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152. Your Kids, Your Nervous System and Their Attachment Style After Divorce · Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce

• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Hi love, today's episode is for the mom, and I know not every woman going through divorce has children.
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: I didn't, and I know many of our beautiful listeners don't have children, but if you do, today's episode is for you.
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: It is about the most important things that you can role model for your kiddos through this divorce because, as a therapist who has treated people, you know for all the various issues that people go to therapy.
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: I am here to tell you that it is not the divorce that's actually causing the lasting damage to children.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: It's something much deeper and harder to put your finger on, and we're going to unpack it today.
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: Hi love, welcome to Dear Divorce Diary, the podcast helping divorcees go beyond talk therapy to process your grief, find the healing you crave and build back your confidence.
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: I'm your host, dawn Wiggins, a therapist, coach, integrative healer and divorcee.
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: Join me for a fresh approach to healing grief and building your confidence after divorce.
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: In today's episode, we're going to talk about how your kids are co-regulating to your nervous system and why you can't fake nervous system regulation and how that impacts them.
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: We're going to talk about the importance, like top priority, of you letting go of guilt and trading it for empowerment, and how that is going to impact your kiddos and we are going to talk about the fleeting temptations to go back to your ex through Jill's story.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: Jill wrote in recently.
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: Actually we were havinga conversation.
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: She didn't write.
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: We were having a conversation and talking about how, from time to time, she has this temptation to go back because a bit of how she feels overwhelmed by single parenting and guilty that her kids don't have more contact with their dad.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: And we're going to talk about how to get unstuck.
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: If you've been having some of that guilt about kids spending more time with their parent and how that has to do with role modeling, healthy nervous system and healthy attachment style for your kiddos.
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: Okay, so kids and co-regulation.
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: So you've heard all the buzzwords about how important it is to have a regulated nervous system.
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: The nervous system is that part of your body, mind.
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: It's the all of the pieces that integrate through your spine, right and, and they go up into your brain and help translate the signals from your brain down into using your nerves and your nervous system down into your body.
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: So your brain gets data or information from your environment and the nervous system helps interpret that data and send signals down into your body about whether or not you feel relatively or are relatively safe or threatened in your environment, and it helps communicate to all of the organ systems in your body about what needs to be prioritized right now in terms of your day-to-day living.
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: So your nervous system is like you know, the brain is the brain of your body, right, but the nervous system is how your brain communicates with your body, and we know that it is important to have a generally well-regulated nervous system because, if not, you're going to be in sort of a kind of constant stress mode which causes all kinds of downstream effects in your body with regards to illness and disease and overall metabolic function.
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: I've heard this analogy recently about the nervous system being like a rubber band and it needs to have the capacity of a rubber band.
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: There are times where you experience stress that that rubber band needs to have the capacity to stretch so that it can handle the stressors coming at it, and it has been designed to be able to stretch.
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: But when it's overstretched for too long, what happens?
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: It either becomes stretched out or it can snap, and so we want our nervous systems to be able to have that healthy flexibility so that it can stretch when we need it to stretch and then it can relax when we need it to relax.
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: So how well we take care of our body-mind, how stressed we feel, how we cope with stress you know the stories we tell ourselves about stress all affect you know how regulated our nervous system is, and kids primarily.
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: The way that their nervous systems function is they co-regulate to the people that they spend the most time with in their life.
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: So how regulated your nervous system is is going to very much, and whoever else they spend time with right whether it's teachers or best friends or co-parents or you name it right is going to greatly influence how regulated their nervous system is.
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: And so we often think, as parents, when our kids are experiencing divorce, like, oh, it's the breakdown of the family or it's, you know, going to be a trauma for them to have gone through this.
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: And while that may be true, what I have seen when I've treated people in life yes, they were impacted by their parents' divorce, but more often, what they were impacted by as a result of the divorce was the fact that their parents weren't attuned to their emotional needs during the divorce, that their parents were distant, were cold, were anxious, were stressed out, were depressed, were generally not available for them to be able to process what they were experiencing to be able to process what they were experiencing, and so it's usually not the shift in the family dynamic that causes the lasting problems for kids.
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: It's how emotionally available or attuned or stressed out or regulated your nervous system is.
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: That indicates to a kid whether or not they're safe in their environment, and so one of the most powerful gifts you can give your kiddo during this season is to have a well-regulated nervous system and to work on creating a healthy attachment style with your kiddos.
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: It's hard to have a healthy attachment style with your kiddos if you don't yourself have a relatively healthy or secure attachment style.
