Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce

You want love.
You want support.
You want good things to happen to you.
So why does some part of you still tense up when they actually arrive?
Because when love has historically come with conditions, disappointment, betrayal, obligation or loss, receiving something good can feel surprisingly vulnerable.
You may find yourself wondering:
What’s the catch?
What will this cost me?
What are they going to want from me?
What if I let myself depend on this and it disappears?
What if opening myself up just gives someone another opportunity to hurt me?
After divorce, those protective instincts can follow you into far more than romantic relationships.
They can shape how you receive kindness.
Help.
Friendship.
Opportunity.
Support.
Even the things you deeply want.
In this guided meditation, we’re not going to force your heart open or ask you to trust before you’re ready.
Instead, you’ll gently explore what your heart has been protecting you from and practice allowing love, care and goodness to come toward you without immediately needing to earn it, repay it, control it or brace for what happens next.
Inside this episode, you’ll:
Notice how your body responds when love or support comes toward you
Explore what your heart may still be protecting you from after divorce
Practice receiving without performing, proving or reciprocating
Soften the instinct to search for the catch
Create a new experience of allowing kindness, care, joy and support to feel safe
Practice opening your heart without abandoning your boundaries or yourself
Your heart does not have to fling the door wide open.
An inch is enough.
Because healing doesn’t usually happen through one giant act of trust.
It happens through small experiences that teach your nervous system:
Maybe this doesn’t have to cost me.
Maybe I don’t have to fight for everything.
Maybe something good can come toward me…and I can let myself receive it.
This Thursday VIP episode is unlocked for everyone.
And if this episode brings up the realization that you’re exhausted from trying to heal, figure everything out and hold yourself together largely on your own, enrollment for A Different D Word is open now.
A Different D Word is my 12-month divorce healing experience for women who want deep, individualized support as they process the grief, trauma, attachment patterns and nervous-system wounds that divorce can expose.
You don’t have to know exactly what you need before you begin.
And you don’t have to earn the right to be deeply supported.
Support the show
You can't think your way into healing 🥵 You have to practice your way there 👭If you're ready for the next step, learn more about  A Different D Word and apply here ✨

You can know exactly what you need to do next—and still feel every part of you screaming, nope.
Set the boundary. Ask for help. Leave the relationship. Start dating differently. Choose yourself. Let someone really see you. Take the next step in your healing.
Why can the thing that might actually change your life feel so threatening?
Because your nervous system doesn’t automatically choose what’s best for you. It often chooses what it already knows how to survive.
In this episode, Dawn and Joy talk about why familiar pain can feel safer than unfamiliar possibility after divorce—and how the same patterns that kept you stuck inside your marriage can quietly follow you into your healing.
We talk about self-prioritizing when you’ve spent decades managing everyone else, the difference between intuition and nervous-system alarm, why denial and avoidance can feel so compelling, and what happens when your protective parts start talking you out of the very life you’ve been praying for.
We also get into one of the hardest parts of real healing: allowing yourself to be witnessed. Because sometimes the next breakthrough isn’t about finding another thing to do by yourself. It’s about letting someone see the pattern you can’t see from inside it.
If you’ve been wondering, Why do I keep pulling away from the thing I know I want?—this conversation is for you.
Inside this episode:
Why prioritizing yourself can register as danger after years of codependency
How familiar pain becomes confused with safety
Why anxiety can masquerade as intuition
The protector parts that show up when change starts getting real
How denial and avoidance keep us from facing uncertainty
Why you may have to move before you actually feel ready
How community helps you recognize patterns you can’t see alone
If you’re recognizing yourself in this episode—if you know what you want, but keep finding reasons to wait, pull back, or convince yourself you should be able to do this alone—this may be the moment to stop trying to outthink the pattern.
Enrollment for A Different D Word is open now through September 20th. This is our 12-month healing program for women who are ready to stop circling the same pain and finally have the support, tools, community, and deeper healing work in one place.
If you’ve been wondering whether it’s the right next step for you, book a call with Dawn. We’ll slow it down, talk about what’s actually happening in your life, and figure out together whether the program is a fit.
Support the show
You can't think your way into healing 🥵 You have to practice your way there 👭If you're ready for the next step, learn more about  A Different D Word and apply here ✨

