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185. Regret Won’t Save You: The Divorce Forgiveness Shift That Finally Sets You Free · Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce

• 0:49
  Speaker 1: What if your big, big feelings of regret and your difficulty finding forgiveness for yourself or your ex are actually a mask that you're wearing to avoid dealing with something else?
• 1:02
  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.
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: I'm your host, dawn Wiggins, a therapist, coach, integrative healer and divorcee.
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: Join me for a fresh approach to healing grief and building your confidence after divorce.
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: Shout out to one of our amazing premium subscribers, lisa.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: Hey, lisa, did you know that we're preparing to release an interview episode all about sex and dating after divorce?
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: It's juicy.
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: I'd be so curious to know if that is an episode you are eager to listen to or not, and if you have a request for a premium episode, what would it be?
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: Hit me up, lisa, love you so much.
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: In today's episode on regret and forgiveness, we're going to dig into these three concepts on regret and forgiveness, we're going to dig into these three concepts the idea that he took something from you that you cannot get back, the avoidance and tools to fully face your feelings and fears, and also unpacking the idea that maybe we don't actually heal.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: Maybe what we do is just let go.
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: So in talking with producer Joy about regret today, we were kind of, you know, exchanging stories about the moments in time we have felt the most regret and why those moments were so hard to move through and kind of what they meant for us.
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: You know, and I think one of the things we stumbled across first is that we both felt regret around moments in time where we didn't feel strong enough to confront or face with or deal with or set boundaries with something right.
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: We didn't feel strong enough to take action, and so we just sort of went small or avoided and sort of delayed or deferred the consequence right of not facing the thing.
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: And so is that ironic that we both had similar experiences of regret.
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: Is that your experience of regret, I wonder.
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: But I think that embedded in there is the acknowledgement that there are lots of times in life where we're not strong enough to confront or face the issue that's in front of us.
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: I think that's really normal, I think that's really common, I think, especially as younger adults.
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: Of course, we weren't strong enough to face a lot of things, or at least we thought we weren't right.
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: But the thing that we hate about that is that oftentimes we get stronger by going through the thing and I think that's sort of the illusion that gets shaken up when we go through crisis, especially divorce is that eventually, things get harder and harder and harder until the point that it's like, well, we don't have much of a choice other than to get stronger so that we can confront the thing.
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: And I certainly know that that was my story and I certainly know that that was Producer Joy's story, and so I think that that kind of concept of, well, I wasn't strong enough and I avoided getting stronger in the meantime and I chose avoidance instead, is like, ooh, right, there we can see massive amounts of disempowerment, right, and this lack of sort of belief in self or, yeah, right, lack of belief in self, lack of personal power, misalignment, lack of faith, like so many things, right, but just like energy leakage everywhere.
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: And so when I try to pick something heavy up at the gym and I'm either literally not strong enough or my form sucks, right, it's going to be extra hard and I'm going to think I can't, you know, and that's why I have a trainer help me fix my form.
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: So the reality is that perhaps regret is something that you feel because you haven't wanted to face your energy leakage or your lack of strength in a moment in time.
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: And now here we are, you're facing it, and I know you are because you're here listening to me talk about this right now, right?
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: So the first big concept that I think we have to look at is do you struggle with feeling like he took something from you that you can't get back?
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: And I think that piece right there fuels regret and it fuels unforgiveness, that if there's something you can never get back like man, I think there's a level of bitterness that goes with that thought or that belief that is really really hard to shake.
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: And I've been confronting this idea in my own life so much.
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: Not with my ex-husband dear Lord, have mercy, no but a different person in my life, right, this idea, that is it true?
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: And I was listening to Abraham Hicks the other day and she made me so mad for a moment because she directly called this thing out and I was like, ooh, it's spicy today in the law of attraction land, but is it true that any person could take from us?
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: Is it true that we could lose something and that we can't get back?
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: Is that even true?
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: And I think that that takes a huge amount of sort of exploration right, because I believe that we are hardwired for love and belonging.
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: I believe that our intelligent divine creator means for us to feel happy, joyous and free.
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: There are so many times in the Bible that it says fear not, you know, and where we are promised beautiful, beautiful things.
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: And I think so often we are just running our lives from these places of scarcity and lack, like there is something I cannot get back and it's not true.
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: So back to the person in my life, right where I've been really doing this work inside of me.
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: I think what has fueled my resentment and power struggle there with this other person is the idea that they have something that only they can give me, that nobody else can give me, and I've really been confronting that belief Like, sit with that for a moment, think about how many people in your life you perceive that only they can give you that thing.
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: I think we feel that about our kids.
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: I think we feel that about our spouses.
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: I think we feel that about our friends, I think our parents, I think that we have gotten that in us about our skincare consultants and our Botox injectors right, like I can only get this certain feeling from youthfulness or I think we also have put this on our government like I can only get a certain sense of security from our government, right?
