An Article For Women Who Wonder If They Will Ever Recover From Their Divorce

As a psychologist in private practice, I treat many women who are going through a divorce. I also went through a divorce myself. One well-documented statistic is that women file 70% of all divorces. An article in the Journal of Marriage and Family (February 4, 2025) concluded that many women who filed for divorce felt as if the end of their marriage turned out to be a positive experience, giving them a chance to redefine who they are and make independent decisions.

This study confirms my observations of many of my female clients who are facing a divorce — whether or not they are the person to file. These women feel as if their divorce presented an opportunity for independence, growth and a chance for a new life. I tell some of their stories — and mine as well — in my book Bouncing Back: How Women Lose & Find Themselves in Marriage & Divorce.

I often explain this observation to my female clients who are divorcing. They come to see me in great distress, wondering if they will ever feel happy again. I want them to know that divorce can have a positive outcome.

Ellen Holtzman

I am a psychologist in private practice and the author of “Bouncing Back: How Women Lose & Find Themselves in Marriage & Divorce.”

Meeting 1:

The topic for our first meeting is: How has divorce changed over the past 100 years? Who is likely to divorce and why?

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/10/16/8-facts-about-divorce-in-the-united-states/

https://annaklaw.com/us-divorce-rates-by-year/

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/200001/will-your-marriage-last

Meeting 2: The Decision to Divorce

Readings: Bouncing Back: How Women Lose & Find Themselves in Marriage & Divorce, Chapters 1, 3, 7, and 11

Meeting 3: The Emotional Experience of Divorce

Readings: Bouncing Back, Chapters 9 and 10

Meeting 4: The Impact of Divorce on Children and Families

Readings:

https://divorce-education.com/effects-of-divorce-on-kids-of-different-ages/

https://www.ndsu.edu/agriculture/extension/publications/talking-children-about-divorce

chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://lifespanjournal.oasi.en.it/client/abstract/ENG218_4.pdf (This is a dense piece. It might be easier to focus on the abstract, introduction, aims, method, discussion and conclusion. Skim the other sections.)

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/home-will-never-be-the-same-again/202412/late-in-life-parental-divorce-can-upend-adult

Meeting 5: Psychotherapy and Divorce

https://www.icfetx.com/blog/best-path-forward-discernment-counseling

https://www.hesterbancroft.com/psychotherapy-and-divorce

Bouncing Back, Chs. 4, 15, and 22

Meeting 6: Divorce Recovery

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-mind-body-link/202505/losing-a-marriage-finding-myself-healing-through-divorce

chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://self-compassion.org/wp-content/uploads/publications/Sbarra.pdf

Bouncing Back, Chs. 22–25

My book, Bouncing Back: How Women Lose & Find Themselves in Marriage & Divorce, tells the stories of three women — myself and two of my psychotherapy patients — struggling through marital crises. I wrote it, hoping that it would help people feel less alone. So many of my readers have told me that they can identify with the stories in my book that I know I achieved my goal.

Here is a quick peek into the book. The quote below comes in the middle of one of the stories where I am working with a young woman trying to find her way into adulthood.

“When I was a teenager,” I said, “I believed that grown-ups knew what they were doing. Of course, I thought I would know what I was doing as an adult. By the time I got into my thirties, I felt so uncertain that I wondered if I had missed some important life lesson that everyone else received. Thirty years of practice made me see it differently. We are all bumbling around in life. That is as good as it gets.”

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=bouncing+back+how+women+lose+and+find+themselves+in+marriage+and+divorce

In a recent podcast, I built upon the stories in my book to offer people guidance about issues related to divorce. Podcast host, Justice, asked me interesting questions that gave me an opportunity to discuss setting boundaries, self-care, co-parenting, and divorce recovery. Hope you enjoy it.

https://soundcloud.com/mmtv3/growth-matters-bouncing-back-from-divorce-with-strength-and-resolve

“I’ll make this my last appointment,” said Lisa, a female psychotherapy patient I had been treating for only six weeks.

My head jerked back towards her. “Your last appointment?” My voice squeaked out in surprise. “How come?”

