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About this episode

Is your relationship quietly unraveling, and you’re not sure what to do next? Facing the possibility of divorce can feel like your world has been turned upside down, leaving you trapped between fear, uncertainty, and the heartbreak of not knowing what comes next. Too often, couples get lost in a whirlwind of painful emotions, making rushed decisions that can have long-term consequences for themselves, their children, and their extended families.

In this episode, you’ll discover practical tools and compassionate insights designed to support couples sitting at the crossroads of staying together or parting ways. Learn how to recognize the early warning signs of relationship distress, approach difficult conversations with honesty and courage, and understand the deep-seated reasons why so many people struggle to speak their truths. You’ll also find guidance on how to stabilize your emotions, slow down the decision-making process, and move forward, whether by rebuilding your connection or ending things as peacefully as possible. This episode offers hope, clarity, and a path to navigate one of life’s toughest transitions with greater awareness and intention.

Dr. Becky Whetstone is a writer, author, and marriage and family therapist obsessed with relationship dynamics since she was young. She writes in an entertaining and informative way, and after many of her life experiences, she wants to change how we handle marriage, separation, divorce, and post-divorce dynamics.

Episode Highlights

03:58 Becky’s story and why she cares about marriage crisis.

10:04 Why support is needed even when divorce is decided.

15:33 Why taking time to calm down matters.

20:19 Warning signs that a relationship is in trouble.

23:27 Hiding unhappiness can hurt a marriage.

25:24 Having hard conversations with your partner.

30:10 Why people avoid talking about problems.

32:49 Facing relationship problems like an adult.

36:20 How attachment styles affect marriage crisis.

39:29 The need for self-work and growing as a person.

42:06 How divorce affects everyone in the family.

46:58 Lessons learned from divorce.

51:01 Where to find help and resources.

Your Check List of Actions to Take

• Pay attention to the subtle indicators of disconnection or unhappiness in your relationship, and don’t ignore ongoing disillusionment.
• If you’re seriously struggling, courageously communicate your feelings directly to your partner rather than keeping them a secret.
• Don’t rush into separation or divorce; give yourselves time to stabilize and reduce emotional reactivity so decisions are made with a clear, calm mind.
• Engage with a marriage therapist or coach who specializes in couples in crisis to help navigate this difficult period constructively.
• Practice grounding and self-soothing techniques to bring yourself out of fight-or-flight and into a state where you can think and communicate clearly.
• Continue to work with professionals even if the decision to separate has been made—this can support amicable transitions, especially when children are involved.
• Understand the ripple effect your decisions have on your children, extended family, and community; honesty and preparation are crucial to support everyone involved.
• Use this crisis as motivation to address your own emotional wounds, attachment patterns, and habits, whether or not you stay together, so you avoid repeating the same patterns in the future.

Mentioned

I (Think) I Want Out (*Amazon Affiliate link) (book)

Uncoupling (*Amazon Affiliate link) (book)

Facing Codependence (*Amazon Affiliate link) (book)

ERP 373: How To Embrace Ambivalence When Making Big Relationship Decisions — An Interview With Rachel Zamore

Evolve in Love – Next Level (program)

Evolve in Love – Next level – Book Your Discovery Call

Essentia’s website (*Affiliate link)

Stratami™ Organic Mattress (This is the mattress we purchased) (*Affiliate link)

Classic REM5 Active Mattress – (The mattress we wish we could have gotten for the cooling feature) (*Affiliate link)

Connect with Dr. Becky Whetstone

Websites: MarriageCrisisManager.com

Facebook: facebook.com/relationshipcrisismanager

X: x.com/DoctorBecky

YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UCTB7JNDz6Uic8Xtdt_3YMhw

Instagram: instagram.com/doctorbecky/#

TikTok: tiktok.com/@drbeckyatgoodinside?lang=en

Threads: threads.com/@doctorbecky

Connect with Dr. Jessica Higgins

Facebook: facebook.com/EmpoweredRelationship 

Instagram: instagram.com/drjessicahiggins 

Podcast: drjessicahiggins.com/podcasts/

Pinterest: pinterest.com/EmpowerRelation 

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/drjessicahiggins 

Twitter: @DrJessHiggins 

Website: drjessicahiggins.com  

Email: [email protected]

If you have a topic you would like it to be discussed, please contact us by clicking on the “Ask Dr. Jessica Higgins” button here. 

