Latest / Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce / 113. Overcoming Resentment & Codependency Through Family Boundary Setting after Divorce

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113. Overcoming Resentment & Codependency Through Family Boundary Setting after Divorce · Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce

• 0:49
  Speaker 1: High love.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: We are back with our boundary series and this week we are talking about the seven boundaries in family relationships.
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: So think your parents, your in-laws, your children, your siblings, your aunties, like whomever right is your family, and also highlighting the relationship between healing your resentment and your boundaries.
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: High love.
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: 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.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: I'm your host, dawn Wiggins, a therapist, coach, integrative healer and divorcee.
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: Join me for a fresh approach to healing grief and building your confidence after divorce.
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: In today's episode, we are going to dig into your inner circle and your outer circle and how to renegotiate those based on healthy boundaries.
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: We are going to really look at the relationship between the resentment that you struggle to get rid of and healthy boundary setting, and we're going to dig into the seven types of boundaries you need to be looking at in your family relationships.
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: Let's do it All right to begin, let's start with and this thing that I'm going to ask you to do now is so much more powerful when you do it on paper, so just know that right.
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: I want you to think about your inner circle and your outer circle, right, like the people who you have closest to you, whom you confide in, and the people who you have more of like a surface level relationship, with whom you don't necessarily confide in, right, and so we tend to refer to this as like a just like kind of a binary right, like inner and outer, but for today's exercise, I want you to picture this like concentric circles, like I want you to think of like three or four rings, okay, and I want you to think about the idea of restructuring how you view your own internal circles.
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: And why Don is this important?
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: Well, because, based on where you have people in terms of access to your innermost world and various stages of that is going to dictate where and when you set boundaries or don't set boundaries, right.
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: So let's think about this In my inner, inner, inner, most circle right, we have, like basically, my relationship with God, my intuition, inner being and any healer I am working with whom complete intimacy, right, complete intimacy and transparency is essential, because that's the only way to get well right Is to be able to go so deep into a thing and so transparent about it that you can kind of root out any of the issues.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: Other people that I would consider in my like inner, inner, inner most circle would be like Brené Brown, for instance.
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: You know what I mean.
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: Like people, like mentors, people who just truly have gone so much further than me in a process that has such wisdom.
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: That's really what I'm talking about.
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: Right, like your inner circle, is your wise, wise, wise leaders in your life, and then out from there would have the people closest to me, like my husband, my best friends, my closest people right, and then out from there, probably for me right would be varying stages of friends and family and whatnot.
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: I think that a lot of times what happens with people is we keep including people in our inner most circles who really belong in our outer circles, and then we get very, very frustrated with how those conversations go.
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: And it's because we keep trying to have levels of conversation with people where it's just not appropriate right, where we are predictably going to get in return insecurity and judgment or defensiveness or right, just a lack of meaningful dialogue in a way that helps everyone kind of rise.
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: And so I want you to really make a list and you're going to need this list for other moments in this podcast episode anyways but make a list of the people who you have contact with the most in your life, the people who are like your people right, friends, family, loved ones.
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: And I want you to really fill out your rings three or four rings and really look at where you maybe have people too close to your centers, too close to your inner sanctum, your internal chamber, and where they need to be moved further out in this circular map, because from there now we can take a look at maybe where healthy boundary setting needs to happen.
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: But this is the first boundary.
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: Remember we talked about a couple episodes ago what is a boundary?
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: Well, our skin is a boundary, right.
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: It's literally a line of delineation that keeps my inside safe and intact.
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: Right, and keeps too many germs or corrosive materials outside of me, out of my body right.
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: It keeps the bleach out, it keeps the organs in, it's a protective barrier, right.
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: And so when we first reorganize where our loved ones go in our inner versus outer circle, that is right there, us creating a newer, fresher, healthier boundary without ever having to have a conversation with them, right, it's not like I'm sending out memos to these people and saying I would like you to know that I have demoted you to an exterior circle.
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: That's not it, right.
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: It's an internal recalibration, love, an internal recalibration that allows your psyche to say like, oh, I have been trying to hold this person in a space that they're just not built for today, right?
