Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce
This isn’t a breakup pep talk. It’s a full-body recalibration for women navigating life after divorce. Dear Divorce Diary is a podcast for women dealing with grief, loneliness, anxiety, anxious or avoidant attachment, and identity loss after divorce — especially when quick fixes, positivity, and spiritual fluff no longer work. I’m Dawn Wiggins, therapist, coach, and homeopath, and this show goes where most divorce advice won’t: into your nervous system, your unspoken grief, your buried rage, and the parts of you that shut down just to survive. Through honest conversation, somatic tools, EMDR- and IFS-informed work, and nervous-system support, each episode helps you feel instead of perform healing — and rebuild safety, confidence, and self-trust from the inside out. You’ll hear raw solo episodes, real voice notes from women in the trenches, and intimate conversations with experts who don’t just talk about healing — they embody it. If you’re tired of being told to “move on” while your body is still bracing, this podcast is your place to land. Your nervous system already knows the truth — it just needs a space that can hold it.
Episodes
If New Year’s resolutions have never worked for you...especially after divorce, it’s not because you lack discipline, motivation, or follow-through.
It’s because the version of you who survived divorce is not wired to safely become the woman you’re trying to create.
After divorce, most women try to change their lives by changing their behavior.
But behavior never sticks when the nervous system doesn’t feel safe expanding.
In this New Y...
New Year’s Eve has a way of turning self-criticism up to full volume after divorce.
The comparisons.
The sense that you should be further along.
The quiet question of what’s wrong with me that this still hurts?
If you find yourself being unusually hard on yourself today, this episode isn’t here to tell you to “think positive” or try harder.
It’s here to explain why this happens—and what your nervous system is actually doing wh...
The holidays after divorce don’t hurt because you’re single.
They hurt because they force you to confront how unsafe it feels to need support.
In this Day 9 episode of 12 Days of Divorce Christmas, we talk about the hidden, hardest part of life after divorce—asking for help. Not logistically, but emotionally. Not politely, but vulnerably.
If feeling safe, seen, and supported came naturally to you, this wouldn’t be the relationshi...
In this Day 8 episode of 12 Days of Divorce Christmas, Coach Tiffini joins me to unpack what actually happens inside your nervous system when you try to bring old traditions into a new life after divorce...especially in this in-between week between the holidays and the New Year.
Through an IFS (Internal Family Systems) lens, we talk about the protective parts that step in when traditions carry grief, memory, and expectation. Not bec...
How ya doing babe? We're on day 7 of "The 12 Days of Becoming HER Again" and it's all pretty raw.
Today we’re talking about loneliness after divorce...not as something to fix or outrun, but as something that moves in waves.
For many women, loneliness doesn’t stay constant.
It rises.
It crests.
And when it hits, it can feel overwhelming.
In this episode, Joy and I talk about:
- Why loneliness after d...
Today's convo is about a specific kind of holiday pain after divorce...
the Christmas cards knowing exactly how to **send you.
The smiling families.
The matching outfits.
The quiet comparison that starts to creep in and makes you feel like you no longer belong to the world you used to be part of.
In this episode, Joy and I talk about:
- Why Christmas cards trigger comparison so deeply after divorce
- How performance c...
If you’re here today, it means your kids aren’t with you...and that absence lands in the body, not just the heart.
This episode is for the moms navigating holidays, weekends, or long stretches without their children after divorce. The quiet. The ache. The way your nervous system doesn’t know where to settle when the people you’re bonded to aren’t home.
Joy shares from lived experience what it’s like to be deeply, trauma-bonded to you...
Ep. 298 Day 4: Christmas + Divorce | A Quantum Meditation to Shift Loneliness in Your Nervous System
Christmas after divorce can hit your body before your mind ever catches up.
You can know logically that other people’s celebrations have nothing to do with you—and still feel the ache, the comparison, the quiet grief in your chest when you wake up.
Today’s episode is different.
This is a short quantum healing track designed to help your nervous system release the emotional charge that gets activated when you imagine other families cel...
Welcome to Day 3 of the 12 Days of Divorce Christmas...also known as the 12 Days of Becoming Her Again.
Today we’re talking about one of the hardest moments after divorce: going to the holiday party alone.
The explaining.
The questions you don’t want to answer.
The way your body tightens when you walk into a room where you used to belong as part of a couple.
