Feeling lonely after a divorce can be an overwhelming experience, particularly for women. It's essential to understand that loneliness is an emotional state and not a reflection of your worth. Join me, Karin Nelson, as I unpack the difference between being alone and feeling lonely. I'll show you why loneliness feels so heavy and how being alone in society today has gotten a bad rap.
I offer the antithesis to loneliness and how you can start to reframe the loneliness that you're feeling right now, to transform your emotional landscape. Tune in to explore meaningful ways to lift feelings of loneliness and embrace a fulfilling post-divorce life.
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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:
This is the podcast for any woman going through a divorce right now. I promise you, when you start listening, you are going to feel better about yourself, about your situation and the direction that you're headed. You are listening to Becoming you Again, episode number 181, 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. Hello, welcome back to the podcast today.
What has been going on in your life? I gotta say. Sometimes we get stuck in this rut of thinking okay, I'm older and so that probably means I'm not going to be doing new things, or my life can't be as exciting or as cool as, like you watch your kids. You know growing up and they have. They're always out doing things and they've got friends and they're trying new things and exploring and experimenting and doing all these things Right, and then we get older, like where I'm at right now we think I don't. My life is so boring, I never do anything fun, I never try new things, blah, blah, blah. Well, I just have to say I don't think that we have to take on that stigma that society tells us that we've passed our prime or that nothing cool or new can happen in our life, because I have to say that, like over the last year, I've done some things that I've never done before.
I went and lived in Alaska for two months without my partner, without my kids, stayed there with my sister, which was very fun. I haven't spent that much time with my sister since, which was very fun. I haven't spent that much time with my sister since I was in high school and it was so much fun. And it was really funny actually, when my kids, when I was going to Alaska, when I was leaving to fly to Alaska, my kids dropped me off at the airport, which to me it was such a funny situation because typically and in fact I had done this the past the previous two summers with my daughter I dropped her off at the airport when she went to live in Germany for the summer, each summer, and so it was so funny to have my kids drive me to the airport, walk me in. I check my bags, they're with me, we take pictures and give hugs before I walk off to go through security. You know, my kids are 22 and 19. And so it was just kind of like this weird, hilarious juxtaposition of usually it's the parents dropping the kids off and in this situation it was the kids dropping their parent off, which I just found funny and ironic in some ways, but also incredibly amazing.
And then when I was in Alaska, my sister and brother-in-law took me four wheeling a couple of times. I haven't really ever been four wheeling. I've done it one other time and there was someone else on it with me when my my ex-husband was on it with me, so we were like riding together, but I was on the four wheeler in Alaska all by myself, going up hills and through mud, puddles and rivers and things that I have never done before. At times it was very scary that I have never done before. At times it was very scary and other times I felt powerful and that was pretty cool, but also sometimes terrifying.
And then recently I went fishing, for I think maybe the first time. Like I was telling my mom the other day, I went fishing with my partner and he's really into fishing right now and I he's done it all through his life but he kind of got out of the habit and now he's back in and so he was going fishing. I wanted to go. We went and got my license and we got me a reel and all these things and I went and I caught some fish. I caught three fish and I was like ecstatic. I mean you can see the look on my face in the pictures of like this is something I've never done. I mean you can see the look on my face in the pictures of like this is something I've never done. I've never done this before. I've never experienced this.
And I was telling my mom and I was like I just I don't remember ever going fishing as a kid. You know, growing up in Utah that could be something that a lot of people would do. And she said that's because your dad didn't like to go fishing and so we didn't go. And then she told me that she actually used to love to go fishing. She grew up in Wyoming and she said that her dad would take her and her brothers and sisters all the time when they were younger and she loved it, and so we've made a plan already that she's going to come up and we're going to go fishing together and, like I'm 46 y'all who would have ever thought that I'd be continuing to try new things?
