Healing from divorce trauma is a journey that requires more than just time—it demands a commitment to understanding and nurturing your own emotional health. What if you could move past paralyzing grief and disconnection from yourself that often come with a divorce? In this episode, I share four transformative steps to help you heal from the trauma of your divorce, guiding you toward reclaiming your life.
This episode delves into the importance of establishing safety, regulating emotions, deconstructing core beliefs, and creating new experiences for a fulfilling future.
Things you'll get out of this episode:
• Understanding the impact of divorce as a trauma
• The necessity of establishing emotional and physical safety
• Learning the art of emotional regulation
• Observing and deconstructing limiting core beliefs
• Shifting into positive, corrective life experiences
• Empowering support systems for healing
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List to the full episode:
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 Becoming you Again, the divorce podcast that helps you with your mental and emotional needs, supporting you all the way through your divorce and moving into your future afterwards. I'm so glad you're here. 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. Welcome back to the podcast. My lovely ladies, I am so happy to have you here. We are, if you're listening to this podcast when it drops.
We are finishing out the end of the year, heading into the new year, and you might be in a place where you are feeling a lot of feelings, where you're having a lot of grief. You're having a lot of grief, where you might be recognizing that you have gone through some very hard, possibly even traumatic things as you are moving through your divorce. So in today's episode, I am giving you a throwback to an episode where I talk about healing from the trauma of your divorce. This is such a powerful thing for you to understand in your own healing process, because divorce trauma is real. When you are in it you feel trapped, sometimes by your past, what you once had. You continue to get triggered over and over by photos, memories, texts from your ex, maybe even your kids and their own personalities. You might also feel paralyzed when you think about your future, about what you're missing out on, about how you can possibly move forward alone as a single mom. Maybe you're worried about having less income or how that income or your finances is going to affect your future and you're feeling very paralyzed by the uncertainty of what will be. And then people are just like just trust yourself, just figure it out, you're going to be fine, it's going to be okay. People will tell you to learn to love yourself or reconnect with yourself. But when you go through trauma like divorce, there is a disconnect from yourself. Knowing and having a certainty that things are going to be okay, and maybe even knowing how to love yourself seems completely impossible, because those things have not been things that you have been doing for yourself in many, many years. But healing from your trauma that is where the magic happens. That is where you learn to return to yourself, to reconnect with yourself. In this throwback episode, I am going to teach you the four basic steps to healing from the trauma of your divorce so that you can show up in your life with curiosity. So that you can show up in your life with curiosity, with openness, with trust, with acceptance, with love, and you know what's going to happen. You are not going to feel stuck anymore, you aren't going to be as easily triggered over things and you are going to be able to make decisions to help you move forward in a way that is best for you. I hope you enjoy this episode. I promise you these are the four steps that I take all of my clients through. These are the four steps that I have used on myself for my own healing, and they can help you too. So, without further ado, enjoy the episode.
Hello, my lovely listeners, how are you all doing? I am actually getting over about being sick for probably about two weeks. I guess it was a little bit less than two weeks, but almost two weeks. It felt like forever if I'm being real, but I am finally starting to feel better and I am so grateful for that. You know, when you're in the middle of being sick and it just feels like your world is going to end and you're going to be like this forever. That is maybe the worst feeling in the world and I hated every second of it. I have to say I was sick with a cold for about a week and then I started to feel a little bit better and then I was hit with another wave of sickness for about another week just a little less than another week. But I was so tired and exhausted and depleted. But I have come to this realization that maybe played into why I was feeling so down and out for so long, and I find this really fascinating.
I am a few months into my trauma-informed training course that I've been going through and as part of this program we bring our own relationship trauma that we need to work through firsthand so that we can like experience what we're learning on ourselves and then take it to our clients. As we are helping our clients, you know, heal from their own trauma as well, we are helping our clients, you know, heal from their own trauma as well. So every week we have a class session where we learn about things, and then another day in the week we have our own processing calls with our coach where we can process through anything that we want to right so that we can heal through our own trauma, whether it's with our own relationship that we bring, or just anything that we want to be coached on as well. So I've been working through some of my own shit on these processing calls and, whoa, some stuff has been coming up that I really hadn't been making space for and really didn't have a voice to be heard that needed to be heard. So as I've been going and working on these processing calls with my coach, I have been able to open up and make space for things that needed to come forward and to be heard.
