What if embracing your emotions during a divorce could be the key to finding independence and fulfillment? Join me, Karen Nelson, as we explore this transformative idea in "Becoming You Again." Society often tells us to hide hard emotions, like anger, fear, and sadness. But the most effective way to heal from your divorce is to create a safe space to process these emotions fully and develop the emotional resilience needed to thrive post-divorce.
I’ll walk you through a gentle approach to navigating difficult emotions. From initial resistance to eventual acceptance, I discuss the five stages of opening up to our feelings, emphasizing the importance of understanding and embracing them. By the end of this episode, you'll know how to reconnect with yourself, creating a lasting foundation of emotional resilience that supports a fulfilling and independent life.
This episode focuses on emotional healing during and after divorce, emphasizing the importance of allowing difficult emotions rather than resisting them.
This episode:
• Explores the common resistance to difficult emotions
• Teaches healing through embracing rather than avoiding feelings
• Teaches the five stages of emotional healing
• Promotes self-compassion as a critical part of the healing process
• Offers tools to support emotional resilience
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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.
Featured on this episode:
Interested in the Divorce Betrayal Transformation? Learn more here.
Are you lost and confused about who you are after divorce? Don't worry. I've got 51 Ways to Get to Know Yourself Again. Click here to download.
Want to work first hand with Karin so you can stop worrying about what your life will be like after divorce, and instead begin making it amazing today? Click here to schedule a consult to find out more about working 1:1 with Karin as your coach.
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Full Episode Transcript:
When you're going through divorce, sometimes what you need most is a giant hug from somebody who's been through it and knows exactly what you're going through. This podcast, becoming you Again, is that giant hug you've been looking for. You are listening to episode number 201, and I'm 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 than when you were married. I'm your host, karin Nelson. Welcome back to the podcast.
Okay, so I just want to start off this podcast by pretending for just a minute. So come with me on this little adventure where we are going to pretend. Let's pretend that you are taking a divorce class on healing and self-compassion and learning to love yourself and all of the things right, All the things that we wish for after we go through a divorce, and you and I, and like a hundred or so other women, we're all in this class together and I'm up there and I'm teaching a portion of this class and I say raise your hand. If you've ever felt difficult or challenging or scary emotions, anything like anger or fear, or worry, or grief, or sadness, or betrayal or rejection or anything else that just feels hard, raise your hand. I can guarantee that every hand in that room would be raised, including my own. Okay, so keep imagining with me. We're still in this class and then I'm, I'm up there and I'm teaching and I say now I want you to raise your hand.
If, when you felt that difficult emotion, if, instead of just allowing it, what you did was you resisted it in some way, like maybe you told yourself to stop feeling sad or to just get over it it's been long enough or if you were crying to try and release some of that emotion, you kept telling yourself to just stop crying and questioning why you can't just stop crying, why you can't just move on Now, after I describe all of that, raise your hand if you have resisted your difficult or challenging emotions in some way in the past. And again, my guess is that most, if not all, of the hands would be raised, including my own. My point with this little exercise of pretending is that I want you to recognize that you are not alone when you feel difficult, challenging, hard, scary even sometimes emotions. Anyone who has been through a divorce has felt these emotions. Anyone who is a human let's be real, right Anyone who is a human has felt these emotions, but they seem to be ever present and they seem to stick around for a very long time when you're going through a divorce, and so I want to remind you that when you feel these difficult, challenging emotions or these negative emotions or like however you want to label it, right, that is part of the human experience. Nothing has gone wrong in your lived experience when you feel some of these hard emotions, any of these hard emotions.
But that is not what we're taught when we are growing up. We are taught to stop crying, that it's going to be okay, that you don't need to be sad, you don't need to be scared. You are taught to let's go get some ice cream so that you can feel better, or let's watch a show together so that you can feel better, or just stop crying. I don't know why you're being so emotional or anything along those veins. Right, and to be real, it makes sense that none of us, or the majority of us, were not taught to be okay with feeling and allowing difficult emotions, because nobody taught our parents how to do it. Nobody's sitting around in 1961 in high school or something, saying why don't you feel your emotions? Let's talk about emotions. Nobody's doing that right. It was so far out of the realm of what we should be talking about. Emotions were things that we do not talk about, that we try to pretend we don't have, and thankfully, we are in a different place in our world. Yes, there's still much more that we need to learn and grow and places we need to go, but we have evolved differently things beautifully to this point, and now we're at a place where, like, we want to learn about our emotions, we want to get in touch with them, we want to allow them and learn how to manage them like adults instead of like children. So our parents were taught not much about their emotions. They were living in emotional childhood and that is what they taught you. So it makes sense that we don't really know what to do other than to resist, react or avoid our emotions.
