In this episode of the "Stronger in the Difficult Places" podcast, Dr. Zoe Shaw speaks directly to women navigating challenging relationships, including the relationship with themselves. She frames the conversation through the lenses of psychology, faith, and a feminist perspective, emphasizing personal empowerment rather than fixing the other person. After sharing recent personal wins—a forthcoming OWN miniseries, the release of her new book, and discovering a convenient LA‑San Diego train—and a personal fail involving her mother’s surgery, she explains how writing serves as her therapy and the catalyst for this episode’s topic. Dr. Shaw reflects on the two‑year anniversary of her divorce and uses that milestone to outline three core lessons she continues to practice: (1) self‑regulation before seeking co‑regulation, with concrete steps of naming feelings, moving the body, and writing; (2) recognizing that being alone is not the same as feeling lonely, and learning to cherish solitude; and (3) establishing boundaries as a form of freedom rather than rejection, which protects the self and invites authentic connection. Throughout, she interweaves personal anecdotes, practical advice, and encouragement, concluding with a reminder of the podcast’s weekly release schedule and an invitation to join her email list for ongoing support.
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This is not a podcast about being broken, although you may have been. This is a podcast about strength for women who find themselves in difficult relationships, including that sometimes difficult one with yourself. We'll look at your relationship through a lens of psychology, faith, and a little dash of my own kind of feminism. We're not fixing them. We're fixing you. And that changes everything. Welcome to Stronger in the Difficult Places. Save yourself, heal your relationships. Listen in. Hello, welcome to Stronger in the Difficult Places. I'm your host, Dr. Zoe. I think that's already said in the intro, but today I'm going to be sharing 3 things my divorce has taught me about codependency. But first, my win and my fail. My win is that I saw the trailer of the miniseries documentary that's going to be coming out. September 27th on OWN, Oprah Winfrey Network. I'm not sure how to feel about it. Definitely is a little bit of a trigger. It's me telling my story, but I'm excited. We filmed that last year. It's finally coming out. That's definitely a win. And the beautiful win is that it's coming out around the same time as my book, literally 3 days before my book. Now it's 6 episodes. I'm not— one, only one of the episodes is me. And I'm not sure which episode is mine, but it will be on OWN starting September 27th, around the same time that my book comes out, which is September 30th. So I couldn't have planned that better. It's a win. My other win is I have lived in LA for over 30 years, and I did not know about the San Diego train that takes you straight from LA to San Diego. We got on it last weekend, had a blast in San Diego, and I don't think I'm going to go to San Diego any other way after this because there's a lot of traffic from LA to San Diego. It can be a lot. both ways, especially on weekends, because everybody's trying to get down there and come back. The train was just so relaxing. You could just sit there, you could do work, you can just relax and watch the train pass all the traffic, and it was just wonderful. So that's my win, is figuring out the train to San Diego. My fail is my mom got surgery last week, and my sister and I both happened to be out of town when she got surgery. Obviously, I live on the other coast, so I'm always out of town. My sister was out of town as well. We both really thought that it was going to be a little thing, but it turned out to be a bigger thing. And she had her husband and he's taken good care of her. But in retrospect, I wish I had gone to stay with her when she had her surgery. It was bigger than we thought. She's recovering well. She's doing okay. But as a daughter, I feel like I should have been there. And if I had to do it over again, I would do that. I really feel like that was a fail. I should— I should have been there. My sister felt the same way. So both of us were like, ooh, we didn't know it was going to be this big of a surgery or we would've made plans to be there. But mom's doing great. I'm talking to her every day and she's recovering. But yeah, it's a fail. I don't, you know, the do differently is just maybe ask more questions. And for me now, it's just if my mom's having a procedure done, she's going into the hospital, I'm gonna be there. That's just, that's my rule. Okay. So you guys know, I am a writer. I write to express myself. I write for my own therapy. I write to help other people. All 3 of those reasons are why I am a writer. And of course, why I'm now an