Reclaim My Life After Divorce: Let Go of Regret & Pain

Have you ever whispered those devastating words to yourself: “I gave him my best years, I need to reclaim my life”? If so, this podcast episode is specifically created for you. It’s for every woman who feels like their time, identity, and self-worth were lost in the process of loving someone else. For every woman who mourns not just the end of her marriage but the years that feel forever lost. Divorce coach Dawn explores how to heal by breaking free from codependency, letting go of outdated beauty standards, and reconnecting with your inner wisdom. You’ll discover that your value didn’t end with your marriage—and that your best years can still be ahead. This is your invitation to reclaim your life—not from him, but for you. Your story isn’t ending—it’s just beginning.

5 Key Takeaways

1. “I gave him the best years of my life” isn’t true. This common belief stems from codependency and societal pressures, not the truth. Your essence — and value — remain fully intact. When you say, “I gave him the best years of my life,” you’re essentially saying that your worth was somehow diminished by loving someone. But that’s not true, your capacity for love, your wisdom, your humor, your creativity—all the beautiful qualities that make you you—these don’t have expiration dates. They weren’t depleted by your marriage, and they certainly weren’t given away. This way of thinking often masks a deeper fear that you’re somehow less than now, but it’s time to challenge that narrative. Now you need to say to yourself, “I’m ready to reclaim my life.” You are the same magnificent person you’ve always been, just with more life experience and hard-earned wisdom.
2. Codependency masks itself as regret. When your happiness is tied to another person’s presence or approval, you can feel lost without them. Healing means reclaiming this sense of internal validation. What feels like regret about wasted time is often grief over losing an external source of validation and identity. In codependent relationships, we unconsciously outsource our sense of self-worth to our partner’s moods and presence in our lives. When that relationship ends, it’s not just the person we’re mourning—it’s the entire system we’ve created to feel okay about ourselves. You can learn to become your own source of validation. This is how I was able to reclaim my life. It isn’t about becoming completely independent; it’s about developing a loving, accepting relationship with yourself. This internal validation makes future relationships healthier and more fulfilling.
3. Society’s beauty standards distort feelings of self-worth. Another powerful thing to understand when you’re asking yourself, “How do I reclaim my life”? Understanding that aging doesn’t lessen your value. Your wisdom, lived experience, and compassion are your new power. Our culture has convinced women that their value peaks in their twenties and it’s all downhill from there. This toxic messaging makes divorce feel like a double loss — not only are you losing your partner, but you’re also told that you’re past your prime. This isn’t true. Your laugh lines tell stories of joy. Your gray hair represents wisdom earned through experience. Your body has carried you through challenges that would have broken your younger self. These aren’t signs of decline — they’re badges of honor. When you shift from measuring your worth by impossible beauty standards to celebrating your resilience and experience, you discover a kind of beauty that truly radiates from within.
4. Feeling present reclaims your life. Learning somatic tools and grounding practices helps you fully experience life in the now. If you feel that you’ve wasted time, it’s often from realizing how much of your life you spent going through the motions rather than truly living. Maybe you were so focused on keeping the peace or just surviving that you forgot how to be present. The good news? Time isn’t actually lost—it’s simply waiting for you to fully inhabit it. Ask yourself, “Am I being present? Am I working to reclaim my life?” When you learn to ground yourself in your body through somatic practices, like EFT tapping, you begin to experience the richness of each moment. Instead of your mind spinning with regrets about the past or anxieties about the future, you can drop into the sensations of right now. This presence transforms ordinary moments of your life into something sacred, helping you realize that your most meaningful life can begin right now.
5. Healing takes conscious effort—but it’s possible. Grieving lost time is part of the process. With the right support, you can forgive, accept, and grow into your next chapter. Healing from divorce isn’t something that just happens to you — it’s something you actively participate in. Stop saying, “I want to reclaim my life,” but not committing to your own healing. It requires conscious effort and often professional support, but transformation is absolutely possible. The grief you’re feeling about lost time is valid and needs to be honored, not rushed through. But grief isn’t meant to be permanent, it’s a process that leads to acceptance, wisdom, and eventually, a kind of freedom you may have never experienced before. Countless women emerge from their divorce not just healed, but more vibrant and authentic than they’ve ever been. Your story isn’t over—in many ways, it’s just beginning.

