The question I hear more than almost any other, from clients, from women inside Phoenix Rising, and from my community is: “Why didn’t I leave sooner?” Perhaps it’s an inner voice that nudges. It sounds like you, but it’s partially your friends, your family, maybe your attorney or it’s cultural. That voice asks, “If it was so bad, why did she stay?” or  “You should have known better.”

But here’s what I want you to hear: waiting to leave is not a failure and leaving is not defined by a single moment. It’s a process. You didn’t fail to leave sooner, you were in the process of leaving. You were in the process of becoming the woman who could.

In this episode I talk about what that process actually looks like and why the timeline you’re judging yourself for may be exactly what made exiting your marriage possible. I get into how hope keeps women in relationships longer than almost anything else, and why that’s not a weakness. I also explore why doing this self-work inside a community of women who get it, is exponentially more powerful than going through it alone.

The goal isn’t just to get out, it is to build something different on the other side. That’s exactly what you’re doing.

What you’ll hear about in this episode:

• How leaving starts as a whisper and why staying at that point actually feels like the more responsible choice
• Those practical realities like “where will I live?” or “what happens to the kids?”, aren’t about being stuck. They’re about assessing risk.
• Leaving requires a version of you that doesn’t exist yet, and becoming that person takes time
• How to reframe the question from “why didn’t I leave sooner” to “what was I learning?”
• Why leaving before you’re ready can actually prolong the cycle and how the timing, even when it feels late, is often exactly what you needed

✨ If you’d like to watch the video version of this episode, you can find it here.

Resources & Links:

Focused Strategy Sessions with Kate
The Divorce Survival Guide Resource Bundle
Phoenix Rising: A Divorce Empowerment Collective
Kate on Instagram
Kate on Facebook
Kate’s Substack Newsletter: Divorce Coaching Dispatch
The Divorce Survival Guide Podcast Episodes are also available YouTube!
Seven Step Mindset Reset for Divorce 

Show Transcript:

Kate Anthony: [00:00:00] Okay, guys, I wanna talk about something that I hear from you guys really often from my clients, from my my group, the Women in Phoenix Rising, and that is beating yourself up for not having left sooner. This is a question that lives in so many women’s heads. Why didn’t I leave sooner? What, why did I stay so long?

Oh my God, why did I tolerate that? Why did I keep going back? It’s this inner critic that is berating you perhaps, and usually our inner critics are, not our voice necessarily, right? It sounds like us, maybe it’s your friends, maybe it’s your family. Your attorney, God help you. If that’s your attorney, give them the boot.

It’s cultural. We ask women that all the time. Why did she stay? If it was so bad, why did she stay right? It’s this quiet, insidious shame that says, you should have known better, [00:01:00] but here’s what I wanna offer you today. Leaving is not a moment. It’s a process. And if you understand that, like if you really grasp it, it changes everything about how you see yourself and how you understand this process because you didn’t fail to leave sooner.

You were in the process of leaving. So we tend to tell the story of leaving like it’s a single decision. There’s a day that you wake up, everything becomes clear and you just go look, I am guilty of telling that story. To be honest I talk about what I call my frying pan moment where I was standing in my closet one day and I had just had this moment of clarity where I realized that if I stayed, that my son was going to probably grow up to be an abuser, that my son was gonna have this model for relationships that I did not want for him.

He was [00:02:00] three years old and I did, I had this moment of clarity, but I also had. Years of questioning and years of processing before I got to that moment of clarity. And I didn’t just pack a bag, make a call, file papers, I’m done. No, it’s never that clean. That’s very empowering and that’s very cinematic, right?

It’s very, it’s how it happens in the movies, but that is almost never how it actually works, especially not in complex relationships, not in marriages with kids. Especially not when there’s emotional abuse, coercive control, or even just like deep entanglement. Financial, psychological, relational en mesh.

Leaving isn’t just one decision. It’s not one poof of clarity. It’s a hundred. Sometimes it’s thousands and most of them don’t look or feel like leaving at all. Sometimes leaving [00:03:00] it starts as a whisper. Something feels off. You can’t quite name it. You are uncomfortable, but you’re also not sure if you’re overreacting.

Maybe you’re too sensitive. Maybe it’s your childhood trauma, so you stay, because staying at that point feels like the more responsible choice, the more rational choice, the more fair choice, the better choice. And you tell yourself every relationship has problems, right? Relationships are hard. No one’s perfect.

Maybe I just need to communicate better. Maybe I need to try harder. Maybe I need to work out my trauma. So you try and that trying is actually part of the leaving process, even though it may not look like it at the time. And then maybe sometimes the whisper. Gets louder, and patterns start to emerge.