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: Yourself have a relatively healthy or secure attachment style, and so that is one of the most valuable things you can be working on and providing for them along the way is to slow everything down, to find your breath, to find some ease, to create a sense of security and well-being inside of your own body-mind, so that you can not only role model that for them but embody it for them, because they're going to co-regulate to you.
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: So if you're feeling now, moms, we are really good at faking things for a period of time, right, we are really good at saying, no, honey, I'm okay, no, honey, you're okay, we're okay, we're going to be okay.
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: But when our cups run over, right, and then we lose it and we yell or we slam the door oh God, that was like my thing, right, that I would slam a door and ugh.
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: But we can only fake it for so long before the truth reveals itself, right, and the truth of our nervous system health, the truth of our mental or emotional wellness, the truth of our attachment style.
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: Eventually it catches up with us, right, and the whole time our kids are able to perceive whether or not we really have a sense of security or wellbeing in the world or in our relationships, and we can't fake that vibration with them.
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: So if we're telling them, no, honey, I'm fine, you're fine, everything's going to be fine, and that's not true, we're gaslighting them, right?
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: We're telling them something that they're going to sense in their energetic body is not in alignment, and so it's really important for us, as moms, to start getting honest with ourselves about how much work our nervous systems and our attachment styles need, because that's the greatest gift we can give them.
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: Which brings me into the importance of letting go of guilt.
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: If you are worried that your kids don't know the truth of what went on in your marriage and that they're going to blame you at some point, one of the most important things you can do is you can let go of the guilt and you can choose instead empowerment and solution.
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: You can say where God guides, god provides, and so I'm going to reach for solution and I'm going to work on this so that I can demonstrate that everything can be healed from.
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: And that is so true.
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: It's not something that popular culture teaches us.
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: Popular culture and marketers and corporations tend to prey on the fact that we feel victimized by the world around us and that we need to blame someone right and we need to cope with the fact that we have been harmed.
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: But the reality is, is that radical transformation is possible, that we don't need to be codependently reliant on the wellness industry?
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: The wellness industry is a multi-trillion dollar industry that wants to sell us a number of wellness tools that we then are going to be dependent on to maintain our nervous system, health and function.
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: But I will tell you, a truly healed, truly transformed individual who feels the peace that passes all understanding doesn't need to be dependent on a trillion dollar wellness industry.
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: You will truly be well and I assure you that that level of healing is available to you and the tools that we use in the program that we are currently enrolling will provide you with that path to whole body mind wellness.
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: But you cannot have true wellness and still be feeling bunches of mom guilt.
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: Mom guilt reinforces victim thinking and it's going to reinforce for your children that you are eligible for being blamed.
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: And the reality is is no human is getting out of this human thing without their own hero's journey, without their own struggles to overcome?
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: It doesn't matter how perfect you are, mama, you're not going to spare your kiddos from having struggles to struggle through, because struggle is how we mature, it's how we cultivate the wisdom that comes from lived experience.
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: So quit blaming other people for your current struggles.
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: Quit signing up for your kids to blame people for your current struggles.
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: Quit signing up for your kids to blame you for your current struggles.
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: Dedicate and commit yourself to releasing blaming yourself or feeling guilty for your kids' lived experience and instead sign up for being the most empowered version of yourself.
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: That's going to claim massive transformation.
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: That's going to claim a well regulated nervous system and attachment style so that you can hold space for them.
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: So many people we struggle to really hold space for people's pain these days, for their big feelings, their big experiences.
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: We don't have to fix it, change it, we don't have to suppress it.
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: We just need to hold space and share the good word right that there is transformation available.
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: And that's what your kiddos need for you.
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: They need you to hold space.
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: They need to see you healing your body, mind and know that it is possible and watch you role model that right by having your own healthy nervous system and secure attachment style.
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: Let's talk for a minute about Jill.
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: She is so on the track of healing.
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: It is so very impressive.
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: Just in the last couple of weeks she's shared with me how she has taken a vacation with her kiddos.
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: She doesn't have a lot of extra resources, right, but she's made strategic choices.
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: She has been doing the various things.
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: She's tried some flower essences, some castor oil.
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: She's taken some yoga classes.
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: She went to acupuncture this week and she said that that massively moved the needle for her.
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: She could feel grief and pain leaving her body during the acupuncture session and she said it was really, really powerful for her.
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: I love that because acupuncture is energy medicine, just like EFT tapping or homeopathy, and so those needles, when they go in those very strategic spots right, it helps release stuck energy that is so, so, so powerful.
