Kate Anthony [00:00:00] Hey, everyone. Welcome back. So today, I wanna talk about something that I don’t know that we give a lot of or enough attention to on this show. Somebody wrote in about it experience that they have, and by the way, I love it when you write in and you tell me things that you want me to talk about. It gives me ideas.

So today’s topic is really like what happens when you’re the one who gets left, and more specifically, what happens when the end of your marriage comes with a level of betrayal that you never really imagined possible from the person that you trusted the most and that you thought you had this life with?

We talk a lot on this show about women who are trying to decide whether to leave their marriages, maybe women who have spent years trying to make things better, who have exhausted themselves attempting to get their husbands to participate in the relationship and are finally coming to terms with the fact that [00:01:00] the marriage and the relationship, the connection, the partnership that they wanted may never really be the one that they have, right?

And that’s a huge part of my work. It’s why I wrote my book, The D Word: Making the Ultimate Decision About Your Marriage, for those who don’t know, haven’t gotten it yet. And it’s a really important conversation. But there are also women who didn’t want their marriages to end, who believed that they were in these committed relationships, who are making plans for their futures, and who suddenly discover that their husbands have been living an entirely different reality.

Maybe even a secret life, right? Maybe there’s an affair, another woman waiting in the wings. Sometimes their husband has been consulting attorneys or making financial arrangements while continuing to reassure his wife that everything’s fine. Sometimes this also happens at a, the precise moment when she is least equipped to [00:02:00] deal with it Which is really something fucking special.

Maybe during an illness. You hear this a lot, like women– I I was in chemo I just got a cancer diagnosis, and all of a sudden my husband has left me. I know a f- I’ve certainly worked with quite a few women whose spouses left them when they were in the hospital having given birth or during an illness.

During that time, you would have every reason to believe that your spouse will be the person that is gonna be helping you through whatever is happening in your life, right? So there is a particular kind of devastation in that experience. And before we go any further, I want to address something that I think is important, ’cause, look, I see the other side of this in my work all the time.

Most of the women I work with are the ones who have spent years trying to get their husbands to acknowledge that something is wrong, and they’ve asked for change, they’ve begged for help, they have gone to therapy, they’ve explained over and over again what they need, and eventually they’ve reached a point where they simply can’t do it anymore.

[00:03:00] And then when they finally say they’re leaving, their husbands are shocked. They are blindsided. And I always find that interesting because the divorce may surprise him, but it certainly wasn’t a secret, right? He just didn’t believe that he would– that she would ever do anything about it, or he didn’t believe that there would ever be consequences for ignoring the things that she had been saying for years.

So I’m not gonna suggest that everyone who gets left has been victimized by the person who leaves. Sometimes the person initiating the divorce has spent years trying to save the marriage that the other person refused to participate in repairing. And being devastated that your spouse is leaving doesn’t automatically mean that you’ve been wronged.

People have the right to leave marriages they no longer want to be in. You know I believe that. They don’t have to prove abuse or infidelity or some catastrophic event to justify ending a relationship. But having the right to leave a marriage doesn’t give [00:04:00] someone the right to abuse, manipulate, intimidate, or financially destabilize their spouse on the way out.

And that’s where I want to explore today because there are women who genuinely had no idea that their marriages were ending, women whose husbands were actively concealing affairs, making plans to leave, or even reassuring them that everything was fine while privately preparing for divorce. And then when the truth finally comes out, they aren’t simply grieving the end of a marriage.

They’re literally discovering that the person they trusted the moth- most has been deceiving them, sometimes for years And oh my God, that is, how destabilizing is that? Think about what marriage asks of us. It asks us to be vulnerable to another person in ways that are both practical and emotional, right?

We combine finances. We share intimate information. We make [00:05:00] career decisions based on what’s best for the household. We organize our lives around this shared future. We’re constantly investing in the future that we’re building together. And in a healthy marriage, that mutual vulnerability is part of what makes intimacy possible.

