Ep #108: Grounding Work for Ultimate Healing After Divorce | Becoming You Again Podcast
Grounding is a way of speaking the language of your body that your nervous system. Grounding is a way to intentionally reactivate your parasympathetic nervous system to send your body and brain messages or signals that you are safe.
Once you learn how to ground yourself in the language of your body, that’s when you will be able to fully tap into your intuition and understand what you and your body need. This is the connection that will allow for ultimate self trust, ultimate self love, ultimate self acceptance and self confidence. Grounding work is the foundation for true self connection.
Listen in as I offer you many options for grounding techniques to try out and see what works for you and your body, bringing into alignment your mindset, body and intuition for full and true self connection.
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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 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 show 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:
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I'm Karin Nelson and you're listening to Becoming You Again, episode number 108.
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Welcome to Becoming You Again the podcast to help with your mental and emotional well being during and after divorce. This is where you learn to overcome the trauma of your divorce by reconnecting with yourself creating lasting emotional resilience and living a truly independent life, so your life will be even better than when you were married. I'm your host, Karin Nelson.
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Welcome back to the podcast, my lovely friends, I am so happy that you're here today. As always, let's jump right into today's episode where I am going to be talking about grounding work for ultimate healing after divorce. There's a four step process that needs to occur for healing after divorce. And those four steps are establishing safety, focus on emotional regulation, breaking down belief systems, and then having repetitive corrective experiences. I've talked about these on the podcast before, I'm not going to go in depth into these today. But if this is something that you are wanting to know more about, if you're really wanting to get a little more clarity about those four steps, and how we you able to implement those into your life to actually heal from your trauma,
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then you can go listen to episode number 102 Healing from the Trauma of Divorce, I go into more depth and talk about those four steps in that episode. But today, I really just want to focus on grounding work and what that actually looks like. I'm gonna give you some examples in a little bit, so that you know
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exactly what grounding work looks like what it means, what I'm saying when I say the word grounding. But to understand what grounding means, we have to kind of understand just a little bit about our nervous system. The nervous system is the body's - basically it's like the communication network. It is responsible for transmitting messages between your brain and other organs and tissues. And there's two main branches of the nervous system. We're getting just a tiny bit scientific on today's podcast episode, but that's okay. Sometimes we need the science to understand right? There's two main branches of the nervous system, the parasympathetic and the sympathetic. If you remember probably back in like biology class in junior high or high school, they talked about this.
The sympathetic nervous system is what gets activated when we are very stressed when we are in danger. Whether it's real danger or perceived. Remember, our brain does not know the difference between real danger and perceived danger, like real threat, and emotional threat, it thinks it's all the same. And so it reacts through our nervous system, which is ultimately as I said, connected to the brain. And this sympathetic nervous system is what triggers our fight, flight or freeze response. And then the parasympathetic nervous system is what comes online, when we are able to return to that state of calm, that state of feeling reregulated. This is what helps our body relax and feel safe. When we experience trauma. Basically, what's going on is our sympathetic nervous system is activated. And then our body goes into a state of high alert, like it's always on alert. And this may manifest with physical symptoms like a fast heart rate, sweating, difficulty taking deep breaths, it might feel like a catch or a lump in your throat. And if this goes on for too long, it can also just continue to show up as like chronic stress, chronic fatigue, auto immune disorders, hyper anxious states, things like that. And so I think it's really important to understand how to ground your body and reregulate your parasympathetic nervous system. So that we are not living in these chronic activated states of high alert, which is often what's happening when we are in trauma, and then we don't know how to get out of it. And so we are constantly just on living on high alert, living above where our nervous system is just regulating at a normal baseline level.
And so what grounding can do is it actually allows you to intentionally reactivate your parasympathetic nervous system and it allows you to send your body and your brain messages or signals that you are safe. Grounding is learning a way of speaking the language of your body. It is learning a way of speaking the language of your nervous system that your nervous system sometimes understands much better than just saying words like I'm safe. I'm okay. I'll get through this. I can do this.
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That doesn't necessarily reregulate your body or turn your parasympathetic nervous system back online. But here's the beauty of what learning how to ground yourself will do for your life.
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Because once you learn how to ground yourself in the language of your body,
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that is when you are going to be able to fully tap into your intuition. You will understand exactly what you and your body need. And it is this connection that will allow for ultimate self trust, ultimate self love, ultimate self acceptance, and ultimate self confidence. Grounding work, in my opinion, is the foundation for true self connection.
Grounding is a way to really pay attention to the needs of our nervous system. And so grounding at the most basic level, is anything that helps you connect to the here and now. And that is where true healing from any kind of trauma, from any kind of emotional overload is going to happen.
My coach explains grounding in this way, and I really like it. So I'm going to share it with you folks today. Think of an electrician wiring a house. the electrician knows that electricity in the wires has to go somewhere. And so when setting up electricity in a home, it all ends up in some way connected to the ground. There are always grounding wires for a house in the ground. And this is because the Earth, the ground is a safe place for energy to be spread and released. The ground holds negative electrical properties that will neutralize positively charged electricity. And the ground is also a place for the electricity to be discharged as well. And we are kind of like that, as humans, we are also made up of energy made up of these electrical currents running through us constantly, right. And if we don't process and move through that energy, and move it around us and move it through us, we will be affected physically. And so by grounding ourselves as humans, we are connecting to the earth in some way to neutralize and discharge all of that energy and to reconnect to ourselves.
