Becoming You Again

How to Take Your Power Back After Divorce By Owning Your Emotional Life

• Karin Nelson • Episode 245

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One of the most disempowering things that we do to ourselves is let everything outside of us be in charge of our emotional life. This conversation is a guide to taking your emotional life back after divorce without minimizing the hard parts. 

I start by untangling the thought–feeling–action loop and why confusing thoughts with feelings keeps you stuck. You’ll hear how naming a single emotion can calm your brain, what healthy detachment really looks like, and how to process emotions in your body so they stop running the show.
 
I’ll teach you how to get honest about the realities you face: messy co-parenting, unfair legal systems, financial strain, and cultural pressure. Owning your emotions is the practice of agency within tough circumstances. 


By the end of this episode you’ll have a simple, repeatable method of processing through your emotions so you can finally step into the power that you’ve been missing in your own life. 

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Karin Nelson:

This is Becoming You Again, episode number 245, and I am your host, Karin Nelson. 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, lovely ladies. As always, I am so glad that you're here. I'm Karen Nelson. If you're new here, I am the host of Becoming You Again. And I just want you to know that every time you press play on this podcast, what that is telling you and your brain is I matter. You are choosing yourself. You are choosing to heal. You are choosing to grow. You are choosing to have more understanding about yourself, more awareness about what's going on in your life. And you are choosing to reconnect to the authentic true you, the real you. The you that has been buried underneath years of all of that emotional responsibility for everyone else, all of the people pleasing, all of living in the survival mode and walking on eggshells, and the weight of carrying around a marriage that just didn't honor you or allow you to grow and evolve and thrive. So, yay! Amazing. Celebrate the fact that you are now stepping into this new version of you, this becoming version of you, this version of you that is growing and evolving. That's beautiful and amazing. And I'm so proud of you. So keep doing that. Keep coming back, keep showing up for yourself. So, how is everyone? I'm doing pretty good. I have been gearing up for the holidays. My birthday is in December as well. So gearing up for that, gearing up for my son to be home for Christmas and just having family around more and all of the things. So I'm doing pretty good. I actually really love the holiday season. Uh, how are you all doing? If you're struggling with the holidays, if you're not really sure how to navigate it, if you used to love them and now you hate them, if you're nervous that you're not gonna be able to have a good holiday season with your kids because it's maybe the first time they're away, or the first time you're not together as a family in the home, or whatever you might be dealing with, just know that I got you. You can check out my holiday guide by going to my website. It's gonna guide you through all of the ins and outs of supporting yourself, setting boundaries, budgeting, creating new traditions, dealing with the days when you don't have your kids, and so much more. And it's only $39. So treat yourself if you need some extra support as you go through the holiday season and get that holiday guide. All right, let's jump into today's podcast episode because I'm gonna be talking about emotions. Yes, your emotional life. This is like the thing. This is the thing that we struggle with as humans, because nobody teaches us how to deal with our emotions. Nobody does. Nobody sat me down when I was in elementary school and said, this is how you feel and allow and process through an emotion. You know what I was taught to do? I was taught to react, to avoid, to resist, to push it down, to pretend that I everything is fine, to do all of those things, to basically do everything but actually allow my emotions. And I know I'm not the only person who was never taught how to allow your emotions to be a part of your life. So I'm gonna talk about it today. I know I talk about this a lot on the podcast, but I'm really gonna dive deep into why it's important and how to own your own emotional life and stop handing it over to everything and everyone outside of you to be their responsibility. This is how you're gonna stop feeling like your emotions are happening to you. And you're going to begin to understand how to be empowered in taking back control of your own emotional life and how to emotionally detach from your divorce in a way that is like healthy and grounded and empowered for sure. Here's the truth that I really want you to hear when it comes to your divorce. Your divorce doesn't break you. We hear that sometimes, like my divorce broke me, my divorce ruined me, right? It is not your divorce. I promise you that. What is breaking you and what is ruining you is avoiding your emotions, is pushing them down, is pretending they're not there or pretending everything is fine. And so being able to heal through your divorce, through whatever challenges