What if the act of letting go isn’t a one-time event, but a continuous, liberating journey? Join me, Karin Nelson, as I walk you through the intricate and often emotional process of moving forward after a divorce. This episode unpacks the concept of letting go, emphasizing that it's a skill requiring time, patience, and emotional resilience.
I will explore and offer practical strategies to gradually release and let go through consistent physical, mental and emotional practices. This episode is aimed at empowering you to let go of the past and embrace a more liberated future. Tune in to equip yourself with the tools for emotional resilience and start your journey towards a brighter, unburdened tomorrow.
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Grief and trauma are the two biggest struggles women deal with as they go through their divorce. It's highly likely that you are experiencing both and don't even realize what you're feeling. I'm here to tell you that it's okay for you to grieve your marriage (even if it was shitty) and it's normal to be experiencing some kind of trauma (which is essentially a disconnection from yourself - your mind, body and soul). I can help guide you through the grief in all of the forms it shows up so you can heal. I can also teach you how to ground yourself in healing so you can ease through the trauma. Schedule your free consult by clicking here.
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Full Episode Transcript:
You are listening to the podcast that helps you get through your divorce with strength, peace, resilience and a little bit of love and kindness for yourself. You are listening to Becoming you Again, episode number 180, and I am your host, karin Nelson. Welcome to Becoming you Again, the podcast to help you with your mental and emotional well-being during and after divorce. This is where you learn to overcome the grief and trauma of your divorce. We're going to do that by reconnecting with yourself, creating lasting emotional resilience and living a truly independent life so that your life can be even better than when you were married. I'm your host, karin Nelson. All right, my friends, welcome back to the podcast.
In this episode, I am talking about letting go, letting go of things in the past, letting go so that you can move forward, letting go so that you allow yourself to heal. I think anyone who is going through a divorce or who has gone through a divorce or who goes through some sort of loss of some kind, and divorce for many of us is a loss in many different ways. Right, it doesn't necessarily have to be a loss of your partner, because maybe you're happy to be moving on from your partner, but it can be a loss in so many other ways, which is why there's usually so much grief associated with divorce. But I do think that every person who goes through a divorce in some way has to go through the process of letting something about their past life, their relationship, their parenting time, their finances like whatever right has to go through some sort of process of letting go. We might even have people in our lives telling us can you just let it go, can you just move on? Maybe it's time you moved on, maybe it's time you just let go. And that can feel hard and painful and confusing, because we wish sometimes that we could just let go right. We wish that it could just be as easy as saying just let it go. I don't want to drag this around with me. I don't want to feel like I have a chain around my ankle pulling me down every time I try and take a step forward, and it can feel very heavy and very hard and frustrating, even right. We want, we wish so often for letting go to be simple, to just be the act of saying fine, I'm just going to let it go and then it's gone right, and we don't have to think about it, we don't have to pain over it. We don't have to feel emotionally connected to whatever it is that we want to let go in the past. But here's the reality of letting go.
Typically, and in more cases than not, letting go is not just like lowering the ax and being able to detach. It doesn't just happen when you do one grounding exercise or one meditation and then you're like, oh, I have this cathartic release, I can just let it go now. Typically, it doesn't happen like that. Typically, it's not just like a switch that goes on and off and you're like I can let it go, I've let it go, it's over, it's done. And it's also not necessarily like this race to the finish line Like we so often think about. You know, when it comes to self-love or becoming a better parent or learning to have compassion for ourselves and those around us, it's not like this sprint and then we're there and then we've achieved it. It's something that happens over time and it's something that most likely, we will get better at as we go through our life and as we learn skills. But that is the point that I'm trying to make.
