If you want to find closure after divorce, you have come to the right place.
One of the hardest things I see women struggle with as they heal from divorce—whether they wanted it or not—is watching their ex move on. Women ask themselves, “Did it matter? Did I matter? Was any of this real?”
All of us have struggled with this idea in some way or another, and probably not just with an ex. If we women peel back the layers of life, we often ask ourselves the question, “Did I matter to them?”
What Happens When Pain Is Ignored?
A woman in the ‘A Different D Word’ program has been struggling with these feelings recently. She shared a story about attending a family event where her ex arrived with his new wife, and no one in the family acknowledged how strange the situation was.
How many times have you experienced that in life, where you went through something so deeply painful and people who mattered to you acted like it wasn’t even happening?
Tumbleweed: How Healing Habits Help You Move Forward
First things first: What do you have in common with tumbleweed? You may not have grown up in an environment where you were taught that you mattered, you can love and grieve, you can recover from anything, you are magical, and you have a beautiful life purpose. You may not have been taught that when you experience pain or something unwanted, it’s just temporary, and it will pass as long as you allow yourself to process it and find the silver lining.
Breaking Free from Emotional Chaos: Finding Closure Through Stability, Self-Worth, and Inner Peace
Many of us were taught certain values, but our family experiences often contradicted those lessons.
If you weren’t taught to be grounded and rooted in love, have self-respect, turn unwanted events into really powerful growth processes, and understand that there is a divine creator that you are connected to, you are more like tumbleweed than you realize.
I was taught many of those things in concept. But then what lived in my family was chaotic, violent, tumultuous, and dark and there was more fear than love. I was a tumbleweed for a huge chunk of my life.
I understood some things, but the second I had a really big, painful emotion, I would blow in a new direction. And the moment something unwanted happened that felt outside of my control, I would get tumbled in another direction.
Rooted in Strength: Stop Drifting and Take Control of Your Life
Tumbleweed doesn’t have roots—it just blows where the wind blows.
When our minds and our bodies are disconnected, we are not in flow. When we women are not truly grounded, anytime something unwanted happens, it will blow us away, and we won’t feel like we have command of our lives when that’s not actually true.
You have command of your life and your circumstances, but you’re not utilizing and leveraging it in your journey of finding closure after divorce. This is why you want him to decide for you whether or not your relationship mattered, because you want to outsource your interpretation of the circumstance to somebody else’s perception.
You have command, but to know that you have command and to feel embodied in the command of your life and your circumstances, you have to become grounded, which can be really hard!
Do you remember Ten Second Tom from the movie 50 First Dates? Ten Second Tom has a lot to teach you and how you can leverage your habits to get clear about whether or not you matter.
The Power of Emotional Memory: Your Past Shapes Your Identity
Ten Second Tom can only remember for 10 seconds at a time, and then he would circle right back around and say, “Hi, I’m Tom. Who are you? What’s your name?”
If you have watched that movie, I want you to tell me about Tom’s personality. What do you know about him? We could say that he was upbeat and that he was a positive guy and had positive energy. But what else could you say about his personality other than he was really positive? I can’t really point to anything, which is really fascinating, because so much of your personality is informed by your emotional memory.
You start to encode memory from conception. From the moment that egg and sperm meet, you start to become a sentient being. Each cell in your body has a purpose, guiding where it goes and what it does: Your heart cells know to go to the heart center, the foot cell knows to be a foot, and the brain cell knows to be a brain.
From conception, your cells retain memory. Often, these memories become intertwined with emotions—especially negative ones—which shape your personality. All the things that you’ve experienced and inherited become part of your personality and memory.
And so Ten Second Tom, he didn’t have more than 10 seconds of memory and he was happy all the time because he didn’t have all that negative emotion fused into his experiences.
Healing from Within: Releasing Past Pain and Reclaiming Your Future
There are so many beautiful things you can do to help shape your future, find closure after divorce, and recover from codependency.
Your memory experience is not just things that happened to you, it’s how it felt to be in your body in those moments.
How it felt to be in your body when you were in utero, how it felt to be in your body when you were first born, how it felt to be in your body when you laid in your crib or your bed—that’s also your memory.
How did it feel to be in your family? How did it feel to be in your classrooms and school? How did it feel to learn? How did it feel to grow? How did it feel?
I know for me as an infant, I was colicky. So for me to be in my body at a very young age felt awful, so dissociation started early.
Unless you’re using tools that can get to the heart of that and help cleanse those cells of negative emotion, you will have mental and emotional habits and patterns that you will be fighting against your entire life. So then, it doesn’t matter to you that you and your ex shared a deeply meaningful experience.
You met, you fell in love, you pinched each other’s butts, you planned vacations, you argued over money, you had coffee together, you knew what his favorite dinner was, and he knew, ideally, how you like to have an orgasm. There was this rich, lived experience and then you both didn’t feel in command of the situation, and it didn’t last.
Every lived experience that you shared with him mattered. It is part of how you are experiencing this one life you get to live, in this body. It is part of how you are learning or growing.
Breaking Free from Codependency
It all mattered, but it won’t matter unless you decide it matters.
From a codependent place as tumbleweed, you are used to outsourcing your sense of self: what you think, what you feel, what you believe. You’re used to seeking validation from others—wondering if you’re okay, if it mattered, and ultimately, if you matter.
If you have these habits and uncomfortable thinking patterns, it will be hard for you to become grounded, rooted, find closure after divorce, and no longer tumbleweed. You must claim and own that process yourself.
There are healers like myself that can help guide you along that path. I can teach you about EFT tapping, EMDR therapy, quantum healing, and homeopathy. But you have to reach for them, and then you have to make them become habits, because right now what you’re doing habitually is discounting yourself, your experiences, and the power that you have in your life to overcome unwanted circumstances.
Throughout life, you will face challenges, but your current habit is interpreting them as negative rather than opportunities for growth. You believe, “I can’t handle it” versus “I can.”
From Tumbleweed to Transformation: Embracing Healing with Confidence and Joy
I feel confident saying all this stuff to you, but this is not how it always was. I was tumbleweed. And more and more I strive to be Ten Second Tom.
I want to move through life where all my cellular memory has been transmuted into neutral, positive cellular memory, so that I can come to each scenario confident that I can overcome it, and confident that I can have fun doing it.
You have an accumulation of pain that needs to be purged. It needs to be transmuted from the cells of your body. But, the thing is, it’s not as hard as it has to be. It’s uncomfortable maybe for a day or two, but then after that, the negative energy just goes and you move on in your divorce healing process.
Healing doesn’t have to be miserable—it can be empowering and even joyful. It can be a beautiful experience where you find closure after divorce, create healthier habits, and truly understand that it all mattered.
If you are ready to know this more deeply, I want you to head to Instagram, follow me, and send me a DM.
About Dawn Wiggins
Divorce Recovery Coach • Holistic Healer • Founder of Cocoon
Dawn Wiggins is a licensed marriage and family therapist who combines science and holistic healing to help women recover from divorce. Through EMDR, homeopathy, and compassionate guidance, she helps clients process pain and rediscover confidence. Dawn created Cocoon, a supportive divorce recovery community for healing and growth after divorce—because you don’t just deserve to heal, you deserve to thrive.
