Why Getting Back Together After Divorce Might Be a Bad Idea? Unpopular Take

In this episode of Dear Divorce Diary, divorce coach Dawn Wiggins dives into one of the most common struggles for women post-divorce: the temptation to get back together after divorce. Whether it’s hooking up, staying energetically connected through apps, or simply not letting go, these behaviors can reinforce the very relationship patterns you’re trying to escape. Dawn explores the psychological roots of this tendency, from childhood brain mapping to addiction patterns, and offers practical strategies for breaking free from getting back together after divorce and moving forward with intention.

5 Takeaways to Rethink Getting Back Together After Divorce:

1. Your Childhood Brain Influences Your Relationships: Your early childhood experiences (particularly before the age of 7) create neural pathways that influence how you experience relationships as an adult. If you keep circling back to your ex, you may be operating from a familiar pattern where “it’s normal to not get my needs met in a meaningful way.” Recognizing and reprogramming these early brain maps through healing modalities like EFT tapping, homeopathy, or quantum healing is essential for breaking these cycles and moving forward.
2. Trust Your Future More Than Your Past: Your higher power or intuition will never ask you to go backwards by getting back together after divorce. If you’re meant to be with someone from your past, that will happen through moving forward, not by retreating. Remember this key insight: “What is meant for you cannot be kept from you.” Moving forward with intention doesn’t mean you’ll miss something essential from your past — it means you’re allowing yourself to grow into who you’re meant to become.
3. Learn to Identify and Meet Your Own Needs:
   One of the most crucial skills for post-divorce healing is learning to recognize what you actually need in any given moment. When you feel the urge to reconnect with your ex, ask yourself: “What am I actually calling for?” Is it acceptance, validation, touch, or something else? Once you know this, practice meeting these needs elsewhere, either through your support system or by developing your own ways of self-soothing.
4. Understand the Role of Dopamine Addiction:
   Modern life, especially with smartphones, has created widespread addiction to comfort and instant gratification. Getting back together with your ex often represents choosing short-term relief over long-term goals. This pattern delays achieving what you actually want — happiness, love, financial security, and meaningful relationships. Breaking this cycle requires building tolerance for temporary discomfort to meet your larger life goals.
5. Embrace Quantum Healing:
   Sometimes the reluctance to let go stems from a deep fear that moving forward will re-traumatize you. Quantum healing techniques can help treat these fears at a subconscious level, allowing you to become more secure in the long term. The goal is to trust that you’re in the right place at the right time and part of a beautiful process with purpose.

Highlights from The Truth About Getting Back Together After Divorce:

• 00:00 Childhood Beliefs and Relationship Patterns
• 05:05 Trusting the Future’s Path
• 08:11 Identifying and Meeting Your Needs
• 13:09 Quantum Healing for Emotional Release
• 14:42 “Mindfulness and Healing Meditation”

Full Podcast Transcript:

Dawn Wiggins [00:00:00]: One of the biggest fears for women who have just completed a divorce is repeating the same relationship mistakes in the future. And if you are still hooking up with your soon to be ex or doing a similar going backwards behavior, you are actually reinforcing the pattern that you don’t want, you say you don’t want in future relationships. So this episode is actually requested by one of you gorgeous ladies listeners. And for that I am so grateful. I think it’s such a common sort of hardship to struggle to let go, right, and actually move forward. And there are so many ways. We are used to soothing our nervous systems and our minds and unfortunately, going back is often one of those. So in today’s episode, we are going to talk about how all the ways in which hooking up with your soon to be ex or just not letting go, right, like not exiting the group chat, not deleting the app where you’re watching whether or not he’s in an Uber or armed or disarmed his alarm or, you know what I mean? Like all the little ways in which you still like, stay in it energetically, right? Stay really linked in energetically.

Dawn Wiggins [00:01:21]: We are going to talk about how some of that is related to your early childhood brain map and what needs to be tweaked there. We are gonna talk about the function of trust in terms of changing this sort of behavior pattern. We are gonna talk about one of the skills that you really need to rehearse and practice over and over again in order to be able to move forward more efficiently or, you know, being able to intentionally manifest something different than what you just are rehearsing. And we are also gonna talk about what addiction has to do with this habit. So Ch, this is a jam packed episode. Let’s dig in. All right, so first things first. When we are conceived in utero, and then early children, right, young children, our brain maps sort of get laid down for how we experience relationships, the world around us, how we sense things, whether or not we trust, how secure we feel, sort of all the underpinnings of attachment theory, right? But also before seven years old, we internalize the bulk of the beliefs we’re gonna hold about ourselves and the world and relationships.

