Breaking Old Patterns: What Divorce Is Really Trying to Teach You

Breaking old patterns is the key to healing after divorce—not just recovering from it. In this podcast episode, divorce coach Dawn helps you understand why divorce is often just a symptom of deeper emotional wounds, outdated belief systems, and unconscious coping mechanisms. Whether you missed the signs or truly believed in forever, this moment can become a powerful wake-up call. You’ll explore how trauma, shame, and inherited behaviors have shaped your relationships—and learn how to finally break free. If you’re ready to stop repeating the past and build a future grounded in clarity, confidence, and self-worth, this podcast episode is for you.

5 Key Takeaways:

1. Divorce is often a turning point for self-discovery. It reveals patterns you didn’t know were shaping your relationships. Many women experience that moment when they’re sitting in therapy or journaling and suddenly they say, “Wait, I had no idea I was doing that”? So many of us go through our relationships completely unaware of the unconscious patterns driving our choices — maybe it’s how we avoid conflict, how we people-please to keep the peace, or how we emotionally shut down when things get intense. Divorce has this way of holding up a mirror and showing us all these behaviors we didn’t even realize we had. It’s like finally getting the manual to understand yourself, even though you’ve been living in your own body your whole life. Yes, it can be uncomfortable to see these patterns clearly for the first time, but love, this awareness is actually a gift. You can’t change what you can’t see, so this newfound clarity about you, your attachment style, and your relationship patterns is the first step toward creating a healthier, healed life for yourself.
2. Breaking old patterns begins with radical self-awareness. Understanding your emotional triggers is key to stopping the cycle and breaking these patterns. This is where the real work begins, so be gentle with yourself as you start on this healing journey. Radical self-awareness means getting curious about those moments when you feel triggered, shut down, or reactive — instead of just pushing through or numbing out. Maybe you notice that when someone raises their voice, you immediately go into freeze mode, or when you feel criticized, you either explode or completely withdraw. These aren’t character flaws — they’re information about how your body and nervous system learned to protect you, probably when you were very young. The beautiful thing about developing this kind of awareness is that once you can catch yourself in these moments, you get to make a choice. Instead of just reacting the way you always have, you can pause and ask yourself, “What do I actually need right now? How do I want to respond from my adult self rather than my wounded child self?” It takes practice, but this is how you start breaking free from those automatic responses that might have been sabotaging your relationships (without you even knowing it).
3. Trauma, dissociation, and shame keep you stuck. Healing after divorce requires feeling, grieving, and releasing. So many of us smart, capable women think we can just think our way out of our pain. But if you don’t actually feel and process the emotions underneath them, you’ll stay stuck in that same loop. Trauma lives in our bodies, not just our minds, and when we’ve learned to dissociate or disconnect from our feelings as a survival mechanism, we miss so much important information about what’s actually happening in our marriages. Maybe you were so good at suppressing vulnerable emotions that you missed the signs that your partner was pulling away, or you were so focused on keeping things “fine” that you never addressed the lack of real intimacy in your marriage. The healing happens when you’re willing to get out of your head and into your heart — to feel the divorce grief, the anger, the disappointment, and yes, even the shame that might be lurking underneath. It’s not comfortable, but it’s where the real transformation lives.
4. Emotional disconnects are often overlooked red flags. Lack of intimacy or vulnerability signals deeper unresolved wounds. Emotional disconnection can masquerade as getting along well with your partner. You might have thought, “We never fight, we have fun together, we want the same things” — and all of that can be true, but all the while, you’re still missing this crucial piece of deep emotional intimacy. Real connection isn’t just about having similar interests or parenting styles; it’s about being able to share your fears, your dreams, your insecurities, and your authentic feelings without fear of judgment or rejection. When we’re not emotionally connected to ourselves (often because of our unhealed trauma), we can’t create that kind of intimacy with our partners, either. So you might miss the signs when your partner starts withdrawing or when conflict gets avoided instead of worked through with curiosity and care. Looking back, you might realize that you and your ex were more like really good roommates who happened to share a bed and some goals, but you weren’t actually seeing and being seen by each other on that deep level that sustains long-term relationships.
5. You’re not broken—you’re waking up to your true self. Breaking old patterns helps you reclaim your worth, rewrite your story, and build a healthier foundation for the future. You are not damaged goods because your marriage ended. You’re not a failure because you couldn’t make it work. What you are is a woman who is finally waking up to patterns that probably got established when you were very young, maybe even patterns that were passed down through generations in your family. This divorce isn’t proof that you’re unlovable or that something’s fundamentally wrong with you — it’s evidence that you’re ready to stop living from old programming that no longer serves you. Maybe you learned early on that love comes with certain conditions, or that you have to be perfect to be worthy of care, or that your needs don’t matter as much as everyone else’s. These beliefs shaped how you showed up in your marriage, but now you get to question them. This is your opportunity to reclaim your inherent worth, to build a relationship with yourself based on compassion rather than criticism, and to create a life that actually reflects who you are at your core rather than who you think you should be. That’s not broken, love — that’s awakening.

