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Ellen Wyoming Deoy: Hi everyone, welcome back. I have a very special conversation today with Gwendoline Van Doosselaere, the founder of Artemis Divorce Coaching. And while divorce can be a tricky topic and subject for many people, talking with Gwendoline today really shed a lot of light on the transformative power of going through that transition for those who are going through it and offers some amazing ways to look at reframing what that's like and how to come back home to the center of yourself even in the midst of that difficult and challenging journey. It's a real privilege to have her here and I hope you enjoy this conversation. Welcome to Resilient and Radiant, the podcast that supports women navigating toward their true north. I'm Ellen Wyoming Deoy, coach, guide, and fellow traveler on the path of becoming. Here we explore resilience, intuition, boundaries, healing, and the everyday practices that help you align with your most radiant, authentic self. Whether you're reinventing, healing, or simply finding your way forward, this space is for you. Let's dive in.

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Gwendoline Van Doosselaere: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. Pleasure to be here.

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Ellen: It is great. And uh I just think it's fun to let people know that we went to high school together.

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Gwendoline: I know we went to high school together. I think there was like a brief overlap in college and then realizing that we landed in the same city for a 20-year portion of our lives and like in complimentary fields. I think we were both in the environmental field for a while.

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Ellen: Yeah. And we continue now we're overlapping and coaching. It's fantastic and I love getting to know you as an adult. Um so before we get into the heart of today's conversation, I'd love for listeners to get to know you a little. Um can you tell us a bit about your own story when you realized this was the work for you.

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Gwendoline: Yeah. So, the story—how did I get to become a divorce coach? Because it's not something that I ever imagined for myself. I didn't know what a divorce coach was until going through divorce myself. Um and I had worked in you know very different fields and I went through—I was in a two-decades-long relationship and it was a dating relationship that then you know about 9 years in became a marital relationship and we started a family and we moved to Portland. Um and I realized that this wasn't working for me and it wasn't working for me in some really really profound ways. Um but the concept of divorce was agonizing. It was, "How do I make the decision to... how can I possibly carry the weight to end this family? I made a vow. I committed myself to this partner, to my married life, to my children." And I just kept coming up against this decision over and over again of like, "Something's not right here. This is not letting me really become and be the type of mother that I want to be for my kids."

One of the pivotal moments was realizing for myself that I could choose to stay married but my kids would only ever see... I had become such a shrunken version of myself and I didn't even realize it. When I look back at pictures of me in the thick of kind of divorce hell—I call it divorce indecision—I am lifeless. I am gray. I have infinitely more wrinkles than I have now, even though that was years ago. Um there's no light in my eyes, and I just look incredibly sad. And I realize that my kids are only ever getting access to like 10% me, maybe 20% me. They might have me 100% of the time, but I'm not really—I just can't be there. And that if I continue like this, they're never going to know who their mother is.

And so when I realized that the excruciating calculation is actually maybe to separate myself from their dad and to create a haven for me and them where I can be fully myself and fully the mother that I want to be—that made it a really clear decision. And unfortunately, all of that dovetailed with the pandemic and so it was one of the most difficult periods of my adult life. And it took many years to get it finalized and it took, you know, over $100,000 in legal fees.

Going through it, I went into it fully informed. I had done years of research. You know, people come to divorce—they don't come to it overnight. They come to it often years, if not decades, in preparation. And so, I knew what to expect. I knew what the process should be on paper. But then walking through it, I was like, "This is completely isolating. I'm in the dark and I don't know up from down." 50% of marriages end up in divorce and how is it that the process remains so hidden from us? I just don't think it needs to be that way. And so when I started getting the call for becoming a divorce coach because in the meantime I was finding myself the go-to person for a lot of people who would come to me navigating their own divorces and needing and wanting advice and wanting to hear what they were supposed to do, I decided to step into it fully and to dive into helping bring education, awareness, and clarity to what is the most turbulent time in our adult lives.

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Ellen: One of the things that you say here makes me really think about divorce being quite hidden—the stories about it, the process for it—almost because I would expect my thought right now about society is that it's a shameful thing. We're supposed to have a perfect life, a perfect marriage, a perfect family. There are still some of these like heavy societal weights of like this 1950s ideal of what family should look like. And so that things don't get opened out because they feel like it's been a failure or something. But let's talk a little bit about the reframing that you help do. You've said it's a rite of passage that no one asks for and it is often framed as failure. What are some things that led you to see it this way and what do we miss?

