Ep 210: The Art of Being Kind vs. Nice: Reducing Divorce Stress

Divorce throws your emotions into overdrive, with stress levels soaring as you navigate uncertainty and major life changes. But what if one powerful stress-reduction technique isn't about better coping mechanisms, but rather dismantling a fundamental belief most women carry? The distinction between being "nice" and being "kind" holds transformative power for women going through divorce.

I’m going to walk you through the societal conditioning that pressures women to be nice—putting everyone else's comfort before our own, staying silent to avoid rocking the boat, enduring unacceptable behavior to avoid being labeled difficult—actually increases our stress and disconnects us from our intuition when we need it most. You’ll see how niceness keeps us small and stressed, while kindness—speaking our truth, setting boundaries, honoring our values—creates authentic connection and reduces anxiety. 

You’ll learn:

• Divorce creates immense stress due to uncertainty, worry, and emotional overwhelm

• Women are conditioned in our patriarchal system to be nice over everything else

• Being nice means putting yourself last, forgetting yourself, and sometimes putting yourself in danger

• Nice behavior turns us into people-pleasers who don't advocate for our own needs

• Being kind means being honest, using your voice, and setting clear boundaries

• Kindness involves speaking up when things are uncomfortable or unacceptable

• Start with small steps to replace niceness with kindness in specific situations

• As you practice kindness over niceness, your stress levels will naturally decrease

• Building courage to be kind helps align your brain, body, and intuition

• This practice helps reconnect you to your wholeness and integrity after divorce

  
  

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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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Full Episode Transcript:

When you're going through a divorce, sometimes what you need is the most 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 that you've been looking for. You are listening to episode number 210, and I am your host, karin Nelson. Welcome to Becoming you Again. The podcast where you learn to step into your power as a woman in this world again. The podcast where you learn to step into your power as a woman in this world, where you learn to reconnect to your wholeness, your integrity, and bring into alignment your brain, your body and your intuition after divorce. This is the podcast where you learn to trust yourself again and move forward toward a life that you truly want. You are listening to Becoming you Again, and I am your host, karin Nelson. Welcome back to the podcast. My lovely ladies, I am, as always, so happy that you're here.

Before we get started, I wanted to just ask real quick if you can do me a huge favor. It actually won't take that much of your time. In fact, you can do it right now with your phone in your hand as you're scrolling. You can scroll to whatever podcasting platform you use to listen to this podcast, find where you can leave a rating for this podcast and leave me a quick rating, and if you can leave a review, even better. First of all, it makes me super excited when you guys do this, but also it helps get this podcast in front of other women who are struggling as they go through their divorce, just like you. Okay, thank you so much. I know that that's maybe a bit to ask, but hopefully it won't be too much of a burden for you because you can do it right now as you're listening.

When you're going through a divorce, you may be feeling a full rush of emotions. It may be feels overwhelming because you're feeling the whole gambit of what seems like mostly negative emotion, and you might even be right about that. Right Like you might be in the other half of the 50-50 of life, where it just seems like there's more negative emotion bubbling up and stress levels are through the roof. There's so much to think about when you're going through a divorce. There's so much to worry about. There's so much to roof. There's so much to think about when you're going through a divorce. There's so much to worry about. There's so much to plan. There's so much like underlying hope that things are just going to work out, but you're just not sure because of the uncertainty and there's so much fear that comes along with that uncertainty, that unknown in the future.

And so, cyclically, because of all of that stress and that worry and the planning and the hoping and the all of the things that we have to think about that mental load that we're carrying around as we go through a divorce, emotions pop up because whatever happens in our brain and in our body comes to the surface through our emotions and when you don't know how to open up to and allow emotions, then they get bottled up, which leads to feeling overwhelmed and it leads to feeling emotionally exhausted, like I've had many clients come to me and they're like I'm just so tired and I can't figure out why I'm so tired. A lot of it has to do with bottling up those emotions, not processing through the emotions, just holding them all inside, and so when we have all of these things going on, all of this combined leads to major stress during a divorce, which it makes sense, right? Divorce is stressful. Let's just be real and lay it out on the table. Divorce is stressful.

So I have many other podcast episodes where I talk about helping you reduce your stress. I talk about completing the stress cycle and allowing and processing through emotions, and all of those are going to be super, super helpful, super, super useful to you. So if you haven't listened to those, go scroll through some of the titles, find ones that kind of stick out to you and resonate with you, and listen to those after this episode, because today's episode, I want to offer you a way to deal with stress from a kind of different perspective than I think most people are talking about or most people are thinking about, and this is learning the difference between being nice and being kind. Let me say it again I'm going to teach you the difference between being nice and being kind, because there is a big difference. And then I want to help you work on dismantling the idea of being nice and instead I want to help you work to implement more kindness in your life. This is going to help support your stress level. This is going to help support your intuitive hits. This is going to help support bringing your brain, your body and your intuition back in alignment, back to wholeness, back to all pointing in the same direction. When you can do this, when you can be more kind and let go of the need to be nice or feeling the obligation of being nice. Your stress level is going to automatically decrease and you will be further reconnecting to yourself, which is the most beautiful thing that you can do for yourself, and it's going to help you create calm and peace. Who doesn't want that? That sounds amazing, right? So let's talk about nice versus kind. So, as women you know I love to talk about women. You know I love to talk about socialization, because it's not talked about enough. I don't think we have been raised in this patriarchal social system to be nice we just have.

