Overcoming Divorce Trauma with Dawn Wiggins

Note: Our Podcast, “A Year and A Day”, was created to be heard, but we provide text transcripts to make this information accessible to everyone. All transcripts on our website are created using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers and could contain errors.

Jaime – 00:00:05:

Welcome to A Year and a Day. I’m Jaime Davis, board-certified family law attorney at Gailor Hunt. On this show, I talk with lawyers, psychologists, and other experts with the goal of helping you navigate divorce without destruction. In this episode, I’m talking with divorce recovery coach and therapist, Dawn Wiggins. Dawn helps people tear down their walls and build back their confidence. Challenging the status quo, she integrates multiple modalities from EMDR to EFT tapping, immersive journaling, and homeopathy, embracing remedies that heal both the mind and body. She also has her own podcast, Dear Divorce Diary, which has recently been ranked globally as a top 3% show. Thanks for joining me, Dawn.

Dawn – 00:00:55:

Hi, Jaime. Thanks for having me.

Jaime – 00:00:58:

So Dawn, can you start by sharing what inspired you to become a divorce recovery coach and therapist?

Dawn – 00:01:06:

Yeah. So in the sixth grade, I made a grand announcement that I wanted to become a therapist. That was no doubt influenced by two things. My parents’ shit marriage. And subsequent traumatic childhood. And also I had taken some sort of career assessment that said you would be optimal for this. So I think a history of childhood trauma and codependency in the family system definitely led to me saying I wanted to be a therapist. I think I really wanted to spare other children from experiencing the pain that I was experiencing. And so I definitely was dead set on achieving that goal. Went to college, graduated early, all the things was checking all the boxes, right? Got married very young and had not at all addressed all that underlying trauma. And was not in tune with yet so much of the research we’re in touch with today, like Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, Gabor Mate. Understanding how trauma is stored in the body and that we cannot think ourselves out of our mental health problems. We have to actually really treat them from an embodied place, release them from the body in a meaningful way. And so I just thought that I could make this deal with myself that I would never get divorced. And that I could think myself out of my problems. And that didn’t work. And about eight, nine years later, found myself getting divorced. And that was sort of like the humbling moment where I was like, crap, I guess my way did not work. And as a marriage and family therapist getting divorced, that was so embarrassing. And it was really the kick in the pants that I needed. I was chronically ill at that point. I had cluster headaches and all these just really painful things going on. And I said, I’m going to dig to the bottom of this so that it never ever happens again. And just really kind of proceeded down this very cool, inspiring path of healing my own trauma. And of course, with the assistance of a lot of healing modalities and healers, and just stepped into my power in such a meaningful way that I couldn’t kind of unsee what I saw as a result of all of that healing.

Jaime – 00:03:19:

Oh, wow. What a wonderful story. I’m sure that your experiences have really helped you help other people going through this process.

Dawn – 00:03:30:

It’s, it’s so easy when you’re going through it. I know you and your listeners know this all too well to lose track of what’s possible, right? It’s such a low time and space where you have very little energy, very little clarity, very little kind of hope often. And there’s kind of this idea of a better life, but we get so kind of stuck in the dark spaces, I think, during divorce because it’s just so overwhelming. And so, yeah, I love kind of shining that light of what’s possible for women.

Jaime – 00:04:03:

You really just took the words right out of my mouth. I was going to say the same thing that, you know, my clients seem to just get stuck, especially at the beginning. It’s really hard. There’s so much going on and so many decisions that have to be made. And there’s so much uncertainty about the future that you really can just get stuck in the anxiety of all of it.

Dawn – 00:04:23:

Yeah. That’s so well said. And then what really sort of inspired me to keep going in the direction of divorce recovery is understanding from my marriage and family background and my own recovery process is that for most people who are getting divorced, there’s some history of either attachment trauma, some attachment style issue in their own early childhood or their parents childhood, and some usually history of trauma in there somewhere. And so it’s like getting divorced adds to the trauma pile that was already there. And most people, I think, aren’t even aware that there was some lurking trauma. And then here they get to divorce and they think it’s all about, well, he left me. He moved on so fast. I don’t know. We’re so disempowered in that place and we don’t realize that it was always lurking there. And so I really am very passionate about teaching women that you have to look further back in order to really future-proof your relationships because we are all going to recreate the thing that is familiar to our brain map from an early childhood place. And I think that just not enough people understand that.

