How Counselling Helps You Navigate Divorce

Divorce is one of the few experiences where everybody around you offers an opinion and almost nobody actually asks how you are. There is a solicitor for the legal side and possibly a mediator for the arrangements, but the part that genuinely keeps people awake at three in the morning, the grief, the anger, the question of who you even are now, tends to have nowhere at all to go.

That is the gap divorce counselling fills. This article looks at what the work involves, when it tends to help most, and where it sits alongside the legal process rather than duplicating it.

What Is Divorce Counselling?

Divorce counselling is talking therapy focused on the emotional and psychological experience of a marriage or long partnership ending. It is not legal advice, and it is not mediation. A counsellor will not tell you what you are entitled to, will not draft anything, and will not negotiate on your behalf.

What it does offer is a space where you are not managing anyone else’s feelings about your divorce. Friends and family, however well meaning, usually have a view, that you should have left sooner, that you should try harder, that you are handling it wrongly. Counselling is one of the few places where none of that is present.

It can happen at any stage. Some people come while still deciding. Some come during proceedings, when the practical demands are highest and the emotional processing has been postponed indefinitely. Many come afterwards, once everything is signed and they discover that the feeling they expected, relief, closure, something, has not arrived. All three are legitimate starting points, and the work looks different in each.

It is also worth saying who it is for. Divorce counselling is not only for the person who was left. People who initiated the separation frequently carry a particular kind of guilt that is difficult to voice anywhere, precisely because they made the decision and feel they have forfeited the right to find it hard. That is a common reason people delay seeking support, and it is not a good one.

Why Does Divorce Hurt So Much, Even When It Is the Right Decision?

This catches an enormous number of people off guard, particularly those who initiated the separation and expected to feel straightforwardly relieved.

It is a bereavement without the recognition

Divorce involves real losses, and they arrive together. The relationship itself, the shared future you had assumed, the daily contact with your children if arrangements change, sometimes friendships and extended family, occasionally the home. What makes it distinct from other grief is that it is rarely acknowledged as grief. Nobody sends a card. There is no accepted period during which you are expected to be struggling, and people tend to assume that a decision made deliberately should not hurt.

Identity comes apart alongside the marriage

A long partnership shapes how you see yourself, as someone’s husband or wife, as part of a couple that other people invited as a unit, as a person with a particular kind of future. When that ends, the questions underneath it are genuinely disorienting. People often describe feeling as though they do not know how to describe themselves any more. That is not weakness or an inability to move on. It is an accurate response to something that actually has changed.

What Does the Work Actually Involve?

Early sessions usually focus on making room for what is there, because most people going through a divorce are running on suppression. There is a great deal to organise, often children to protect from the worst of it, and very little space in which to fall apart. A counsellor is not going to add to your list.

From there, the work tends to move through several strands, in whatever order they surface. One is the grief itself, allowing it to be what it is rather than something to be got over by a reasonable deadline. Another is anger, which in divorce is frequently enormous and frequently unexpressed, because expressing it is either unsafe or would make the practical arrangements worse. Counselling is somewhere it can exist without consequences.

A third strand is the story. Most people going through a separation are carrying a running account of what happened and whose fault it was, and that account is usually punishing to at least one person. Examining it honestly, including your own part, without collapsing into blame, is often where things start to settle.

And a fourth, usually later, is the future. Not in a brisk, motivational sense, but the slow work of imagining a life that is not defined by what has ended. Our page on relationship difficulties covers the broader picture of how we work with this.

How long any of this takes varies enormously. Some people do a focused piece of work over a few months around a specific part of it; others come and go across a longer period as different stages bring different things up. Returning later is not a failure of the earlier work, divorce tends to arrive in waves rather than all at once, and it is reasonable for support to follow the same shape.

How Does Counselling Help With Co-Parenting?

Where children are involved, the divorce does not end the relationship, it changes its terms. You will be dealing with each other for years, often at exactly the moments when it is hardest.

One of the more practical things counselling offers here is a place to put the reaction before it reaches the other parent. A great deal of co-parenting conflict is not really about the handover time or the school shoes. It is unprocessed feeling about the marriage arriving through whatever door is open. Having somewhere else for that to go makes a genuine difference to how the arrangements actually run.

