Why the Divorce Rate Spikes in Perimenopause, and What to Do About It
Divorce rates spike sharply in midlife, and perimenopause is a real driver of that spike. But the clinical truth isn’t that perimenopause causes divorce. It’s that perimenopause removes the biological buffer that let a woman keep tolerating a marriage that was already quietly failing her. Here’s the neurobiology, the gray divorce research, the trauma layer underneath it, and what it actually takes to either repair a marriage or leave one with your clarity intact.
Last updated: July 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT
- The Woman Sitting in Her Own Driveway at 9 P.M.
- What Is the Gray Divorce Phenomenon, and Why Is It Rising?
- What Is Actually Happening in the Brain During This Breaking Point?
- How Does the Collapse Show Up Inside Driven Women’s Marriages?
- How Does Unresolved Trauma Complicate the Crisis?
- Both/And: How Can It Be the Hormones AND the Marriage?
- The Systemic Lens: Who Benefits When We Call Her “Crazy”?
- How Do You Actually Heal or Leave From Here?
- Who I Am and Why I Know This
- Frequently Asked Questions
The divorce rate spikes in perimenopause because declining estrogen lowers the brain’s sensitivity to oxytocin, and that shift removes a neurobiological buffer that had let many women tolerate years of relational imbalance. Bessel van der Kolk, MD, has documented how old relational wounds resurface with particular force during major physiological transitions like this one. Sociologist Susan L. Brown and her colleagues at Bowling Green State University coined the term “gray divorce” to describe the rising rate of divorce among adults over fifty, and perimenopause is a documented inflection point inside that trend. In my work with driven women, the hardest part usually isn’t the hormones. It’s helping a woman tell the difference between a marriage that’s genuinely over and one that just needs a different kind of repair.
In short: The divorce rate spikes in perimenopause because declining estrogen and oxytocin sensitivity lower the neurobiological buffer against chronic relational dissatisfaction, so long-standing marital problems suddenly feel intolerable instead of manageable.
The Woman Sitting in Her Own Driveway at 9 P.M.
It’s 9:00 p.m. on a Friday, and Ali is sitting in her car in her own driveway with the engine still running. She’s 49, a managing partner at a mid-sized accounting firm, and she has been idling here for eleven minutes. Inside the house is her husband of twenty-two years, a man who’s generally kind, reliably employed, and completely unaware that his wife is currently doing math on how many miles it’s to the airport. Her phone buzzes on the passenger seat. A text from him: “You good? Dinner’s getting cold.” She doesn’t want to go inside. She doesn’t want to answer his question about her day. She doesn’t want to manage the emotional temperature of the room one more time tonight. She just wants to sit here, in the dark, with the radio off, and be nobody’s anything for five more minutes. She rests her forehead against the steering wheel and thinks, not for the first time this month, that she might actually need a divorce.
If nothing was ever obviously wrong but you still came out doubting your own perception, my self-paced course Clarity After the Covert is the map for what you experienced.
Ali isn’t in crisis, not in the way she thinks she is. She’s in perimenopause. And in my clinical practice, her exact posture, the idling car, the eleven minutes, the sudden inability to walk through her own front door, is one of the most common presenting pictures I see in driven women in their late 40s and early 50s. The marriage, which may have been imperfect but functional for two decades, suddenly feels intolerable. The patience is gone. The capacity for over-functioning has evaporated overnight. And the woman who spent twenty years managing everyone else’s emotional life has, quite simply, run out.
The cultural narrative wants to call this a midlife crisis or chalk it up to hormonal rage. As a trauma therapist, I see it differently. The rage is real. The hormones are the catalyst. But the marital crisis is almost always rooted in a structural failure that predates perimenopause by years, sometimes decades. Perimenopause doesn’t break a good marriage. It exposes the fractures in a marriage that was quietly built on one woman’s chronic over-functioning. If this is landing hard, you may also want to read my post on perimenopause and relationship problems, which walks through the relational patterns that make this transition so volatile.
What Is the Gray Divorce Phenomenon, and Why Is It Rising?
“Gray divorce” describes the dramatic rise in divorce rates among adults over 50, a trend that has climbed steadily for three decades even as the overall U.S. divorce rate has fallen. I remember a client’s intake form making this visible to me: married thirty-one years, “reason for seeking services” answered with one word, “enough.” The numbers back up her form: divorce for younger couples has dropped since the 1980s, while the rate for adults over 50 has roughly doubled, and for adults over 65 it has tripled.
