How to Move On After Divorce: From Wanting Him to Regret You to Reclaiming Your Power

5 Key Takeaways

1. Reclaiming Power Isn’t About Revenge.
   You can want your ex to regret losing you — just don’t get stuck there. Focus on becoming unforgettable through growth and self-love. Here’s something that might surprise you: it’s totally okay to want your ex to feel the weight of losing you. That desire? It’s not petty — it’s human. It means you know your worth and you want that worth to be acknowledged. But here’s where you need to get real about how to move on after divorce. When you’re focused solely on making him regret his choices, you’re still making your healing about him rather than about you. And love, that’s not where your power lives. True power comes from channeling all that fierce energy into becoming the most authentic, vibrant version of yourself. Learning how to move on after divorce means doing that deep work — the real work of self-discovery and growth — so you don’t just become unforgettable, you become unshakeable. And that transformation? That’s not for him, that’s purely for you, love.
2. Obsession Blocks Healing.
   Wanting him to suffer keeps you suffering too. Shift from obsessing over your ex to a desire for his growth and your peace. The mind that stays fixated on your ex is a mind that literally cannot focus on your own healing. This pattern shows up all the time when trying to move on from a divorce, but here’s what you need to understand: obsession is just unprocessed grief in disguise. When you find yourself spiraling into thoughts about his regret, try this gentle shift. Instead of hoping he suffers, hope he grows. This isn’t about taking the high road — it’s about freeing up your mental and emotional energy for what actually matters in your emotional healing after divorce. Your peace isn’t dependent on his pain, love. When you can genuinely wish for his growth (even from a distance), you’re actually wishing for a world where fewer people get hurt the way you’ve been hurt.
3. Karma and Victim Mindset.
   Wishing pain on your ex keeps you stuck in victimhood. True freedom comes from choosing compassion, even if from afar. When you want him to hurt simply because you feel hurt, that means what you’re putting out into the world is suffering. And from a vibrational standpoint, wishing suffering on people is exactly what you’re going to call back to yourself. Staying in a victim mindset keeps you small and powerless. This doesn’t mean pretending you weren’t hurt or minimizing what happened to you. Your pain is valid, and what he did matters. But to move on after divorce, there’s this big difference between acknowledging your pain and building your entire identity around it. The goal is to go from victim to victorious. You move from “Why did this happen to me?” to “How can you use this to become stronger and more compassionate?”
4. Become the Woman Who Chooses Herself.
   Stop waiting to be chosen. Build self-worth, practice vulnerability, and align deeply with your values. So many women wait to be chosen rather than doing the choosing. When choosing yourself doesn’t feel as good or empowering as someone else choosing you — there’s work to do. What if the most radical thing you could do right now is become the woman who does the choosing? This is a crucial part of emotional healing after divorce — developing a solid relationship with yourself. It means getting curious about who you are when no one else is watching. The woman who chooses herself doesn’t settle for breadcrumbs because she knows her worth isn’t up for negotiation. She practices vulnerability not to be loved, but because authenticity feels better than pretending. When you become this woman and you move on after divorce, you don’t just attract better relationships — you become someone who couldn’t tolerate a mediocre one.
5. Emotional Safety Starts With You.
   The more self-aware and emotionally aligned you become, the less susceptible you are to manipulation, gaslighting, or repeating old patterns. When you are in alignment, love, you cannot be gaslit or manipulated. Can you say whether or not you’re that deeply grounded in your intuition and that aligned in your energy right now? The more deeply you know yourself, the more impossible it becomes for someone to convince you that your reality isn’t real. When you’re aligned with your intuition and grounded in your own truth, red flags become impossible to ignore. You start trusting that gut feeling that says “something’s off” instead of talking yourself out of it. This level of self-awareness isn’t just protection when you move on after divorce — it’s freedom.

Highlights

• 00:00 Reclaiming Power After a Breakup
• 04:00 Suffering, Karma, and Victim Mindset
• 07:57 Path to Unforgettable Self-Alignment
• 09:45 Empowerment Through Self-Discovery

Full Transcript

Dawn Wiggins [00:00:00]: How often do you obsess over whether or not your ex regrets letting you go? In this episode, we’re diving into the raw truth of wanting him to feel this loss while you reclaim your power, heal and become the woman he’ll never forget. One of the most common things I hear from you when we’re chatting in the DMs or wherever, right. Is that, you know, you don’t want him back in the way that he has been behaving, but you certainly want your fantasy version of him back. And what you really want more than anything is for him to regret, right? Regret that he didn’t work harder, regret that he let you go, regret that he, you know, didn’t treat you better. All these things, right? You want him to regret. And I gotta tell you, I’m kind of here for it, right? But. But let’s pack. Unpack all the ways in which this is impacting your divorce recovery journey and the ways that we can just sort of tighten it up.