Highlights

• 00:00 Divorce: Understanding Underlying Causes
• 03:50 Uncovering Self-Awareness in Therapy
• 08:15 Divorce: Symptom of Untreated Issues
• 12:15 “Emotional Disconnects Fuel Divorce”
• 14:29 Healing the Root Causes of Divorce
• 18:03 Rattled Belief Systems and Self-Reflection
• 20:15 Unraveling Love, Punishment, and Worthiness
• 23:27 “Quantum Healing Session Offer”

Full Transcript

Dawn Wiggins [00:00:00]: Have you ever said, I knew it? Or why is she better? Or is God punishing me? If these are words you have thought, felt, or spoken, this episode is for you, an obvious part of a disorienting experience like divorce is to do a post mortem, right? To do an autopsy on everything you just experienced and to try to find your orientation. Where am I in time and space? What was real, what isn’t real, and how the heck did I get here? This episode is all about understanding how you got here and that ultimately divorce is a symptom of something you didn’t realize was activated all that time. And I think that one of the things that I really try to impress upon people when they’re in couples counseling or they’re in the early stages of. Of the divorce process is, listen, I know that this divorce is going to take up a massive space in your body, mind, but I need you to not get so distracted by that. You lose track of, like, hey, this is actually a symptom. We have to treat the underlying cause or you’re going to find yourself back in this same pattern. It’s very normal in human. We all have our patterns that we will operate from throughout the course of our lifetime.

Dawn Wiggins [00:01:26]: And ideally, we get to healthier and healthier levels, and we do what we can to intervene on that pattern so that we can create better outcomes. So this episode is about, hey, I don’t want you to go through this again. I want you to experience an amazing life. I want this to be the launch pad from which you experience bigger, better, brighter, bolder seasons. But we have to treat the right thing. And if all we do is treat and recover from the divorce, man, we missed the boat on the bigger issue in today’s episode. We’re gonna unpack something I see happen all the time in my private practice. Right.

Dawn Wiggins [00:02:06]: Which is this kind of concept. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. It’s like I had no idea that XYZ was going on either inside of me or inside of him. So we’re gonna unpack what that ends up looking like in therapy. We are going to look at what divorce could be a symptom of. There are a number of things, and some of them might not be what you’re expecting. There are obvious ones, like, oh, attachment style issues. Right.

Dawn Wiggins [00:02:30]: But there are some that you might not realize. And then we’re going to really look at the tendency as humans for us to go to the assumption that we are being punished for something in our lives. All right, let’s dig in. Now, I think that there are sort of two different groups of women. I’m probably overgeneralizing, right? But I think there are two different groups of women that are going through divorce. And one group is like the. Oh, gosh, I knew from the beginning there were signs and I ignored them. I didn’t have the capacity to confront them or to end the relationship or to move on or whatever it is, right? But there were signs and I ignored them and.