A sociological term coined by researcher Susan L. Brown, PhD, and her colleagues at Bowling Green State University’s National Center for Family and Marriage Research, describing the rising trend of divorce among adults aged 50 and older. Brown’s research, conducted with I-Fen Channing, shows gray divorce rates have roughly doubled since the 1990s even as overall divorce rates have declined. The phenomenon reflects a real shift in how midlife women weigh the costs and benefits of long-term marriage once children have left home and career identity has consolidated.
In plain terms: Divorce is going down for younger couples but going up sharply for people over 50. And midlife women are doing most of the leaving.
The cited reasons are less often acute betrayal and more often chronic dissatisfaction: persistent inequity in emotional and domestic labor, slow erosion of intimacy, and a self-erasure they’re no longer willing to sustain.
What the gray divorce research doesn’t fully capture is the biological accelerant underneath it. Perimenopause lowers the threshold for marital crisis, not because it invents problems that weren’t there, but because it strips away the capacity to keep tolerating problems that always were.
My clinical frame, refined over years of sitting with driven women in this exact transition, is this: perimenopause doesn’t cause divorce, it surfaces what the marriage was already quietly avoiding. The question isn’t whether the biology is real. The question is what the biology is finally letting her see.
What Is Actually Happening in the Brain During This Breaking Point?
Here’s what took years of clinical practice to see clearly: to understand why the perimenopause divorce rate spikes so predictably, you have to look at what’s happening in the brain, not just the marriage. The sudden intolerance for a partner’s behavior isn’t only psychological. It’s hormonally mediated, and a specific, well-documented event.
The reduction in the brain’s sensitivity to oxytocin, often called the “bonding hormone,” which occurs as a secondary effect of declining estradiol during perimenopause. According to Louann Brizendine, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry at UCSF and author of The Female Brain, estrogen enhances the brain’s oxytocin receptors. When estrogen declines, the biological drive to nurture, appease, and maintain social bonds at the expense of the self diminishes significantly. The woman who was biologically wired to accommodate the relationship is, quite literally, losing that wiring.
In plain terms: The hormone that made you willing to absorb decades of imbalance is leaving your body. What felt manageable at 38 feels unbearable at 46, not because your values changed, but because your neurochemistry changed the math.
During the reproductive years, the female brain is bathed in hormones that promote caretaking and social cohesion, often masking structural inequity in a marriage. When perimenopause hits, that buffer disappears.
The amygdala, the brain’s threat-detection center, becomes hyper-reactive as estradiol’s calming effect fades. She isn’t just annoyed. Her nervous system sits in chronic, low-grade fight-or-flight, and the nearest available target is usually the person across the dinner table.
Pauline Boss, PhD, whose work on ambiguous loss has shaped how I think about grief that has no clear ending, would recognize something familiar in this transition: a woman grieving a version of her marriage that never fully existed while she’s still living inside it. Pauline Maki, PhD, professor of psychiatry, psychology, and obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Illinois Chicago, has documented the specific cognitive and emotional shifts of perimenopause, including decreased emotional regulation, heightened sensitivity to interpersonal stress, and a reduced capacity for the kind of effortful tolerance long-term relationships require. This isn’t a character flaw. It’s a neurobiological shift. And naming it changes the entire frame of the marital crisis.
How Does the Collapse Show Up Inside Driven Women’s Marriages?
The marriages most vulnerable to the perimenopause divorce spike share an often invisible structural feature: they’ve been held together for years by the woman’s chronic over-functioning. She’s the project manager of the shared life, running the calendar, anticipating his moods, smoothing conflicts with his family, carrying the household’s cognitive and emotional weight while sustaining a demanding career. Her partner is a “good person” who helps when asked. He just has to be asked. And she’s been doing the asking for two decades.
Shelly, a 52-year-old orthopedic surgeon, came to therapy describing what she called “a complete marital breakdown.” Her husband, a mid-level operations manager, was by any objective measure a decent partner. Present, non-abusive, genuinely fond of her. But when Shelly’s perimenopause brought severe insomnia and cognitive fog that made her forget which daughter had a dentist appointment that week, she no longer had the bandwidth to be the household’s project manager. She missed a mortgage payment for the first time in eighteen years. Her husband’s response was confusion and mild irritation. Shelly’s response was volcanic. “I looked at him holding the unpaid bill like it was my fault,” she told me, turning her wedding ring around her finger the way she did whenever the story stung, “and I realized he wasn’t my partner. He was my dependent. And I was done carrying him.” Sitting across from her that afternoon, I didn’t experience her rage as disproportionate. It read to me like the first honest math she’d done on the relationship in twenty years.