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: So that's the first thing.
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: The second thing is the idea.
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: I want you to look again at your list of loved ones and look at who on that list do you tend to have reoccurring resentments with.
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: And I want you to get really honest with yourself there.
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: Who are the people that just kind of, over and over again, feels like they're repeat offenders, that they just are constantly kind of doing things or saying things, and you have a resentment that just maybe you're able to purge it, but then it resurfaces and there's just some stuff going on there.
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: Now, maybe you've heard the phrase that resentments the expectations, expectations of other people are predetermined resentments, right?
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: That when we have expectations of people, that inevitably we are going to experience resentment because humans are fallible, we are flawed, we let each other down.
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: That's just how it goes, right.
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: But I actually think that oftentimes we have unrealistic expectations of people, right?
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: We want everyone to be able to fit in that inner sanctum in our circle and we want everyone to have that same wisdom and we want everyone to be just so edifying.
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: But the reality is is that we're human and some people have more tendency to judgment and defensiveness and these types of things right.
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: So I want you to think about those loved ones, those family members that you have repeated resentment, and I want you to really consider moving them further out in your circles.
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: And then I want you to notice where you may be suppressing or repressing your truth and not saying some things that need to be said, not setting some boundaries that need to be set, because resentment, love.
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: There is a very close relationship between resentment and boundary setting.
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: When we have chronic resentment chronic it likely means that we have suppressed some truth, some lived experience of ours.
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: That needs to be said out loud to somebody else.
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: And so in this episode, when we dig into the seven different types of boundaries, I want you to be looking at the relationship between how close you're letting people be, what expectations you've had of them, how much resentment you've been feeling and how much you've been suppressing inside of this relationship.
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: That really needs to be said.
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: The air needs to be cleared, a boundary needs to be set, because love.
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: We teach people how to treat us.
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: We teach people how to love us and oftentimes we are not loving ourselves well enough, we are not being honest enough with ourselves, we are not being transparent enough and we are not communicating effectively enough and therefore we are teaching people that however they are treating us or loving us is good enough.
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: And sometimes, most of the time, we have to be able to level up the ways in which we are loving and caring for ourselves and we have to be willing to ask for the same changes in our relationships with other people.
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: But that is not an overnight change.
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: That is a process Reteaching people.
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: How we now want to be treated, how we are now going to treat ourselves, is going to be a journey, and I think too often when our mental health is shaky, when our emotional health is shaky, we want quick change.
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: We want to be able to tell somebody hey, this is what I need from you and we want them to snap to it and we want it to be different overnight.
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: And I tell people in my practice, day in and day out, that when behavior changes overnight, it is not to be trusted.
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: True, sustainable behavior change.
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: Love takes time and it comes from a deeper level where you've had a true change of heart.
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: You've had a true change of mind as a result of exploring something, as a result of practicing something, as a result of transmuting something painful into something positive.
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: And so, as you are retraining yourself to love yourself well and you are asking or requesting other people to love you better so that that is not an overnight process and it is going to take faith and hope and practice and consistency over time, let's dig into the seven different types of boundaries that you might need to be practicing with your family.
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: This could be with anyone in your family, right?
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: It could be your kiddos, it could be your in-laws, it could be parents, right, like.
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: There's so many beautiful places where we could be looking at these things.
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: First one is a physical boundary.
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: Some of these might seem weird to think about with family, but I promise you, personally and professionally, you know between those two spaces there's not a lot.
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: You could tell me that I haven't heard before.
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: And I promise you all seven of these boundaries to apply even to family relationships.
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: So physical boundary, right, could be as simple as, like, you're not really a hugger and you got a family member who loves to hug.
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: Right For you to be saying more consistently I'm not up for a hug today.
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: Or vice versa.
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: Right, like, maybe, like I'm a hugger, so I wanna hug everybody.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: So a boundary.
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: I've had to learn to respect other people's boundaries when they don't love to be hugged right.
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: Another physical boundary could be about child safety.
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: Right, I've certainly had to set boundaries about booster seats when my daughter was younger.
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: We will use car seats or booster seats.
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: To a certain age, we will observe certain practices that create physical safety.
