3 Hidden Reasons Second Divorces Are So Hard on Women

Takeaways from the podcast:

1. Second divorces trigger deeper shame and isolation. Many women feel like they no longer belong — even in the divorce community — after ending a second marriage. Even within our divorce “club” — that many of us didn’t want to be in — you might feel like you don’t quite fit. The shame feels heavier this time because society has this unspoken rule that one divorce is understandable, but two? That must mean something’s wrong with you. But you absolutely belong in every space of healing and support. Your pain isn’t less valid because it’s happening again. If anything, you need even more compassion and understanding, not judgment. The isolation you’re feeling is real, but it doesn’t have to be permanent. You are still worthy of love, support, and belonging, regardless of how many times your heart has been broken.
2. Healing requires facing hidden, exiled parts of self. True recovery begins when you start to connect with the wounded parts of you that have never felt fully seen or loved. There are parts of you — beautiful, hurting parts — that have been carrying your pain in secret rooms of your heart. These aren’t broken parts; they’re protective parts that have been working overtime to keep you functioning each day. Think of it like having a beautiful oil lamp where the flame is still burning bright, but there’s so much soot built up around the glass that you can barely see the light anymore. You’re not damaged, love. Those exiled parts of you that feel unwanted, unseen, unheard, or unloved? They’ve been holding space for your deepest wounds because they didn’t want you to collapse under the weight of it all. But now it’s time to gently invite them back into the light, to let them know they’re safe to be seen and loved exactly as they are.
3. Your value is not diminished by repeat pain. You are not broken. You are layered and complex, and still worthy of love, belonging, and happiness. You are not a “walking red flag” or a cautionary tale. You are a woman who has been brave enough to open her heart again after it was already broken once. Do you know how much courage that takes? You tried, you risked, you went for it when it would have been so much easier just to close yourself off forever. That says a lot about your capacity for love. The fact that you’ve walked this path more than once doesn’t make you less worthy of happiness — it makes you someone with a lived experience and hard-earned wisdom. Your worth isn’t determined by your relationship history or how many times you’ve had to start over. You are inherently valuable, not because of what you’ve done or haven’t done, but because of who you are at your core. That flame inside you? It’s never been damaged, no matter what you’ve been through.
4. Wisdom comes from lived experience, not perfection. Experiencing multiple divorces gives you hard-earned insight into who you are — but only if you allow healing in. Here’s something beautiful about your journey that I want you to recognize: you have a unique type of wisdom that can only come from walking this path. You know firsthand what it feels like when patterns repeat, when red flags get ignored, when hope meets reality in painful ways. You understand the devastation of uprooting a family more than once, the complexity of blended families, and probably the tender experience of loving someone else’s child as your own. This isn’t failure, my love — this is education of the deepest kind. You’ve learned through experience (which is how most of us learn best) that no man can fix you, that you have to do the work of discovering your own beauty and worth. The key is making sure this wisdom doesn’t turn into bitterness or self-loathing. When you allow healing in alongside your experience, that’s when your story becomes empowering.
5. You deserve to feel safe in love—again. Reclaiming your confidence starts with deep self-acceptance and finding a space where your full self is welcomed. You deserve to feel safe in love. Not just parts of you, but all of you — including those wounded, scared, confused parts that you might want to keep hidden from yourself and others. Feeling safe in love means you don’t have to perform or curate yourself to be “acceptable.” It means you can bring your whole story, your whole self, your whole complicated beautiful mess to the table and know that you’re still worthy of tenderness and care. This safety starts with you — with learning to hold space for your own pain without collapsing under it, with practicing self-acceptance instead of self-criticism, with finding people who can bear witness to your story without trying to fix you or judge you. When you can feel safe within yourself, you’re less likely to be manipulated by people who would exploit your self-doubt. You start trusting your instincts again, setting boundaries from a place of self-love rather than fear, and opening your heart from a place of wholeness rather than neediness.

