In-Laws After Divorce: How to Rebuild When Half Your Family Tree Falls

5 Takeaways

1. Losing your in-laws after divorce is its own grief process. Divorce often means losing an entire extended family — the people who supported and loved you, and the sense of belonging you found in their gatherings. This secondary loss of family relationships can hit unexpectedly, sometimes even many years after the divorce is final. It deserves the same acknowledgment, time, and emotional space as the grief of losing the marriage itself, even though many people back-burner this grief because there are so many other urgent things demanding attention during divorce.
2. Emotional waves around your ex’s family can resurface years later. Even years post-divorce, grief related to ex-family relationships can resurface and really surprise you, especially in situations like finding out someone from that family passed away and realizing you never got closure from your in-laws after divorce. These waves don’t mean you haven’t healed or that you’re doing something wrong; they are telling you that something meaningful is asking to be acknowledged and deserves to be felt. Allow the feelings without judgment or telling yourself that you should be “over this by now.”
3. Feeling the emotion is the fastest path through it. Most women suppress or avoid grief, especially the complicated grief around in-laws after divorce, which creates emotional looping where you get stuck in the stories rather than the feelings. There is data showing that if you let an emotion fully come in and fully experience it in your body, it will pass and move through in two minutes or less. Embodied practices — breathwork, crying, holding a pillow like you’re comforting a younger version of yourself, or even throwing a pillow to get rid of the energy — can release what the mind tries to manage alone.
4. Grief activates old subconscious beliefs, which shape your healing. Grieving the loss of in-laws after divorce often awakens buried negative beliefs like “I should have done something,” “I am a failure,” “I don’t deserve love,” “I’m insignificant,” or “I should have known better.” These aren’t truths — they’re old subconscious patterns, often from childhood, that keep repeating until you become conscious of them. Becoming aware of which of your negative beliefs are activated is the first essential step in reprogramming them, so you can attract healthier future relationships, better support systems, and stronger connections without self-sabotaging.
5. Rebuilding your support system after losing in-laws requires vulnerability, and it can lead to a deeper, healthier connection than you had before. Leaning into community — joining groups like Al-Anon, therapy groups, personal development workshops, yoga or meditation communities — and practicing vulnerability with people who are genuinely working on healing is what truly rebuilds your emotional foundation after divorce. Most women avoid this because discomfort and group vulnerability feel threatening or scary. But that discomfort is often the doorway to real healing. Creating a new support system built on transparency and letting people see your pain allows you to experience connection and belonging in ways you may not have experienced before. 

Highlights

• 00:00 The Lingering Impact of Ex’s Family
• 03:53 Grieving During Divorce Process
• 08:30 “Internalizing Grief’s Negative Beliefs”
• 10:46 “Understanding Repetition Compulsion”
• 15:08 Healing Through Community Support
• 17:57 Overcoming Subconscious Blocks
• 20:39 “Wiggins Handle Check”

Full Transcript

Dawn Wiggins [00:00:00]:

Divorce isn’t just losing a spouse, it’s losing a family. The in laws, the traditions, the sense of belonging gone overnight. And in this episode, we’re unpacking the grief of losing your ex’s family. How to heal, rebuild, and find your own sense of belonging again. Hi, love. Welcome to Dear Divorce Diary, the podcast helping divorcees go beyond talk therapy to process your grief, find the healing you crave, and build back your confidence. I’m your host, Dawn Wiggins, a therapist, coach, integrative healer, and divorce. Join me for a fresh approach to healing grief and building your confidence after divorce.

Dawn Wiggins [00:00:53]:

In my experience, so many of us have these so stories about our ex’s family, good, bad and ugly, right? About the things that drew us to them, the things that were so heartbreaking to lose, the things that were maybe a relief to lose. But that’s all to say. There is so much about letting go of not just your ex, but their family that shifts four years after, you know, a separation and divorce. It’s. It’s part of the divorce process that I think trickles down for a very long time. And I know, even myself, I had something related to this. I am like 15 years post divorce, right. And I had something related to this sort of hit me between the eyes in the last year.

Dawn Wiggins [00:01:37]:

Really, really interesting. So we felt like it was time to tackle this topic of family grief. So today in the episode, we are going to take a look at. One of the things that I absolutely loved about being married to my ex was his family. There were so many things that that family did that my family didn’t. That felt like medicine for many, many years, you know, the way they did, especially the holidays, like all the holidays, honestly, felt really magical to me. And there was something very. Even though of course there was drama and conflict and whatever, like any family, there was just something really familyish about it.