Financial intimacy, emotional intimacy all of it. But then when one person begins using what they know about the other person’s fears or weaknesses to gain an advantage, that betrayal goes so far beyond romantic infidelity, right? It is a betrayal of the fundamental trust that made the marriage possible.

And then you’re suddenly forced to reevaluate not just your relationship, but your own judgment. Like, how did I not know this? I hear this all the time. How did I not see this? How could I have trusted them? Was anything real ever? And women can spend months trying to reconcile the [00:06:00] person that they believed they were married to with the person that they’re suddenly meeting during their divorce.

And I think that one of the hardest things to accept is that y- you may never get an explanation that makes those two versions of that same person fit together. You may never know exactly when your spouse stopped acting in good faith. You may never know if the person you’re divorcing was the person you were married to all along, and that’s fucking head-spinning.

And then when you’re trying to make sense of all that, you’re also expected to navigate the legal dissolution of your marriage and all that entails. It brings me to something I, I see so often in high-conflict divorce, right? Sometimes the person who initiates the divorce has been preparing for months before the other person knows what’s happening, and preparing itself is not abusive.

I help women prepare to leave marriages all the time, particularly when there are [00:07:00] safety concerns, right? So doing all this preparation behind the scenes is often very prudent, right? Consulting an attorney, gathering financial information, developing a strategy before announcing the separation.

That can be absolutely necessary. But sometimes that preparation is followed by an aggressive campaign designed to overwhelm the other person before they’ve had an opportunity for– to protect themselves, and this is very different, right? So let’s say a husband announces that he’s leaving and immediately starts making demands.

He wants agreements signed before his wife has consulted an attorney. He begins changing financial arrangements or restricting access to information. Suddenly, his paycheck isn’t going into the joint account. He suddenly insists, he decides that some new arrangement is already the status quo. And then throughout it all, he’s saying, “I just want things to be amicable,” right?

“We don’t need attorneys. We can do this ourselves. I don’t wanna fight. We should be able to, work this out.” Which sounds all [00:08:00] very reasonable until you actually look at what’s happening because what he’s saying is, “Oh, no, I want peace,” while his behavior is creating chaos. And that chaos becomes his leverage.

So if someone can keep you sufficiently overwhelmed and frightened or emotionally activated, you may become much more likely to agree to things that you wouldn’t otherwise agree to simply because you desperately want the pressure to stop. This is like false confessions , right? You just want it to be over, so you’re like fine, whatever you want me to say.”

Or you spend so much energy responding to one manufactured emergency after another that you never get the opportunity to develop your own strategy. And then the woman on the receiving end may be so consumed by the emotional devastation of being left and being betrayed that she doesn’t immediately recognize what’s happening, and she thinks that she’s [00:09:00] having a relationship crisis.

He might already be treating it as a legal campaign, and by the time she realizes that, she feels as if she’s already lost ground, and she has. Again, I don’t want to suggest that every person who behaves aggressively during divorce is executing some elaborate, calculated strategy, right? People can behave terribly without having a master plan, unfortunately.

But coercive control doesn’t really require a written blueprint. And, one of the things that I often say to my clients when they’re going through this, like when they have– when they are the ones who are trying to create the strategy behind the scenes, when they’re working on sort of mapping things out in a way in that, requires, like I said, consulting attorneys, making a plan, all of those things.

Once you tell your spouse that this is what’s happening, I do tell my clients, “Then you gotta s- kinda stop and let them process.” Because if you push and push [00:10:00] when they’re not ready to accept what’s happening, it’s gonna get ugly real fast, right? So- When you are the one who is preparing behind the scenes, there is a point in the strategy where you pause.

But what we’re talking about here is the pattern of behavior where they’ve been making plans behind the scenes, and then they’re pushing, and you do not have the emotional bandwidth or space to get your, prefrontal cortex b- back online to be able to start making reasonable and rational decisions.

