Dawn Wiggins: And I think that that is tricky, right?
• 17:42
  Dawn Wiggins: And I think that that pisses you off when I say it, because it would piss me off if someone said it's me.
• 17:46
  Dawn Wiggins: But it's true, right Is that?
• 17:48
  Dawn Wiggins: Anywhere blame is activated, anywhere we feel like somebody else should be accountable for our journey or our healing path, we are not integrating the lessons, we're not fully taking our power back, we are diluting our power by saying somebody else should be providing the power to me.
• 18:05
  Dawn Wiggins: And so I just want you to ask yourself how free do you want to be and how accountable are you willing to be for that freedom?
• 18:12
  Dawn Wiggins: And I don't think it has to be all that hard and take all that long.
• 18:16
  Dawn Wiggins: In fact, if your healing takes so long, it's probably because you're avoiding asking for help more often and are like afraid that you can't afford the help or afraid that you can't um, afraid of who you're going to be if you get the help, or, right, like you're afraid of something.
• 18:33
  Dawn Wiggins: So, again, getting in our own way, right, why has this healing journey taken me all these years?
• 18:38
  Dawn Wiggins: Well, you know, some of it, I think, has been a lot of fear.
• 18:41
  Dawn Wiggins: Some of it, I think, has been a lot of ego for me.
• 18:43
  Dawn Wiggins: Like, maybe I thought that I knew more than I knew in the early years, maybe I was really invested in blame, maybe I had a bigger pile of shit to heal from.
• 18:54
  Dawn Wiggins: I don't know right.
• 18:55
  Dawn Wiggins: But but I know that we have such a wealth of information available to us today and it's just like sometimes are we ready to hear it and and I think that's what makes it take a long time is sometimes we're just not ready to hear it yet.
• 19:07
  Dawn Wiggins: And healing is a process and it does happen in layers.
• 19:10
  Dawn Wiggins: I will tell you today, loves, I am still getting in my own way, but I am not so hard on myself for it.
• 19:15
  Dawn Wiggins: Like, let me give you a hard example.
• 19:17
  Dawn Wiggins: So Kaylee is my homeopath.
• 19:19
  Dawn Wiggins: Maybe you heard the episode on homeopathy.
• 19:21
  Dawn Wiggins: Kaylee is my homeopath and she prescribes remedies for me and guess what?
• 19:25
  Dawn Wiggins: I take my will back and I prescribe my own remedies for myself, I totally, totally derail my own case and and that's a conscious choice I make.
• 19:33
  Dawn Wiggins: So I say, oh, look at me being impatient.
• 19:36
  Dawn Wiggins: But also, oh, look at me wanting to learn by doing, and that's beautiful.
• 19:40
  Dawn Wiggins: So it's just like being willing to be honest with myself and recognize where there's a trade-off for what I'm doing right.
• 19:48
  Dawn Wiggins: A trade-off by saying, okay, I'm going to learn by hijacking my own case and then I'm going to accept the consequences of that, which is, maybe it takes me longer to heal because I wanted to do it my way Right.
• 20:01
  Dawn Wiggins: That is what I see people do over and over and over again, and that's what happens with anger.
• 20:05
  Dawn Wiggins: It's like well, I want to feel justified in my anger, because anger to me feels better than not even like shame, because I don't want you to trade your anger for like, oh, I made mistakes and I need to own those and go to shame.
• 20:19
  Dawn Wiggins: No, it's like hang on.
• 20:20
  Dawn Wiggins: This next thing I'm about to say is like fire is all get out.
• 20:25
  Dawn Wiggins: We don't know how to trade anger for letting ourselves off the hook.
• 20:29
  Dawn Wiggins: We don't know how to trade anger for letting other people off the hook.
• 20:31
  Dawn Wiggins: We don't know how to trade anger for celebrating that my path is fine.
• 20:36
  Dawn Wiggins: We don't know how to trade anger for acceptance.
• 20:39
  Dawn Wiggins: We don't know how to trade anger for self love.
• 20:42
  Dawn Wiggins: So what we do is like we give ourselves these other options.
• 20:46
  Dawn Wiggins: Oh, it's like anger or shame, or anger or blame, or anger, right?
• 20:53
  Dawn Wiggins: No, why not let anger go for like oh, who I am was probably preordained, and therefore a very purposeful, by some power greater than myself, and that must be super magical.
• 21:05
  Dawn Wiggins: And so maybe I should just let myself off the hook, because I'm here doing this messy human shit where I'm learning by doing, and that's just how it's designed.
• 21:14
  Dawn Wiggins: I was supposed to learn by doing.
• 21:16
  Dawn Wiggins: I'm also supposed to learn by saying I need help and as long as I'm doing that, I'm doing great Right, and that I don't have to choose between anger and shame, or anger and fear, or anger and blame.
• 21:27
  Dawn Wiggins: I can choose between anger and like feeling like I'm a badass full of a lot of personal power given to me by a power greater than myself.
• 21:37
  Dawn Wiggins: That's, I was designed to be a conduit for God's power, and that is what I'm having trouble accepting, is that I'm a conduit for God's power and I could do a lot of good with that if I could let go of this anger.
• 21:50
  Dawn Wiggins: So that's the invitation.
• 21:52
  Dawn Wiggins: This week is right.
• 21:53
  Dawn Wiggins: Look at the places that you're doing blame.
• 21:56
  Dawn Wiggins: Look at the places where you're not allowing yourself to fully feel and express your anger.
• 22:00
  Dawn Wiggins: Look at the places where maybe you need to ask for a little more help and look at the places where you're blocking yourself from feeling really freaking good about yourself, because that's what God wants for you and that's what the design was.
• 22:13
  Dawn Wiggins: And you're just not sure it's safe to do that because people are going to call you arrogant or something Right, and so you don't want to be judged for being arrogant or thinking highly of yourself.
• 22:25
  Dawn Wiggins: But at the end of the day, loves, we were supposed to come here to create and play and love.
• 22:29
  Dawn Wiggins: Well, to love and be loved.
• 22:30
  Dawn Wiggins: We are here to love and be loved, and you can't love and be loved well if you're blaming yourself or other people.
• 22:35
  Dawn Wiggins: And so exchange your anger for love.
• 22:38
  Dawn Wiggins: And if you can't figure out how to do that, dm me.
• 22:42
  Dawn Wiggins: And you know there's a path.
• 22:44
  Dawn Wiggins: There's a path.
• 22:45
  Dawn Wiggins: You are so worthy of love and belonging, you are so worthy of being celebrated.
• 22:49
  Dawn Wiggins: So is your ex, so is your mother-in-law, so are your parents.
• 22:51
  Dawn Wiggins: So are your children.
• 22:52
  Dawn Wiggins: You know, everybody gets.
• 22:54
  Dawn Wiggins: Everybody gets a break.
• 22:54
  Dawn Wiggins: Everybody gets a break, because that is truly the path to a joyful existence.
• 23:00
  Dawn Wiggins: I love you so much.
• 23:05
  Dawn Wiggins: Peace, dear.
• 23:13
  Dawn Wiggins: Divorce Diary is a podcast by my Coach Dawn.
• 23:14
  Dawn Wiggins: You can find more at mycoachdawncom.