Highlights

• 00:00 Codependency and Time Regret Insights
• 04:51 Post-Menopause and Self-Worth Crisis
• 06:24 Valuing Wisdom Over Appearance
• 12:31 “Rediscovering Your Timeless Essence”
• 13:49 Journey to Forgiveness and Acceptance
• 19:31 “Somatics for Presence and Healing”
• 21:26 Open Lines for Community Connection

Full Podcast Transcript

Dawn Wiggins [00:00:00]: Are you a woman who is haunted by the idea that some element of your years with him were a waste? Ugh. This idea that you gave him the best years of your life. I think it’s something that, whether you were someone who wanted the divorce or didn’t want that, like, it’s almost like a universal truth for women, right, who are grieving the loss of this season of their life and then asking themselves a question like, who am I now and what is my life now and where do I go from here? It’s like this universal angst about time spent and time lost. And so today we are gonna unpack this whole idea. We’re gonna specifically touch on, number one, sort of this idea of beauty standards. And it’s not limited to just that, but a nod to the, the cultural, the social implications of what it really means to be a woman in a post divorce phase of life. Ouch. The second thing that we’re going to dig into is what codependency has to do with this particular element of divorce grief.

Dawn Wiggins [00:01:07]: I gave them the best years of my life. There is a thinking error in there. There’s some codependency embedded in there and I want you to be aware of it so that you can have the tools to tackle it when you are feeling that and it’s coming up for you. And then the third thing we’re going to unpack is this idea about time being the most precious resource and you can’t get it back. And really, really dialing in what are the things that you need to change in this moment of your life so that you don’t have to re experience this, the depth of this pain about time being a resource that’s gone and the regrets that go with that. Right. I think that’s one of the most lowest vibe, like when we look at the vibrational scale and emotions that are on that vibrational scale. As we were prepping for this episode, producer Joy was like, where would you put this concept on the emotional scale? And I said, pretty frickin low, right? Because it’s really this sense of helpless, hopeless, griefy despair stuff that’s so low vibe that it leads to things like dorsal vagal collapse from a nervous system health standpoint, or can be that thing that tips you into depression.

Dawn Wiggins [00:02:16]: Right? So it’s definitely one of the things that we want to have a strategy for so that you do not have to go through this again. Before we dig into those three things, I want to just shout out one of our listeners that is in our cocoon community on the Heartbeat app. Her name is Hannah. Hannah, I just want to send you some love and say awesome job on the fitness routine that you have really leaned into this year. I am particularly impressed by that because what we do in the body often translates to the mind. So when we get stronger in the body, right? When we increase our physical resource, when we take better care of our nervous systems, when we move our body and we get things flowing, what that does is it unsticks the things that are stuck emotionally as well. Right? There’s this beautiful relationship between body and mind. Then when we take action in one sphere, it automatically affects the other sphere.

Dawn Wiggins [00:03:06]: So, Hannah, I just want to say keep going. You’re a badass. And thank you for being part of our community. Okay. Beauty standards and this idea that you gave them the best years of your life. I sort of want this moment on the pod to be validation for how hard this moment is specifically for women. And, you know, I tend to be a very positive poly. Is that a thing? If it’s not a thing, I.

Dawn Wiggins [00:03:34]: It’s a thing now. Positive poly. And I tend to want to, you know, take our pain and integrate it and tip up and not wallow and not dwell, but sometimes we just have to call a spade a spade. Right? And when you are getting divorced and you are a woman, it’s like socially, culturally, right? The chips are stacked against you. Women as they age are less valued in society. I have started to hear. I wonder if you have started to hear these also. I know better than to compare my for your feed to your for your feed, right? Because the algorithm gets tuned.

Dawn Wiggins [00:04:13]: But I have started to see in my for your feed people talking about, why don’t grandmas look like grandmas anymore? I don’t know about you, but I don’t plan to look like a grandma. E. Grandma. But that is. It’s. It’s a significant shift culturally because in the archetype. Archetypes of women, Crohn’s historically are meant to be the most sage, wise, seasoned women who are meant to give back all of this beauty and wisdom to the younger generations. And in many ways, our beauty obsessed culture is sort of killing that.

Dawn Wiggins [00:04:51]: And I think that when we see so many women post menopause depressed and having suicidal thoughts and so sort of feeling lost around body image and purpose in a post menopausal world, like, that’s awful. We’ve done that as a collective, you know, and it’s not just the men that have done it. We have contributed to it as Women by buying into these unreasonable beauty standards as we age. And we’ve bought into the idea that if I’m not young, I don’t have the same value. And we know that men, it tends to be reverse, right? Men are seen as silver foxes and as these like, awesome catches when they’re older and more experienced and have a couple bucks in their pocket and I don’t know, whatever, right? And so it’s very common for men to leave women for younger women. But that doesn’t work in reverse, right? And so in this moment in time where you feel like you’ve given the best years of your life, you’re most beautiful years, your most childbearing years, your most robust years, right? There’s all this sort of grief around, not just what you gave him, but your own, like, oh, crap, I can’t get that stomach back, I can’t get that wrinkleless face back, if you will. And, and I think we also have to be willing to take a look at. Also, what about this sloppy seconds idea, right, that you’re just less valuable now that you’re divorced.

Dawn Wiggins [00:06:24]: I think that we do a horrible job in communities of just sort of judging people and qualifying their worth based on pain, painful experiences, which, if you ask me, like, the more you have lived and loved and experienced and integrated back to that chrome thing, right? The more wisdom you have, the more you have to offer, the more valuable you are. But when we measure people based on how they look and whether or not they’re perfect, all of that gets skewed and lost. And so I think we have to take a look at the ways in which we are criticizing ourselves in that way, the way that we’re contributing to this toxic culture. Because the reality is, love is you can tell some stories, you, you can give some younger women some freaking advice, you know, things, you’ve been through things. And that needs to not get lost or taken for granted. You have so much to offer. And I think that’s one of the beautiful things that goes on in our community, and especially in our small group coaching program, is very often the women have the best source of feedback and advice for each other because of your wisdom, of experience. And we are just so used to judging ourselves against these awful standards that aren’t real, but we do it right, we perpetuate it within ourselves.

Dawn Wiggins [00:07:51]: So I just want to say, I see you, I get it. It’s hard, but stays hard as long as you’re bought into that same, like, untouchable standard, right, of perfection and beauty. And use. If you stop buying into those standards and you start creating communities around people who value the wisdom of your experience, that starts to shift. Right. When we reimagine our priorities and we really get grounded in the things that matter most, man, that starts to get reinforced and then. Right. We’ve really divorced the terrible standards and can love and accept ourselves more and start to value the things that are ahead of us as women in these, you know, post divorce years.

Dawn Wiggins [00:08:39]: All right, let’s talk for a bit about what codependency has to do with I gave him the best years of my life. Now sort of adjacent to these beauty standards thing. Not the same, slightly different, Right. Is this idea that I am only able to be happy in a relationship. I’m only able to be happy if I look young. I’m only able to be happy if my last name is the same as my children’s, or I’m only able to be happy if I have this person to call and share my day. Right. This idea that we place qualifications on our happiness that are made up, that we have this subconscious idea that I can’t be happy with and in myself and the community and the experiences that I create today, that my happiness is tied to somebody else’s choices or behaviors.

Dawn Wiggins [00:09:32]: And that’s really one of the key elements of codependency. That I can’t be happy unless you’re happy or I can’t be happy unless we’re connected and you’re not mad at me or all is. Well. It’s an outside solution for an inside problem. That is codependency, an outside solution for an inside problem. And so when we haven’t really found a grounded sense of worth, worthiness, when we haven’t found, like, gosh, I really love and accept myself and not. I love and accept myself because my wrinkles are managed. No, I love myself with my wrinkles.

Dawn Wiggins [00:10:08]: We’re not good at that love. We’re not. I’m not good at it. Are you good at it? I don’t want to say how it is for you, but, like, man, you know, I was in a team meeting with producer Joy and coach Tiffany this morning, and coach Tiffany, if you’ve never seen her, she has the most beautiful, like, china doll face, right? And I’ll sit in that meeting and I’ll look at, like, how my face is more wrinkled or sagging, and I’m like, oh, if only had Tiffany’s skin. Right? That right there, that’s codependency. It’s like, I can’t be happy unless I have Coach Tiffany’s skin. Like, what is that? And so why can’t I just be like, wow, Coach Tiffany, I just love your skin and I love my skin. And, you know, so it’s such a habit for us to.

Dawn Wiggins [00:10:55]: To lament, right? To lament that I can’t have this thing back. I can’t be happy unless these check boxes. I know that’s how I got married in the first place. It was like, I can’t be happy unless I have the ring and the wedding and the husband and the things. Like, I needed. I needed to check these boxes about my career and the way my life was going. Right? You could tell the kind of woman that I was. Right.

Dawn Wiggins [00:11:18]: I needed to not be behind where my peers were. If anything, I, you know, I wanted to be ahead and I wanted to make sure I had checked all these boxes to make sure I fit in, to make sure I was good enough and to make sure that I was quote, unquote, happy. But that’s not true happiness. And so when we’re feeling this I gave him the best years of my life stuff, it’s sort of like the identity, our identities got lost in marriage. That marriage became an identity. And it was part of my identity for sure. Right? It was part of what. Where I was in life, what made me me, but not really.

Dawn Wiggins [00:11:57]: My true essence is not changed by my relationship status. I’m going to say that again. My true essence is not changed by my relationship status. And I think the problem is, is we sort of get caught up in that. We feel like I’m not enough. But then once I get married now, I am enough. And there’s some subconscious sense that you’re changed. And love, you are the same essence, essence today that you were five, 10, 30 years ago.

Dawn Wiggins [00:12:31]:

And so maybe you’ve not been in touch with that essence. Maybe life has just sort of been happening and you haven’t been really dialed into it or grounded into it or intimate with your own essence. Right. Maybe you’re someone who struggles when people say, like, what’s your zone of genius? What’s your particular magic? What are the things you love most about yourself? Maybe you have a hard time answering those questions, and that’s the essence of who you are, and that is not shifting or changing based on which years of your life you’re in. Right? There are beautiful things about each phase of life. And I don’t know about you, but also on my for you feed are women saying, all the time, life got better in my 40s, it got better in my 50s, it got better in my 60s because I was no longer judging myself as harshly as I did in my teens, my twenties, and my thirties. And so love, you can be happy no matter your relationship status, no matter the beauty standards, but that’s got to be an active choice for you to tap into what’s your true essence, what’s your true value, and where have you been placing your value? And that is a tough transition to make, right? So I want to call you home to. You couldn’t have given him the best years of your life because you are still you then and you are still you now.

Dawn Wiggins [00:13:49]: And once you move through the grief, the pain, the regret, the resentment, you will be able to recall those years fondly. But not if you’re gonna hate him your whole life, right? If you, if you are not invested in getting to forgiveness. And forgiveness is a step in the journey, right? It’s a part of the process. It’s not something that’s meant to necessarily happen right away. I don’t think it’s easy for most women to get to forgiveness, but once you do, you will be able to look on those years and see the threat of your essence throughout and see that you were a beautiful soul then, you’re a beautiful soul now, and he was part of your story. And this idea of the best years of your life is a thinking error, right? It’s a distorted thought or belief. But why do we all have that thought then, Don? If it’s such a distorted thought or belief, then why does it seem to be such a universal sensation? Well, I’m so glad you asked because it brings us to sort of this third thing to be examined, which is that time is a spent resource, right? Time is often said to be one of the most precious gifts. And when we are not grounded in the present moment, and I think in a modern world, very few of us are grounded in the present moment because we’re always going a million miles an hour with way too much responsibility and not enough time, space or support.

<p”>Dawn Wiggins [00:15:19]: Safety, security and abundance. The true sensation of those things can only be found in the present moment. And so often we’re obsessed with finding them in past core memories or future. I’ll be happy whens. When this happens, then I will. And so how many of us are good at stopping getting really quiet and still feeling abundant and happy in our stillness? I think when we get quiet and still, we become self critical, we become anxious, dare I say neurotic, probably resentful, and generally not happy. Or feeling a sense of security. And so if you want to be a woman who gets to the point where she does not waste the precious resource of time, then love, when you sit still, all those feelings and patterns that come up inside of you have to be worked through, have to be reconciled to the point of you being able to feel peace and gratitude and abundance in the stillness.

Dawn Wiggins [00:16:34]: And that’s why I know that our coaching program is such a beautiful healing journey for women. Because I think most women, many women, go from this idea that I cannot get this time back, this time is lost, it is spent. I have a sense that it is wasted. And they go from the grief of that to, I must escape that. And so then they want to live in the fast lane even more. I want to scroll, I want to shop, I want to travel, I want a date, because I want to escape this feeling of wasted time. But in the scrolling, shopping, traveling and dating, are you actually present? Safety, security, abundance, gratitude, they can really only be truly felt found in the present moment. And so are you someone who feels confident that you’re good at being present, or do you tend to dissociate? Do you tend to want to escape the present moment? Do you tend to need to distract yourself from the present moment? And if that’s the case, then how can there be any other outcome than five, ten years from now feeling like those years had some element of waste? When you think about all the stories you’ve read of people who are on their deathbed and said, I wish I hadn’t sweated the small stuff so much.

Dawn Wiggins [00:17:55]: I wish I hadn’t worked so much, I wish I had been more present. This is the thing you’re having that awareness right now. When you, every time you think the thought and feel, feel the grief associated with I gave him the best years of my life, you are having a glimpse into your deathbed. Does that make sense? It’s like you’re having this little timeline hop where you can sort of feel how you might feel at your deathbed if you don’t learn how to find abundance in the present moment in a modern world, Love a modern world is never going to encourage you to say, I need to take some time and space for myself to find peace and abundance. Right? That’s just not going to happen. The modern world is always going to say, you need to give us more, you need to buy more, you need to escape more, you need to do more. You are going to have to grab that shit by the horns and say, like, I’m going to Claim peace and presence for myself. Now, I want to add a little asterisk here because sometimes I hear women say I need to learn how to meditate.

Dawn Wiggins [00:18:55]: That’s like we think about getting present, right? We think about meditation. And I want to say to you, there are so many things you can do that probably for you love need to come before meditation. I love meditation. I’m obsessed with meditation. It’s wonderful. It’s been integral in various stages of my healing journey. But when you are a heavily dissociative or have experienced trauma, meditation and the idea of trying to detach from your thoughts or suppress your thoughts or escape your thoughts, it’s not the best next step. Okay, there is an episode dropping, I think, this week on Thursday, where we’re going to talk a little bit more about somatics.

Dawn Wiggins [00:19:31]: Very often, women first need to get into embodiment or somatic work and then tackle some meditation, right? So I just want to say to you that there are a lot of beautiful tools out there for rewiring your brain to be able to be present, and one of them must be somatics. It’s one of the core elements of our small group coaching program is to teach you and for you to get comfortable with somatic processing so that you can be grounded and present without your mind spinning a middle million miles an hour. All right. In today’s episode, we have talked about both the grief and the codependency associated with I gave him the best years of my life. This is a gentle reminder that you are not based on your beauty standards, that your essence is perfect and essential and necessary and is a gift to this community and to the world. And I want you to own that. And that time is also a beautiful resource. And if you know that you need more help getting present and finding safety and security and abundance in this now moment, I want to encourage you to get on our wait list for our small group coaching program, a different D word.

Dawn Wiggins [00:20:44]: I know that our program does it better than most and that because of the way that it’s structured and the. The really healing elements that we have built into it, that it will get you where you need to go. And so right now, we are opening our wait list. We actually Launch enrollment on March 6th or 7th. It’s a Friday, but in the meantime, we are offering three amazing bonuses. You heard about it at the top of the episode, but if you think you might even want to, like, if it’s just even a consideration, put yourself on the waitlist. I’d hate for you to change your mind at the last minute and not have those bonuses, especially because one of them is 15 off the total program cost. So you’ll find a link to jump on that waitlist at the top of the show notes and the bottom of the show notes.

Dawn Wiggins [00:21:26]: Always feel free to send any of us a DM or an email. We love talking to you. We love just getting to know you and you being part of the community. Have a beautiful day. Peace.