Thank you so much for your interest in improving your relationship. 

Also, I would so appreciate your honest rating and review. Please leave a review by clicking here. 

Thank you!  

*With Amazon Affiliate Links, I may earn a few cents from Amazon, if you purchase the book from this link.

Episode Transcript

Becky, thank you for joining us. I'm very excited about our conversation.

Jessica, I am so thrilled to be here. I want to thank you so much for letting me come on.

Yes. Even just in our chatting before getting started here, I've just appreciated your energy and your purpose, and how you're serving such a great need in the industry—therapeutically—around marriage crisis. I know many people listening to the show are really interested in how to improve their relationship or marriage. You have a scope and a vantage point from being really in the difficult parts of when a relationship ends, and how that often people are really grappling and not having much orientation around how to do that in a skillful way. So I know that's a lot that you focus on. But for today's conversation, where would you like to start first off, around just how this became such a passion project for you?

Well, I started going to therapy. I was a lay person, for a long time. I started off 25 years old, having anxiety and depression and stuff. I started going to therapy and working on myself then. I've always been kind of obsessed with relationships. I mean, as a young kid, I read advice columns, I was obsessed with them and relationships. So I kind of had in my head that I was going to grow up and be an advice columnist. I wanted to be Dear Abby or Ann Landers or someone like that.

In my learning and growing, I'm in this marriage and I have two young children. Very early into my marriage, I would say it started off ideal, I thought I had married my dream man. Like, he hit every bullet point for me. So we got married. I never felt so loved. Literally, six months into the marriage, he slammed the door on me. It just went from warmth and love and adoration, to walled off. So really, that alone just blew my mind, and I spent the next five years trying to get him to come back out and play with, and begging him. Toward the end, it would get ugly. He would snap at me and I'd go: Look, I don't know how long I can hang on like this, this is really getting difficult for me. He would say: Well, I'll do it in two weeks. He would always put it off.

Then, like in any marriage, at some point, you hit this climax of, like, that's it! The straw that breaks the camel's back. I hit that moment and I just told him: Look, I can't, I'm serious that I can't take it anymore, and you need to move out. So he went to a marriage therapist, and our marriage therapist asked the famous question: how motivated are you to work on your marriage between 0 and 10? I was a 0, and he was a 10. So he sent us away. He said, if Becky is not at least a 5 or a 6, I can't help you. Yeah, y'all should probably separate. Because at that time, I was like, I can't be around him. So he goes, y'all should probably separate, and then he just sent us off into the ether. And like two cats driving a car, we managed the crisis ourselves. I can't even explain it. I do explain it in my book pretty well, about what an absolute disaster it was with the two of us and our emotions. We were activated like mammals in the fight, flight, or freeze response. We made terrible mistakes, stupid decisions.

After it was all over, I'm not even sure I'm still fully over it, but it just bothered me. Like, why couldn't the marriage therapist help us, why did he send us off? A few years later, I went to grad school. Maybe 10 or 12 years later, I went to grad school, because this was getting to be more and more, a calling, I guess. I was even dreaming about it at night to go to school. So I went to school, and from day one, anytime I got a research opportunity, I decided to research marriage crisis, what a therapist knows about helping people in crisis. I'm in the marriage and family therapy program, and I'm taking the divorce and remarriage class, and they didn't mention anything about it in the class. It didn't even come up. Now, they may have told us to read six huge 10-pound books for the class. But no one has time in graduate school to read all the textbooks that are assigned to them for any given class. So you put them on your shelf as a reference. But I learned in school that they don't teach about this.

Then, as I'm pulling up the research, I'm going: Wait a minute, this is fantastic information. Hey, this is fantastic. Why don't people know this? Why aren't therapists telling clients about this? I was very fired up about it. So I just told myself: Well, Dadgumit, if nobody else is going to put this information out here for therapists and the general public, I guess I'll have to do it myself.

As soon as I graduated in 2006, I started seeing couples, and then trying to attract a niche of couples who were considering divorce or considering their marriages on the brink. Through having studied the research and through experience, I started coaching them through these time. Because so many people, they go: You know what, Becky, I think I want a divorce, so we're not going to see you anymore. Then the couple leaves, and to me, they're about to enter into one of the most stressful experiences of their life. Why would they leave therapy then? 

