By Mark Ryan, BACP Accredited Psychotherapist and NCPS Accredited Relationship Therapist
Most people going into a separation don't want it to be painful. They don't want their children to suffer. They don't want to spend years locked in conflict with someone they once saw as their person. They also don't want to emerge from the process having lost not just the relationship but their sense of themselves, their financial security, or their capacity to be a good parent. And yet for a significant number of couples, something close to all of that happens anyway. It happens not because they were bad people, but because separation without any structure, without support, and without a clear understanding of how to do it well, tends to go badly.
This article is about the alternative. It is not about the legal process of divorce, which is for your solicitor. It is about the human process of ending a relationship in a way that is as liveable as possible for everyone it affects. There is no version of separation that doesn't involve loss and pain. There is a version that doesn't also involve lasting damage, and that is the one we work on in the therapy room, whether I am seeing a couple, one partner, or two people who now need to co parent.
Why Separations Go Wrong
The most common reason separations become destructive is not malice. It is that two people who are both in pain, often feeling wronged, often frightened about what comes next, are trying to manage a logistically and emotionally complex process without any framework for doing it. Decisions that will affect the rest of their lives, about children, finances, housing and ongoing relationships, are being made in the middle of acute distress, often through communication that has already broken down. The conditions are about as poorly suited to good decision making as it is possible to imagine.
Conflict between parents is the part we can most usefully do something about. A meta analysis of 115 samples and almost 25,000 divorced families found that conflict between ex partners was linked with more emotional and behavioural difficulties in children, and that this link ran partly through parenting, with hostility and intrusiveness making things worse and support making things better (van Dijk et al., 2020). The individual links were small, which is worth keeping in mind. Most children do adjust. But the direction was consistent, and it points to something hopeful. How parents treat each other and the children during a separation is something they can influence.
The effects can also be more serious in the most entrenched cases. A study of 107 children from 68 families in high conflict divorces found that parental conflict was associated with post traumatic stress symptoms in the children, whichever parent or child reported on the conflict (Lange et al., 2022). This is not an inevitable consequence of parental separation. It describes what can happen when separation turns into a long running fight that children are caught in the middle of.
The point is not that separating parents are to blame for their children's distress. It is that the way a separation is conducted is not fixed. It can be influenced, shaped, and made better or worse by the choices made and the support sought along the way.
What a Good Separation Looks Like
A good separation is not one without grief, conflict or difficulty. Both partners will grieve. There will almost certainly be moments of conflict. A good separation is one in which those things happen without becoming the defining structure of the relationship going forward. The decisions that need to be made are made with enough clarity and enough respect for both people to be liveable, and any children are protected from being caught in the middle of what their parents are going through.
In my experience, the couples who manage this best tend to share a small number of things. They have, at some level, separated the logistical and legal process from the emotional one, understanding that these are two different kinds of work that need different kinds of support. They have made explicit agreements about communication, about the children, and about what they will and won't ask of each other during the process, ideally before the acute distress of the separation makes those conversations harder to have. And they have sought support, not only legal advice but therapeutic support, individually or together, for the emotional work that the legal process cannot do.
The Decisions That Shape Everything
A small number of decisions made early in a separation tend to shape everything that follows. Getting them right when they are made is considerably easier than trying to renegotiate them later, once positions have hardened and trust has deteriorated further.
How you communicate. The communication channel that existed between you as a couple, whatever its patterns and problems, is not the right channel for conducting a separation. Setting up a different kind of communication, one that is explicitly focused on the children and on logistics, and that has some agreed norms around response times, medium, and what is and is not appropriate to raise, tends to reduce conflict. This is not easy when the underlying feelings are raw, but it is worth establishing early.
What you tell the children and when. The conversation with your children is one of the highest stakes moments in the whole process, and one of the most common sources of distress when it goes wrong. Telling the kids about separation covers this in detail, but the core principle is that children need to hear the same message from both parents, need to be reassured about what their lives will look like, and need to be kept well away from the adult content of why this is happening. Children also learn from watching how their parents treat each other at this point. Seeing two people end a relationship with respect teaches them something important about how relationships can end.
Whether to use mediation. In England and Wales, attending a Mediation Information and Assessment Meeting (MIAM) is usually required before applying to the family court about children or finances, with exemptions, including where there has been domestic abuse. Many couples use mediation far more extensively than this, as the main way of reaching agreements without going through the courts at all. Many find it less costly and less adversarial than a court process, although it is not suitable for every situation, particularly where there is a significant power imbalance or a history of abuse. Your solicitor or a mediator can tell you whether it fits your circumstances.
