Episode Description - Life After Divorce: From Breakdown to Breakthrough
Most people think the hardest part of divorce is splitting the assets or facing the courtroom. But the real challenge—the one no one tells you about—is facing yourself and deciding who you want to be in your life after divorce.
Will your divorce be the springboard for your life 2.0? Or will it continue to be the smoldering ashes of the life you thought you had for years to come?
In this solo episode, you’ll hear the story of Amina, a smart, successful woman who looked like she had it all, but behind closed doors was quietly unraveling in a toxic, controlling marriage.
You’ll discover how Amina slowly began to rebuild her life from the inside out, and how she found the strength to reclaim her confidence, her finances, and eventually her joy. Her story isn’t about revenge or perfection—it’s about how clarity, courage, and conscious choices can transform even the most painful chapter into a path of growth.
This episode is more than a story—it’s a reminder that divorce isn’t just about what you lose. It’s about who you become in the process.
If you're feeling broken or stuck, this conversation will show you that you still have the power to create a life you love—even if you have to start from scratch.
Key Takeaways From This Episode with Karen
- Karen shares how divorce isn't just a legal process—it’s a personal transformation. Going through divorce can help people rediscover who they are and redesign their life.
- Karen tells the story of “Amina,” a successful professor trapped in a toxic marriage, whose journey illustrates the emotional and practical steps of reclaiming personal power.
- Amina faced emotional abuse and financial control but began regaining control through small, strategic steps like taking on a consulting side job to build confidence and independence.
- Divorce is rarely a clean, linear process. Amina’s story involved setbacks and took time, but she ultimately achieved peace, custody, financial stability, and a fulfilling new relationship.
- The secret of divorce: it's about who you become. It’s less about what you lose and more about using the experience to build a life that reflects your true values and desires.
- Making decisions from a place of clarity is key. Karen stresses the importance of calming your nervous system and getting grounded before making major choices.
- Divorce can force deep self-reflection. It compels people to confront difficult questions about identity, values, relationships, and what they truly want in life.
- You can choose how divorce shapes you. While much of the process is out of your control, your response and what you make of it is within your power.
- From survival to thriving: Amina went from anxious and diminished to empowered, assertive, and joyfully living a life she designed herself.
- Karen’s message of hope: Divorce is not the end—it’s a doorway to transformation, and if embraced intentionally, it can help you become stronger, happier, and more aligned with your authentic self.
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Transcript
Life After Divorce: From Breakdown to Breakthrough
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
transformation, personal growth, living by design
SPEAKER
Karen Covy
Karen Covy Host
00:12
Hello and welcome to Off the Fence, a podcast where we deconstruct difficult decision-making to try to figure out what keeps us stuck and, more importantly, how do we get unstuck. I'm your host, Karen Covy, a former divorce lawyer, mediator and arbitrator, turned coach, author and entrepreneur.
Normally in this podcast, I talk to world-class experts about everything involved in marriage, divorce relationships, decision-making and a whole lot more. But today's episode is different and okay, I'll come clean. Today is my birthday and I don't know if you had this tradition when you were in school, but when I was in grade school, it was normal for whoever's birthday it was, they brought treats for the rest of the class. So I thought to myself okay, it's my birthday. Instead of me talking to somebody else, what if I just talk to you? So this is my birthday present to you, my treat for you, and in today's episode, I wanted to talk about the real secret of divorce, and this is a secret that most divorce professionals aren't going to share with you and most people who go through a divorce. They figure it out, but it's usually not until after their divorce is over, and this secret is something that can not only give you the greatest chance for getting the outcome you want at the end of your divorce, which is important. But even more important than that, this can change the way you go through your divorce and, you know, anything that can make what is always going to be anywhere from uncomfortable to a really awful experience while you go through a divorce. Anything that can make that a little bit easier is definitely a good thing. So that's what I'm going to share with you today.