Dawn Wiggins [00:03:10]: Or didn’t know what to do about it, right? And so felt helpless or hopeless or whatever it is, or just was like, hopeful maybe. Maybe instead of hopeless. It’s like, no, I was hopeful that it would change. And then there’s another group of women who genuinely thought that they were headed for happily ever after, right? That they. That divorce was just genuinely never going to happen to them. Now, I had made a deal with myself that I wasn’t going to get divorced. But I fall into that first camp, right? Right. Where there were signs and I ignored them and I just did not have the capacity to deal with them in a healthy way.

Dawn Wiggins [00:03:50]: That said, I cannot tell you how much I did not know about myself and the decisions I was making until I was in therapy doing that postmortem on how I got here. And so what I very often see as a therapist, sitting with people as, you know, a huge chunk of therapy is psycho education, right? Is teaching folks about, like, hey, this pattern that you do, that’s what this means. X, Y or Z, right? This is avoidant attachment behavior. This is anxiety, or this is dissociation, or this is a sign of. Right. It’s like there’s such a massive process in therapy about learning, like, really educating oneself about the patterns that live inside of us. And what I hear so often from people, whether you were in the camp where you saw signs and you couldn’t handle them or you genuinely did not see this coming, is that you didn’t know what you didn’t know. Love.

Dawn Wiggins [00:04:54]: And you’ve got to be willing to take a deep breath and cut yourself and your ex some slack for that. I really believe that when these hardships and painful things happen in life, that these are the moments that are meant to wake us up and shake us loose and beating yourself up for not knowing what you didn’t know. That feeling, that thing where you beat yourself up or you beat him up or whatever it is, right? You’re trying to escape shame. And gosh, shame is just so, like, toxic levels of shame, right? Are just. They become so entrenched in how we function, and we don’t even realize it. But it is so, so, so common for people in therapy to say, no one taught me that. No one explained that to me. I didn’t know.

Dawn Wiggins [00:05:44]: I didn’t understand. If I had only known, then I would have. Crap. I was sitting in a meeting this morning with coach Tiffany and producer Joy. And, you know, we use a lot of internal family systems in our small group coaching program. And coach Tiffany is so excited about. She’s just so on fire about ifs and helping women understand their parts of self. And she was like, if I had had ifs, I wouldn’t have gone through fraction of what I went through.

Dawn Wiggins [00:06:12]: And it’s like, that’s that thing that I didn’t know what I didn’t know. And so there’s something about trusting that process, right, that divorce is a symptom of all of that shit. You didn’t know, you didn’t know. And gosh, what a painful symptom or side effect, right? But love, it’s gonna be all right. Now that you’re knowing it all and now that you’re understanding it all, it’s time to integrate those awarenesses and those understandings and implement them. And when you catch yourself beating yourself up about what you didn’t know or analyzing, analyzing, analyzing, I want you to interrupt that analysis parameter paralysis. Get into your body and take an action or feel a feeling, right? Grieve, feel, express, and then take action rather than doing the analysis paralysis thing because it’s keeping you stuck or blocked or disempowered or, you know, sort of like not in active healing phase. Right? So active healing fees doesn’t look like overwhelming analysis or shaming yourself.

Dawn Wiggins [00:07:22]: Right? So I see women get stuck in that a lot about what they did wrong or comparing themselves to the woman that he moved on for. What makes her better? Why am I. Why wasn’t I good enough? I see women get so stuck in why wasn’t I enough? And. And when you get stuck in that spot, it’s really ignoring the fact that divorce was a symptom and not the actual root issue. And so I want you to really catch yourself when you’re doing that and saying, like, okay, I need to refocus on what is the root cause, because I’m getting hung up in a symptom and not actually addressing the core issue that I need to learn, grow, break free from, or heal inside of me. Yeah. All right, second thing, let’s talk about what it could be a Symptom of. I think that it’s a very exciting time to be alive in that.