What I see consistently in my work is that the perimenopause marital crisis is rarely about one incident. It’s the accumulated weight of an unequal relational contract finally becoming visible once the woman can no longer carry it silently. Eve Rodsky, author of Fair Play, has documented how invisible household labor defaults to women, not because men are malicious, but because the default was never questioned. Perimenopause is the moment that default gets questioned, loudly, in ways that shock everyone involved.
From the outside, the collapse often looks like an overreaction. The husband didn’t do anything wrong in the specific moment. What he did wrong was two decades of quiet expectation. And the woman, whose biology can no longer absorb that expectation, is finally saying so out loud. The rage isn’t disproportionate to the weight she’s been carrying. It’s exactly proportionate. It’s just that no one else could see the weight until now.
How Does Unresolved Trauma Complicate the Crisis?
For driven women, the marital crisis of midlife is frequently complicated by a layer beneath the hormonal and structural dynamics: unresolved relational trauma. Many chose partners who felt “safe” precisely because those partners were passive, emotionally detached, or unchallenging, a counterbalance to the chaos of their family of origin.
“We repeat what we don’t repair.”
CHRISTINE LANGLEY-OBAUGH, M.Ed., counselor, coach, and writer, “We Repeat What We Don’t Repair” (2015)
In her 30s, a driven woman may have appreciated a passive partner because it let her stay in control. Control was her trauma response, her way of manufacturing safety in a world that once felt unsafe. But in her 40s, when perimenopause destabilizes her nervous system and she desperately needs someone to hold the center, that same passivity no longer reads as safe. It reads as abandonment.
The rage she directs at her husband is often, in part, a trauma reactivation. She’s not only angry that he didn’t load the dishwasher. She’s living the somatic memory of being alone and unsupported, a memory that may trace back to childhood or earlier relationships that also failed to hold her. The husband becomes a proxy for everyone who ever failed to show up for her. This is why marital conflict in perimenopause turns so volatile: the argument is never only about the present moment.
Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher and author of The Body Keeps the Score, writes that traumatic memory is state-dependent. It’s retrieved not just through cognitive recall but through the body’s physiological state. When the perimenopausal nervous system is chronically dysregulated, it creates a physiological state that closely resembles the original trauma state, and old wounds become freshly accessible. What felt like a managed, healed-enough relational wound in your 30s can feel raw and present again in your 40s. This is why trauma-informed therapy during this transition isn’t optional. It’s the only thing that can actually separate the historical wound from the current marital reality.
I say this to clients constantly: understanding the trauma layer doesn’t mean excusing the structural problems in the marriage. It means seeing them clearly, without trauma-state distortion, so you can decide from genuine clarity instead of a nervous system in crisis.
Both/And: How Can It Be the Hormones AND the Marriage?
The most urgent question women bring me in this phase is: “How do I know if I actually want a divorce, or if this is just perimenopause talking?” It’s the right question, and it deserves a rigorous answer rather than a platitude.
The answer requires a Both/And framework, and it sounds like this: it’s the hormones AND it’s the marriage. The hormones are removing the filter. But the filter was hiding a real problem underneath it. Both things are true at once.
The hormones create a state of neurobiological crisis that makes any dissatisfaction feel unbearable, any flaw feel catastrophic, any compromise feel like self-annihilation. That’s real, and it’s worth accounting for before making permanent decisions. But the hormones are also doing something important: they’re revealing what was already there. The inequity was real. The loneliness was real. The slow erosion of intimacy was real. The hormones didn’t create those things. They removed the capacity to keep tolerating them.
What I advise clinically is a structured pause: a deliberate six-month window committing to treating the biology before making permanent legal decisions, provided there’s no active abuse or addiction. During that window, you work with a menopause-literate physician to stabilize your hormones and sleep. Then, from a nervous system no longer in crisis, you take a clear look at the marriage.
Shelly is the one who taught me how much this window matters. When she first came to see me, she had already scheduled a consultation with a divorce attorney. Her marriage, from the outside, looked reasonable. Her husband was kind. He wasn’t abusive. He loved her. But Shelly felt utterly invisible in it, unseen, unheard, and profoundly lonely in a house full of people who needed her. She was done, or she thought she was.
