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Unpacking Societal Scripts for Women in Marriage

SASHA: Gwendoline, I’m so happy to have you on the podcast today. I would love for you to introduce yourself and what are you up to in the world.

GWENDOLINE: Thank you so much for having me. I am Gwendoline Van Doo, founder of Artemis Divorce Coaching. I help guide individuals through the chaos of divorce — this really turbulent and traumatic life experience that so many of us go through. I really help women, especially moms, find their center and their strength and their sovereignty and their agency, and be able to bring that through the forever decisions we make in divorce. To reconnect to the depth of who they are and how they want to show up for themselves and their kids moving forward.

SASHA: I love that. Divorce coaching is not a light topic. How did you come upon this specific niche?

GWENDOLINE: I had actually never heard of divorce coaching prior to going through my own. I didn’t know it was even a thing until I was at the very end of mine, starting to build my own community. I met a woman talking about her divorce coach — someone shepherding her through the process, helping ground her, talking about all of the things that divorce touches that just don’t belong in your lawyer’s office and aren’t necessarily covered in therapy. My divorce was a really long process. Coming out of it, I’d lost my job. I found myself becoming the informal go-to person for friends navigating divorce. I kept getting this whisper: divorce coach, divorce coach.

SASHA: We love whispers.

GWENDOLINE: It was very counter to my background in marketing, communications, and humanitarian-centered work. But I realized it was actually a continuation of that work — divorce coaching was allowing me to talk about some of our biggest relational and societal issues. The intimacy of marriage. What is the shape that women take when we are in marriage, when we have these societal scripts? How does it help or hinder us? I got certified and launched my business coming up on a year and a half ago.

SASHA: What were you doing before?

GWENDOLINE: Immediately before, I was working with a diversity, equity and inclusion consultancy, talking about inclusive leadership in the Fortune 100 space. C-Suite leaders, what it means to create space for women and communities of color. Before that, running a nonprofit deeply in the humanitarian world of sustainability and environmentalism. And before that, advertising.

SASHA: When women are in marriage — what are the beliefs and societal conditions we should understand before we dive into divorce?

GWENDOLINE: We are educated and raised to be accommodating, acquiescent. Even if we’re really vocal, even if we’re able to express our needs — the expectation girls grow up with is that you cede the space to the masculine. You don’t take up too much space. There’s a study from BYU talking about when men have the impression that women are dominating the airspace. You’d think that would be when women are talking 60% of the time. But the threshold for when it feels like women are taking up too much space is actually 30%.

GWENDOLINE: In the divorce journey, it’s a big growth edge for women because if they stay in that smaller footprint — not because anything’s wrong with them, not because they’re insecure, but just because that’s what we’ve been conditioned to believe — they have to really challenge themselves. Damn it, I need to ask for what I deserve. I need to ask for what my kids and I need to thrive.

 

From Existential Death to Radiant New Life

SASHA: What gave you the courage to stand up for yourself and advocate for your needs?

GWENDOLINE: Becoming a mom is what changed everything. Things I maybe was able to tolerate and excuse away became intolerable once I had kids. Part of it was realizing I was responsible for what was being modeled in our home. I was somehow consenting to it, allowing it to be in the space my kids were growing up in. And I just couldn’t be implicitly responsible for the dynamics they were witnessing.

GWENDOLINE: But truth be told, we don’t stop being who we are post-divorce. It’s still a complicated relationship with my kids’ father. It just changes shape. My kids propelled me, motivated me to want to model something very different for them.

SASHA: On your website there’s a before photo and an after photo. I looked at the before photos — I don’t think that’s the same person I talked to on the call.

GWENDOLINE: Getting to the point of that picture wasn’t — it was a slow, cumulative process. First stepping into motherhood. I started to look at myself in the mirror and just not recognize myself at all. I remember looking at myself across the sink and thinking: who is this person? My eyes looked — I had no pallor in my skin. I didn’t look alive. I looked gray. I was like, this is not fatigue. This is not having a toddler and an infant. This is an existential death that I’m living through.

GWENDOLINE: I was vacant. I’d curled up into the tightest ball within myself. There was no more light in my eyes. I had fantasies of falling asleep with my kids and not waking up — not in a dark way, just ‘this is what marriage is, I guess. Maybe in my next lifetime I’ll have a better one.’ I now know that’s survival escapism. Your soul is saying: there’s no other solution here.

GWENDOLINE: And then slowly and surely through the separation and divorce process — which is excruciating — I started coming back into myself. Coming alive again. My family’s reaction the first Christmas of my separation: you are this radiant light. You had finally returned to yourself. It’s such a true transformation.

 

Choosing Expansiveness Over Seriousness After Trauma

SASHA: What were the things that called you back to yourself?

GWENDOLINE: There’s a real journey of trauma through leaving a marriage — almost two different planes of existence. What lives in the physical body and what lives in your brain and spiritual space. The activities I gravitated toward immediately after separation were attending to my trauma. I’d listen to music — super loud, all my favorite pop artists, everything that hadn’t had space in my marital life — and I’d have dance parties by myself in my kitchen. The vibrations of music are known to recenter you and move the trauma through.

GWENDOLINE: I was running a lot. Building a new community of friends. I explored almost every healing modality that came my way. Monthly moon circles with girlfriends. I journaled a lot. My brain thinks in visions and energy and colors. I was literally doing lion’s breath in my kitchen on the floor, sobbing, trying to exhale the darkness of that marriage out of my body. I do not want to ingest the smoke of the toxicity of my marriage. I don’t want it to metabolize through my skin. I’ll paint my walls the darkest shade of emerald.