Dawn Wiggins [00:08:15]: Well, for so many reasons, but in that we have never been so aware as a society of things like, you know, how how nutrition in pregnancy or the mother’s energetic patterns in pregnancy affects the developing baby. And we have never been so aware of how trauma impacts our, our relationships or attachment styles or what high functioning overachieving women are actually suffering from or what ADHD or autism looks like inside of women. Like we see PTSD and how that’s its own form of neurodivergence. Like, holy crap, the conversations we’re having on TikTok and Instagram, they’re so exciting, right? And these are the things that we really need to be looking at as divorce is a symptom of these things. Divorce is a symptom of untreated neurodivergence, untreated attachment style issues, untreated cptsd. I’m gonna tell you what, some very or untreated low self esteem, right? Untreated toxic shame. So super interesting how divorce is very, very, very often a symptom of toxic shame inside of oneself and it’s so profoundly affects your self esteem that you end up settling or picking someone that is going to be harmful, right? But one of the things that divorce is often a symptom of that people just, I don’t think, talk about. At least I haven’t heard it talked about a lot.

Dawn Wiggins [00:09:54]: That doesn’t mean it’s not happening. So if you’ve heard this talked about, send me your content, I want to know. Right? But divorce is often a symptom of chronic dissociation. Now we know dissociation is a symptom of trauma. So aren’t I just saying that divorce is often a symptom or a side effect of trauma, like chronic C PTSD or that kind of thing. Like yes, that’s what I’m saying. But trauma is like a big, that’s a big chapter book, right? I’m just talking about just this piece about dissociation. So for instance, you know, I recently had someone say, this person I’m divorcing, I don’t know him.

Dawn Wiggins [00:10:32]: He didn’t act like this when we were dating or when we were married. Like, this is not who I understood. We didn’t fight that much. He never told me any of this. I didn’t know any of this. This is just not who I married. And when I lay it out for them for her and said, say, well, actually friend, all of your Trauma caused you to have, you know, parts and dissociation and for you to avoid feeling, right, intending to think, intending to boss babe and telling, tending to analyze and problem solve and codependent, you know, to do all these behaviors that are not emotionally nuanced or emotionally attuned or really vulnerable. Right.

Dawn Wiggins [00:11:17]: And so it was very easy then from this dissociative place where you’re not necessarily knowing how to feel or process your feelings. You’re not in touch with your feelings because you’re bypassing vulnerable emotions, bypassing real vulnerability and intimacy in exchange for, we get along, we have so much fun. We do the same things. We love raising our kids. We had plans for our careers and for our travel and for our home. And, you know, like, that’s all beautiful stuff, but it’s like, lacking emotional intelligence and intimacy. And then you don’t realize you have a blind spot around. Well, if you’re not actually connected on this deep emotional level, you’re going to miss all sorts of signs and symptoms, Right? So when he was withdrawn, you know, when you were postpartum, when he, you know, started doing more with the guys and didn’t want to include you, when he started distancing himself and you didn’t.

Dawn Wiggins [00:12:15]: You weren’t in touch with how that felt for you, and you just sort of started maybe bickering about it or this or that, but there wasn’t this intimate connection. It’s like you’ve got blind spots around. Oh, well, actually, that behavior is a sign of something else, and it’s deeper and it means more. And just because you’re not having conflict around, it doesn’t mean it’s not a massive issue going on. Right? So when you’ve got folks who are highly dissociative or bypass emotional expression, vulnerability, or intimacy, man, that is driving so much of divorce. And so when you’re moving through the process of grieving what could have been this life that you envisioned, and you’re moving through the process of anger and sadness and insecurity to do with the divorce process, I want you to keep coming back to. But what is underneath there that got me here in the first place? Is it a tendency towards codependency? What do I mean by that? I mean a tendency to people please and suppress your own thoughts, feelings, opinions and beliefs in order to keep the peace or to keep things copacetic. Is.