you're facing, and into the rest of your life begins the moment that you stop outsourcing your emotional experience and you take your power back. Okay. So what I first want you to understand is that your emotional life is happening behind the scenes. It's like this behind the scenes control panel of your entire human existence because we are humans and as humans, we feel and experience emotions. We always will, we always do. It is part of our experience. And whether you know it or not, every action that you take, every conversation that you have, or every conversation you avoid or come away from going, I wish I wouldn't have said that, or I wish I would have said that, or every boundary that you set or don't set, or every time you say yes when actually you wanted to say no, or every time you have a fight with your ex, or every time you spiral on social media or doom scroll, or every time you make a decision or don't make a decision, that is all driven by emotions. Emotions at their most basic level are simply just like a vibration in your body. And typically, yes, we can have things in our body that react to something like a memory, a ghost memory, uh, an experience that we had in the past. But very often, the vibrations that we feel in our body that represent the emotions that we're feeling are triggered by the thoughts that are happening in our brain, by the meaning that we give things. They are not triggered by your ex. They are not triggered by your court date. They are not triggered by your custody schedule or your mother-in-law or your soon-to-be ex-mother-in-law, or your circumstances, or your kid when he yelled in the room the other day. They are not triggered by anything outside of you. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm gonna explain more of this, so don't check out yet because there's so much more to this. I'm not saying things don't happen to you. I'm not saying circumstances don't happen to you. I'm not saying people aren't shitty. I'm not saying that your ex isn't the worst human alive because he might be. I am not saying that your kids aren't little assholes sometimes, because they are sometimes. I'm not saying any of those things. So stick with me here, okay? I am just saying that the emotions that you feel, the feelings that you feel inside your body, the sadness, the grief, the frustration, the anger, the happiness, the joy, the peace, all of those are not showing up because of something that is happening outside of you. They are showing up because of the meaning that is happening in your brain. Your thoughts are creating your feelings, and your feelings are driving how you show up, how you behave, the actions that you take, and then your actions are creating your life experience. Now, again, don't get me wrong, don't hear me incorrectly. I am not saying that people don't do things to you because I know that they do, and I know that that also shapes your life experience. I will get into that in a minute. But when you can understand this very basic idea that your thoughts create your feelings, your feelings drive your actions, and your actions create your life experience, everything can change for you. Everything can change for you. When you're going through a divorce or living the post-divorce life, sometimes it feels like you're on emotional roller coaster, right? I remember feeling this when I was going through my divorce. And I'm my my ex and I, you know, when we were going through a divorce, we got along really well for the most part. Like our divorce was really easy. We just had my lawyer and we divided everything. And we lived in the same house for like a year, and then we got divorced, and then he stayed for another six months until he moved out. Like, we got along pretty well. And I still remember really being on that emotional roller coaster. One minute I'm fine, the next minute I'm overwhelmed, the next minute I'm numb, then I'm furious, then I'm confused, then I'm lonely, then I'm sad, then I'm happy, and then I'm okay again, and then I'm fine, and back and forth and up and down. And the emotional roller coaster just was like constant. And this happens with so many, like the majority of the women that I coach as well. You might be dealing with like blaming your emotions on all the things that are happening outside of you, on your ex because he's showing up and he is such a freaking asshole, right? We know that they can act like that. We know that they are. Or maybe your divorce is really challenging, or maybe your judge just isn't listening and isn't taking anything that you say or, you know, submit to the court into consideration. Or maybe it's the parenting schedule that you're really struggling with, or maybe you're really struggling like as a parent right now with your kids and dealing with what that what's they're throwing at you and what what's going on for them and what's going on for you, or maybe you're really struggling with money, or literally like throw in any other thing that could possibly happen in your divorce. And you might be blaming your emotions and the things that you're dealing with and feeling on all of that stuff that's going on for you. You might be avoiding feeling negative emotion. And maybe you have been doing this for a very long time. I know for me, that was what I was doing. I was like