Dawn Wiggins [00:01:03]: So in this episode, we’re gonna first talk about the reasons I give you permission for this whole sort of thought process, right. Obsessing over wanting him to regret you. I actually gave you permission. I wanna talk with you a little bit about that. The second thing we’re going to talk about is karma, and you just double checking that yours is where you want it to be. And the third one thing that we’re going to discuss is who are you? The woman who is this woman that he’s never going to forget. Right. How do you know that you are stepping into her and embodying her? All right, let’s dig in.

Dawn Wiggins [00:01:47]: So first things first. You want him to regret, and I think that’s beautiful. Because if he’s steeped in that sense, right, that felt sense of regret, that would mean that he was grieving, really grieving the loss of what you shared, of your role in his life and of his lived experiences with you. And I want him to grieve. I want him to grieve deeply. The loss of you, the loss of, you know, the life that you dreamed. I want him to grieve deeply and I want him to feel that fully. But maybe for different reasons than you do.

Dawn Wiggins [00:02:31]: The reason I want him to grieve it fully is because I want him to become a better man. I don’t want him to perpetuate this same relationship breakdown, the same relationship loss, these, you know, unhealthy attachment style patterns and behaviors. This lack of intimacy, this lack of loyalty or fidelity or accountability, this lack of Emotional intelligence or conflict resolution. I. I want him to become a better man because the world needs more better men. I don’t want him to regret losing you because I want him to suffer, Because a world full of suffering men only makes for a world full of suffering women. So I want him to get better. And when you start obsessing over whether or not he regrets, I want you to send up a prayer that he grieves, that he becomes a better man.

Dawn Wiggins [00:03:29]: >And I want to give you full permission to desire for him to grieve. But I think in the way I’m framing it, you can sense here that I’m. Is. There’s a softening in the way that I’m presenting it versus how you think of it, right? You think of it. You want him to hurt because you’re hurting. And I want him to become a better man. And I think at the end of the day, you do too. Especially if you have children with him, because you want him to be a better man for your children.

Dawn Wiggins [00:04:00]: But this piece of the conversation leads into the second thing I want to discuss, which is karma, right? When you want him to hurt simply because you hurt, that means that what you’re putting out into the world is suffering. And from a law of attraction standpoint, from a vibrational standpoint, I don’t want you wishing suffering on people, because that’s what you are going to call right back to yourself, is more suffering. And so there has to be this slight shifting of your mindset, right? Where you are okay with your grief process. Not like, yay, this feels like shit, and therefore I am pleased, right? But an acceptance that we all have to face our feelings and move through them in order to be free of them, and that we want the same thing for him. Right? But I think that what we really have to look at here is that a victim wants him to suffer, right? Like I am a victim because I am suffering. And so I want him to suffer, which then makes him a victim. It’s that victim mindset, right? Which is like where I pity myself and I want to be better than other people rather than I want to foster emotional vulnerability and intimacy in relationships. And I want to release judgment because I can see that everywhere in the world, we are judging each other.

Dawn Wiggins [00:05:26]: We are falling apart as a society. And so I want you to shift. If you’re wanting him to hurt for the sake of hurting, I want you to shift out of that because you can’t get to the place I know you want to get to from that mindset. I want you to go from victim to victorious, right? I want you to get to I want to become this woman he never forgets. Because I’m going to do that from a place of empowerment, from badassness, not from a place of I want him to pity me and I want people to pity me and I pity me and I want him to hurt. I, at the end of the day, often see women in the world waiting to be chosen rather than doing the choosing. We’ve talked about that a good bit here on the podcast and we’re probably gonna bang that drum for a very long because at the end of the day when we when us choosing self, right, like me choosing me, like me saying like, hot damn, I, gosh, I am just. It feels so good to choose me when that choosing of self doesn’t feel as satiating, as good, as empowering, as aligned, as delicious as someone else choosing me.