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Gwendoline: So when I think the reframing of divorce as a rite of passage helps us rethink of divorce as an opportunity for accountability and awareness instead of shame and silence. And so when we look at it as this supremely transformative return and call to myself. I came to this witnessing other people going through divorce, witnessing myself and realizing that what I'm actually doing is going through a deep personal transformation. And I never would have—none of us choose this. None of us would ever step to the threshold or the plate knowing what's at stake. We would be like, "Honestly, hell no. The answer is no." Um, so it has to come through pain. And what it is is a calling to return to yourself, to return to the essence of yourself.

And more and more I'm thinking of divorce less as the singular event and the catalyst and that the catalyst happened actually so many times before. And the catalysts are the all of the moments of dissonance between who you are inside of you and the life that you're leading. And it's the voice of, "My god, is this really it? Is this what my life is like? Is this the type of parent that I stepped up to be in life? Is this the relationship I have with my kids? Is this the relationship I have with the most important person in my life?" And it's all those little moments of dissonance that ultimately accumulate into the call for transformation which we call divorce. Um and seeing it as a rite of passage, I think we can give ourselves a lot more compassion. And we can hold ourselves through it because it actually has a process and it has a pathway. Um it has a start, middle, and end. It's not this like forever black hole.

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Ellen: I think that's really important to note because through the isolation of the experience and for how long it can take for people, it can feel like the long dark night, but there is an outcome. You reminded me here around—and I really love reframing it as a transformative journey on our own personal development experiences if we choose to look at it that way. And I can totally imagine that there may be one partner who is not seeing it that way, who is feeling struggling through the mud, not understanding, refusing to look within the dynamic of the relationship to understand where the faults lie. And sometimes I can imagine that people just change over time and we are no longer the fit for whatever reason.

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Gwendoline: Right.

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Ellen: Mind me, I love when you say coming home to yourself. It's actually a theme I've been working in on a totally different topic, but I had an experience in 2010 where I was with my longtime partner and I was like, "I am living completely outside of my center inside of this relationship." And when we talked about it, and agreed that we both had done this weird thing where we had twisted ourselves up to become something different for the other person and we knew we needed to separate. I literally saw an electric spark in the room as if the bond had been broken. It was really huge and this was a long-term dating relationship. Spoiler, we took time apart for 6 months to a year. This is now my husband. But that break caused a deep introspective look to see who we really were and were becoming and what choices would we make. I could almost look at it as the second half of our life together.

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Gwendoline: Yep.

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Ellen: And that can be the same person or a different person. I don't even want to put my story into this, but you just really reminded me of it cuz I came home to myself in that break and I knew where I needed to stand in order for it to continue. So, thank you for really highlighting that. I feel like that's super resonant. Um, had another question for you. I can imagine and also having friends who have gone through divorce, um there's a lot of chaos before they can arrive at a moment of clarity. I'm wondering if you can explain or share what you have seen emotionally. What are people really wrestling through as they're trying to even give themselves permission to have these thoughts that maybe this is what the next step is?

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Gwendoline: Yeah. There's so much. I want to speak to a little bit what you said about feeling the rift and the separation and how I hear that mirrored in other people's stories too where they can feel themselves unwinding from their partner and it's so energetic. They know that they've had to do something else and it doesn't always translate to divorce but it does translate to this really deep knowing that especially I think we as women have this intuitive knowing of, "My gosh, there's so much information that I have within me that's telling me what my truth is." Um, and part of the homecoming is being able to separate yourself from what's happening in society, the relationship advice, all of the stuff—you know, "you need better communication, you need this." And in my experience, women have tried all of the things. And what they really need to do is listen to themselves through this.

And so that also speaks to your question about chaos and about fear. Um, because part of chaos—I don't know if you've ever heard of the FOG acronym? It stands for fear, obligation, guilt.

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Ellen: Yeah.

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Gwendoline: And when you start to tap into yourself somatically and you pay attention to what your brain space becomes in a certain environment, you're like, "My gosh, it's always so confusing for me here" or you're like, "Why is there no clarity in my relationship? Or why is this like so hard for me and I literally can't think my way out of it?" It's your body's cue to listen to the dissonance that you're experiencing.

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Ellen: Yes.