checking out. I was numb. I did not want to feel it. I would tell myself, this is too hard. I don't want to feel this, this is too heavy, this is too exhausting, I'm I'm done. I I can't do this anymore. I don't want to do this anymore. Like that is like avoidance 101 when it comes to emotions, right? Or maybe you're distracting yourself. Maybe you distract yourself by overeating or overworking, or maybe you over-exercise or like work out too much, or maybe you just jump right into the next new relationship that's out there, and then the next one, and then the next one. Or maybe it's like doom scrolling or just numbing out with Netflix, or anything that helps you feel temporarily better in the moment to distract yourself from what might be actually happening emotionally inside your body, right? Maybe you're going apathetic, maybe you're just like shutting down, going numb, pretending you don't feel anything at all, which is really common when we go through challenging things like a divorce. Or maybe you're like acting out, right? Maybe you're like, maybe you're a fight, like when it gets to fight or flight. Maybe you're a fight, maybe you're a fighter, maybe you you argue, you yell, you scream, you text back terrible words and things immediately off of the reaction of what they sent you. Maybe you throw things, maybe you slam doors, maybe you do the silent treatment. I don't know. But these are very common ways that we've been taught to deal with the emotions that we're feeling, the negative emotions typically that we're feeling when we go through a divorce. I mean, we do these at the rest of all the other times of our lives as well, right? But because we're going through a divorce right now, this is typically how we will show up. And I want you to hear me when I say this. Of course you're doing this. Of course you are. Listen, going back to what I said at the uh a few minutes ago, you were never taught what emotions actually are or how to feel them or how to live with them and not be afraid of them. Nobody taught you that. So that's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna teach you how to do that. And we're first just gonna validate that it makes sense that you've shown up in all these other ways, and we're not gonna beat ourselves up for that. We only know what we only know, right? And so if you've been showing up in this way, we're gonna love you through this. We're gonna not beat that person up, we're gonna not beat up that version of you, and we're just going to try and learn and do a little bit better and slowly get into this new remedy of learning how to be with your emotions. Okay? Because I know what you were taught because I was taught it also. I was taught don't cry, be strong, get over it, just stay busy, move on already. Don't you think it's time already? Don't you think enough time has passed? Don't be so emotional. Why are you being so emotional about this, right? Like when we grow up and we are taught that, no wonder when we go through something really challenging, like a divorce, we feel very overwhelmed by those negative emotions. So here's what I want you to remember. And you can start right here. I'm gonna get into some more remedies and more tools to help you. But if you're starting to feel really overwhelmed by all of the emotions and the emotional roller coaster that you're feeling, start here. You can say these things to yourself. Nothing has gone wrong when I feel a negative emotion. Nothing has gone wrong when I feel negative emotion. It's a very human thing that we do, which is feel negative emotion, and nothing has gone wrong. You are not broken, you are not weak, and you are not failing. You are a human with a nervous system doing its best to protect you. Okay? That's all that's happening when we feel a negative emotion. Okay, so feeling negative emotions is not the problem, but resisting them is, or reacting to them or avoiding them. Those that's when things start to turn into a problem when we do that to ourselves, because we're not supporting ourselves or helping ourselves in any way when we do that. Now, I'm not asking you to be perfect. I know that you're still probably going to resist them and avoid them and react to them. I do. We all do, but we can get better in the moments of learning how to deal with them and learning how to support ourselves through them, through actually processing through them. Okay. Because so many women think that they're feeling their emotions when what they're actually doing is thinking about their emotions or thinking thoughts and then saying, I feel. Because how many times have we heard someone say, Well, I feel dot dot dot and I feel dot dot dot. And it goes into like a big long sentence of something, right? What they're trying to say is, but those are my feelings, and that's that's what's going on for me. What they're actually describing our thoughts. A feeling or an emotion, those two words are interchangeable, is actually like a one-word descriptor. Like sad, happy, joyful, peaceful, angry, frustrated, lonely, anxious, those are feelings, those are emotions. So if you hear yourself saying something like, Well, I feel like everything is falling apart, or I feel like this shouldn't be happening to me, or I feel like my ex ruined my life, those are not feelings. Those are thoughts. Those thoughts