Jaime – 00:05:38:

And one thing I was hoping that you and I could talk about that I think a lot of folks going through divorce don’t consider is the loneliness of divorce. How common is the experience of loneliness during and after a divorce? And why do you think it’s such a prevalent issue?

Dawn – 00:06:00:

Yeah. So it’s layered, especially this day and age in a post-COVID kind of, we’re so polarized just as a people right now. So I think it’s a layered issue for sure. But if we look at kind of the science of loneliness, there’s a lot of information that says it’s a signal that being alone, there’s a perceived threat to our nervous system, right? That we don’t feel safe being alone, that there’s some threat perceived in aloneness. Because I think in a healthy state, aloneness would be a period of rest. I’m not talking about Tom Hanks and Wilson, right? In a stranded island for like months on end. That’s not what I mean. That’s too much aloneness, right? But generally speaking, in a world where we’re overstimulated, we’re practically never actually alone. Aloneness would be really refreshing. But so many of us experience loneliness that that points to a number of things. A, again, that kind of early childhood attachment style, perhaps concern that was unresolved, where maybe there was some period of aloneness there or emotional neglect or some sort of, even if it’s what we call benign emotional abandonment, right? Just periods where you didn’t have a caregiver that was very attentive and feeling alone felt oppressive or dangerous. Then believe it or not, there’s so much emerging data that says that our gut health also can disrupt our sense of connectivity in the world. And so things that disrupt our gut health that are particularly prevalent for women are pharmaceutical birth control can really cause anxiety, depression, a disruption in our gut microbiome. And antibiotics, we know, right? Multiple courses of antibiotics disrupt our gut microbiome. So anything that’s really disrupted our gut also contributes to feelings of loneliness. So when you add probably some early childhood stuff on top of divorce, which is already a lonely process, so many people experience loss of friends, a family that doesn’t understand or doesn’t approve or validate, loss of the family as you knew it, and then you add these gut issues. It’s just such a big pile. It feels so overwhelming to most people, almost insurmountable oftentimes, I think.

Jaime – 00:08:16:

And so I understand that you integrate various modalities such as EMDR, EFT tapping, and homeopathy in your practice. Can you tell us a little bit about what these methods are and how do they help individuals cope with loneliness after a divorce?

Dawn – 00:08:34:

Yeah. So back to you can’t think yourself out of these problems. And that’s what so many of us try to do. We try to be really self-reliant. I can do this without calling a professional. Or I can do this without needing to feel the vulnerability that comes with. And I think it’s gotten so popular to call a therapist or a coach these days. And I love, love, love, love, love that. But also we have emerging data that says that talk therapy beyond a certain amount of sessions can actually reinforce the neural pathways for a lot of the mental illness that we’re experiencing. So when we go to talk therapy and we come and we’re venting and we’re just rehearsing the problems and we’re talking about what he did this week and what he did that week and then what his mom did and then what he did to the kids and all of that, it’s really reinforcing the perception of threat in our environment. And it causes us to feel more and more disempowered. Now we get that very short term dopamine hit from the therapist going, oh, yeah. And helping you connect the dots about some things. But long-term, beyond making sense of how you got here and creating a plan to get out, talk therapy can actually slow down your progress. And so this is why I love these three particular tools, EMDR, EFT, and homeopathy, because they’re going to dig into the subconscious mind. They’re going to dig into the quantum field, which is a whole nother loop. We don’t necessarily have to open, but it really helps us heal things from a neurobiological place. Now to do those things effectively, oftentimes we have to have a sense of being in our bodies. And I think many, many, many of us are disconnected from our bodies this day. When I have someone in session, I’ll say, okay, and that story you just told, where do you feel those things that you’re talking about in your body? And some people can identify and some people can’t. They’ll say, it’s just in my head. And so the first steps to EMDR, EFT is really to help people start to reconnect in their body. Yoga is a really good tool for this. Just body awareness and body scans are really good. EMDR is a process where we activate old painful memories or body sensations. Because a lot of our underlying issues are from a time before we can even have a picture memory for them. We have memory in ourselves going back to conception. So if we can’t remember certain things from conception to let’s say five or seven, we follow the body map and we add what’s called bilateral stimulation, which can be like the butterfly tap or certain tones in the ears, or some people use eye movement, which is what EMDR stands for is eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. We identify the negative beliefs that you have come to store with those experiences. So anytime there’s a trauma or a painful experience, it doesn’t even have to be a trauma per se. And we internalize that there’s something wrong with me. I’m not good enough. I’m not safe. I’m helpless. I don’t have control. It’s not okay to be myself. I can’t feel or show my feelings. I can’t trust myself or others. These are some of the most common negative beliefs we internalize with painful experiences. And then we add the butterfly tap and we just sort of reprocess these memories. And it follows the memory networks that have all the associated memories in there. And eventually, rather than looking back and having kind of a negative view on an experience, it becomes neutral or positive. And we’ve reshaped now the part of the brain called the reticular activating system. We’ve given it something new to believe about ourselves and the life we live and the people we encounter. The reticular activating system is the part of the brain that scans the environment and it filters out data that we don’t need because we have too much data coming at us all the time. So let’s say you’re in traffic and you see brake lights. In front of you, your foot automatically goes to your own brake, right? And that’s your reticular activating system filtering out all the data that you could see out your windshield and even here and whatever and say, oh, this is the data you need right away. And so when we do things like EMDR, we’re helping the reticular activating system find a new way to select what it’s filtering in and filtering out. And so overall, we release all these old painful memories. We have an overall better self-concept because we’ve now replaced negative beliefs with positive beliefs. We’ve programmed the reticular activating system to see good things in the world and not just painful things in the world, reinforcing those negative experiences we’ve had. And then overall, right, we’ve actually reprogrammed our subconscious mind. And there is emerging data that says we’ve changed our neurological structure because trauma changes our neurological structure. And so when we do EMDR, the brain can actually heal from trauma. And I sometimes call it return to factory settings. So EFT is sort of an at-home version of that. It doesn’t function the same with bilateral stimulation, but it uses acupressure points on the head and upper body that helps move stuck emotional energy through. And so EFT usually is like, you know, there are actually some therapists that do entire therapy sessions using EFT. But you can often find on YouTube like a 10-minute EFT tapping session. And it just uses these different acupressure points and it helps move, again, those negative beliefs and stuck emotional energy. In my community, we actually are wrapping up tonight a week-long EFT challenge where we were tapping into abundance every morning and every evening. And so many of the women that attended, just from tapping for 10 minutes in the morning and 10 minutes at night with this particular script, they’ve moved through traumatic memories. They’ve started to track like, so many of them are like, I got this job opportunity. I found money in my pocket. It’s like wild how it just aligns the conscious and subconscious mind so that what we say we want and what we actually want are now in alignment. Homeopathy is a deeper dive, but it’s energy medicine. All these things are moving energy, old stuck energy through the body. Homeopathy is a very old form of medicine that used to be very, very popular here in the US in the early 1900s. We used to have homeopathic doctors and hospitals and all sorts of things. But it’s a complete form of medicine that says that like cures like. So, for instance in Western medicine, ADHD medicine would be an experience of like cures like. If you have someone that’s really hyperactive and you give them a stimulant, it actually helps them focus and calm down. Homeopathy works from a similar principle, which is. A Hippocratic principle goes all the way back to Hippocrates. Very, very, very long time ago, that like cures like. And so there can be a remedy made from sort of anything in nature. And so we find the kind of totality of symptoms inside of the person. So let’s talk about common divorce remedies. Let’s see, sepia is a very common remedy I would use during divorce. It’s for the burnt out working mom. She’s exhausted. Her thinking is sluggish. She has brain fog. Her energy is sluggish. She really looks forward to time alone. Her circulation is sluggish. She may have cold hands or feet. She is just completely exhausted. She feels undersupported. She just wants to run into a cave and hide. And that energy signature of that mom happens to match the energy signature of cuttlefish ink, which is in Latin, sepia. And so when we administer that remedy, she gets this boost of energy. She clears some of that stuck, stuck energy. And she feels so much more just stronger, vital in so many ways. So that’s a common remedy that I would use for a woman going through divorce. So all of these methodologies, they go so much deeper than thinking about or talking about. They actually transform how we’re functioning from the inside out.

Jaime – 00:16:30:

That is all so very interesting. And I just love the concept of moving this stuck mental energy. I think that’s something that folks can really relate to, right? Like if you think of it in that manner, I can see where that is very helpful. What are some of the first steps you recommend to someone who is feeling overwhelmed by loneliness during a divorce?