And I'm learning that sometimes, with that trauma healing and opening up and allowing for you can, your body can get physically sick. Now I don't know if this is why I was sick for so long, I can't say for sure, but I will say to be feeling down and sick and then recognize that I'm starting to feel a little better, have a processing call and then, like, immediately get hit with another sickness. To me, those dots are adding up in my head of oh, I've got some things that are happening in my body, to where my body is reconnecting with myself. My nervous system, my breath work, my soul, my mind, all of it is coming together and part of that healing needed to be purging of whatever was held on in my past. Now again, this is just a story that I'm telling myself, but it makes sense to me and so I'm going to keep it. This isn't everyone's lived experience. When it comes to trauma, when it comes to healing, when it comes to working things, sometimes we just get sick because we get sick right, and sometimes that's just what's happening. But other times I think there is also an underlying layer that is making us sick, and I think in my case that is what was happening and it's why I was, you know, kind of sick for longer than usual. And this kind of leads me into today's topic, which is healing from the trauma of divorce.
I want to give a disclaimer here that I am speaking of trauma as it relates to the impact certain events have had on your ability to regulate your nervous system. And if you believe that you have deep-seated trauma from abuse, or if you believe that you have PTSD, or maybe you've actually been clinically diagnosed with that or something else and you haven't worked through this trauma with a therapist. I highly recommend that you do that for yourself. That's really important that you get the specialized care with a therapist that you need. What I'm going to be teaching you about trauma, of course, can be used in conjunction with specialized trauma therapy, and it can also help anyone who wants to learn to heal from their own trauma that isn't so deep-seated or isn't PTSD, right, and just to get better at self-regulating your emotional response and regulating your nervous system, because that's really what it comes down to. So what is trauma?
The definition that I find most useful of what trauma is is from Bessel van der Kolk, who is a psychiatrist who focuses primarily on trauma healing, and he says in his book the Body Keeps the Score. That quote trauma is specifically an event that overwhelms the central nervous system, altering the way we process and recall memories. Trauma is not the story of something that happened back then. It's the current imprint of that pain, horror and fear living inside people. Close quote.
So I think what's really interesting about that definition by van der Kolk is that when we think about something that happened in the past that is traumatic to us, that was a traumatic experience that we are defining for ourselves as trauma, or maybe we don't even recognize it as trauma yet, but it does affect our nervous system in a way that takes us back to that feeling that we had when that experience occurred. So it's like we are re-experiencing it in the moment and we may not even understand why. We may not have connected it to something in our past yet, but what's important is that it's happening currently again, with whatever is going on around us in our experience. We can't move past that because we are recreating it inside our body, inside our nervous system, and it is like remembering that feeling and bringing it back to the present. It's what we're feeling right now and I think what we often think of when someone says they have experienced trauma in the past is we think of a big major occurrence in our lives, like sexual abuse or a natural disaster or disease or something like that.
But I also want you to understand that trauma can be caused by smaller events as well. But I also want you to understand that trauma can be caused by smaller events as well, and maybe these don't seem small to you. But divorce, obviously, if you're experiencing right now, it is a big event right, it is to you possibly a big T trauma, emotional abuse, death of a pet, death of a family member, something like that and what might be traumatic to a lot of people may not be traumatic to others. So, when it comes to trauma healing, it's coming to an understanding of you and your experience in relation to your nervous system, your mind and your body. Just because someone else wouldn't define their experience as traumatic, that doesn't mean that it discounts your experience, and vice versa. So, essentially, we experience trauma, which then creates a disconnect from our self, and then, when we are able to heal from trauma, it's almost like we are returning to ourself. We are able to reconnect our mind, body and breath. We reconnect to our intuition, to trusting ourself and to feeling more whole.
