Divorce and Breakups
Everyone else thinks it is over, and you are still in it.
The support tends to arrive in the first month and disappear before the hard part. We work on grief with no ritual, co-parenting with someone you are angry at, and the empty weekends.
Overview
Grief without a ritual is still grief.
The paperwork gets filed and people treat it as a completed event. In practice the ending is not the day the decision was made, it is the eighteen months afterward when your life is being reassembled around an absence. There is no funeral for a marriage. There is no day when people bring food. There is a very active period of sympathy that lasts about six weeks and then a quiet expectation that you should be moving forward.
My parents divorced when I was young, so I know something about the version of this that plays out over years rather than months. What I see in clients is grief that keeps getting apologized for, particularly when the person left, or when the marriage was genuinely not good. Relief and devastation are not mutually exclusive. You can have wanted this and still be undone by the first weekend when the house is silent and everything in it belongs to a life that no longer exists.
At a Glance
- Adults and couples, in person in San Diego
- Telehealth Monday through Friday across California
- EMDR certified, Gottman and EFIT Level 1 trained
- Free 15-minute consultation
Individual sessions are $210, or $325 for 90 minutes. Couples sessions are $225, or $345 for 90 minutes.
Full fees and policiesDoes This Sound Familiar?
The specifics, not a symptom list
Open any line to see how I would think about it with you.
It is the first empty weekend that gets you.
Not the court date. The Saturday with no plan and no one arriving. We plan for those specifically, in advance, because willpower on the day is not a strategy.
The Work
Three things at once
The grief itself
Named as grief rather than as adjustment. We make room for the contradictory parts: the anger and the missing, the relief and the loss, often in the same session, without needing to resolve them into one position.
The practical machine
Communication with your ex, the handoffs, what you say to the children, what you do not. Concrete and specific, sometimes down to drafting the message together, because these decisions repeat weekly.
Who you are now
Later, the identity question. A great deal of a long relationship's structure is invisible until it is gone: routines, mutual friends, an assumed future. Rebuilding is real work and it is more interesting than it sounds.
The Arc
A shape, not a protocol
Everyone moves differently. This is how this particular work usually unfolds here.
Sleep, food, the mornings, the handoffs. In the first stretch the entire aim is stability and not making irreversible decisions while your system is in shock.
Questions
Answered plainly
Anything not covered here is worth asking on the free 15-minute consult.
Related Work
Is it too late to come in? It has been two years.
No. A large share of the people I see in this work arrive well after the legal process, when the initial support has faded and the feelings have not. Delayed is extremely common.
Do you do divorce mediation or write custody recommendations?
No. I am a therapist, not a mediator or a custody evaluator, and I do not write letters or reports for court proceedings. That boundary protects our work. I can help you find the right professional for those needs.
Can we come in together to end things well?
Yes. Discernment and separation counseling is real work, particularly where there are children and the relationship has to continue in a different form.
How do I know whether my child needs their own therapist?
I work with adults and couples, so I would not be the one seeing your child. In session we can talk through what you are noticing and I can point you toward child and adolescent specialists in San Diego.
Will therapy make me stop loving them?
That is not the aim and I would not promise it. People generally find that the feeling changes shape rather than disappearing, and that it stops running their week.
Free 15-Minute Consult
Fifteen minutes to find out whether this is the right work.
Tell me what is actually going on. I will tell you honestly how I would approach it and what to expect.
In person in San Diego, and by telehealth across California.