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: So Jill has been thinking some negative thoughts about how she is too tired to be able to continue on as a single mom and overwhelmed, and that her kids have been abandoned by her ex and that maybe she needs to consider getting back together with him in order to give herself and her kids what they need.
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: And I want to just reinforce that, when we feel like going back in order to go forward, that that is not typically the truth.
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: Very, very, very, very rarely.
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: There's always exceptions to every rule, right, but very, very rarely.
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: Is going back to your ex, where everything was stagnant, the solution?
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: But very often, we sometimes can't see the forest from the trees and we can't see the path forward, right, because we got bogged down and stuck and burnt out.
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: And so, after talking to Jill for a period of time, right, she was able to see how the fact that she chose this partner in the first place is the very thing that she needs to heal from right Her own abandonment issues from her own childhood, how going back to this person who makes excuses for taking responsibility for his own children is not going to be the path forward.
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: That's going to be more of the same for his own children is not going to be the path forward.
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: That's going to be more of the same.
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: We were able to talk about how she has not been abandoned.
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: Her kids, maybe, were abandoned by their father, right, but you can't abandon something that can take care of itself, right, and you, love, can take care of yourself.
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: It doesn't feel natural to you right now.
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: As women who have just kind of lived codependently, I think that self-care still feels more of a burden than restorative.
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: But that's our work is to get back to a place where self-care feels restorative and not like a burden.
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: It feels good for us to take care of other people and it feels like a burden for us to take care of ourselves.
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: And then we get burnt out and then taking care of anyone feels like shit Pardon my language, right.
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: And so it is a process to get to the place to transform, to the place where we can, taking care of ourselves feels restorative and we can generate enough energy.
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: We're taking care of our kids and our loved ones feels good and we know where our limits are.
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: And then we go back to taking care of ourself.
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: That's restorative, so that we could take care of others right.
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: But you can't abandon someone who can take care of themselves.
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: So kids can be abandoned because they can't completely take care of themselves.
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: Kittens can be abandoned, houses can be abandoned, right, but adult women cannot be abandoned.
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: But what it can do when men are not standing in their masculine power and they're not showing up for their responsibilities?
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: It can feel like an echo of a time where perhaps we were mentally, emotionally or physically abandoned as children.
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: And so, just to kind of sum up this episode, I want you to think about what the energy was like in your childhood.
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: What was the vibe?
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: What did it feel like?
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: The energetic essence of it?
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: Did it feel confusing?
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: Did it feel chaotic?
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: Did it feel clear?
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: Did it feel stressful?
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: Did it feel disorganized?
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: Did it feel secure?
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: Did it feel insecure?
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: When you think about being young, in the totality of what it felt like, what did it feel like to be close to your mom?
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: What did it feel like to be close to your mom?
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: What did it feel like to be close to your dad.
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: What did it feel like to be in school?
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: What did it feel like to be around your grandparents on either side?
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: What did it feel like to be in those containers, in those spaces, those spaces I think most of us would say it felt stressful, it felt lonely, it felt in a mixed bag, right?
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: Certainly there were spaces, there were certain teachers that it felt wonderful to be with.
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: There were certain moments in time or places that felt wonderful.
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: But when you think through your childhood less about the content of the memories and more about the energy that it felt like to be close with these particular people or in these particular containers that's going to give you some clues about who you were co-regulating with as a child, right?
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: How did it feel to co-regulate with the caregivers that you had?
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: And that's going to give you a clue about the stuff that we need to rehab and we need to rewire for yourself so that you can hand your children greater gifts to do with your nervous system and your attachment style.
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: If you have questions about how you can join the program that we're currently enrolling, which aims to help you rewire your attachment system and help you have that really flexible nervous system, send me a DM or send me an email that says tell me more.
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: We are currently enrolling that program.
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: Your response to this program has been overwhelming.
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: When I have been on the phone with you it's been like oh, this is a no-brainer Dawn, and so it's very, very exciting to hear how you feel like this is something that you need and it's such a good fit for what you're looking for.
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: I love, love, love how we have been communicating in the DMs, jumping on calls, going back and forth in email.
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: I love that we have been sending out gifts for those that have submitted reviews, and the response, the feedback from the gifts that you've been receiving, the little gift packages has been overwhelming.
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: Also, it's just feeling so, so, so good to be in dialogue with you.
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: So thank you so much for just being here and for being so open and for being so willing to reach for healing even when it feels so hard.
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: I am insanely proud of you and just love the community we're building over here at Dear Divorce Diary.
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much.
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: Have a beautiful week, peace.
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: Dear Divorce Diary is a podcast by my coach, dawn.
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: You can find more at mycoachdawncom.