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Gwendoline: And it's creating the chaos of "I just don't know up from down anymore." And you can stay in that place for a really long time because I think we don't get the validation to exit society. It's so hard. It goes back to the stigmas around divorce. And the fear is real. The fear is really real. And my relationship with fear has changed over time. Instead of understanding fear as a hallmark of what I shouldn't do or what I shouldn't step towards, fear is a teacher and fear is a guide of letting me know especially big fear tells me, "This is you're on the precipice of change" and the magnitude of the fear is indicative of the magnitude of the change that's inviting me forward. And so I faced a big fear four times in my life—one of them was making the decision of divorce. And this is what I offer in coaching too: "Is there another time in your life that you can go back to and be like 'okay it was present at this time, what did I do, how did I step through it, and how can I source myself to do it again this time?'" It is a really tough decision to make.

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Ellen: I always say in my own work that fear is also the compass point directing us in the way to walk.

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Gwendoline: 100% and it's so scary to go there and I love the resourcing that you do in working with somebody to call upon a past experience that they've had to kind of re-trigger their brain wiring that this is possible.

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Ellen: Yeah. On the compass point, coaching as a compass, not a fix.

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Gwendoline: Yeah.

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Ellen: How is what you offer, divorce coaching, different than legal advice or legal counsel?

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Gwendoline: So divorce coaching is very different. It sits, if you think of a Venn diagram, you have your legal support, you have your therapy, you have your financial support. Um you might have other professionals in there, too—maybe you have a parenting specialist. And your divorce coach sits in the middle of all of that. And the ways in which a divorce coach is different than any of the other professionals connected to divorce is that divorce coaches are specially trained to help you walk through the chaos of divorce. Statistics mean the majority of adults do get married, so we can extrapolate that 50% of adults are navigating divorce and divorce after the loss of a loved one is the most traumatic event that any of us can go through.

And so majority of the adult population usually between 40 to 60 years old goes through this and they're going through crisis. I mean you are going through the death—it's grieving a living death. You're going through the death of the dream of what you thought your life was going to be like. The death of you as a human, the death of your most important relationship, the death of everything you believed about love, death of how you were going to step forward as a parent and how you feel responsible to your own family and your own community as now this marital pillar because we do view marriage in this way.

And divorce coaching—a divorce coach understands the crisis moment of all of this and it also understands that divorce is on a timeline. You got like 30 days, 60 days, 100 days to make consequential decisions around your finances, around how you parent, your parenting plan with your kids. Um you need to sign on the dotted line and sometimes it's impossible to walk back what your decision is. So, a divorce coach helps you walk through this emotional crisis when you're often in a state of survival and help you make future-oriented decisions often when it's not necessarily clear to you what your values are.

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Ellen: Yeah.

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Gwendoline: A lot of women that I work with—I had a north star that was really clear for me and I help women that I work with get to theirs and often it's about just being really acutely attuned to what they speak about, what they keep bringing into conversation. I'm like, "These are your themes. These are the things that are so important to you that you keep speaking them out loud." And so we build decisions based on what's important to them versus reacting in fear or reacting in a scripted socialized version of who they thought they needed to be.

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Ellen: I would say even out of a panic moment where you're in a certain kind of mindset or frame of thought that day and you're like, "This is actually what needs to happen with the kids" and then it explodes everything in that moment and it doesn't align with this longer-term vision because you're having... I would imagine there's a lot of acute sympathetic activation happening consistently through the entire process where our brains aren't online all the time to have that big-picture cognitive thinking and solutions finding. So, I'm hearing you say what I really love about this as a coaching model is that you're so much a spaceholder and a container and also almost a memory bank when they're not able to work with it on their own so easily. Because I know if I were in extreme duress or fear or a trauma, which is what all of these things are activating in us when this is a break apart, I would need that mirror to reflect me back to me so I can be reminded of who I am in my darkest moment. And I think that that is so powerful.

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Gwendoline: Yeah. It's interesting you say that because that ends up being the role that I take—being the witness. I am being the witness and being the holder of that journey and the mirror. And the number of times that I do, especially obviously when I've been able to work with somebody upwards of six months... and I can see that first moment when they come to me and sometimes it's in a moment of a lot of courage and there was actually joy. They're like, "Wow, okay, I feel liberated. I'm scared, but I'm liberated."

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Ellen: Yeah.

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Gwendoline: And then, I go back to the rite of passage because I found that we go through a really similar journey. We have the agony, we make the decision, and then we're in the state of elated liberation. And for a lot of women, it's like, "I get to live again." And then we go through the tunnel of the deep, the valley of death—the drop.