What children are told, and what they are shielded from

This is one of the questions parents agonise over most, and counselling can help you think about it clearly at a point when your own state makes clear thinking difficult. There is no script, and anyone offering one should be treated with suspicion. What is generally true is that children cope better with honesty pitched appropriately to their age than with a version so carefully managed that they can sense something is being withheld, because they usually can, and they tend to fill the gap with something worse.

Where the scope of this support ends

It is worth being clear about what is on offer. Hope Therapy works with adults, so this is support for you as a parent rather than counselling for your children. If your child needs their own support, that is a separate conversation and a different service, and it is one we are happy to talk through with you rather than leaving you to work it out alone.

Where Counselling Sits Alongside Legal and Practical Support

These are different services and it helps to know which is which, because people sometimes arrive at one hoping for the other.

A solicitor handles the legal process and advises on your position. A mediator helps the two of you reach agreement on arrangements. Nothing in this article is legal advice, and a counsellor is not qualified to give any, if you need it, get it from someone who is.

Counselling handles what none of those address: how you are actually coping. In practice the three work well together, and counselling often makes the others go better. People who have somewhere to process the anger tend to arrive at mediation more able to negotiate, and tend to make fewer decisions in the legal process driven by a wish to punish. That is not the reason to do it, but it is a real effect.

One practical note. If you are working with a solicitor or a mediator, they do not need to know what you discuss in counselling, and a counsellor will not be reporting to them. Confidentiality works the same way it does in any other therapeutic setting, with the same limited exceptions, and your therapist should explain those clearly at the outset.

When Should You Seek Support?

Earlier than most people do, is the honest answer. There is a widespread assumption that you should wait until things have settled, or until you have a clear reason. Neither is necessary.

It is worth speaking to someone if you are not sleeping, if you are unable to concentrate at work, if you are drinking more than you were, or if you notice your reactions to your children are not what you would want. It is also worth it simply because this is difficult and support helps, you do not need a threshold of suffering to qualify.

If your low mood is severe, has persisted, or has come on quickly, speak to your GP as well as considering counselling. If you are having thoughts of ending your life, please contact your GP, call NHS 111, or call the Samaritans free on 116 123 at any hour. Hope Therapy does not provide crisis support, and a weekly appointment is not the right kind of help when someone needs support now.

For most people considering counselling during a separation, none of that applies, and a first conversation is a reasonable place to begin. Our relationship counselling service page explains how sessions run.

• Qualified & registered therapists
• LGBTQIA+ affirming support
• NCPS organisational member
• Online nationwide
• Face-to-face across England
• Established 2014

THE AUTHOR

Ian Stockbridge

• MBACP (Senior Accredited)

Founder & Clinical Director — Hope Therapy & Counselling Services

MBACP (Senior Accredited) · SNCPS (Acc) · BSc (Hons) CBT · PGCert Clinical Supervision

Founder of Hope Therapy, published author, clinical supervisor, and co-presenter of The Talk Room Podcast. Practising therapist with 25+ years of senior leadership experience.

Before Ian Stockbridge was a therapist, he was a leader. For more than 25 years he worked in senior management and directorial roles across commercial organisations — at times managing teams of more than 200 people. He was effective at it. But the longer he did it, the harder something became to ignore. The people around him were struggling. Capable, committed, often high-achieving people carrying invisible weight that had nowhere to go. Stress accumulated quietly across months and years. Anxiety managed behind professionalism. Relationships and mental health dealt with in the margins of a working life that left little room for either.

• SCoPEd Band C
• SNCPS (Acc)
• BSc (Hons) CBT
• PGCert Clinical Supervision
• Diploma — Person-Centred Counselling
• Diploma — Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy
• Certificate — Acceptance & Commitment Therapy
• Certificate — Trauma
• Certificate — CBT for Insomnia
• 25+ Years Leadership
• Clinical Supervisor
• Published Author
• Podcast Co-Host
• LGBTQIA+ Affirming

View Ian’s Full Profile →