If you have children involved, we will oversee and make sure that it's amicable. Or if you want to reconcile, when you're upset with your spouse and you decide to get back together with them, we want to make sure you do that in the healthiest possible way.

The research tells us what has to be present for a successful reconciliation. If you separate, let's do it in the right way where you're both working on yourself during the separation and moving forward and taking care of all the things that got you in this situation in the first place, and oversee it and have a timeline so you don't get stuck separated in a limbo. Then if you decide to divorce, I've learned through my experience that couples say, I want an amicable divorce. But they don't know how to do it. So they end up in the arms of family lawyers. The family lawyers are adversarial, that's how they're trained. They start doing things that are really nasty and ugly, and that destroys families. They don't take into consideration how that affects families over the long-term. So we oversee and manage an amicable divorce process. We see people in their co-parenting stage.

Then if they get out of this, we're still working with them on healing and prepare them for dating and remarriage, to do that in the healthiest possible way. The blended family dynamic is something that very few people know anything about, and there's a lot of fabulous research and information on that subject. So I make sure these people that are wanting to move on into a new relationship understand the pitfalls and dynamics and ways to handle remarriage and blending families. So you can see it's like filling a void in our field that has been going on for a long time. I'm very proud of what we're doing, and we save the marriages that can be saved. Some people are just thinking they want to get a divorce.

They need change.

Well, they just don't realize their problems are fixable, and we could probably get this show back on the road with a little work. So that's the other thing is, I'll go: Wait a minute, you haven't earned a divorce. I understand you're stuck and I understand you're frustrated. But that's what the therapist does, is we help you get out of that and do the teaching and the training and the therapy that you need, so you can be healthy with yourself and in the relationship.

Well, I think this is really important, as you're describing the scope of your work and what you are providing, to help people understand if they know someone or they are experiencing some contemplation of separating or divorce. That traditionally, and this is changing with your work, and then just as people grow and advance in their work as a helping professional. That often, couples' therapists or coaches are really in service of helping repair and really work on the dynamics and helping restore the relational patterns. But if it gets to a certain place where one person is really out or has emotionally left or withdrawn from the relationship, or has stepped out and there's really a no there, or even just the ambivalence. Just before we started, we were talking about it, and I'll put a link to the show notes, an interview around discernment counseling. It helps people when they're really in that question mark and they can't say I really want to work on this, to have the support, to have clarity around what decision they do want to make. So what you're really helping us understand is, there's so much more here if either partner is a no, and how to negotiate that and how to be skillful about it. Also, what you're choosing, most attorneys are trained to mitigate risk and be protective, yet there are collaborative attorneys that really are interested.

Yes, that's the only way to go.

Yes. Just the awareness, as you move forward and you do proceed with divorce, perhaps re-partnering and how to support the health, with the children and the blending. That is a whole thing in and of itself. I have another link I can put to today's show notes.

On an aside, I wasn't going to ask you this, but as you're talking, and I know we really want to pivot towards how people can catch this. Because one of the things that you make an analogy around, if we have a physical symptom that's very subtle, that's trying to get our attention, or perhaps it amplifies, ideally we want to explore that or look at that around what's going on physiologically in my health, physically. That I can catch this before it escalates or becomes a problem or some type of issue. You're making this analogy around relational health, that we have these indicators, we have these signs that we can pay attention to and turn towards and have some thoughts about that. Before we go there, I wanted to ask you, I don't know if it was 10 years ago, there was a lot of hype around conscious uncoupling. Did you incorporate any of that work? I haven't studied it, so I don't know.

No, I started reading the book. I guess this was around the time Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin got a divorce, and she used that term. I appreciate the Buddhist attitude of it. But I think that very few people are capable of it.

Okay. Well, you do speak about this in your book about regulating the nervous system, and that's how it might fit, is the recognizing when we're in that fight or flight or freeze mode, and that we want to make sure that we're doing our practices to stay grounded, to stay regulated, so we can choose and be intentional, be conscious. Versus, just like you said, being the cat driving the car.

Well, the thing is, to be consciously uncoupled, you have to be calm. Your nervous system has to be in the green light zone, like you and me are right now. So we're able to think clearly and be rational. 

This is when people are filing for divorce and taking credit cards away and doing all sorts of awful things to each other, which are going to set the divorce into a nasty motion.

Negative spiral. It only takes one to get really egregious or aggressive.