02:09
But first I want to tell you a little story. This is a story about my client. I'm going to call her Amina, which obviously is not her real name, and I've changed up some of the facts to sort of anonymize the story. But you'll get the gist of it here. When Amina came to me, she was a smart, successful, really well-accomplished university professor and she had been married for over 15 years. She had a teenage daughter and from the outside, life looked pretty good. From the inside it was different. Amina was wrecked by guilt, she was anxious all the time, and her life, her personal life, was a big mess. You see, when she had met her husband Jay, they had met in college and, like so many other college students, they met, they fell in love, they wanted to be married. But in Amina's culture it was normal for parents to arrange the marriage for their children. So the fact that Amina went to her parents and said, I met this guy, I want to marry him right, that was not done and Amina was able to persuade her parents yes, I should marry him, he's a good guy, blah, blah, blah. So Amina married for love and her parents gave in. She got married and for a while everything was great Amina and her husband both graduated from college, they got great jobs, they started their life together. A few years later their daughter was born.
03:40
But along the way Amina's red flag meter started going off. I mean, her husband had anger issues, right, so he would yell at her. He wasn't physically violent, but he was relentless and he was a screamer and he would follow her around the house and yell at her and berate her and slowly but surely, he wore down every last bit of confidence that Amina had. But she was married and she stuck it out and she had a daughter, she had a career, she had so many other things to pay attention to that she was like, well, okay, this is just what it is. I can't deal with one more thing right now. But then Jay lost his job and after he did that, his anger went through the roof. All of the incidents of yelling and screaming and blah, blah, blah. They got worse and he would follow around the house and she couldn't take it anymore and it just got worse and worse and it continued because Jay couldn't seem to hold on to a job.
04:42
So, on top of everything else, now Amina was the breadwinner for the family and after a while she just she was at a breaking point. She couldn't take it anymore. So she reached out to me and she felt so nervous and so guilty and so anxious and she was I wish you could have seen her, because she was just like curled up into herself and small. But she couldn't take it anymore and she didn't know if she wanted a divorce. She didn't know what she wanted, she just knew she couldn't live like that anymore.
05:15
So, when Amina and I started working together, we started small right. We started by saying, okay, don't worry about a divorce right now, you've just got to get a little peace. You've got to get somewhere that you can relax, calm your nervous system down and think a little bit. So that's what we focused on, and so Amina got a side hustle working as a consultant for a company. So, in addition to working as a professor, she spent a few hours a week working for a company. She made some extra money and she got to feel what it felt like to work with people who really appreciated her and it kind of started to build her self-confidence a little bit and it gave her access to a little extra cash that her husband, who was very financially controlling, he didn't have access to that money, so that allowed her to squirrel away a little bit of money and in a couple of months she was finally able to get the courage and have the money to get her own place, separate and apart from him, so that she could have a sanctuary where she could relax, right and, step by step that's the way Amina went through the whole divorce process . And you're probably expecting me to tell you at this point that, oh, she, you know she left him.
06:39
She had, you know she had full custody of her daughter. All the money was fine, everything worked out and they lived happily ever after and that is kind of what happened. But not that way. You see, divorce is never a straight path kind of what happened, but not that way. You see, divorce is never a straight path. It never goes quite the way you think it's going to. And did Amina get all the things? Did she get a fair settlement? Did she get a great relationship with her daughter? Did she end up meeting a person who was in a relationship that really treated her the way she deserved to be treated and the way she'd always dreamed of? Yes, yes and yes. However, it didn't come in a day, it didn't come in a week, it didn't even come in a year. It took time, but ultimately that's exactly where Amina got, and none of that would have happened if Amina had stayed locked in the life that she had.
07:35
But let's rewind a little bit, because you might find that you're in a similar situation to what Amina was, where maybe you're in the beginning of your divorce or you're thinking about a divorce and you're trying to figure out ah, should I, shouldn't I, should I, shouldn't I? And divorce feels like an end, it feels like the destruction of your whole life, it feels like you failed, and so jumping into something like that, especially when you don't know how things are going to go, like that's scary, that's absolutely terrifying. Or maybe you're in the middle of your divorce or just started your divorce and it looks like, again, everything is ending. You're having to deal with a legal system that you don't really understand, that you may have never had to deal with before. You're looking at trying to amass financial information that's more than an IRS audit. You're looking at numbers. You might not be completely comfortable with what they are or what they mean. Or even if you are comfortable with your numbers, you're still looking at them going. How is this going to turn out? How am I going to be okay? How are my kids going to be okay? What is going to happen to me? And it's terrifying. It's terrifying on every level. But here's what you don't realize Divorce isn't just about divorce.
