How to Separate or Divorce Without Destroying Yourself or Each Other
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, 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.
I wanted to write about the alternative. Not the legal process of divorce, which is for your solicitor, but 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’s the one we work on in the couples therapy room.
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 significantly. The conditions are about as poorly suited to good decision-making as it is possible to imagine.
Research on high-conflict divorce has found that children in families where parental conflict persists and intensifies after separation are at risk not just of the adjustment difficulties well-documented in the general divorce literature, but of post-traumatic stress symptoms specifically (Lange, Visser, Scholte, & Finkenauer, 2022). The word ‘traumatic’ is worth sitting with. It is not being used casually. It describes an experience that overwhelms a child’s capacity to process and integrate what is happening to them. This is not an inevitable consequence of parental separation; it is a consequence of high-conflict separation. High-conflict separation is, in many cases, a consequence of two people going through this process without adequate support or structure.
The implication 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 is something that can be influenced, shaped, and made better or worse by the choices made and the support sought during the process.
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. There will be difficulty. A good separation is one in which those things happen without becoming the defining structure of the relationship going forward; one in which the decisions that need to be made are made with enough clarity and enough respect for both people to be liveable; and one in which the children, if there are children, are protected from being caught in the middle of what their parents are going through.
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
There are a small number of decisions made early in a separation that 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 child-focused and logistics-focused, and that has some agreed norms around response times, medium, and what is and is not appropriate to raise, tends to reduce conflict significantly. 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 damage 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.
Whether to use mediation. In England and Wales, attending a Mediation Information and Assessment Meeting (MIAM) is now a requirement before making most applications to the family court, but many couples use mediation far more extensively than this, as the primary method for reaching agreements about children and finances rather than going through the courts at all. Mediation is not suitable for every situation, particularly where there is a significant power imbalance or a history of domestic abuse. Where it is suitable, the evidence suggests it produces better outcomes for children, lower costs, and agreements that both parties are more likely to comply with over time.
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 genuinely willing to do for the sake of a better process, not for the sake of the other person, but for the sake of your own life and your children’s wellbeing, is one of the most useful pieces of work that can be done before negotiations begin in earnest.
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: solicitors, mediators, 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; managing the fear, anger, and shame that tend to accompany even a separation that both parties recognise was right; maintaining enough emotional stability to parent well during one of the hardest periods of a child’s life; and avoiding the temptation to use the separation as an extended opportunity to establish, through solicitors, through mutual friends, or through the children, that the other person was wrong and you were right. That last one is worth naming directly, because the pull toward it is strong and almost universal, and it does more damage to the people who give in to it than to the people 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 specifically at what individual therapy can offer once the relationship has definitively ended; but the same support is often most useful during the process, not just after it.
What Couples Therapy Can Do When the Decision Has Been Made
It is one of the more common misconceptions about couples therapy that it 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 implement it 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; processing enough of the emotional content of the separation to reduce the risk of it flooding the co-parenting conversations; and building the foundations of a working co-parenting relationship before the worst of the conflict has the chance to calcify.
The research on what makes the difference for children after a parental separation is unambiguous: it is the quality of the parenting relationship, not the structure of the family (Amato, 2000). Two parents who are separated but co-parent with genuine respect and minimal conflict tend to produce children who adjust well. Two parents who remain technically together but are in ongoing unresolved conflict do not. The implication is that 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.
Not Destroying Yourself
The other half of the title of this piece is worth addressing directly, and doing it justice means being specific about what separation costs you, because the general advice to “look after yourself” tends to be both well-intentioned and almost entirely useless. Separation affects people across four distinct dimensions: intellectually, emotionally, physically, and logistically. Each one requires attention; 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 simultaneously with the emotional demand of the situation. Legal questions, financial questions, housing questions, questions about the children: all of these arrive at once, without the cognitive bandwidth that would normally be available to handle them, because so much of that bandwidth is already being used by the emotional processing of a significant loss. The result is that people in the middle of separations often describe feeling mentally exhausted and unable to think clearly, which then compounds the anxiety about the decisions that still need to be made. Recognising this as a predictable consequence of the situation, rather than a personal failing, makes it easier to seek the specific help, legal, financial, therapeutic, that takes some of that cognitive load off one person.
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 and they do not follow a neat progression. What tends to happen instead is that the process of managing the separation, the decisions, the logistics, the communication with the other person, keeps pushing the emotional content underground, where it sits and accumulates until it finds its way out, usually through the body, through sleep disruption, through physical illness, or through a disproportionate reaction to something minor. Having somewhere to put the emotional content, not for the benefit of anyone else, but for your own functioning, is not a luxury during this process. It is a practical necessity.
Physically, the impact of separation is often the most surprising, because it operates at a level that most people are not aware of until it is disrupted. Long-term romantic partners co-regulate each other’s physiology in ways that build up gradually and largely below conscious awareness: sleep patterns, cortisol rhythms, heart rate variability, the baseline state of the nervous system. Research on co-regulation in couples has demonstrated that partners actively up- and down-regulate each other’s physiological arousal, and that this process is a core function of adult attachment bonds (Sbarra & Hazan, 2008). When the relationship ends, that regulatory system is withdrawn suddenly, which is one reason why the physical effects of separation, disrupted sleep, elevated stress hormones, reduced immune function, are not simply metaphors for emotional pain. They are real biological events. Add to this the loss of physical presence itself: the body in the bed, the texture of ordinary physical proximity that builds over years of shared life, and the specific kind of loss known as ambiguous loss, where the person is still present in some form, through co-parenting, through legal proceedings, through mutual social connections, but the relationship as it was is gone. The body grieves 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, the practical infrastructure of daily life that was shared and now needs to be rebuilt independently: all of this arrives without a pause for the emotional and physical recovery that would make it easier to handle. 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 aspects of separation. Trying to do all of it independently, out of pride or a wish not to show vulnerability, tends to produce worse outcomes across every dimension.
Not destroying yourself through a separation means recognising that all four of these dimensions 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, and protecting that version requires active, deliberate attention to your wellbeing across all four, not just the ones that are loudest at any given moment.
LGBTQ+ Relationships and Non-Traditional Structures
The process of separation looks broadly similar across relationship structures, but there are some differences worth naming. For same-sex couples, particularly those who went through 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 public dimension that different-sex couples may not experience in the same way. Relationships that were hard-won can feel additionally devastating to lose.
For couples 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 the wider network is affected, what happens to agreements and relationships with other partners, and how the practical and emotional work of separation is shared when more than two adults are affected. The same principles apply explicit communication, child-focused decision-making where relevant, therapeutic support, but the specific conversations may need to involve more people and more complexity.
A Process Worth Getting Right
Separation is not something that happens to you and then is 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 either be a wound or a scar. The difference between those two outcomes 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. 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, a free consultation is a good place to start.
You might also find it useful to read the other pieces in this series: how to know when a relationship is over; whether a trial separation might help; telling the kids; co-parenting after separation; and life after separation: how to start again.
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
Amato, P. R. (2000). The consequences of divorce for adults and children. Journal of Marriage and Family, 62(4), 1269–1287. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-3737.2000.01269.x
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), 615–625. 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), 141–167. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868308315702
