For most of the women who sit across from me, divorce does not arrive during a quiet season of life.
It arrives while there are teenagers in the house. While there is a mortgage, a career, a calendar that never empties, and a mother who needs a ride to her cardiology appointment. It arrives in the middle of everything, and then it asks you to keep everything running anyway.
And somewhere underneath all of it, you are grieving the life you thought you were going to have.
Divorce asks more of your body than most people admit
Sadness is the part everyone expects. What surprises women is the rest of it. Sleep that will not hold past three in the morning. A short fuse with the people you love most. Trouble concentrating on work you used to do without thinking. Shoulders that seem to live somewhere up near your ears.
That is not weakness, and it is not you failing to cope. It is what sustained stress does.
A long-term study of 416 women, first interviewed when they were mothers of adolescent children, found that in the years right after divorce they reported significantly higher psychological distress than married women, but no difference in physical illness. A decade later, that had changed. The divorced women reported significantly higher levels of illness, even after the researchers accounted for age, remarriage, education, income, and prior health.
A related line of research followed mothers further into midlife and beyond. It found that divorcing in early midlife was associated with physical pain, physical limitations, and depressive symptoms across the years that followed, with early financial stress carrying much of that weight.
I want to be careful here, because findings like these are easy to misread.
They do not say that divorce ruins your health. They do not say your future has already been decided. In twenty-five years of practice I have watched a great many women build lives after divorce that were steadier, more honest, and more genuinely theirs than the one they left.
What the research does say is that this stress is real, it accumulates quietly, and it deserves to be taken as seriously as everything else on your list.
Grief does not wait for a convenient season. It arrives in the middle of the school year, the quarter, the caregiving.
Midlife was already full
Divorce also rarely happens in isolation.
The Seattle Midlife Women's Health Study followed women for up to twenty-three years and eventually asked them a simple question: looking back, what has been the most challenging part of life for you? The most frequently named challenge was not menopause. It was coping with multiple stressors happening at once. Close behind it came divorce or the end of a partnership, health problems, and the death of parents.
The themes the researchers identified will sound familiar. Changing family relationships. Rebalancing work and personal life. Rediscovering yourself. Securing enough resources.
Divorce does not replace any of that. It lands on top of it.
So if you have been wondering why you feel like you are failing at something you are actually managing rather well, this is part of the answer. You are not carrying one thing. You are carrying several, and one of them is grief.
Self-care is not another item you owe someone
When you are the person everyone counts on, the phrase "self-care" can land like one more task you are already behind on. I understand why women roll their eyes at it.
So let me offer a different definition.
In the seasons that matter most, self-care is rarely a spa day. It is protecting your sleep. Eating on some kind of schedule. Moving your body in a way you do not dread. Keeping one or two friendships alive even when you have nothing interesting to report. Saying no without attaching a five-minute explanation to it.
And sometimes it is one protected hour a week that belongs to you and to no one else.
What that hour can actually do
Therapy during a divorce is not someone telling you whether to stay, leave, forgive, date again, or move on. Those decisions are yours, and they should be.
What it can be is a confidential place to slow down enough to understand what you are actually experiencing. To grieve without also having to manage someone else's reaction to your grief. To notice the patterns that keep repeating. To work through anger and fear rather than storing them somewhere in your body. And to begin asking the questions that tend to get postponed for years:
- Who am I outside of this marriage?
- What do I want the next chapter of my life to look like?
- What have I been tolerating that I no longer want to tolerate?
- Which parts of myself would I like to meet again?
Women often ask me how often they should come. There is real research on this. A meta-analysis of psychotherapy for depression found that it was the number of sessions per week, rather than the total number of sessions or the overall length of treatment, that correlated with outcome. A later randomized trial of cognitive behavioral therapy and interpersonal therapy found that more frequent sessions produced faster symptom improvement and fewer people dropping out, though a longer follow-up found the gap between frequencies narrowed over time.
The honest takeaway is not that more is always better. It is that rhythm matters. Showing up consistently, during a season when consistency is genuinely hard, tends to help. What that rhythm should be for you is a conversation between you, your circumstances, and your clinician, not a rule.
You do not have to be falling apart to deserve help
One of the most stubborn myths about therapy is that something has to be badly wrong before you are allowed to walk in the door.
It does not.
Midlife divorce is an ending. I will not pretend otherwise, and I would be doing you a disservice if I rushed you past that part. But in my experience it can also become a period of examination, boundary-setting, and rediscovery that women later describe as the beginning of something rather than the end of it.
You have spent years taking care of your children, your home, your relationships, and your work.
You are allowed to become one of the people you take care of.
Sources
- Lorenz, F. O., Wickrama, K. A. S., Conger, R. D., & Elder, G. H. (2006). The short-term and decade-long effects of divorce on women's midlife health. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 47(2), 111–125. PubMed
- Wickrama, K. A. S., et al. Stressful family contexts and health in divorced and married mothers. PMC8679856
- Woods, N. F., & Mitchell, E. S. (2018). The challenges of midlife women: themes from the Seattle Midlife Women's Health Study. Women's Midlife Health, 4(1). Springer
- Cuijpers, P., Huibers, M., Ebert, D. D., Koole, S. L., & Andersson, G. (2013). How much psychotherapy is needed to treat depression? A metaregression analysis. Journal of Affective Disorders.
- Bruijniks, S. J. E., et al. (2020). The effects of once- versus twice-weekly sessions on psychotherapy outcomes in depressed patients. British Journal of Psychiatry, 216(4). Cambridge Core
This article is for reflection and education and isn't a substitute for individual therapy. If you're in crisis or thinking about harming yourself, please call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, free and confidential, 24/7) or call 911.