Letting go is complex and it's nuanced. However, learning the skill of letting go and practicing it and getting better at it doesn't have to seem daunting, it doesn't have to seem excrutiating. Getting better at it doesn't have to seem daunting, it doesn't have to seem excruciating and it doesn't have to seem out of reach. And, in fact, when you get to the point where you feel like you can leave so much of what has been painful and hurting about your divorce in the past and you get to that point where you feel like you have actually been able to let it go in many ways, in different ways throughout this process, it feels very liberating. So here's what I want you to know about letting go. I'm going to kind of walk you through about what it is and then I'm going to give you some practical ways to develop skills to allow yourself to begin the process of letting go.
Because, like I said, it's not just like a one and done. It's the same as when you feel emotions and you process emotions. You might feel some grief and you process grief, but that doesn't mean that grief will never come back. Of course it will come back because you're human and you're going to feel grief throughout your life. Maybe you'll feel some sadness. You don't feel sadness once and allow it and process it and then it never comes back. Of course, you feel sad throughout your life. You are human. Same thing with happiness. Happiness also is, you know, fleeting, because we feel it, we enjoy it. It goes away. We feel something else Doesn't mean we're never going to feel happiness again, right? So it's the same thing with letting go.
We are going to develop these skills, practice them, allow things to kind of taper and evolve over time and then we'll have a shift and things will feel less heavy and you'll get better at it and you develop the skill that you bring along with you that every time you might feel like you're being dragged back into the past. Something is following you around from the past, something feels heavy and hard. You practice the skills that you're learning and you continue to let things go All right. So that's number one letting go. It's a practice, it's a skill, it's something that you can learn how to do. It's like going to the gym and like working the muscle you were working the muscle of letting go. And again, it's not always this cathartic, like breath of release, of like I feel so much lighter now. Most letting go practices and I'm going to give you some at the end of this podcast, but most of them are just like simple everyday things that you just kind of do every day or once a week or whatever you decide fits right and feels right in your life. It's going to help your brain and your mind shift to create different feelings in your body. It's going to incorporate grounding exercises that's going to shift how your body shows up in certain situations.
The idea of letting go, the practice of letting go, is often associated like out in society or in movies and things, as like this huge, powerful shift that you feel and that happens once, and that's often not what it is. It's a muscle that you condition. You get better at connecting to yourself, becoming stronger, more peaceful, as you work out that muscle of letting go. The next thing I want you to know is that it is cyclical. It comes in waves, it like waxes and wanes. It's very much something that you will work through and then it will like go in the background and it won't be something that you feel like you need to do to let something go in the past and then maybe it'll come back months later or a year later or a couple of weeks later, if it's something that's very much on your mind like I just really need to leave this in the past, right.
It doesn't mean you've done something wrong. It doesn't mean that you failed and you thought you knew how to let it go, or you thought you had let it go and now it's back Doesn't mean any of that. It just means that letting go, the practice of letting go, can be cyclical. It's kind of like grief in that way, and grief is a part of letting go, right, grief? You have to work through that grief to get to a place where you feel ready to untether yourself in some way. And the untethering it might be the biggest tether you've ever seen or you can even imagine, because this is all like metaphorical, right. It's not like we see something that's actually connecting us to what it is that we want to let go. So it might be a big tether that we are just unraveling one layer at a time, one string at a time. That's okay. It doesn't mean anything is wrong with you. It doesn't mean that the thing that you're trying to let go and by thing I just again, I just mean like maybe it's your relationship You're just trying to let go of what the meaning was for you or what it held for you, or that love that you felt. Or maybe you're trying to let go of what the meaning was for you or what it held for you, or that love that you felt. Or maybe you're trying to let go of the idea that your life doesn't look the way you thought it would. Or maybe you're trying to let go of the anger that you feel toward your soon to be ex-partner, or maybe you're like whatever it is right. There's so many things that could encompass what this letting go represents for you. That tether, for whatever that is, might be strong, it might be big, but it doesn't mean that untethering it over time and feeling release and then not feeling like it's completely gone away and it comes back in a cyclical wave. It doesn't mean that something is wrong. It doesn't mean that you are wrong or that you failed. It just means that it's a skill that's going to come back up and you're going to have to work that muscle a little bit in those moments when the nervous system feels heightened and it needs to go through this cyclical practice that you've developed, that you are developing, of letting go. And I also want you to know that this is an integration.