Yeah. So I'm explaining, I think it's very important that couples in crisis understand that their nervous systems are activated and their brain is feeling a threat. So we need to have both people go to their corners, and we need to have a stabilization period, and we need to slow things way down. I want anything done in marriage crisis slowed way down. If we can get people to slow down, then in time, they will have a more calm, nervous system, and they can be more decent and reasonable and rational with each other. So I think buying more time, just like: Hey, I know you feel like you just have to get a divorce right now, but let's really talk about why you feel such a sense of urgency about this. Like, what's the hurry?

Again, I teach people ways to help themselves along in calming down exercises and whatnot, to learn how to calm your nervous system. Then we agree that we're not going to have any conversations when their nervous system is activated. First step, stabilize, let's just sit here for a minute, take your breath, calm down. Because we want to access that functional adult part of your personality that all of us have.

I appreciate that you're using the term wake up and being a little bit more in a space to see clearly. I think the nervous system and regulating and really attending to that is very, very supportive. It also speaks to, I think, the larger process, and I'm interested in what you might have to say about this. I appreciate that you really help people understand how much intentionality, skill, attention, so-called work it takes to be able to nurture relationship, versus this autopilot and it just somehow naturally sustains itself. Somehow, sometimes we get into that habituated state that: Oh, we love each other and it's good, and it'll just thrive on its own. So I love that you have such an emphasis to really help people recognize that.

What I'm curious about in this concept of being more awake in your stages of deterioration, which it might be helpful for people to get a bit of a scope of that, just to be able to recognize where maybe they are experiencing some warning signs or signals that things are perhaps in a place of disconnection or discontent. But, Becky, one of the things that I got in your first stage is the sense of disillusionment. And what I know about the stages of intimacy, the second stage, and I know there's different language around this, but what I understand is this power struggle where the neurochemicals, you talked about how, I don't know if this fits for your story, but about six months, something changed, and it was very, very different. People have this from nine months to a year and a half, where the neurochemicals settle, all the excitement, and then we're real deal, and we get to see our differences and our challenges and our weaknesses. So that will happen. Like, I feel that that will happen. Because in early stages, we imagine who people are, and we don't really know.

Oh, our idealized Person A. 

Right. Oh, and we need time to really see how somebody shows up when they're dealing with grief or upset.

All the different life things.

The different life things. So with the disillusionment, what I really got from your stages is the propensity to feel alone with it or not know what to do with it, and then the compounding effect. Because really, we do have a choice around what we do with that disillusionment. But oftentimes, to your point, we're not feeling very equipped, don't know how to turn towards and really discuss these things. But tell me if that feels like it fits with what you're helping people see around the deterioration stages.

Oh, absolutely. One of the first things that knocked me out when I was reading the research, was I found Diane Vaughn's book called Uncoupling. You can still get it online. I think she wrote it in 1990. She is a sociologist who went through a divorce herself after 20 years of marriage, and she didn't know things were bad. She didn't realize that her marriage was dying. But her husband realized it. So she decided to do some serious research on this. I want to say she's really the first person that identified these stages of deterioration that a couple goes through. I think it's her second chapter, it begins with this sentence, or very soon into the chapter, it says: uncoupling begins with a secret. The secret is, you're unhappy in the marriage, and you're not telling your spouse about it.

I tell my clients to think of it like, when you've got disillusionment, it's a cancer cell in your marriage. You have awakened one day and said to yourself: Uh-oh, I think I'm unhappy. Then we say, well, I know marriages have ups and downs, so I'll just wait a little bit here and see how it goes and see if I'm seriously unhappy. Then they move on, and then sooner or later, they become aware of: Hey, wait a minute, this is not going away. I'm still unhappy, and I'm unhappy enough that it could lead to divorce. But they quickly dismiss the idea, because I don't want to get divorced because of kids, money, property, family, friends, blah, blah, blah. That's stage two. Stage two is called erosion.

In my book, I tell couples, when you realize you're in stage two, that your feelings are serious and they're not going away, that is when you either, as you said, come in to your spouse and say: I'm struggling in our marriage in a serious way, and/or go to a marriage therapist. That is it, that you stop it right there, do not let it go to stage three, four, and five. Those are the couples I see, who typically either have never been to marriage therapy, they haven't talked about their problems. The leaning in partner is the person that wants to save their marriage, and they're usually shocked, because the decider who's thinking of leaving the marriage has not really directly and clearly stated it to their spouse: I am struggling in a serious way in our marriage. I'm dealing with a guy right now who's been married for 30 years, and he wants to leave his wife so badly, and she has no idea how unhappy he is. Every week when I talk to him, he still hasn't had the conversation. He still hasn't had the conversation.