I asked her to wait six months. Not forever. Six months. We worked with her physician to address the severe insomnia and the estradiol crash keeping her amygdala locked in threat mode. Within three months, the physiological crisis had eased. And from that calmer ground, Shelly did something she hadn’t been able to do at the height of the crisis: she articulated, specifically, what she needed. She and her husband entered intensive couples therapy. It took eighteen months of real, unglamorous work. But the marriage that emerged, renegotiated on honest terms, with explicit agreements about intimacy and emotional labor, was one Shelly actually wanted to be inside of. She’s still married. I don’t know if it’ll hold for another twenty years. What I know is that the last time we spoke, she was no longer invisible in her own house, and that, for her, was the whole point.
Not every marriage survives this process. Some shouldn’t. But the decision to leave deserves clarity, not the acute neurobiological crisis of an untreated hormonal transition. The Both/And here is: your dissatisfaction is real AND your neurochemistry is temporarily distorting how unbearable it feels. Both things are true. Both deserve attention.
The Systemic Lens: Who Benefits When We Call Her “Crazy”?
I can’t do this work honestly without naming the water we’re all swimming in: culture and the medical system weaponize the perimenopausal transition against women who raise legitimate marital grievances. This systemic dimension isn’t separate from the clinical question. It’s embedded inside it.
When a woman in midlife expresses profound dissatisfaction with her domestic and relational arrangements, the cultural default is to pathologize her. She’s told she’s “hormonal,” “crazy,” “going through a phase,” or “not herself.” Her legitimate grievances, grievances that may have been building for years, get dismissed as psychiatric symptoms. This is systemic gaslighting, and it serves a function: if she’s crazy, her husband doesn’t have to change. He just has to wait for her to “get back to normal.”
But “normal” was a state of chronic self-abandonment. The perimenopausal rage, the refusal to keep over-functioning, the insistence on renegotiating the relational contract, these aren’t psychiatric symptoms. They’re a biological and political boundary-setting mechanism. Judith Herman, MD, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and author of Trauma and Recovery, has written extensively about how women’s anger is systematically pathologized as a means of social control. Perimenopause creates a perfect storm for this pathologizing: she’s visibly emotional, she’s raising demands that disturb the status quo, and there’s a convenient hormonal explanation ready to discredit her.
What I see in my practice is that women who internalize the “crazy” narrative stay longer in dynamics hurting them. They doubt their own perceptions and minimize legitimate anger. Women who can name the systemic dimension and hold their own reality make clearer, more grounded decisions.
If you’re being told your dissatisfaction is “just hormones,” I want to be direct: your hormones are real, and they’re creating a real neurobiological context that matters clinically. Your dissatisfaction may also be pointing to something that genuinely needs to change. Both things being true is the whole point. You’re not crazy. You’re inside a system that would prefer you stay quiet.
How Do You Actually Heal or Leave From Here?
Whether you’re trying to repair your marriage or make a clear-eyed decision about ending it, the path forward is sequential. This is the order I actually walk clients through in my office, not a theoretical checklist.
1. Triage the biology first. Don’t make permanent relational decisions while your nervous system is in neuroendocrine collapse. Consult a menopause specialist and discuss whether hormone therapy is appropriate for you. Mary Claire Haver, MD, board-certified OB/GYN and menopause specialist and author of The New Menopause, notes that many women see dramatic improvement in mood, sleep, and relational tolerance within weeks of starting appropriate hormonal support. Lower the physiological volume before you try to assess the relational reality clearly. You can schedule a consultation to think through the sequencing.
2. Engage in individual trauma-informed therapy. You need a space to separate your historical relational patterns from your current marital situation, to understand how your over-functioning developed and what it’s costing you now, and to grieve who you thought your partner would become before you can see the actual person across from you clearly. If you’re looking for that support, working with Annie is designed for exactly this kind of work.
3. Initiate the honest conversation. Once you’ve stabilized biologically and done some individual work, bring the unvarnished truth to your partner: the specific, named things that aren’t working, the relational contract that needs to change. If your partner is willing to do the real work, there’s real hope. If he insists you’re just “hormonal” and demands the compliant caretaker back, that response is data.