Dawn Wiggins [00:02:34]: Because before seven, our top brain isn’t online yet, and so we can’t resist or reject ideas very effectively. Sure, we may throw our sippy cup on the ground and say no, but that’s not actually processing an idea or belief and deciding to keep it or reject it. So until that top brain comes online around seven years old, we’re just sort of absorbing the beliefs of the people around us. And if you think about your caregiver’s beliefs about the world around them, you could see where maybe there are some things that need to be worked reworked in your brain map. And so based on that, if you have a really hard time letting go of your ex and you kind of keep circling back, whether it’s for affection or sex or money or help hanging your picture frames or whatever it is, and that’s not all necessarily wrong, right? But you have to notice what’s activated in the behavior or not. There’s probably a brain map that you need to reprogram around. It’s familiar to not get my needs met, right? And then you keep going back to this place where your needs weren’t met in a meaningful way to get a need met, right? But in a very incomplete, unfulfilling, not rewarding, shame triggering way. And so I wonder, have you done any journaling or therapeutic work or EFT tapping around? It’s familiar to me on some level, on a soul level, on an energetic level.

Dawn Wiggins [00:04:03]: In an early childhood brain map to not get my needs met in a meaningful way. This is where we use all the beautiful quantum tools to remap that early childhood brain. It’s not possible to do that through traditional talk therapy. So this is where going deeper, using deeper modalities like eft, homeopathy, quantum healing, which I have recently started adding to my practice. You’ve heard some of those tracks over on the premium side of the podcast, but like, wow, we are going to start adding it more and more and more to podcast episodes. So brain map needs to be tweaked. Second thing is we really have to dig in to look at how much you are trusting yourself, your intuition and source, or your higher power or God at this stage of your recovery. Right? I want you to take a look at the role that intuition, faith and rebuilding trust in self is working for you or against you.

Dawn Wiggins [00:05:05]: Okay? Typically when we have left a relationship, we are pretty mixed up about what we can and cannot trust. And in a world full of AI, a bunch of noise, everyone is trying to sell you something and most of the claims are false. Like, wow, it can feel like a lot of work to sift and sort through what is true anymore. I mean, we see that problem in politics and I mean just you name it, right? We just sort of, as a community don’t know who or what to trust. And so I just want to say to you that your higher power is never going to ask you to go backwards in that way, right? Your higher power believes in your future in such a deep and meaningful way that even if you move forward and you’re, let’s say, meant to be with your ex, right, that will happen via your moving forward. Let’s really let that sink in. Moving forward and letting go of the way things were is always going to be this beautiful path to the way things are meant to be. Because we are always in a process of being clarified, sanctified, grown, matured, whatever word resonates for you most, right? We’re in a growth process.

Dawn Wiggins [00:06:27]: And so when we’re going backwards, revisiting the past, we’re not typically growing forward. And so I want you to trust that if you move forward with intention and with motivation and passion, you don’t have to be worried that you’re going to miss something in your future, that you may have screwed up in your past or what is meant for you cannot be kept from you. And God is not gonna punish you for making a mistake. He is going to continue to line things up so that you continue to grow in the ways that are meaningful according to your purpose on this planet today. So I want you to trust that. I want you to trust our intelligent creator, and I want you to trust your future more than you trust your past. And that is really something I want you to let settle into the cells of your body and your bones. By moving forward, you are not going to miss something from your past that was essential to your future.

Dawn Wiggins [00:07:25]: So just allow yourself to move forward. The third thing I want to talk about today is the skill that you have to really practice. You got to put the reps in, right for this to work. But the skill of learning how to meet your own needs, and that doesn’t mean don’t allow other people to meet your needs. That’s not what I mean. But there’s a difference between an I can ness. I can figure this out, I can soothe these emotions, I can listen deeply inside to recognize what I need, and I can reach out to someone that’s a part of my future in order to get that need met. And I can maybe even meet some of my own needs in this now moment.

Dawn Wiggins [00:08:11]: And so learning how to identify your needs and meet them for yourself, even if that means asking for help from someone in your, you know, now moment or future future, sort of intentional manifested life, that’s a skill. I think many, many people start therapy because they don’t know what they want, they don’t know what they like, they don’t know how to move forward. They feel sort of lost. They feel sort of confused or mixed up or blocked around what they truly want. And so we default then to what’s familiar, right? And so I need you to really practice sitting down and. Or not sitting down, right? You remember last week where I talked about the pillow throwing, right? And really banging that pillow. So doing things like banging pillows or sitting down with your crayons like I teach in the post divorce roadmap immersive journaling program. Sitting down with your crayons and scribbling before you do some body scanning and some little journal prompting, right? Or growling or, you know, doing some things that are gonna help clear the stuck energy so that you can discern, what do I need in this moment? I having this urge to slip and fall on my ex’s, you know, what? And.