And you notice that the same things keep happening, the [00:04:00] same arguments, the same emotional cycles, the same confusion afterwards, where you’re left questioning your own reality. And so now you’re not just uncomfortable. Now you’re starting to feel unsettled, but you still don’t leave because now that there might be something else in the mix.

Maybe now there’s hope. Hope that you can just explain it the right way. If you can. Just get ’em to understand, if you can just find the right therapist, the right book, the right strategy, it’ll get better and hope is very powerful. Hope keeps people in relationships far longer than anything else because.

I say this all the time, right? You don’t wanna leave. We’re not, you’re not stopping yourself from something you want. You’re stopping from yourself from something that you, Jo, you never wanted. You never wanted to have to leave this relationship. Of course, hope feels powerful and it keeps you in [00:05:00] this thing because actually the thing is what you want.

So again, this is part of the process. Not a failure of it. Your hope isn’t failure. Your hope is where the process starts to germinate, and then maybe down the line you start to hit some moments of clarity. Some of those moments like I had with my son that was like, oh my God, my kid, I’m supposed to stay for him.

Fuck no. I gotta go for him. Or maybe you have moments where you think I can’t do this anymore. And maybe you even say it out loud. Maybe you tell a friend, maybe you tell him. Maybe you Google divorce attorneys at 2:00 AM or divorce podcasts, and then you land here and you start to shift, you start to pull back, and then maybe he apologizes things, calm down, there’s a good day, a good week, maybe even a good month.

And suddenly you’re back in it. And in hindsight, you look at that moment and you’re like, oh God, but you’re not back in it ’cause you’re [00:06:00] weak or indecisive or. You missed anything. It’s because your nervous system was wired, is your nervous system is wired for safety and the intermittent reinforcement, those cycles of good and bad it’s one of the most powerful conditioning tools there is.

That is a trauma bond. Our brains are addicted to the dopamine hit that we get when we have the positive cycle. We’re constantly seeking the positive. We want that dopamine hit, so we become addicted to the cycle and bonded through that cycle. That’s what a trauma bond is. The intermittent reinforcement is the conditioning.

It keeps you tethered. It makes leaving feel like a loss. We’re addicted to the highs that we get. When things are good. And so if you leave now, it feels like you’re losing that thing, [00:07:00] so you stay, but you’re still in the process. And then there are all these practical realities. Leaving isn’t just emotional, my God, it’s logistical as hell.

Where the fuck am I gonna live? How am I gonna support myself? What’s gonna happen to my children? What’s the custody arrangement gonna be? Can I survive not seeing my children half the time? Will they be safe? Can I afford an attorney? What’s he gonna do when I tell him These are not small questions?

These are life altering, high stakes decisions, and your brain knows that. Your brain that is.

Knows this. So even if emotionally you’re starting to disconnect, your system is still trying to solve for safety. And until those pieces start to come together, even imperfectly, it can feel impossible to leave. So that’s not you being stuck, that is you assessing risk, [00:08:00] that’s you trying to survive what feels like a massive destabilizing shift, and it is still part of the process.

And then there’s your identity. Who are you? If you’re not his partner, his wife, who are you? If this marriage ends, who are you? If the life you built intentionally, thoughtfully, doesn’t look the way you thought it would, it’s not a small unraveling. It feels existential. And so of course you don’t leave overnight.

Leaving requires a version of you that doesn’t exist yet. You still have to become the person who leaves and becoming takes time.[00:09:00] 

So when you look back and you ask, why didn’t I leave sooner? What you’re really asking is, why didn’t I skip the process And the answer you couldn’t because you took every moment of doubt every. Attempt to fix it. Every cycle you endured, every piece of information you gathered, every boundary you tried to set.

That was you moving through the process, not avoiding it. And there’s something else that I wanna name, which is that you gotta remember that you did not have the clarity then. You have now. You had not yet become this person. You’re looking back with current awareness and applying it to a past version of you who didn’t yet have all of the information.

So of course it seems obvious now, of course, it seems like you should have left [00:10:00] sooner, but that version of you. Was making the best decisions she could with the information, resources, and capacity that she had at that time, and she was doing it while she was inside of a dynamic that likely distorted her perception, eroded her confidence and made everything harder to see clearly.

So instead of asking why didn’t I leave sooner, a more accurate question might be. What was I learning during that time? Who was I becoming? Because you were learning. You were becoming, even if it didn’t feel like it, right? You were learning what didn’t work. You were learning how he responds under pressure.