4. Evaluate the contempt question carefully. Relationship researcher John Gottman, PhD, has identified contempt, the sense that your partner is fundamentally beneath you, as the single strongest predictor of divorce. If what you feel is genuine contempt, that’s a different clinical reality than the exhaustion of a woman whose over-functioning capacity has simply run out. It’s worth knowing which one is driving the urgency.
5. If you’re ending the marriage, do it from grounded clarity. If, after stabilizing your biology and doing the therapeutic work, you look at your marriage and know it’s over, honor that clarity. Leaving a marriage in midlife is a profound grief. If you’re moving through the aftermath of a midlife divorce, my post on dating after divorce addresses what that terrain looks like for driven women. And the Fixing the Foundations™ course is a structured way to rebuild the proverbial foundation beneath the house of your next chapter.
Ali, the managing partner who sat in her own driveway that Friday night, came in three weeks later and finally said the sentence out loud. “I don’t think I hate him,” she told me, still in her blazer from a client meeting, twisting the strap of her laptop bag around one hand. “I think I hate that I’m the only one who ever notices when the milk is about to go bad. Twenty-two years of noticing everything, and I’m so tired I could sleep for a decade.” I sat with that for a moment, and what struck me wasn’t the marriage complaint. It was the exhaustion underneath it, the kind that doesn’t come from one bad week but from two decades of vigilance nobody else in the house ever had to carry. What I’ve come to think of as the vigilance tax is exactly what perimenopause makes women stop paying quietly. Ali hadn’t decided anything yet, not about the marriage, not about the milk, not about the airport. She left that session still uncertain, still tired, still twisting the strap of her bag. That uncertainty, I’ve learned, is often the most honest place to start.
Nothing was obviously wrong. Everything felt off.
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The perimenopause divorce rate is high because this transition demands an authenticity that many marriages, built on one woman’s chronic self-suppression, simply can’t hold. Whether your marriage survives this reckoning depends on whether both people are willing to do the real work. What I know, after thousands of hours sitting with women in exactly this seat, is that your job isn’t to keep the marriage intact at the expense of your own health. Your job is to stop abandoning the woman you’re becoming. Whether your partner can walk that road with you is ultimately up to him.
Who I Am and Why I Know This
I’m Annie Wright, a licensed marriage and family therapist with over 15,000 direct clinical hours, a significant share spent sitting across from driven women at exactly this inflection point: the car in the driveway, the marriage that used to work, the sudden collapse of tolerance perimenopause brings. I’ve watched women mistake a hormonal crisis for relational certainty, and I’ve watched women mistake relational clarity for a hormonal phase. Learning to tell the two apart, in real time, with a real marriage and real children in the balance, is demanding clinical work. I built and later exited a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy practice on exactly this kind of work, and I bring that rigor to every woman who sits across from me now.
PERIMENOPAUSE LIBRARY
This is one piece of a larger conversation. Browse Annie’s complete perimenopause library, organized by symptom, identity, relationships, profession, and treatment.
If this resonated, you may also find this guide helpful:
Warmly, Annie
Q: Is it normal to suddenly feel like I hate my husband during perimenopause?
A: Yes, and it’s more common than most women realize or are willing to admit. The sudden, visceral intolerance for a partner’s behavior is driven by the loss of oxytocin and estradiol sensitivity, which removes the neurobiological buffer that once let you tolerate inequities and annoyances. You’re not crazy. Your neurochemistry is retiring a coping mechanism you’ve relied on for years. What that reveals about the actual state of the relationship is worth taking seriously.
Q: How do I know if I actually want a divorce or if it’s the perimenopause talking?
A: It’s almost always both, which is why I recommend a structured pause before any legal action. Stabilize your biology first, then reassess the marriage from a nervous system that isn’t in acute dysregulation. Some women find, from that calmer ground, that the marriage is repairable. Others find the clarity was always real, and the biology was just amplifying it. The goal is deciding from genuine clarity, not neurobiological emergency.
Q: Will hormone therapy save my marriage?
A: Hormone therapy won’t fix a structurally broken marriage, but it can save a fundamentally sound one that’s buckling under neurobiological symptoms. If the relationship has genuine respect and willingness to change, hormone therapy can remove the biological static so you can reconnect from a calmer place. If the relationship is structurally unsound, it’ll simply give you the clarity to act on what you already know.
Q: What if my partner thinks this is all “just hormones” and won’t take it seriously?