It’s the pattern of behavior and its effect on the other person’s ability to make choices, make meaningful choices. Because when someone’s actions repeatedly create emergencies and undermine your access to resources or pressure you to make decisions before you’ve received legal advice, right? We gotta take that very [00:11:00] seriously.

Because our shock and our trauma Interferes with our ability to function straightforwardly. When your sense of safety collapses, your nervous system shifts into survival mode. You can’t concentrate. You can’t sleep. You f- you’re staring at an email from your attorney and you can’t process what should be a relatively straightforward request.

And divorce requires an almost absurd amount of executive functioning right at the moment when we often have, the least of it. So now we have a woman who is being asked to make some of the most consequential financial and legal decisions of her life at the exact moment when her capacity to make those decisions may be severely impaired.

And often the, the spouse who just drops this bomb and has been secretly planning this knows it. And then the legal system doesn’t necessarily accommodate that. Deadlines still exist. Financial disclosures need to be completed. Temporary ame- [00:12:00] arrangements have to be addressed. And if the other person is deliberately exploiting that vulnerability, the imbalance is, can be even more pronounced.

This is why I am such a strong advocate for women getting legal representation early, especially when the divorce has begun with deception or intimidation. You have to have an attorney to advise you. Even if you’re hoping to mediate, we still need to have– You have to have, I will say it till I’m blue in the face, you have to have a- at least a consulting attorney so that you have someone who is advising you.

You need someone who can help you establish boundaries around the process and prevent you from being pressured into decisions that you don’t fully understand. Often, that may not actually be your attorney. That might be me. That might be your coach. And sometimes the most important thing your attorney can do in those early stages is create enough breathing room for you to think.

And, sometimes you don’t even know that you need to ask for that. And so that is why sometimes working with a [00:13:00] coach is the right move because I will say to my attorney to my clients, “This is what you need to tell your attorney. You need to ask your attorney for to stop sending you, forwarding you every fucking email from him or his attorney.”

You need to explain to your attorney that you need breathing room, that you need space to think, and you may not know that you can do that or how to do that, or that even that you need to do that right now. So you have this outside voice of reason saying, “Hold on. You don’t need to actually respond to that right now.

You don’t actually need to be responsible for receiving all of that information all at once every fucking day.” There are ways to work with your attorney that you may or may not be aware that have. You’ve got agency in this process, and sometimes you need someone else Helping you figure out what that agency is.

There’s another aspect of this experience, and that’s like what happens when a woman is abandoned, as I said, at the moment when she’s– at a moment when she’s particularly vulner-vulnerable. We live in a culture, you [00:14:00] guys are gonna be shocked to hear me say this, but we live in a culture that assumes that women will provide care, not just for children, the daily invisible labor of maintaining another adult’s life.

The anticipation of needs, the emotional support, the responsibility for all the fucking domestic labor, everything that keeps a household functioning. And women are often, usually doing this while working, often while earning as much or more than their husbands. But what happens then when the woman becomes the person who needs care?

What happens when she gets cancer, when she becomes disabled, when she’s the one who can no longer manage everything? Does the marriage suddenly become less appealing to the man who was benefiting from all that labor? I know that my ex-husband used to get actually angry with me when I would get sick.

A cold. He would be [00:15:00] angry. Instead of “Oh, no, what do you need? Can I get you some soup?” I’m talking about my ex-husband here. Did I say that? Not my current husband. He is fucking lovely. I get sick, I go to bed, he takes care of everything. But my ex-husband would actually get angry ’cause I wasn’t able to take care of him, right?

It was fascinating. Fascinating. There is research that raises some kind of uncomfortable questions about this. So a 2009 study of more than 500 patients with serious illnesses found that marriages were significantly more likely to end when the patient was a woman rather than a man. I wanna be careful with that statistic because subsequent research has produced more mixed results, and there was a widely circulated study on illness and divorce that was actually retracted after researchers discovered an error in their data.