create a feeling inside of you, perhaps sadness or anger or anxiety or loneliness or frustration or disappointment or rejection. But when you say something like, I feel like everything is falling apart, we get confused because we're like, but I feel this way. Yeah, I think about the, I think this thought, like I feel like he ruined my life, or I feel like he hurt my feelings or whatever. And then inside our body, we feel the sensations and vibrations that our brain releases chemicals from, from that thought, and we feel something. We feel sad, we feel rejected, we feel disappointed. Okay, that's the difference. And I really want you to understand the distinction between the thoughts and actual feelings. Because when you don't know what a feeling or an emotion actually is, it becomes like completely impossible to process through it because you're like, well, how do I process through I feel like everything is falling apart? You can't, because it's impossible to process through that idea. What would that even look like, or what would that even mean? But if you think I feel like everything is falling apart, and that makes me really anxious or really scared or really worried, okay, we can work with scared, anxious, and worried. We can process through those. And so when we talk about like being able to emotionally detach from your divorce, I don't mean like just being able to like cut it off, numb it off, shut it down, pretend like your divorce doesn't bother you, or you're totally fine, or you're totally healed, or you didn't feel anything, or you've already moved on. Like I'm not talking about that's not what I mean by healthy emotional detachment from your divorce. What I actually mean when I say that is you are going to stop giving your ex control over how you feel, over your emotional life. You're gonna stop attributing your feelings to things that are outside of you that are going on, like the court date or how long it's taking, or how your kid showed up when he came home from his dad's last weekend. You're gonna learn how to allow your emotions to move through your body instead of staying stuck in your head and spinning and ruminating on those thoughts. You're gonna learn to take responsibility for your inner emotional world. And this is really important because what this is gonna do is it's gonna, this is gonna help you step out of victim mode and into emotional maturity and into emotional power over your own life. So if you're feeling stuck right now, it could be because of one of these two reasons. It could be because of something else, but I'm gonna give you two reasons, see if either of these fit, okay? So if you're feeling stuck, it might be because you think that your emotions are caused by external events, like, oh, my ex just makes me so mad, or this divorce is making me bitter, or the schedule sucks and it is making me miserable. I hate missing out on my kids, or Thanksgiving was ruined. Because I was all alone. No kids, no family, nothing. And when you believe that your feelings are created or are caused from something outside of you, you become powerless because you have to wait for that thing outside of you to change to be able to feel better. And in some cases, you might have to wait forever for that to happen, right? That sucks. That sucks. So we're not gonna do that to ourselves. We're not gonna wait anymore for everything outside of you to change so that you can emotionally be in charge of your own life and feel better. And the good news is you don't have to. You really don't have to. Okay, and then let's get back to this thing that I was talking about a minute ago. I kind of got off track there for a second. But another reason why you might be feeling stuck is you might think that your emotions are too big or they're too painful or they're too exhausting, or they just are too much and you can't handle it. And so you avoid them or you run from them or you drown in them. You can't get out of it. And you feel like if I feel one more thing, I don't know how I'm gonna ever be able to like get out of this hole of feeling all of these negative emotions, right? Or you beat yourself up for having felt them at all, or not being able to support yourself through it. But again, going back to this idea of like nothing has gone wrong when we feel negative emotion, nothing is wrong with you when we feel things deeply. Divorce is a big thing in your life. It's a big deal for most of the people who go through a divorce. And if you feel it deeply, and if you feel like you're on an emotional roller roller coaster throughout the whole thing, nothing has gone wrong. There's nothing wrong with you. It's part of the experience, but it doesn't mean that it has to take you out or take you down. It doesn't mean you're not strong enough. It doesn't mean any of that. Your emotions are a normal part of the human experience. And your system is truly responding exactly as we as humans were built to respond. So, how do we support ourselves through this emotional detachment in a healthy way, through being able to process and feel and allow these emotions to be a part of our lives? These are two skills that I'm sure I've talked about in the podcast. I teach to my clients when necessary, that I use in my own life. But the first skill that I really want you to know about is being