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: I've had to set a lot of boundaries around food for my daughter physical boundaries around food, because that is what has kept her safe, as she's had a massive amount of food allergies.
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: And so these are great examples of physical boundaries around touch, around space, around things that interact with our physical bodies, that create wellness.
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: How many times have we gone to dinner somewhere and it would just be so much easier to just go with the flow and eat what everybody else is eating, but it creates disharmony inside of my body or my loved one's body, and so, rather than just accept and suppress disharmony in my body, saying no, I'm going to make a healthy choice and I'm gonna make a request that we eat somewhere or we plan a meal that creates harmony in my body, right, that's a physical boundary, a sexual boundary.
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: This could be certainly to do with touch, right, if there's certain types of touch that make you feel uncomfortable, but also this could just be to do with sexual content, with what gets played on the TV while you're around, or if there's pornography sitting around or that's being exposed, or certain types of language about sexual acts that are just not appropriate to be talked about in certain spaces.
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: Right, an emotional boundary.
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: So first things first, I want to point out how recalibrating your inner and outer circle is, you making an emotional boundary right.
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: Remember last week how I talked about a lot of times when we have resentment and we have frustrating conversations, it's because you've been going to the hardware store to buy a gallon of milk.
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: When you renegotiate your and you recalibrate your internal versus external rings, you're actually creating healthier emotional boundaries for yourself.
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: By recognizing that if every time you're upset, you call that one family member and then when you get off the phone, you don't feel better, you feel worse, that's a really good sign that you need to recalibrate your emotional boundaries with that person, that they need to move to more of an outer circle status, an emotional boundary?
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: Is you really being able to recognize that when I go to this person with an issue, either in the relationship or in my own life, that the responses that I get are not intimate, non-judging, curious, right?
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: Curiosity is a wonderful sign of emotional health.
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: When we can be highly curious individuals rather than defensive, shutting down and criticizing, right?
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: Those two things feel very, very different and true curiosity is a sign of real emotional health, of healthy love and acceptance of a non-judging response, right?
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: So I want you to think about this list of loved ones that you have.
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: An emotional boundary is being able to say I am not going to engage this person because the response that I'm going to get is not going to be curious, it's going to be critical.
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: And so you know, there are certain spaces where it may be appropriate to say, hey, I don't wanna have this conversation with you because you are not going to be curious, you're going to be critical.
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: I probably could have articulated that better just now, but we don't always need to articulate these boundaries.
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: Sometimes we just need to adjust them for ourselves and just start acting differently, teaching them differently how to treat us and then letting that play out over time.
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: It is a tricky thing to know when you need to recalibrate your emotional boundaries and when you need to articulate the changes you're making to someone else.
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: I am going to own that I come with a bias that has a bit of a negative belief built into it.
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: Right, but I have a tendency to default to taking responsibility for relationship behavior.
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: So I have a tendency to look at myself first and look at where I need to address the board in my own eye before I pick out the spec in your eye.
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: I'm always going to default to what could I have done better before I'm addressing with you what you could have done better.
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: I do think that that is, in many ways, a healthy relationship behavior.
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: It's coming from a desire of me to certainly keep the peace, but also to just make sure I am fully taking responsibility for what I'm bringing to the table keeping my side of the street clean and then I tend to suppress the things that I truly want to request from you.
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: I tend to try to do it all on my own, and that's where it becomes pathological right, because a relationship love is between two people and I can't do all the relationship work on my own side of the street.
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: At some point I have to be willing to make my request and say, hey, are you willing to provide this in this relationship?
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: But we also are learning that a request is different than a boundary right.
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: Very often, when we do our own inner work very effectively, then we can go and make healthy requests, and a boundary doesn't necessarily always need to be verbalized.
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: There are nuances to all of this right and this is where sometimes we do need a guide or a healer to help us navigate through it, because we have blind spots.
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: We all have blind spots, all right.
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: Our next type of boundary is a spiritual boundary.
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: This one is really really tricky, especially where it comes to co-parenting right, because maybe you have your ex wants to raise your children with a different faith practice, or maybe they remarry and there's a different faith practice involved, or maybe there's very different ideas about faith and spirituality.
