Latest / Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce / 184. Divorce Grief: Letting Go of the Life You Imagined & the Loss of “What Could Have Been”

Transcript

184. Divorce Grief: Letting Go of the Life You Imagined & the Loss of “What Could Have Been” · Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce

• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Do you know how to take the dream or vision of the life that you had imagined with your ex and your children?
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: Do you know how to take your what could have been and turn it into your future reality?
• 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.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: I'm your host, dawn Wiggins, a therapist, coach, integrative healer and divorcee.
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: Join me for a fresh approach to healing grief and building your confidence after divorce force.
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: I want to take a moment to shout out Kim.
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: She is one of our premium subscribers and actually Kim and I text a good bitch.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: She keeps me posted on where she's struggling and what's going on and maybe asks for a recommendation from time to time, and I absolutely love texting and chatting with Kim.
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: Also, when you become a premium subscriber, you have to pick a little emoji to represent you and Kim.
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: She doesn't know this, but picked the same my little signature emoji, the little like golden sparkle emoji.
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: Anyways, kim, thank you so much for being a subscriber and for being, for including me in your healing journey.
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: I love, love, love, being a part of your life and getting to know you and holding space for you.
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: In today's episode, we are going to explore whether or not you are actually grieving and if you have a grieving team, ooh, what is that?
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: We are going to talk about one of the top things that holds us back from being able to process the loss of what could have been and what holds us back from continuing to dream and to actually create our dreams, and we're going to check out whether or not you are doing enough dreaming or if you've forgotten how.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: Okay, first things first in tackling this, how do you actually freaking let go of the life you imagined and grieve what could have been is well, are you actually grieving?
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: And that may sound like a silly question, but I do think that so many of us get hung up in sort of the stages of grief.
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: Right, we know grief is not linear and we know that it has different kind of faces or stages.
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: I think a lot of us sort of hop off the grief process without realizing it.
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: You know, you've heard me talk this year already about bitterness or resentment.
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: We get sort of hung up in these offshoots of grief that are really just sort of grief avoidance, right.
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: So I want you to check in with yourself today.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: Are you actually doing grieving?
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: Or are you hanging out in a hallway called grief avoidance where you think a lot about grieving and you just sort of stay numbish slash, angryish slash I don't know what you would call that where you aren't going through the process of being in your pain from like a somatic perspective?
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: Right, because grief is a pretty surrendered process.
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: It's a pretty like I have to create space to grieve because I'm probably going to cry a lot and a lot of people tell me that if I go there Dawn, I'm afraid I'm going to get depressed and I'm never going to come out.
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: And you know it's sort of heavy and there's a lot that's in there that you're carrying, that has to come out, that you have to feel as it passes through you, and I think a lot of us would rather avoid that, right?
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: You me, yeah.
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: And so grieving means creating the space to do so.
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: It means putting down your phone and the Netflix and the wine and the coffee and the busyness and the you know work and the responsibilities and the things and like creating space for grieving.
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: And when we don't do that, life manages to do it for us very often and in less opportune times.
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: And so there's something to be said for checking in with yourself, like, hey, could I be more intentionally allowing these feelings to move through and sitting not just sitting in them, right, but processing them and you know we love to talk about processing feelings around here.
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: You can use a homeopathic remedy.
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: You could use a plastic baseball bat to process your grief.
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: You could, you know, use bilateral stimulation, right, the butterfly tap or EFT to process your grief.
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: You could just sit in the shower floor and cry your eyes out there, right, but you'd have to give yourself permission and space to feel.
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: And I think that that's something that we avoid a lot as a society today, and we avoid it because we think we don't have the energy and we don't have the capacity, and so we tell ourselves like I'll do it tomorrow because it's too hard to grieve today.
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: But the more we do that, the more we suffer.
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: And there's something to be said for just needing to sort of be accountable for moving our process forward.
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: And I know that one of the things that made it abundantly easier for me to grieve everything to do with the life that I imagined and what could have been was I was working a program in Al-Anon, right.