Okay, but here's the good news. The good news is that you are here right now, today, listening to this podcast episode so that you can gain skills and tools to help you become an emotional adult, to help you learn how to manage your emotions and let go of needing to manage everyone else's around you. But the the especially really great news is that you are here because you're going through a divorce. That's maybe not great news, but you're here because you want to heal. You want to learn the skills and the tools that you need to heal yourself so that you can move on and live any kind of life that you want. So today, in this podcast episode, I am talking about healing by feeling feeling your emotions, inviting them in, opening up to those scary, hard, negative emotions and then allowing them to just process through you. I know that maybe seems impossible. I know that maybe seems so scary, so out of reach, but I promise you that it is possible. I promise you that this is a skill that you can get better and better and better at, and your emotions don't have to be scary, even the ones that seem really crazy, ridiculous, that you just never want to feel, even those ones. I promise you it's possible.
If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you know that early last year I lost my father my dad and it was sort of expected, but not really. He wasn't super healthy in societal terms of what health is, and he was in his late 70s, so in that way it wasn't expected. We didn't expect him to live for five or 10 more years, but it was unexpected in how quickly the end came. That I am positive. Without these tools that I have, that I have been working on for years as a coach and as myself, trying to evolve and trying to heal from my own divorce and from my own challenging things that I've gone through, without all of those skills that I have at my fingertips, I am positive that I would not have been able to move through my grief and allow it to be with me and open up to it and grow along with it and carry it with me without it like taking over my life, without me be becoming incapacitated by my grief. I just I'm positive that I never would have been able to do that. And so when I say that it's possible for you to learn these tools and heal yourself and allow difficult, negative, hard emotions to be with you, I'm speaking from my own personal experience. I am speaking from helping my clients by teaching them these tools and then watching them just like run with it and live these amazing, beautiful, incredible lives, because they're not afraid of their emotions.
So let's talk about it. I want to teach you some things. I first want to talk about how to just gently touch on those hard emotions when they come up. Like if you've never been willing to accept negative emotions and you've always turned and run or pretended that they're not there or maybe even reacted to them right Like throw things, yell, scream, slam doors, whatever If you've just never been willing to accept that they're there, it can feel kind of scary to open up to allowing hard emotions. So I'm going to teach you how to just like gently touch it and step away. So I'm going to teach you how to just like gently touch it and step away and then gently open up more and more and more through these five stages that I'm going to talk about today. So there's five stages that have been kind of outlined and this is by Kristen Neff from the Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook, which is a great resource. But take note of these five steps, these five stages, because once you can open up to these five stages, you'll be so much more prepared to allow difficult emotions to come into your life.
So the first stage, the first stage is resistance, and this is when you feel the anger, the sadness, the betrayal, the rejection and you kind of struggle against it. You're like go away, I hate this feeling, I don't want to feel it anymore. And you just push against it, like probably where most of you are at right now. Let's be real, right. You just push against it, you're trying to get away from it, you don't want this feeling and you're doing whatever you can to do it. You're like you're over cleaning, you're over exercising, you're calling all of the friends to distract yourself. You're like doing whatever you can to just not feel this anymore. Okay, so that's the first stage, that's resistance. It's probably where most of you are and that's okay. This is not a problem. I don't want you to think that any of these stages are bad or wrong or you're doing it wrong. No, it's fine, we all do that, not a problem.
The next stage is exploring, and this is kind of what we're doing in this podcast right now. Right, I'm introducing an idea to you about being open and allowing the heart emotion to be with you, and so if you feel a negative emotion. And then you're like, oh, that podcast episode where she was like heal by feeling. Let me see what am I feeling. And you just kind of get curious, right, like where do I feel the sadness? Where does it show up in my body? What does it actually feel like physiologically in my body? And you just kind of start to explore the feeling a little bit. That is the next stage. That's exploring, that's getting really curious about. Okay, if I don't need to be afraid of this, but I'm not ready to let it completely in my life, let me just get curious about what it is. Where do I feel it? What does it feel like? Is it tense, is it tight, is it hard? Does it show up in my throat, my stomach, my chest, my head, my extremities? Where is it? Let's get curious. And the third stage is tolerating.
Okay, so this total side tangent, total side note. You know me, I love the side tangents, but every time I hear the word tolerate, all I think about is Taylor Swift song tolerate it on Evermore. First of all, it's such a good song, it is literally so good. But it I mean probably, if you've never listened to that song, go listen to it, especially if you're going through a divorce, because I bet 90% of the women who are listening to this podcast right now or who are going through a divorce can absolutely relate to every word Taylor sings in that song in terms of their relationship with their ex and how they felt about like not being seen or loved in a way that they like deserved or should be. Right, okay, so sorry, that was total side tangent. Um, I like to do that. I like the side tangents, but I even love Taylor more. So there you go. Tolerate. It's just a word. Literally anytime I hear it, I think of that song.
Okay, so let's go back to the tolerating of the emotion. This is when you start to feel just like a little bit more safe, feeling it, letting it in, allowing it. You're like, okay, listen, body, I don't actually like feeling this rejection, but I can handle it. I can stand it for a little bit and I'm just going to let it be with me and I'm just going to open up to it. I'm just going to like, carry it around with me in my backpack. I've taught this to my clients before. It's like you have a backpack and you're just like putting the like brick of rejection or whatever in your backpack and you're just like all right, fine, I guess I'm just going to carry this around with me today. I'm just going to tolerate it, right, it's like you're just. You're just like kind of opening up to it. You're not super excited about it, you don't really want it to be there, but you know it's there and so you just like, let it come. Okay, I don't really want to feel the sadness, I don't really want to feel this grief, I don't want to really want to feel this anger, but I'm just going to bring it with me. I'm not going to react to it, I'm not going to like, let it make my decisions. I'm just going to let it be there. I'm just going to tolerate it. That's the next step.