What I tell people is, to have a happy marriage and keep it chugging along, you have to be aware and you have to be an adult. Adults go in and have the difficult, uncomfortable conversations, because it's in the best interest of the marriage and family as a whole.

It's a short-term, painful, scary, really risky conversation, and what's on the other side of that. I just got chills when you were talking about the significance of one person carrying this secret, and you fast-forward to couples where it's compounded and it's escalated. I'm almost hearing the voice of the person that's leaning in that's shocked. You didn't even give me a chance. You just unilaterally decided!

That's exactly what they say. That's exactly what they say. This guy has kids in college, and what I'm coaching him to say, because in a way, he would just like to just proceed and say I want a divorce. I'm saying, if your wife says the words: why didn't you tell me, why didn't you give me a chance? I promise you, what happens next is, your kids are going to turn on you. Because your kids, and I know from experience, they come to you and start asking you questions about the whys and what happened. The older they get, they keep going: we want to know everything, don't hold back anything. They're making judgements for themselves about who failed the other, one or the other or both. If they find out you did not give your spouse a warning and you just shocked them with it one day, your kids will probably turn their back on you, and your relationship may never be the same.

Well, it'll be a huge, difficult, painful, perhaps pivotal moment that is hard to reconcile. It's hard to understand. Now, I do think the bond and love and understanding, they're never going to condone it probably, but that there could be some repair. But still, it's something that will be difficult to reconcile.

Yeah, it'll be an injury that's sitting out there. They may lose respect for him, for the person. The kids will lose respect. So you have to think of it in terms of not just the marriage, but the family. Because when you make a divorce decision or a separation decision, it affects numerous people over the lifespan. In 30 years out from it myself, I could tell you, I couldn't have predicted all the ways it would play out over 30 some odd years.

This is really important, I want to talk about this, and I also don't want to lose one thread. So let's just put a pin in that, if I can, and come back to it. So when you talk about a person that's feeling the unhappiness and perhaps hopelessness around change or the relationship improving, and they're getting to this deciding place, and really having a difficult time at some juncture just to have that difficult conversation. You're saying I'm even working with someone therapeutically, and I've seen this too. I actually can recall clients that are slicing it smaller, making it more doable, and still it being so incredibly difficult. In your view, you mentioned fear, and then you also just mentioned something about a functional adult. I know, in your book, you talk about how our childhood wounds sometimes keep us in a pattern of protection that might interfere with us doing the hard thing or the adult thing. So I'm curious what gets in the way of people having this difficult conversation? Is it fear? Is it their wounding? Tell us what you see.

It certainly is fear. The people that I work with, I've never met anyone that didn't have childhood developmental trauma. So when you've got that, you're dealing mainly with three personalities, and only one of them is functional. That's the functional adult. That's our better self. If I met someone I admire today, you better believe they would see my functional adult, like you, Jessica. But when things don't go our way, we have a wounded little child from our past that feels all kinds of extreme emotions, whether it be fear or sadness or rage or whatever. So it awakens in us. Say, our spouse does something that we don't like, that little wounded child awakens in us as sort of like pulling on her pants' leg. Then unfortunately, there's about a 15-year-old incalcitrant teenager that we refer to as the adaptive child, that protects the scared, angry, whatever, wounded child. It does it just like an incalcitrant, nasty teenager would. So when someone is not wanting to speak to their spouse about how unhappy they are, I like to think that they're all feeling all sorts of feelings the wounded child is, and that the adaptive child voice in their head might be saying something like: Well, screw them!

Or it's not going to matter.

They're not going to change anyway, and you're entitled to be happy. So you can go have an affair or act like they don't exist, or emotionally divorce or disconnect, or whatever the hell it is you want. Because you don't have to go in and tell them. Because if you do, they're just going to jump down your throat and tell you what a jerk you are. So best just leave it alone. So I think that those kind of conversations with themselves, these are all these internal conversations. It's like, people perceive it. This man I'm working with, he perceives it as taking the top off a can of worms. Once the worms are out of the can, you can't put them back. So it's like, when am I in the mood to do that, when do I have the energy to take the lid off the can of worms? Because it's going to be a big drama.

