From Rumination To Real Healing

Ever feel like your brain won’t stop replaying the divorce story while your heart is begging for some peace? I'm talking about the difference between rumination and actual emotional processing, and why staying in your head keeps you in the emotional pain loop. Instead of rehashing texts and rewriting the past, I'll guide you back into your body (which is where your feelings actually live) so grief, anger, and sadness can move through instead of turning into exhaustion. No perfection required for this healing tool because small acts of practice create capacity and growth.

We also draw a sharp line between reflection and spiraling. Reflection extracts lessons and next steps; spiraling feeds old stories and steals energy. You’ll leave with steps to identify the emotion you're avoiding, a tiny micro-practice to ride the emotional wave without fueling it, and language to treat yourself like a human instead of a project. Divorce brings a roller coaster of feelings, but you don’t have to be dragged by every loop. With skill, compassion, and a few seconds of brave attention, you can move from stuck to steady.

If this resonates, follow the show, share it with a friend who needs it, and leave a quick rating or review. Want deeper support? Learn about one-on-one coaching at KarinNelsonCoaching.com and take the next step toward a calmer, clearer you.

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Transcript

Welcome And Core Problem

Karin Nelson 0:00

You're listening to episode number 258 of Becoming You Again, 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. You are amazing. I love you. I'm so happy that you are back listening to another episode. So let's jump right in because I think this one is going to be super useful, super helpful to any of you that are out there listening. Because I hear all the time from my clients and from other women who message me on social media and they will say things like, I'm just so tired of processing my emotions during my divorce. I'm feeling all of these negative emotions all the time during this divorce, and it's so exhausting. I've been processing the emotions of this divorce. Why isn't it working? Why can't I just move forward? And typically, I have to say, well, it's because you're not actually processing your emotions. What you are calling processing is actually rumination. You're actually just spinning in your thoughts about your divorce or about your ex or about your kids or about what's going on right now in your life. What actually is going on is you are resisting, feeling the feelings, feeling the emotions. You're not processing through any of them. And that's why you feel stuck. And that's why you feel emotionally overwhelmed or dissociated because you don't want to feel what actually is happening in your body. And the problem is like, this isn't your fault. Let's just, let's just validate where this is coming from. Nobody teaches us how to sit with our emotions. No one teaches that as like a class in school of like, okay, this is how we sit in our emotions. And this is what it means when we're ruminating in our brains, right? Nobody teaches us that. What we think is sitting with, and I'm going to put that in quotes. What we think sitting with our emotions, like, well, I've just been sitting with the anger, or I've been sitting with the sadness, or I've been sitting with the uncertainty or the loneliness or the whatever of my divorce. But what's actually going on is you're just lying awake at night, replaying all of the terrible moments that you had in your divorce, which is making you feel angry. Or you're driving in your car and you're obsessing over the text that your ex sent you, telling you how selfish you are and what a terrible mother you are, which is making you feel sad or rejected. That's not actually feeling and processing through the sadness, through the anger, through the rejection, through any emotion that you're feeling. All that is is ruminating and spinning in the thoughts and replaying the events and adding proof to the already believed story that you have about your divorce or that you have about your ex or your kids or yourself or what you thought your life was gonna be like after divorce. All you're doing is staying in your head and in the story and spinning in it. Your feelings, your emotions, I'm gonna say each of those words because they are interchangeable. Feelings and emotions, they mean the same thing. They happen in your body. It's like the tightness in your chest and the heat rising in your cheeks when you feel that flash of anger. It's the sting behind your eyes and the catch in your throat when you feel sad. It's the way you curl up in a ball with the release of tears and sounds coming out of your mouth and the muscle movements when you feel immense grief. And the thing is, thinking about our feelings, that's happening in our head. And those thoughts, the story, the rumination about our situation, and about our feelings, even about the anger, about the sadness, about the rejection, those thoughts continue to create the feelings that we're having in our body. When we open ourselves up to actually processing and actually sitting in and actually feeling our feelings or feeling our emotions, those are going to move through us. But when we stay in our head and in the story, that story is just going to continue to circle and spin like that little buffering circle on our computer when our computer is thinking. It's the same thing. And so we get confused and we're like, why can't I move through this? Why haven't I been able to move on? Why can't I let go of this? Why do I still feel so sad? Why do I still feel so angry? Why do I still feel any of those things, right? It's because you're not actually feeling the feelings. You're spinning in the thoughts, you're ruminating in your head. There is a difference between being able to reflect on what's happened and take the lessons from it that you want, and spiraling about what went wrong or what should or shouldn't be happening at this point in time. And the problem is that because nobody teaches us the difference, nobody teaches us how to actually sit with and process through our emotions and our bodies that we get confused. We get confused by thoughts versus feelings. And so when we notice