author. And so I sat down one morning and I wrote this article. I don't know what you would call it. And I titled it 3 Things My Divorce Taught Me About Codependency. And you know that I'm all about helping people untangle codependency. Helping people untangle complex shame. And so I wanted to share this with you. What do you even call a divorce anniversary? There really should be a name for it because people don't typically celebrate these things. And I'm certainly not planning to, but the date is coming up. 2 years. Actually, it was 2 years a couple of weeks ago. And as much as I don't want to honor it, I can't ignore it either. It carries weight. It marks something. This date actually asks to be noticed. And I didn't think it would ask to be noticed. And here's the interesting thing. When I wrote this, I was a couple of weeks away from the anniversary, but the anniversary actually passed and I didn't realize it until I sat down to read this. And so I didn't mark it in the way that I thought I would. I forgot about it. But before the anniversary, I thought about it and I wrote this. I'm supposed to be working on my 3rd book right now, and no, it's not about divorce. So it feels a little bit like I'm cheating on my manuscript every time I sit down and this is what flows out of me instead. But I've learned not to fight what wants to be written. I don't always choose what pours out of me when I open my laptop, unless of course there's a looming deadline, then I'm definitely being intentional. But writing often writes me, and the beautiful thing about that My therapy, my healing tends to become someone else's too, and that's what makes a detour like this worth it. So here I am sitting with this fast approaching date. Like most anniversaries, it's brought with it a flood of reflection. Have I grown? What have I actually learned? Am I repeating old patterns? The vulnerable answer is sometimes. I talk a lot about codependency and complex shame, professionally and personally. They're more than just topics I explore. They've been my lived experience. I've studied them, named them, and helped others walk through them. But nothing teaches you quite like your own heartbreak. And as I navigate a new relationship, I find myself bumping up against the same old places, those familiar inner tugs. I catch myself spiraling and analyzing and dissecting every feeling, every silence, every shift in tone. And that's the hazard of doing this work for a living. You can't always turn it off. Actually, I never turn it off. But if I've learned anything in the last 2 years, it's this: I can grow. I have grown. And I'm learning to hold my wisdom with gentleness, not perfectionism. My relationship with my ex-husband started when I was just 18, long before I understood anything about codependency or had even coined the term complex shame. There were mistakes on both sides, and I've made peace with that. But now, in this next chapter, I'm doing my best to show up differently. Not perfectly, just differently. If you've ever stepped into a new relationship after coming out of a dysfunctional one, You know, the overwhelming desire to get it right. You wanna bring all your therapy and books and hard-earned clarity to the table and say, see, I've done the work. But real-life love isn't a laboratory. It's messy and it's human and it's beautiful. And we all show up with history. Can we just retire that word baggage, please? So as I sit with this 2-year milestone, I wanna share these 3 truths divorce has taught me about codependency. And these are lessons I'm still practicing because healing isn't a one-time thing. It's a daily walk. It's a maintenance. And if you're walking it too, I hope that this encourages you. One, I have to self-regulate before I co-regulate. I didn't realize it at the time, but early in my marriage, even in our most tumultuous seasons, I constantly sought co-regulation. If my husband was calm, I could breathe. If he reassured me, I could relax. When he didn't, which became more and more common, I spiraled. And back then, I didn't know how to self-regulate, so I'd either let the anxiety burn itself out, leaving me emotionally scorched, or I'd keep pressing for some external reassurance until I could settle. This is what codependency looks like on the ground. When your internal stability depends entirely on someone else's, Emotional state. Now I'm learning a new way. In my current relationship, I make a conscious effort not to seek co-regulation until I've done the work to regulate myself. Co-regulation is a beautiful, necessary part of a healthy interdependent relationship, but only after you've done your part. The danger comes when we skip that first step and make someone else responsible for our calm. So what does co-regulation actually look like? So here's how I practice it. I name the feeling. I don't say something