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Ellen: Yeah. I call it the ocean of like no light, you know, just bobbing on.

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Gwendoline: Yeah. And you do get to the end of the tunnel and to have somebody who's like, "You came to me holding this energy, this energy of liberated joy. Let's carry it through because you know this... to survive any crisis, to survive the deep grief that is transformation because that is transformation. We are letting go of a version of ourselves. You need the light. You need moments of light and glimmers of light and hope."

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Ellen: Yeah.

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Gwendoline: To carry through.

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Ellen: You kind of serve as this guidepost who's holding a lantern when they can't hold it themselves, reminding them that it's there. Coaching journey—that's amazing. The other thing you said that I wanted to think about—you were talking about grieving the death of the relationship. And I was realizing that so in my work when I do intuitive work or if I'm doing a reading, I will often see the relationship as its own being, sometimes entity, its own life force, separate but connected of course to the two people because there's really a couple relationships happening, right? There's the relationship with that person's self, the one with each other, and then the one with the relationship that they've kind of formed and then sometimes the dogma and the patterns and everything that are embodied within that life. What's unpacking that like when you're helping someone navigate the grief of not only the unraveling from the other person, but unraveling from the entity that's been with them within the relationship space for so long?

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Gwendoline: It's an interesting question because there are some elements of that that I feel are better suited for the therapeutic space. To go through a divorce is a betrayal trauma and it's not even because the person cheated on you. It's a deeper betrayal trauma because it's an abandonment. You feel abandoned by your beliefs around love and around partnership and lifelong commitment.

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Ellen: Yeah.

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Gwendoline: So, there's the part of it that's within you—the relationship with yourself, the relationship with the person who was your number one. And it is important to identify that when we marry somebody, we have chosen this person to be our number one. And that's really important. You're not born to them, you're not in community with them—you really chose them. Especially in Western society, let's say that. And the other part of the betrayal trauma is around everything that you're socialized. It's everything that you thought life was about and you can't always see what the cultural script is. You're like, "Wow, is there even any love in the universe? Like, is this even a thing?" And so, what I have noticed from people is that they will feel like they're completely untethered.

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Ellen: Yeah.

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Gwendoline: People describe it like being an astronaut out in space. There's no grounding. There's no—you know, they just don't know what to believe in anymore. Part of my work is in helping be that backbone during those times and the grounding force because you do need to pull apart you. My focus is really on helping people bring their energy back into themselves and even in those moments of being disconnected—how do you step back into you? How do you still feel some sense of safety when you don't know what to believe in anymore? And to allow time. You don't unravel... I think I heard a statistic a long time ago that for every year of a relationship, you need to account for at least a month of healing work. And I think that's probably short, frankly, when you're talking about decades-long relationships.

And there's one more thing: It's the "and." It's bringing in the "and." It's not an either-or. It's like I have a client whose family is really amazingly supportive and they're like, "You don't even need to ever talk to this person ever again. Write them off. Doesn't matter that he's your baby daddy. Just never need to talk to him ever again." And she's yearning to connect with him, right?

And I'm like, "Well, what if you bring the 'and'? What if you realize that your family in this instance or your friends are their role is to be your protectors and their role is to be like 'we don't ever want to see you get hurt again especially not by this human' but there's another role here and that there's the 'you' who's like 'but I had a relationship with this person, my emotional self is still connected in the heart space with him'—and so can you hold the 'and'?" And maybe you don't need to act on either one of them—maybe you shouldn't talk with him or send him a love note. So, I help clients hold that complexity and all of the different layers of it without oversimplifying it cuz it's not a clear-cut way forward.

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Ellen: Yeah, I really appreciate that—the ability to hold both and—because I find in different work but similarly the cognitive dissonance that can occur where I need to choose one or the other and then act on it to be able to fulfill and have a sense of almost relief from completing the action. It's like compulsion almost out of depending on the energetic ties that bind us. Just giving us permission to go "and this is still here" can relieve a lot of the tension because if we're trying to avoid it, trying to avoid the "and" and saying it's not right—"My family and everyone tells me that this is wrong but why do I still feel this way? I have to ignore it. That part of me is wrong"—that's a cutting off of themselves. But by allowing them to have "and I still feel this way," and "I will not act on it today perhaps, but I allow myself to still feel this and to maybe feel some love even though I know this doesn't work anymore," can relieve a lot of the burden and the pressure and it helps keep them home.

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Gwendoline: Yep.