Connect with myself, create these experiences that most people think, well, you're too old for that, you're too old to experience these things, because I'm here to tell you no, you're not, and this is not even what the podcast is about today. I just got off on this tangent of like telling you about what's been going on in my life. So there you go. If that's what you need to hear today, before we jump into what this podcast is actually about, which is loneliness, then take it. You are not too old. Just because you're divorced, it does not mean that your life is over, it does not mean there's something wrong with you, and it does not mean that you cannot go out and experience cool new things in your life, all right. So that was my little like tangent platform. Catch up, I guess. If you want to tell me what's going on in your life, I would love to hear come over and send me a message on Instagram at Karen Nelson coaching, let's talk. I would love to hear. Come over and send me a message on Instagram at Karen Nelson Coaching, let's talk. I would love to catch up with you. I would love to connect with you. I'd love to hear from you. All right, so let's jump into today's episode.
Like I said, we're talking about loneliness, which I know can be a very big deal for people who are going through a divorce or who are divorced. So we are going to have a conversation about it today because I think for women especially of course men can feel lonely as well, but you know this podcast is geared toward women, so I'm going to talk to the women. But loneliness can feel heavy, it can feel hard and it at times especially that first little bit after divorce or during the divorce it can feel all encompassing. The purpose of this podcast today is I want to offer you some new ways of thinking about why you feel lonely, what loneliness is, and hopefully these ideas will have the opposite effect on you. If you are feeling like you're in the throes of loneliness. Hopefully from this podcast conversation, you will come away feeling lighter, seeing things from a new perspective that you hadn't before. That will change the way you approach and think about the experience of loneliness after divorce and moving forward.
So, first off, I want to differentiate between feeling lonely and being alone. Being alone doesn't necessarily mean that you will feel lonely. You can be alone in your home, going to the grocery store, going to the movies, driving in your car, driving in your car, and when you do all of those things, probably the majority of the time, you're alone physically, but you are not feeling lonely. And then, on the flip side, because loneliness is an emotion, it's a feeling, it is a chemical reaction that has been sent down from your body that turns up as sensations in your body. Because it's a feeling. Right, you can feel that way whether you are physically alone or whether you're sitting next to someone. You can feel that way living in a house with a bunch of people who are home all of the time at the same time, or at a party full of people, or you can feel it when you're literally physically not around anyone and you are alone. You can feel the emotion of loneliness at any time, which is important to understand, because often we think that because we are physically alone, that's why we are lonely, but that isn't the case.
My guess is that many of you who are going through a divorce or who are already divorced probably felt lonely during your marriage, even when you were right next to your partner, or even when they were in the other room. You felt completely and utterly alone, and I'm going to explain more about why that's the case a little bit later in this podcast. So don't worry, I'm going to tell you why that happens. But what I want to emphasize today is why our brain makes this feel like such a big deal. So that's first.
We want to understand why loneliness feels so heavy, and the main reason is because of our primitive brain. Right, I've talked about the brain before. We've got the primitive part of our brain which was passed down through DNA for thousands of years, and then we've got this front part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex. That is like the reasoning, the decision-making, the less stuck in the emotional, habitual reactions to things part of our brain. Well, this primitive part of our brain tells us that if we are left alone, then that means we're most likely going to die. Because back in the day, when we lived in no-transcript and we moved around in groups, being left behind, being kicked out of the group or being alone most likely meant that you were going to die. And so it's possible that what's really going on when you feel loneliness after divorce is that your brain has equated being alone with feeling rejected, and feeling rejected feels very painful and very heavy and feels like our survival is imminent. It feels like we are going to die. That's what our brain is telling us, right? It's equating it to that, and so it can feel very hard, very heavy, very scary, and loneliness, in my opinion, is kind of a form of sadness. Right, when we feel it, it probably, for most of us, feel something similar to sadness it feels heavy, it feels deep, it feels aching.