And then the fourth stage is allowing. This is when you're just going to kind of be in the flow, the ebb and flow of your feelings. Like you just recognize that feelings, all type of feelings they're just going to come and go, and so you're just going to open up to them and you're going to make space for them Good ones, bad ones, difficult ones, easy ones, negative ones, positive ones, all of the ones and you just go with the flow of the human emotional experience. This is this one's the best. I really think that this was probably the step that, like, served me the most when I was, when I was dealing with my dad's death last year. It was this fourth stage of just allowing I do.
There were some days when I just felt painful grief, like it just really I could feel it. It was there, it was present, but I had to live my life. I have a business and I have kids and I have a partner and like, yes, maybe there was a few days where I allowed myself to, like, lay on the couch and not do much. But guess what? There were also days when I needed to live my life and earn a living and take care of responsibilities. It didn't mean that I had to shut the grief out. What it meant was that I just opened up to it and allowed it to be a part of my life, allowed my body to feel what it was feeling, allowed my body to feel what it was feeling, allowed my brain to think what it was thinking, and not made it mean anything had gone wrong. Not made it mean that I wouldn't be able to get through this, that it was too difficult, none of those things. I just opened up for the grief and I made space for it inside of me and I just brought it along. I allowed it to process inside of me in whatever ways I needed.
And then the fifth stage of opening up to difficult emotions is you befriend them. And this is where you start to recognize the value there is in feeling difficult emotions and how important that can be in your life. I know you've heard this before, but if, if there was no pain or no sadness, you wouldn't understand happiness and it all Right. And so it's in this stage where we just start to recognize the value there is in the difficult emotions, you start to ask yourself okay, this emotion is present. What can I learn from this? It's trying to tell me something, probably. What is it trying to tell me? Now, listen, befriending and probably even allowing or tolerating those hard emotions may seem completely foreign to you, so far out of reach from where you're at right now, and you know what that's okay. I am just giving you this information to let you know that the more you work on understanding your personal emotional journey, the better you will get at being able to handle all types of emotions and letting them be with you. There is no finish line to cross right. This isn't a race to get to a certain stage so that you can say you accomplished it Like no, this is just you and your life and you're continuing to work on it and evolve and grow. That's it. So if you're going to go through these steps and it starts to feel overwhelming or it starts to feel like too much, that is totally okay. Just back off, just touch it. Touch the difficult emotion for a few seconds and then come back to it later. It's fine. We don't have to white knuckle our way through, allowing difficult emotions to be present in our life. No, like that is not what we're going for. We're not going for the white knuckling, just trying to drive through it.
My partner and I we love to have philosophical discussions, like literally about everything. Everything is on the table, and there is this one movie that we've had many, many, many discussions about and it's called Whiplash. I don't know if you've seen this, but it's about this drummer. He's like a young adult, like 20s or something, and he's a great drummer. And he joins this music conservatory and in this conservatory is this mentor, this instructor, and he is very intense in his teaching methods and you can watch the movie and you can make your own opinions. In my opinion, his methods are abusive and they're not okay.
I personally don't think that an environment of hate and disregard and giving until there's literally nothing left to give will always lead to a bright or better outcome. I just don't agree with that and, again, in my opinion, with my own journey of self-acceptance and healing and growth. The kinder I am to myself and the more self-compassion I give myself, the better off I am. I feel more accepted by myself, I trust myself, I push myself in ways that feel safe but also motivating, to like reach goals and to create things in my life that I didn't have before. Like that's my way of going through this journey, which is like basically the opposite of what this movie is about, and that, that, that instructor's methods Right, and so, in my opinion, like white knuckling things just to do them, to try and push us to the next level, to try to reach that success, goal or like whatever, I don't think that method is very useful.
I think the negative effects of that outweigh the positive results in my opinion. So I'm telling you, you don't have to white knuckle it If it's too hard, if it's too scary. If you can literally only just touch the emotion for like five seconds at a time, do it, allow it for five seconds, be with it for five seconds, tolerate it for five seconds and then back off. Not a problem. Be kind to yourself, listen to your body, take breaks Back off when you need it. None of those things are a problem when learning to allow difficult emotions to be present.
Now, if you want some more guidance on actual ways of exploring or tolerating or allowing the emotions, I have other podcasts, episodes. Specifically, you can listen to episode number one 35, processing emotions one-on-one. That's a great one. Or episode 80, emotional intelligence Again a really great one. That's going to give you some more like practical applications of how to do this in your day-to-day life.
All right, my friends, that is what I have for you today. Thank you so much for being here, as always. I love you so much. You've got this. Be kind to yourself and 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 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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