Ep 193: How to Stop Ruminating in Negative Divorce Thoughts | Becoming You Again Podcast

Ruminating thoughts can feel like a relentless storm, especially during the emotional upheaval of divorce. Imagine finding a way to calm those swirling thoughts without battling them head-on.

Join me as we explore how somatic practices can help regulate your nervous system and alleviate stress, allowing your mind to refocus on healing rather than replaying the past. We'll delve into the emotional challenges of grief, anger, depression, and anxiety, and uncover strategies to foster resilience and find a path toward recovery.

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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 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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1. Interested in the Divorce Betrayal Transformation? Learn more here.

2. 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.

3. 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:

This is Becoming you Again, the podcast that offers you the mental and emotional support that you need as you go through your divorce. You are listening to episode number 193, and 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 be here with you today. I hope that everything is going well over your holiday season. If you are struggling to get through the holidays, please, please go listen to episode number 191. That's two episodes ago where I talk about handling the holidays as you go through your divorce or after your divorce, whatever situation you happen to be in, but I promise you that it doesn't have to hurt as bad as it might be hurting for you and as a little plea from me to you if you are enjoying the podcast, if you are getting any good tools or information from this podcast. Please take a moment right now as you are listening, and go leave a rating and or review for me. That helps this podcast get in front of more women who need the help and guidance that they're looking for as they go through a divorce. So that's just my little soapbox for the moment. Please go do that.

Let's jump into today's episode where I am talking about how to stop ruminating in your thoughts, and I'm going to give you a couple of really simple ways to break that pattern when you are stuck in rumination. So, basically, what is rumination Like? Think back to a time where you had maybe a conversation with your ex or soon to be ex, or your kids or your boss or your mom, where it was maybe tense, there was maybe a lot of emotional things happening, emotions were flaring, emotions were high, the nervous system was activated and you just keep going over that conversation in your head over and over and over and you just cannot stop thinking about it and you wish that you had said something differently and you kind of are beating yourself up about oh, why didn't I say this? And you have the perfect comeback now that you wish you would have said, but you just cannot stop thinking about it. You can't stop worrying about what this conversation might mean for the future. You can't stop replay about it. You can't stop worrying about what this conversation might mean for the future, you can't stop replaying it. You can't stop thinking about how it felt.

And you continue to feel activated hours, sometimes days, even after the inciting event. Those are called ruminating thoughts and they can be very distressing because they continue to keep your nervous system heightened, keeping your mental and emotional load overloaded, which creates exhaustion and more mental and emotional stress for yourself, which is physically draining, which is emotionally draining and which is mentally draining. And so, after a while of continued rumination, you can feel exhausted. And that is the last thing that you want to feel as you are trying to support yourself and your kids, as you're going through a divorce, as you're trying to move forward, as you're trying to heal. The last thing you want is to be thinking about certain conversations, certain text messages, certain situations, certain interactions over and over and over again, especially when we logically know that we can't go back and change what happened in those conversations or in those moments. We are not magical. We don't have time machines where we can go back and change the past, and we can't stop the cycle because often people are like well, just stop thinking about it, just start thinking about something else, just decide that it doesn't matter, stop thinking about it. And yes, of course that is so easy to say and so much harder to do when you are actually in those ruminating thoughts, especially when you are already going through a lot of emotional turmoil. That seems to happen quite often in a divorce. Maybe you have a lot of grief that you haven't been able to release yet, maybe you have a lot of anger that has been building up over many, many years, maybe you're feeling some depression, some anxiety, some worry, some uncertainty. All of these things build up, and then you get stuck in a ruminating thought pattern and you're like I wish desperately to be able to stop thinking about this, and yet I just cannot seem to change my thoughts. And so this is a time when, instead of trying to change the thoughts, what we want to do is we want to focus on the body. This is why I'm going to give you a couple of somatic practices that you can use, because, once you are able to re-regulate your nervous system, even if it's just by like a couple of points on that pain scale of one to 10,. Once you're able to re-regulate, that's when your brain will come back online and you'll actually be able to problem solve and refocus intentionally on thinking about other things other than the ruminating thoughts.