So we can’t responsibly say that men universally abandon sick [00:16:00] wives at six times the rate that women abandon sick husbands. But I don’t think we need a dramatic statistic to examine the underlying cultural issue, because women’s caregiving has historically been treated as an obligation, while men’s caregiving has often been treated as an act of extreme generosity.

Think about how we talk about men who stand by their wives through se- serious illnesses. They’re like extraordinary husbands, they’re heroes, they’re praised for showing up. And I don’t begrudge anyone recognition, right? Caregiving is hard. But how often do we celebrate women for staying with husbands who become ill?

How often do we even notice? We expect them to stay, of course we do. It’s the same thing as we see a h- a man in the supermarket with his two-year-old, and everyone’s like, “Oh, he’s such a good dad.” And you see a [00:17:00] w- a woman in the grocery store with a two-year-old, and it’s just, it’s Tuesday.

And that expectation tells us everything we need to know about how differently we value women’s labor and men’s labor within a marriage. There’s also something really fucking devastating about discovering that the relationship you thought was a partnership may have depended on your continued ability to provide.

And just siphon everything out of you. An illness doesn’t necessarily– doesn’t just make you physically vulnerable, right? It makes you financially dependent, less capable of protecting your own interests. And if your spouse chooses that moment to leave, particularly if he also begins an aggressive divorce campaign, he is creating a crisis that threatens your ability to get medical care or maintain your financial security.

And again, I am not suggesting that someone is obligated to remain married simply because the spouse is ill. But there is an enormous difference between ending a relationship and [00:18:00] actively exploiting someone’s medical or financial vulnerability during the separation. When a woman has spent decades caring for her husband, only to discover that he isn’t willing to care for her when she needs him most, the betrayal goes beyond the loss of the relationship.

It’s the realize that the reciprocity she believed was fundamental to her marriage may never have existed in the first place, and that is so painful, especially when you’re already fighting for your health and you have to contend with that reality. Ugh.

There’s another piece of this [00:19:00] whole puzzle that I want to address, too, and that is what happens when a woman has been the primary breadwinner, has also been doing most of the domestic and emotional labor, and then discovers that she might have to pay spousal support to the husband who contributed very little, either financially or domestically, emotionally, all of that, right?

That is a special kind of slap in the face. So let’s talk about, first of all, why spousal support exists in the first place. Historically, marriage created an enormous economic disadvantage for women. Women were expected to stay home, raise children, maintain households, and support their husbands’ careers.

Their labor made it possible for their husbands to earn money, advance professionally, and accumulate wealth. But because the labor was unpaid, women often emerged from long marriages with little earning power of their own. [00:20:00] So spousal support was developed in part to address that inequity And I support that principle, right?

I believe unpaid domestic labor has real economic value. I believe that a spouse who sacrifices their career to raise children or support the other spouse’s professional advancement deserves recognition and protection when the marriage ends, for whatever reason the marriage ends. And I also believe that should apply regardless of gender, because as a feminist, I believe in gender equality, right?

So we both get the same. But here’s where we run into a problem. What happens when the lower-earning spouse wasn’t the one doing all of the unpaid labor? What happens when he wasn’t staying home raising the children or taking responsibility for the practical work of the family life? What happens when his wife was doing all of that and earning the money [00:21:00] while he was in the basement playing video games?

Or otherwise, or being a day trader, or, playing golf. Because we need to acknowledge that there are marriages in which the husband is earning less, not because he made sacrifices for the family, but because he simply chose to work less. Maybe he had opportunities to earn more, and he didn’t pursue them.

Maybe he decided to work part-time while his wife worked full-time. Maybe she spent years asking him to contribute more financially and domestically, and he just fucking refused. He didn’t know how I can’t tell you the number of women I have worked with who are the breadwinners, high-income earners, whose husbands literally couldn’t figure out how to change a diaper or wash out a, a baby bottle or pick the children up from daycare on time.