The reality for most women is that we are conditioned to be nice over everything else, and when we do that, we put ourselves last, we put ourselves on the back burner, we forget ourselves, we put ourselves in danger. Sometimes we forget ourselves when we are conditioned to be nice over everything else. We forgo our emotional and sometimes physical safety because we've been conditioned that our place in this world is to be nice. We turn into people pleasers. We make sure everyone's needs are taken care of over our own, and this is often to our own detriment, our own detriment of our own comfort, our own detriment of our emotional well-being, our own detriment of our physical well-being. We don't use our voice, we don't offer up our opinion because of fear of rocking the boat or making someone mad or making someone feel uncomfortable or being shunned or being canceled. We are very concerned about not upsetting someone, and so we will not speak up and we will act in certain ways because we think that if we show up nice enough, they might not get upset. They won't get upset.

When we are taught to be nice, we often do not advocate for ourselves. We don't speak up for our needs, for our wants. We will put up with a lot of bad behavior because we don't want to be thought of as rude. We don't want people thinking, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, she's so rude, what a bitch. We don't want people thinking, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, she's so rude, what a bitch. We don't want people labeling us that way. So we will put up with so much bad behavior. We do things or we say things that maybe, deep down, we don't agree with, because we want to be liked, we want to fit in and listen.

I'm giving these examples of the things that we do. When we're taught to be nice. It makes sense. All of it makes sense. And if you can't figure out why it makes sense that we do this in this socialized patriarchal system that we live in, pay attention, start to look for why it makes sense that we do this. Just because it makes sense doesn't mean it's in our best interest. I want to give you an example of exactly what I'm talking about.

So there's this podcast host who I love and she wrote a book and in her book she talks about this, but she's talked about it on her podcast as well, and she tells this example of when she was a teenager growing up in Southern California. She used to go hang out at, like, this local diner and there was a guy who was in there a lot and he was older than her. He was probably in his thirties, I can't remember the specifics, but he was like much older than her she was like 15 and he was in his late twenties, early thirties, maybe even older, and he was in there a lot too. This guy and they would talk. You know, he was a guy, that was just. He was kind of a regular and she was a regular. She would go in there, like after school and stuff, and they would talk sometimes as we do as humans. And one day they were talking and he was telling her that he was an amateur photographer and that if she wanted him to, he could take some headshots for her.

Now this is like in the I can't specifically remember, but I think like the late eighties, early nineties, around that time period and she was like yeah, that sounds great. She's an outgoing girl, she wants some headshots. She's like that sounds pretty cool actually. So they meet a few days later and he's like you know, I know a great spot, we can drive there. You can just come with me in my car.

She's like 15. She doesn't drive, she doesn't have a car, she's by herself, there's no cell phones. He's a grown ass man and she's feeling nervous. This is the way she tells the story. She's feeling nervous, she's kind of questioning it, but she also doesn't want to upset him or be rude, because she's been taught that she needs to be nice and polite. And so she's like okay, and she gets in his car and they drive out to literally the middle of nowhere. The middle of nowhere. She's a 15 year old, she's alone in his car with him out in the middle of nowhere no cell phones, no other people around, no houses, no restaurants, nothing. She suddenly is realizing and she's kind of been realizing it. She's been pushing those fears and that intuition that's been telling her this is not a good idea. She's been pushing it down, pretending it's not there in the name of being nice, and she finds herself alone with this dude with no way of asking for some help, of being able to run if something turns and things go sour. She said she ended up just taking the photos and he was a little weird, but nothing untoward, thank God, happened. But the conditioning behind being nice really had her putting herself in a potentially dangerous situation.

I want you to think about this. Maybe you haven't had an example like this in your life where you've been like in physical danger because of the fear of being rude or being labeled a bitch or being name called or whatever right. But have there been other times in your life where you have decided, because you've been conditioned to to be polite, to not speak up, to not use your voice, to not listen to your intuition and to push it down because of the way you've been conditioned? I want you to think about that. I guarantee you will find some moments in your life. I guarantee it. We do not need more nice people in this world.