Divorce grief can harden you in ways you don’t always notice.
You brace more.
You anticipate more.
You hold tighter.
You get really good at pushing through.
Sometimes that hardness was necessary. It helped you survive what was happening.
But eventually, the armor that protected you can start making it harder to feel safe enough to soften again.
This week’s Cocoon VIP is a gentle yoga practice followed by Yoga Nidra designed around that exact idea: softening what divorce and grief have hardened in you.
During the Nidra, you’ll work with the image of a rock resting in a flowing river. The water doesn’t force the rock to change. It simply keeps moving around it, slowly softening the sharp edges and carrying away what is ready to go.
Old stories.
Old identities.
The weight of past relationships.
The ways you learned to protect yourself that may not fit anymore.
There’s nothing here you need to figure out or fix.
You’ll move your body, settle your nervous system, and then give yourself space to notice what happens when you stop gripping quite so hard.
Grab your mat, a blanket, pillows, warm socks, and anything else that helps your body feel supported.
Then come let the river do some of the work.
Support the show
You can't think your way into healing 🥵 You have to practice your way there 👭If you're ready for the next step, learn more about  A Different D Word and apply here ✨

You’re doing the therapy.
You’re listening to the podcasts. You understand your attachment style. You’ve journaled, processed, learned the language, set the boundaries, and tried really fucking hard to move on.
So why do you still feel stuck?
In Part 1, we started asking a different question: Is your healing plan actually big enough for what you’re carrying?
Today, we finish the checklist.
Because sometimes the problem isn’t that you’re resistant to healing.
It’s that you don’t have the right tool for the wound.
Or the person helping you doesn’t have the skill set required for where you’re trying to go.
Or you’ve been measuring your healing by whether you ever get triggered instead of looking at the trajectory of your life.
Are you recovering from triggers faster?
Ruminating less?
Trusting yourself more?
Needing less closure, reassurance, or validation from your ex?
Are your boundaries easier to hold?
Is your life gradually becoming bigger than your divorce?
And then we get to the question that might be the biggest gut punch of this entire two-part series:
What is it costing you to stay under-resourced?
Your sleep? Your health? Your energy? Your work? Your friendships? Your relationship with your children? Years spent emotionally attached to someone who is no longer building a life with you?
There is a cost to getting the right support.
But there is also a cost to continuing without enough of it.
By the end of this episode, we want you to be able to zoom all the way out and compare two things:
How big is the wound?
And how big is the support?
Because if you’re carrying three gunshot wounds, the cute little Band-Aids aren’t the problem.
They were just never big enough for the job.
If this episode helps you realize that your burdens currently feel bigger than your solutions, scroll down and fill out the interest form for A Different D Word. Doors close September 20.

Download the Healing Checklist Here!
Support the show
You can't think your way into healing 🥵 You have to practice your way there 👭If you're ready for the next step, learn more about  A Different D Word and apply here ✨

You’re tired of healing.
You’ve listened to the podcasts. You understand your attachment style. You know about boundaries and nervous system regulation. Maybe you’ve done therapy, read the books, journaled, meditated—and you’re still wondering why you can’t just let go and move on.
Here’s the good news: letting go may not actually be the problem.
The bad news? You may be carrying a hell of a lot more than you realized—and the support you have may not be big enough for all of it.
In Part 1 of this two-part series, we’re helping you take an honest inventory of what you’re actually trying to heal after divorce: grief, betrayal, attachment wounds, identity loss, old trauma, parenting stress, loneliness, nervous system overwhelm—and all the other pieces that get lumped into “Why am I not over this yet?”
We’ll help you figure out whether you need more information or help integrating what you already know, whether you’re stable enough for deeper healing work, and whether the dose of support you have actually matches the weight of what you’re carrying.
Because maybe you don’t suck at letting go.
Maybe you’ve been trying to treat three gunshot wounds with a really cute Welly Band-Aid.
And next week in Part 2, we’ll show you how to tell whether the help you’re getting actually matches what you need.

Download the Healing Checklist Here!
Support the show
You can't think your way into healing 🥵 You have to practice your way there 👭If you're ready for the next step, learn more about  A Different D Word and apply here ✨