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: I got a sponsor and I worked through the steps and here's what I found so, so, so valuable about that.
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: And so you could take what I experienced and kind of see like how could I adapt that for my life, right?
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: But first of all, going to Al-Anon and grieving my marriage felt like team grieving and that for some reason made it seem a lot easier, Like it was like I had a team of people to do it with that I could see consistently at meetings, but we would get together after meetings for a meal or I would pop over to somebody's house and climb in bed with them and cry or get a hug, right.
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: It was like there was this automatic community for me to grieve in and with people who were also doing it, and it wasn't just like such people who were also doing it and it wasn't just like such.
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: It wasn't just like an endless spiral of grief, meaning that the program has structure to it.
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: It has steps and principles that mean that we're not allowed to just sit and wallow in our grief.
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: That's not working a program or working through a grief process.
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: It was like there was this forward momentum, but with a team process.
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: It was like there was this forward momentum, but with a team, and so I really love that.
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: I think that's what we aim to do in our coaching program called A Different D Word right, where we have women that are in a 12 month process, a year long process of moving through and manifesting a new life.
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: It's like team grieving is how I envision it, and you know there was something else about Al-Anon that made grieving feel a little safer, and that was even just in the first two steps.
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: So the first step is we admitted we were powerless and that our lives had become unmanageable, and I know that that was a key piece for me.
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: Really getting well was like I sort of learned through the process of getting divorced that I had been effing some shiz up in my life, that there were things in my life that were massively out of alignment, and that was sort of the first moment that I couldn't avoid that.
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: Right, I am sort of used to being an academic overachiever and a career overachiever and I really like how it feels to overachieve, and so this sort of relationship breakdown was like I am no longer overachiever and a career overachiever and I really like how it feels to overachieve and so this sort of relationship breakdown was like I am no longer overachieving and I cannot deny or avoid that.
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: So there are some things here that I need to look at and be accountable for.
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: And by having the steps sort of acknowledge that and say like, hey, there's a whole group of people here who also you know lives who had become unmanageable, and so that was very shame reducing for me.
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: And then step two is came to believe that a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity.
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: And that felt less alone for me, right, like, oh, came to believe that a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity, something about me not having to restore myself to sanity.
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: And I also remember saying to my therapist at the time well, thank God, you're in charge of my life now.
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: So it looks like, right there I got great relief from feeling like I had leadership in my life.
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: That didn't have to come from me, because I didn't feel capable of leading myself in that space.
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: And so obviously I was leading myself because I took myself to meetings and I took myself to therapy and I took myself to these places where I did the efforting of getting better, like yoga and you know, whatever all the steps that I was taking.
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: So I was providing leadership, but something about feeling like I had other oversight going on in my life, right, surrendering that really, really, really helped me.
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: So are you grieving on a team and does your team have a leader that can sort of take some of this off your plate?
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: Right, because I feel like.
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: You know, I had someone text me last week, someone that I see one-on-one and you know she was struggling with something with her kiddos and she was like I don't even know who to go to this thing about and it feels so big and so overwhelming and I just need some guidance.
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: I don't know what my next steps are, and I immediately knew some really powerful next steps.
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, do you have someone you can reach out to when you're in those stuck spots to say I am stuck and I need some guidance, right?
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: So are you actually grieving and do you have a grieving team?
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: That's the first thing we're chatting about today.
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: Now the next thing is the thing that often blocks us from being able to let go of the life we imagined and grieve the loss of what could have been is we want it to be easier.
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: We want to take the path of least resistance always.
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: We want to take the path of least resistance always, and that often equates to not having to do the hard work of grieving or not having to do the hard work of letting go or not having to do the hard work of building a new dream.
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: And I think that in the planning of this episode and in the noodling it out with Producer Joy, it's really this theme of accountability came up, and it was.
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: It was, it was fun.
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: Um, like so often, I think we dream dreams.