When we feel trapped in trauma and often, like I said, we may not even recognize that we have experienced something traumatic we may not even recognize that we have experienced something traumatic. We may not even recognize what's happening. But what's really going on is our nervous system is being triggered over and over again and it can feel very difficult to move forward in our lives when this is happening, because what's going on is we stay locked in past belief systems, but then we're paralyzed by a fear of what the future might hold, and this can be especially true for women who are going through a divorce, like if we think about belief systems when it comes to marriage and family. Right, we might be blocked and locked in a belief system of what family is supposed to mean, what family is supposed to look like. We may be locked in a belief system about being more worthy if you're in a relationship and a divorce means that you're less worthy. We may be locked in a belief system about being the capability to be an effective mother while providing for the family, while leaving the home to work, while having a job, any of those kinds of things or something else. And so staying locked in the past by these belief systems that we've latched onto at some point in our life and then being paralyzed by what the future might hold, because we can't let go of these past belief systems, but also because we don't know what the future is going to hold. That is a very scary place to be, and so, when we can heal from our trauma, we can let go of the past and start to dismantle those belief systems and we can open ourselves up to the possibility of what the future might hold. And what's most important about this is we really reconnect to what's going on in the present and opening ourselves up to what is. And the goal for some when it comes to healing from trauma may be just regulating their nervous system, getting out of that flight fright or freeze mode right. That way, they're no longer going to feel trapped in the past or paralyzed by the future and they're going to be able to focus on the present and the here and now and be full of curiosity and openness and acceptance and love of what is, of what's going on right now, and acceptance and love of what is of what's going on right now.
When I'm working with my clients, there are four basic steps that we take when it comes to healing from trauma. Those four steps are establish safety, emotional management, observe and deconstruct core beliefs, management, observe and deconstruct core beliefs and shifting into repetitive corrective experiences. Now, when I'm working with my clients, we don't always go in this order. I don't even usually say these four steps to my clients like, okay, today we are going to establish safety and then the next time we are going to work on emotional management, and then we're going to observe and deconstruct core beliefs, like I don't lay it out like that to my clients. We just really sit down and talk and understand what it feels like to be safe, how to process through emotions, talk about the core beliefs that they might be holding onto, that are holding them back, that are keeping them stuck and then shifting into these repetitive corrective experiences through how they're living their life and what's showing up for them and then correcting as we go. And so they don't always even go in that order, but for sure, in my opinion, the number one most important thing when it comes to healing from any kind of trauma and I work on this with my clients first thing and then we always seem to go back to it over and over again because I find it to be so important and that is establishing safety. And so I want to talk about each of these just very briefly, kind of give you a quick description of what each one really entails, so that you have a better understanding of how these four steps, when they come together, really create a sense of healing from your trauma, as you're able to work through and implement each one of them into your life.
So safety, like I said, I believe that is the most important thing. It's the most important thing that you can do when it comes to regulating your nervous system. It's the most important thing that you can do when it comes to reconnecting yourself with you, and to me, this is why establishing safety is always number one. Now, of course, I'm talking about physical safety, but I'm also talking about safety as like your emotional safety, how you feel in your body and being able to recreate that for yourself in moments. And the reason why is no real learning or real growth or evolution of yourself will occur until safety is created. When your nervous system is constantly being bombarded and is constantly dysregulated, it is very difficult to move forward, it is very difficult to trust yourself, it is very difficult to tap into your intuition Doesn't mean you can't do those things. Of course you can, but it is much harder to do when your nervous system is dysregulated, is constantly being bombarded. But when you feel safe and your nervous system feels calm and peaceful and in alignment, you are able to step out of the flight, fight or freeze mode and make decisions from a clear headspace and make decisions from within your intuition rather than from fear or urgency. That is why safety is so important.