When I coach my clients. We will talk about things. We will talk about things that they're struggling with and why it's happening, and practices that they can use, ways they can think about it, different things that they can try in their life the next time something similar might come up or moving forward, how they want to be or who they want to be or what they want to be feeling or how to work through feelings. We talk about all of these different kinds of things, but the key is with my clients is we don't just talk about things. They actually have to go and try to integrate the things that we've talked about into their life in whatever way that looks like right. Every one of them does it differently. Every one of them tries things that are different. Every one of them has things that resonate with them differently, and then they integrate them into their life to develop the skill that is the practice of letting go as well. It's so much about learning the skill and then integrating it into their life. It'll be the same for you learning the skill and integrating it into your life.
You and I, as humans, are meant to learn things from the experiences that we have learned things from the situations that we go through, we make meaning out of it, and when we learn things and make meaning out of it in a way that is useful to us, we go and we integrate those things that we've learned into our lives.
Those things that we've learned into our lives, we try to have understanding and evolution moving forward in our life, and that is part of letting go is learning the skill, untethering in some way, a little little by little, in this cyclical fashion as it comes up, and then integrating what we have learned into our actual daily life, and that's such a beautiful thing. So I'm going to give you a few practices that you can start to integrate into your life. When you feel stuck, when you feel like everything is hard and nothing is going right, when you feel trapped in the past, when you feel like you can't move forward in some way, when you feel heavy and and everything feels hard right, these are going to be things that you can start to integrate into your life as letting go practices, as letting go skills that you are developing on a daily basis or a weekly basis or however often feels good to you to untether from whatever it is that you are working to move forward from that you are working to let go. So there's definitely a couple of different types of practices, some of them physical, some of them mindful, some of them emotional, right, and so some ways to physically work through letting go and develop a skill is to sweat. You can release so much through your pores and that can can happen through exercise. That can happen through sitting in a sauna. That could mean going to a steam room, or some people I know have the steam option in their shower. Turning on the steam option in your shower, sitting in a hot tub and allowing yourself to sweat, sitting out in the hot sun for however long it takes for the sweat to come through your pores, like that can be a release for you and a practice of beginning to let go. It could also be using a cold plunge, a cold bath. What this does is it's going to help your blood vessels to circulate, which is going to release toxins from your body. Obviously, exercise of any kind is going to be a great release, a great skill, a great way for you to develop a practice of letting go physically. And then, perhaps, taking a look at your diet, trying different things, intermittent fasting or just a weekly fasting practice can be a great way of releasing, moving on to mindset release and different skills that you can participate in.
When it comes to that might be using morning pages. This was actually introduced to me by one of my clients. Using morning pages this was actually introduced to me by one of my clients. Morning pages was an idea that was introduced in a book called the artist's way by Julia Cameron. Actually, after my client told me about it, I went and bought it because it just is right up my alley. It's exactly the things that I teach and practice, and morning pages is just a great way for you to wake up and just literally write down all of your thoughts, all of your thoughts. Get them out on paper. It's a great way for you to wake up and just literally write down all of your thoughts, all of your thoughts. Get them out on paper. It's a great way to release. If you don't want to call them wording pages journaling is basically the same thing and you just write down whatever's in your head. Get it out. It's like flushing your mind out onto paper.
You can do what I talked about in my last podcast, where I talked about your thoughts about divorce and writing those thoughts down and then choosing one to work on and reframing it, creating new meeting, coming up with a new thought that you're going to practice. That's basically a practice of releasing the old thought and then coming up with a new one that you're going to choose instead. That is a way of releasing, that is a way of moving forward, that is a way of letting go. You can try journaling on prompts like today I let go of dot dot dot, today I invite in dot dot dot. Or today I release dot dot dot. And then what is it that you are working on? Letting go? You can, of course, use breathing exercises. I've gone through the breathing exercise, the box breathing, but there are many, many others.
