75 Words of Encouragement for Someone Going Through Divorce
Seventy-five lines for the woman going through a divorce and the friend standing beside her, grouped by where you actually are instead of where you think you should be.
Wednesday, 4:52 P.M.: Kira in the Parking Lot
Kira is 37. She’s a patent attorney. She has argued in federal court, billed more hours than she can count, and kept things moving when everything around her was trying to stop. Today she’s sitting in the parking lot of her divorce attorney’s office, and she isn’t moving at all.
It’s Wednesday, 4:52 p.m. Mediation ran long. The folder on the passenger seat holds the proposed parenting plan, tabbed and annotated in her handwriting, color-coded because that’s how she does things. She waited until his car left the lot before she let herself stay still. Now the lot is empty, and she’s just sitting here with her hands resting on the wheel. Not gripping. She notices that she has stopped gripping things.
On her left hand, her wedding ring. She moves it sometimes, finger to finger, without knowing she’s doing it. Sometimes it ends up on her right hand. Sometimes she realizes it’s been there for two days. She doesn’t know yet whether that means something. She’s thinking: I didn’t think I’d be here. And I also think I’m going to be okay. Those two things can both be true.
Kira is an illustrative example, not a real client, but that parking lot is real for a lot of women. If you’re going through a divorce, or sitting with someone who is, this collection is for the moments when your own words aren’t quite there yet. It’s organized by where you might actually be, because the first week feels nothing like month nine, and the friend who wants to help needs different language than the woman living it.
If you’re looking for words about rebuilding after loss more broadly, the uplifting quotes for hard times collection is a natural companion to this one. And if the longer work of becoming someone new is on your mind, quotes about reinventing yourself picks up where this page leaves off.
What Divorce Grief Actually Is
Before the quotes, a frame. One of the hardest things about divorce grief is that it doesn’t come with a cultural script. There’s no casserole delivery. There’s no week off work. There’s no gathering of people who hold space while you absorb what’s happened. Often, by the time the paperwork is filed, the people around you expect the hard part to be over, when for many women it’s just beginning.
A term introduced by Pauline Boss, PhD, family therapist and professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota, for a loss that stays unclear and doesn’t resolve the way a death usually does. In her framework, someone can be physically absent but psychologically present, or physically present but psychologically absent. Boss has written that divorce can carry this ambiguity, and her book Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief (Harvard University Press, 1999) includes families changed by divorce among its examples.
In plain terms: The person you’re losing is still alive, and may still be at school pickup or across the mediation table. That’s part of why this grief can feel so hard to finish. It isn’t that you’re doing grief wrong. It’s that the loss itself won’t hold still.
Boss’s work helps explain something I see often: when a loss is unclear, people tend to blame themselves for not being over it yet. The marriage is ending. The future you planned is changing shape. And the person is still there, sometimes in the same kitchen on handoff days. It makes sense that the grief doesn’t move in a straight line.
A term introduced by Kenneth J. Doka, PhD, grief researcher and professor emeritus at the College of New Rochelle, for grief that isn’t openly acknowledged, publicly mourned, or socially supported. He edited the book that named it, Disenfranchised Grief: Recognizing Hidden Sorrow (Lexington Books, 1989).
In plain terms: If you feel like you “shouldn’t” be this sad about a divorce, especially one you chose, that feeling may be coming from a culture that hasn’t made room for this kind of loss. Your grief doesn’t need anyone’s permission to be real.
The quotes in this collection are chosen with that in mind. They aren’t here to rush you, and they aren’t silver linings. In my work with women going through divorce, I’ve noticed that the right words at the right time don’t fix anything. What they do is make the experience feel less unspeakable. That’s worth something. That’s actually worth a lot.
Words for the First Week
The first week of a separation, or the first week after a decisive conversation, a signed document, or a move, lives in a register that’s hard to describe to people who haven’t been there. It isn’t exactly sadness. It’s closer to disorientation. The ordinary architecture of your life, the texts, the Sunday routines, the shared grocery list, has been quietly removed, and you don’t yet know what will replace it. The practical demands keep coming. The inside of it feels like fog.
These lines are short on silver linings on purpose. The first week doesn’t need optimism. It needs company.
“Every morning I wake up and for a few seconds I’m disoriented, confused as to why I feel grief seeping into my body, and then I remember what has become of my life.”