08:59
It's about you. It's about who you are as a human being. It's about what matters to you, because going through a divorce, on top of all the other legal and financial and emotional craziness that you have to go through, it makes you stop and take a look at yourself, take a look at your life and ask the hard questions that none of us really take the time to ask, questions like what do I want my life to look like? Not just what don't I want it to look like? You're really clear on that. You don't want it to look like what you've got, but what do you want it to look like? What matters to you? What do you really care about? What does marriage mean to you? What kind of relationship do you want? What do you want in a partner or a spouse? What do you value?
09:58
Divorce when you go through it and you hit that rock bottom place which, full disclosure. It's not a fun place to be in, right, it pretty much sucks. But it forces you to take a hard look at things you wouldn't look at otherwise. And when you do, if you allow it to, it can totally shift your perspective and take you out of living a life by default and give you the chance to actually live a life by design. To create the life that you truly want out of the ashes of the life that you thought would give you what you wanted.
10:39
But it didn't work out that way. You see, divorce isn't something that just happens to you. It's a process that allows you to become something more. It allows you to become the person that you've always wanted to be. That's what Amina found out. She went I wish I could have shown you the pictures, the before and the after pictures.
11:07
She went from being this shy, closed off, small, anxious person into somebody who really knew who she was, who loved life, who was radiating happiness and joy and all the things. So she went from somebody who couldn't even like confront her husband to someone who knew her power and was able to stand up for herself and set boundaries that she enforced right, because if you have a boundary and you don't hold fast to it, you don't enforce it, it's not, you know, it's not any good. So, Amina became able to set boundaries for her spouse and for other people in her life. She began to be able to take control of her financial future. So, she started to control her money and where it went, and make financial decisions that reflected her values and what she wanted for her and for her daughter in the future. And, yes, ultimately Amina was able to find a new relationship. Now it wasn't with her spouse, but she found a relationship with somebody who loved her and cared for her and gave her the kind of relationship that she really wanted and she deserved.
12:26
So, the bottom line for Amina which is the same as it can be for you is that Amina started living a life by design, not by default, and you can do the same thing. That's the gift, if you want, of divorce. It takes you all the way down to the bottom, but when you're there, if you can think about it and find in yourself the power, you can strip away all the things that you don't want and actually start to create the life that you do want. And that's the secret. That's the gift. If you focus only on what your spouse did to you, or how much this sucks, or how horrible this is, is divorce all those things? Of course it is, but if that's what you focus on, you're going to stay stuck in the yuck right. What you want to do is move past that and actually use your divorce as a catalyst for change, a catalyst to become the you that you've always wanted and live the life that you've always wanted to live.
13:35
So the secret about divorce it's not about loss, it's not about what you lose. It's about who you become in the process, and that's actually good news, because that's something you can control. Right, there's a lot about divorce so much about divorce that you can't control. You can't control the lawyers or the judge or your spouse or the system, or a lot of what goes on is going to be beyond your control, and that sucks. Straight up.
14:09
However, what you can control is what it all means to you and what it does to you, and you can let it beat you down or you can let it build you up, and when you're on the bottom, when you've gone through hell, you realize you're a lot stronger than you think and you can use that strength to really start to create the life you want a life by design instead of one by default. You can use that power to build the happiness that you want, build the relationships that you want, live how you want and follow your dreams, to pull them out of the ashes and dust them off and actually really go for it and the person that you become. If you will do that, instead of let your divorce leave you bitter and broken I mean, nobody wants that so if you can, let that go and instead pull yourself up and use your divorce as fuel to create the life that you want. You're going to be amazing. So, remember this.
15:20
If you take nothing else from this episode no, you are not broken. Your life is not over. You are not a failure. You're going through a hard time, but this hard time will give you the ability and the energy and the experience to build the life you truly want and the person you become because of this, that person is going to blow your mind.
If you've enjoyed this episode, if you've enjoyed my little rant, do me a big favor and, like the episode, subscribe to the podcast, subscribe to the YouTube channel. And if you know someone else who's struggling, who's struggling in their marriage or struggling through their divorce, do them a favor and share the episode. Share the love. It'll make all the difference. Thank you.