I cannot tell you. Or get dinner in the oven. And many of these women, they stay, right? You’ve stayed. Who knows, right? They’ve stayed because they love [00:22:00] him, because she believes in the marriage, because you keep hoping that things are gonna change. So you compensate, right? You work harder, you pay the bills, you make sure everybody’s lives function.

And now after all those years of s- of subsidizing his choices, you’re being told that you might have to c- be… have to continue subsidizing him after the marriage ends, possibly after he’s the one who decided to leave, possibly after he cheated. We have no-fault divorce for now, and we support it, and we want it, but also it might be when she’s facing fi- serious financial or medical challenges.

So can we just acknowledge how fucking infuriating that is? Because again, I believe in equality, but this isn’t equal. We’re talking about a woman who may have spent her entire marriage trying to get her husband to act like an equal partner, only to [00:23:00] discover that div- the divorce process is going to require her to keep financially supporting the very imbalance that she was living with and fighting against.

It’s literally it’s infuriating. So maybe we need a more sophisticated and more nuanced conversation about fairness because, the law is supposed to be gender neutral. Great. It should be. A man who leaves the workforce to raise children and support his wife’s career should be entitled to the same consideration as a woman who does that same thing.

But gender neutrality doesn’t automatically create substantive equality. So if we only look at the difference between the two people’s incomes without adequately examining why that difference exists, we risk treating two very different situations as though they are the same, as though they’re equivalent.

And there’s a difference between someone who [00:24:00] sacrifices their earning capacity for the benefit of the family and someone who simply declined to exercise the earning capacity that they had. And I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask whether our legal system is doing enough to distinguish between those situations Now, here’s where the law can be a little more nuanced than people often realize.

So courts in states like California and New York can consider a spouse’s earning capacity, not just what they’re currently earning. California law specifically considers whether someone’s earning potential was impaired because they spent years performing domestic duties. New York law also recognizes unpaid caregiving and contributions to a spouse’s career and the ability of both parties to support themselves.

And courts can they can impute income, which means assigning an earning figure based on what a person is reasonably capable of earning, even if they’re not actually earning it. So if a husband has [00:25:00] the education, the work history, professional skills, and opportunity to earn substantially more than he is earning, his wife, should be talking to her attorney about whether his earning capacity can be established, whether they can impute the income.

And there’s something I find really interesting. So in 2026, in a, in New York State, a judge determined that a husband seeking support had the capacity to earn $100,000 a year And the court still ordered his higher-earning wife to pay more than $5,000 a month in temporary spousal maintenance. Now, I’m not suggesting that the ruling was legally incorrect or that we know everything about that marriage.

We don’t. But it illustrates something that women need to understand, right? So even when a court recognizes that a husband is capable of earning more money, that doesn’t necessarily eliminate his entitlement to support. [00:26:00] Sometimes they’re giving you an on-ramp, right? It’s a temporary. It’s like, okay, you have a year.

We have imputed this much income. We understand you actually have been out of the workforce, so we understand it might take six months to a year for you to get there. I think that is reasonable. There is still this possibility that you’re gonna have to pay support, and that’s where the difference between legal fairness and lived fairness becomes really fucking clear because a court is looking at statutory factors and financial circumstances.

But you might be looking at decades of carrying a partner who wouldn’t carry his share. Those two perspectives are a little out of whack. We’re gonna have different perspectives on what justice might look like the– from the justice system. And, maybe there’s a feminist contradiction here that I wanna point to, right?

So for decades, we’ve argued correctly that women’s unpaid labor [00:27:00] has been systematically undervalued. But if we’re going to make that argument, we also have to be willing to examine what happens when a woman performs both the paid labor and the unpaid labor because her husband’s lower income doesn’t automatically mean he was making an equivalent contribution somewhere else in the home.