Ariel Levy, Staff Writer at The New Yorker, Author, The Rules Do Not Apply (2017)
“I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.”
Theodore Roethke, The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing (2010)
“There are times when you simply must trust that you have worked hard enough. It is okay to give yourself permission to take time to rest. Too much focus on growth can lead you to deplete your resources.”
Arielle Schwartz, PhD, The Post-Traumatic Growth Guidebook: Evidence-Based Strategies to Recover from Trauma and Build Resilience (2020), p. 162
“Grief is a world you walk through skinned, unshelled.”
Ariel Levy, Staff Writer at The New Yorker, Author, The Rules Do Not Apply (2017)
“Each and every day, do at least one small, simple, soft thing that feels good to your body: do yoga, watch the sun rise, dig in the garden, play your guitar, take a walk with a friend, or do anything else that brings you joy.”
Resmaa Menakem, MSW, LICSW, My Grandmother’s Hands (2017)
“Why is a reaction to loss always expected? Why can’t loss be something one mourns in private, away from everyone else?”
Costanza Casati, novelist, Clytemnestra (2023)
“We live in a culture that encourages us not to take our own suffering seriously, but rather to make light of it or even to laugh about it.”
Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self (1981)
“This bitter winter would go on forever.”
Ariel Levy, Staff Writer at The New Yorker, Author, The Rules Do Not Apply (2017)
“Healing cycles can only be opened up to, watched, and validated; they cannot be evaluated, manipulated, hurried, or changed. When they get the time and attention they need, they are able to complete their healing mission.”
Peter A. Levine, PhD, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma: The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences (1997)
“I was alternately numb and filled with searing pain. These seemed my only two states of being. I cut off all my hair, broke up with my boyfriend, quit smoking, quit drinking.”
Dani Shapiro, Author, Podcaster, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love (2019)
“The numbness began to wear off, to be replaced by a pain so intense I could neither stand nor sit.”
Pat Barker, Novelist and historian, The Silence of the Girls (2018)
“There is no right way, there is only listening to what is good and comfortable for your body.”
Chanel Miller, Artist and Author, Know My Name (2019), ch. 13
“I was a stranger to myself, adrift in the world.”
Dani Shapiro, Author, Podcaster, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love (2019)
Words for the Long Middle
Month three. Month seven. The anniversary of the day you knew. The long middle of a divorce is a different country than the first week. The shock has settled into something more like a steady, low-grade grief. The legal process is still grinding. Your friends have gone back to their lives, and you’re still in this.
These lines are for endurance. Not the sprint, but the long, unglamorous work of continuing to live while something is still ending.
“It took me a long time to learn healing is not about advancing, it is about returning repeatedly to forage something.”
Chanel Miller, Author, Artist, Know My Name (2019)
“The process of growth is not a straight line but a spiral. You’ll cycle through similar issues many times.”
Jasmin Lee Cori, MS, LPC, The Emotionally Absent Mother (2010)
“Inner wisdom is not accessible unless you have the time and solitude to listen.”
Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D., Jungian Analyst and Psychiatrist, Goddesses in Older Women: Archetypes in Women Over Fifty (2001)
“Pain does not always dissolve on its own or diminish with time.”
Mark Wolynn, Director of the Family Constellation Institute, It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle (2016)
“I began to belong more to my present than my past.”
Chanel Miller, memoirist, Know My Name (2019), ch. 11
“Many women learn that fallow periods can be healing respites that precede a surge of activity or creativity, only after they have learned to accept them as a phase and not a sin.”
Jean Shinoda Bolen, psychiatrist and Jungian analyst, Goddesses in Everywoman (1984)
“And when your heart is put back together, remember the source of all putting back together.”
Joy Harjo, Poet Laureate and Indigenous writer, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (2015)
“We do not change by snapping our fingers and deciding to be someone entirely new. We change bit by bit, day by day, habit by habit.”
James Clear, Atomic Habits
“By its nature, grief is a sign that an experience has been relegated to the past.”
Babette Rothschild, Psychotherapist and Trauma Specialist, The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment (2000)
“Let grief be your sister, she will whether or no. Rise up from the stump of sorrow, and be green also, like the diligent leaves.”
Mary Oliver, poet, Devotions (2017)
“It is grief which has left its mark on me, not time.”
