Building Confidence After Divorce: Become Unshakable

One of the top desires I hear from women is, “I want to build confidence after my divorce.”

Two elements of true confidence are divorce-proof, but I don’t see women using these consistently or reliably. Instead, I see women using other things that ultimately lead to false confidence.

The thing is, divorce shatters false confidence.

Which is why you and I were on the bathroom floor, crying, feeling overwhelmed, and asking, “What have I done to my life, and how am I going to dig out of this moment?”

How to Get Confidence Back After Divorce

Today we’re unpacking the two elements that you must be digging into to build a true life of confidence. It’s a foundation of stone versus a foundation of sand.

Find a Solid Sense of Self and Well-Being

When I think of rebuilding confidence, I am automatically aware of the self-doubt and anxiety that get in the way; what other people are thinking of me, the stories that I tell myself about things that I’ve said or I’ve done, or overthinking and replaying an experience.

Then I think to myself, “How can I clear that out of the way?” We know that when we women are people pleasers and looking to others for approval, one person could approve of one thing and then the other person could completely disagree.

In these situations, you need to think, “Where can I find a solid sense of well-being and belief in myself?”

And that’s where we first have to look.

For that, we have to look at what’s capital T true. In modern culture, especially with social media, there are a lot of opinions about what is true. Society is in an uproar, with each other defending what we each believe to be true. We women have to find a firm foundation to understand ourselves.

From my experience as a trained therapist and as just a human who has suffered and has grown after divorce, that comes from believing there is a higher power.

Connect with Your Higher Power

I’m confident there is an organized creator of this world. From this higher power, there is a prescribed order and organization. There is a way to see, understand, and be aligned with that higher power.

We can sense it when we feel love or joy or when we’re learning. We can sense it in nature – there is an order, organization, and rhythm to things.

There is some intricately created stuff in this universe that we can’t wrap our heads around. We study it, but gosh, it’s glorious, beautiful and remarkable. We can see how, through the history of time, humans have built philosophies and religions around a higher power or an organized creator.

I love learning about various religions and philosophies, and I have found a lot of peace in seeing the overlapping messages between, for instance, the ancient principles in yoga, the twelve steps in Alcoholics Anonymous, and the Bible.

Having a human experience is ultimately building a life of abundance, connection, and growth, as well as being in alignment with an intelligent creator.

Ask yourself: “Have I been living my life in touch with an intelligent creator?” This is the first element of building confidence after divorce.

I think some of us would say, “I feel really good when I’m in nature,” or “I feel really good when I’m in a relationship with someone who loves me well and doesn’t judge me.” But when we women get in our houses, in our jobs, in our cars, in our little concrete boxes, we often lose touch with a true creator. When we look around the world, we see suffering. But to build true self-esteem and confidence, there has to be an unshakable foundation first.

There has to be an identity and a purpose in something that cannot be shaken by popular culture.

Second Element of Building Confidence: Identify Where You Picked Up Negative Self-Beliefs

The second element of building self-esteem and confidence is an understanding of all the places in life where you have accidentally picked up negative beliefs about yourself. When I became an EMDR therapist, this was an essential element of the training. Doing subconscious work is key.

Example: Disney Pixar’s Movie “Inside Out Two”

As very young children, we are egocentric; the world revolves around us. We have magical beliefs about Santa Claus and fairies and that our parents are perfect. However, we can also have equally negative beliefs that get internalized. As young children, when painful things happen, we internalize those as “I did it. That was my fault.” When we get in trouble for certain stuff, we think, “I can’t be myself. I’m not worth it. I don’t matter.” This is a byproduct of living.

We get all up in our egos, and we start to internalize negative beliefs.“I can’t trust. I can’t express my feelings. I can’t let it out. I can’t get what I want.”

If we don’t have a sense of which negative beliefs are running our lives, and we women don’t intentionally swap those out for positive beliefs, we end up living life from that place of negative beliefs.

Swap Out Negative Into Positive Beliefs

Without switching the negative beliefs to positive beliefs, it’s pretty impossible to build a life of actual, true confidence.

If you don’t believe, “I am worth it. I am lovable. I can learn to trust people. I can be myself. I can get what I want. I am safe, I am smart” and have this rooted deep in your subconscious mind, then rebuilding self-esteem after divorce will always be a fleeting thing.

Divorce is a magical season to change these negative beliefs into positive ones, because it’s a time when we women are at the raw baseline of how we’ve been living up to this moment. It’s a beautiful time to be doing this work. It’s right on the surface and you are ready to transform.

Identify False Confidence

Now, this leads me right into false confidence. Up until this point, we’ve most likely been getting our self-esteem from approval from other humans.

“My mom says I’m great, therefore, I’m great” or, “My partner says I’m great, therefore I’m great.”

These are really good feelings, but the problem is that when our confidence is dependent on some sort of performance, role, skill, or appearance, when my role as wife ends, when my role as mom transitions because my kids grow up or go to their dad’s house for the weekend, when my role as a youthful, glowing person ages out, I’m screwed.

Because all of those things are circumstantial and belong to certain times in our lives – none of those things last forever. They’re roles. They’re temporary. They’re not grounded in a stable identity or a higher power. They’re not rooted in a purpose-driven life.

This is not to say that they’re not valuable or that I don’t pursue any of them. But I can see, looking back, how when I’m alone at night and I’m feeling anxious or insecure about whether or not I am loved by certain people in my life, those roles don’t sustain me in those moments.

Use Confidence Building Tools

Skin-deep moments are not helping you build a life of confidence after divorce.

If you don’t transform those things, then you end up attracting a future partner based on the same way that you attracted your last partner – and divorce statistics for second and third marriages just go up and up and up.

We, women, have a job to teach our children and our children’s children how to have a strong sense of worth and identity that’s built-in something deeper than social media. It’s a brutal season for our children and knowing how to shift a negative belief into a positive belief is an invaluable skill.

How do we implement that? When we identify a negative belief, how do we transition it into a positive belief? We can use EFT tapping or EMDR. Homeopathy doesn’t necessarily swap a negative belief into a positive belief, but it removes all of your resistance to being able to shift it.

When we women do immersive journaling or positive affirmations, we process and embrace positive beliefs and release negative ones. Now, very often, we have to do that at a subconscious level because these things get internalized at a very young age. And you don’t necessarily have to pay a healer to do these things. This is why in the Loneliness Roadmap, I specifically provide you with the healing tools to identify the negative beliefs and to use bilateral stimulation to stimulate the brain in the way that you get into the subconscious mind.

So, start on your path to confidence after divorce. You can connect with your higher power and swap negative beliefs into positive ones. You’ve got this. I love you.