Dawn Wiggins [00:06:40]: There’s work to do, friend. There’s work to do around me, knowing my worth, living into my worth, really feeling grounded in my worth. And can I tell you, I am still in that process right here. Me, Dawn. I am still in the process of being able to choose myself on deeper, more powerfully rooted levels than ever before, layer by layer by layer. And I’m doing it so much these days in such ways like, it’s intoxicating, but like, man, if you had asked me 10 years ago if I had self love, I would have been like, what are you even talking about? It hurts my brain. Maybe not 10 years ago, probably longer, but I digress. So I want you to move from I want him to hurt to I want him to grieve because grieving or I want him to regret right to I want him to grieve.

Dawn Wiggins [00:07:34]: I want him to grieve too. And I want you to grieve. And then I want you to learn how to choose yourself so powerfully. You can’t ever lose, right? Because you’re with you, you choose you. And then. And then from that place of energetic alignment, you can have whatever you want. It’s hard for you to believe right now because it feels like you’ve lost everything. I know.

Dawn Wiggins [00:07:57]: And listen, it’s not a light switch of a journey. It’s comes layer after layer after layer. But that love is how you become the woman he never forgets is you move so deeply into alignment with the truth of who you are. You become such a powerfully grounded woman who can just point and choose what she wants and it comes to her. That is my vision for You. That’s the stuff that keeps me up at night. How can I help you get from here to there? That’s the stuff that gives me chills, that you become a woman who never again settles for less than alignment. And I think in order to do that, you know, producer Joy and I were having this really interesting conversation today about, well, but did a trauma cause it, or is it just that we don’t know ourselves? Well, sometimes, right? Like when we don’t choose marriages that are ripe with intimacy and vulnerability.

Dawn Wiggins [00:09:00]: Is that because we had some trauma always beforehand? No, Think so. Not always. For some of us. For me, it certainly was. It was related to trauma. But not everybody had this horribly traumatic childhood and then therefore chose a partner that had less than, you know, wonderful vulnerability and intimacy. I think sometimes we just grow up in childhoods where there wasn’t a lot of intimacy with our parents, and so we didn’t learn how to do intimacy. We didn’t learn how to do emotional vulnerability.

Dawn Wiggins [00:09:27]: Maybe we had lovely parents, but they didn’t know how to be vulnerable. And so we just never learned how to do that. And so then we came along with somebody who just sort of, you know, doesn’t have those traits either. And it seemed normal. It seemed right. It seemed good enough. It seemed fine. It seemed like, gosh, I’m going to take this person at their word.

Dawn Wiggins [00:09:45]: >But then they ended up, you know, not being worthy of youf word, their word, whatever. And so I think that this becoming the woman that he never forgets involves you not just choosing yourself powerfully, but also getting to know yourself on a level that you’ve never known yourself before. And that means getting way outside of your comfort zone and getting to know yourself in the nooks and crannies of you, what you love and what you don’t love, the gifts that you have that you’ve never tapped into, and leaning into spaces that cause you to feel vulnerable, uncomfortable, insecure, but that you work through those until you, gosh, just feel unshakable, you know, bend but don’t break. So this is a call, right, to lean into spaces that you’ve not leaned into before. This is a call to, yes, obsess over whether or not he’s grieving, to pray for him that he grieves deeply so that he can become a better man and then get refocused on you becoming the kind of woman who doesn’t settle, who knows she can choose, who is so comfortable with vulnerability and intimacy, that you know yourself so well inside and out that you can’t be taken advantage of. You can’t be manipulated. You can’t be gaslighted. You know that we can only be manipulated and gaslighted to the extent that we are not in touch with ourselves and aligned.

Dawn Wiggins [00:11:23]: Well, when I am in alignment, love, when I am deeply in touch with my intuition, I cannot be gas lit or manipulated. Can you say whether or not you’re that deeply grounded in your intuition and that aligned in your energy right now? Gosh, golly, I don’t want you to continue being manipulated and gaslit. But how manipulatable we are is directly tied to our self worth and how aligned we are. So this is your call to action, to shift that obsession about his regret to an obsession with your own personal power and alignment. And a prayer that he grieves deeply so that he can become a better man. Because that is what’s better for all of us. If you haven’t jumped on our wait list yet for a different d word, our 12 month healing healing cocoon, where we definitely are offering you the path right to this version of yourself where there’s intimacy and vulnerability and all the tools that we talk about over here on the podcast where they become yours to just soak up and step into this ideal version of yourself. The wait list is open for a limited time where you get these three awesome bonuses.

Dawn Wiggins [00:12:40]: You get a bonus session with me, you get a bonus session with Kate Mayer doing quantum healing and you get 15% off the total program price. Scroll down to the show notes, click through the questions and hop on the wait list. Can’t wait to see you there. Peace.