Counseling for Women After Divorce

You’ve Lost You…

You’ve built an impressive life, with a career you worked hard for, an advanced degree, close friendships, and kids who are doing well. You’re the one people call when they need advice, and you’ve spent years being the person who has it together.

So, it makes sense that divorce feels like your first real “failure.”

Maybe you’re the one who ended it. You spent months, maybe years, deciding, and now that it’s done, you’re surprised by how bad you feel. You expected relief, and some days there is relief, followed immediately by guilt for feeling it, and almost no one checks on the woman who filed. Or maybe the decision was made without you, and you’re still replaying the moment you found out, wondering how the person who reads every room at work missed what was happening in her own house.

Either way, the woman you were before this marriage feels like a distant relative now, someone who looks a bit like you but whose life you can barely remember living.

You’re used to solving problems. You’ve handled layoffs, sick parents, kids’ emergencies at 2am, and you’ve handled them well. But none of your usual methods work on grief, or on the anger that arrives out of nowhere, at your ex, at the wasted years, at starting over at an age when you expected to be settled.

The divorce podcasts and co-parenting books you’ve consumed with your usual thoroughness haven’t helped much with the grief or anger, and as cliché as the question feels, you keep asking it: who even am I anymore?

Post-Divorce, Life Looks Like This…

• It’s a weekend, the kids are with your ex, and you’re feeling like the only person in the world. Even the dog is uninterested (you glare at him sideways, but he’s napping and blissfully unaware). Unsure what to do with a whole empty Saturday, you pull up another mindless show and settle in, hoping distraction gets you to bedtime.

• In a moment of inspiration, you scroll your contacts looking for someone to call, and you call no one. So many of them are shared friends from the marriage, and the few who are clearly yours have heard enough about your misery, or so you’ve decided on their behalf. You toss the phone on the couch.

• It’s 2:14am and you’re wide awake, re-arguing a fight from 2019 and finally delivering the closing argument you never got to make. You can see tomorrow getting worse by the minute, and you keep arguing anyway.

• You’re fine all day, and then one detail sets you off: the new apartment, the tone in a scheduling text. You type a long message you will never send, delete it, and spend the next hour composing better versions in your head.

• The to-do list that used to belong to two people is now entirely yours, and tonight it came out as yelling at your kids over shoes in the hallway. The guilt arrived before they’d left the room: how can I add to what they’re already going through?

• Your kid wants to know why everything has to change, and instead of an answer that helps them feel secure, you stumble through “that’s for the adults to worry about,” realizing as they walk away that you dismissed them, which is the opposite of what you wanted.

• At work, you’re distracted. Someone asked for your opinion in a meeting and caught you mid-calculation about getting one kid to practice and the other to dance at the same time. You used to be the sharpest person in that room, and you want her back.

• Or, maybe there are no kids in this picture, and the house is simply too quiet at 7pm. You land from a work trip and there’s no one waiting for the “just landed” text, so you eat dinner standing at the counter, because setting the table for one feels worse than not setting it at all.