“My husband and I have been talking on the phone every night,” she said

She flipped her hair back away from her eyes. It looked like she had just had it cut and streaked with blonde highlights. She smiled at me. I smiled back. A tug of uneasiness pulled on me. I shifted my weight to get my back comfortable against the hard surface of the chair.

“What do you two talk about?”

“The kids. The happy times our family had together.”

I watched the corners of her mouth flicker upward. Her brown eyes looked bright and sparkly. I nodded, uncertain about what to say next.

“You know,” she said. “We miss each other. We thought we should spend more time together, eventually even live together again.”

Suddenly, the right words came to me. Your husband has been sleeping with another woman. That is why you kicked him out. Don’t let him move back into your house. I could say it in a loud, firm voice. Of course, I didn’t say anything at all. I struggled to make sure my mouth didn’t sink into a deep frown. I had made this mistake with a previous patient, Angela, and I wanted to avoid making it again.

Angela was a nurse, married for fifteen years, with two pre-teen daughters. I had treated her for eight months several years earlier. She came to see me because she was unhappy in her marriage. Each week she told me a different story about her husband, Harry. Harry spent little time with the family. Harry followed her around the house yelling at her in front of their children. Harry was even scrolling through a dating site. After two months of this, I hated Harry. A sharper tone edged into my voice each week when I asked her why she stayed married to him.

One day Angela didn’t show up for her appointment. She didn’t call me back when I phoned to find out if she had forgotten and wanted to rebook. I never heard from her again. Right away, I knew I had made a mistake. I hadn’t respected her timing. I had been careless with my tone. I had failed to empathize with her desperate need to stay with a husband she could barely tolerate. My therapeutic mistake taught me a lesson as important as any I learned in my four years of graduate school: be gentle when challenging a patient’s decision.

“I wonder if you are moving too quickly,” I said to Lisa in my best, soft, whispery therapist voice.

“I don’t think so,” she said.

She buttoned her sweater. We sat there, smiling at one another. “What do you think?” she said.

“About what?”

“Me and my husband.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “What I think is less important than what you think.”

“I miss him. I believe it is worth giving our marriage another try.”

“You don’t have to let him move back in,” I said. “You can spend time together and live apart. Kind of test each other out. See how it goes. There is no rush.” In my mind, I was flashing a bright yellow light at her.

Lisa was fumbling with her purse, not looking at me. My warning sign hadn’t registered. I felt tempted to lay out all the reasons why her decision didn’t make sense. I didn’t want to say goodbye, and I was worried she was making a mistake. Then I remembered my heavy-handed approach with Angela and realized I should handle Lisa with care. “Are you sure you don’t want another appointment?” I said.

“I’m sure.”

“You can always come back.”

She stood up and grabbed her purse.

“How about seeing a marriage counselor before you get back together? I can recommend someone.”

“Yeah, maybe,” she replied. “I don’t think we will need to do that.”

I locked my office door and went out to the car. The drive between my office and home took fifteen minutes. I used the time to decompress from the day, thinking about what to make for dinner and which TV show to watch.

I walked in the door and slid a frozen Trader Joe’s chicken tikka masala into the microwave. Then I switched on the Great British Baking Show and sat on the sofa, spooning the food into my mouth. Those bakers making a fancy frosted cake weren’t holding my attention; I was worried about Lisa. Sure, things looked good right now. But what about all the times her husband had promised fidelity and betrayed her? If she gave him another chance — for the fifth time, I thought, although I had lost count by now — I was sure he would break her heart.

Why was Lisa taking what looked to be an enormous risk? Psychotherapists often say that past behavior predicts future behavior, and her husband’s repeated instances of infidelity suggested a pattern he seemed unlikely to break. Although Lisa saw the pattern, she couldn’t escape her fears of being on her own. Greg had always promised to take care of her. She had depended on him to manage her life. Lisa had gone right from her mother’s home to the home she had made with Greg. She didn’t have the confidence that she could take care of herself. If there was even the slightest possibility the marriage might work out, Lisa was willing to take the chance. Who was I to take issue with that? When my marriage unraveled, I felt as she did right now.