I so appreciate you saying that. Because I've actually heard people say: Oh, I want to have this conversation, but I don't want to do it when things are really bad, because it's already really bad.

You and me know, we know, Jessica, that the quicker you take the can off the worms and just deal with something directly, the better it is. Here's a fact. Anticipatory fear is always worse than the actual doing of it. I tell people, anticipatory fear, if you are acting out of your functional adult, you tell yourself: I don't want to have this conversation, I dread this conversation, but I am going to do it because it's the healthy right thing to do.

Yeah, I'm super scared.

Yeah, it doesn't mean you're going to feel great about it. It's going to be hard. But adults come in and deal with the difficult business.

Acknowledging there's likely never going to feel like a good time. That when things are good, I'm afraid to screw up the goodness, because I miss having good times, and I really want the good times or the good moments. So why would I bring something difficult if I'm hanging onto that? Or when things are really hard, it's hard to feel like there's ever really a good time.

Ironically, a certain percentage of the couples, where the person comes in and goes: I just want you to know I'm struggling, I'm seriously unhappy. That ends up creating a conversation that they needed to have for a very long time, and the spouse handles it in an unexpectedly graceful way and is willing to take ownership. Sometimes we can stop the seriousness of the problem, full stop, just with that conversation.

It's like real talk. It cuts through some of the dynamics.

It's not a conversation of blame, it's a conversation of understanding each other.

Well, that's the key. Really, I'm sure you would agree with me, that if we come in blazing, or we're not in that adult functional self or even in that regulated state, we're likely going to be more critical and blamey. That's really hard for someone on the receiving end to really understand what the message is. They're feeling attacked, or it's really about them, whatever they're doing or not doing. So if the conversation can be really in a place of: I'm scared to say this, here's what I've been feeling, here's where I am at. The vulnerability, which is, again, very, very difficult to do, a huge risk. And it allows for that understanding. I agree with you that I have seen this open things up that neither person thought were possible. Maybe they're now like, oh my gosh, and all this attraction starts to merge, and maybe they're having more sex than they've had. It just blows the lid open a bit, to the whole worm analogy.

Yeah, shake-up of the system, so to speak. In some marriages, it's not going to go that well. It may go into a full war. It depends on what the decider's position is, how done is the decider and what's transpired prior. But there is still a significant amount of, if you'll just tell your spouse what's going on with you and what you need, it can change everything. So I'm begging your listeners to have courage to deal with their stuff, and just be diplomatic, be tender, be soft, be respectful. Don't scare your partner with your words.

I'm assuming you would feel, or help us here, do you think that the attachment tendencies show up in this difficulty of having this conversation?

Of course.

Well, do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Clearly, if you are dealing with an avoidant-attached decider, for example, they're not comfortable punching through the wall of anticipatory fear. Probably many of the deciders that I work with are avoidant deciders, because they just don't deal with their stuff. They just sweep it under the rug. So all I can say to them is, we can go back to what I say in the book, is unfortunately for you guys who are working with me now, you weren't healthy as individuals when you got married, and now the trauma and disabilities and the immaturity that you haven't taken care of is showing up in your relationship. So in my dream world, the deciders that are avoidant and anxious attached people would have worked all this out and become secure attached before getting into a marriage. But they don't.

I so appreciate what you're saying, and I also just use different language. You seem more comfortable being like this and that. I do know, and I'm sure you would agree with me, that people who have more of that avoidant tendencies, that's developed for good reason. In their early environment, that was more adaptive, that is probably related to the wounded child. Also, just that it hasn't been safe to reach, it hasn't been safe to have that conversation and take those risks. So it's really a foreign territory. I'll just raise my hand that I definitely had more of that anxious tendency attachment style, and my husband had a little bit more of that avoidant, and we were doing really profound work, Becky, before we got married and in our dating. I feel like we grew so, so much, and I feel like we had a way in which we were practicing that I could trust, which gave me confidence to really commit on a life scale. I will say, it continues to develop. So I think also, just an and to what you're saying, that these things are not static. That we can do a level of work, and I think secure functioning is very much a practice, we don't arrive at a state.

