Ep 213: The False Sense of Safety in Certainty

The power to feel emotionally safe, even when life feels uncertain, might be the greatest gift you can give yourself after divorce. But our brains make this challenging in ways you might not realize.Have you ever wondered why leaving an unhappy marriage feels so terrifying, even when you know it's the right choice? The answer lies in how your brain processes certainty versus uncertainty. Your amygdala—the primitive part of your brain responsible for survival—doesn't distinguish between physical threats and emotional ones.

When divorce disrupts your predictable patterns, your brain interprets this uncertainty as danger, triggering fight, flight, freeze, or fawn responses that can leave you feeling constantly anxious, overwhelmed, or stuck.What's fascinating is how we can mistake familiarity for safety. Even in disconnected or toxic relationships, the predictability creates a false sense of security. Your brain says: "I know what to expect here, therefore I'm safe"—even when you're deeply unfulfilled.

The transformative truth? Uncertainty itself isn't dangerous. We live with it constantly! The key is learning to create emotional safety for yourself without requiring external certainty. In this episode you’ll learn the first steps to dismantle false safety mechanisms and build true emotional security.

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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:

If you're a woman going through a divorce and you are just tired you're tired of being told it's your fault, you're tired of being made the bad one, you're tired of believing that you've ruined your life and your kids' lives then Becoming you Again, this podcast, is for you. This is the podcast where you learn to step into your power as a woman in this world, where you learn to reconnect with your wholeness as a woman in this world, where you learn to reconnect with your wholeness, your integrity and bring into alignment your brain, your body and your intuition. You learn to trust yourself again. You are listening to Becoming you Again, episode number 213, 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, 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 glad that you're here.

I just got back from an amazing, very quick trip with my son to LA. We had the best time. It was a very short trip. I was taking him out there to go see one of his very favorite bands. It's a. It's a kind of a, a small band. They were playing in a small venue, but kind of a kind of like a famous venue, the Roxy on Sunset, and it was something that he had been asking for.

He's 19. He's in college. I think he can go by himself. Of course he can. He's an adult, he could do these things by himself, but he's also a college student who doesn't have a job currently. So he's poor. Let's be real. So I do believe the reason he asked me or his dad to take him on this trip was number one he wanted to go. It's his favorite band and he wanted to go to the LA show because there were some like fun things that were going to be happening at this show specifically, and it was the first show of the tour and all of those things. And I think, secondly, because then he didn't have to pay. So I decided I was going to take him.

We went on this trip. We had so much fun and I mean, let's be real, it was a 50-50 trip, for sure, you know. You know how I talk about this idea of like life is 50-50. There's going to be great things and there's going to be crappy things too. There were definitely some crappy things, but overall I will remember this trip as such a great time one-on-one with my son, which is something that I hadn't really ever done before with him.

I've taken my daughter on one-on-one trips before, or we've gone to see live podcasts together. We have a lot of the same interests and my son and I we have a little bit of a different relationship. I love our relationship. I think it's amazing, but it's not the same as the relationship I have with my daughter, and I had never taken him on a one-on-one trip. So again, this was a very fun thing for me personally to do with him. I felt like we connected on a level that we haven't been able to in a while.

We did a lot of fun things one-on-one. I got to kind of see him in his element. We did a lot of fun things one-on-one. I got to kind of see him in his element, especially when we were at the concert meeting some of his friends that he's met online and they were such good, nice people and to just kind of connect with him in this world that he revolves in that I'm on the outside of, and he didn't care that I was there. He wasn't upset about it or embarrassed or something that you might think a lot of kids would be if their mom was there. And there was another mom at the concert who was with her son, who was also an adult. It was just so much fun. We had a great time.

The weather in LA was absolutely perfect, which was such a nice break from Utah spring. I don't know if you know anything about Utah spring. Some days it's amazing and it's, like you know, 60 degrees and beautiful outside, and then in two minutes it will be snowing and you'll have two inches of snow on the ground and it will be freezing cold outside. So the weather was amazing, it was beautiful, we had a great time and, uh, I am such a proponent of like make things fun when you can, if you, if you have the means and the ability to do that and, if not, find simple ways to connect with your kids today, right now, in your regular life, because there are ways to do it where you don't have to spend money where you don't have to travel. Just find ways to connect with your kids, if possible, because that was the true, overall amazing thing that we were able to do. It's a little bit harder with him at school. I'm not going to, I'm not going to tell you that it's so easy with him away at school, but it definitely was an amazing opportunity that I feel very grateful to have been able to partake in. And if you don't have those kinds of opportunities, create some of your own in your life, in your day-to-day life right now.

Okay, that's not even what the podcast is about. I just that was kind of like my I don't know my soapbox. I do that sometimes. You guys know me. I get off on these tangents and I just wanted to tell you about how fun our trip was because it was so great. But the podcast is actually about something totally different and I'm going to be talking about this false sense of safety that we feel in certainty. I'm going to explain it all. I don't know if that title is confusing or not. That might not even be the title I choose. I sometimes go into these podcasts thinking that I know exactly what the title is going to be. And then, after thinking about it or recording the podcast, and then realizing this actually isn't the best title or whatever right, I come up with something else. But as of right now, that is the working title the false sense of safety in certainty, because I think that this is a thing that really needs to be examined and looked at, especially, especially if you're going through a divorce or if you're on the other side of divorce and you're still struggling to figure out what you want your life to look like.

Okay, so let's get a little brainy, let's get a little scientific tiny bit. I'm not a scientist, so I'm just going to touch on it a little bit, but we're going to talk about the amygdala for just a minute. Now, I talk about the amygdala a lot, and so this will be nothing new for you if you are a regular to this podcast, but I think it's really important to understand parts of our brain. So we have these two main parts of our brain, not the whole brain. There's more to it, but these are the two main parts that I typically focus on when I'm talking about healing the nervous system, our brain, our mindset, how it works, all of that. Okay, so we have these two main parts, the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. So just for a minute I want to focus on the amygdala.

The amygdala is the most primitive and evolutionary part of our brain, meaning it is the part of our brain that has been passed down through evolution, from generation to generation to generation. This is the part that has evolved with us and stuck with us since the very beginning of humans. It's the part of our brain that is concerned with our survival, and its most basic function is to make sure that we survive, and that means we survive as a human like me individually and you individually you're still alive but also as a species right, it's scanning the surroundings, looking for danger, trying to predict what might be dangerous or life-threatening, and then do what it can to keep you alive, so that you continue on living. But it's also like the part of our brain that's like okay, now procreate, now go have babies and bring more people into the world, because we as a species also need to survive. So I'm not going to focus, obviously, on that part in this podcast today. I'm going to be talking about the survival of you, the individual, because this is one of the reasons why our brain likes certainty so freaking much.

Because, even though we live in a world that is pretty much full of uncertainty from minute to minute, even second to second let's be real, second to second Like I could have a heart attack in five seconds and die while I'm recording this podcast and I don't know because it's very uncertain what is actually happening in my body, because I'm not hooked up to scanning, I'm not in the hospital and hooked up to machines recording my heartbeat and my breathing and all of the other things that happens when you're in the hospital, hooked up to a machine. And even then, even then, it can be hard to predict what's going to happen, right? So we live in a world where certainty is not a real thing, but our brain will use the past to try to predict what is going to happen next, to try to create a false sense of certainty to keep us from living on the edge at every moment. I want you to think about this in terms of when you're going through a divorce. In my opinion, this is one of the reasons why divorce feels so scary, so hard, so all consuming, so terrible, so confusing, so agonizing even at times, because we have an idea of what our life is going to look like or what we think is going to happen. Right, our brain was predicting daily we wake up, we're with this person, we have this life, it looks this way, we do these things, et cetera. Right, and then, basically, when divorce is brought into the mix, all of those things are thrown into the fire and burned up. And now our brain is trying to predict what's next, but it's confused by what's actually happening, because it can't predict what the next thing is going to be, which feels very unsafe to the brain because it feels like uncertainty is a bad thing. And so the brain interprets everything that's happening during the divorce, all of these changes and all of these things that are out of the norm, that are abnormal and strange and different, and it's interpreting all of that as uncertainty. It has an inability to predict what's going to happen next and it interprets that as a threat to our survival.

Well, what happens in the amygdala when it senses a threat to your survival? It creates a nervous system response which shows up in your body as fight, flight, freeze or fawn. Those responses are what, evolutionarily, we have adopted to keep us alive. And, yes, this is a very true, very real physical response, right, like when we are physically threatened, we respond in this way. It kicks in. But the tricky thing with the amygdala and with the nervous system response is that it also kicks in when we are emotionally threatened, which is what's happening when you're going through a divorce, like, maybe you're physically threatened and if that's a real thing, please get the help that you need, please make decisions from that place of keeping you physically safe. But for a lot of us that is not the case and it is more an emotional unsafety that we are feeling when we're going through a divorce and your brain does not care about or know the difference between physical danger and emotional danger. All of it just sees it as a threat to survival in the amygdala's eye and so it naturally responds with a nervous system response.

And when our amygdala is feeling this threat to survival and it's having these nervous system responses, we may not even understand what's happening in our body, right, we might not be even connected enough with ourselves to understand that that's actually happening and this is something that I work with my clients on a lot to understand when they're being activated by their nervous system, which is being activated by their amygdala, because their survival is being threatened in their amygdala's eye. I work with my clients on this almost every single week. We talk about this, about recognizing what's happening in your body, about understanding what's going on, because the more awareness we have around it, the more we can create space within our bodies to create those moments of lessening the nervous system response and showing up more with our prefrontal cortex and deciding and having choices and all of those things. If you don't know how to do this and you don't know how to recognize it and you're like, how do I get out of this space where I feel unsafe, where I feel activated all the time, where I feel nervous, where I feel anxious, where I feel worried, where I just feel tense in my body all the time and I don't know why? If you don't know how to do that, come to me, set up your free consult with me. I offer a three 30 minute consult. We'll talk about it. We can talk about what it looks like to work together and how I can guide you and help you understand what's happening in your body, understand what's happening in your brain, in your day-to-day life, so that you can go live your life in a way where you feel connected, where you feel emotionally safe to create the life that you want. You can set up your free consult. By clicking the link in the description, you can go to my website. There are lots of different places where you can do it. You can even come to me on Instagram and just message me and say, hey, I want to set up a consult.

But here's what's really interesting about the amygdala and about our brain and the emotional response and the nervous system response, because our brain associates uncertainty with danger. It also, on the flip side, associates certainty and stability with safety. But I want to just say this before we move on there is nothing wrong or bad or even inherently dangerous about uncertainty. We've just associated this for so long, that idea of not knowing, with being bad or wrong or dangerous or unsafe. But again, when we really slow things down and look logically at how the world works look logically at how the world works we live in uncertainty all the time, minute to minute, second to second. We just typically don't think about it or contemplate it very often because if we did, we would be living a life that was unmanageable, completely unmanageable. We would not be able to get anything done. It's a mechanism that our brain uses to help us function better, which is also one of the things that our brain is really good at is helping us function right.

But the more we know that the brain associates uncertainty with danger, and so it associates with certainty perceived certainty, even, obviously, with certainty perceived certainty even obviously, with safety. That's the key that I want you to start to recognize, because we have kind of this diseased idea going around that uncertainty is bad, and that is where I want us to focus is breaking down and unwinding this idea that uncertainty is bad or wrong. Okay, so let me go back to this idea of our brain associating certainty with safety, because that is a false narrative that our brain is relying on. Even if you've been in an unhappy or toxic or codependent or even an emotionally explosive marriage, your brain sees that and what it knows, those day-to-day practices, as predictable, and so it will still interpret that as safe, even though it's not actually safe and you don't actually like it and you're actually unhappy, right, okay. So I'm going to give you an example.

So let's say I'm married, okay, and I know that I'm going to wake up and I'm going to go about my day, and this is kind of what my day looks like my husband and I we don't talk to each other. We maybe say a few words in the morning, like good morning, or you want for breakfast. Or, as he leaves the door, hope you have a good day to him, right? Maybe he doesn't respond or maybe we don't even say any of those things. Maybe it's literally just complete no talking between each other because there's so much animosity or resentment or disconnection. Or maybe if there is talking, it's very aggressive or antagonistic, like maybe my husband is going to say one word or he'll tell me that I forgot to do this thing, or he'll be passive, aggressive in some way, or vice versa. Maybe I'm doing this to him, right?

He goes to work. I go to work, go about my day pretending that everything's fine and that I'm actually fulfilled and that I'm happy. And if I talk to my friends, I'm like they're like how's everything going? And I'm like, oh, it's fine, it's good. And I don't talk about how I don't have a relationship anymore, a connected relationship with my husband, and I don't talk about how we don't get along or how we're constantly bickering or fighting, and I don't talk about how we aren't connected in any way. I just pretend like everything's fine, right, I'm fulfilled, everything's good. And then we'll see each other around dinner and maybe he'll ask what's for dinner, and then he'll take his food and he'll go downstairs and turn on his video games. And then he'll take his food and he'll go downstairs and turn on his video games and I'll sit at the kitchen table with the kids or by myself and then clean up dinner and then go to the bedroom and maybe read or watch a show or just scroll on Facebook or Instagram or something for the rest of the night and then go to bed Right, and all that time I'm complaining in my head about the characters that I'm watching on television or I'm complaining about what happened at work, because it's so annoying.

But I'm not saying these things out loud because I don't have a partner that I can talk to and I'm so unhappy and I'm so unfulfilled and I'm so emotionally detached from myself, from him, from the world. But this is just how my life is and I tell myself this is just how it is, this is just what marriage looks like, this is just what we got to do. But I'm unhappy and I'm not sure how to make it change and I'm scared of the one thing that I way more out of reach, way more unsafe than what I have right now, which is just living a sad, unhappy, unfulfilled life. But at least I know what this life looks like. At least it's predictable. At least I feel some sort of safety in this knowing of what's probably going to happen day after day after day. Do you see what's happening when your needs aren't being met in any sense of the word? But your brain sees this day as predictable? It'll continue to tell you that you're safe because your brain is attached to whatever is familiar.