Dawn – 00:16:56:

So I created, you’re probably leading into this, right? I created a couple of pieces of content that are just so, so valuable. The first thing I want them to know is that loneliness is a clue, right? We’re so used to suppressing uncomfortable things or distracting ourselves from uncomfortable things. And loneliness is really, really a clue that something needs to be healed. So anytime you’re feeling that loneliness, I actually want you to lean into it and I want you to get curious because just distracting from it or suppressing it is going to lead you to make the same relationship mistakes down the road. I know that one of the reasons that I got married so early is because I was sort of using that marriage as a lifeboat for my underlying mental and emotional issues that were unresolved. And so I think too often women have made that choice, right? They’ve gotten married because they were lonely or because they felt not good enough and because they felt financially not, not solvent enough, right? And so they reach for a marriage to solve these problems rather than actually getting to the root of them and solving them. And so the first thing is loneliness is a clue. Listen to it. Listen closely, right? And I have two awesome pieces of content or tools for women to use when they’re early in that kind of loneliness process. And one is kind of an at-home EMDR process, really. I call it immersive journaling. It’s called the Loneliness Roadmap. But I hop on video with you and I give you a little journaling page and I teach you how to do that butterfly tap when you’re feeling deeply lonely so that you can start to process some of those feelings through. And I think most of us feel lonely at night when we’re not in our therapist’s office, which is not very convenient. And so that’s why I created the Loneliness Roadmap. So you can start to really process those things on a deep level from home, from the comfort of your sofa or your bed or whatever. And then actually, I’ve recently collaborated with another healer who has created this amazing quantum healing track to heal loneliness, which you can find on my podcast, Dear Divorce Diary. And it’s a piece of really premium content. Sessions with her are like $200. And she created this track just to help heal from a subconscious place, loneliness, in our subconscious mind. And so those are two just really amazing, amazing resources. Because so many of the things that we need these days in modern society to heal, working with us, Jaime, you know this, is not cheap. You’re not cheap. I’m not cheap. And it really starts to stack up and get overwhelming, I think. So these are two resources that are free or close to free that just can really be game changers.

Jaime – 00:19:41:

In your experience, are there misconceptions that people have about loneliness and divorce?

Dawn – 00:19:48:

Yeah, I think… I think most people going through divorce would tie their loneliness to something he did, right? He left. And that’s not unique just to women, right? Men, if it was flip-flopped, I think it would be similar. But I think most people, human nature, is to want to alleviate their pain by blaming someone else. Brene Brown has talked about that in her research, right? That blame is the way we discharge. We try to burn off our own pain and discomfort. And so I think I see a lot of people blame their loneliness on because they were abandoned by their ex. But you actually can’t abandon something that’s capable of taking care of itself. For instance, you can abandon a baby or a house, but you can’t abandon a grown adult, right? Because we are resourced. We have the capacity to take care of ourselves, but so many of us are out of touch with taking care of our own emotional needs that we don’t know how to do it. So, yeah, would you say that you see the same with your clients, that they sort of blame things like loneliness and other emotional discomforts on their exes?

Jaime – 00:21:04:

Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think it’s really hard for people to accept that they played a role in the breakdown of the marriage, right? Like, maybe they weren’t the cause, but they at least played a role. And I find that a lot of people have trouble with the concept that cheating in a marriage is a symptom of a bad marriage, not the cause of a bad marriage. We see that quite a bit.

Dawn – 00:21:31:

It’s a symptom of so many things, not even just a bad marriage, right? But let’s say poor mental health and wow, just so many things. But I love that you brought that up because I have been able to help many couples work through infidelity if they’re willing to tackle individually the depths of their own mental health issues, right? And so I often say to people, if more people were willing to just go do that deep kind of healing work, we’d see a lot less divorce because divorce isn’t really a solution. It’s sort of a temporary fix for a problem that’s still going to be there unless you dig in and kind of get to the bottom of your own stuff. You’re spot on, though we, not only did we attract, because like calls to like, right? Going all the way back to Hippocrates, back in like, I don’t know, it was something like 500 BC or something like that, like way long ago, like calls to like. And so any of us that are married, we attracted that partner and we absolutely played out, right? A pattern in that relationship. And there’s no changing that unless you actually change yourself.

Jaime – 00:22:39:

Right. You make a really great point. I mean, the divorce rate for second and third marriages is higher than for first. And so that seems to indicate that folks are not fixing that underlying problem. They’re just trying to get remarried and they are repeating the patterns that may have existed in the first marriage.