Dawn Wiggins [00:13:29]: Is it an attachment style issue? Right. Are you. Do you tend to have an avoidant attachment style that when there’s conflict, you withdraw or an anxious Attachment style that when there’s conflict, you drive forward and you can’t handle it if it’s not resolved right away. Or do you know that you have a tendency to dissociate that feeling feelings at all is very difficult for you and you suppress and shut down and intellectualize or sort of float outside of your body and detach from the situation until it blows over. Like, do you know that you tend to do that? Do you know that you have trauma that you haven’t fully recovered from or addressed? I want you to keep coming back to what is it that happened long before? And P.S. another one that I haven’t mentioned until just now is it could be just inherited energetic patterns from your ancestors. Right. There can just be inherited generational traumas that are contributing to divorce.

Dawn Wiggins [00:14:29]: And so do you keep bringing yourself back to actually, I have to not just recover from this divorce, I have to treat the thing that caused the divorce in the first place. And do you feel like you have the right treatment plan, the right approach to help you heal that thing that happened first or the things that happened first? Right. I want you to keep your eye on that. Because the divorce piece, like, man, it’s so painful and it’s so destabilizing. But he, you know, when you have conflict in divorce and when you keep, keep over analyzing and getting caught up in conflict and the next text message and the lawyer said this, and can you believe his mom did that? And you know what he’s doing with the kids or not the kids like you will just so powerfully impact your children and your life if you can stay focused on what’s the thing that caused this problem in the first place. I think one of the things we do exceptionally well as a team over here at Dear Divorce Diary is the coaching program that we have developed is aimed at certainly helping you recover from divorce, but it’s really aimed at recovering you from the thing that caused the divorce. And I think that’s the thing that really sets us apart from other divorce coaching programs and solutions is that our program is long enough to give you the opportunity to experience and break those patterns that cause divorce in the first place. The tools that we use go deep enough to address the inherited energetic patterns from your ancestors early pre verbal traumas.

Dawn Wiggins [00:16:06]: And you know, like, it’s just we have such a beautiful way of addressing the things that cause the problem in the first place. So it’s such a profound recovery from divorce and the things that led to it. And that’s something we are really, really proud of over here. Okay, let’s tackle this third piece, right? Which is just. It’s a thought I hear people and women express, like, far too often. And it breaks my heart when I hear it. But is God punishing me? Right? I was a good wife. I am a good woman.

Dawn Wiggins [00:16:35]: I, you know, did everything. And he cheated on me. He betrayed me. He left me. He blindsided me. He did xyz, right? I don’t understand. I don’t deserve this. I deserve better.

Dawn Wiggins [00:16:49]: I did everything I was supposed to do to be a good person and a good wife, and still this shit is happening, right? And I didn’t cause this divorce. He caused this divorce. And is God punishing me now? Maybe you don’t relate to this, right? But I think most of us at some point in our life have had this thought about God being a punishing God, or us really grappling with why bad things happen to good people. That’s what it’s really about, right? If I’m a good person, why is this horrible bad thing happening to me? I recently was sitting with a woman who was just sobbing, asking this question. I’m gonna stick a little Easter egg here, right? Also, my bestie has said this before. For in dark times of her life, like, God must be punishing me. What did I do to deserve this? And I think that what I want you to hear is that very, very often those inquiries come from a place of feeling so profoundly lost, disempowered, or helpless in your life. Stuck, trapped, dark.

Dawn Wiggins [00:18:03]: I might say, like nervous system red. Like paralyzed or vagal shutdown, dorsal vagal shutdown or collapse. I think that when we feel so profoundly shocked or rocked by something and we have tried so hard to be a good girl or a good person, I think it rattles our belief systems. It rattles our sense of self and what we thought we understood about how the world worked or what we were taught about how the world worked. And so if you’ve thought to yourself, like, am I being punished? I want you to know that what you’re really grappling with there is your belief system, your fundamental belief system about how life works and whether or not you feel safe believing the things you used to believe, that’s a big conversation, love. And it goes far deeper than just the impacts of this divorce. And I think those are the things that are so meaningful to address and get clarity on as you build this next chapter of your life. Because we all know that when you build a house with a strong foundation on a strong ground, that then Right.

