Forgiveness after divorce is a journey. In my sessions with clients, bitterness after divorce is a common theme, and it often manifests in many ways. So today, we’re talking about why it can be so hard to shake off bitterness and why forgiveness feels out of reach right now. We’ll also explore how bitterness is the opposite of love and why it can become addictive.
The Hidden Toll of Bitterness: How It Blocks Healing and Becomes Addictive
First, take a deep breath, center yourself, and feel the bitterness within your body. On the one hand, you don’t like that—you can see where it’s wreaking some havoc in your life. On the other hand,
bitterness can feel like a cozy blanket you’ve been using to soothe yourself—it’s familiar, and you know what to do with it.
Bitterness: A Step Above Despair but a Block to Growth
When we look at the emotional vibrational scale, bitterness is negative, but it’s not as low vibe as helplessness, powerlessness, or grief. It’s not the bottomed-out place that you found yourself in at certain points in this divorce journey, where you just felt as though you wouldn’t survive.
Interestingly, it’s almost an improvement over other moments in time you’ve felt in this divorce process or at some point in your life.
But bitterness is chronic.
It’s a hardened heart, and it is blocking you from finding forgiveness after divorce and improving your self-esteem. It’s blocking you from attracting newer, better friends, dating partners, and life situations. It’s blocking your healing.
As long as you’re feeling bitterness, you are blocking a certain amount of abundance from coming into your life.
This is what should motivate us to move closer towards forgiveness. Whatever you were planning to put on your 2025 vision board, know that you are already sabotaging that if you are committed to bitterness.
The Numbing Cycle: How Avoidance Fuels Emotional Addiction
There is an addictive component to bitterness. And addiction can be so many things.
It’s the pursuit of numbing emotions and continuing those numbing behaviors, even when they lead to negative consequences. It’s the continued use of any substance, whether it’s fitness, shopping, scrolling Instagram or TikTok, gossiping or dating, wine, or vaping.
Whatever your particular addiction is, it’s using instant gratification to avoid feeling what you’re trying to escape.
When you’ve got activated bitterness, there are plenty of things in life that you are using to stay numb rather than process whatever’s underneath the bitterness.
What are the things you’re doing to avoid getting in touch with those deeper layers of pain? How are you attempting to stay numb as often as possible? Do you stay busy? Do you say yes to things all the time? Do you drink coffee each day until you can have wine at night? Do you scroll a lot on social media? Do you eat anytime you feel?
What are the things you do to avoid emotional discomfort and delay the process of forgiveness after divorce? Do you do it often enough that it’s a pattern? Does it have power over you? Is it hard to put it down?
If I asked you to be sober for a year, what would that feel like to you? If I asked you to delete all social media apps for a year, what would that feel like?
If we can’t imagine giving up a certain behavior or pattern for an extended period, it’s a sign that it’s controlling us, and we’re not in control.
I’m not trying to strip all the moments of joy out of your life. My daughter and I love scrolling Instagram and watching silly cat videos, and yes, I look forward to coffee in the morning.
I am not advocating for you to not have mood boosting experiences in your life, but I am asking you to take a look at where it goes beyond mood boosting and where it becomes dependency.
The Cycle of Resentment: How We Stay Comfortably Numb
Bitterness is a chronic sign of anger, resentment, hurt, rejection, and jealousy.
It can be really hard to break through that because it is so hard for us to give up the things that keep us comfortably numb.
If you feel bitter and you’re struggling with forgiveness, look for the addictive threads in your life.
Why Forgiveness After Divorce Feels Impossible: Protecting Wounded Parts
Now, bitterness, as uncomfortable and toxic as it is, is protecting you from something. All human behavior has an explanation.
When we look at parts of the self that have been wounded, we know that other parts crop up to protect us from ever having to feel that pain again.
You have wounded parts, and you have protective parts to make sure you never get hurt like that again. These protective parts will stop at nothing to protect you.
Vulnerability doesn’t feel like an option for you, which is the reason it’s so hard for you to approach forgiveness.
This may feel shocking to you, but the feeling of being able to trust yourself and others is deeply uncomfortable for you. The feelings of forgiveness or redemption are uncomfortable for you.
The idea of letting go of control and protecting yourself is so uncomfortable to you. Peace, healing, and trust are emotional states that you are struggling to tolerate.
Breaking the Cycle: Why Your Nervous System Resists Forgiveness
Peace, trust, and healing don’t feel available to you because your nervous system, which has experienced chronic distress, will stay distressed over reaching for an unfamiliar safe state.
So we need to train our nervous systems and our mind-body to understand that there’s no external threat right now. The threat is internal. The threat is the memories of the pain.
When you’ve been feeling bitter for some time, I believe, as an experienced, trauma-informed therapist, that there are wounds that you have not fully processed.
Where there’s a pattern that is not shifting, it means there is something unprocessed.
Even though you’re using tools like EMDR, EFT tapping, vagal breathing, or a homeopathic remedy, if a pattern isn’t shifting, it means that there is a pocket of unprocessed trauma. It could be big T trauma, it could be little t trauma. But most of the time with divorce, it’s layers of trauma.
Unhealed Wounds: The Deeper Pain Blocking Forgiveness After Divorce
Think about the thing you’ve been avoiding healing. What’s under that bitterness? What is that thing in the back of your mind that you’ve never talked to anyone about?
Whatever you’re running away from, whatever you’re avoiding, it’s calling to you.
You have not made peace with your painful experiences, and it’s why you can’t approach releasing bitterness or finding forgiveness after divorce.
Healing Starts Within: Releasing Bitterness to Embrace Love
Chronic anger has massive implications for your body, particularly in terms of cardiovascular health, heart function, circulation, and autoimmune disease.
Bitterness can’t coexist with love in a meaningful way.
If you want to love yourself well and you want to attract partners, people, friends, and meaningful experiences that are heart-centered, you have to be willing to dig deep and touch the things you have not been wanting to touch.
You have to be willing to break the addictive cycles that have been going on in your life.
Believe it or not, it’s not as hard as you think it is.
When I sit with people and do EMDR processing, let’s say we spend 15 or 20 minutes on the topic. It’s a painful thing, but very often we have a handful of those 20-minute segments and boom, you’ve shifted massive patterns in your life.
You can also do bilateral stimulation at home. You can do it with a friend. There are ways you can move through these painful moments with your support system, but you have to start by being willing to go there.
Your Path to Healing: Free 21-Day Post-Divorce Journaling Program
One tool I often recommend to help women prepare for this process is the 21-day immersive journaling program called the Post Divorce Roadmap, which we are currently offering for free. It’s normally $33.33. You can use the email coupon code called Email Friends.
I want to be able to talk to you via email. I want to be able to send you emails every week that talk about things you’re struggling with.
It’s so hard to shift our mental and emotional habits, but when you get that email from me in your inbox, it’s going to be right on time while you’re struggling with exactly that thing.
And I want to be able to keep you posted when we’re launching EFT events, when we’re launching a new group coaching program, or when we come up with a fancy new idea.
When you download the Post Divorce Roadmap for free, it’s a valuable resource to help you prepare for a shift in your emotional state, addressing the issues that perpetuate bitterness and block forgiveness.
Now, how does that immersive journaling program do that?
- Each week of journaling is split into segments, and it’s seamless for you.
- There are playlists, mirror prompts, tools, body awareness techniques, and more.
It is truly immersive, and it will help you clear the deck so that you can focus on what you’ve been avoiding and start to shift.
If you need any extra help, shoot me a DM.
Click on this Divorce Roadmap link and enter the code Email Friends to download that program for free.
I love you so much. Peace.
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.