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I like to think of grounding, as anything that helps me reconnect with my body reconnect to the here and now. And there are many ways to do this. But you, yes, you are ultimately the one who has to try things out and decide what feels right for you. There's going to be some things that are truly speaking the language of your body that maybe don't speak the language of my body. We are all different and unique and that is the beauty of it. And so don't be afraid to try out several of these on different occasions when you're trying to reconnect with yourself when you're feeling activated to see what works and what feels good. I'm going to give you some examples. But I think often the easiest place to start for most people, especially if grounding yourself is a new concept is to start just with simple observation. It truly doesn't get more simple than making an observation about what you see, or what you hear in any given moment. And not just observing. But really paying attention.
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Like that is kind of what the observing part means, right? Many of us are seeing and hearing all day long, but not really observing it. So a simple way to ground yourself is to see and or hear. And then observe it, let it sink in, like understand what is actually happening, what you're actually seeing. And hearing. The most simple exercise for this type of grounding, that I know of, is to scan your five senses. I've definitely talked about this on the podcast in previous podcasts, several of them I think, but I use this one often at night when I'm having trouble sleeping or if I wake up in the middle of the night and I can't fall back asleep. I will just go through my five senses. What do I see? What do I hear? What do I smell? What does it feel like with my body against my mattress or against the sheets? What do I taste? And then I pay attention to the here and now to ground myself to speak the language of my body to relax to reconnect to get myself back on line and remind my nervous system that I am safe, that everything is okay. Some other examples of observatory grounding are you could sip some water or some tea or sparkling water and notice the
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sensation while you are sipping. Notice the bubbles, notice the liquid and notice it going down your throat, notice it in your mouth, notice the temperature change from when it's outside when you put it up to your lips, and then when it goes inside, there's so many things to observe, when you start actually paying attention.
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You can run your hands underwater, and notice the sensation of the water against your skin. You can move your tongue around your teeth and around inside your mouth.
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You can say your name eight to 10 times. You can use bilateral stimulation of your body.
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This can look something like tapping your feet left, then right then left then right rhythmically, or tapping your hands on your thighs left then right then left than right. You can use this bilateral stimulation, if you go for a run, or if you go for a walk. Or if you march in place. You can punch in the air left, then right then left and right. All of these things are allowing your nervous system
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to recognize we're in the here and now and in this moment, we are safe. And you don't even have to say those words, although you can. But this is learning to speak the language of your body. There are other ways to do it. You can observe something like clouds moving or leaves blowing in the wind. You can observe waves or ripples in the water. Or you can come up with something on your own that truly allows you to connect with your body or the earth and allows you to release the energy and reconnect with yourself at the same time.
Something that I did a few weeks ago for myself to ground myself was we had a very thin layer of snow on our grass in our backyard. And I walked through the snow barefoot for just a few minutes. And it was just a simple way for me to first of all, reconnect with the Earth, reconnect with my body. Because let me tell you, it's very difficult to feel something so cold, like snow, right, against your skin, on the bottom of your feet without being very present in the here and now. And all of these exercises, all of these techniques of grounding, are simple ways to get you to the present the here and now. Get you out of your head, get you out of the past, get you out of the future, get you out of what was or what could be and stay here now where you are safe. While I was doing that action of grounding myself by walking on the snow I was paying attention to the feelings and the sensations that my body was having. And I was simultaneously offering safety signals
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through my body, through my thoughts, reminding myself that I was safe in that moment, that I was here and now present. And if learning to ground yourself, for a fuller picture of healing after divorce is something that you're really wanting to bring into your life, I would highly recommend keeping some kind of grounding journal where maybe once or twice a day for a week or two, it's totally up to you, you get to decide how often and how long, you just kind of record the grounding technique that you practiced in that moment.
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Write down the technique who used. Write down any observations that you had, about the technique about what you felt about anything that you learned about yourself along the way. Anything that you learned about your body? Did you feel reconnected? Did you feel more relaxed? Did you feel more centered? Did you recognize something inside of you that you hadn't maybe recognized before? It's a beautiful thing when you can start to connect your mind your body and your soul all as one. And when I say soul I mean like your intuition, like your gut, like the part of you that often is the missing link when it comes to women who have been oppressed in their marriages, women who have been, you know, held down by society, women who have been told you're not good enough to have a voice, you're not good enough to take up space, you're not good enough to have an opinion, all of that kind of thing. And when you can reconnect to your nervous system in this way and feel comfortable in your own body that is when that intuition comes back online, and you reconnect with that and that friends is the most beautiful thing that you can do for yourself. If you have been feeling stuck in your healing after divorce, either you're feeling grief and you just aren't sure how to move through it. Or maybe you're easily triggered by your ex or things in your life that show up.
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Or if you just are feeling very disconnected from yourself, and you're looking for a path back to you. Then
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I want to invite you to schedule a free consult with me. I would be honored, truly honored to be your guide to help you move through your grief and heal from the wounds of your ended marriage and your divorce. If that sounds like something that you're interested in knowing more about and just speaking with me and having a conversation, then I would say go for it. Schedule it. You can schedule your consult by clicking the link in the show notes. Or you can go to Karin Nelson coaching.com. That's k a r i n n e l s o n coaching.com. All right, my lovely ladies, thank you so much for listening. I appreciate you being here and doing the work on yourself. You are important, you are worthy and lovable.
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Have a great week and I will talk to you next time. If you like what you're learning on the podcast and you're ready to create lasting change in results in your life. Then you need to be working one on one with Karin as your divorce coach. This is where we take everything you're learning in the podcast and 10 x it with implementation and weekly coaching where you start to see change in yourself and your life immediately. To find out more about how to work exclusively with Karin go to www dot Karin Nelson coaching.com. That's www dot k a r i n n e l s o n coaching.com
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Thanks for listening. If this podcast agreed with you in any way, please take a minute to follow and give it 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.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai