Becoming You Again

Rediscovering Your Decision-Making Power After Divorce

• Karin Nelson • Episode 232

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Standing in your kitchen at 8 PM, staring at unwashed dishes and feeling completely overwhelmed by the simplest decisions? You're experiencing what many women face after divorce which is decision paralysis. Even when you absolutely knew ending your marriage was right, the decision fatigue that comes after can leave you questioning your ability to choose anything from breakfast options to career moves.
 
One of my clients said, "I feel like I used all of my decision-making energy just getting out of my marriage," and this summed up what I hear from so many divorcing women as a common struggle. After spending months or years gathering courage for that monumental life decision, even small choices now carry what feels like impossible weight.
 
The challenge isn't just about making decisions. It's about making them as this new version of yourself you're still getting to know. For years, your decision-making muscles were trained to filter choices through questions like "What will keep the peace?" or "What might avoid conflict?" You learned to put everyone else's needs before your own. Now, you're suddenly expected to decide based on what YOU want except that muscle of knowing yourself, your wants, needs and desires has become weak because of years of ignoring it.  


This episode walks you through four transformative steps to break free from post-divorce paralysis: grounding yourself, learning to process emotions, examining limiting beliefs that keep you stuck, and taking small aligned actions to rebuild self-trust. You'll discover that the courage and wisdom that got you through divorce haven't disappeared; you just need to reconnect with those qualities.

To download your FREE GUIDE: "7-Day Self Trust Reset" click here.

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Karin Nelson:

This is Becoming you Again. I'm your host, karin Nelson, and you are listening to episode number 232. Welcome to Becoming you Again, the podcast where you learn to step into your power as a woman in this world, where you learn to reconnect to your wholeness, your integrity, and bring into alignment your brain, your body and your intuition. After divorce, this is the podcast where you learn to trust yourself again and move forward toward a life that you truly want. You are listening to Becoming you Again, and I am your host, karin Nelson. Welcome back to the podcast. My lovely ladies, as always, I'm so happy that you're here. What has been going on for you in your life? Are your kids back in school? It's. You know. Seasons are getting close to changing, which I am very excited about.

Karin Nelson:

I'm not a huge fan of summer, I'm just. I really don't like it that much. And where I live, it's just hot, it's just hot and dry. And what I've realized over the last, however many years of my life and recognizing what it is that I like, what my wants and my needs are, is that I don't like living in a place that is very hot, and once my kids get to a stage where they are more settled, I may decide to move away from where I live, being able to spend last summer in Alaska not saying I'm going to move to Alaska, because I absolutely would hate the winters there but the summers are perfect. The summers are incredibly beautiful, the weather is about my right temperature and it rains a lot, and I love rain. It is one of my favorite things. Now, maybe if I lived somewhere where it rained a lot, I would decide differently. I don't know, because I've never lived anywhere where it rains a lot, but when it rains here, it is absolutely my favorite thing in the world, and I think I might choose to try and live somewhere where it rains a lot more often and see if I actually truly do like that. Anyhow, that's where I'm at.

Karin Nelson:

What's going on for you? That's just like a little weather talk for you. Can you tell that? I work by myself from home every day Because I don't have a lot of people to talk to, unless I'm talking to my clients, but we're usually not talking about the weather. Let's be real. We're usually talking about what is going on for them, but we're usually not talking about the weather. Let's be real. We're usually talking about what is going on for them, how I can help them. So you can tell that when I get on my podcast, I'm like here, what do normal people just have like small talk conversations about? Oh, the weather. So there you go. There's my small talk conversation with you.

Karin Nelson:

But let's jump into today's podcast episode, because today I'm going to talk about getting out of this like post-divorce paralysis that a lot of us find ourselves in and it comes to not knowing how to make decisions for ourselves. We're going to talk all about it because I think it's really, really common for women who go through a divorce to find themselves in this space. This is something that, like, women tell me all the time, whether they're just coming to me for a consult, whether they've been my client, whether they are my client right now. This is something that they all have struggled with and I have struggled with it myself. It's kind of like that idea like you're standing in your kitchen and you know 8 pm on a Friday night, you've already gotten in your pajamas because you're ready for bed. That's me. I'm basically just describing me, but I know this other people do this too right. You're standing in front of the sink, it's full of dishes and you're just like I can't. I just feel like I don't even know what to do with my life. Right, like it's not because you're physically unable physically unable to like clean your kitchen or do your dishes or load your dishwasher or whatever. Right, it's because there's like this weight or a heaviness that has kind of settled over everything.

Karin Nelson:

You knew when you made the decision to divorce. You knew that it was absolutely the right decision for you, no question about that. But somehow you feel more stuck about making decisions and making choices than you were, about that decision to leave, about that decision to ask for divorce. And so that is what I'm talking about today. It's like this weird paralysis that shows up as you're going through your divorce or as you are, you know, after your divorce, when you absolutely knew that it was the right call, but then you're afraid to make decisions in your everyday life because you're afraid of what's going to come next, like there's a huge weight to what now and it feels really scary and it keeps you stuck. So I had a client one time this was right after she got out of her marriage. She had just asked for the divorce, started living on her own and she said to me I feel like I used all of my decision-making energy just getting out of my marriage and now I can't even decide, like, what to eat for breakfast. And that is really kind of the crux of all of this.

Karin Nelson:

Right, it is that exactly you spent months, maybe even years, gathering the courage to make like a pretty big decision in your life finding the right lawyer and by right I'm just going to put that in quotes, because there's no right or wrong. Right it's just whoever you choose. But finding the lawyer, going through the custody agreements, like dividing all the assets, figuring out where you're going to live, all of that, that's a lot of decision and there can be decision fatigue that comes with that. Like you had to have conversations that you never thought you'd have. Right, you stood up for yourself in ways that felt really scary but also really necessary and really right for you and the trajectory of your life. That is such a hard word for me to say Trajectory. Is it hard for anyone else to say? I feel like I had to say that like four times before I actually got it to come out correctly. Some words a little bit harder for me to say, apparently. But anyway, like sometimes these decisions, because we have such decision fatigue during our divorce process.

Karin Nelson:

It can feel heavy, even like small everyday decisions, because now you have to figure out everything else that's on your plate, right, like what kind of job do you want, or do I stay in the job that I have, or do I go back to school, or do I want to stay in this house long term, or do I find somewhere else? Or like what is that going to look like? How am I going to spend my weekends? I'm going to have some weekends that are open. What is that going to look like? It's going to be scary not having my kids here. What is that going to feel like? Like what kind of friendships do I want to have? Do I keep my old friends? Do I even have my old friends? Do I have any friends? What about dating flags? Because I definitely don't want to find myself in the same relationship that I had before, right? Or like what does a regular day look like for you, now that you are not planning your day around someone else's needs and someone else's comfort and someone else's preferences? It can feel overwhelming, because it's not just about making decisions. It's about making decisions as this like new version of you that you're still getting to know, and this is why those small decisions, the everyday decisions, can feel really heavy. This is what I see happening.

Karin Nelson:

You look at your life and everything feels like really enormous, really overwhelming, like almost like everything is loaded with a big amount of significance. Should you keep the house or should you sell it? Because if I keep it, then I have all these memories and how do I like navigate those memories? But if I sell it, then I have to find somewhere else to live, and is that going to uproot my kids and maybe you know the safety that they might feel in this home? Or should I go back to school? Or should I just continue to advance my career? Or should I move closer to school? Or should I just continue to advance my career or should I move closer to family because they're going to be able to help me? But if I do that, then does that like uproot my again, uproot my kids? Is that a choice that I want to make, right? Everything feels big, Everything feels permanent, and when that is the case, sometimes we end up not making any decision at all because that feels safer.

Karin Nelson:

And whether we're doing that consciously or not, I don't know I do have a lot of clients who don't recognize that they are not making decisions. Because it feels safer to just kind of stay where they're at, to kind of stay in indecision. That feels safe Because if they stay there they'll never make the wrong decision, because somewhere in their brain they are telling themselves that this is the wrong, this could possibly be the wrong decision, this could possibly be the wrong choice. And if I do that, there's no going back. But that's what I kind of want to teach you in this podcast is like we want to start making decisions. They don't have to be big ones, like the divorce decision might've been a really big decision. We want to start making small decisions so you can learn to trust yourself again and so that you can start to see that like no decision is final, right, no decision is like the linchpin in okay, your life is over now and there's no, there's no changing your mind, there's no going back.

Karin Nelson:

Because that truly isn't how life is, because often what will happen is we see all of these life choices that feel really enormous, like exactly what I just described right, sell the house, keep it, go back to school, whatever, stay in the job. But because it feels familiar, because it feels safe, we will just stay where we're at. We will just stay where we're at, we will stay in the job. That's just fine. But it's not fulfilling, because at least it's familiar, at least it's not scary, at least it's not starting over right, at least it's not outside of my comfort zone.

Karin Nelson:

Or you decide to keep the house, even though it just doesn't feel like home anymore, because selling feels like too much or like again. I'm not telling you to stay in your job or leave your job. I'm not telling you to sell your house or, you know, stay in your house. None of those. Those are totally up to you. I'm trying to point out that we will not make any decision at all or just keep status quo because it feels comfortable, which is maybe even one of the reasons why you stayed in a marriage for as long as you did. I know that was a huge reason for me, so no judgment for me about that. If that is what happened for you, I understand that You've moved beyond her because you've asked for the divorce and things have started to shift and change and transition for you, but you're also not who you're becoming. Yet that space is uncomfortable. That space feels shitty a lot of the time, like I remember.

Karin Nelson:

This is a good example for you, but I remember after my divorce I had to get rid of our old internet service because it was in both of our names and so I had to cancel it. But I didn't want to go with that company again. I just hadn't been happy with them and it was really expensive too right For me on my single person income now and so I was trying to decide what internet company to go with and I ended up choosing one that was less expensive. But they also ended up being just a really crappy, really crappy service. It didn't work for me and the kids. My kids couldn't like we couldn't stream on different devices, or my son couldn't play video games and all of us be on different devices and me be working from home and using the internet as often as I do as I'm coaching, like we couldn't all do those same things at the same time. There wasn't enough like I don't know how the internet works, but there wasn't enough bandwidth or whatever for all of that because of the choice that I had made to go with a less expensive but also less known crappy We'll just call them a crappy company, right? I had to cancel that. I had to go with a more expensive service. It was a big hassle.

Karin Nelson:

It was very emotionally tough for me to sit in those feelings and I remember thinking just for over and over like I'm not cut out for this. I don't understand this. This is too hard, I don't make the right decisions Just this loop of beating myself up and telling myself I couldn't do it, my decisions were always going to be wrong. I didn't believe that I had what it took to be like a solo single parent, mom, individual living on my own. I just didn't believe that I knew how to make decisions that were best and right for me and I believed these small decisions defined like the trajectory there it is again that word the trajectory of my entire life from then on. But here is what I learned from my own experience, from working with my clients and working with other divorcing women who are just like you when you feel stuck like this, it is not because you are suddenly stupid and you just don't know what to do or you're suddenly like incapable of making decisions that are best and right for you. No, that is not the case at all. Like hello. You literally proved that you can make hard decisions. You can make decisions that will affect your life, but also that you know are good and best and right for you. You asked for a divorce. You left your marriage. You're healing after all of it.

Karin Nelson:

The real issue is that somewhere along the way, you stopped trusting yourself to know how to make decisions, even small ones, and that decision-making process it got mixed up somewhere For however long you were married. For however long you were married, you learned to make decisions through a very specific filter, like what's going to keep the peace? What will make him happy? What might be the best decision for our family unit? What decision is going to hopefully avoid conflict in this situation? To hopefully avoid conflict in this situation, and your decision-making muscles they got trained to consider literally everyone else's needs or reactions before your own, and now that you're not married anymore, you're just all of a sudden supposed to start making decisions based on what you want, except a lot of the times we don't know what we want.

Karin Nelson:

Right, that muscle that knowing that, trusting ourselves, understanding our own desires, our own wants, our own needs, trusting our own judgment, trusting our own opinions, trusting our own judgment, trusting our own opinions. That hasn't been worked out for years. We haven't gone to that self-trust gym, that self-opinion gym, that self-understanding gym, for a very long time, and those muscles have become weak, and so we have to learn how to do that again. We have to learn who we are again and not to mention that, like our nervous system is probably totally out of whack, it's still recovering. Because even when divorce is absolutely the right choice for you, even if that choice was forced upon you and you just don't understand yet that it's the best decision for you, even if that choice was forced upon you and you just don't understand yet that it's the best decision for you, right, it's still a big life disruption. There's still a huge transition that you're going through, and your body and brain are still trying to process through the stress. They're trying to realign, they're trying to figure out what it feels like to not have to walk on eggshells every second, to not have to be in constant nervous system being heightened every single day. And you're trying to figure out what that new baseline looks like for you. Because when your nervous system is dysregulated, everything feels harder, everything feels scarier than it actually is.

Karin Nelson:

And so I'm going to give you four steps to helping yourself get unstuck, to help you move through this, to help you start to trust your own wisdom, to help you start to trust yourself so that you can move forward with intention in the direction that you want to go. And giving yourself permission to change your mind at any time. Not like wishy-washy oh I made that decision, oh no, what if it's wrong? Not like that, but like going, making a decision, going in that direction and then really evaluating and seeing like, yeah, this isn't working for me, for my kids, for our life, for me, for my kids, for our life the I'm not going to say the trajectory, the direction that we're headed, it's not working. I'm going to change my mind. Like that's what I mean by changing your mind, being willing to give yourself permission to do that. Okay, so here's the four steps. These are the four steps that I teach my clients. We don't I don't actually like say, okay, these are the four steps we need to do. This is just what we talk about as we're coaching.

Karin Nelson:

We figure out how to ground ourselves in moments. We learn how to process our emotions and be with them and know that they're not as scary as we're making them out to be. We learn who we are and how to trust ourselves and we decondition from all the social programming that we've had. And then we like learn to make decisions that are best and right for us, based off of us, not based off of what we've been told are best and right for us. And then we just go, start living our life and making and evaluating where we maybe need to make shifts, and we start living our lives from that way. So the first step is you need to understand that you are safe right now, in this moment. Getting back to the present moment, that is where we create safety. That is where we create emotional safety for ourselves.

Karin Nelson:

When you're constantly spinning about the future, when you're constantly looking at the past and going, look at all those terrible decisions I made, or whatever you're doing, right, living in the past or thinking about and worrying about the future, our nervous system is constantly heightened still and it thinks that we're in danger, even though we're not actually in danger. Right, I've had many, many podcast episodes about this. Go listen to some of those other ones if you're not sure what I'm talking about. But when our nervous system is heightened or out of alignment and it thinks it's in danger. This really shuts down our ability to think clearly. This really shuts down our ability to connect to ourselves and our intuition and what is best and right for us, and so we want to be able to make decisions from a more calm place, a more peaceful place, a more realigned nervous system, and the best way to do that is to get present in this moment and remind yourself in this moment I am safe, I actually do have power in my life, and so I need to ground myself, I need to anchor into the present, to understand that all is good right now, in this moment, so that I can bring my prefrontal cortex back online. So do a grounding practice, do a somatic practice. I have lots of previous episodes that you can, if you don't have any that are like your go-tos, that you really love. I have lots of other episodes that you can go to to find a grounding practice or a somatic practice that works for you.

Karin Nelson:

And now we're going to learn to be with our emotions. We're going to learn that nothing has gone wrong when we feel negative emotion. I really want you to like write that sentence out. I say this to my clients literally all the time, all the time. Nothing has gone wrong when you feel negative emotion. They are not to be feared. They are part of the human experience and it's okay.

Karin Nelson:

And this is where I think a lot of women. It screws everything up in our lives because we think that in order to be able to move forward, in order to be able to become the person that we want to become, we have to stop feeling scared or we have to stop feeling angry or sad or uncomfortable or whatever. It is frustrated. But here's the thing it's not the emotions that are the problem. It's really not. The problem is that we are too afraid of these emotions that we make. We let them make our decisions for us. We let them keep us stuck. You can feel scared about your financial future, and you can still take steps to improve it. You can feel angry about how your marriage ended or about the relationship that you chose because you married this guy, and you can still choose to create something incredibly amazing and beautiful, moving forward. You can feel sad about the life that you thought you were going to have, or about choosing divorce because you know it's affecting your kids, and you can still be excited about the life that you are creating.

Karin Nelson:

The goal is never to eliminate or get rid of negative, difficult, challenging emotions, because that's not real. We can't do that. The goal is to learn how to feel them, to learn how to be with them and to not be controlled by them. I have a guided training that comes along with a workbook that's going to teach you literally exactly how to do this. It's called the Feel to Heal Guided Training. It is 29 bucks. You can find it in the link in the description if you want it, but I'm going to walk you through exactly how to do this. It's an audio with a workbook. You do it when you need it. It's going to help know how to do it.

Karin Nelson:

But it's also not something that people teach us. We are taught to react to our emotions, to resist our emotions or to run away from our emotions. We're not taught to just sit with the discomfort and let it be and to not be afraid of it. Because learning to sit with that discomfort instead of immediately trying to affix it or avoid it or run away from it or react to it, that means getting curious about what your emotions are trying to tell you instead of judging them as good or bad, and that takes practice. But once you know how to do that, man, you are so powerful in your life. You're so powerful and that is pretty fucking amazing.

Karin Nelson:

And this is when we really get to examine old beliefs, or beliefs that we've been conditioned to just bring along with us, and we get to decide intentionally if we want to continue believing that or if we want to start believing something new and let that one go. Because after divorce, you might be thinking things like now I'm damaged goods and nobody's going to want to marry me because I've been divorced and I'm in my 50s or my 40s or my 30s right, whatever you might be believing, well, I have now failed at the literally most important thing in my life my marriage. I'm a failure. You might be believing something like I'm too old to start over, or now I can never be financially secure on my own it's not even an option for me or I've definitely messed up my kids because of the decision that I made to divorce, or I've ruined my life. I've ruined their life.

Karin Nelson:

Right, there's all of these old beliefs. There's probably a million others that are possibilities that you might be believing, and the thing is, is those beliefs feel real because of the way you're thinking about them, but just believe these things. You are going to make decisions that continue to reinforce them. That is not how we want you to live your life. Don't do that, because if you don't want to believe those things, you're allowed to choose different things to believe. You're allowed to think other thoughts than what your brain is just spitting out at you. If you believe you're too old to start over, you're not going to take risks or try new things or go back to school or try a new career or make a decision from that place. You just won't do it. If you believe your divorce makes you a failure or unlovable or unworthy in some way, you are going to sabotage potential future relationships or never date again or whatever. If you believe you're never going to be financially secure, you will never invest in yourself or in your future or put a savings away.

Karin Nelson:

You have to get curious about these beliefs, like where did they come from? Are they actually true for you, or are they just like ideas, beliefs, stories, whatever, that you picked up somewhere along the way that somebody told you once and you believed that somebody told you a bunch of times that you believed? What evidence do you have, that they are good and right for you, or that you want to continue to believe them. What evidence do you have for that? And then here's one of the most important questions that I want you to ask yourself Does this belief serve me? Does it help me create the life that I want, or is it keeping me small and stuck? Because that's where the real truth is going to be revealed to you. My truth may not be the same truth as yours. What is best and right for me may not be what is best and right for you. That is why you have to get curious for yourself and understand for you what is best and right for you. And if you don't want to believe in those things anymore, if you want to let something go, you're allowed to, you truly are allowed to.

Karin Nelson:

And then the last step is you need to start taking action based off of these new ways of thinking, these news, ideas, news, these new ideas. You want to start loosening your grip on those old limiting beliefs, those old things that are keeping you stuck, so that you can start to make decisions from a different place, not because of fear, of obligation or because of what other people might think, but because it is aligned with your own values, with your own priorities, with your own wants, your own needs, your own desires. And here's what I want you to know about this it doesn't mean that you have to make, like, huge over-sweeping I don't, that's not even a, I don't even know what that is Huge like sweeping, that's the word. I want sweeping decisions that are dramatic and are going to make huge changes in your life. You've already done that right. You've already made a big decision that is affecting lots of areas of your life.

Karin Nelson:

All of your other day-to-day decisions they're not going to be that way. Most likely, right. Most of them are just small, and that's where we want to start. We want to start with small actions that are truly aligned with who you're becoming, with who you're understanding you to be at this moment in your life. Right, if you want to believe that you're capable of creating financial independence for yourself, maybe you start by opening a savings account and you put away $10 a week or $10 a month or $500 a quarter or whatever, right? Maybe you make that decision and that feels good and right to you. If you want to believe that you deserve love, that you are worthy of being loved, that you are worthy, even as a divorced woman, of a loving partnership that is a true partnership. Maybe you start by being kinder to yourself, in the way you talk to yourself, in the way you see yourself, in the way you recognize and love you, if you want to believe that you are capable of creating an amazing life as a single woman, a single mother, maybe you start by buying yourself flowers every Friday. Maybe you start there. I don't know, but these are the small decisions that you can start to take to build that self-trust, to create the evidence that you're looking for, that you are capable of making decisions in your life.

Karin Nelson:

When you go through a divorce. You are not starting over from scratch. It's not like you're a baby who's starting from knowing nothing and has no previous experience, no previous information to inform you as you make decisions and move forward. That is not what it is. We're not starting from scratch. You're not going back to zero. You're building on everything that you've already learned, everything that you've already come out of, survived, thrived, everything that you have overcome to this point, everything that you have learned to this point. You have all of that information at your fingertips and that's incredibly amazing. That's great. You already made a really tough decision for yourself that you knew was best and right for you, by asking for a divorce, by ending a marriage that wasn't serving you any longer, and that took incredible courage, that took a lot of self-awareness, that took strength that you might not have even known that you had. All of that is still in you. All of that is still there. You still have wisdom in you and courage and strength, and it's still available to you, and you're not even going to have to use the majority of it to make day-to-day decisions, I promise you.

Karin Nelson:

The real reason you feel disconnected is because you've been through this major transition and transitions. They can be disorienting just because of what they are, but that doesn't mean that you've lost your power. It doesn't mean that you don't know how to connect to yourself. It doesn't mean you don't know how to listen to your intuition. You just need to remember how to do it and tap into it from time to time when you have to make decisions, and we start by making small decisions to be able to do that.

Karin Nelson:

So when you do this work let me reiterate you're going to feel emotionally safe. You're going to ground yourself. You're going to do a somatic practice. You're going to like feel emotionally safe. You're going to ground yourself. You're going to do a somatic practice. You're going to learn to be with your emotions. I promise you that will serve you so freaking much in your life if you can learn to do just that. You're going to learn to question beliefs, question if this is what I truly want to believe and the direction that I really want to go in my life. Question it You're allowed to, and then you're going to take action based off of those beliefs right, based off of your new ways of thinking, your new ways of being, the new stories that you want in your life. You're going to just take action from there.

Karin Nelson:

And when you start to do that, you stop feeling stuck, and that's what's really cool about this is you don't have to live your life stuck anymore. You stop feeling like you are a victim of your circumstance. You stop feeling like you don't have any power in your life. You start to remember that you actually do have power. You actually can make decisions. We can't determine everything that happens to us outside of us, but we can definitely recognize where we do have power, and that is huge.

Karin Nelson:

And that starts with making decisions, small ones, day to day. You don't have to have it all figured out, you don't have to have your whole future planned out, you don't have to have every decision made right now, today, you just have to start making decisions that feel best and right for you right now with the information that you have. That's it. And when you do that consistently, and when you practice trusting yourself with small things and then a little bit bigger, and then a little bit bigger, you start to rebuild that self-trust and you start to say things like I got this, I can handle it. Whatever it comes, I can do this. I can do hard things. I can create a life that I love, and I can always change my mind if I need to, if I want to, if I choose to. You absolutely can. You are amazing. Keep making choices, one decision at a time, one day at a time, one step at a time. You've got this All right. My friends, that is what I have for you today. Thank you for being here. I will be back next week. Hi, friend, I'm so glad you're here and thanks for listening.

Karin Nelson:

I wanted to let you know that if you're wanting more, a way to make deeper, more lasting change, then working one-on-one with me as your coach may be exactly what you need. Together, we'll take everything you're learning in the podcast and implement it in your life, with weekly coaching, real-life practice and practical guidance. To learn more about how to work with me one-on-one, go to KarinNelsonCoachingcom. That's W-W-W dot. K-a-r-i-n, n-e-l-s-o-n. Coaching dot com. Thanks for listening. If this podcast agreed with you in any way, please take a minute to follow and give me a rating. Wherever you listen to podcasts and for more details about how I can help you live an even better life than when you were married. Make sure, and check out the full show notes by clicking the link in the description.

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