What you are and are not willing to do for the sake of the process. Separation tends to surface a particular kind of zero sum thinking, where anything conceded to the other person feels like a loss and any outcome that could be described as fair feels like failure. That thinking is understandable and almost universal, and it tends to make everything harder and more expensive. Being explicit with yourself, and ideally with the support of a therapist, about what you are willing to do for the sake of a better process is one of the most useful pieces of work that can be done before negotiations begin in earnest. It is not for the other person's sake. It is for the sake of your own life and your children's wellbeing.
If you are approaching a separation and want support thinking through how to structure it, couples therapy can help with this even when the decision to separate has already been made.
A good separation is not one without grief, conflict, or difficulty. Both partners will grieve.
The Emotional Work Nobody Tells You About
The legal and logistical aspects of separation come with professionals attached, such as solicitors, mediators and financial advisers. The emotional work tends to come without much infrastructure at all, which is one of the reasons it so often goes undone until it becomes undeniable.
That work includes grieving the relationship and the future that was imagined within it. It includes managing the fear, anger and shame that tend to accompany even a separation that both people recognise was right, and keeping enough emotional stability to parent well during one of the hardest periods of a child's life. It also means resisting the temptation to use the separation as an extended opportunity to establish, through solicitors, mutual friends or the children, that the other person was wrong and you were right. The pull toward that is strong and almost universal, and in my experience it does more damage to the person who gives in to it than to the person it is aimed at.
Individual therapy during a separation provides somewhere for this emotional work to happen that is not the kitchen table, the children, the solicitor's office or your closest friends, all of whom are likely to be partisan, exhausted by the situation, or both. Life after separation looks at what individual therapy can offer once the relationship has definitively ended, but the same support is often most useful during the process, and not just after it.
What Couples Therapy Can Do When the Decision Has Been Made
It is a common misconception that couples therapy is only for couples who want to stay together. Couples therapy can be, and regularly is, used to help two people end a relationship as well as possible, with the co parenting relationship and the children's wellbeing at the centre rather than the question of who was right.
This kind of work, sometimes called divorce therapy or co parenting therapy, is not about re examining whether the decision to separate was correct. It is about helping two people who have made that decision to carry it out in a way that minimises harm. In practice, this tends to mean establishing communication norms that both people can follow, working through the decisions about children in a structured way with a neutral professional in the room, and processing enough of the emotional content of the separation to reduce the risk of it flooding the co parenting conversations. It also means building the foundations of a working co parenting relationship before the worst of the conflict has the chance to set hard.
The research above suggests why this matters. Because the link between parental conflict and children's difficulties runs partly through parenting, anything that lowers the temperature between parents and keeps each of them steady and supportive with the children is likely to help. Investing in the quality of the separation, including through therapeutic support, is one of the most direct things a parent can do for their children's wellbeing. Our article on co parenting after separation goes further into how to build that working relationship.
Not Destroying Yourself
The other half of the title of this piece deserves to be addressed directly. Doing it justice means being specific about what separation costs you, because the general advice to look after yourself tends to be both well meant and almost entirely useless. Separation affects people in four ways, intellectually, emotionally, physically and logistically. Each one requires attention, and neglecting any of them tends to make the others harder.
Intellectually, separation tends to produce a kind of cognitive overload that most people are unprepared for. The sheer volume of decisions, many of them unfamiliar and high stakes, runs alongside the emotional demand of the situation. Legal questions, financial questions, housing questions and questions about the children all arrive at once, without the mental bandwidth that would normally be available to handle them, because so much of it is already being used by the loss itself. People in the middle of separations often describe feeling mentally exhausted and unable to think clearly, which then adds to the anxiety about the decisions still to be made. Recognising this as a predictable consequence of the situation, and not a personal failing, makes it easier to seek the specific help, whether legal, financial or therapeutic, that takes some of the load off.
Emotionally, the experience is more layered than most people expect. Grief is there, but so is relief, and guilt about the relief, and anger, and fear, and sometimes a disorienting absence of feeling when the emotional system has simply run out of capacity. These feelings do not arrive in a predictable sequence. What tends to happen instead is that the work of managing the separation, the decisions, the logistics and the communication with the other person, keeps pushing the feelings underground, where they build up until they find a way out. For many people that is through disrupted sleep, tension or illness, or a disproportionate reaction to something minor. Having somewhere to put the emotional content, for your own functioning and not for anyone else's benefit, is a practical necessity and not a luxury.
Physically, the impact of separation is often the most surprising. Research on adult attachment proposes that long term romantic partners come to regulate each other's bodily states in ways that build gradually and largely below awareness, and that losing a partner can leave a person in a state of arousal and disorganisation until they find new ways to steady themselves (Sbarra and Hazan, 2008). That is a theoretical framework supported by a review of evidence and not a single definitive finding, but it fits what many people describe. Sleep goes, appetite changes, the body feels on alert, and the bed feels strangely large. Add to this the loss of everyday physical presence, and the particular strain of a relationship that has ended while the person is still present in your life through co parenting, legal paperwork and mutual friends. The body feels that concretely, and it needs time and care accordingly.
