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

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.
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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!
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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 ✨

Divorce changes your relationship with a lot of things.
Love. Trust. Safety. The future.
And sometimes… money.
Because money isn’t just money. It can represent security, freedom, worthiness, belonging—and whether or not you believe there will actually be enough.
In this VIP re-release, we’re digging into the subconscious money beliefs you may not even realize you’re carrying: scarcity, feeling ineligible for more, inherited beliefs about wealth, and the complicated feelings that can come with allowing yourself to actually have more.
We’ll talk about:
How “there’s not enough” becomes a deeply ingrained belief
The family, cultural, and spiritual messages that shape your relationship with money
Why part of you may not believe you're eligible for abundance
The connection between money, identity, belonging, and loss
Why being “realistic” can sometimes keep you from imagining something different
How to begin noticing and shifting the beliefs underneath your money patterns
Human Design as a tool for understanding how you naturally make decisions and move through the world
A guided practice to begin working with scarcity and your capacity to receive
Because after experiencing profound loss, it’s worth getting curious about what your mind and body learned from it.
Not just about love.
But about having, losing, trusting—and believing there can still be more.
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 ✨

There are things you learned to carry because, at one point, you had to.
The responsibility. The mental load. Other people's expectations. Keeping everyone okay. Being the strong one. Being the woman who could handle it.
But just because you needed that version of yourself then doesn't mean you have to keep being her now.
This week, Dawn sits down with Alexis Contos, founder of The Breadwinners, a community redefining what it means to be an ambitious, successful woman—and creating spaces where women can put down the titles, roles, accomplishments and performance long enough to figure out who they actually are.
Which, hello. Divorce.
Because divorce has a way of forcing you to confront the identities you've accumulated—and decide which ones actually belong in the life you're building now.
Dawn and Alexis talk about:
What you carry vs. what you bring into your relationships and your life
The versions of yourself you never became because you got so good at being this one
Why divorce can feel like both falling and failing in public
The friendships, careers and identities we eventually outgrow
Why protecting everyone else can quietly become sacrificing yourself
The "egg" you're terrified to drop
What happens when accomplished women stop performing and start telling the truth
How to borrow someone else's belief in you while you're learning to believe in yourself
Because sometimes the next version of you doesn't need more.
She needs you to finally put something down.
So what are you still carrying that doesn't belong anymore?
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 ✨