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: I relate to this very much dream dreams, but then wanting somebody else to be accountable for the manifestation of said dream.
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: So what the F do I mean by that?
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: Well, when I was young, I dreamed a lot of dreams about my future and what it was going to look like.
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: But I wanted my marriage to do a lot of that manifesting for me.
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: I wanted my ex to do a lot of that provision for me, right?
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: And so producer Joy and I were chatting about sort of us being the generation of women who were raised by the Disney fantasy situation where, like, we want a Prince Charming to do the work, like we sort of feel a little Cinderella-y.
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: Whether we felt Cinderella-y I, you know, I know I did in my childhood, right, and wanting like to have some freaking birds and a prince help, you know.
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: And wanting to be rescued and not wanting to be accountable for me being the one that fulfills the dreams.
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: And I think you know, I think accountability might feel easier if I felt competent and qualified.
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: But there's an illusion in all of there.
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: Right, like love, you are completely competent and completely qualified to manifest your own dreams.
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: And when it feels overwhelming, I would like to suggest that you have that higher power that can restore you to sanity.
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: You have that higher power advocating for you on your behalf behind the scenes at all times.
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: You have that higher power that wants to help you step into your purpose and lead a fulfilled life.
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: You have that higher power who is constantly like, showing up for you and me.
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: But then we have to sometimes be willing to do the step work right.
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: We have to put the reps in.
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: We have to be willing to pick up heavy things and put them back down again.
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: Right, putting in the reps.
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: And that means personal accountability and effort.
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: Oftentimes it often means like just sort of saying like okay, rather than doing this dopamine thing, like scrolling or pouring a drink.
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: I'm going to do this serotonin thing, which means getting outside and efforting or choosing the thing that's going to grow me than the thing that's going to numb me.
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: Right, that's the effort, right there, and I think that we've grown more and more uncomfortable with that in our modern life, because modern living has told us that we can have whatever we want whenever we want it.
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: I was joking yesterday that you know, mcdonald's now has its own delivery apparatus, right, and I think that's sort of the whole thing.
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: Like you can get McDonald's delivered, but just because you can do a thing, does that mean it's a good idea?
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: No, so I just think that that's the culture we've grown accustomed to, right, is there are so many expectations of us and so many ways that we numb out and because we feel so burnt out and overwhelmed.
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: But sometimes we just have to make the hard choices of manifesting our own dreams, right, and so then I want to know, I want to ask you the next thing I want to ask you is are you still dreaming, and are you dreaming your own dream?
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: You know, that's the other thing that sort of came up as part of this conversation, like when I was younger, like pre-30, I was dreaming, but I wanted my ex-husband to like sort of fulfill my dreams.
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: And then, even in this next marriage, there have been lots of times and Producer Joy will attest to this where I have sort of had full-blown brat attacks about my husband not manifesting my dreams fast enough.
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: And I think that it's once we really get accountable for, like saying I'm going to dream my own dreams and I'm going to be accountable for manifesting my dreams, where everything sort of changes and opens up.
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: And I think that's key, right?
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: So, a, are you still dreaming?
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: And B, are you dreaming on your behalf?
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: Are you dreaming primarily on your kid's behalf?
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: Are you dreaming like that?
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: A new relationship will satisfy you, you know?
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: So I think that, going back to what I said in the very, very beginning of the episode, do you know how to take the life you imagined?
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: Do you know how to take the dream of what could have been, validate it and nurture it?
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: Meaning, you had that dream for a reason right?
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: This dream with your ex and your children, or whatever?
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: You had a dream.
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: What were the elements of it that felt so good to you?
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: What felt good about that dream?
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: Was it connection?
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: Was it belonging?
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: Was it community?
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: Was it purposeful?
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: Did it feel warm and gooey and did it feel safe in your dream, right?
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: Obviously it didn't feel like all these things, otherwise it would be right.
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: But what were the elements of the dream that mattered to you so much?
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: I need you to write those things down.