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Ellen: Because they're not cutting off this part that they "shouldn't" have anymore. So, I really—I mean I just think this speaks really highly to the nuance that you bring in supporting sounds like mostly women through this transition phase because there's so much work. There's so many parallels to what you're talking about that I'm like, "Oh my gosh, this is what happens for me in regular coaching journeys where it's not divorce, it's starting a new business or it's working through my boundaries or healing from burnout." It's another form of that in a much more high-stakes game. And so to have a person that is holding a space and is seeing these things to help through all those aspects of transformation is extremely powerful. I mean like thank you for doing this work for people. This is amazing.

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Gwendoline: Yeah. There's something that you said that basically what I'm trying to do because when... is to not perpetuate the trauma of self-abandonment.

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Ellen: Yes.

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Gwendoline: Which we needed to do for a thousand reasons like socialization. We thought this and we just don't even realize that's what we're doing. When you're 20 and 30, you don't... I've come to understand that from a spiritual or personal development standpoint, it's not really something that you have the emotional capacity for—you're not meant to really tackle that until you're in your 40s. It's just, you know, I'm oversimplifying it, but there's a reason it's in the middle of life. And when you start to maybe give too much attention to what somebody else is saying to things that are external to you, you're continuing that self-abandonment. And again, it's like really deeply coming home to yourself and being like, "What is it that the 'you' is telling you through this?"

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Ellen: Yeah.

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Gwendoline: And sovereignty—being able to get back to your sovereign self—is paramount.

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Ellen: I love the sovereignty word and to get back to the sovereign self, liberation and sovereignty. It feels, like you said, paramount. You're touching on and you're actually already diving into some aspects of the soul-level work on this energy. I mean, like intuition, holding space. Is there anything else around an aspect of soul journey? Because I do feel like not necessarily all coaches would be kind of approaching it always from this perspective and I think it's a unique and intuitive gift that you have that you're bringing to this practice and if you have any sort of thoughts on that or things to share.

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Gwendoline: Yeah, I think I do know that there's some people who approach any sort of coaching but divorce coaching from like a super practical standpoint and they're like, "We're going to get your parenting plan and your assets division, your finances squared away" and all of that's really really important. And I have clients with whom that's primarily what we focus on, but it's always informed by what's happening energetically, what's happening underneath the surface.

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Ellen: Yes.

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Gwendoline: So, it's like, okay, so we're going to write a parenting plan and here's what it says. And it says that transitions are going to be on Sunday because that's what the precedent was. And they're like, "But it's not working for me, but I guess I can bend. I guess I can be like so accommodating and I can make it work." And the question I end up asking are like, "Well, how old are your kids? Can you do this for the next 10 years of their lives? What are the consequences? Are you used to overwhelmingly taking on those consequences? What is the part of you that really needs to claim what you need through this? And how do we do this in a way that respects your ability to thrive and your ability to thrive with your kids?" And it's not about being against or anti your partner or like making life really difficult for them. Um, but often for women, it's about stepping fully into themselves and into the asks and what they need to thrive in life. So, it goes a little bit beyond the best practices and it goes into: how do we shape this in a way that's in integrity with you?

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Ellen: Yeah.

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Gwendoline: Need.

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Ellen: Yeah. You're supporting the catalytic transformation of who they can become beyond the nuts and bolts of what needs to happen for this divorce. I have some practical questions after the whole question. Um, there are different types of divorces, right? There are people who separate amicably, super high-stakes, high-stress situations where there's a lot of tension and fighting and ones that feel more ambiguous, like "why are we doing it, oh, we're doing it, we need to do it," whatever it is. How do you navigate that with clients and why is it important to kind of understand what that framework is initially?

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Gwendoline: Yeah. Uh I think the ambiguity question is a really big one. Most people are in that state of ambiguity of "Should I stay or should I go?" for so long and it's one of the spaces I'm looking to kind of move into a little bit more because I think we need more support and not because everybody needs to be divorced but because you're it's the beginning of asking yourself these impossible questions. Sometimes you can come back together and sometimes you can't or you need to take just some breathing space apart. In that state of ambivalence, being able to be validated—which we don't have society—the social narratives and constructs around divorce are "You're going to mess up your family, you're going to mess up your kids," "intact family forever, even if the home environment is horrible."

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Ellen: Right.