Natalie Haynes, novelist and broadcaster, A Thousand Ships
“Mourning is important. But when it goes on and on, it can be a way of avoiding grief.”
Edith Eva Eger, Clinical Psychologist, The Choice: Embrace the Possible (2017), ch. 21
“The feminine does not save itself for some glorious moment in the future, nor grieve over some lost moment in the past. It holds nothing back. Now is all there is.”
Marion Woodman, Ph.D. (Hon.), Jungian Analyst, Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride (1982), p. 111
Words About Grief That Doesn’t Look Like Grief
Divorce grief comes in forms that aren’t easily recognized as grief, by other people or by the person feeling it. Numbness. A strange relief that feels wrong to admit. Anger that doesn’t seem to track with the facts. An absence that hits at odd hours: 2 a.m., a Tuesday afternoon, the drive home from somewhere ordinary.
What I see consistently in my work with women going through divorce is that these unexpected states, especially the relief, the anger, and the numbness, are often the most confusing and the most isolating. If your grief is showing up in one of these less-recognized forms, these lines are for you. And if it’s been hard to name what you’re carrying, words of encouragement for hard times speaks to the broader experience of holding more than the outside world can see.
“You don’t need to die to leave a mark of psychic pain.”
Carmen Maria Machado, Author, Fellow at Yaddo, In the Dream House (2019)
“When our grief cannot be spoken, it falls into the shadow and re-arises in us as symptoms. So many of us are depressed, anxious, and lonely. We struggle with addictions and find ourselves moving at a breathless pace, trying to keep up with the machinery of culture.”
Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow
“The loneliness of feeling unseen by others is as fundamental a pain as physical injury, but it doesn’t show on the outside. Emotional loneliness is a vague and private experience, not easy to see or describe.”
Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD, Clinical Psychologist, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents (2015)
“Contempt as a rule will cease with the beginning of mourning for the irreversible that cannot be changed.”
Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self (1981), p. 104
“I dream I lay grief on a tarp by the highway, for sale, for practically free. And wait.”
Bianca Stone, What Is Otherwise Infinite (2022)
“I felt the guilt and grief held in those unshipped boxes. It was all-consuming.”
Dr. Mariel Buqué, PhD, Psychologist, Break the Cycle (2024)
“It is hard to describe the space that yawns open in your life after she is gone. You have to make yourself leave your phone at home; you have to practice ignoring it. You keep reminding yourself that you are accountable to no one.”
Carmen Maria Machado, Author, Fellow at Yaddo, In the Dream House (2019)
“Perhaps it is that I want to see you, but I do not want to see you with your new lover.”
Maggie Nelson, Writer, Bluets (2009)
“At some point in the last few years, her burnout had morphed into something worse. She wasn’t sad or lost or frustrated. The effort required to go out and have a life was exhausting to consider.”
Ella Dawson, author, But How Are You, Really (2024), ch. 11
“I too have known loneliness. I too have known what it is to feel misunderstood, rejected, and suddenly not at all beautiful.”
Mary Oliver, poet, Devotions (2017)
“The soul nerve is where we experience a felt sense of love, compassion, fear, grief, dread, sadness, loneliness, hope, empathy, anxiety, caring, disgust, despair, and many other things that make us human.”
Resmaa Menakem, Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker and Somatic Therapist, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (2017)
“Anger delivers important information about where one of our boundaries has been crossed.”
Glennon Doyle, Memoirist and Activist, Untamed (2020)
“The kind of sadness you feel at the end of summer. When the fireflies are gone, the ponds have dried up and the plants are wilted, weary from being so green.”
Augusten Burroughs, Memoirist & Advertising Executive, Dry (2003), p. 64
Both/And: Relief Doesn’t Cancel the Grief
There’s a particular bind women in divorce find themselves in, and it doesn’t get talked about enough. If you initiated the divorce, you’re expected to seem fine. You chose this, so what are you grieving? And if you didn’t initiate it, you’re expected to be devastated, your recovery gets tracked, and you’re not supposed to feel anything as inconvenient as relief.
Both stories are too small. What I see in my clinical work is that both women, the one who asked to leave and the one who was left, often feel the same contradictory things. Grief and relief. Clarity and confusion. The certainty that this was right and the ache of what it cost. Divorce can be the right thing and the most painful thing at the same time. The relief doesn’t cancel the grief. The grief doesn’t mean you made the wrong choice.