Dawn – 00:23:00:

Mm-hmm. That’s right. Spot on. I say that all the time. Took the words out of my mouth.

Jaime – 00:23:06:

Can you discuss the role of community and support networks in overcoming divorce loneliness? And how can someone build these networks if they feel like they’re in isolation?

Dawn – 00:23:18:

Yeah, so interesting, right? I love giving women the tools to sort of heal themselves and or the remedy, right, to heal themselves. But it’s so interesting. The way trauma happens or the way we internalize negative beliefs is when we perceive we’re under supported during something really, really painful, right? When we’re not in intimate community during something really, really painful is how trauma ends up happening in the brain. Similarly, because like calls to like, in order to heal those traumas or their wounds, it has to happen in intimacy or in community or in connection. We are hardwired. We are neurobiologically wired for connection. And so community is absolutely an essential part of recovering of healing, right? Of digging into understanding ourselves better. I think so often when we’re in isolation, we feel so much shame, right? This must just be me. There’s something wrong with me. There’s something wrong. That’s what people say to me all the time. There’s something wrong with me. I’m not enough. I must be broken, permanently broken, sometimes people say, which actually is a common thought that goes with any sort of sexual abuse or sexual assault, which I think runs concurrently with divorce. So when we get in community, we feel seen, we feel heard, we feel understood. And it allows us to just sort of immediately shed a certain amount of stuff. I think also some of the stuff we can work on in community is, those attachment wounds, right? So let’s say we struggle with intimacy and we struggle with letting our guard down because we’re heartbroken and we’ve been heartbroken for so long. We put a wall around our hearts energetically, literally close that sort of energetic center in our bodies. I think in community is where we can practice opening the heart again and practice trusting ourselves and practice trusting others, practice kind of sensing where people are coming from and reconnecting our intuition, our guts with our perception of the world. Another thing that I often hear women say when they find my podcast, because my podcast is a deep dive on healing. It’s not, it’s not like, it’s like if you want to, if you know early on in your podcast, early on in your healing journey that you’re going to, you want to heal all the things, that’s what my podcast is for, right? It’s not a surface level trek into the recovery space. But a lot of women find me because they had done a certain amount of therapy and then they started dating. And then all the stuff got kicked back up. And they were like, oh, crap, missed some stuff, right? So I think that that’s also what gets worked on in community is realizing that you maybe haven’t healed as much as you thought you did because you get triggered by things. And anytime we’re triggered, it’s a little clue that there’s a pocket of something that isn’t healed yet.

Jaime – 00:26:12:

Do you think community is also helpful for helping someone normalize what they’re feeling? Like, I’m not the only one feeling lonely who’s going through a divorce. I’m not the only one who feels broken, like nobody wants to hang out with me. Like, you know, there’s lots of other women out there who feel exactly the same way as I do.

Dawn – 00:26:33:

So much, so much it normalizes, which… There’s a two-edged sword there, though, right? So, I think it reduces shame, right? Being in community and having that shared experience reduces shame. I actually don’t necessarily want it to normalize though, because I think that, and I’d be so curious your take on this. I think we’ve normalized things that need not be normalized. Right? Like there are too many things we’ve come to accept that we should just cope with, like chronic anxiety and chronic depression. And I do think that being in community is, it reduces shame and it does normalize. Process of grieving, of letting go, of healing. But there’s that double-edged sword, right? Where we sometimes co-sign each other’s negative beliefs or limiting beliefs. We co-sign each other’s blaming of somebody else or victim mentality. And that gets normalized. That part I don’t love.

Jaime – 00:27:32:

Yeah, I can absolutely see that. I mean, I think we experienced that on the divorce attorney side when we have clients who talk to their friends who are also going through their divorces and they’re like, well, my friend got so-and-so or my friend’s attorney said X, Y, and Z. And then we have to have the conversation that no two divorces are going to be exactly the same because no two sets of facts are exactly the same. And you may not know all of the details of your friend’s situation. And so whatever they’re going through may be different.

Dawn – 00:28:09:

Wow. And that, you know, coming from your perspective, I know I’ve watched so many women maneuver through the legal aspect. And the better their mindset, the better their belief system, the more easily they navigate the legal piece. So how frustrating is that for you? Because when we’re comparing, we’re definitely not in a positive mindset, right? We’re definitely coming from scarcity. So that’s so interesting from your perspective, because women can do so much to change their legal outcomes. Because to your point, right? Context matters, nuance matters. And yeah, when we’re comparing this case to that case, we’re not taking context and nuance into consideration at all.