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Gwendoline: Which is not—we know better now. It's better for kids to be in separate households if parents are... there's always a lot of conflict. So that's a really important phase for people to get more support and then translating that into the type of divorce that they might have. I tend to attract higher conflict clients and they come to me and they wouldn't even use that word for a long time but my ears are attuned. I'm hearing the places where negotiation's really hard. I'm hearing the places where conversation cannot advance. And it really becomes this like either-or setup. Or this place where they're trying to advocate for themselves, but the other person is passing them—you know, they're accusing them of negligence or being like they've always been the primary parent, but the other parent is like, "You don't know what you're doing." And they're like, "What do you mean? Been doing this for like the last six years. I think I know what I'm doing."

Strategically it matters because how you shape a parenting plan, how you go through the negotiations, how you think about your finances is different if you're in partnership with somebody who can have dialogue, who is able to do some give and take—the stakes are a little bit lower. Like maybe you don't have to decide everything today. But if you're with somebody with whom it's excruciating and a one-line request of "can we can you please give me the kids' jackets?" becomes a bible of content, you typically want to have negotiations that are set up for the next 10 years of life. And that's like—think about how... can you imagine what you're going to need 10 years from now?

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Ellen: No.

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Gwendoline: So, I have a hard time visualizing two years from now every now and then. So, that's where having some strategy behind what type of divorce you're going through really matters. And then, to draw from my work before becoming a divorce coach of talking about social issues around sexism and racism—it's understanding the caveats of the legal system and the judicial system and the stigma around moms and how that perpetuates through a divorce and how you need to present yourself to the legal system so that you're taken with credibility and care and not just dismissed.

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Ellen: So, there's a lot of strategy behind this work and I can just imagine that there are a couple people listening today who are in this position of uncertainty probably or they're a little bit in the thick of it and realizing wow it would be really nice to have someone to kind of co-n. So let's talk... like we're talking to that audience and to those people who are in some pain right now and who want to know not only are you there to help them get to the other side but what does "success" look like for the other side? What's a little guiding light that they can look at if they're trying to think about this right now?

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Gwendoline: Yeah. So, it can be really scary to think about divorce and you're like, "Oh my god, is the grass greener on the other side? Am I just going to become this wrinkled cougar who's trying to go after young men cuz there are no men my age anymore and is this the best it's going to be and I'm about to throw it out the window?" I find that that perspective is the perspective of somebody who hasn't gone through transformation. They don't know yet. So they're still looking at it through society's lens and they're judging themselves on that. They're like, "Wow, this is the best that I'm going to get." Because divorced women especially, nobody wants to become them.

And when you end up in a community of people who have been through divorce, what you find is that there is so much humility and there's so much humor and there's such depth and there is this well of emotional awareness. There isn't a single person when I tell them I'm a divorce coach they don't tell me their divorce story and they don't tell me how devastating and excruciating it was and yet they're so much better off for it because they got to return to themselves. And maybe that means that they stepped into a career or a passion that they never could have imagined. They become a photographer or a hypnotist. Or or maybe they didn't actually end up divorcing, but their marriage changed for the better and their relationship with their children changed. They are so much more present and they've come to really rely and understand what makes life count. It's not by the external measures of success anymore—not so much like, "Oh well, I have a million dollars in the bank." It's "I am rich in the quality of my relationships and my community and the connection that I have for my children." And for a lot of dads, what I see sometimes is they're actually stepping into their children's lives in ways that they didn't do so much when they were married for all of the reasons. And that's a huge benefit for kids to have that more of a bonded relationship with their fathers.

And for moms, they get to be more fully themselves. They're going out dancing with their friends. They're going to go take that trip. They're pursuing the pottery class. They're just more rested. So you don't get to it without the fire of transformation. And I think you know that. But the flip side—it's not so much like "Is divorce better than what I have now?" The real question is, "Can you survive what you have now? Or is what you have now going to kill you? Is it going to make you so bitter that you're not even going to like yourself?"

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Ellen: Well, I think about does that bitterness then breed autoimmune issues? Do we become sick because of the bitterness? Do we then lose our health and our vitality even further because we're not operating in a way that our body would like us to be free?

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Gwendoline: Yep. Yeah. And I've found a pattern that people—the women, the ones who make the decision to divorce and again it's overwhelmingly women—they come to it because they get to a moment of existential death. They're like, "If I either choose this decision which is like jumping off a cliff or I stay here which is like entombing myself."

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Ellen: Yeah.