Sometimes more often than not, statistically, the woman was just doing more. And then when that’s the case, the– an outcome that treats the lower-earning spouse as the economic disadvantaged party without adequately accounting for the imbalance in contribution Can feel like another institutional failure to recognize women’s labor.

And I’m not saying that every… Not all men. I’m not saying that every lower-earning husband is la- lazy or that every woman who earns more should be exempt from paying support. The argument is that earning less is not, by itself, evidence [00:28:00] of sacrifice or a, a, evidence of need. I think that we have to examine the actual distribution of labor, opportunity, and responsibility because otherwise we risk creating the same inequity that spousal support was originally intended, in part, to address.

Because earning more is not, by itself, evidence that you were the more privileged person in the marriage, which is what that support, spousal support intention was, right? Was there to balance out.

If you’re going through this, I think there’s a practical lesson here, which is that your attorney needs to understand more than just what each of you earned. They might need to understand your husband’s employment history and earning potential. If your husband has an MBA but has opted out of the workforce I don’t know maybe he actually can make more money.

So your attorney needs to understand whether his reduced earnings were the result [00:29:00] of caregiving, like, genuine caregiving responsibilities. Was he an actual stay-at-home dad who was doing the grocery shopping and the cooking and the cleaning and the pickups and all of that? Or was it a simply a, a personal choice that he was being a deadbeat and not contributing?

And they need to understand your financial circumstances, including whether you can realistically afford to sup- the support being requested, right? They mi- those facts might be legally relevant depending on your state and the type of support at issue. And I also want to prepare, want you to prepare for the possibility that even when you present those facts, the legal outcome may not feel fair because divorce court, family court is not designed to compensate you for every year you carried more than your share of the marriage.

And that’s a really hard pill to swallow, especially for women who didn’t want the divorce in the first place. If you didn’t choose to end the marriage and you didn’t choose this betrayal and you didn’t choose the financial [00:30:00] disruption And now you’re being told that you have to write a check every month to the person who caused all that upheaval?

That’s just a continuation of the exploitation that you experienced throughout the marriage. Understanding the legal rationale doesn’t always make that less, any less painful, ever. And this is the, I t- often talk about, the difference between legal justice and moral justice, or what’s fair versus what’s legal.

They’re not the same thing, and that can be one of the most horrible and painful discoveries that women make during divorce the court is not there to determine who was the better spouse. Neither is your attorney. It’s there to apply the law to the dissolution of your marriage, and really it’s there to apply the law to the dissolution of marriage.

They don’t even take the your marriage into it necessarily certainly not in the way that you would hope. And depending on where you live the behavior that caused the marriage to end may have little or [00:31:00] no bearing on how the court divides property or determines support. All states are no-fault currently, and there’s a handful of states in which you can add a fault clause if it will make a, a significant differ- difference to the property division or support allocation.

I am not advocating by any stretch for a return to fault-based divorce, but it can be utilized s- in a certain number of states. A- as, as, as I believe, right? No-fault divorce is one of the most important legal protections that women have, particularly women leaving abusive marriages. And I…

We cannot lose sight of that, but I also think we need to acknowledge the emotional consequences of a legal framework that’s designed to dissolve a marriage without necessarily addressing any of the moral injustices that occurred within it. And a lot of us walk into court looking for accountability, and the court is just looking to resolve a legal relationship.

That’s it. It’s a lawsuit. We just gotta… And [00:32:00] those are really different objectives, and then when we don’t understand that, we spend so much time and energy and money even trying to persuade a judge or your attorney to recognize an injustice that the law may not be structured to actually remedy. So as infuriating as that can feel, it’s really important to understand that so that you can actually develop an effective divorce strategy.

This is where something like a support group, for example, like Phoenix Rising, right? This is a lot of what we do in Phoenix Rising. It’s just holding space for women to feel to feel the weight of the injustice. Fuck this system that doesn’t recognize my labor, that, that doesn’t give a financial sort of penalty or, to the person who’s exploiting the labor that I’ve invested for decades.