Now what's really interesting is, sometimes we will fall into a ruminating thought pattern trap, if you will, when we can't really find a solution to something Like maybe there's a problem from the situation, or the text message or the email or whatever right Whatever brought on those ruminating thoughts. Sometimes we think, if we think about it enough, we will be able to come up with some sort of a solution, and yet, because we don't have all of the pieces, because the future hasn't happened yet, because we don't know how things are going to turn out, we can't come up with a solution, which also sometimes keeps us stuck in this ruminating thought pattern. And so, again, we want to take it back, depending on which situation it is, whether you're just continuing to focus on the thoughts of what happened or you cannot come up with the solution to the problem that your brain thinks needs a solution. We take it back to a somatic practice. Now, remember, somatic just means body, so all we're doing is, instead of staying in our brain, focusing on the thoughts we are going to get into our body for just a minute, and I promise you that is all this takes, because I have been using exactly these practices over the last several weeks. For me particularly, it's been since the presidential election. So over these last several weeks, I have been using these somatic practices on myself because I have been finding myself ruminating in thoughts of uncertainty, thoughts about what the future might look like, thoughts about confusion, about what is going on and all sorts of things, and I've been using these ruminating somatic practices and it works, I am telling you, it works. So, whether you need to use this for your divorce, some things that's going on with your ex or your kids or any other relationship that you're struggling with right now, going to help.

So the key to getting yourself out of ruminating thoughts is to focus on patterns. We want to focus on some kind of a structured pattern, because patterns provide a structured way of redirecting your focus, which is going to interrupt that repetitive ruminating cycle that you are stuck in, and it's also going to get you out of the future or the past in your thoughts and get you into the present. The present moment is where we are able to understand what's really going on. We reassure our body that we are safe right here in this moment and that everything is okay. And the present moment keeps us out of the worry of what might happen in the future and the anxiety of what happened in the past. All right, what might happen in the future and the anxiety of what happened in the past, all right.

But patterns, specifically, are very key to providing structure. And what really is happening is you realize that you are actually in control over your thoughts because you are controlling where you are focusing. You are controlling where you are focusing and oftentimes, when we are in ruminating thought patterns, we feel very out of control. We feel like we don't have any control over anything, and it's very frustrating and we're desperately searching for some kind of control. Patterns is where you bring that control back to yourself, where you step into your power of in this moment, right now, right here, I actually do have control and what it is is I can find these patterns.

So the very first somatic practice that I want you to try remember any kind of somatic practice. Some work better for others. Right, some things will work better for you and what you're doing and others might not work as well. So you just got to kind of test it out, trial and error, see what works good for you, what resonates with you, et cetera. The very first thing that I want you to do is get comfortable, take a deep breath, in through your nose, out through your mouth, in through your nose, out through your mouth, in through your nose, out through your mouth, and really just center yourself in the moment of where you are in the present. Okay, put your hands together so that the fingertips are touching and then you're just going to count in a very patterned way, starting at your thumb, ending at your pinky and then working your way back One, two, three, four, five, five, four, three, two, one. Repeat several times if necessary, but what we're looking for is on a scale of one to 10 on that pain scale. We want to recognize that your nervous system is realigning in some kind of way, whether you originally felt like you were at an eight and you went down to a 7.5 or a six or a four, whatever it is right. So do it as often as you need to to really bring you into the present moment, reminding your nervous system and your body and yourself that you are safe right now, in this moment, redirecting the focus into a pattern for control, which will then bring your prefrontal cortex back online and you can step into problem solving.

The next somatic practice that you can try out is just look around wherever you are, whether, like right now, I'm in my office. So I'm going to look around my office and I'm going to look for any kind of pattern that has to do with shapes. I'm choosing rectangles. Okay, I see rectangular windows on my French doors in my office. I see some art hanging on my wall that are shaped as rectangles. I look down on the floor and see the wood floor pattern. The wood slats are rectangular shapes. On my keyboard on my computer, I see rectangular shapes all over the place. I open this drawer to my desk and I look inside and I find a rectangular box. I find a rectangular piece of candy. I find some rectangular pieces of paper.

Wherever you can find patterns, help your brain to focus on those patterns, and it doesn't have to be rectangles, it can be any shape at all. You decide, but focus and find the shapes. Another practice that might be very useful would be doing some kind of number game or word game. Wordle might be very helpful. Connections is also a really great one. Sudoku is a really great one when it comes to numbers, recognizing numbers and patterns, and maybe those are going to take too long, I don't know.

Again, this is trial and error, you deciding what you need in those moments. But most of these somatic practices do not take very much time. You can do them by yourself. You can do them in a crowd. You can do them as you're sitting on a train, writing to and from work. You can do them when you're in the room with the rest of your family watching television. You can do them when you're locked in your bedroom and you need a moment for yourself. You can do them at any time when you really find yourself stuck in these ruminating patterns. These are the moments when we want to show up for ourselves, take care of ourselves and have our own back, and you are gaining the tools that you need to be able to do that. So try these out.

Come and message me on Instagram at Karen Nelson Coaching and let me know how it's going. I can't wait to hear. You got this. I love you, you are incredible and you are going to get through your divorce with your own power, with your own sense of self and moving toward a future that you are so excited about. That's all I have for you today. 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 KarenNelsonCoaching 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.