It's not actually being objective. Our brain is not an objective source in life. It's not good at objective right. It doesn't know what facts are really. We have to discern those for ourselves. Our brain is very subjective, based on what's happening within us. Our brains have a hard time being objective about what's helpful or what's safe or what's connective or what's fulfilling for you. Our brains have a difficult time being objective about many things in our lives. But if it feels familiar, it will associate familiar with safe, because familiar is predictable, and predictable to our brain means certainty.

So the question then becomes just because you have a false sense of security in the mundane, in disconnection, in pretending that everything is going well or that you're taken care of? Are you actually emotionally safe? Are you living a life full of certainty? Do you feel connected to yourself? I mean, I can't answer those for you, but my guess is your answer is going to be no. I know those were my answers when I was asking should I get divorced or should I stay married? This is just one way that your brain uses to do what it thinks it needs to do to help you survive. The formula that the brain uses is this is predictable. I'm used to this, so I must be safe, and this is true even if you live in unpredictable or emotionally unsafe environments, or even physically unsafe environments as well.

Hypervigilance of trying to predict what's unpredictable can give you a false sense of safety, because you're used to trying to be hypervigilant and trying to predict someone else's emotional moods or outbursts or rage that might be coming. So you're hypervigilant about how you act around them. You're walking on eggshells, right, you're trying to predict it, but because you are used to trying to predict how they're going to react or how they're going to show up, that feels safe to your brain, to your amygdala, it's like we know that we can probably predict how this is going to turn out, and so it feels safe, even though the reality is you are not safe emotionally, you are not fulfilled, you are not connected to yourself or anything else in your life. And so this brings me back to why I believe going through a divorce feels so terrible, so scary, so uncomfortable, so emotionally distressing distressing. It is because of this idea of unpredictability, uncertainty being interpreted by the amygdala as unsafe, so it must mean that your survival is threatened. So the thing that we want to start paying attention to is breaking down the belief that uncertainty is unsafe or that something is bad or has gone wrong when we live into the uncertainty.

I want you to think about what that would mean for you and your life and the power that you would have over literally every aspect of your life if you could create a strong grasp on this concept of believing that you can feel safe even in uncertainty. What if you believed that? What would change about your life if you could believe that? How would you behave differently if you believed that you could feel safe even with uncertainty Uncertainty about the future, uncertainty about your kid's future, about your job, about the state of the country, about the state of the world, about what happens when you die? How would you feel and how would you behave if you knew how to create safety for yourself? But we're still living in and accepting that so much of it was uncertain.

One way to really start to gain awareness around where you think you're in safety and what your brain is trying to protect you from, is to ask yourself a couple of questions. So what I want you to do is I want you to pick an area that you've been struggling Like. Maybe you're stuck, maybe you can't decide on something, maybe it has to do with your divorce, or like a decision that you need to make. Write it down, and write down a description of what that is, of what's going on, of the thoughts that you have about it, or why you can't stop, or whatever comes to your head. Just write it down. It could be something like well, my life is ruined because of the divorce, or this is all my fault and my kids are going to blame me forever, like even into their adulthood, they're going to blame me because I'm choosing this divorce or because I left the marriage, or whatever, right, okay, whatever you're struggling with, it could be a myriad of things, but just pick one for now. You can go back and do it with other ones later, but just pick one, write it down.

Write down the description of the thoughts or the thought that you have about being divorced in the world today and what that means to you and what it's about and all the things. And then I want you to ask yourself these two questions how is this thought or this set of thoughts keeping me safe? Look at it, really think about it. How is it keeping you safe to keep thinking these things? And then, after you've answered that, I want you to ask yourself what danger does my brain see in believing or thinking differently about this? What is my brain telling me is going to happen if I think about this differently? That's where we're going to like kind of uncover what your brain is telling you about staying in the same situation, about believing the same things. That's how we're going to know where to focus when it comes to certainty versus uncertainty, safety versus unsafety and what your brain perceives as those things. So do this work. Doing this work is where you're going to gain some awareness around, letting go of needing certainty to create safety for yourself Once you have awareness around it, that's where you can start to grow. That's where you can start to evolve your beliefs to ones that actually serve you and actually take you in a direction that you want to be heading in.

Living in a false sense of certainty and pretending like you're emotionally safe in that is such a disservice to you. It's keeping you disconnected from yourself and from the relationships in your life that you want to connect with. Do this work, please. You are deserving of it. You are worth it. You are worth understanding the difference between false certainty and true safety, even in uncertainty.

All right, my friends, that is what I have for you today. I love you so much. You are amazing. Have a great week and 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. com. That's W-W-W dot K-A-R-I-N-N-E-L-S-O-N coaching. 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.