Counseling for Women After Divorce in virgina

You’ve Lost You…

you’ve always been the capable one. so, why does divorce feel different?

You're not used to struggling. You graduated at the top of your class, built a career you're proud of, raised kids who are (mostly) thriving. When problems arise, you handle them. That's who you are.

But divorce has thrown you in ways you didn't expect.

It's not that you can't manage the logistics. You've already figured out custody schedules, divided assets, and found a new place to live. You can run a household solo. You've been doing most of it for years anyway.

What you can't seem to manage is how you feel. The anger that flares at unexpected moments. The sadness that hits you in the car, at the grocery store, in the middle of a meeting. The profound exhaustion that sleep doesn't fix. The unsettling sense that you don't quite know who you are anymore.

Whether you're in Richmond, Virginia Beach, or a suburb of DC, you're living some version of the same reality: going through the motions of your life while feeling like a stranger in it.

a day in your life after divorce

Morning starts with a knot in your stomach before you even open your eyes. You check your phone immediately–partly habit, partly hoping there's nothing from your ex that you'll have to deal with before coffee.

The kids need breakfast, backpacks, permission slips signed. You're short with them in ways you don't mean to be. Your 9-year-old asks why you seem mad, and you say you're not, even though you're clearly something. You drop them off and sit in the carpool line for an extra minute, gathering yourself before you have to be a functional adult at work.

At the office, you're distracted. Your job requires focus: decisions, deadlines, people depending on you, but your mind keeps drifting…to the conversation you had with your ex last week…to the look on your daughter's face when she found out about the divorce…to the stack of legal documents still sitting on your counter.

By evening, you're running on fumes. You order takeout again because the thought of cooking feels overwhelming. You help with homework, supervise bath time, read stories. Then the kids are in bed and the house goes quiet, and it hits you: this is your life now. These silent evenings. This empty space where a marriage used to be.

You pour some wine and turn on something mindless, trying not to think about how many nights have looked exactly like this one.

What you’ve already tried

You're a problem-solver by nature, so you've approached your divorce recovery like a problem to solve.

You've listened to every podcast about divorce and co-parenting and "starting over." You've ordered books from Amazon that sit half-read on your nightstand. You've downloaded meditation apps you use for three days then forget about.

You've tried to "stay positive" and "focus on gratitude" and "be present for your kids." You've told yourself this is just a season, that time heals, that you'll get through this the way you've gotten through everything else.

Maybe you've even seen a therapist; someone who let you talk and nodded in the right places but didn't actually seem to change anything. You left sessions feeling heard but not helped.

Here's what I want you to understand: the problem isn't that you're not trying hard enough or haven't found the right strategy yet. The problem is that the grief that follows divorce doesn't respond to strategies. It's not a project you can optimize. It's a fundamental disruption to your nervous system, your identity, and your sense of the future, and that requires a different kind of support than books and podcasts can offer.

how this work is different

I'm Dr. Emily Fornwalt. I work with women across Virginia who are struggling to find themselves after divorce.

I don't do surface-level therapy. We won't spend weeks recounting the story of your marriage, and I won't hand you coping techniques that work for about five minutes.

What I do is work with your nervous system directly, using approaches called AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy) and interpersonal neurobiology. That probably sounds like jargon, so let me explain what it means practically:

When you've been through something as destabilizing as divorce, your body stays in threat mode. You're constantly braced for the next conflict with your ex, the next hard conversation with your kids, the next reminder of what you've lost. This is a physiological state, not a mindset problem. And no amount of positive thinking changes your physiology.

We work with what's happening beneath your thoughts: the emotions that are hard to move, the behaviors that developed long before your marriage, the ways your nervous system learned to protect you that aren't serving you now. As those shift, everything else shifts too: your reactivity, your clarity, your capacity to handle hard things without falling apart.

I work exclusively online. Whether you're in Hampton Roads, Northern Virginia, or the Shenandoah Valley, we can work together without you having to carve out commute time you don't have.

your life can change after divorce counseling

Your emotional reactions become proportional. Right now, a mildly annoying text from your ex can ruin your whole afternoon. A small frustration with your kids can trigger a disproportionate blowup. As we work together, your responses start matching the actual size of the situation. You have more range, more flexibility, and more choice in how you react.

You stop dreading everything. The kid handoff, the email from your lawyer, the inevitable questions from relatives, these things may never be pleasant, but they stop looming over you. You handle them and move on. Your life stops feeling like one anxiety-provoking event after another.

You sleep better. Your brain stops running its late-night replay of everything painful. You wake up with actual energy instead of dragging yourself through each day.

You know what you want. Not what you should want, or what would make other people comfortable, or what sounds reasonable. What you actually want. For your career, your kids, your relationships, your future. And you trust yourself to pursue it.

You enjoy things again. It sounds simple, but when you've been in survival mode for months (or years), pleasure becomes inaccessible. As your nervous system settles, your capacity for joy returns. You laugh at things. You look forward to things. You feel like a person again, not just a shell going through motions.

You figure out who you are now. Not who you were before your marriage, and not who you became during it. A new version, one that incorporates everything you've been through and points toward what you deeply care about.