But loneliness isn't a way of being, and I really want to emphasize that. It isn't the state that your life is like. Often we'll look at other people who live alone or have been single for most of their life or all of their life or whatever right, and we look at them and we think, oh, they must be so lonely, like it's this state that their life is in, that they're always in loneliness, which just isn't the case. Loneliness isn't a result of not having a partner or not having enough friends or not having people live with you or people hang out with you. Loneliness is a feeling, and feelings so often come from what we're thinking about, the story that we're telling ourselves. So if you're divorced and you feel loneliness, the most likely culprit of what you're telling yourself is I'm alone. Right? That seems very obvious. You must be telling yourself some form of I'm alone, and then probably you're adding on this little caveat after the I'm alone. That says and that means something has gone wrong or something is wrong with me. Because in reality, the opposite of loneliness is connection. And if you want to feel less lonely and you want to think differently about your life, then you need to think about and create connection.
So, going back to this primal DNA that has been passed down to our primal brain, because of this primal DNA and the society that we've been raised in, being alone has, I think, gotten a pretty bad rap. Like people are looking at you, people are looking at other people who are alone, who have never been married, who don't have a partner, who like to be single, who like to spend time with themselves, and we think that there must be something wrong with them. Oh, they must be so sad, they must feel terrible all the time, they must not enjoy their life, they must not have anything fulfilling going on for them. I mean, if you just look at this whole story that is playing out right now in like real time in our lives, about these childless cat ladies, right, how some people are saying that they are the bane of the world, they have nothing good in their life, they must not have any joy or happiness or fulfillment, and how could they possibly? Which is why they're a childless cat lady and that's such a terrible thing.
Okay, so that was a little bit of a side tangent, but the message is the same. If you, society, is telling us, if you are alone, something has gone wrong, there's something wrong with you. You must be sad all the time, but living alone and being alone at times isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially if we are using that time that we are alone to worry less about well, why isn't anyone around me? Or why don't I feel connected to anyone else? And instead we take a deeper look at why aren't we using these moments where we feel lonely as an opportunity to connect to ourselves? Yes, connection is the antithesis of loneliness. However, we can't always rely on others to feel that gap for us, to create that connection for us, feel that gap for us, to create that connection for us. And in my opinion, you should never leave it up to other people to be in charge of your emotional life. That is your responsibility.
Because if we think that the only way to stop feeling lonely is to make more friends, to go out more, to have the kids at home more often, to get a new partner or a roommate or whatever, and then we go, seek out those things, all we've really done is put a bandaid on the actual problem, because, at the most basic level, all each of us really wants is to feel seen, to feel appreciated, to feel like we are good enough, to feel like we matter, and we can create those things for ourselves. The problem with seeking that from others when we don't give it to ourselves, when we don't like ourselves, when we don't enjoy being with ourselves, is that we believe, for those fleeting moments when we're with other people, that we can feel accepted, we can feel good enough. But because we don't actually believe those thoughts in our head, when we get alone again, it's fleeting, it's temporary. Our thoughts go back to the negativity about our life, the negativity about ourselves, about how everything is hard, about how we're all alone, there must be something wrong with us, et cetera. If you don't like yourself and you don't enjoy or appreciate your life, and the majority of your thoughts when you're alone are that being alone with yourself is not okay, then being with others is also not going to feel that great.
When you are stuck feeling loneliness, frequently it's because you've made being alone mean that something is wrong with you. Being alone or feeling lonely isn't bad in and of itself, but what happens when we're stuck in this idea that there is something wrong with it and that it is bad? We make it mean that that must mean that other people don't like us, that must mean that we're not good enough. In some way, that must mean that we are not lovable. And often, when you're in this space, when you feel lonely and then deep down, you think that you're not lovable or you think you're not good enough and that's why you're alone, what your brain is going to do is turn to wallowing in the thoughts and the feelings, because our brains like to be right. Our brains are like oh, you feel lonely and you don't think you're good enough. Okay, let me reinforce that for you. Let me open up this file cabinet of all of the moments where you felt not good enough, all of the memories where you felt lonely, where somebody did or said something that you interpreted as negative toward you, and let's believe it. Let's use it against ourselves and make ourselves feel worse and feel more lonely. So I said it before the antithesis to loneliness is connection, but that connection has to start with a connection with yourself First. You have to start by enjoying your own company. You have to start by feeling okay with being alone with you. You have to like yourself as much as you like any friend or your kids or anyone else in your life, because without that strong connection to you as the foundation, you will have a very difficult time actually being able to connect with other people. So let me give you an example of what it looks like when you are connected to yourself.