Logistically, the demands are relentless and unforgiving of timing. Legal processes, financial reorganisation, housing, the children's routines and the practical infrastructure of daily life that was shared and now needs to be rebuilt independently all arrive without a pause for recovery. The most useful thing most people can do at this level is to be honest about what they cannot manage alone and ask for help, whether that is legal advice, practical support from family or friends, or professional help with the financial side. Trying to do all of it independently, out of pride or a wish not to show vulnerability, tends to make things worse.
Small Things That Help
None of this has to be done perfectly. A few modest habits tend to make a difference.
Keep one or two fixed points in the week that do not change, such as a walk, a meal with a friend or a regular session with a therapist.
Write down decisions and agreements, so that you are not relying on memory at a time when memory is unreliable.
Choose one trusted person who is not caught up in the conflict and let them know how things are.
Protect sleep as far as you can, because almost everything else is harder without it.
Leave important messages to the other person for a time of day when you are rested, and read them twice before sending.
Not destroying yourself through a separation means recognising that all four of these areas are real, that they are connected, and that none of them resolves itself automatically with time. The version of yourself who emerges from this process with your integrity, your self respect and your relationships with your children intact is worth protecting.
LGBTQ+ Relationships and Non Traditional Structures
The process of separation looks broadly similar across relationship structures, but there are some differences. For same sex couples, particularly those who went to significant effort to build a legal and social framework for their relationship, the decision to end it can carry a particular kind of grief and a public dimension that different sex couples may not experience in the same way. Relationships that were hard won can feel additionally devastating to lose, and some people also fear that their ending will be read as proof that their relationship was never going to work. It is worth saying plainly that it is not.
Practical questions can look different too. When a couple has built a shared life without the legal framework that marriage provides, there may be no obvious process to follow and no one assuming the relationship deserves a formal ending. It helps to make your own: agree who will move out and when, how shared money and property will be divided, and how you will tell friends and family. In queer communities, where social circles often overlap, it is worth deciding early how you will handle mutual friends so that nobody feels forced to choose a side.
For people in consensually non monogamous arrangements, the ending of one relationship within a wider network raises questions that the standard separation framework doesn't fully address. How is the wider network affected? What happens to agreements and relationships with other partners? How is the practical and emotional work shared when more than two adults are affected? The same principles apply, with explicit communication, decisions focused on the children where relevant, and therapeutic support, but the conversations may need to involve more people and more complexity.
In practice, it helps to name who needs to be told and in what order, so that a partner's other partners and close friends do not hear about it second hand. Metamours can be a source of support as well as strain, and it is worth deciding together whether and how those connections continue. Whatever your relationship looked like, how you end it is part of how you will remember it.
A Process Worth Getting Right
Separation is not something that happens to you and is then over. It is a process that unfolds over months or years, that shapes the co parenting relationship for decades if there are children, and that leaves a mark on both people that can become either a wound or a scar. The difference depends significantly on how the process is approached, how much support is sought, and how clearly both people keep sight of what they are trying to protect.
You might also find it useful to read the other pieces in this series, including how to know when a relationship is over, whether a trial separation might help and whether to stay together for the kids. If you are working out the weeks in between, how to end a relationship amicably sets out a practical plan.
If you are at the beginning of this process, or in the middle of it, and want support thinking through how to navigate it as well as possible, I offer a free 30 minute consultation in person (in London) or online. You are welcome to reach out, whether you are coming alone or as a couple.
About the Author
Mark Ryan is a BACP Accredited Psychotherapist and NCPS Accredited Relationship Therapist, and the founder of Rise and Grow Therapy, a private practice offering couples and relationship therapy across Kensington, Pimlico, and Angel, Islington in London, as well as online consultations. His approach draws first on Imago Relationship Therapy, alongside integrative relational, attachment-based, Gottman, and systemic approaches. Mark works with couples of all kinds, including LGBTQ+ couples and those in non-traditional relationship structures such as consensual non-monogamy, as well as with individuals working through relational issues.
References
Lange, A. M. C., Visser, M. M., Scholte, R. H. J., & Finkenauer, C. (2022). Parental conflicts and posttraumatic stress of children in high conflict divorce families. Journal of Child and Adolescent Trauma, 15(3), 615 to 625. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40653-021-00410-9
Sbarra, D. A., & Hazan, C. (2008). Coregulation, dysregulation, self regulation: An integrative analysis and empirical agenda for understanding adult attachment, separation, loss, and recovery. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 12(2), 141 to 167. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868308315702
van Dijk, R., van der Valk, I. E., Deković, M., & Branje, S. (2020). A meta analysis on interparental conflict, parenting, and child adjustment in divorced families. Examining mediation using meta analytic structural equation models. Clinical Psychology Review, 79, 101861. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2020.101861