Highlights

• 00:00 Unpacking Second Divorces
• 05:06 Embrace Self-Discovery and Experience
• 07:17 “Overcoming Women’s Self-Doubt”
• 11:48 “Reconnecting with Hidden Self”
• 15:29 “Safe in Love, Whole Acceptance
• 19:27 Healing Remedies for Self-Esteem
• 20:21 “Feel Love, Belong, Connect”

Full Podcast Transcript

Dawn Wiggins [00:00:00]:
This wasn’t supposed to be my life truly has been the theme of our conversations on the podcast this year. And today we are unpacking second divorces. Today’s episode has a special place in my heart because going through divorce is painful enough. And within the experience of divorce, I feel like there are these pockets of women who become marginalized even within this shitty club that none of us ever wanted to be in. Right? And there are just these ways of walking through divorce where in an ideal world, we’re community for each other, we’re loving, we’re accepting, we are relating to one another, we’re having compassion, and we are really seeing each other through a lens of, my God, how can I support you and love you well through this? But even within the pain that we’ve experienced, we still feel like we don’t belong. Like, you know how last a couple of weeks ago, we talked about women who have cheated or who have betrayed, Right. And today it’s women who are getting divorced for the second time. And I will add to that my childhood Ride or Die, who is my daughter’s godmother, has been divorced twice.

Dawn Wiggins [00:01:27]: And I really want, if this is you, I want you to hear just how special you are to me and to this podcast. So today’s episode is a dedication to women who are really struggling to even feel like they belong in the shitty club of divorce because of their, you know, niche experience with it. So in this episode, we are going to talk about why exactly you belong and how you can really help yourself connect with that feeling of belonging. We are going to talk about the thing that really has been sort of driving your pain, the thing that is very specific to you as a woman who has been divorced twice. And if you are a woman who is considering getting remarried, you might want to really sort of listen into this element to make sure that you’re not setting yourself up for this outcome. And finally, we are going to talk about some next steps that you can take to really recover in a more, I don’t know, maybe comfortable way or maybe like a more confident way. More. Yeah, I feel like I’m on it.

Dawn Wiggins [00:02:39]: I, I, I’ve got this. I’m less overwhelmed. I’m more dialed in. I feel a greater sense of safety or security in my body approaching my recovery this time around. Right. We’re going to talk about how to thing cool. All right. First things first, I have always felt really committed to screwing a thing up a number of times before I finally get it right.

Dawn Wiggins [00:03:08]: And what I mean by that is that we learn from experience. And I am fiercely passionate about how the Internet and information has changed our understanding of things, as I’m a Gen Xer, right. Like Gen Xers, I think we have so much more information than our boomer parents had. And with that information, sure, we know a lot more, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re so much more wise, because wisdom comes from experience. And for those of us who are getting divorced a second time or even a third time, I was just telling producer Joy a story about when I was working the steps in Al Anon during my early divorce days, how I had a grand sponsor. That’s a thing in when you’re working the steps and you have a sponsor who was a therapist and was getting divorced for the. Or getting married for the fourth time. So.

Dawn Wiggins [00:04:17]: But that was someone in that sort of boomer phase. Right. But when you have walked this path multiple times, you have a wisdom of experience that’s invaluable. Now, the thing of that is, is if you don’t do the healing piece right, then that experience can end up looking like resentment and self loathing and bitterness and a closed heart and disease and a lot of pain and grief and, you know, it can turn into things like asthma and cancer and fibromyalgia. So that’s not what I want your wisdom of experience to. To become. Right. I want to be talking about how you have learned firsthand that when we don’t dig in and heal the things the first time they do get repeated.

Dawn Wiggins [00:05:06]: And I want you to have the wisdom of experience to know that there is no man that can fix you. That’s not a thing, right? That you discovering your own beauty is truly the path that you know these things firsthand. You know, the devastation of splitting up a family economy, you know, you know, the devastation of feeling trapped in a pattern in a way that will become a testimony for you. It will become a message that you have for other women and other families and other children. You have probably had the experience of being a step parent and loving on some other child, like, so beautifully. Right. You just have probably an experience with blended families and so many things that you have walked that are admirable. And so you belong in this club and you belong in a room where you feel loved and valued for the experiences that you have gained by being really, really sure that this is not the way.

Dawn Wiggins [00:06:21]: I know that that learning from doing has always been the most powerful way that I have tackled anything. And yes, it comes with a lot of scraped knees. And I’M not here to minimize that, but I am here to celebrate that you went for it, that you opened your heart again, that you took a risk, that you were courageous as all get out, that you tried, that you were willing to go for it. And now it’s time to tweak some things and dial them in a bit differently. Right, let’s really take a look at the messaging that we tend to tell ourselves when we’ve made the same mistake over again. Right? We tend to say things like, what is wrong with me? We tend to say things like, I don’t deserve more or better or different. We tend to think things like, that’s not for me. I’m not eligible for that anymore.