You want an appropriate place to get all of that out Because you try to bring that [00:33:00] to court and you’re actually gonna shoot yourself in the foot because, of course, women going through divorce are expected to re- remain very composed. You have to be factual. You’ve got to avoid emotional language. You’ve got to communicate professionally.

Y- document. Don’t, don’t react. All of that is important, but also, holy shit, when you have been abandoned during an illness or discovered years of deception, facing financial devastation, you’re told– And then you’re told that if you express your anger in the wrong setting or in the wrong way or whatever, it’s gonna undermine your credibility.

So you have to not only manage the trauma that you are experiencing, but then also the presentation of your trauma. You’ve got to be upset enough to be believable, but not so upset that you’re un- that you look unstable. By the way, we are already acutely familiar with all of these impossible standards.

They are deeply embedded in the [00:34:00] way that our emotions are interpreted in our culture. We know how to play that fucking game. But divorce gives those standards legal and financial consequences too. Because emotional regulation under these circumstances isn’t just a personal wellness practice or “Oh, I guess I’m not gonna look like a crazy person.”

It’s like, “Oh, no, a judge might actually rule against me.” I tell my clients all the time, “Your anger is valid. It is fucking justifiable. It is righteous, and we need to be strategic about where and how you express it.” It’s not inappropriate, but I just want them to get through the legal process with the strongest possible position, and that means making room for the full emotional reality of what they’re experiencing somewhere outside of the courtroom and outside communications with their ex and often their attorney.

That belongs with me, that belongs with your therapist, and all of those things. There’s another piece of this experience that I think is important, right? Which is that we often talk about, no– going no contact, [00:35:00] as if that’s a relief. And for women who have ex- spent years trying to escape coercive control or emotional abuse it often is.

It’s also impossible when you have children to go fully no contact, right? But low contact. But for a woman who has been unexpectedly abandoned, no contact can feel like another layer of loss. The person that she spoke to every single day is suddenly gone. I have a client who went through this, and the hardest thing for her husband left abruptly and I think moved to another state with another woman, abandoned her and the children, and all she felt like– she was just like– she kept trying to call him because she just wanted to understand.

She wanted to talk to him, to reach the person that she thought he was. But then, he was calling her crazy and unstable because she… she felt crazy and unstable. She didn’t understand what had fucking happened. The person that she spoke to every single day is gone, the [00:36:00] person who knew the details of her life, who shared her routines and her history, who was supposed to be her primary attachment figure, and suddenly he’s gone.

And so she wants him to explain. She wants to know what’s going on. She wants to apologize or to hear him apologize, to acknowledge something because she has a deeply embedded attachment to him And just because he violated our, her trust doesn’t mean that the attachment just evaporates.

Actually, abrupt and traumatic separations can intensify the urge to seek reassurance from the very person who caused the injury. Reconciliation isn’t necessarily the way to go or advisable, but oh my God, right? And it just… Your nervous system is adjusting to the loss of the relationship that organized a significant portion of her daily life, and often we don’t get closure, right? ‘Cause that’s really what you’re trying to get when you wanna understand or you wanna explain or you want… maybe we wanna get closure, right? It– there’s often an idea that if we [00:37:00] could just have one more fi- one final conversation, right? Ask the right questions or hear s- some specific truth, that we’d be able to move on.

But the hard truth is that when someone has demonstrated a willingness to lie, manipulate, evade accountability, all of that, another conversation is not gonna bring clarity. It’s just gonna create another opportunity for confusion or harm, and that is so unsatisfying. But sometimes the work of recovery involves accepting that the person who hurt you may never be able to give you the explanation or the acknowledgement that you deserve.