I switched off the TV and wandered into the kitchen for a late-night snack of saltine crackers with sweet, sticky strawberry jam. Comfort food. This had become a common pattern on the nights when I was preoccupied with a patient, wondering if I had done enough to help her.

When I started practicing psychotherapy, I assumed self-doubt was normal for a new therapist. I thought over time, once I had more experience, all my patients would get better, and I would no longer worry if I had done a good job. But that hasn’t been the case.

Sometimes I’ve thought about whether I would have more consistent success if I followed a particular type of psychotherapy. There are many schools of thought about the best approach to treatment. Psychodynamic therapists, for example, help patients understand how the family they grew up in shaped them. According to this theory, insight into family dynamics will lead to change. In contrast, cognitive/behavioral therapists encourage patients to recognize how their distorted thinking affects their mood. These therapists want their patients to identify their automatic, negative thoughts and replace them with more positive, rational ones.

Some research indicates cognitive/behavioral treatment, particularly for anxiety disorders, is the most successful form of psychotherapy. However, other studies, including one provocatively entitled “Are All Psychotherapies Created Equal?” in Scientific American, suggest that different treatment approaches are equally efficacious. Consequently, many therapists practice in an eclectic fashion, as I do, using whichever theory best addresses the patient’s problem. I like to think my approach is flexible, tailored to the kind of problem the patient brings to me. Still, sometimes I imagine myself throwing spaghetti on the wall in my therapy office to see what sticks.

On one of those days when I was preoccupied with my self-doubt, I scrolled through various websites until I found a 2020 Aeon magazine research report by Helene Nissen-Lie. She found that therapists with varying experience levels all felt some self-doubt and suggested that self-doubt can even be a good trait. The report encouraged psychotherapists to listen to their patients’ feedback and to self-correct their approach, as I had done between my Angela debacle and meeting Lisa. However, there was one thing which these researchers neglected to consider: even if self-doubt was a good basis from which to hone one’s professional skills, it didn’t feel good.

It was late, time for bed. I pictured Lisa’s husband giving up his girlfriend, coming home on time each night to make her feel important to him, not a disposable piece of trash. Oops, where did the word “trash” come from, I wondered? It was easy to remember. It was the feeling I had with my husband more than thirty years earlier.

You can find out more about this story in Bouncing Back: How Women Lose & Find Themselves in Marriage & Divorce which is available on Amazon and Bookshop.org.

A PSYCHOTHERAPIST STRUGGLES WITH PAINFUL SELF-DOUBT was originally published in Human Parts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

THE SILENT TREATMENT

When I was 22 years old, I moved in with the boyfriend I had been dating for almost a year. A month later we had our first fight. The argument started with my request to go out to dinner on a Saturday night. My boyfriend shook his head “no.” He was a graduate student with papers to write. “Too busy,” he said.

I lobbied hard. It would be a quick meal at the corner Chinese, and we would be home in an hour. “Come on,” I said in a voice that was louder than I had ever used.

My boyfriend got up in the middle of my sentence and turned his back on me. He walked out of the kitchen, crossed the living room, stepped into the bedroom, and slammed the door shut. He slept on the couch that night, and I tossed and turned in the bed. When I left for work the next morning, he sat at his desk reading a book and didn’t look up. He remained silent when I returned home at the end of the day.

My stomach balled up into a knot. My chest tightened. Being completely ignored felt like torture.

COUPLES THERAPIST

Years later, after I became a psychotherapist, I treated many couples who resembled my boyfriend and me. William and Caroline came to see me about their arguments over finances. During the therapy session, William accused Caroline of spending money they should be saving. Caroline raised her voice in anger to defend herself. Rather than argue back, William looked down at the floor and then out the window of my office. His lips formed a thin dark line.

Caroline glanced at her husband and then at me. “See that is what I mean.” she said. “We are in the middle of a fight, and he just stops talking.”

In my effort to help William and Caroline, I turned to the work of one of my favorite couples therapists, John Gottman. Gottman coined the term “stonewalling” to describe the dynamic where one partner withdraws from the argument and refuses to speak. He found that stonewalling makes a couple more defensive, decreases their sense of empathy with one another, and interferes with their ability to find solutions to their problems. Not surprisingly, this negative pattern increases the likelihood that a couple will break up.