Oh no, I'm not the 100% queen of healthy person myself. I've got my own daily struggles. But at least I'm aware of it and I'm on top of it, and I know what it is, and I know when I'm doing the things that don't work, and I know what does work. That's the kind of stuff that I wish couples would learn.

Okay. So your voice is really about, can we encourage people to have their awareness around some of these things before committing to life partnership and marriage? Because these things will be fundamental and elemental to the success of their marriage.

They're fundamental. I'm still leaning on people, please get as healthy as you're able to. Let's just say, because people want an interdependent marriage in 2025. So that assumes that each person is a stable person on their own alone. They can be alone. They are emotionally healthy enough to do that and to support themselves and all that. And you need those things to be able to have the farm called the marriage that you take care of. Then you lean on each other and help each other through the struggles of life. If you're not good to go on your own to start with, which a lot of people are not, and they get married, that's where you're going to see it show up in real serious problems in your relationship. So I am leaning on people, if you're married now, or in a serious relation now, or a relationship where you're dating, it's never too late to go do the work on yourself so that you can be a truly interdependent partner in the healthiest way. Yes, be aware of what's healthy and what isn't. 

That's one of the things that I appreciate, and I share that with you. We're humans. We're not perfect. We're on this journey and just in the process of being more evolved and developing. Becky, I appreciate when I said a moment ago about just being more comfortable with a category. I think that's one of the things that you really offer in your book, is helping people have a sense of scope and what to consider, and really breaking it down. It's really a reference tool in helping them be able to access some of the things that they could be evaluating or considering and how these things show up. So I think that's really, really helpful, and that's such a strength that being really clear offers.

Thanks. So the main thing is, I want you to be self-aware and aware, and I want you to know about what being an adult in relationships is. Adults deal with their stuff. I'm a Pia Mellody trained therapist, and she wrote the book Facing Codependence, and she's really the godmother of trauma treatment in the world. So the reason she calls the book Facing Codependence is because she's referring to, in codependence, people with childhood trauma. They don't deal with their stuff head-on. They procrastinate. They have problems, and they don't deal with them. So because I'm so influenced by her, I am all about this facing things, facing things, going into the center and dealing with things. That is what it is to be an adult.

Me too, I echo that. I feel like that's one of the strongest messages, is to be able to turn towards some of the difficulties that get activated in relationship as an opportunity for growth. So I know we're winding down here, Becky. I would love to come back to the impact. Because I do think, especially here in the US, more of the individual mindset, that it can be easy to think: Oh, it's just me that I am going to feel the consequence or my child. They might have some awareness. But there's a real collective piece here that you're talking about, family, community, around the impact of divorce and separating. Do you want to speak to that?

Yeah. Well, I'm just saying, I do think that people who are trying to make the divorce decision, first of all, just the whole nature of it, they're really not, as we discussed earlier, making super rational decisions. 

It may be a similar struggle, just the spouse isn't around or whatever. But it just brings a whole new set of problems. Then you bring in stepparents and stuff, and holy lord. So I try to shoot them down because I thought dating was going to be fun when I got my divorce, and oh my God, it was not fun at all. It was a nightmare. It was horrible. It made me want to run back to my husband, because the man I was dating weren't even as good as he was. So you get perspective when you go out there in the world. But yes, when you split up, it affects both of your biological families, all of your friends, your kids, and their lives forever. Everyone's life forevermore.

Part of my story is, 12 or 15 years after our divorce, our son got killed in Afghanistan. My ex-husband has never wanted anything to do with me since the divorce. So we weren't on friendly terms, and then we have to come together to make a zillion decisions about how we're going to handle that. You can't foresee things like this. People don't think about things like this. It was really crazy. Because my son's dad is very prominent in San Antonio, and my daughter was going back and forth between our two houses. She would tell me, dad has about 200 flower arrangements in his house, and people have sent turkeys and hams and steaks. I literally had no flowers in my house, and nobody brought me food or anything. So I just tell people, these are those moments you just can't foresee, and they're so painful, and you're still going to have to deal with this person as a family anyway over the course of the years. But yes, it still affects my daughter to this day who's 35, and last time I visited her, which was a few weeks ago, she said, my one wish in the whole world is that you and dad could be friends. It just kills me. That's why I'm telling you, I'm not sure I'll ever be at peace with it.