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: And I just wanna remind you, love, that religion doesn't own God.
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: God owns religion, right, and that God can be found in a lot of spaces and a lot of places and God can redeem anything, and so I don't want you to be fearful about your children exploring into other faith practices, and I want you to kind of think about spiritual boundaries and co-parenting as a place where you can really practice strengthening your own faith and strengthening your own intuition and your ability to hear God speak to you in your life, because I think that that is really the very, very important thing.
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: I think so often in setting all of these other types of boundaries, we need to have our own healthy spiritual boundaries where we are first and foremost, strengthening our own relationship with God so that we can have an embodied faith and not just an intellectual faith.
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: Love, because so often when our faith is intellectual, when we set boundaries, we do not have the healthy boundaries with self in order to maintain them, and so we cave because we don't have faith that God is going to redeem whatever is unfolding, and so we get wobbly and we get anxious and we back down and we opt for keeping the peace rather than creating harmony and creating alignment.
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: So I think very often spiritual boundaries are I am going to act in a way that creates spiritual harmony inside of me and I'm going to trust right.
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: A spiritual boundary would be being accountable for my own vibration.
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: That's how I.
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: I'd be very curious your view of spiritual boundaries, but I view it very much as I am accountable for my own vibration, I'm accountable for my own environment and I am accountable for nurturing my own spiritual well-being and not caving on those things because they're not popular or because they're not easily accepted or because, you know, I got all into my head and I got anxious and I caved into that.
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: All right, financial boundaries, financial boundaries and family is tricky right, because on the one hand, it is such a beautiful thing when we can give and receive generously, including financially, inside of families, right.
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: Very often families need help financially.
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: Very often I have been the one that needed financial help and so I think it's a very beautiful thing when you can really give and receive from an open heart financially.
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: But I think part of having healthy financial boundaries love is really being able to acknowledge when financial assistance is got strings attached to it and when financial assistance is being offered or received from a victim standpoint.
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: A victim standpoint says I cannot do this for myself, I need to be rescued, versus I want to do this for myself.
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: I'm going to live empowered.
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: I do need some assistance and I am grateful for that, but I am not going to rely on you alone to solve this problem for me.
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: I'm going to also step up and I'm going to engage and I'm going to do all the hard work to also be part of the solution.
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: And so I think oftentimes, financially, when we are wanting to rescue other people or we are wanting to be rescued, that whole process leads to resentment, and so it's really important to take a look at financially.
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: Is there this tendency to have strings attached or to kind of there's going to be some secret payback clause later, right, that you're going to pay for it a different way, that in a way that does not feel in alignment or does not feel like it came from an open heart?
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: And when might you be a bit in the poor me space?
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: Or when somebody else is in the poor me space, because then they're not going to take that gift.
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: You're not going to take that gift and put it to its best use, because that's what we want to do with gifts, right, we want to always give and receive generously, but we want to put those gifts to good use.
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: So that would be healthy.
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: Financial boundaries, time boundaries with family this one is so good because, again, you probably don't have a lot of spare time and oftentimes, when we are giving of our time, there's some sacrifice happening right, and sacrifice sacrificial giving of your time is a very normal, appropriate part of loving people.
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: Well, but if you are sacrificing your time or you are asking other people to sacrifice their time in a way where it is not also honoring their own health and wellbeing or it's not honoring love, your own health and wellbeing, then we need to relook at those time boundaries, right?
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: Because when you say yes too many times, a reckoning will come right.
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: There will be a reckoning.
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: And so while we want to ask for help when we need it and we want to offer help when it is asked, just check in with yourself Is there somewhere where you're out of balance?
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: And a good way to notice if you're out of balance with your time boundaries again is that resentment piece.
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: Resentment is such a good indicator of where our boundaries are out of whack.
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: And then our final boundary that we wanna look at is non-negotiable boundaries, and non-negotiable boundaries, again, are issues of safety and respect.
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: Now, we can't set respect boundaries with people who are it's a relational boundary right, a respect boundary is a relational boundary.
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: We can't set relational boundaries with people with whom we only have functional relationships, right.