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: And so I want you to look around at the places in life where you're feeling like somebody took something from you that you can't get back, and I want you to confront that negative belief, because as long as you are maintaining that negative belief, love, you're going to be hanging out in regret and unforgiveness for a good long while.
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: I believe that we were designed in a way the body is designed to heal itself, and that means the mind is designed to heal itself.
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: Right, we are designed to release pain and to live abundantly, and that means changing our beliefs, and it is in the shedding of the old belief and developing the new one that we get stronger.
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: It's going to freaking challenge you to shift that belief that he took something from me that you can't get back.
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: And listen, when I got divorced, I was 30 something and diagnosed infertile with chronic illness.
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: Like, I certainly was eligible for that belief, right, that becoming a mom was going to be a questionable possibility for me.
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: And so here we are.
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: Right, I really believe that, if you can think it, it is possible, but you have to find alignment and you have to release the negative beliefs that are holding you back.
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: The second thing I want to unpack with you today is when I sit with clients and they're telling me about their fears and their pain and their resentment, really their negative beliefs about themselves, right, what happens often in a therapy session or a coaching session is this process of me holding space for you to fully face what you're feeling and feel it so completely that, all of a sudden, all the space that was taken up by your pain is available, it's free.
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: All of a sudden, it's like there was all this pain in your balloon of your body, mind, and by fully feeling into it and just feeling it with me, that is gone and what's left is space and with that space, all of a sudden, you can reach for something that is clear, that is available.
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: It's like there's room to move or to add in a new helpful thought, or to work towards a goal or to see something you didn't see before because the room was so full of clutter, right, like.
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: Imagine you're like in a room where someone was hoarding and you're like I can't find this thing that I need.
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: But if you took all the hoarded junk out, all of a sudden, the thing you needed it would be right there.
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: And that's what happens when we fully face our fears and we fully feel our feelings is, all of a sudden, the room of our body, mind, is spacious and there's all this capacity and we can see the things that we need to see in order to move forward.
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: And so I want you to ask yourself have you fully faced some of your feelings and fears?
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: And I think that links back to the thing that you're afraid that he took from you, that you can't get back.
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: And I heard this quote once, and I don't know where I heard it.
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: Ah, I heard it on my husband's whiteboard.
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: I don't know where I heard it.
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: Ah, I heard it on my husband's whiteboard, I don't know where he heard it.
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: It says believe in your future more than your past.
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: And I want you to be honest with yourself right now.
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: Do you today, believe in your future more than your past?
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: If you do, great, you are on the right track, love, you are getting there right, but there's something about your current capacity that needs to be strengthened, and I think.
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: The more fully you can face your fears about your future, the more you can feel into it not in an intellectual way, in an embodied way the more you can release, release release the emotion of fear, the more you will be able to move past regret and reach for forgiveness.
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: I think we're so afraid of our emotions these days and listen, I don't think we're necessarily meant to feel them all by ourselves.
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: There's a reason that it's easier for my clients to feel those feelings so deeply when we're in the room together.
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: Right, there's something about someone holding space for us where we're afraid we're going to float away down the river and careen over the edge of the waterfall and never come back again.
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: Right, there's something to somebody grounding that space for us.
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: So when it feels like I might get lost in the forest of emotion, someone can guide me back.
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: That's right.
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: Right, but who are the people in your life that you can go there with?
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: And do you feel ashamed when you feel that fully in front of other people?
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: So many people I know are afraid of ugly crying in front of someone else, and I think that's the key.
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: Right there, though, right Is we got to get to the place where we're ugly crying, where we're not repressing our anger, where we're screaming, we're raging, we're crying, we're letting it out and with it we'll go regret and we'll go unforgiveness, and suddenly there will be space.
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: There's this quote from Paulo Coelho, who wrote the Alchemist, and the Alchemist is a beautiful, beautiful kind of poetic work, right where it talks about the process of alchemizing pain.
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: And the quote is sometimes the heart needs time to accept what the mind already knows, and I think that's what we're talking about here with regret.
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: I think regret is like grief light, right, it's like the room before the grief room.
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: Regret and unforgiveness are like I am not ready to fully let go yet I'm not really ready to fully accept from a heart level what my mind already knows, that I have to let go.
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: But I haven't found sort of the strength to face it, the strength to let it go.
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: And it's interesting, you know, we have a whole episode where we talk about grief and we focus on the body, because sometimes we literally need to strengthen our vital force or strengthen our heart center.
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: Right, there are some supplements that I recommend sometimes for people who are stuck in grief, because sometimes we literally need to strengthen our vital force in order to step more fully into that grief process.
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: And so if that's something that resonates with you, please don't hesitate to reach out.
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: Sometimes it's like you may mean to be facing your fears and to be letting go, and you may just feel like something is missing, like something's off, like there's not enough resource to go there, and I want to reinforce for you that that's real.
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: That's true that alchemizing your pain, it requires resource and energy and cellular health and it requires capacity.