Dawn Wiggins [00:07:17]: We tend to doubt that whatever the thing is that we want or desire is possible for us or that it’s going to happen in our lifetime. We tend to doubt that it even exists. And there is a unique sort of experience that you are having inside of that that I want to pull out a magnifying glass and a candle and show you. Because too often as women we go to this place where we’re self loathing, we’re self critical. We are really just sure that we are permanently damaged in some way, like fatally flawed in some way that causes us to not be able to have the thing that we so desperately want and believe would help us to feel better. And so when I was preparing for this episode and running some things past producer Joy, I was talking about how when you tell women that no they are worthy, that no they are beautiful, that no they are inherently magical and amazing, that a lot of that feedback really bounces off women a lot of the time, right? It doesn’t penetrate. It can’t pierce the veil of self doubt. And you know, I think as women we’re like, but look at all this data, right? Look at all this data.

Dawn Wiggins [00:08:38]: All these times I was rejected, all these times that I was not accepted, all these times that these bad things happened to me, I don’t have any evidence, dawn, that I am truly good enough, that I’m not permanently damaged. You know, it’s like I’m searching. I want to believe you, dawn, but it’s hard to accept. And so what is that, right? How can I explain to you what’s happening, why you found yourself in this second or third divorced situation in a way that’s not to do with. You are fatally flawed. And so here’s what I want you to hear. That you love, have parts of you that are more hidden than someone else, right? So Someone else who has had an easier time having healthy relationships or has an easier time with their self esteem, or has an easier time navigating life in love or parenting or marriage or whatever it is, right? That person is not better than you. They’re not less damaged than you.

Dawn Wiggins [00:09:44]: It’s neither of those things. Their self esteem, their flame, their wellness is more on the surface. Yours is more hidden at the end of the day. Your worth, your value, your essence, yourself. It’s not damaged. It’s never been damaged. I wish I could show you inside of you, how true this is, but you are not damaged. What has happened is there have been layers of buildup blocking.

Dawn Wiggins [00:10:15]: Like if you could picture this beautiful hurricane lamp, right, With a flame, you know, like an oil lamp, right, with this beautiful robust flame. But it’s been burning for so long, there’s so much soot around the hurricane lamp, right? You. You almost can’t even see the flame anymore. That’s what happens to women who have experienced relationship traumas, early childhood traumas, multiple marriages and divorces. What has happened is through generational trauma, generational events, there has been a buildup of residue blocking out your beauty, your magic, your particular personal power and sense of esteem and wellness. And believe it or not, in homeopathy, this is looked at as layers of subclinical viral load that your body has been carrying that it hasn’t been able to clear. Now, from a psychology standpoint, when we look at it through the lens of trauma, what we would say is there are parts of you, love, that have been so exiled, so exiled, so lost that they have not tasted what it feels like to be loved and accepted by you or anyone else in this lifetime. And this episode is almost more for those exiled parts of you who need so badly to have love poured on them that you’ve lost track that they’re even there.

Dawn Wiggins [00:11:48]: There are parts of you that have been carrying your pain for you and keeping it as a secret, even almost. Because for those exiled parts of you to bring that pain forward would be so painful for your whole self that you might collapse and feel like you can never stand up again. And so these exiled parts have been doing you a favor, holding your pain in secret dark rooms, saying, don’t worry, I will take all of this trauma, all of this rejection, all of this betrayal, all of this unwantedness, and I will hold it for you, and I will help you attract someone else to carry your burden. But the thing is, love is until you connect with those exiled parts of you who have felt unwanted Unseen, unheard, under supported, unsupported, unloved. Until those parts can take a step into the light and feel like me, you, producer Joy, coach Tiffany, whoever else is willing to hold space for the depth and intensity of the pain and the emotions that those exiled parts have been carrying on your behalf. Until there are people who can bear witness to the amount of pain that you have experienced and not collapse, that they’re not going to feel safe to come forward. And so love, you are not broken, you are not damaged. You are this beautiful, robust, magical flame with exiled parts that are so hidden who just need the healing tincture of acceptance, love and space being held.

Dawn Wiggins [00:13:38]: And so this is your call to come home right to those parts. This is the call to action. To say, like, that’ll do. That is enough shoving baby in a corner. Nobody shoves baby in a corner. It’s time to come home. It’s time to allow you know, your truest self to emerge, which means all of you, and not just the parts of you that you have polished and botoxed and highlighted and curated so that some people will accept you. It’s time to come truly home to self and allow yourself to be seen and loved in a way that feels safe enough for you to become a cohesive self, a well loved, well accepted, confident self.