I'm going to take it back to Alaska. I've been talking about it a lot in my podcast lately but because it was such a fun experience for me. But I did have kind of a different experience when I was in Alaska. Obviously I've talked about this. My whole trip was originally centered around me going and spending time with my older sister. We hadn't lived close to each other since we were teenagers and of course, we had seen each other over the many years that we've spent apart. But we didn't really spend more than a few days or a few hours with each other over the past 20 plus years, and so that was the initial reason of going was be to spend time with my sister, and it was amazing. We had so much fun. We spent almost every moment together, like when we weren't sleeping besides that, or me working with my clients, but all the rest of the time we spent together and it was so fun. We laughed so much. We felt connected. Sometimes we were laughing, sometimes we were crying, we were mourning over our dad who had passed away earlier this year. Sometimes we were talking, but most of the time we were laughing. It was just so much fun.
And then, when I had about a week left it was a little over a week we all got the news that my brother-in-law, my sister's husband, his mom, had passed away, and so, of course, the decision was made that they would leave to come down to the lower 48 for her funeral and to be with his family and, to, you know, support each other in that way, and of course that was the decision, and I was glad that I could be there to be able to stay at their home, watch over their home, take care of their dog, take care of things for them on that end, so they didn't have to worry about it. And so my last week in Alaska actually ended up being a week of being alone, of course, with the exception of Gus, my sister's dog, but I was there, was no one, no one else at the house, it was just me for an entire week. And for many, as I've just described in this podcast, that would have been terrifying, that would have been terrible, that would have been sad, that would have been full of loneliness. But because I have learned to create connection to myself and because I like being with myself, that week for me was none of those things and in fact, the entire time I was in Alaska, I was never homesick. And not to say that there's anything wrong with being homesick, but I was never homesick. I was never lonely. Even when I was with other people, I never felt that feeling of loneliness.
I worked during my working hours, I was coaching, I was working on podcasts, I was working on my business, and then I did what felt right and good for me. I would take Gus on walks, some of them longer, some of them shorter. I would take a bath. I drove into town and I would go shopping. I would pick up food that sounded delicious and I knew I wouldn't be able to have for a long time because I knew I was leaving Alaska soon. I enjoyed rainy days. I started a book that I wanted to read, I snuggled in cozy blankets, I would stretch, I would connect, I listened to myself and I felt connected to me.
Let me reiterate this there was not one time during that week or that entire time I was in Alaska that I felt lonely. And, to be honest with you, I can't remember the last time I felt lonely because over the past six to seven years, I have worked very deeply on liking myself, on creating connection with myself, on enjoying me, on listening to my wants and my needs and then giving myself permission to act on those. I like being with me, and so when I am alone, I don't feel lonely, and when I am with others, I also don't feel lonely. I feel connected to myself in both situations, and that allows me to feel connected to others, whether they are in my presence or not. And so, whenever you feel lonely, I want you to start by asking yourself how can I feel connected to myself, what does that look like, what does that sound like, and how can I enjoy being with me or enjoy my own company? And I want to offer you if your brain says to you in those moments when you ask those questions, I don't know, no, don't take that as an answer. That is just a cop-out answer that your brain just offers you when it doesn't want to think about things I want you to just dig a little bit deeper and listen to what your mind and your body are telling you and start there for reconnection to yourself, so that you can begin to lift that loneliness. All right, my friends, I hope you find this helpful. I love you. You got this. You are capable of creating connection to yourself and lifting the loneliness that you're feeling.
As always, I will be back 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 karinnelsoncoaching dot com that's wwwkarinnelsoncoaching 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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