As I worked with William and Caroline to find a more productive way to resolve their disagreements, I thought back to my boyfriend, the man I went on to marry. For years, he would give me the silent treatment when he was mad, and I would beg him to speak to me. The result would not have surprised Gottman: the relationship inevitably went downhill.

It is almost impossible to pick up a national publication without reading about JD Vance’s views on underwear. Newsweek, for example, described Vance’s 2021 speech to the Pacifica Christian High School where he told his audience that the American people have been duped into believing that they can change spouses as easily as they change their underwear.

As a psychotherapist who has helped hundreds of men and women decide what to do about their troubled marriages, I would like to tell Vance that ending a marriage is more complicated than he realizes and that most Americans understand this, too. The patients I have treated during my professional career believed they had married for life; divorce, they thought, was something that happened to other people, not them. It was humbling and heartbreaking to discover that their choice of a life partner turned out to be someone with whom they argued incessantly or had little in common. Once they recognized the intractable problems in their marriage, it took them months, sometimes years, to decide to divorce.

Divorce is nothing like changing your underwear at all, unless your underwear is made of concrete and you have a jackhammer in your basement to use to get it off.

According to People magazine, Vance’s mom married five times. Perhaps the frequency of his mother’s divorces gave him the impression that this experience is easy. But children know little about what their parents think and feel, and Vance has never been divorced himself. His understanding of the emotional difficulties which people face when their marriages are on the rocks is limited, at best.

Married men and women don’t have a crystal ball to predict their futures. Your spouse can change in ways you never imagined — sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. And you can change, too. Divorce teaches us that human beings are fallible. This is a lesson that Mr. Vance, like all of us, would do well to learn.

INFIDELITY

“My husband is having an affair,” Lisa said.

She was a well-dressed woman in her late forties, sitting across from me in a blue easy chair that many of my psychotherapy patients called the comfy chair. She leaned forward and perched herself on the seat’s edge. Her bottom lip quivered, and her cheeks looked hollowed out. Her eyes captured my attention, most of all: round, opened wide, and encircled by dark rings. They looked shot through with shock and grief, reminding me of my own, many years earlier.

Lisa tried to speak, but tears ran down her cheeks. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice hoarse from crying. “I feel so betrayed.”

“Nothing to be sorry about,” I said.

She plucked a tissue from the box, dried her eyes, blew her nose, and slumped back against the comfy chair.

THE PSYCHOTHERAPIST

As I sat across from Lisa, I ran my fingers through my short hair and looked down at my clothes: navy cotton jacket, white blouse, and plain black slacks. The understated outfit matched the most recent iteration of myself, a competent psychotherapist.

The fingers on my right hand twitched. It was a muscle memory, and I was suddenly time-traveling backward over three decades. My husband had just left me. I was the patient sitting across from a therapist, pulling a tissue out of the box to wipe the tears away. I was 32 years old and sat with my head in my hands, sobbing.

“Any woman in your shoes would be crying,” I said. I blinked a few times, pushing the grief-stricken, younger version of myself back into a dark corner of my mind where I wanted her to stay.

My brain shifted back into psychotherapist mode, and I imagined how therapy with Lisa might unfold. I hoped the parallels between our experiences would deepen the connection, making treatment more effective as a result. Although after thirty years as a psychotherapist, I realized there were no guarantees; I couldn’t control the outcome of treatment.

Lisa pulled another tissue out of the box, wiping away the tears trickling down her cheeks.

“Just tell me a little bit about what’s going on,” I said in my soft, calm tone. “There’s nothing to be scared of.”

Lisa was quiet for a minute, composing herself. I watched her smooth her long brown hair streaked with blonde and tug at the hem of her bright purple skirt. The contrast between her sad eyes and attractive appearance stood out for me: a woman who looked her best even when she was falling apart.

WHAT SHOULD I DO ABOUT MY HUSBAND?

“I just kicked my husband out of the house for the fourth time,” she said. “It all started six months ago. I discovered he had slept with a female coworker. Greg, my husband, swore it didn’t mean anything. He had sex with her one time. At least, that’s what he told me. I made him leave, and he went to stay in a hotel.”