Consider Nadia, an illustrative example, not a real client. She’s 42, a pediatric surgeon, and she initiated her divorce eight months ago after years of a marriage that was, by most outside measures, fine. Good co-parenting, shared financial goals, friendly. And also deeply lonely. There was no dramatic ending and no betrayal story. There was just a slow, accumulating recognition that she had been disappearing inside the marriage.
When she talks about the divorce, she moves between grief and something like relief in the same sentence. “I feel like I abandoned my family,” she says. “And I also feel like I finally came home to myself.” People who love her have told her she should feel one of these things or the other. She’s learning to refuse that instruction. Holding both isn’t a sign of confusion. It’s emotional accuracy. If you’re grieving something you also needed to leave, quotes about leaving toxic relationships holds more language for that experience.
“Loss still hurts even if you choose it.”
Sharon Martin, DSW, LCSW, Cutting Ties with Your Parents: A Workbook to Help Adult Children Make Peace with Their Decision, Heal Emotional Wounds, and Move Forward with Their Lives (2024)
“You can miss someone and not want them back in your life.”
Sharon Martin, DSW, LCSW, Cutting Ties with Your Parents: A Workbook to Help Adult Children Make Peace with Their Decision, Heal Emotional Wounds, and Move Forward with Their Lives (2024), p. 43
“I had built a new life, and it was a happy one, but I felt a sense of loss that went beyond family. I had lost Buck’s Peak, not by leaving but by leaving silently.”
Tara Westover, Memoirist & Historian, Educated: A Memoir (2018)
“I want you to know, if you ever read this, that I was happy. Or, more simply, that I was happy to have loved you.”
Maggie Nelson, Writer, Bluets (2009)
“We had to learn to love each other differently after our marriage ended, to ensure our children felt safe in their home and free to love both of us.”
Deesha Philyaw, Award-Winning Author and Essayist, Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines (2016), p. 125
“The greatest tragedy of marriage within patriarchal culture is not that so many couples divorce but that an even greater number of couples stay together without feeling that they love one another.”
bell hooks, Feminist Cultural Critic and Author, Communion: The Female Search for Love (2002)
“We cannot advance together if you are like this. Love cannot be won or lost; a relationship doesn’t have a scoring system.”
Carmen Maria Machado, Author, Fellow at Yaddo, In the Dream House (2019)
“It is safer to rupture relationships with people and systems than to rupture your relationship with yourself.”
Tamu Thomas, Women Who Work Too Much (2024)
“Loneliness chosen is always preferable to loneliness imposed.”
bell hooks, Feminist Cultural Critic and Author, Communion: The Female Search for Love (2002)
“Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could have been any different. But we cannot move forward if we’re still holding on to the pain of that past.”
Oprah Winfrey, What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing (2021)
“The transformation is neither holy nor grievous. It’s just a strategy of survival.”
Leslie Jamison, Memoirist, Essayist & Professor, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath (2018)
“Forgiveness does not mean access. We can give the other person the gift of forgiveness and ourselves the gift of safety and freedom at the very same time.”
Glennon Doyle, Memoirist and Activist, Untamed (2020)
The Systemic Lens: Two Women, Neither Given Enough Room
Divorce grief is culturally complicated in specific, gendered ways. The woman who initiated the divorce is expected to seem fine, because our culture has a low tolerance for women who make a choice and then appear to suffer for it. She chose it, so she’s supposed to own it cleanly. No tears. No second-guessing.
The woman who didn’t initiate is expected to be devastated. Her recovery is watched. She’s allowed to grieve for a while, but not too long, and certainly not past the point where it becomes inconvenient for the people around her. She’s expected to heal on a schedule that suits the people watching.
Both women are expected to recover faster than they actually do. Both are living in a culture that doesn’t have good language for divorce grief, one that moves quickly to “moving on” and quietly withdraws support once the first shock has passed. None of that is a personal failing. It’s the water we’re all swimming in.
The deeper question here, who gets to grieve, on what timeline, and in what form, is connected to the relational patterns Fixing the Foundations works with. And if the divorce has shaken your sense of who you are, this guide to post-divorce identity reconstruction goes further into that part of the work.