Jaime – 00:28:54:

Well, one of the ways I deal with that in almost every single initial consultation that I have with a client, I ask the client, do you have a therapist? And if they tell me no, I tell them they need to go find one. Nothing against them specifically, but divorce is one of the most stressful life events that they’re going to go through. And when they get that extra support, they are in a better position to help me represent them to the best of my ability because there are just certain decisions I cannot make for my client. I can’t tell them what custody schedule is in the best interest of their particular children. I can’t tell them whether or not they’re willing to accept a settlement proposal. And I need them to be in a healthy place where they can make really sound and well-reasoned decisions when it comes to these. Really major issues that are going to impact the rest of their lives.

Dawn – 00:29:57:

What a time to be alive that that’s what you recommend, that that’s part of your onboarding process. That’s just amazing. I’m very, very impressed by that. But it’s so true that most people are reacting from a deeply emotional place at a time when you need to be making really grounded decisions, grounded and kind of intuitive decisions, right? Attuned to your point, what your kids need and what your household is going to need. So I love, love, love that you have that as part of your onboarding. Does anybody ever resist?

Jaime – 00:30:33:

If they do, they don’t express it to me directly, but I can sometimes tell if they have not gotten the help that I think that they could benefit from.

Dawn – 00:30:42:

That’s that idea, though, that this rigid self-reliance is a trauma response that it’s just, it’s a difficulty in being vulnerable, which I so get is during divorce is even harder. But once you can just sort of surrender a little bit and get that extra help and get that support. I remember when I was getting divorced, going to my therapist and feeling like, okay, thank God she’s temporarily in charge of my life because I’m not doing a great job. And it’s not that I wanted her to be in charge long-term, right? But it just felt like I had this backup, right? This someone that was going to catch my thought process when it was off. Someone who was going to spot my blindspot. You know what I mean? It just felt such a relief for me. Like, okay, I don’t have to catch it all right now because I can’t.

Jaime – 00:31:34:

Well, there’s just so many decisions that have to be made in a fairly quick manner. And it just can be completely overwhelming. I have clients that they’re newly separated and they’re already worried about what the custodial schedule for the next Christmas is going to be, for example. And I’m like, well, let’s worry about tomorrow. Who has the kids tomorrow? What are we going to do for this weekend? And then really trying to get them to baby step through some of these smaller things and worry about today, I have found is very effective in trying to help with some of the overwhelm that they’re feeling.

Dawn – 00:32:11:

The custodial schedule for next Christmas, that’s a massive flag for attachment trauma, right? Like I can’t tolerate separation from my kiddos. And I am already foreshadowing that I’m not going to be okay. On that holiday is a massive kind of like, oh, let’s heal that. Let’s heal that so that you can, like you said, deal with today and just positively anticipate that by next Christmas, you’re going to be in a more stable, grounded place. Yeah. So that aloneness feels like, oh, I’ve got space to go do fun things, to find myself, to connect with my people, to build a new life rather than feeling like you have to rely on your kiddos. I see it so much with women, right? I think so, so, so often in divorce, women do not realize how much of their pain they are hiding in their relationships with their children.

Jaime – 00:33:03:

Yeah, that is very interesting. And we see that too when we have moms who really can’t say anything bad about dad as a father. I mean, he may be a terrible husband, but as a parent, they really don’t have any complaints. But yet they’re not willing to give the ex-spouse any custodial time. They believe that they should be the primary caregiver, that dad should have very minimal visitation. And those can be some really tough conversations to have with folks.

Dawn – 00:33:36:

I can see that as appropriate if it’s sub two years old, right? Infants and very, very young children. That makes sense to me just in terms of, you know, the early childhood brain map, you know, but I find that a lot as well that women, we have tried to heal so much of our pain by having children, by being controlling, by, and it’s not serving us or our children. And my call to action for women of the world is to, you know, there’s this quote recently that we used in my community, that a woman who loves is powerful, right? So that’s to all the mamas, to a woman who loves is powerful, but a woman who loves herself is unstoppable.

Jaime – 00:34:22:

Oh, that’s great. I will love that. I may have to start using that in some of my consultations.

Dawn – 00:34:26:

There you go.

Jaime – 00:34:29:

Well, what advice do you have for people who may feel ashamed or embarrassed about their loneliness after divorce?