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Gwendoline: And at that point when you're on that precipice you make the big decisions. If I may can I add to that a little bit please. So, one of the things that we as a society and as kind of friends or loved ones who are watching our people get divorced, what we tend to not know is how much they need us and how much they just need us to show up and to not project our own stereotypes on them of, "Well, God, something must be wrong with you if you can't keep your marriage together" or "Damn this mom seems really excited to have some time to herself—does she not love her kids enough?" or all of the things that we project. Or like, "Oh you're getting divorced, you'll find another man, no big deal" and then we judge who they're dating.

Or the more painful part is for grown children who are going through this and who are looking for their support networks—they need their parents. One of the biggest heartbreaks that I see are people who are going through divorce and they are so desperate for the security and the comfort that only like a parental figure can give them and their parents... often it's cuz they haven't been through it themselves or they just don't have that emotional depth—they just turn away.

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Ellen: Oh the parents of the adults who are getting divorced so would be grandparents of the kids. That's what you mean.

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Gwendoline: Yeah. And not out of meanness. They just don't show up. They don't call. Their kids are like, "Hey, I need you. Can you come help me move out of my house? Can you just come for the weekend?" And they're like, "Nah, it's not convenient." And it's kind of like, but this is a time when your child needs you to show up emotionally. They just need your emotional presence. So, I would say as community members, if we could just have more compassion for people going through divorce.

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Ellen: Yeah, that would be huge. Thank you. And what would—I can imagine also that a person in the situation might be reticent to ask for help beyond close family whether or not they receive it. But what would be some of the encouragement you would offer to a person going through it? Perhaps their community does not know how to show up, doesn't know what to do. Um sometimes is uncertain—am I intruding? Do they just need some space? How do I ask for help? How would you encourage someone going through this to seek help and what to ask for? What would be the script? They might even need a script.

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Gwendoline: I think it's twofold. One is, how do you ask for people who are going to stay in your life like close friends, family members? And one of the scripts that I've seen work is: "You may not understand this. I don't even understand it. I just need you to show up for me. I just sometimes need you to be by my side. You don't have to say anything. Just be there."

And the other part for people going through divorce is that you actually do need to recreate your community. You do need to go get an additional friend group and invite in other activities and start to seek out people who've been through this and who are divorced. Part of it is that whether we like it or not, to have a single adult woman who's divorced is really threatening. It's really threatening for married women. It's like walking around with a capital A, the scarlet A, except it's a D.

And so even for your married friends, sometimes you become this inadvertent mirror of their fears—all of their fears around what could go wrong with their marriage or the demise of their relationship. Um, so you need an additional community to help ground you in your transformation.

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Ellen: Absolutely. Yeah. Because it's part of that transformative process that my previous friend group may not be at a point where they know that this isn't about them and it's actually about what I'm going through, but they can't see that because they're scared. Because they may be going through many things that they're trying to keep under the rug in some cases or just not know how to show up because they feel like "Why would I rub a happy marriage in your life right now?"

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Gwendoline: Yeah.

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Ellen: You need people to ground with. That's great. Thinking about kids and support for kids—children of young kids, right? Not the adult children not getting it from their parents but the kids who are experiencing their parents splitting. Given there are so many types of separation, what are some things parents can think through to sort of scaffold that transition, which will inevitably be stressful, but to give them a softer landing?

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Gwendoline: It's an interesting question. Um I've seen some people who enter into separation with so much foresight and so much care for their kids and it's like months of preparation and even scripting the conversation of how are they going to tell their child and that and it's amazing and then getting the therapeutic support—at young ages it's often play therapy or letting teachers know and saying, "Hey, this is happening. Just FYI if there's a big outburst." It can sometimes feel like almost... kind of unfortunate cuz there's so much care in these circumstances, but kids are going through a transformation, too. And so, it's not like the "perfectly delivered 'hey, mom and dad are splitting up' conversation." It's how do you continue to hold them through the unraveling of their foundation?

What I found now multiple years into mine and also watching other people and my parents also divorced when I was actually an adult—which is a whole interesting thing to go through...

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Ellen: I think mine did as well.

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Gwendoline: Yeah. Is it doesn't end the transformation and what that means doesn't end when you're a society that so heavily prioritizes and values like the intact family. I found that my kids will end up bonding with other kids who come through divorce so they can understand each other. Um, and obviously there's the other end of the spectrum of people who do this with little care or where there's so much trauma and reactivity that it's like the kids are now swept up into it and have their own fears. And so, as much as possible, it's getting additional professional support. And if your kids aren't into therapy, you know, how else can they get their energy out? Maybe it's a sport, maybe it's art, maybe it's friends. One of the things that has been really helpful for me is to have a relationship with my kids' therapist independent of if my kids go to her or not. So, she knows them and I'm able to bring issues up to her and say, "Hey, this happened. How can I best parent through this?"