Words About Who You Are Still. And a Path Forward
At its most disorienting, a divorce can feel like a loss of self. Not just of a partner or a shared future, but of the version of you who existed inside the marriage. The wife-self, the coupled-self, the person who knew what her life looked like. When that frame is removed, the question that surfaces can feel dizzying: who am I now?
These lines are for that question. Not to answer it, because the answer will take time, but to help you hold it more gently while it’s still open.
“I had been old and stern for so long, carved with regrets and years like a monolith. But that was only a shape I had been poured into. I did not have to keep it.”
Madeline Miller, Novelist and classicist, Circe (2018)
“I’d like to begin again. Not touch my own face, not tremble in the dark before an intruder who never arrives. Not apologize. Not scurry, not pace.”
Deborah Garrison, The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing (2010)
“Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you.”
Tara Westover, Memoirist & Historian, Educated: A Memoir (2018)
“My life, my time, my decisions became newly my own.”
Sue Monk Kidd, Author, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter (1996)
“I’ve decided I want to make a home for myself; otherwise it would do me in, too. Home is a symbol of the self. Caring for a home is caring for one’s self.”
Gloria Steinem, memoirist, My Life on the Road (2015), ch. 4
“It’s time I started living my life for me.”
Jeannette Walls, Memoirist & Journalist, The Glass Castle (2005)
“How many people get to be awake and aware for the emergence of the person they were always meant to be? How many people get to have two lifetimes in one?”
Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD, Clinical Psychologist, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents (2015)
“I want to be who I am, going where I’m going, all over again.”
Ada Limón, poet, Bright Dead Things (2015)
“i’m learning to become all the space i need.”
Danez Smith, Don’t Call Us Dead (2017)
“Even as your heart takes you through many messes, the purpose is to bring you back home to yourself in a solid, powerful way.”
Deirdre Fay, MSW, Becoming Safely Embodied: A Guide to Organize Your Mind, Body and Heart to Feel Secure in the World (2021)
“A Hestia woman will bring in fresh flowers for herself that will never be seen by the absent man. Her apartment or house always feels like home because she lives there, not because she makes it that way for someone else.”
Jean Shinoda Bolen, Jungian analyst, psychiatrist, and author, Goddesses in Everywoman (1984), p. 8
“I would not go on anymore weaving my cloths by day and unraveling them again at night, making nothing.”
Madeline Miller, Novelist and classicist, Circe (2018)
Words to Say to Her, From a Friend
If you’re reading this because someone you love is going through a divorce and you don’t know what to say, this part is for you. The most common mistake well-meaning friends make is reaching for silver linings. “At least you found out now.” “You’ll be so much happier.” “This is your time.” They aren’t wrong, exactly. But they ask her to skip ahead to a chapter she hasn’t reached yet.
What she often needs is simply to be met where she is. Some of the lines below are ones you could say out loud. Others are ones you could send her on a hard night. And if you want more for a friend in a rough season of any kind, 99 words of encouragement for someone going through a tough time is a good next place to look.
“Listening is the most important political act we can perform.”
Gloria Steinem, Feminist Organizer and Journalist, My Life on the Road (2015), ch. 5
“Our capacity to destroy one another is matched by our capacity to heal one another. Restoring relationships and community is central to restoring safety and connection.”
Bessel van der Kolk, MD, Psychiatrist, The Body Keeps the Score (2014)
“Being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health; safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score
“Emotional intimacy is profoundly fulfilling, creating a sense of being seen for who you really are. It can only exist when the other person seeks to know you, not judge you.”
Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents (2015)
“Being with our friends, the people who love and cherish us, is too unsettling to our schedules. But our schedules are our lives. And what are our lives without others?”
Anne Helen Petersen, Cultural critic and author, Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation (2020)
“We have become primary sources, witnesses to each other’s histories.”
Noemi Martinez, Mother, Writer, and Publisher, Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines (2016), p. 110
“The more women can stick up for one another, the better.”
Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013)
“Sharing our strengths while honoring our weaknesses together is not a contradiction but a way to make love powerful.”
Loretta J. Ross, Reproductive Justice Activist and Author, Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines (2016)
“We create families of choice because our families of origin could not hold the truth of who we are, building sanctuaries where we can finally heal.”
Irina Contreras, Multi-Media Artist, Writer, and Queer Mother, Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines (2016), p. 94
“When compassion is present, the laughter and humor of mirth is never unkind. Compassion acts to relieve suffering, one’s own as well as others.”
Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D., Jungian analyst, Goddesses in Older Women: Archetypes in Women Over Fifty (2001)
“Tears can also help us realize that our loneliness is now causing us much unnecessary pain. This in turn can motivate us to open to the possibility of finding safe connections.”
Pete Walker, LMFT, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving: A Guide and Map for Recovering from Childhood Trauma (2013)
“Slowing down the rate of our connections, rather than collecting people like they’re business cards or stamps, and making those connections deeper and more meaningful, luxuriating in them, is itself a step toward liberation.”
Sarah Jaffe, Independent journalist and author, Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone (2021)
The path forward from divorce rarely looks like what we expect. It’s slower, less linear, and more interior than the culture makes room for. If you’re in it, and even one line here made the experience feel a little less unspeakable, that matters. You don’t have to be done grieving to be doing it well.
If what you need now is more than words, you can learn what therapy with Annie looks like, explore Fixing the Foundations, my self-paced course for relational trauma recovery, or reach out to connect. The article archive has more on life transitions, grief, and the relational patterns underneath them.
Warmly,
Annie
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Frequently asked questions.
Is it normal to grieve a divorce you chose?
Yes. Choosing to end a marriage doesn’t mean there’s nothing to mourn. It means you made a necessary decision, and necessity doesn’t cancel grief. You can know the divorce was right and still feel real sadness about the relationship that ended, the shared future you’re giving up, and the version of yourself who lived inside the marriage. In my work, this is one of the most common experiences women describe: the steadiness of the decision and the weight of the loss, side by side. Both are real. Neither cancels the other.
What’s the difference between divorce grief and other grief?
Divorce grief is often a form of what Pauline Boss, PhD, calls ambiguous loss: a loss that stays unclear. The person you’ve lost is still alive, which means you may see them at school pickup or in mediation. If you initiated the divorce, the people around you may expect you to seem fine. And the culture tends to move quickly to “moving on,” often before you’ve had time to grieve. Divorce grief can also include several losses at once: the marriage, a shared social identity, the planned future, daily routines, and sometimes the person you were inside the relationship. All of those are real losses, even without formal acknowledgment.
What do I say to a friend going through divorce when I don’t know what to say?
Say less than you think you should, and show up more than you think is necessary. Silver linings (“at least you found out now,” “you’ll be so much happier”) ask your friend to skip ahead to a chapter she hasn’t reached yet. What she likely needs is to be met where she is. Simple words help most: “I’m here.” “You don’t have to be okay.” “I’m not going anywhere.” Then follow through on that last one. Show up in month seven, when most people have moved on. That’s often when it matters most.
How long does divorce grief last?
Longer than the culture tends to make room for, and not in a straight line. There’s no timeline you’re supposed to hit. What I see most often is that the grief comes in waves: long stretches where you’re functioning well, broken up by hard days you didn’t see coming, sometimes around an anniversary, a holiday, or a handoff. A difficult Tuesday a year in doesn’t mean you aren’t healing. It means grief isn’t a straight line.
When should I look for professional support after a divorce, and what kind?
The threshold is lower than most women think. You don’t need to be in crisis to benefit from therapy or coaching. If the grief is affecting your ability to work, sleep, or be present with your children, or if you notice you’re managing instead of feeling and numbing instead of processing, those are useful signals. Trauma-informed therapy can be especially helpful when the marriage involved emotional neglect, patterns that go back to childhood, or dynamics that felt destabilizing over time. Executive coaching can help when the divorce is colliding with your work or leadership. It’s easier to reach out before you feel like you’re drowning than after.
References.
- Boss, Pauline. Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
- Doka, Kenneth J., ed. Disenfranchised Grief: Recognizing Hidden Sorrow. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1989.
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LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · Author, W.W. Norton 2027
Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
Annie Wright is an EMDR-certified licensed psychotherapist and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, and she's been in practice since 2013. She draws on psychodynamic and somatic approaches alongside EMDR, and she is licensed in 15 U.S. jurisdictions and registered to provide telehealth in Florida (California, Colorado (telehealth only), Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington). Annie works with driven and ambitious women from relational trauma backgrounds, and everything she writes about is field-tested across thousands of clinical sessions. She is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited, and is currently writing her first book, The Everything Years: Navigating the Pressure and Promise of Your Thirties, with W.W. Norton (2027). A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information.
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