Dawn Wiggins [00:02:16]:

And. And I grew up kind of really separated geographically from my larger family. And so when it was just like my parents and I, holidays often felt flat or, you know, the police were called. I don’t know. You know what I mean? There were things. And so that particular medicine was something that was very, very hard to lose. Also, I was introduced to my ex by one of his family members and she said in the beginning, like, if you break his heart, I will break your legs. And.

Dawn Wiggins [00:02:46]:

And it was funny and we laughed about it at the time, but, like, in the end it didn’t work out. And then my. I lost that friend and it was like, it was non negotiable like that was it. We just never spoke again. And that was super heartbreaking. And I found out recently that she passed away and we never spoke again after the divorce. And it really hit me literally in the gut. I was shocked.

Dawn Wiggins [00:03:15]:

1. I was devastated. And it’s so interesting that so many years later that that grief would still crop up in that way. And I actually ended up texting my ex and just letting him know that I was thinking of him and his family. And you know, I, I just think this whole family piece, it’s an element to the grief that is. Can be certainly for many of us, deep and wide. And were there things about, you know, his family that stressed me out or frustrated me? Like, of course, right. Nothing is all good or all bad, but it definitely felt for me like a massive loss of a support system.

Dawn Wiggins [00:03:53]:

And I don’t even know that I was really dialed into that grief early on. I’m curious if you are this episode, this topic came up because several people sort of in our community and even in my personal life have mentioned this and so we knew it was time to record it. But I think that when you’re in the process of getting divorced, there are so many other things that need your attention, that grieving that maybe gets back burnered a lot. And I just want to really encourage you that it’s an important thing to dedicate some time and space to, right to when you feel it come up. This is the key piece, is to not just swipe it aside and say, I’ll deal with that later, or I don’t want to feel that right now. And maybe in that moment it’s not the time and space, but as often as possible, when you feel this grief to do with his family come up, I want you to tap into it, even if it’s only for two minutes. And I say two minutes for a very important reason. Because there is data that says that if you let an emotion fully come in and fully experience it and sit with it, that in two minutes or less it, it will pass and move on.

Dawn Wiggins [00:05:07]:

But we are so used to being dissociative, disembodied, just really numb or avoidant of our painful emotions, that very, very often we get stuck in emotional loops, we get lost in the stories we tell ourselves about those emotions and then they just pile on and pile on and pile on. But if you could tap into that pain, if you could take a deep breath, if you could let it know that it belongs, if you could identify where you felt it in your body and if you could, in some physical or embodied way, express that pain and feel into it. It would shift and you would feel lighter. Now, there are some tools that, you know, that I love to do with shifting energy in the body and making space for it to fully process. There are two remedies in particular that are great for this in the homeopathic realm. One is Ignatia and one is Natrum. You can get both of these on Amazon and I will put the links in the show notes. There’s also a flower essence that I absolutely love for grief.

Dawn Wiggins [00:06:10]:

There are blends. There are so many beautiful flower essences, but there are a couple Bach flower essences for neutralizing grief that are absolutely invaluable as well. So I will stick those in the show notes. I think that what these remedies, these essences and remedies do to help us process our grief is to allow it to come in and go out. Because we tend to, as I mentioned, right. Dissociate or loop on the thoughts. In my experience, most of us collapse thoughts with feelings. And we don’t realize that if we just felt purely felt and let go of the story we were telling ourself about the feelings, that we would feel better.

Dawn Wiggins [00:06:56]:

But we really like to tell ourselves stories about those feelings because it’s how we try to justify the pain. It’s how we’ve tried to distance ourselves from the pain. It’s how we try to feel better about ourselves in the midst of the pain, and it actually makes us feel worse. So the next time it floats in, maybe you’ve, you know, added to cart so that you have these tools handy in your purse, and maybe you grab a pillow and you do some pillow throwing. Or maybe, you know, we talk about pillow throwing sometimes to discharge anger, right? But you know what else I love to do with a pillow to embody something like grief is hold that pillow like a baby or like a little child, right? Cuddle that pillow as though it is your grieving self and really connect with that pillow as though it’s a younger version of yourself that’s really struggling to feel safe enough to feel these big, big, big sad feelings. Man. Pillows have like this kind of star role over here in the podcast. But I want you to really practice physically embodying these emotions and energetically pushing them through your body, not so much your mind.

Dawn Wiggins [00:08:04]:

That’s let give yourself permission to cry, right? And if, if crying comes very, very easy for you and it’s hard to stop crying, that’s Ignatia. And if crying Feels unavailable to you. And it feels like, I can’t do that. I need to keep this push down because I might not. That’s natural. And the flower essences you can layer right in there. And it is just going to help be a. Create a safe space in your body to go ahead and feel.