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: I imagine it felt like commitment and security and belonging and sort of adventure, right?
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: Those are probably some of the most delicious elements of a dream, something that feels like belonging, feels purposeful, feels adventurous.
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: And so it's time love to, yes, make all the things we talked about today like carve out space to actually grieve that, but also not abandon it.
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: Do you know that when you really look at people who are successful and by success I do not mean monetary, I mean people who have claimed abundance in their lives so that abundance may be financial, but it could be relationship abundance.
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: It could be purpose-driven abundance, it could be adventure abundance.
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: It could be whatever-driven abundance.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: It could be adventure abundance.
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: It could be whatever.
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: The abundance is right.
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: But people who experience abundance and you ask them like how, how did they get there?
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: I think most often what they talk about is grit, not giving up.
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: And so how often do we, especially as women, give up on our own dreams and take whatever I don't even want to say failures, but take whatever like roadblocks we experience, or like detours we experience, or griefs we experience, and let it completely knock us off track until we, like, give up on our own dreams and say, like, what if I can't?
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: I call bullshit you can.
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: So I want you to identify those elements that you long for in your old dream and I want you to dream a new dream that includes those elements.
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: And then here's the key.
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: This piece is very, very important, because if you miss this next piece, you're going to miss the boat completely.
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: Everything you want, love is absolutely available to you, but you have to spot it when it happens and you have to have the capacity to let it in.
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: So there are so many things I have often gotten hung up on wanting from a very specific couple of people and a very specific couple of places, but once I opened up my heart wide enough to be able to receive it from other people in other places, it comes in in spades, in boatloads, like overflowing amounts of all the things that I have longed for needed or craved in my life, and so your dream matters.
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: Your dream is purposeful.
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: You are dreaming that dream for a reason and I need you to believe that and trust that.
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: And then I also need you to believe and trust that your higher power is working very diligently in the back end of your dream business to make it manifest.
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: But you have to open up your capacity to receive it in places that are not necessarily specific to what you thought, but in new and different ways.
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: So you know that joke about I prayed.
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: I was stranded on the rooftop, you know, and the floodwaters were rising and I prayed for God to rescue me and he sent a canoe and I said, no, god's going to do it.
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: And I sent a helicopter and I said, no, god's going to do it.
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: Right, I need you to notice love when those canoes show up in your life and you swipe them off.
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: And I see this happen all the time, when we pray for solutions, and then the solution comes and we're like, oh, that solution costs too much, or that solution is too hard to implement, or that solution is too scary, or I'm uncertain if it will work out, or I'm right, like that.
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: We let all this noise, get in and so love.
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: I want to validate that that life you imagined has so much beauty in it.
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: It's time to take that, re-roll it and implement it and trust that it can be.
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: It's just going to look different than you thought it was going to look.
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: And so, gentle, reminder, to check in with yourself.
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: Are you actually grieving in the body, right?
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: Are you shedding, are you releasing, are you letting go?
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: Are you willing to take the harder path of serotonin versus dopamine?
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: And are you willing to invest in your own dreams and dream for yourself and not just for your children, or not just via a romantic partner?
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: I believe in you so stinking much.
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: Gentle reminder, during this holiday season, we are currently giving away the Post-Divorce Roadmap for completely free.
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: If you click to the show notes where it says Post-Divorce Roadmap, you can enter the coupon code.
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: Email friends.
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: It asks you for your credit card, but that does not mean that you will be charged.
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: It's just part of the onboarding process where it asks you to step through all these pieces.
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: So don't get bogged down in that.
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: If you have any issues with it, do not hesitate to send me a DM or an email and I will make sure that myself or my team walks you through it, but I would absolutely love to take this conversation over to email and for you to jump into the post-divorce roadmap Looking and for you to jump into the post-divorce roadmap Looking forward to seeing you there.
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: Peace, dear.
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: Divorce Diary is a podcast by my coach Dawn.
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: You can find more at mycoachdawncom.