Dawn Wiggins [00:14:40]: And if this sounds freaking scary, good, because that’s. That’s it, right? There’s a reason that those exiles stay in hiding, and it’s because you can’t engineer the discomfort out of vulnerability. And I know from doing this work with myself and with the healers that I have worked with that touching those exiled parts is almost like lightning in its intensity of discomfort. But it’s so temporary. And then. Right. What follows is an amount of relief that is sort of beyond measure of anything that could ever benefit you. It’s.

Dawn Wiggins [00:15:29]: It’s the relief that comes from feeling safe in. In love is from where all goodness flows. Feeling safe in love. And so it’s not enough for half of you to feel safe in love and the other half of you to be cowering in a dungeon in the basement of your. Have you seen that meme recently? This is one of my favorites. Oh, no. Who was it? It was producer Joy was watching the movie Inside out and she told it back to us, went to the movies, and in the movie Inside out, they made a joke about the subconscious. It’s where they keep all the troublemakers, right? So in your subconscious mind that you’ve had this dungeon, right, where you have shoved your exiled parts and then called yourself less than worthy and called those parts of you less than worthy.

Dawn Wiggins [00:16:18]: And it’s simply not true. They have been holding all of your pain. And I want you to know that we have the capacity here for that pain. We have it. It’s what we work on in our own team building, right? Is the capacity to hold space to bear witness for your pain. Do I have any Outlander fans in the room? Oh, my goodness. If you are an Outlander fan, please send me a DM Outlander. Is that right? With Jamie and.

Dawn Wiggins [00:16:46]: Yeah. Okay, first of all, witchy Scottish women, right? Like, that’s. That’s my secret crush. First things first. Second of all, Jamie, that’s my other secret crush, okay? And so for my Outlander fans, do you remember that season where Jamie ends up in. In prison, right, and traumatized in all the ways. And like the way that he comes back to her is by her bearing witness to his parts of his psyche that he had to exile in order to survive to get back to her. But then he got back to her, right? And he was part of himself because he.

Dawn Wiggins [00:17:21]: He exiled those. So. So that’s it. That’s what I’m talking about right there. And the only way that he could walk back to her was her holding space for bearing witness to the darkest, darkest, darkest experiences that a human can experience. And that’s what we do over here. We practice expanding our capacity to bear witness to your pain. And so we just want to say where your people.

Dawn Wiggins [00:17:48]: Come home. Come home to yourself. Be willing to walk that path back to you. So that when you look at your own lantern, you can see how bright it is. She’s beautiful. She is sparkly and shiny and has so much that the world needs. And you know, we were also, producer Joy and I were discussing this really cool concept, right? Is that the more exiled you are, the more you doubt your own worth and your own value, the more manipulatable you are, right? The more you have parts of self you haven’t accepted, the more people can use that against you. They can weaponize your own self doubt, your own self loathing, your own self low self worth, your own doubt in your worth and love and belonging.

Dawn Wiggins [00:18:37]: They can use that against you. And that’s how they do it in. In political warfare, right? That’s. That’s how they. That’s how you know terrorists are created, right? Is like being able to exploit whatever your vulnerabilities are. And so, love, I want you to come home so that you can no longer be exploited by men or the skincare industry, or quite frankly even the wellness industry, right? Who’s just going to convince you you have to buy another supplement in order to be well when the truth is you got to walk those exiles back. You got to love them well. And so if you have been married and divorced more than once or you’re facing a second divorce, I want you to know that this is what’s at the crux is exiled parts.

Dawn Wiggins [00:19:27]: And whatever the thing is that has caused your esteem to be that mucked up, I want you to know that without a doubt, there is a solution. Something else that I’ve been studying lately and pulled out of my apothecary today is a remedy, a homeopathic remedy that’s considered a nosod made from strep. Strep is a disease that has existed for eons and can contribute to low self esteem. Did you know that? Fun fact. There are so many things in this world, love that we don’t know. That we don’t know in a God created universe, right? That are tools for a return to health and wellness, that are deeply acting, spiritually transformative and are ready and available for you if you claim them for yourself. So to my ladies in the house that have been married and divorced more than once. Welcome home.

Dawn Wiggins [00:20:21]: >We love you so much. You belong here. Your answers are here. You deserve to. To feel love and belonging just as much, if not more than everyone else. So to my Outlander fans and to my second time divorced folks, send me a DM and just tell me you’re here and that we’re connected. I know that we are right, but I love it when you reach back. Shoot me a DM on Instagram.

Dawn Wiggins [00:20:46]: On Wiggins. Talk soon. Peace.