You were learning what your limits are. You were learning how much you could tolerate, and eventually what you could no longer tolerate. You were gathering data, you were building evidence, you were piece by piece. Constructing [00:11:00] the internal certainty that you would eventually need in order to leave, because leaving without that internal certainty very often leads to going back, leaving before you’re ready, before the process has unfolded.

Can prolong the cycle. So the timing, even if it feels late, is often exactly what made it possible. And yeah, there’s grief in all of it. Grief for the time that you feel like you lost or wasted grief for what you endured in that time. Grief for the version of you who stayed longer than you wish she had.

And that grief is so real and it deserves space, but it doesn’t mean you did something wrong. And if you’re still in it, if you’re still in that place where. You haven’t left yet, but something inside of you is shifting. I want you to hear this really clearly. You are not behind. You are in the process and the process might look like [00:12:00] beginning to ask different questions, paying attention to patterns, starting to tell the truth first to yourself.

Gathering information. Which is what you’re doing by listening to this podcast right now, building support, imagining a different future, even if it feels far away. These are all movements towards leaving even if you haven’t physically left yet. And if you have left, but you’re still carrying that question, why didn’t I do it sooner?

I want you to consider this. What if the timeline you’re judging is the timeline that made your leaving possible? What if all of it, the delays, the doubts, the attempts to make it work, was part of what got you to a place where you could finally say, I’m done and mean it? Because leaving isn’t just about getting out, it’s about staying out.

It’s about building something different on the other side. And that requires a level of clarity, strength, and self-trust. That doesn’t happen [00:13:00] overnight. It is built over time through the process. So you’ve gotta remember that it takes women an average of seven times before they leave and stay gone. They leave an average of seven times and go back before it sticks.

All that you have gone through. Even if it feels like it was too long, all of that was building you towards your being able to leave and stay gone. So instead of asking, why didn’t I leave sooner, maybe you ask, what did it take for me to leave it all? What did it take for me to override the fear? What did it take for me to face the uncertainty?

What did it take for me to choose myself? Maybe for the first time in a really long time, and if you’re listening to this and you’re still in the process, still deciding, still navigating, still trying to [00:14:00] understand what’s real and what isn’t. You don’t need to rush yourself to a moment that you’re not ready for, but you also don’t need to stay stuck in confusion, right?

It’s like there’s a balance here. You can move through this process more consciously, more supported, more strategically. Because while leaving is a process, it doesn’t have to be a chaotic or isolating one. And if you’re listening to this podcast, that’s exactly what you’re doing. You are moving through this process more consciously.

You are gathering information and data. You are beginning to think more strategically. One of, I think the most powerful things that women can do is do this kind of unfolding, right? If you’re just like listening to me in your car or on a walk, or, while you’re doing the dishes with an earbud in your ear, whatever it is, right?

You’re going through this alone. If my words [00:15:00] are opening something inside of you. Giving yourself clarity, all of those things, it is exponentially more powerful when you have a group of women who are also going through it at the same time. That is why I’ve created, I created Phoenix Rising years ago, and that’s why it’s so powerful because I’ll never forget my first Al-Anon meeting when I heard my deepest thoughts and feelings that I had not even risen to my consciousness coming out of other people’s mouths, and it was like.

It opened something in me that was like, not only do you all get it, I am learning about myself through you. You are sharing your experiences and your feelings, and I’m realizing that I relate to them even though I had [00:16:00] never identified them before. The group, the collective community helped me put words to things and identify feelings that I.

Had zero, zero names for. Information about anything until that time, and that is why group work is so powerful. It helps you see clearly. It helps you understand the dynamics that you’re in. It helps you make decisions from a place of grounded clarity instead of fear or urgency. It helps you move through the process.

Much more quickly because you’re getting information at an accelerated speed. It’s not like it’s gonna take you out, but you start to see things much more clearly and then. When you do make a move, whatever that move is, it’s when you can really stand on. Because remember, the goal isn’t just to leave. [00:17:00] It is to understand why you stayed, what changed, and how you move forward without losing yourself again.

You didn’t leave sooner because you were becoming someone who could, and that takes time. So I want you to give yourself some grace. Give yourself some compassion. Ask yourself those questions. What did I learn along the way? Who was I becoming? What information was I gathering? And if you do need more support, you will find it inside of Phoenix Rising.

You can find that at kate anthony.com/decided, and we will hold you. We will reflect back to you. We will mirror you and we will help you gain clarity. Gather information and become, we will help you become. So that’s all I got for you today. I will see you next week with another amazing episode.

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