Nice is fake. Nice is surface level. Nice is complacent. Nice is based in fear of possibly offending someone else. Nice is based in fear of possibly offending someone else and so I'll just go along to get along. Nice in this way causes you stress, because you're constantly worried that you're not doing enough to make others feel comfortable and you are constantly looking outward rather than focusing on creating any kind of a safety for yourself, physical or emotional. That means like inside right, you feel safe in your own space with yourself and then making decisions and acting based on your values and priorities. So if that's nice which is how I guarantee, like 99% of the women who are listening to this podcast, including myself, I have to work very hard and I still struggle with this to let go of being nice and if that is the definition of nice everything that I just talked about for like the last 15 minutes minutes then what is kind? How is it different?

Being kind is being honest. Being kind is being willing to speak up and use your voice and state your opinion, even when it might be scary, even when it might mean that people are not going to agree with you. Being kind is educating others about the kinds of behaviors that are not acceptable, about the kind of behavior that is not going to fly. Being kind is hard. It's hard to do. Being kind is setting boundaries of what kinds of behavior you are going to put up with and what kinds of behavior is not acceptable to put up with and what kinds of behavior is not acceptable.

Being kind is speaking up at the dinner table when someone else is talking shit about women or making racist jokes or trashing their wife, saying how lazy she is or whatever any of those kinds of things. It's calling people out and saying things like. That's not acceptable. That makes me feel super uncomfortable and I'm going to leave this conversation. I didn't ask you to come over here and interrupt me and my friend while we're talking here at this bar. I don't want to give you my phone number. Please leave us alone. That is what being kind looks like. It's saying things like. I feel uncomfortable in this situation.

These generalizations aren't true and I'm telling you this because I want you to do better. I want you to be better. I'm working on being better. I want you to work on it as well. Moments like these, they're scary. It's scary to speak up. They take courage, but moments like these are also based in compassion for yourself and also compassion for other people. When you are kind and you show up with honesty about how you're feeling, about what your values are, about, then voicing those things instead of saying nothing or instead of just putting up with bad behavior, that's when you honor yourself. That's when you honor the world. That's when you honor your values and your principles that actually matter and that actually make the world a better place.

So how do we break down the social programming of being nice and instead building up new neural pathways of being kind? We start with little baby kitten steps. I've talked about this before in other podcasts, but this is the way. This is how we build new beliefs. This is how we literally change our brain matter to create new neural pathways where we think differently, instead of going to the same old, conditioned neural pathways that we've had forever.

Here's what I want you to do. I want you to identify one area where you often show up as nice as that surface level fake. I just want everybody to feel comfortable, including myself. I'm just going to show up as nice as that surface level fake. I just want everybody to feel comfortable, including myself. I'm just going to show up as that, maybe think of like a specific time that this has happened that maybe sticks out in your mind, maybe it's the last time it happened. Maybe you think about this and you're like I really wish that I would have spoke up or I really wish I would have done something different to support me or to support the people that I love, or to support my values in this way. So think about that time, okay.

And then I want you to think, if a situation like this were to happen again, how can I be kind rather than nice, like that's a pretty simple but maybe poignant question. How can I be kind in this situation, being honest, using my voice, standing up for my values and my priorities? How can I be kind, rather, instead of nice? What would that look like? What would I have to be feeling in order to show up with kindness? And what would be like a kitten step thought that will help me step my way away from being fake, away from being nice, and into the honesty of being kind? What would that look like? What does that sound like? That's where we start, because once you can create a practice of being kind, over being nice, you're going to start to see that your stress levels go down, go down. Who doesn't want their stress to go down? Doesn't that sound incredible? Yeah, sounds pretty fucking great, because, instead of betraying your very being, you're instead honoring your truth, you are educating other people, you are setting boundaries for your own self-care, and all of that is going to lead to reducing your stress overall.

This is where we step into fucking politeness, which is another thing from the same podcast that I gave before. A sentence that they repeat over and over and over in this podcast is fuck politeness, fuck it. Being polite is on the same level as being nice. It's fake, and it doesn't mean that you can't open a door for someone. It doesn't mean that you can shake someone's hand when you first meet them. That's not what I'm talking about here. What I'm talking about is putting yourself below other people's needs, below other people's comfort, because you don't want to offend someone, you don't want to say the wrong thing, you don't want to create somebody else's discomfort or have them label you as a bitch, as a Karen, as somebody who doesn't fit in, or whatever else the fear is coming from that keeps you surface level fake. That is what we are talking about.

Show up in your truth, be courageous. To do that, it is scary, and to be courageous, you have to have the fear and you also have to have the action of doing it anyway. That is what courage means. You are capable of this. You can get better at it.

I am not great at this. I am still working on learning to be kind and letting go of being nice. It's a hard thing to do. We can do hard things. We can do hard things. Let's get to work on doing this. That is what I have for you today.

Thank you so much for being here. I will be back next week, hi friend. Thank you so much for being here. 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 Karin Nelson coaching dot com. That's WWW dot. Karin NELSON 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.