Dawn Wiggins [00:08:30]:

Now the next thing we’re going to dig into is how we internalize negative beliefs associated with grief. Now, I asked a handful of people to share some of theirs because I got to tell you, we run our lives based on what is in our subconscious mind, what we believe about ourselves and negative or positive. And if you’re not aware of the negative beliefs that are running your show, you think you’re making decisions from a conscious place, but your subconscious is always going to take priority. And if you, for instance, right, make a decision that you’re going to get up and you’re going to go to the gym every day this week, and then when it comes time to do it, you don’t actually go to the gym. That’s because somewhere in your subconscious mind there’s a negative belief that is blocking you from the conscious decision you made. So when we are grieving and we internalize negative beliefs about ourselves, love, it makes it so much harder to move forward and have our hearts open to new support, to new love, to new friendships, to new experiences, to new connections because we’re protecting ourselves in some way. So some of the negative beliefs that have become associated. I want you to listen for your body, right? I’m going to read some to you and I want to list.

Dawn Wiggins [00:09:43]:

I want you to listen to what your body says. When you hear me saying some of these. I don’t deserve love. I should have done something. I am a failure. I’m insignificant or unimportant. I don’t matter. I cannot stand up for myself.

Dawn Wiggins [00:10:02]:

I should have known better. I am helpless. I am or powerless. Big deep breath. Now. If your mind said, nope, none of those, dawn, none of those are me, I want you to know that is a very strong sign that you are dissociating your mind from your body, that you’re not super dialed in to your emotions, your subconscious, your body awareness, that that’s a flag for you, right? When we have an absence of, of resonance, it’s not because there’s nothing there. Because all humans live subconsciously by their belief systems. And people who are getting divorced definitely have negative beliefs activated.

Dawn Wiggins [00:10:46]:

And so if you, you’re someone who’s like, nope, none of those resonated, there’s some Wires disconnected, that we have to start by connecting up, right? Then I want you to notice the ones that did resonate. Those are your stories that you probably picked up from such a long time ago. And it’s just playing out again and again in this particular context. Have you ever heard of something called a repetition compulsion? It was a Sigmund Freud idea, right? That we all have these woundings, and then we subconsciously repeat the same behavior set or pattern, behavioral pattern, over and over again, trying to resolve it until it feels good, or we feel like we’ve completed it or we’ve fixed the problem, right? So, for instance, let’s say your negative belief about this is I’m a failure. Then it’s like the repetition compulsion is that somewhere in your childhood, maybe you felt like a failure about something. Maybe something happened and you felt like somebody judged you harshly or, you know, somebody really made you feel like you were a failure. And then you carried that with you, this idea that you’re a failure. And then you’ll subconsciously keep picking circumstances that are a setup for you to fail, things that you just, like, can’t possibly achieve.

Dawn Wiggins [00:11:59]:

And you’ll keep doing that over and over again. A subconscious pattern trying to feel like you succeeded even in circumstances that are relatively impossible to do so. So it’s like, until we start to realize, like, oh, I’ve been setting this up this way subconsciously, we keep repeating this same sort of unattainable pattern that leaves us feeling horrible about ourselves. And once we can become really conscious about the things that are actually happening at a subconscious level, then we can shift the pattern. We can say, oh, right, honestly, what you’re doing by. Very often it’s honestly what divorce is doing is it’s saying, I no longer want to do this repetition compulsion. But the reality is, is most people leave it there. They get divorced and they do some good therapy and they focus on grief, but they never tackle, truly, at a subconscious level, those negative beliefs.

Dawn Wiggins [00:12:50]:

And then they get remarried from that same place and end up experiencing it all over again because of the way the subconscious mind works. So if you notice which one resonated there, I strongly encourage you to really make sure you’re doing some healing work that involves shifting those negative beliefs into its positive partner, right? So if you have this, I should have done something, it’s like, oh, I did the best I could. So until you can claim for yourself, I did the best I could, and there’s no resistance there. Like, you really feel. Feel that. Like you believe it up and down and in and out. You believe that you are worthy of love, you did your best, that you don’t have to be perfect. Whatever the positive partner statement is to that internalized negative belief, right? Until you can own that for yourself so completely that it doesn’t have resistance on it, then you’ve still got some subconscious work to do.