She stopped talking and turned her face toward the large window in my office. Bright sunlight streamed in on this hot July day. My gaze followed hers until we were both looking at the tall tree with its deep green summer leaves on the other side of the glass pane. The tree gave my office a sense of being part of nature, even though the building was close to a busy main street in a Boston suburb. I looked around at the light blue carpet covering the office floor and at the ivory walls, my version of Caribbean beach colors I hoped my patients found peaceful. The white noise machine purred in the background.

I sat back in my chair and folded my hands in my lap, breathing slowly and evenly like a calm meditation teacher. Through my years as a therapist, I learned to use my posture, my hands, and even the tilt of my head to convey a message to my patients. Today my body language said, “I’m not in a rush. Just take your time.”

Lisa remained quiet for a minute. Finally, she opened her mouth to speak and tears filled her eyes. I said nothing, shifting my face toward the floor. My goal was to strike the delicate balance between giving her the privacy to weep and letting her know I was ready to listen when she was ready to talk. She sighed and shook her head, picking up her story where she had left off.

“When Greg called me the next morning, he said this woman meant nothing to him. So, I told him to come back. I would give him another chance.”

Everything seemed fine for a couple of weeks until one night when Greg came home from work late. He told her it was a busy time of year. After several arguments, he admitted taking this other woman out for drinks after work. Lisa suspected she meant more to her husband than he had let on, and she made Greg return to the hotel for another week. He called her every day, telling her he knew he had made a mistake. He begged her to let him come home until she finally relented.

Why did Lisa continue to trust her dishonest husband? The question nagged at me, but it wasn’t the time to ask. Right now, Lisa needed me to listen to her story without interruption.

Greg stuck to his promise a little longer this time, coming home right after work, taking Lisa out for weekend dates. Then, one Tuesday night, he didn’t come home on time. When Lisa confronted him, he said he had been talking to this woman about work and had lost track of the hour; it was completely innocent. Lisa felt like she was losing her mind, unable to know if Greg was telling the truth or lying.

“Feeling crazy is one of the worst parts of this,” I told her, remembering a line from Nora Ephron’s thinly veiled fiction, Heartburn, about her husband’s affair, which I read during the terrible first year after my husband left me. The discovery that your marriage is entirely unlike what you believed it to be makes you feel as if you are losing your mind, Ephron wrote.

Greg was back in the hotel for a night once again.

“Maybe I overreacted,” she said. “So, the next morning, I told him to come home.”

Within a few weeks, Lisa discovered a text message on Greg’s phone full of sexual innuendos. She had no doubt he was still carrying on with his “girlfriend,” as Lisa referred to her now. She made him pack his bags and move back into the hotel. Once again, he called, texted, and begged her to let him come home.

“Greg made one promise after another,” Lisa said. He would break off this affair. He was done with the other woman. Lisa was the only woman for him. “I’m almost fifty years old; we’ve been married for thirty years,” she said. “I can’t believe I am in this situation. I thought he would always take care of me. How could he have done this?”

“I know how scared you must be,” I said.

“I don’t know if I should let Greg come home again,” she said. She teared up and stared at me, waiting for me to say something. I imagined telling her what I really thought. Get rid of this guy immediately before he hurts you again. But patients don’t want to feel pushed. If they feel cornered or confronted, they sometimes cancel their appointment or fail to show up.

I glanced at my clock. Her story had so gripped me I’d lost track of the time. There were only five minutes left in the session, but Lisa seemed to expect her first appointment would help her decide what to do about her husband. Why the rush? Because it suited Greg?

“You can take your time to make a decision,” I said. “Greg is living in a hotel, not on the street.” Finally, I got the smile from Lisa I wanted. She leaned back in the comfy chair and took a deep breath. Humor often worked to ease the tension in therapy.

“I hate to do this,” I said. “I know this is a bad place to stop. But we’ve run out of time. Let’s make an appointment for next week.”

This is an excerpt from my book, Bouncing Back: How Women Lose & Find Themselves in Marriage & Divorce, which is one Amazon’s top 100 bestsellers in Couples and Family Therapy.