But yeah, I have a lot of tales to tell for myself and my clients, to inform people who are thinking about leaving, is make sure you know what you're doing. Because once you set the process in motion, you can't pull it back. It's likely not to be the wonderful thing that you're fantasizing about.

Yeah. Well, I'm also hearing just your very, very clear call that if we're not doing our work and we're looking for an out, likely it's difficult to imagine that life is just going to be beautiful by just pivoting away from the challenge.

No, it'll show up in a new relationship.

Yeah, and you're talking about things that it's difficult to anticipate, like our community, our friends, likely. I mean, this seems so common, and yet I don't think it needs to be this way. But people feel sometimes like, I have to choose, and then you feel like I'm losing all of these family members, and talk about the spouse's family. There can be really significant relationships that you think could weather that, and often, It's really difficult. Then you're saying we can't even have co-parenting relationship, that might be a severing and we can't actually be friends, and the heartbreak of that.

Yeah. You would think the Marriage Crisis Manager who works in this all the time could have a great co-parenting relationship. But if the other spouse doesn't want it, you can't have it. If I could just go back, and then this is a statistic too, that a significant number of people, knowing how it played out 10 years after a divorce and seeing how people were affected, wish they could go back and work harder on the marriage than they had.

Wow, thank you for sharing your personal story and your experience and your research and your training, just to give people a sense of your wisdom and your knowledge and experience here. So for people who are interested in learning more about what you're doing, if they are contemplating or they know someone contemplating separation or divorce and are having difficulty getting support, what would you encourage and what do you want to offer here?

Well, I have a website, it's called MarriageCrisisManager.com. I do help marriages that are not in crisis, and I speak to a lot of individuals who are unhappy in their marriages and wanting me to coach them about how to head it off at the past. So I love doing that work. Then also, right now, as far as I know, I'm the only person that's doing this marriage crisis management, and I am overwhelmed with demand.

So I am branching out and trying to create a niche in the marriage and family therapy world where I teach therapists all the things I know about it and how to help couples during this process. It's a void in our field, and I'm filling that void, and we need therapists who are interested in helping couples. It's extremely gratifying work, and the couples are so grateful for our knowledge. You will be the impetus to save many relationships.

Well, and it sounds like you've forged and really provided a system that you've tested and it's proven here, that really supports clinicians and helping professionals to have a bit of support negotiating with clients and helping them. Then, tell us about your book. I've referenced, and you've referenced it today. Tell us what your book is.

The first thing I did out of grad school was sit down and write this book, and I've tweaked it over 20 years to get it to where it is today. I couldn't get a publisher or an agent to accept my book. I sent out proposals. I did all the things a person who wants to sell a book does. I must have been rejected 275 times. They would tell me that this is too negative, that people want me to tie that marriage up in a bow at the end and save it every time. That's Disney.

That's not the work.

No, and I'm saying, but you don't understand, I want couples to know how to diagnose their marriage. I want couples to know when to go to a marriage therapist. Then once you get into it, there's some things that we can do that might save your marriage anyway, and I want these people to know this all. But you can't save it 100% of the time. But anyway, finally after 20 years, I found a publisher willing, that really got it and felt it was time, and that I was the person to put this out there.

The name of the book is?

I (Think) I Want Out: What to Do When One of You Wants to End Your Marriage. It is for individuals who are unhappy in marriages, individuals and couples who are unhappy, or any marriage crisis. It's for therapists as a reference on how to help couples do this. So it's available at every bookseller online.

Awesome. I will put the link to your book on today's show notes. I'll also put the link to your website on today's show notes. I don't know if there's a specific area where you're working that you would point therapists to, but it sounds like you have an aspect that you're wanting people.

You're talking about on my website, you mean?

So if somebody who's a therapist or a helping professional wants to get trained with you, where would they go?

Yeah, go to my website. I think I've already put up a page for training, or it's almost finished. Put your name on our list and we'll be in touch with you. But right now we have a Facebook page where we're all sharing knowledge and expertise and struggles with working with couples on the brink, and we're going to have kind of a book club. I do offer this for non-therapists, a book club to go over the book chapter-by-chapter with me in meetings once a week.

Great. Well, I'll put the link to that Facebook.

Knowledge is king.

Yeah, wonderful. I can tell, there's so much here. So thank you so much for everything you've shared with us, and I so appreciate your spending time with me.

Thank you so much.