Dawn Wiggins [00:13:44]:

So that’s the really important thing to look at around losing your ex’s family because that is what’s going to give you the cleanest, best opportunity to move forward. Building a new support system that is yours, right? That is even stronger than the last one, that feels truly supportive in a way that you’ve maybe never even experienced before. But in order to do that, the support system that you’re going to attract, we want it to come from this place of, ooh, these positive beliefs about self, that you do deserve love, that you don’t have to be perfect, that you can stand up for yourself, that you did the best you can can, that you’re doing the best you can, that you’re strong and you have choices, right? We want you to attract a support system from those places, which means doing that subconscious work is key now to do with a support system. I cannot say enough about how much leaning into these uncomfortable spaces is going to be for you. Feeling and healing faster than you are now. Very much of what I did in my post divorce life was leaning into a new support system. And I know you’ve heard me talk about this a lot. I joined Al Anon, I joined a personal development workshop, I joined a therapy group.

Dawn Wiggins [00:15:08]:

And these are just some of the things, right? I joined a yoga community and a meditation community and I couldn’t do all those things all the time, right? But I was a part of these healing spaces where I know new people were genuinely working hard on healing and rising and believing that there was so much better for themselves out there. And having those people was so crucial to when I was having a cluster headache cycle and I needed to go to the hospital or I needed help hanging curtains in my house or I just needed somebody to snuggle with because I was so, so, so lonely or I needed someone to make plans with because I felt like such a loser or whatever, or I needed somebody to help me, I don’t know, fill in the blank, right? It was only by really claiming that support system and leaning into it and being willing to be a burden from time to time that. But a joyful burden. I’ve recently started calling it with Producer Joy. Like I know this is A burden, but I hope it’s a joyful burden. You know, this was really how I got from A to B faster, was leaning into these spaces. And there’s something really magical about being able to talk about your pain and to feel your feelings and to get honest feedback and to have hugs and love and all of this vulnerable support in that season. Because those relationships often end up being more intimate, they end up being deeper, they end up involving more unconditional love.

Dawn Wiggins [00:16:46]:

And those are all the things that are medicine to your attachment style, to your grief, to your internalized negative beliefs. But most of us loves resist vulnerability. And certainly in groups of people we resist vulnerability. And very often we try to find an alternative to, to those things that were like, ah, maybe I can do it on my own. Maybe there’s a way to get through this without having to do that. And I’m here to tell you that the things that you are avoiding, that you hear people talking about and touting as really, really powerful solutions, the things that you are avoiding or that you are afraid of often hold clues to the thing you need the most. Now, I’m not going to give you something as general as, you know, feel the fear and do it anyway and just ignore what you’re feeling and just do the thing I’m telling you to take a look at it. If there’s something you’re resisting there, there is definitely something you need to better understand about yourself and see if you’re just avoiding the pain of vulnerability in some way when that’s actually the thing that you need.

Dawn Wiggins [00:17:57]:

And remember what I said earlier in the episode, we can say we want something on a conscious level, but if we have a subconscious belief blocking us, we will always self sabotage. So if you say you want to have a lover in the future that you can trust and rest in, if you say you want a healthy attachment style, if you say you want to feel truly worthy and good enough without having to talk yourself into it or get a ton of external validation, then probably there are a number of things that you’re going to have to do that are going to feel very, very, very uncomfortable and vulnerable in order to get to the root of those issues and to reprogram them subconsciously. Totally available, totally possible. And it’s probably not going to be just doing the things that are part of your sort of desire to do it individually or with minimal pain. Right? It doesn’t have, it doesn’t even have to take that long. I think there are so many ways that we make our healing take so much longer than it needs to because we’re just afraid. You know, a small example, like, I showed producer Joy one of my new exciting superfoods that I’m into right now, which is copper as a supplement. And I said, okay, but the first time you do it, take half the recommended dose.

Dawn Wiggins [00:19:17]:

And she was like, oh, God, I’m afraid now. Right. I think that’s the thing. It’s like when we. When we say, here’s what to expect discomfort, it’s like, oh, do I really want to do it? You know, but here’s your sign. Yes, we. We want to. If something is truly going to change our lives for the better, we do want to do the short term uncomfortable thing for the long term gain.

Dawn Wiggins [00:19:40]:

All right. In today’s episode, we talked about the pain of losing your ex’s family and the importance of feeling into the grief and how to do that without getting stuck in it. We also talked about the importance of reprogramming the negative beliefs that you are probably associating with. Losing his family because love you are pure magic. And those negative beliefs that you’re bought into, they’re just habits of thought. And finally, we talked about building a new support system that’s even stronger, that’s based on vulnerability, transparency, and letting people love you well and accept you in your pain, not in spite of your pain because of your pain, because you are beautifully human and you are worthy of that kind of love and support. If you haven’t followed me on Instagram yet, I want to encourage you to do that. It’s where I hang out most often, and I absolutely love being able to get your DMs and, you know, send you a DM and, like, it’s just my favorite thing to do.

Dawn Wiggins [00:20:39]:

Right? So my handle is on Wiggins. Check it out. Love you so much. Peace.