And if this is something that resonates with you and you very much enjoy getting into your breath and focusing on that, that is a great way, there's a great skill to integrate into your life, to help you let go, to help you release and move forward little by little, day by day, week by week, whatever, however often you've decided. This is a practice that you need to integrate into your life. And then, emotionally, when we're trying to let go again, there might be emotions, like I said, there might be anger, there might be grief, there might be lots of different things that we're trying to let go of very often, bringing in the practice of processing through allowing your emotions to be with you, getting better at allowing them to be inside you while you live your life is a skill that you can learn to allow yourself to let go. Name the emotion, identify what it is that you are working on releasing. Know what that emotion feels like physiologically in your body. Describe it. Emotion feels like physiologically in your body. Describe it. Where do you feel it? What does it look like? What happens when the flare occurs inside you? Without reaction, right, without reacting to the emotion, letting it be inside you and knowing what it feels like. That is a process that is going to allow it to move through you and release self-compassion.
I have so many podcasts on self-compassion and how to practice that and why it's important. Use that as a means, a skill set, to help you release emotional things grudges, regrets, if you're feeling it, any kind of pain, anything like that. Regrets, if you're feeling it any kind of pain, anything like that. Then, of course, somatic practices. Somatic practices are there to help ground you, to help realign your nervous system, to help you feel more connected to yourself. And the more connected you feel to yourself, the easier it will be to untether, one by one, the things from the past, the things that you might be feeling emotionally strained or deterred or stopped by. So check out some of my podcasts on somatic practices If you're not sure which ones are for you, I have a lot or just do a quick Google search there's hundreds and hundreds of different somatic practices that can help you to gain the skill of emotional release.
And then, something that I think we often overlook is this idea of play. I think as adults, especially women who are adults we forget how important that idea of play and allowing ourselves to have fun, allowing ourselves to laugh, to let go, giving ourselves permission to be silly, to play, to goof, to be a goofball, to be silly to whatever right. That skill and integrating that skill into our life, can truly help honor the child in us that can allow us to move forward. And let go. Now, of course, these things that I have mentioned it's not a complete list. There's so, so many other things that you can do to physically, emotionally and mentally help yourself develop the skill of letting go, of releasing, of being able to move forward, of getting out of the place where you feel stuck.
So pick a couple that I mentioned, or come up with some on your own that feel good, that feel right for you, begin to practice them, begin to integrate them into your life and, as the idea of letting go cyclically comes back, it waxes and wanes into your life and out of your life. Just develop that muscle of letting go in a daily practice and you will start to see things not feeling as heavy, things not feeling as hard, not looking back to the past as often. You will start to see the shift in your life as you go on all of those things that you feel like are holding you back, that you feel like are holding you hostage to the past. You will start to see the tether, release, practice and integrate and love yourself all the way through it. All right, my friends, I hope this is helpful. Thank you for being here. You're amazing. I love you. I will talk to you next week. Hi, friend, I'm so glad you're here and thanks for listening.
I wanted to let you know that if you're wanting more, a way to make deeper, more lasting change, then working one-on-one with me as your coach may be exactly what you need. Together, we'll take everything you're learning in the podcast and implement it in your life, with weekly coaching, real-life practice and practical guidance. To learn more about how to work with me one-on-one, go to KarinNelsonCoaching dot com. That's W-W-W dot K-A-R-I-N-N-E-L-S-O-N. Coaching dot com. Thanks for listening. If this podcast agreed with you in any way, please take a minute to follow and give me a rating. Wherever you listen to podcasts and for more details about how I can help you live an even better life than when you were married. Make sure and check out the full show notes by clicking the link in the description.
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