Separation & Divorce Counselling
Nobody sends flowers when a marriage ends.
There's no funeral and no week off. People ask how the house sale is going. Meanwhile you've lost the person, the future you'd planned around them, a good portion of your friends, and the version of yourself that came with all of it.
It's one of the largest losses a person goes through, and one of the very few that arrives with no permission to grieve.
Wherever you are in it
Most people who come to me about this are in one of four places.
You've been left, and you're still catching up to it.
You did the leaving, and you're finding that guilt gets a lot less sympathy than grief does.
You've been deciding for two years and haven't said it out loud to anybody.
Or it was a long time ago, and you've realised you still haven’t moved passed it.
All four are worth bringing in.
Why this one is so hard to get over
You keep having to see them. Most losses let you get some distance. If you have kids and need to see the person regularly you never get this distance.
The decisions land at the worst possible time. Property, money, where the children live. Choices with twenty year consequences, made in the worst month of your life.
Everyone has an opinion. Friends take sides. Family weigh in. Advice arrives that nobody asked for.
You've lost a future as well as a person. The plans, the assumptions, the picture you had of how the next thirty years were going to look.
Something you can try
Give the separation a time slot.
Pick an hour, two or three times a week, and do the hard part then. The lawyer's email, the bank, the list of what goes where. When it comes into your head outside that window, tell yourself it has a time and this isn't it.
You'll still think about it. What changes is that the whole week stops belonging to it, and that's usually what makes people feel they're losing their grip.
If there are children
Most parents arrive at this frightened of the damage they're doing.
The research is consistent on one thing: it's the conflict between parents that harms children, more than the separation itself. Two people who separate and keep their children out of the middle do considerably better than two people who stay in a house full of tension.
So a lot of this work is practical. What gets said in front of them and what doesn't. How the handovers go. And how you manage your own feelings, so your children don't end up carrying them on your behalf.
How I work with this
I do a good deal of couples work, so I've usually seen the dynamic you're describing from both sides of the room. That helps when you're trying to sort out what was yours, what was theirs, and what was the thing the two of you built together.
We'd start with getting you through the immediate stretch. Sleeping, eating, functioning at work, keeping the admin from swallowing the rest of your life.
Then the harder questions. What actually happened. What you'd want to do differently. And how to come out of this without carrying it into the next twenty years, or into the next relationship.
Where there's real trauma in how it ended, an affair you found out about or something that frightened you, I can use EMDR therapy.
Separating well
Some couples come in together once the decision itself is settled, to work out how to do the ending properly. That's particularly worth it where there are children who will need both of you for a long time yet.
Plenty of people find those sessions easier than they expected. The pressure to fix it has gone, which frees both of you up.
The practical bits
Individual sessions attract a Medicare rebate with a mental health treatment plan from your GP, so if you're coming on your own the cost comes down. Couples therapy sessions do not attract a rebate.
I see clients in person in Joondalup and by video anywhere in Australia, which helps if you've moved out and you're somewhere temporary.
Starting
The first session is a working session. We'll start on what's in front of you right now, and I want you leaving that first hour with something you can use.
Call me on 0410 461 588 or make an enquiry online.