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: And so if you know these things and you're just struggling to complete them, like you're not crazy, right Something, you may need an additional ingredient, but the heart sometimes it needs time to accept, and as long as you feel yourself pushing forward, little by slow, that's okay.
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: You will get there.
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: You will find that alignment, but definitely give yourself the resources to strengthen your vital force.
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: Drink an extra glass of water, eat an extra portion of protein, take a 10-minute nap, give yourself some cell salts, right, like the things that will help strengthen your vital force a little bit over time.
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: The third thing I wanted to touch base on today is do we actually heal or do we just let go?
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: And it's an interesting idea that has been coming up a lot in my algorithm and it's an interesting idea that in order to release regret and to find forgiveness both for yourself and your ex, right, and I think that it's easier to say that the ex is harder to forgive, and I think it depends.
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: I've also been talking a lot about infidelity lately and I think sometimes men get a bad rap as the ones who cheat, but women cheat too, and I think maybe it just sort of depends on how your story unfolded, whether or not you're, you know, struggling to forgive both yourself and or your ex.
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: But is there anything to heal from with regards to the choices you've made, the choices your ex has made, when it comes to regret and forgiveness, or is it really just a process of letting go?
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: And it's interesting when I think about a wound right, like if I fall and I scrape my knee, like is the body just letting go as it's healing or does it need to heal?
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: Like, what are we thinking of when we're thinking of healing?
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: And I think that sometimes cells really do have to repair themselves, and those could be cells all over the body, they could be brain cells, they could be heart cells, they could be sacral cells right, cells in your whole pelvic area.
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: They could be gosh nervous system cells.
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: Sometimes cells really do need to detoxify and repair themselves.
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: But what, but, but?
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: Beyond that cellular healing, what are we healing?
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: Nothing, we're letting go.
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: We're letting go of negative beliefs.
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: That's really it right.
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: What is bitterness and regret and unforgiveness other than a negative belief about myself, the people around me and life?
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: Negative beliefs that perpetuate regret and unforgiveness are things like I can't get what I want, I don't matter, I can't trust, I'm not safe, I can't express myself, I can't stand it.
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: Those are all negative beliefs that perpetuate regret and unforgiveness.
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: But if I told you beyond a shadow of a doubt that you could get what you want and you are good enough and you are worth it and you can learn how to trust and all of these things are possible, and you believe that with your whole heart, do you think you would still spend time being bitter?
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: I don't think so.
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: I don't think so.
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: And so when we let go of all of that self-doubt, all of that doubt in a higher power, all of a sudden our cells can detoxify themselves and repair.
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: There's nothing to quote, unquote heal in the mind other than replacing negative beliefs with positive ones and then the consequences in the body of all those negative beliefs can start to repair themselves at a cellular level.
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: You know, in church this Sunday one of the pastors on the teaching team was talking about prayer and he walked us through doing prayer in church, which was pretty cool.
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: I had never been in a church service like that before.
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: Was pretty cool.
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: I had never been in a church service like that before.
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: And he talked about why we sometimes stop praying for things and it's because a prayer went either unanswered or we got the answer we didn't want.
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: Or maybe you prayed and prayed and prayed for this marriage to be redeemed and it wasn't.
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: And I think the important thing to understand there doesn't mean you can't get what you want.
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: I think it's important to understand that sometimes you are shopping at the hardware store for a gallon of milk, and typically they do not sell gallons of milk at the hardware store.
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: They sell hammers and nails.
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: And so sometimes we have to accept back to Paulo Coelho we have to accept that we know we've been shopping in the wrong store for the wrong thing and it's easy to say, well, I guess I just can't have what I want or I guess there's something wrong with me.
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: Rather than saying what I have been reaching for, I have not been strong enough to receive yet.
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: I have not been in alignment enough to receive yet, and I have had to go through a process of conditioning my mind, my beliefs and my faith in order to actually receive these things.
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: And so, love, when you find yourself looping around unforgiveness and regret, I just want you to know you're sort of in the antechamber of grief and that it's time to take your foot off the brake.
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: You know when you're at the top of that roller coaster and it's about to go down, oh, you just felt it in your body just now, didn't you?
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: And you would give anything for a brake pedal at the top, but you don't have control because somebody else is in charge of that thing.
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: That is the whole deal.
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: You have got your foot on the brake of your grief process.
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: You are more invested in your past than you are in your future, and it is time to take your foot off the brake and careen into the emotions of grief.
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: I'm not telling you to do that on your own by any stretch right.
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: Find a friend to ugly cry with, make space for what is possible in your life and make a decision.
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: Write it on your mirror, right?
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: Y'all know what a fan I am of mirror messages.
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: Write it on your mirror, I believe.
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: I now believe in my future more than my past, and I am getting stronger every day.
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: I love you so much.
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: Peace, dear Divorce Diary is a podcast by my coach Dawn.
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: You can find more at mycoachdawncom.