As a therapist who has treated people in therapy for various issues, I am here to tell you that it is not divorce causing lasting damage to children. It’s something much deeper and harder to put your finger on, which we are going to unpack today.
How Kids Coregulate Your Nervous System
Today, we will talk about how your kids are co-regulated to your nervous system, why you can’t fake nervous system regulation, and how that impacts them. We will talk about the importance of you letting go of guilt and exchanging it for empowerment, and how that will positively impact your kiddos.
You’ve heard all the buzzwords about how important it is to have a regulated nervous system.
The nervous system is your body and mind. It’s all of the pieces that integrate through your spine – they go up into your brain and help translate signals from your brain down into your body.
Your brain gets data or information from your environment, and the nervous system helps interpret that data and sends signals down into your body about whether or not you feel relatively safe or threatened in your environment.
It helps communicate to all of the organ systems in your body about what needs to be prioritized right now.
Why You Need to Regulate Your Nervous System After Divorce
We women know that it is important to have a well-regulated nervous system because if not, you’ll be in a constant stress mode, which causes all kinds of downstream effects in your body, like illness.
I’ve heard this analogy recently about the nervous system being like a rubber band, and it needs to have the capacity of a rubber band.
There are times when you experience stress, and that rubber band needs to stretch to handle the stressors coming at it. It has been designed to stretch, but what happens when it’s overstretched for too long? It either becomes stretched out, or it will snap.
We want our nervous system to be able to have that healthy flexibility so that it can stretch when we need it to stretch, and then it can relax when we need it to relax.
How well we take care of our body and mind, how stressed we feel, and how we cope with stress, all affect how regulated our nervous system is.
How Kids Co-regulate Their Inner Circle’s Nervous System
A child’s nervous system functions by co-regulating with the people with whom they spend the most time in their life.
How regulated your nervous system is will greatly influence how regulated your kid’s nervous system is. We often think, as parents, when our kids are experiencing divorce, that it’s the breakdown of the family that will be trauma for them. While that may be true, more often, it’s the fact that their parents weren’t attuned to their emotional needs during the divorce and that their parents were distant, cold, anxious, stressed out, depressed, and generally not available for them to be able to process what they were experiencing. It’s not usually the shift in the family dynamic that causes lasting problems for kids. It’s how emotionally available or attuned or stressed out or regulated your nervous system is.
Your nervous system indicates to a kid whether or not they’re safe in their environment.
Being Emotionally Unavailable Affects Attachment Style
One of the most powerful gifts you can give your kid during and after divorce is to have a well-regulated nervous system and to work on creating a healthy attachment style.
It’s hard to have a healthy attachment style with your kids if you don’t have a healthy or secure attachment style, so that is one of the most valuable things you can be working on.
Slow everything down and find your breath to create a sense of security and well-being inside of your own body and mind.
This is so that you can not only model that for them, but embody it for them because they’re going to co-regulate with you.
Moms are good at faking things. We are good at saying, “No, honey, I’m okay,” and then we lose it, and we yell or we slam the door. We can only fake it for so long before the truth reveals itself. The truth of our nervous system health, mental or emotional wellness, and attachment style eventually catches up with us. The whole time, our kids can perceive whether or not we have a sense of security or well-being in the world or our relationships. We can’t fake that vibration with them.
So if we’re telling them, “I’m fine,” and that’s not true, we’re gaslighting them.
We’re telling them something that they’re going to sense in their energetic body is not in alignment.
It’s really important for us as moms to start getting honest with ourselves about how much work our nervous systems and our attachment styles need, because that’s the greatest gift we can give our kids.
Letting Go of Guilt
If you are worried that your kids don’t know the truth of what went on in your marriage and that they’re going to blame you for divorce at some point, one of the most important things you can do is let go of the guilt and choose empowerment and solution instead.
You can say, “Where God guides, God provides.” You can reach for a solution and work on it so that you can demonstrate that everything can be healed.
Choose Long-Term Inner Peace Not Fast Short-Term Satisfaction
Popular culture marketers and corporations tend to prey on the fact that we women feel victimized by the world around us and that we need to blame someone or we need to cope with the fact that we have been harmed.
The reality is that radical transformation is possible, and we don’t need to be codependent on the wellness industry.
The wellness industry is a multi-trillion dollar industry that wants to sell us several wellness tools that we then are going to be dependent on to maintain our nervous system, health, and function. But I will tell you, a truly healed, transformed individual who feels peace doesn’t need to be dependent on a trillion-dollar wellness industry. You will truly be well. That level of healing is available to you.
Kids and Divorce: Codependency and Victim Mentality
The divorce healing tools in my program will provide you with that path to whole-body-mind wellness.
You cannot have true wellness and still be feeling a lot of mom guilt.
Mom guilt reinforces victim thinking and will reinforce to your children that you are eligible for being blamed.
The reality is that no human is getting out of this experience without their own hero’s journey and without their own struggles to overcome. It doesn’t matter how perfect you are, you’re not going to spare your kiddos from having struggles to struggle through, because struggle is how we mature. It’s how we cultivate the wisdom that comes from lived experience.
Quit blaming other people for your current struggles. Quit signing up for your kids to blame you for your struggles after divorce. Commit yourself to stop blaming yourself or feeling guilty for your kids’ lived experiences and instead sign up to be the most empowered version of yourself.
People struggle to hold space for people’s pain, their big feelings, and big experiences. We don’t have to fix it or change it. We don’t have to suppress it. We just need to hold space and share the good word.
There is transformation available and that’s what your kiddos need for you. They need you to hold space. They need to see you healing your body and mind after divorce and know that it is possible and watch you role model that by having a healthy nervous system and secure attachment style.
Focusing on your well-being not only benefits you but also sets a powerful example for your kids, fostering resilience and emotional balance in their lives.
This is a tough one, but it’s an important one. I know you can do this. I love you.
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.