A: That response is itself significant clinical data. A partner who dismisses your neurobiological reality and your legitimate relational grievances as “hormones” is telling you something important about his capacity for this transition’s work. You can try to educate him, bring him research, bring him into a session, ask him to read Mary Claire Haver’s work. But if he keeps insisting you just need to “get back to normal,” you have a clear picture of what the renegotiation is working with.
Q: Is the rage I feel toward my husband a trauma response?
A: Often, yes, in part. The biology lowers your threshold for frustration and makes the rage easily accessible. But the specific target, what he does that makes you furious, is often connected to historical relational wounds and long-standing marital inequities. The biology lights the match. Unprocessed trauma and unequal mental load supply the fuel. Separating those layers is exactly what trauma-informed therapy is for.
Q: What does the gray divorce research actually say about who initiates?
A: Susan L. Brown’s data also shows gray divorce carries greater financial consequences for women than for men, a practical consideration alongside the psychological ones. If you’re thinking about leaving, consulting both a therapist and a financial advisor first is essential.
Related Reading
Boss, Pauline. Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Brizendine, Louann. The Female Brain. New York: Morgan Road Books, 2006.
Brown, Susan L., and I-Fen Channing. “The Gray Divorce Revolution: Rising Divorce Among Middle-Aged and Older Adults, 1990-2010.” Journals of Gerontology: Social Sciences 67B, no. 6 (2012): 731-741. https://doi.org/10.1093/geronb/gbs089.
Haver, Mary Claire. The New Menopause. New York: Portfolio, 2024.
Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence, From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
Kravitz, Howard M., et al. “Sleep Difficulty in Women at Midlife: A Community Survey of Sleep and the Menopausal Transition.” Menopause 10, no. 1 (2003): 19-28. PMID: 12544673.
Maki, Pauline M., et al. “Guidelines for the Evaluation and Treatment of Perimenopausal Depression: Summary and Recommendations.” Journal of Women’s Health 27, no. 10 (2018): 1159-1171.
Rodsky, Eve. Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live). New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2019.
Van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking, 2014.
References
Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)
- Kravitz HM, Ganz PA, Bromberger J, Powell LH, Sutton-Tyrrell K, Meyer PM. Sleep difficulty in women at midlife: a community survey of sleep and the menopausal transition. Menopause. 2003;10(1):19-28. PMID: 12544673.
- van der Kolk BA, Wang JB, Yehuda R, Bedrosian L, Coker AR, Harrison C, et al. Effects of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD on self-experience. PLoS One. 2024;19(1):e0295926. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0295926. PMID: 38198456.
- Cloitre M, Stolbach BC, Herman JL, van der Kolk B, Pynoos R, Wang J, et al. A developmental approach to complex PTSD: childhood and adult cumulative trauma as predictors of symptom complexity. J Trauma Stress. 2009;22(5):399-408. doi:10.1002/jts.20444. PMID: 19795402.
- Gottman JM, Levenson RW. Marital processes predictive of later dissolution: behavior, physiology, and health. J Pers Soc Psychol. 1992;63(2):221-233. PMID: 14567652.
- Brown SL, Channing IF. The gray divorce revolution: rising divorce among middle-aged and older adults, 1990-2010. J Gerontol B Psychol Sci Soc Sci. 2012;67(6):731-741. doi:10.1093/geronb/gbs089.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author
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Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 direct clinical hours, licensed in 14 U.S. jurisdictions, including Colorado for telehealth only, and registered to provide telehealth in Florida. She works with driven women, including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs, in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, NBC News, and The Information. She’s currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT #95719)
15,000+ direct clinical hours
California LMFT #95719 · Connecticut #003806 · Washington DC #LMFT200001447 · Florida #TPMF356 · Maine #MF8600 · Maryland LCMFT #LCM1206 · New Hampshire #1030 · New Jersey #37FI00254800 · Texas #206391 · Virginia #0717002589 · Washington LMFT #MFPL.MK.70098095
Creator of House of Life™ and Fixing the Foundations™
The Everything Years (W.W. Norton)
Founder & former CEO, Evergreen Counseling
Regular contributor to Psychology Today. Expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, NBC News, and The Information.
This article is for information and support. It is not a substitute for therapy, diagnosis or treatment from a licensed clinician who knows you. If you are in immediate danger, call or text 988 in the United States to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or call 911. See the full medical disclaimer.
This content is psychoeducational in nature and isn’t a substitute for professional mental health treatment. If you’re in crisis, please contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
Warmly,
Annie.
