Conquering the Emotional Cling: Two Crucial Factors You Need for Letting Go After Divorce

During a recent group coaching session, we delved into the topic of letting go. We explored feelings of not being wanted, not feeling worthy, struggling with self-belief, and the common urge many women experience to reconnect with their ex. There’s also the shame that surfaces when those feelings persist, especially after experiencing hurt or abuse.

Struggling to let go often leaves us feeling unfulfilled, whether we’re spending time alone or with loved ones. Many women still crave validation and have the desire to reach out to their exes.

So today, we’re talking about the top two reasons that letting go is so hard.

Reclaiming Your Power: Shifting from External Validation to Self-Love

The first thing to know is that your attachment style is directly linked to how much difficulty you have in letting go.

I want you to reflect on this: do you trust your ex to take care of you and love you more than you trust yourself to do the same? It’s easy to defer your personal power to someone else, believing that their love and care will make you feel safer, more worthy.

These feelings are rooted in early childhood experiences. Our early childhood brain development lays the foundation for the relationships we later form, often reflecting a lack of safety and security.

This early pattern can make it difficult to trust yourself and feel secure in your own body and mind.

For example, maybe there was a tendency to let go of your own self-expression in exchange for your parents’ self-expression. Certainly in my life as a child, if I expressed my own thoughts and feelings, I was told that my feelings were not something that there was time or space for—I was often yelled at for expressing my feelings.

If my feelings didn’t align with my parents’ moods or beliefs, I was told that they didn’t matter or weren’t relevant.

Breaking Free from Childhood Conditioning: Learning to Trust Your Own Voice

In my own childhood, there wasn’t space for conversations or processing how I felt about things. While I’m not advocating for self-indulgence, children need room to explore who they are and how they feel, particularly when navigating emotions in difficult situations.

As children, we’re not taught how to manage emotional regulation. And we’re certainly not developing confidence in our ability to manage our feelings and our self-esteem.

This lack of belief in yourself comes from being told over and over as a child, “Just do what I say.”

We’re not cultivating confidence in our ability to problem solve, think for ourselves, and take good care of our feelings. When we’re told to defer to other people’s needs, thoughts and beliefs, it stops the process of becoming “individuated,” which means evolving from dependency on our parents into independence.

Imagine as a young person, if you had different political or religious views than your parents, how would they have tolerated that? If you had different ways of seeing the world, how would they have tolerated that?

Rebuilding Self-Belief: Healing the Habit of Relying on Others

How can you evolve from relying on someone else’s beliefs and validation to building your own independent confidence, if you never had space to explore your own thoughts and feelings?

What ends up happening is you’re in the habit of believing in other people more than believing in yourself.

This certainly shows up in an attachment style— especially for anxious or disorganized attachers.

It’s just easier to believe in other people rather than believing in yourself. And so that is a key piece to understanding why letting go is so hard because you’ve been taught to hold on tightly to a belief in somebody else’s way.

So, what do we do about that?

Well, this brings us to the second reason letting go is so hard: you must address this habit to truly choose yourself. This habit has been ingrained since you were young, and we women must heal it at various places in life, so you need to reflect on different stages of your life—when you were a toddler, in school, during high school, or even when choosing your partner to marry.

You have to think about all those ages and the difficulties that we had at those various stages of life. This process is often called inner child work or internal family systems work.

Healing Through Self-Compassion: Embracing Your Younger Self

We women have to look at the places where we got hung up and were struggling to believe in ourselves. Now, how this played out in a recent group session for our coaching students was I encouraged them to pull out pictures of their infant selves, their seven to nine-year-old selves, and their high school selves. Then I told them to pick up a pillow.

We all picked up pillows and imagined holding our younger selves. At first, it felt awkward—but it was powerful to validate that younger version of ourselves and step into the role of the loving, affirming parent we once needed.

From Codependency to Confidence: Embracing Self-Belief and Curiosity

Many parents say, “Oh, you know, you could do anything,” or “You’re beautiful in God’s eyes,” or “I love you so much.” But what does it feel like to hold a pillow of your younger self and say, “It’s okay to believe something different than I believe.”

If you haven’t done this work already, think about how your ex reacted when you held different beliefs. Did he listen? Was he curious or was he judgmental? What about you? Were you curious about your ex’s different beliefs, or were you judgmental?

The flexibility of thought is crucial for healthy relationships. Codependency says, “We must believe the same thing. We must feel the same thing.” So, codependency is rife with judgment and it’s devoid of curiosity.

I want you to look at how much flexibility of thought and how much curiosity existed in your early life and in your marriage.

You have to believe in yourself more. Believe in yourself enough to know that you can be successful without your ex or anyone else propping you up.

Now, we’re hardwired for love and belonging, and I believe that we’re built for partnership.

So this is not a pitch for you to have to live life solo after your divorce, but it’s about living life collaboratively rather than dependently.

Building Self-Love: Making It as Satisfying as Your Favorite Comfort Food

We want to move away from dependency and into collaboratively living life with community; toward believing in yourself and loving yourself.

You know that warm feeling you get when you enjoy your favorite comfort food? That’s how people’s love feels to you, but your love doesn’t feel that way.

There’s a bridge that has to be crossed to get to you loving yourself and feeling warm and delicious.

This happens through the process of rewiring your subconscious mind.

Three Powerful Ways to Rewire Your Mind for Self-Love

There are three ways to rewire your mind for self-love:

• EFT tapping, which helps rewire your subconscious mind. It helps clear out old, painful emotions tied to the past. EFT tapping helps prime your reticular activating system to see it in a new and different way.
• Positive affirmations, which are so powerful. I’m a big fan of doing them as you’re drifting off into sleep, with 528 hz music that primes your brain to be in a receiving mode of self love.
• Inner child work, by pulling out a picture and engaging with your inner child.

These three practices will help build a strong foundation for letting go in a meaningful way—empowering you to choose yourself instead of losing yourself in the process of choosing others.

Next Steps: Deepening Your Healing with Inner Child Work & Guided Tools

I created two premium 528 hz music tracks for you. One is an EFT tapping video for letting go and one is a guided meditation track for you to fall asleep and be asleep to, which will allow you to start to internalize these positive beliefs about yourself. It takes consistency and repetition over time.

I highly recommend using the guided sleep meditation every night for a month to see real shifts, and practicing EFT tapping once or twice a day for a week.

Commit to Consistency: Bridging the Gap Between Desire and Transformation

Think about it, when you go to the gym consistently for some time and you start to see results, it becomes intoxicating. But when we women abandon ourselves, we abandon our healthy habits and consistency, and we lean back into the old tools— like numbing out, pretending, and avoiding. Eventually, we must acknowledge the gap between where we want to be and the habits we practice daily.

Your future self is there cheering for you and your inner child. Wounded parts of yourself are waiting for you to rescue them and let them go, rather than continuing to expect somebody else to rescue them.

These are the concrete tools that are going to move the needle so powerfully for you. It’s about developing and cultivating those healthy habits that will bridge that gap between where you say you want to be and where you are today.

I love you so much. Peace.