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: So it's gonna be very difficult for you to set a respect boundary with your ex, right?
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: There are certainly our non-negotiable boundaries you would set with your ex, but for today's conversation around family, we want issues of safety.
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: This is going to do with physical safety, safety in your home, certainly drug and alcohol use, abuse related concerns, issues of aggression, hostility, violence.
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: We wanna have non-negotiable boundaries around all of those things and I want you to feel empowered to set and stand by those boundaries and ask for help if you need to, especially if it's issues around violence and that kind of thing.
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: Right that you'd be willing to ask for help from law enforcement and whoever it takes.
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: And then non-negotiable boundaries around respect, and those are some of the trickiest to set, I think, when it comes to family, because when you set a boundary with someone who tends to be disrespectful, they're not gonna respond favorably at first and that is gonna feel very, very scary for you.
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: And so these boundaries are certainly boundaries where we wanna make sure we have really gone through the boundary checklist that I provided and we wanna make sure we've done all of our inner work before we're setting the boundary.
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: We wanna make sure we have our support system in place.
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: We wanna make sure that we have really moved through it in a way where we know that what I'm setting I can then enforce, and that I have a support system in place to help me stand strong when I am teaching you a new way to treat me, because this work is hard, it shakes our old way of doing things.
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: It is working against the brain map that we have literally love.
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: You have synaptic pathways in your brain that are mapped in a particular direction and I want you to think about synaptic pathways in your brain as like a jungle, like all of these limbs and leaves and trunks of trees, and they're interconnected and they're all woven together and it's thick love.
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: And when we are creating new synaptic pathways and we are letting old synaptic pathways die at first, it is a lot of effort and it is very uncomfortable.
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: Think about if you were moving through a thick, thick, dense forest, what it would take to literally cut down an old pathway and create a new one.
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: It's hard work and so you are not expected to do all of that hard work on your own.
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: We do not heal in a vacuum, love.
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: We cannot heal in isolation.
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: You are not expected to remap your brain in isolation.
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: And so this is my cue to you, my permission to you that love where you are feeling resentment and where you are feeling burnt out.
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: It is time to really recalibrate the boundaries and to really ask for extra help in setting new, healthy boundaries.
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: And know that when you get pushback, love that pushback isn't necessarily because you did it wrong.
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: It's because we teach people how to treat us, and when we tell them that the old way is not the new way, there is resistance.
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: Think about any time you've tried something new, your own resistance that pops up right.
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: Resistance is kind of how humans respond to change, how humans respond to uncertainty.
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: But know that the more you communicate, the more you articulate what you need, the easier it is for people to adjust to the new way, because uncertainty feels so uncomfortable for all of us.
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: So when you're setting new boundaries, as you've clarified them, know that the more you can communicate even though you're gonna wanna retreat right Cause it's so uncomfortable the more you can communicate, the easier it is for people to know where they stand and the easier it is for people to lean in, and with that we have our getting unstuck segment, where you, one of our listeners, dm'd me on the gram to say Dawn, this is the thing I'm struggling with this week.
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: Could you please help me get unstuck?
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: If you have not submitted to getting unstuck yet, please, please, please.
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: What are you waiting for?
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: By sending me your current stuck point, right, you are not only helping yourself, but you are helping every single woman who's tuned in here.
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: You are struggling with it, love, I promise with you, so many other women are struggling with it too, and so if you have not yet reached out to me for getting unstuck and it's, it's anonymous, right.
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: I changed the names to protect the innocent, so send me a DM today.
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: My Instagram handle is at Dawn Wiggins, all right.
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: Today, melissa writes in and she says Dawn, I am newly divorced.
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: He was cheating, I let him back and then he continued cheating.
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: It's over now, but I am 41 years old and I am terrified.
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: No one is going to ever love me again.
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: I know they say it gets better with time, but I am just at a loss right now and feeling very, very overwhelmed at the moment.
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: Melissa, love, you are my favorite woman to love on because I relate to your story.
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: So so so much for anyone who's been around a while.
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: You've heard me tell the story that I was in in this post-divorce world.