that we're having a feeling that's happening in our body because the emotions are flowing through us, it feels really uncomfortable. And we get scared. And so we tighten up because we're like, I don't want to feel that. That doesn't feel good. And we resist allowing ourselves to sit in the feeling. But the thing is, is that's actually what we need to do to be able to move through it, to be able to let go of that feeling, to be able to process through that feeling. We have to sit with it. We have to get out of our head and get into our body. And again, because nobody teaches us how to do this, especially as we're going through a divorce, we're going through something challenging in our life, we feel all of these negative, heavy emotions, and they feel negative and they feel scary and they feel heavy because we don't allow ourselves to actually sit in them. So we're scared of them. And it seems to be happening all the time, especially when we're going through a divorce, right? It's like this divorce emotional roller coaster that's just from one to the other to the other to the other. And we think, ah, I've been sitting with these emotions for so long, and I'm so tired. Why haven't I gotten past this yet? Why haven't I been able to move on? Why aren't things more peaceful yet? And then we shame ourselves and we judge ourselves, which adds another layer of emotional burden and emotional overwhelm and emotional exhaustion on top of the layer of sadness and anger and grief and rejection and frustration, et cetera, et cetera. And it feels terrible and we feel stuck and we don't know what to do about it. So what do we do? How do we unstick ourselves from the rumination and the spinning and the self-judgment of not having moved on yet, of still feeling like we're in the same place that we were six months ago or two months ago or a year ago, right? Well, we have to start first with the shame piece or the self-judgment piece. Because that shame and that self-judgment and that guilt, whatever's coming up, that is actually blocking us from being able to take a look at the baseline emotions that you're feeling. That the ones that are like the anger and the sadness and the grief and the whatever, right? So we have to start with the self-judgment piece first. And how do we combat self-judgment? We have to be compassionate with ourselves. We have to be kind with ourselves. So this is something that has been really useful for me lately. It's been really useful for some of my clients lately. I want you to try it on. How human of me. It's such a simple sentence, but it can do wonders for that self-judgment and that shame that you might be feeling. And you can try it, you can add it to whatever is going on for you, right? Whatever situation is happening for you that you are judging yourself for. How human of me to want to feel peace through my divorce and yet I don't. How human of me that I'm still feeling sad about the way my ex treated me during the marriage. How human of me to feel angry when my ex sends me a text. How human of me to feel upset that things don't look differently than they do right now. Try it on. See if that doesn't help lighten the self-judgment that you are piling on yourself. Because once we can lessen some of that self-judgment and that shame that you're feeling, that's going to open us up to be able to see what you are actually feeling and then get into your body and open up to it. Because by using that very simple sentence of how human of me, what you're doing is you are first you're validating that you're human, you're not perfect, you make mistakes, and it's not a problem, right? You also recognize that you're not the only one who has gone through what you're going through, and you are not the only one that will feel it, right? There will be others after you, and there's others before you, and there's others that are going through it right now, and that it's okay to not do it perfectly. That's what we are as humans. We are imperfect beings, and that is not something to judge ourselves for. We are human, and that's okay. So once we can drop the judgment, that's when we can get curious about what it is that you are actually feeling underneath the shame, underneath that judgment. And you can open up to being willing to get into your body. Ask yourself, what would I have to feel if I stopped ruminating and spinning in this story? What emotion am I avoiding feeling by staying in my thoughts? And only you will know, right? And there's probably no wrong answer, in my opinion. Because it might be anger or it might be sadness or it might be grief or fear or frustration or rejection or loneliness or something else. But once we have an answer to what you're trying to avoid, what you're trying to resist by staying in your thoughts, that's when you can open yourself up to sitting with the feeling, actually sitting with it, not spinning in your head, but getting into your body, even just for a few seconds, and feeling what you're feeling. What does sadness feel like inside my body? Where do I feel it? Where does it show up? What does it look like? And sit with it. Open up to it, breathe through it. Neuroscience shows that the physical wave of an emotion inside of our body, when we're not resisting it and we're not prolonging it with our ruminating thoughts, will typically last less than 90 seconds. That's not very long. And that doesn't have to be what you do now. Like that 90 seconds can be the goal, right? You might only be able to sit with it for 10 seconds or five seconds. But sitting with it for 10 seconds or five seconds is going to grow your capacity to be with your emotions in your body longer and longer and longer. Working up to that 90 seconds, you don't have to do this work perfectly. You just have to keep trying. And this work may feel uncomfortable at first, it may even feel scary because you've never allowed yourself to do it, because it feels so strange, odd, uncomfortable. That's okay. Nothing has gone wrong when you feel negative emotion. Nothing has gone wrong. This is work worth doing for yourself. Keep going. All right, my friends. This is a short one today, but I think so, so important. That is what I have for you. 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-ne -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.