able to take responsibility for your own emotional life without blaming your circumstances for everything you're feeling. And I want to be really clear about this. And I kind of mentioned this at the beginning that I would talk about this later. But this gets very misunderstood. And often when we talk about emotional responsibility, we it will end up being like weaponized against what I'm talking about, or against we use it against ourselves. Okay. Taking responsibility for your emotional life, it does not mean that you are to blame or that you caused the circumstances that you find yourself living in, or the circumstances that like are surround your life. Taking emotional responsibility does not mean that you are to blame for your divorce, for your ex's behavior, if you were abused, for the legal system, for your financial realities, for any trauma that you've experienced in your past or that you're experiencing now. It does not mean that you are to blame for societal pressures, for the system that we live in, for racial injustice, for systems that have been set up to work against minorities, systems that have been set up to work against women, systems that have been set up to work against lower income people. Like you didn't create that. You are not to blame for that. You didn't create those obstacles that you're up against. And that is not what I'm saying. I am not saying that things don't happen to you, that people aren't crappy to you. That is not at all what I want you to take away from this. Because there are absolutely things outside of your control that affect you, like your ex's choices and his emotional maturity, the custody schedule, the legal system that often can feel very unfair, or your kids' reactions, job loss or income shifts, cultural expectations of what is expected of us of mothers and of wives, patriarchal conditioning, religious messaging, housing costs. These things are real. These things matter. They do have impact on you. And you are not imagining that they make things heavier for you or harder for you or more complicated or unfair even. Right? And so when I say that you are responsible for your emotional life, I am not saying you caused this, you should have prevented this, this is your fault. If you are better at your thoughts, your life just wouldn't be as hard. Like I absolutely am not saying that. And that distinction is where all of the power lies. You cannot control people, you cannot control systems, you cannot control society or your ex or the court rulings or the past. You cannot control that December hits different now or that how other people treat you, or if your ex follows the parenting plan, but you can learn how to recognize the thoughts that your brain produces in response to these things. You can learn how those thoughts create your emotional temperature. And you can choose, little by little, how to respond, how to support yourself, and how to regulate your emotional world. This is not bypassing emotions, this is not pretending everything's fine. This is not gaslighting yourself into like toxic positivity or positive vibes only. What this is is actually the opposite because what you're saying to yourself is, yeah, life is handing me some fucking shitty stuff. It's hard, it's unfair, it's out of my control in a lot of ways. And I am still allowed to take back control of my emotional agency and what my emotional life looks like. Owning your emotional life, it is an act of power, not an act of blame, not an act of shame. Because when you can understand that your emotions are not being controlled by anything outside of you, your ex, your past, the courts, your soon-to-be ex-mother-in-law or society, that's when you start to feel like you are actually in control of your life and you stop feeling stuck. This is emotional responsibility, this is emotional safety, this is emotional power, and it is fucking awesome. And I want you to have it. I want you to step into it. So, what do we do? We have to learn how to process through our emotions. You have to learn how to actually feel your emotions and how to actually be with them and not spin about it in your head. And so, again, just like with skill number one that I talked about, let me clear up a common misunderstanding when it comes to actually feeling your emotions. Feeling your feelings does not mean you're excusing how someone treated you or you're saying it's fine that they abused me for 25 years of my marriage. No, that isn't what feeling your feelings means. It doesn't mean that you're fine accepting unfair treatment. It doesn't mean that you are agreeing that what happened to you is fine and that it wasn't a big deal. It doesn't mean any of that. It also doesn't mean that you're just fine with the circumstances that are happening to you. And it doesn't mean that you're just gonna let it go even before you're ready. Okay. Feeling your feelings, processing through your emotions, just means that you are going to stop fighting the internal experience that you're having when it comes to feeling negative emotions. Because your emotions, they are not the enemy. They are not your enemy. They are a part of you. And when we can just allow them and feel them and process through them, that's when everything is going to change for your life because you'll be able to let go, move