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: I was had a sponsor in Al-Anon and I was really like having kind of a crisis of faith and rules, having kind of a crisis of love, right, and I would ask anyone who is willing to have the meaningful conversation with me do you really believe in love?
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: Do you really believe in the unconditional nature of love that that exists?
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: Do you know anybody who's happily married and has a healthy relationship?
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: Right, I was like searching for that and, of course, I was in such a low-vibes state that a lot of what I was attracting and a lot of what was around me right was people who had failed relationships and were not happily married, and that was the lens through which I saw the world.
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: That was how my reticular activating system was primed at the time was to see failed love, and so I had to really do the work to shift that.
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: But so, melissa, let's dig into.
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: I am 41 and I am terrified that no one will ever love me again.
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: Okay, also at that time my therapist said to me her name was Gerda.
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: Oh, gerda, we love you.
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: She said, dawn, you are too worried with being chosen.
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: You must learn that you get to choose.
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: And at the time when she said that, I knew she was saying something very important, but I couldn't feel it right.
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: I couldn't, I did not feel I could not embody the idea that I got to choose.
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: I only felt like I had to be chosen.
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: And, melissa, I think that's what you're going through.
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: I think it is lost on you that you get to choose, because you are so desperate love to be chosen.
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: And so what has to happen, the transition and the transformation that has to happen is you have to make a concrete, committed choice that you are going to date yourself until you love yourself, because it is not until then.
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: You know this just fricking annoying thing that people say about you have to love yourself first.
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: It is so annoying when people say that and you're in the spot where you are.
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: Melissa, I hated it when people said you have to love yourself, because I didn't get it, and I didn't necessarily think I didn't love myself, but I knew that.
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: I only believed that I could be chosen, not that I could choose, which was a very good sign that I did not know how to love myself.
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: The process of learning to love yourself has to involve digging deep into understanding why you don't.
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: Why do you feel like you can only be chosen and you cannot choose?
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: Why do you not have the confidence to know that you absolutely can be loved?
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: Well, what are the lived experiences that you've had?
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: Of course, your ex-cheating is certainly one of them, but I guarantee you it is not the first and it's probably not even the worst.
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: I know that is like sacrilege what I just said, because your ex-cheating has actually devastated you.
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: It has destroyed everything.
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: It has stolen so much from you at this season in life.
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: But just as a trauma-informed therapist, I know that it is probably not the worst thing you've experienced, because there are things that got into your brain map so early in your life love, that betrayal, became your brain map, and so until you root out those kind of core memories and core experiences that led you to believe that you are not good enough, that you are not worth it, that it's your fault, that you can't trust anyone, that you can't get what you want, and you shift those negative beliefs to positive ones as a result of processing those traumas.
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: Now, what makes it so hard to process those traumas is.
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: Dissociation is a key inborn tool that we have at our disposal so that we don't have to walk around feeling all those feelings all the time.
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: And so dissociation sometimes keeps those key core experiences that created that brain map locked up so that you know they're like a secret, even from you.
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: And so, melissa Love, it's time to start getting really curious about those early experiences and it's time to start transmuting those because and then dating yourself and learning to love yourself.
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: Well, right, which is going to feel so, so, so uncomfortable To anyone who listened to episode 100, which is where producer Joy and I interviewed our husband so that they could answer questions that your ex won't answer.
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: You know, you heard the story of how my current husband, brian, attended my first wedding, how he loved me from the beginning.
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: He's an avoidant attacher and he was incredibly emotionally immature, so he wasn't exactly an ideal partner.
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: But I will tell you he loved me from the beginning and I couldn't tolerate that kind of love.
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: I couldn't tolerate that kind of love, and so I pushed it away.
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: So truly feeling loved and accepted feels deeply uncomfortable to folks who have had betrayal as a brain map.
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: You'll be very gentle with your process.
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: Know that it's probably going to take two to three years of consistent, dedicated work before you really start to get the hang of loving yourself while and being able to choose instead of being chosen.
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: But it is so, so, so worth it, melissa.
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: I love you so much.
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: Peace, dear Divorce Diary is a podcast by my Coach Dawn.
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: You can find more at MyCoachDawncom.