Dawn Wiggins [00:09:24]: And what is it that I’m actually calling for? Because somewhere along the way, I discerned that this relationship wasn’t in alignment for me. And so if I’m going back, what is it I actually need that I haven’t figured out how to resolve? And so I keep trying. I keep doing that thing that’s called the definition of insanity, right? Doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. But there is a need. That urge is happening for a reason. That urge to go back or that urge to, you know, re. Engage or stalk your ex. It’s purposeful.

Dawn Wiggins [00:09:56]: It’s coming from a place that has a need. And so your mission is to get in touch with that need. Is it acceptance? Is it to be heard? Is it to be validated or loved or touched or, you know, what is it? And then how can you move forward in satiating that need with your healing team? All right, the fourth one is a doozy. Loves. And it is in the realm of addiction. So I am convinced that anyone that has a smartphone at this point has a greater issue with addiction than he or she would like to admit. And it just sort of is the thing that came with smartphones and screens in this modern age. And more and more, we are struggling to tolerate discomfort in modern life, right? How well do we tolerate any sort of temporal discomfort these days when, you know, it’s always so funny when we talk with my kiddo about, like, how we couldn’t pause TV or maybe didn’t even have remote controls, let alone cell phones, right? We had, you know, when I was in high school, we had beepers and there were payphones and we didn’t have GPSs.

Dawn Wiggins [00:11:08]: We used paper Maps like, it’s funny. Can you imagine going back to that? And how frustrated and irritable would be, how anxious you would feel. And so there really needs to be this capacity to recognize how addicted we are to comfort, to dopamine, basically. I don’t know about you, but my Instagram feed has been full of ads for dopamine addiction programs lately. So that seems to be like a new 2025 product that’s coming online. I bet there’s something really beautiful to that in terms of educating our communities that dopamine addiction is a very real. That is sort of hamstringing our motivation, our capacity to heal. Because oftentimes healing means processing painful things that we are avoiding, you know, So I want you to really think about when you have that urge to go back to your ex, how you’re often choosing that short term shot of comfort, right? Or some thing that you want to feel good, but very quickly after that you’re probably going to feel worse.

Dawn Wiggins [00:12:12]: And more importantly than that, you’re actually delaying the achievement of the goals, the things you say you want, which is, you know, for most people is like happiness, love, money, you know, feeling in touch with your purpose, close relationships, right? But if you keep rehearsing that sort of, if you keep going for the instant gratification versus the long term achievement or success or purpose driven way, right? You’re just delaying all of that goal oriented stuff that you’re telling us that you want. And I believe you’ve had an idea, right? Oh, it would be nice. You’ve had a thought like, oh, it would be nice to have a committed, trustworthy, safe relationship. It would be nice to have more than enough money. It would be nice to lose 20lbs. It would be nice to have, you know, my kids really love and appreciate me. It would be nice to have a family who doesn’t act like a group of crazy people. But there’s.

Dawn Wiggins [00:13:09]:

But a goal goes beyond just having a thought, right? A goal is like, no, I am choosing this for my life. And when we rely on short term blips of feeling good over kind of long term, consistent, working a plan, right? We’re just sort of not really validating that there are things in life that we want, we want them for a purpose. And so now I want to play around a little bit with quantum healing because it’s been such a game changer for our community so far. And I’m just gonna do a little piece of treatment here, right? So if there is a part that does not want to treat treat this issue around letting go of the ex because that part of you is afraid that it is going to re traumatize you around loss. I want that part to consider that by really becoming a cohesive treatment team inside of you that you will feel more satisfaction and less pain. So I want you to get open, open, open to treating this fear of loss and superconscious Please treat all the parts that are afraid of letting go and moving forward. All of the complex structures, painful memories and experiences that have led to a fear of moving forward. Do a massive change history and everything else necessary and treat until complete.

Dawn Wiggins [00:14:42]: Take a deep breath, exhale and let it all go. And trust that you are in the right place at the right time and you are in a beautiful process for a purpose. If you haven’t checked out premium content yet, I highly recommend giving it a try. We have at this point everything from quantum healing tracks that actually reprograms your subconscious mind right there on the spot to, you know, motivational morning meditations from me EFT tapping guided sleep meditations at a 528Hz so that you’re healing in your sleep. It’s really a rich, beautiful place to get better quickly. I love you so much. Peace.