In my book, emotional regulation, which is one of the other steps that I mentioned, this goes right along with creating safety, of course, but when I'm talking about emotional regulation, it's more about learning to process through your emotions. It's about observing what's happening in your body, opening up to it and then really allowing yourself to process through the emotions. Learning to allow yourself to feel whatever it is that you're feeling and not being afraid of it, not thinking that you don't know how to handle it. Emotional regulation isn't something that we are usually taught. I talk about this a lot on this podcast because I think it's really, really important, and it is one of the things that, in my opinion, is the least talked about when it comes to emotions. But the most important, usually, what's very natural for us and what we are often taught to do when it comes to emotions, is to avoid them, to resist them, to react to them, instead of learning to open up to them, process through them, accept them and once you can learn how to regulate your emotions, to manage them, to allow them to process through them, that is when some real healing is going to be and to occur when it comes to your divorce trauma.
Another step is observing and deconstructing core beliefs, and this is when you begin to learn and understand what some of those core beliefs are that you have, and then you get to question whether or not those are beliefs that you want to continue leading your life with. And these beliefs come from a variety of things that have shaped your life, and this list includes, but it is not limited to, the things that I'm going to list here, and these include your family, school, religion, leaders, cultures, society, movies, tv, social media, books so many other things that have lent to and shaped your core beliefs, and some of them are serving you and some of them are not, and many of them you may not even realize are holding you back or creating trauma, are keeping you stuck and unable to move forward in your life. And then, once you start to observe them and deconstruct them, that's when you're able to shift into repetitive, corrective experiences. That means that you are learning new tools and you are implementing those tools. You are learning new lessons and you are implementing the things that you're learning into your life, which is demonstrating shifts in who you are, in how you show up up, in how you make decisions, in trusting yourself and continuing to do all of this over and over and over again, repetitively, in creating a new life for yourself, in creating that healing that you want when it comes to you and your divorce, and so when you have all four of these things working simultaneously, this is when the magic of trauma healing occurs and you begin to feel whole again. You begin to feel interconnected with yourself again as a divorced woman. And if you're listening to this podcast and you're thinking, hmm, it's interesting, because I do feel stuck in my past, I'm constantly thinking about the past and worrying about the past and then thinking about the future and it's terrifying and you have no idea of the uncertainty. It's so scary and you're stuck in these emotions that are keeping you in the past and the future and you're so disconnected from what is actually happening right now that might mean that you are experiencing trauma from your divorce.
The first thing I want to tell you is nothing is wrong with you if this is happening to you. This is very common for divorced women to experience this and feel this way. Every single one of my clients feels this way. I felt this way, so nothing is wrong with you. Number one, I felt this way. So nothing is wrong with you, number one and number two. You don't have to figure out how to heal all by yourself, all alone. Of course, you have the steps. I just laid out the steps for you if you want to do it alone. But I want you to know you do not have to do it alone. There are so many people out there who are open and know how to guide you through this process, and all you need to do is be open to finding the person that resonates with you the most to help you through. And if you are open to having someone guide you through this healing process, I would be honored to be that guide for you.
If you're curious about what this looks like, then I want to invite you to schedule your free 30-minute consult with me. I want you to come with your questions, find out what this might look like for you, figure out if I'm the right person for you. We'll have a conversation and you can just ask me. Basically, whatever you want. You can share some of your experience with me. If you want, I can guide you through some grief processing if that's what you feel like you need. Sometimes. What we need most is someone who has been in our shoes and knows the path to take and who will just be by our side every step of the way, guiding us and helping us. If that sounds like something that you want and you're interested in finding out more about, you can schedule your free consult with me by clicking the link in the show notes, or you can go to my website, karennelsoncoachingcom and schedule it there.
Trauma is real and I would say the majority of women who are going through a divorce are holding on to some kind of trauma, whether they recognize it or not. That needs to be healed from, and it doesn't have to be scary and it doesn't have to mean something is wrong with you. It can just be a part of your journey and a part of your process, and having someone to guide you through the steps and help you every step of the way may be exactly what you're looking for to help you as you go through this divorce journey. All right, my friends, thank you for listening. I love you for being here and 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 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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