Ep #102: Healing From The Trauma Of Divorce | Becoming You Again Podcast
Divorce trauma is real. You often feel trapped by your past and what you once had, being triggered over and over again by photos, memories, your ex, your home, what you once had. You also feel paralyzed when you think about this future because how can you possibly move forward alone, a single mom, with less income and more uncertainty. People tell you to trust yourself. People tell you everything will be okay. People tell you to learn to love yourself. But when you go through trauma it's like there's a disconnect from yourself, and trusting yourself, knowing everything will be okay and loving yourself seem impossible to do.
Healing from trauma is where the magic happens. This is when you return to and reconnect with yourself. I'm going to teach you the four basic steps to healing from trauma so you can show up in your life with curiosity, openness, acceptance and love.
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If you're going through a divorce or are divorced, odds are you've gone through something traumatic. It may show up in how you're constantly second guessing yourself. It may show up in how you feel triggered by even the smallest things. It may show up in never feeling secure in your emotions, always feeling like they are out of control. It may show up in your ability to believe that you're worthy, lovable or capable of living a life on your own. If any of these are resonant with you, then I invite you to schedule your free consult with me and we'll talk about what may be helpful to you to get you through the trauma and begin to heal. Schedule your free consult by clicking here.
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Full Episode Transcript:
I’m Karin Nelson and you’re listening to Becoming You Again episode number 102.
Welcome to becoming You Again. The podcast to help you with your mental and emotional wellbeing 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.
Hello my lovely listeners. How are you all doing? I am actually getting over about getting over being sick for probably about two weeks. I guess it was a little bit less than two weeks, but almost two weeks. It felt like forever if I’m being real. I am finally starting to feel better and I’m so grateful for that. You know when you’re in the middle of being sick and it just feels like your world is going to end and you’re going to feel like this forever. That is maybe the worst feeling in the world. And I hated every second of it, I have to say. I was sick with a cold for about a week and then I started to feel a little better and then I was hit with another wave of sickness for about another week, just a little less than another week.
But I was so tired and exhausted and depleted. But I have come to this realization that maybe played into why I was feeling so down and out for so long. I find this really fascinating. I’m a few months into my trauma-informed training course that I have been going through and as part of this program, we bring our own relationship trauma that we need to work through first hand so that we can experience what we’ve been learning on ourselves and then take it to our clients as we are helping our clients heal from their own trauma as well.
So every week we have a class session where we learn about things. And then another day in the week we have our own processing calls with the coach where we can process through anything that we want to so that we can heal from our own trauma, whether it’s with our own relationship that we bring or just anything that we want to be coached on as well. So I’ve been working through some of my own shit on these processing calls and whoa, some stuff has been coming up that I really hadn’t been making space for and really didn’t have a voice to be heard that needed to be heard. So as I’ve been going and working on these processing calls with my coach, I have been able to open and make space for things that needed to come forward and to be heard. I’m learning that sometimes with that trauma healing and opening up and allowing for, your body can get physically sick.
Now I don’t know if this is why I was sick for so long. I can’t say for sure. But I will say to be feeling down and sick and then recognize that I’m starting to feel a little, have a processing call and then like immediately get hit with another sickness, to me those dots are adding up in my head, of oh, I’ve got some things that are happening in my body to where my body is reconnecting with myself, my nervous system, my breathwork, my soul, my mind. All of it is coming together and part of that healing needed to be purging of whatever was held on in my past.
Now again, this is just a story that I’m telling myself but it makes sense to me and so I’m going to keep it. This isn’t everyone’s lived experience when it comes to trauma. When it comes to healing. When it comes to working through things. Sometimes we just get sick because we get sick, right. Sometimes that’s just what’s happening. But other times I think there is also an underlying layer that is making us sick and I think in my case that is what was happening. And it’s why I was you know kind of sick for longer than usual. And this kind of leads me into today’s topic which is healing from the trauma of divorce.
I want to give a disclaimer here that I am speaking of trauma as it relates to the impact certain events have had on your ability to regulate your nervous system. If you believe that you have deep seated trauma from abuse or if you believe that you have PTSD or maybe you’ve actually been clinically diagnosed with that or something else and you have not worked through this trauma with a therapist I highly recommend that you do that for yourself. It’s really important that you get the specialized care with a therapist that you need.
What I’m going to be teaching you about trauma of course can be used in conjunction with specialized trauma therapy and it can also help anyone who wants to learn to heal from their own trauma that isn’t so deep seated or isn’t PTSD right and just to get better at self regulating your emotional response and regulating your nervous system because that’s really what it comes down to.
So what is trauma? The definition that I find most useful of what trauma is, is from Bessel Van der Kolk who is a psychiatrist who focuses primarily on trauma healing. He says in his book The Body Keeps The Score that, "trauma is specifically an event that overwhelms the central nervous system, altering the way we process and recall memories. Trauma is not the story of something that happened back then. It's the current imprint of that pain, horror, and fear living inside people.”
So I think what is really interesting about that definition by Van der Kolk is that when we think about something that happened in the past that is traumatic to us, that was a traumatic experience, that we are defining for ourselves as trauma. Or maybe we do not even recognize it as trauma yet, but it does affect our nervous system in a way that takes us back to that feeling that we had when that experience occurred. So it is like we are reexperiencing it in the moment and we may not even understand why. We may not have connected it to something in our past yet. But what is important is that it is happening currently again with whatever is going on around us in our experience. We can’t move past that because we are re-creating it inside her body, insider nervous system and it is like remembering that feeling and bring it back to the present. It is what we are feeling right now.