Dawn Wiggins [00:19:16]: Your life can go to these amazing places, to these amazing heights. But when we build shoddy homes on soft foundation, shifting foundations, right. It’s really hard to build this tall, glorious structure. Very often when I hear people say, is God punishing me? That speaks to me about religious programming. It speaks to me about women who didn’t feel seen or celebrated or valued when they were girls. Their relationship with Source or God doesn’t feel intimate or safe yet. And that that footwork hasn’t been done to create an actual intimate relationship with a higher power. There’s this idea that many of us relate to God the way we related to our caregivers or early caregivers, like AKA parents, mothers, fathers, you know, whomever.

Dawn Wiggins [00:20:15]: And so if we say to ourselves, like, is God punishing me? Like, oh gosh, when we are in our most vulnerable places as children, did we feel guided? Did we feel unconditionally accepted or loved? Or did we feel punished? And so there’s really something there to unwind around how we related to our parents, how we, how love has often, especially in trauma oriented early childhood experiences, how love has gotten tangled with anger or punishment, like I punish you because I love you and how we experienced punishment. So love. It’s a tricky thing to understand that while your ex may have completely betrayed you and you are questioning whether or not God actually loves you or he’s punishing you, that truly, truly what needs to be addressed deep down inside of there is your identity, your belief system and your sense of worthiness or lack of worthiness, and the process of rebuilding your sense of worth in God’s eyes, in your own eyes, and in the eyes of the people who matter to you. That’s a journey, friend, that I am so honored to be on with you, that you take your time to be here in this conversation with me is so deeply meaningful and rewarding. And I am so honored that this is where you choose to spend your time, really reorienting your sense of self and your worth in the world. Thank you. The way you think, the things you feel, the things that you’re grappling with, they matter so much. And I want to reassure you that God is not punishing you, but I think that somewhere inside of there there’s a part of you that’s afraid that you deserve to be punished or that you’re going to get punished anyways, or that you’re not worth more or different, or that you’re not going to be chosen differently.

Dawn Wiggins [00:22:25]: And so you settled for someone who would ultimately betray you. All of the way that we live life comes from beliefs that typically got into us before the age of seven. And then the reticular activating system, it’s the part of the brain that scans the environment and sorts out all the enormous amount of data that our senses take in. And it sorts out that data and it has a confirmation bias and it gives you all sorts of feedback that just confirms the belief systems that you act from. So God is not punishing you, love, but somewhere deep inside of there, you have beliefs that are not serving you and they may be hard for you to get in touch with, but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible. There is such an abundant life waiting for you if you can expand your capacity to let it in. If you’ve ever considered joining our small group coaching program we call a Different D Word, now is the time to jump on the wait list. Right There are these three awesome bonuses available to you.

Dawn Wiggins [00:23:27]: A special breakthrough session with me, A special session quantum healing session with Kate Mayer. And 15% off the total program price. I’ve noticed a lot of women have concerns about the cost. So if that’s you, if you’re like, oh man, I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to afford it. Like, just reach out, send me a message, let’s talk about it. But definitely put your name on the wait list. Scroll down to the show notes and you’ll see a spot where you can just fill out the form. And if you’ve even thought about it, right, just put yourself on the wait list.

Dawn Wiggins [00:23:55]: It does not, it doesn’t matter. It’s neither here nor there. Like, just put yourself on the waitlist. Then at least you have the option down the road if something happens or changes or you make a decision, we would love to have you, we would love to talk with you about how to heal from this divorce, from the symptom, the cause that drove this symptom of divorce, and about ultimately, how much you matter, how much you’re worth, and how to build a life with a strong foundation built on that core belief system. We love you so much. Peace.