vague like, oh, I feel off. I get specific. What am I feeling? I give myself grace for the feeling. I do not allow shame. A feeling matters. It's there for a reason. It just is. And then I move my body. I walk, I stretch, I dance, I cry. And then I write it out, the messy truth, the thing that maybe I'm scared to say. And I separate what's present from what's a past trigger. I remind myself I cannot change the past, but I can stop reliving it, right? I give up all hope of a better past. That's my mantra. And I say to myself also, I am not too much. I'm not too sensitive. My feelings matter. Once I've found my footing, I speak my truth most often to my partner, but sometimes to a trusted friend. You guys all know my best friend, Rosie, and I allow space for healthy co-regulation. Only after I've done that work, then I come and I talk and I speak my truth to whoever I need to speak my truth to. And I allow that space for healthy co-regulation, and I seek out people that that are trustworthy, who have earned that right to hear my story. This is how we stop outsourcing our emotional survival. This is how we heal. Number 2, I've learned that alone is not the same as lonely. I knew that my divorce would mean the end of my built-in plus one. My children will grow up and eventually they'll leave home and it'll be just me. And I feared that in a deep primal way, maybe because I married at 19 and I never really lived alone. And if you've never really been alone, it's easy to believe that being alone is dangerous. Society sends us that message every day, whether subtle or not so subtle. We might believe that alone equals failure, that alone equals emptiness, but that's a lie. Today, I'm sitting in my backyard on a lounge chair, listening to the waterfall I recently figured out how to turn up all by myself, a small triumph, but a triumph still. I am alone, and it is lovely. Sometimes it's even marvelous, not always, but more often than I expected. And when it's not lovely or marvelous, it's still peaceful. Being alone and feeling lonely are 2 very different things. I rarely feel lonely anymore. I have my thoughts, my journal, my breath. I have friends who are just a phone call away, and most importantly, I have me. I've learned that when you're rooted in your own presence, solitude becomes sacred. And when you've spent years abandoning yourself to care for others, reclaiming your own company can feel revolutionary. So if you're afraid of being alone, I want you to know it's not as scary as it seems, and you are stronger than your loneliness. Number 3, boundaries give me freedom. So let's talk about boundaries. If you struggle with codependency and shame, then boundaries probably feel like a foreign language, or worse, they feel like betrayal. When you've spent your life keeping the peace and tending to everyone else's emotions, The idea of saying no, or I can't, or this doesn't work for me feels dangerous. You worry, what if they leave? What if they think I'm too much? What if I'm just being difficult? These are the shame scripts that play in the background for many of us. They're sneaky and they're powerful. But here's the truth: boundaries aren't rejection, they're protection. They're not walls. They're doors with handles, handles that you control, and they don't push people away. They invite the right people in. When I started creating boundaries in my marriage, it was the beginning of the end, and it needed to be because a relationship that only works when you betray yourself to maintain it isn't actually working. Since then, I haven't stopped setting boundaries. It's been messy. It's been hard, but it's also been the most freeing thing I've ever done. Boundaries gave me back me. They allowed me to show up fully without shape-shifting or shrinking to keep the peace. The best part? When someone loves you within the boundaries you've set, you can trust that they are loving the real you, not the version of you you've edited to be palatable or pleasing. But the true, whole, untamed version of you. That is freedom. That is healing. And that is what you deserve. These past 2 years have stretched me. They've broken me. They've healed me. And they've taught me this: I don't have to lose myself in love. I don't have to be afraid of being alone. And I don't have to silence myself to keep the peace. If you're walking through the rubble of a relationship or you're stepping into a new one with shaky, trembling legs and a hopeful heart, know that you're not alone, you're not broken, and you're not too much. You're learning how to live from the inside out, and that, my friend, is absolutely everything. You've got this. Thank you for listening to Stronger in the Difficult Places. New episodes go up on Tuesdays. Subscribe to my email list so that you can get some encouragement from me and have a strong week. See you next week.
