Ep 211: When Will My Life Feel Normal Again After Divorce?

"When will my life feel normal again after divorce?" It's a question that haunts many of us during this profound transition. The discomfort of changed routines, financial shifts, and parenting adjustments feels deeply unsettling. But there's a fascinating biological reason behind this distress. Your brain's primitive amygdala interprets these changes as potential threats to survival, triggering fight-flight-freeze responses that actually reduce your cognitive function. First, regulate; second, question. The powerful opportunity within divorce lies in intentionally designing your life rather than returning to old patterns. I'll cover: 

• Divorce creates feelings of abnormality that trigger our brain's survival response

• The amygdala interprets discomfort as danger.

• When the amygdala is activated, our IQ drops 10-15 points

• Realigning your nervous system through grounding techniques helps restore logical thinking

• Question what "normal" means to you

• Deciding intentionally what you want your life to look like gives you power

• Consider whether you want to return to your old definition of normal or create something new

  
  

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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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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:

Looking for a way to feel whole, complete, able to make decisions easily after your divorce, then you're in the right place. This is Becoming you Again, the podcast that helps you do all of those things, while reconnecting to yourself, learning how to be the parent that you want to be and showing up for yourself to create support and love as you heal from your divorce. I am Karin Nelson, and this is episode number 211. Welcome to Becoming you 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 very happy that you're here Today.

I'm going to be talking about this question that I get quite often. Actually, I get it from people that are reaching out to me to possibly coach together. I get it from my clients, and I'm sure that I have asked this of myself in the past when I was really in the throes of wanting desperately to heal from my divorce. But the question is when will my life feel normal again after divorce? When? When is it going to come?

As you are going through a divorce, there are a lot of things that take on a foreign kind of feel, like foreign meaning, out of the ordinary, not normal, not what you're used to, and I know you know what this feels like. This feels so uncomfortable. There's an abnormality to your home life now. Right, there's a difference to your bank account. There's an irregularity to how you parent now versus possibly how you parented before, and maybe not like what you are actually doing. But maybe it feels different now because there's not another person not the other person in the house any longer. Right, you probably have a lot of moments where your emotional regulation is unbalanced, where you feel irrational a lot of the time, or you feel overwhelmed by the emotional roller coaster that you're on. All of this abnormality feels strange, it causes discomfort and it is actually a shock to our amygdala.

Our amygdala is the primitive part of our brain. It is the most evolutionary part of our brain. It interprets this discomfort, this strange feeling, this shock to our nervous system as danger, it sends out warning signals to our nervous system, which then responds by turning to fight, flight or freeze. And these mechanisms are put there. They are in place for our ultimate survival. The amygdala part of our brain has one goal survival, which means that if we feel threatened, we either turn to fight, flight or freeze. Or our amygdala is like survival we better procreate, we better have more babies. It's, that's all it's focused on.

And so, again, when the amygdala is activated and it's threatened and your nervous system is heightened and you're feeling strange, weird, odd, abnormal discomfort, your amygdala is like survival, survival, survival. It's like a warning signal that is just flashing red survival, survival, survival. Because it believes that whatever is going on, whatever is happening to you in this moment, it could mean certain death. It could mean that you are going to die, or it's possible that you could die, and it is going to fight to stay alive. Now, fight, flight or freeze right, those are very different ways of fighting. To stay alive Doesn't mean that one is better or wrong To your amygdala, it doesn't care, it just kicks in with one of them. This is a very primitive response which in some instances, it's very, very useful, and those instances are when our lives are actually physically in danger, right, when our lives are actually physically in danger, right, when our lives are actually physically threatened. But I would say for most of us that is not the reality. And so when our amygdala kicks in with that nervous system response, it's not actually very great of a response because the threat is actually less imminent to living. When it's based off of the emotional activation, because what happens is our nervous system mechanism responds with fight, flight, freeze, sometimes fawn I don't talk about fawn as much, but it definitely is a response.

But then when this happens, when we show up in fight, flight or freeze, right, our intelligence actually declines. We are actually less capable of making intentional decisions, we are less able to problem solve or have logical discernment. Scientific studies have shown that when our amygdala is responding and taking over, our IQ declines by 10 to 15 points. And one reason is because more blood and oxygen are supplying the amygdala, which means there's less activation of our prefrontal cortex. Right, I talk about this quite often, but our amygdala is the primitive one. I just talked about it, our prefrontal cortex, it's that one that does the logical discernment, the decision making, the problem solving, the intentional choice. So when there's less blood flow going to the prefrontal cortex and there's more blood flow supplying the amygdala, we are less able physically able. Our brain is physically less able to discern, to make good choices, to figure things out and problem solve. So all of this is to say that when we go through a divorce and when we experience these moments of abnormality, of discomfort, of irregularity, we feel fear and then we act from our fear, from our survival mechanism.

So what I hear a lot from my clients is this question when will I feel normal again? When will my life go back to normal? I want normalcy, I want to feel normal again. How do I do that? And my answer is usually twofold. Typically, the first thing we do is we go over the ways that they can dysregulate, that they can realign their nervous system response and bring back online their prefrontal cortex. That's always one of the best places to start because, coming back to the present moment, the present moment, like right now now I am hearing Karin's voice that's what's happening in the present moment.

When you do that, when you realign your nervous system and bring back online your prefrontal cortex, this all supports you to get back to a place where you intentionally can choose your next steps, your next decisions, the direction that you want to go in life, and so that's one of the most important things that you can do for yourself, one of the most important things that you can do to support yourself as you are going through this abnormal, weird, fucking stupid part of your life. Even Maybe it's not stupid in your decision to get divorced, but maybe it's stupid in the way that everything just feels so weird and different and abnormal. So realign your nervous system. I have probably like 10 plus episodes on how to do this. Find a grounding technique, help you get to the present moment. Do a somatic practice that you really love. Get to the present moment, learn to process through whatever emotions you're feeling and process through them in that moment. All of those things are going to help realign your nervous system and get your prefrontal cortex back online.

But there's a second thing that I typically coach on, and that is breaking down cultural beliefs that we have formed of what normal is and is not. So let me say that in a different way, cause I think I said that weirdly, but like typically, the second thing we do is we figure out what does normal even mean to you. Oh, there's my kitty, you probably can hear him. He's in the background. He likes to go around the house in the morning when everybody's still asleep and just like meow really loudly and it's not even that, it's like I don't know six in the morning, but he's just silly. So, okay, there was a little interjection from my cat. You might hear him again. Oh, there he is. Okay.

But like, we all have some idea of or definition of what normal is to us, and it's been shaped by our cultural beliefs, by the things that we've been raised around, by the things that we've read and seen and decided upon at different moments in our life, so we have to figure out what that definition is for you. What does normal look like to you? What do you mean when you say I want to get back to normal? What does that mean? Because typically, this is a mix of societal definitions that were put in place by this patriarchal structure that we live in, but it's also like your own interpretations, based off of your own experiences and your own learning and the information that you have received throughout your life. So we have to question the lens that you are looking through when you're defining normal and when you're telling yourself or asking yourself I just want to get back to normal, when am I going to get there? What do you mean by that? And so we have to get curious and we have to talk about it and we have to have an understanding so that we can have some awareness, because it's from that place that you get to decide and redefine if that's what you want to do for yourself what normal means to you. I want you to hear me when I say this.

There is so much power that comes from the place of being able to decide for yourself what your life looks like, meaning the way it looks in all its forms. What does it mean to you? And are you doing it from intentionality? We want to be able to define our lives not based on what society says is normal or is right or is best for you. We want to define our lives from what we know truly aligns with our wholeness, with our connectivity, with our integrity, with our peace, with our place in this world, and we want to be able to have that resonate with us.

My definition of normal is probably very different in many ways than your definition of normal, and we need to know what your definition of normal is so that we can get you back to it, or we need to know what you are using as your definition of normal right now and we need to know if you want to keep that definition or if there are things that you want to shift and change and let go of and how you want to redefine it. That's what we're trying to do here, but the only way to do that is to first realign your nervous system and get your prefrontal cortex back online, and then we need to ask what does normal mean and do I like that definition? And if not, what do I want it to mean instead? So, getting back to the question in the title of this podcast episode when will my life feel normal? Again, the answer is what is normal? And do you truly want your life to go back to that definition of normal? Not a right or wrong answer to that right. If you do, okay, that's good information for us to know. And if you don't, that's also good information for us to know. And if it's not, what you want to go back to, what do you want to go to? What do you want it to look like?

So here's your homework, or the work that you can think about or the steps that you can take, your next steps. If you're doing this work on your own, here's what you can do. You're going to ask yourself what is normal to me and do I truly want my life to get back to that definition of normal, and if so, why? Or why not ponder about those questions? Get curious. Don't judge your answers. Just get curious and have some understanding and some awareness. Don't judge your answers. Just get curious and have some understanding and some awareness, because the question, I don't think, is when will my life get back to normal? The question is what is normal and do I want to get back to that place? If yes, why? And if no, what do I want to get to instead? Okay, I'm going to leave you with that. That is what I have for you today.

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So do that real quick If you're feeling real generous. I appreciate it. The podcast definitely appreciates it. I thank you. I love you. You are all amazing and incredible and deserving of whatever life you want to live outside of your divorce. As always, 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 KarinNelsonCoaching dot com that 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.