For many women, this isn’t just social anxiety — it’s identity grief....
Welcome to Day 2 of the 12 Days of Divorce Christmas...also known as the 12 Days of Becoming Her Again.
Today we’re talking about something no one prepares you for after divorce:
when the house is too quiet.
Not peaceful quiet.
Not restful quiet.
The kind of quiet that feels heavy, deafening, and impossible to sit in.
When the house feels too quiet, most of us instinctively want to:
- distract
- dissociate
- get busy
- scroll
- eat
- s...
Welcome to Day 1 of the 12 Days of Divorce Christmas...also known as the 12 days of becoming her again.
If you’re listening today, there’s a good chance part of you feels like:
“I can’t do this.”
Not the holidays.
Not the decisions.
Not the weight of doing this alone.
This episode isn’t here to convince you otherwise.
It’s here to help you understand that when you feel like you can’t, it’s not weakness or victimhoo...
After divorce, many women aren’t just grieving...they’re carrying too much in their nervous system.
Too much responsibility.
Too much self-doubt.
Too much pressure to hold it together.
That load doesn’t live in your thoughts. It lives in your body.
In this episode, Dawn guides a somatic practice that blends EFT tapping with IFS-style parts work to help the nervous system release what it’s been holding. This is not about insigh...
The holidays can make everything feel heavier — especially when you’re freshly divorced or still deep in the weeds of it all.
In this episode of Dear Divorce Diary, we talk about three hidden patterns that often stall divorce healing and leave women feeling unsafe, unmoored, and scattered, even when the marriage is over and you’re trying to move forward.
This conversation is a teaser for Season 5 - can you believe it?!- where we’ll s...
Today’s episode is personal, unpolished, and happening in real time.
This is the first in our new premium series, Behind the Mic—where we take you into the conversations that usually happen off-air. And this week, I’m sharing something I’m still moving through: a recent miscarriage.
Inside this conversation, we talk about how this loss collided with my lifelong pattern of staying in masculine energy—overfunctioning, overproducing, an...
If the holidays feel heavier this year—even the tiny decisions that shouldn’t take this much out of you—there’s a reason. After divorce, women carry an invisible load no one prepares us for. The planning, the negotiating, the managing, the remembering, the holding-it-all-together… it piles up until your body feels like it’s running on fumes.
And that overwhelm you keep blaming on weakness or poor coping?
It’s not that.
It’s ...
Letting go after divorce isn’t about willpower.
It’s about physiology.
Your body won’t release someone until it feels anchored somewhere safer than the place it’s been clinging.
And that’s why cord-cutting rituals, no-contact declarations, and “I’m done for real this time” moments almost never stick.
In this guided premium episode, we’re not letting go into emptiness...we’re letting go into self-belonging, the only place your...
If you’ve ever felt that tug toward your ex...not the man, but the idea of him...we've got you. That pull is your nervous system trying to finish a story it never got closure on. And after divorce, that pull gets loud.
In this episode, we break down why trauma bonds feel like soul ties and why your body keeps reaching for someone who couldn’t give you safety. You’ll learn what’s actually happening in your brain, why familiar pa...
Sometimes panic doesn’t wait for privacy.
It hits in the grocery store aisle, the Target parking lot, or right between the pasta sauce and the paper towels — the places where your body finally says, “No. I can’t hold this alone anymore.”
This premium episode is your real-time grounding track for those moments.
A full nervous-system reset you can use while you’re actively panicking — not later, not in hindsight, but right the...
...and then there’s the moment you’re just standing in the pasta sauce aisle, realizing your life doesn’t come in a set of two anymore.
No one warns you about that part of life after divorce.
The everyday grief.
The way your stomach drops when you reach for a family-size anything and remember: it’s just me now.
In this episode, Dawn, Joy, and Tiff unpack why the tiny, ordinary moments hit harder than the big ones — and why the gr...
Ep. 286 - A Holiday Loneliness Reset: A Nervous-System Ritual for Divorce Nights That Feel Too Quiet
If you pressed play on this tonight, it probably means the quiet hit differently.
Not the peaceful kind — the kind that presses against your ribs and makes your chest feel too small for your own heart.
The kind of quiet that shows up after divorce, when the world is flashing warm twinkle-light romance and happy-family commercials, and you're sitting in a room trying to remember how to breathe in your own life.
This episode i...
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