SASHA: You said you’re outgrowing seriousness. Was that part of the before?

GWENDOLINE: When I was a kid — I must have been 8 or 9 — my parents put a mug at my breakfast table that said: life is not meant to be taken seriously. Capricorn ages in reverse — we start out serious, then get playful. I think it’s the relativity of life. Having had enough experience, good, bad, and all things in between, to just not take it personally anymore.

GWENDOLINE: A friend said to me during job loss on the heels of my divorce: you are a child of the universe, you belong here. I had that sticky note on my wall for a long time. And it’s a conversation I end up having with clients a lot — they also feel abandoned. The pivot is to stop taking things so personally. I can either take each decision with super heavy seriousness, or I can be out there making wild mistakes and deciding I’m going to do better differently tomorrow.

GWENDOLINE: I need to step toward expansiveness, even if it’s hard. Expansiveness lets me know that I’m growing somewhere. If a decision starts to feel like I’m caging myself in, it means I can only ever be that version, that size of the idea of myself.

 

Navigating Divorce: From Chaos to Clarity with Coaching

SASHA: Do you have a high-level framework for how you bring people through the divorce process?

GWENDOLINE: Overwhelmingly I’m working with women leaving really difficult marriages. One of the first things that presents is someone who is deeply rattled and scared — profoundly scared. They’ve been living in survival and panic and often don’t even realize they’re in a state of constant adrenaline and cortisol. They’re flooded. Their voices shake. And the beginning stages of our work together is usually deeply validating and mirroring back what they’ve experienced, because they’re often gaslit by their partners. They’re gaslighting themselves. Society gaslights them too.

GWENDOLINE: From there we move through: validate the emotional state, bring them to clarity and groundedness, and then start to move through the practical components — legal, financial, parenting — which requires having your thinking mind online. You often can’t get to the thinking mind until you’ve calmed the panicked mind.

GWENDOLINE: And we always talk about the vision. What do they hope to create? What do they hope to feel in this next life? So many women just want peace. A sanctuary for them and their kids. We hold that vision and start to move toward it, identifying the non-negotiables. And we future cast — because it’s excruciatingly difficult to put yourself in your future self’s shoes.

SASHA: Tell me more about future casting.

GWENDOLINE: Future casting is trying to picture, say you’re 40 — what is 45-year-old you going to want? It’s incredibly difficult for us to anticipate our future needs holistically. Part of it means connecting to our deepest sense of self. Part of it is looking at what other people’s experiences have taught us — what do people who are five years out from divorce wish they’d done differently? Big example: parenting time. A lot of moms in survival mode are super protective and want their kids with them all the time. And then themselves five years down the road say, I wish I’d expected more of my co-parent.

 

The Deep Intuitive Connection of Motherhood

SASHA: Tell me about becoming a parent. Have you always wanted kids?

GWENDOLINE: I actually didn’t want to have kids — for the phase of life I was in. In my teens and twenties, I just wasn’t ready. I didn’t feel the need or the desire until I turned 30. And then it became this drive that was so big. Becoming a parent felt like I was ripening. Completing my biological ripening. I felt like my whole life cycle within my cells was complete.

GWENDOLINE: When I was pregnant with my son I’d have these dreams of him. I knew he came with a sister. And when she was coming — I describe it like one day she was in the ether of the universe and I was on the corner of the bed and I could feel this little baby spirit poking its head through the energetic fabric, being like: you ready for me? And then I was pregnant within the next month.

SASHA: I’m curious about the maiden-to-mother threshold. Did you feel intuition or magic come online in a whole new way?

GWENDOLINE: Wherever my kids are in the world, my body is sensed and connected to them. It’s like a cardinal direction. OK, they’re in that part of the city right now. I feel that especially when they were babies. I am my center of gravity should be over there. I’m too far removed from where I need to be.

GWENDOLINE: When my son was a baby, I found out I’d produce milk and then a minute later he would cry. Our bodies were in symbiotic relationship. It makes you realize how in dialogue we are non-verbally with each other at all times — and how we can sense each other. Bringing this into the divorce space: you can smell — I don’t know why I say smell — your nervous system is sensing this other person’s nervous system. Just being in their presence, if they’ve been a threatening person, already turns the alarm bells on. We have this really deep sense of knowing in us. We’ve just turned off our ears to it.

 

Building Essential Support for Women in Divorce

SASHA: How can people work with you in the world?

GWENDOLINE: I work with people one-on-one. Divorce coaching primarily one-on-one right now. They can go to artemisdivorcecoaching.com. I typically work throughout the duration of the divorce process — which often lasts a year-plus — meeting every two to three weeks to talk about all the things.

GWENDOLINE: I’m also building the Divorce School for Women, an online community for women exiting really challenging marriages, because that requires a different approach to divorce and life after. And I’m taking people interested in being part of the pilot program.

GWENDOLINE: And I’m co-building the Portland Divorce Directory, bringing together local divorce professionals. Divorce is completely unsupported. It’s the second most traumatic thing we go through. When you think about the other big traumas — moving, job change, loss of a loved one — there are whole institutions set up to support those transitions. Other than the legal system, there’s almost nothing for divorce. The Portland Divorce Directory serves as a place to bring together all of the professionals you need.

SASHA: How can people connect with you?

GWENDOLINE: Online: artemisdivorcecoaching.com. Instagram and LinkedIn also at Artemis Divorce Coaching. I always welcome emails and messages, even if it’s just to tell me your story.