forward, feel, allow, and everything opens up in terms of reconnection to yourself, rebuilding relationships with you and with others, and in and in creating a foundation of safety and security for you from the inside out. And actual emotional processing is actually much simpler and far less dramatic than you might have heard, or you might have been thinking, or you might have been told. It's body-based, not mental-based, body-based. Okay. So it can sound like, oh, what am I actually feeling right now in this moment? So I was just reading this article, and they were talking about an MRI study, which is a magnetic resonance imaging machine where you kind of lay down, and they had people go in the machine, the MRI with electrodes stuck onto their head. This was this was a study that they were doing. And they watched the way different parts of the brain lit up with affect labeling, which is basically, which basically just means naming the emotion, naming what you're feeling. So literally just naming how they were feeling, like sad, anxious, worry, frustrated, anger, whatever, whatever they were feeling, literally just naming it, calmed them at the level of the brain, like this was what was lighting up in the MRI. Isn't that fascinating? So just knowing that, that little bit of information of like asking yourself, what am I feeling right now? And then naming it is already going to help calm down the intensity of whatever it is that you are feeling. And this is scientifically proven. So we start there. We ask, what am I feeling in this moment? And then we name it. One word emotion, name it. And then what do we do? We say, where is this showing up in my body? Is it in my stomach? Is it in my throat? Is it in my neck? In my head, in my heart, in my arms? Is it tight? Is it hot? Is it heavy? Is it fast? Is it buzzing? Is it stuck? Is it tingly? Is it moving? Is it s getting bigger? Is it getting smaller? Is it cold? Is it hot? Like, describe it. Describe it. And then what if you just allowed that sensation to be present for just a couple minutes? Maybe not even minutes, maybe moments, maybe seconds. What if we just sat with it? What would that look like? What would that feel like? That is how you process through emotions. That's how we get better at it. That's how we get better at allowing our emotions to be present inside of us. Because even if you do this for like 10 seconds, I promise you, you are going to notice that the emotion is going to soften, the intensity is going to soften, it's going to wane wax and wane, wane, go away. I don't really know the difference between the wax and the wane, but it's, I promise you, you're going to notice that the intensity will lessen. And the more you do this, the less scary it is, the less scary it feels. The more willing you are to accept when negative emotion hits and go, I got this. I can do this. I can feel some sadness. I can feel some grief. I can feel some anger. I can feel some happiness, even. Like we do this with positive emotions too, sometimes, but it's much, it feels much scarier with negative emotions, right? So that's what I'm asking you to do, is I'm asking you to just try this out for a couple of seconds, a day, a week, whatever you feel like you're able to do and give yourself right now. And just let your capacity grow. Let your nervous system regulation show up for you. Support yourself through it. Because the more capacity you can build in terms of allowing and processing through your emotions, the better off you're going to be because you will start going to this remedy and this tool over your old habitual ways, which is resisting and reacting and avoiding, right? We're just building more capacity, more capacity for you. And then you don't have to be so afraid of your emotions. And you don't have to be so afraid of what's going to happen next week in the divorce or at the mediation or when you guys separate and move into different homes, or when your kid comes home and they're upset because they were with dad all week. Right? You're learning these tools to support yourself through it. So ask yourself, what am I feeling? Name it, and then say, what am I noticing in my body? That's it. You don't have to solve it, you don't have to fix it, you don't have to chase it away, you don't have to hide from it, you don't have to judge it. You just have to start noticing it. Take ownership of it. Take ownership of your emotional life. You've got this. You can do this. I promise you, you have all the tools that you need to do it within you. Okay? I just gave you a little bit of direction to help you through it. All right, my friends, that is what I have for you today. I know this is a little bit longer podcast. I apologize for that, but hopefully it will be a very powerful one for you. I love you so, so much. You are incredible. You are amazing. You are stronger than you believe. You are more capable than you think. You've got this. Thank you for being here. I will be back next week. Hi, friend. I'm so glad you're here and thanks for listening. 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 KarIn Nelsoncoaching.com. That's www.k-ar-in-n. N-E-L-S-O-N coaching.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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Karin Nelson

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