Dawn – 00:34:35:

Every time you leave your house, I promise you, three quarters of the people you’re encountering are also feeling lonely. Like literally three quarters, probably. I think we believe what we see too often in the world, right? And we think that it’s only me. It’s just not the thing to be embarrassed about because everywhere we go, we are all craving connection and to see each other. And we’re just so kind of skittish to actually be ourselves, right? We’re so afraid of being rejected. And so I would just say like, please, please, please know that you have some, there’s some negative belief in there about yourself that just is not true. You picked it up a long way. All negative beliefs are false, right? All limiting beliefs about self are thinking errors. The way we think and the way we feel and the way we see the world is based on a thinking error. It really impacts. How we move through life, right? So if you’re feeling embarrassed about any of these things, please know that in your mind, in your subconscious mind, the mind is like an iceberg. Is this a concept you’ve heard before? Okay. So if you picture an iceberg, right? The thing that took out the Titanic. We think that the place that we make decisions from is the part of the iceberg that’s above the water. But the majority of how we function in life comes from the subconscious mind, the part that’s below the surface of the water that we aren’t really tuned into unless we’ve gotten intentional about tuning into it, right? So how you picked your partner, that was subconscious. That was the below the water iceberg. How you experience your emotional world, your thought life, so much of that is driven by subconscious negative beliefs. And so if you’re feeling embarrassed about any of this stuff, love, I just really want you to know that there’s a subconscious belief in that bottom half of that iceberg. And it needs to be turned around. And you’re not going to be able to think yourself out of it positive affirmations are amazing. You can really change your life with positive affirmations, but you can’t do it just by thinking them. You have to learn how to get them programmed, how to get the reticular activating system to believe it. And typically, that means we have to do a little more deeper healing work in order to do that.

Jaime – 00:36:49:

And is that one of the places where your podcast would be a good resource for someone to check out?

Dawn – 00:36:57:

Absolutely. Just from listening, I think there’s so much that you will learn for free about how your mind-body actually works and how you’re processing this divorce. And from there, you can start to pick the tools that you want to use. In season three, which is where we are. All of our Thursday episodes are about tools specifically that you could be using and little hidden healing gems, we call it. And definitely a deep dive on how to reprogram all of this stuff. And then between that and the immersive journaling, some of the healing tracks, because so much of us, we know a lot of information these days, right? We sat home during a pandemic and we learned everything there is to know on TikTok about mental health, but there’s a gap between knowing something and implementing something. And I think that that’s the gap that really I strive to bridge for women is around, hey, let’s implement these handful of things. They’re really going to move the needle. They’re going to be very, very powerful. Let’s implement them together.

Jaime – 00:38:00:

If you could only give one piece of advice to someone going through a divorce, what would it be?

Dawn – 00:38:06:

A woman who loves herself is unstoppable. Now the path to getting there… The million decisions that have to be made between where you are today and truly loving yourself in an unstoppable way, that’s a windy path, right? But that is the ultimate piece of advice is unless you can sort of sit in a room by yourself and feel really good about yourself and really good about where you are in life, we’re always manifesting, right? It’s such a popular concept, but we’re constantly manifesting, right? How our lives are today are a manifestation of what we have been thinking about ourselves and the world around us, what we have been feeling about ourselves and the world around us, what we have been believing about ourselves and the world around us. So your current life is your manifestation. So if you want to manifest intentionally, I think that for most women, that intentional manifestation is going to be a reflection of deep self-love and self-acceptance. Because from that place, right, we are just shining love. We are shining confidence. We are attracting all abundant things. So my number one piece of advice is a woman who loves herself is unstoppable.

Jaime – 00:39:10:

Well, I love that. And I think it is wonderful advice. Dawn, thank you so much for joining us today.

Dawn – 00:39:16:

Thank you for having me. Thanks for going through this hurricane with me separately together.

Jaime – 00:39:22:

Absolutely. Happy to do it. Thank you for listening. If you like this episode, be sure to follow the show wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss the next one. While the information presented is intended to provide you with general information to navigate divorce without destruction, this podcast is not legal advice. This information is specific to the law in North Carolina. If you have any questions before taking action, consult an attorney who is licensed in your state. If you are in need of assistance in North Carolina, you can contact us at Gailor Hunt by visiting divorcestuff.com. I’m Jaime Davis, and I’ll talk with you next time on A Year and a Day.