Because there's also very little—we're still figuring out this whole "parenting through divorce" thing. We're what, two generations into it, not even? So, there's a lot for us to learn and holding your kids with a lot of care. There's a lot of advice out there that says that kids are the most reactive with their "safe parent," which can... if you're the safe parent, you're like, "Oh my gosh, how do I not spin into my own triggered response with my kids' response?" The community—having that community of parents who's going through it too who can commiserate with you.

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Ellen: Yeah. I can imagine—not because of divorce, but being the safe parent and having to be the nervous system regulator for really intense feelings and even outbursts of where they're so angry that they're throwing it at you. And I could imagine the guilt that would come. "I hate you. You did this. Why did you put me in the situation?" And it's really them processing and in that moment likely feeling that exact thing, but then as the adult, as the parent, to sit and know: my job right now is to just hold the container for this energy so that this person who's very afraid of me leaving also knows that I'm always here. They can be mad at me and they can throw their anger but I'm not going anywhere. That is a mechanism I have leaned on so much in parenting intensely emotional kids.

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Gwendoline: Yeah. I think it's a really important one and in the process you're teaching them a different version of what attachment and love can look like which I think all of us who are willing to go through divorce in some ways are kind of like, "I'm hoping to break a cycle too."

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Ellen: Yeah.

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Gwendoline: "I'm hoping that my kids go into a marital relationship with better tools to navigate this." But there's something that you said about being able to be the nervous system regulator that's really important. But it also made me think about the grief work and how grieving our marriages or the end of a long relationship takes a really long time. It taps into a whole other tapestry of grief work that we need to do that goes back to our own childhoods. So one of the things I've learned about trauma for myself is that it presents itself when it's ready.

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Ellen: Yeah.

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Gwendoline: Uh and that can take a lot of years and it's okay.

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Ellen: It is okay. Yeah. Um I have a final kind of closing out question and it goes a little bit back to the person who's listening right now who's going, "Wow, I didn't know I needed to hear this today." What advice would you give them in this moment?

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Gwendoline: Uh I would I would tell them I would hope that they are sitting hopefully seated and maybe touching their chest or their heart space and in some ways just receiving that part of themselves that needed that validation of like, "Yes, what you have been experiencing is real and it is true and it is legit and you are not a bad person and they are not a bad person and you deserve to be deeply held and you deserve to be deeply held as who you are, who you're becoming, how you're becoming." And this is really hard work and it hurts. Uh, and and there are supports out there. Um, and we're not meant to walk through life in isolation and alone. There is a way to walk through this transformation with more guidance in a little bit more of a container around what to expect, when to expect it, and how to anticipate it. Um, not because you won't feel it—not because it's not going to kick you in the butt—but because you deserve that compassion and that witnessing.

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Ellen: You almost moved me to tears with that. I think everyone needs to hear that regardless. But yes, to that person, if you are one of the people listening right now who has been deeply moved by this conversation, I hope you hear those words that Gwendalyn just shared. And Gwendalin, how can people find you if they would like to have a conversation?

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Gwendoline: Yeah, the best place is my website. It's Artemis Divorce Coaching. Artemis, like the great goddess—she's the protectress of women and children, which was also intentional. And I've loved her since I was a teenager. Um, and divorce and then coaching. And you can email me too, gwen@artemisdivorcecoaching.com. Um, and I'm on all the social channels. So follow, reach out, schedule a consultation, you know, sign up for the newsletter, and I'll I'll be there. And it's my honor and what I get out of this is the ability to be the type of witness that I know that I am. Not everybody is meant to work in the shadows of life, and I've never been deterred by that. And I've never been deterred by the magnitude of someone's pain. Instead, being invited into that space of transformation is such a gift.

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Ellen: Thank you so much for being here today.

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Gwendoline: Thank you for having me.

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Ellen: Thank you for joining me today on Resilient and Radiant. If today's conversation spoke to your heart, I invite you to subscribe, leave a review, and share this space with the women in your life who are also finding their way toward their true north. And if you're ready for deeper support, come visit me at ellenwyomingdeoy.com. I'd be honored to walk this path with you. Until next time, stay resilient, stay radiant.