It basically just means that your recovery cannot remain dependent on their participation, and that’s so brutal because so often we’re like, “I need closure from them.” What if you don’t ever get that? You’re going to have to find that closure within yourself somehow. In my divorce strategy toolkit, I have a sheet [00:38:00] called Processing Relationship Grief, something like that, and it is a sort of long journaling process to help you take responsibility for what was yours, fully leave what was not res- what you were not responsible for at the foot of the other person, whether they take responsibility for it or not, but it’s a Really powerful exercise in helping you process relationship grief.

It is so important because it allows you to take responsibility and accountability for your own closure of the relationship. Even if there’s shit that you will never understand, it actually gives you a process for h- for dealing with that. There’s a cultural conversation around turning divorce into a, an empowerment story automatically, right?

Women are encouraged to embrace the next chapter and rediscover themselves, celebrate their freedom, imagine all the wonderful possibilities ahead. And I love all that, and I am here for it. [00:39:00] I have seen women build extraordinary lives after divorce. But there is something almost cruel about telling a woman who’s three months into an unexpected divorce, who may be seriously ill or financially terrified, that she should be excited about her new beginning.

Hello, that is not a beginning she wanted. She wants her old life back. She wants the marriage that she believed she had, and she needs room to grieve without being told to embrace her ind- independence and her, personal empowerment. Again, these– I am always about the yes and of things, right?

Yeah, maybe. Maybe she’s gonna get there at some point once she gets– walks through this horrific fire. But we cannot ignore the fire that she has to walk through. I think at our retreat, somebody said they had– at my Unbreakable Retreat, the most recent one, somebody was saying that she was at a, I think, a grief retreat, and [00:40:00] that they had said that wisdom is on the other side of grief.

And I said, “Yes, it might be, and y- as l- it– only as long as you go through the grief and don’t sidestep it.” Because, so often, we’re like, “Oh, on the other side… wisdom is on the other side of grief. Great. Cool. Where’s the wisdom?” Unfortunately, you also– you still have to grieve, right?

And that process can be– I wouldn’t– I don’t know if it’s accelerated, but it can certainly be guided and directed by doing my relationship grief work that’s in the Divorce Strategy Toolkit, which we will link in the show notes. So look, there– gosh, there’s so much. There’s so much more to say here.

If you’re listening to this, essentially, I’m gonna, I’m gonna, I’m gonna wrap this up in a bow. If you’re listening to this and you are the one who was left, especially if it happened at a time when you desperately needed your spouse to show up [00:41:00] for you, I want you to know That I see how different your experience can be from the divorce narratives maybe that we hear all the time or we see on Instagram or whatever, right?

You do not have to be happy about your divorce. Most people are not happy about their divorces, by the way. You don’t have to turn your pain into some triumphant transformation story to prove that you’re gonna be okay. Right now, the work may simply be to protect yourself, get through the next necessary decision, and give yourself the support and time that this kind of loss actually requires, and then the rest can come later.

But I think the support that this loss requires is fundamentally the most important, right? You need to be surrounded by and held by people who really understand so many of the betrayals that you are experiencing and so many of the– so much of the pain and the grief that you’re going [00:42:00] through. ‘Cause it is different from…

I don’t even know if it’s fundamentally different because even if you’ve been in a marriage for decades and you’ve decided to leave, maybe you have seen the betrayal in slow motion over time, and you have come to terms with it. But if the betrayal happens to you in an instant and you didn’t see it coming because you’ve been lied to, that betrayal is like a, it’s a shock to your system.

It’s like a, it’s a, it’s an instantaneous slamming of the door, and it has sent you reeling, right? I think you may end up in the same place as somebody who has had to meander through it for longer, and there’s a different process to getting there. So I see you. I do. I support you. If you’re looking for more support in that as in a group, Phoenix Rising would definitely give you that as well.

So all of that will be linked in the show notes. Everything’s on my website, of course, as well, kateanthony.com. I love [00:43:00] you, and again, if you have anything you want me to ramble on and on about on these interwebs let me know. You can shoot me a message over on Instagram or Facebook. I will try to get to it in a solo episode.

All right. That’s all for today. Bye.