Ep 149: Starting Over After 40: What Divorce Taught Me About Rebuilding Your Life and Finding Yourself Again

In this episode I'm getting a little personal — sharing what it felt like when my marriage ended unexpectedly in 2014 and how the messy, nonlinear years of rebuilding that followed shaped everything, including why I became a coach and why this podcast exists.

This isn't a tidy glow-up story. It's an honest look at what rebuilding actually looks like, and five of the most important lessons it taught me:

1. Emotions are survivable — they build, they peak, and they always pass
2. The difference between regret and guilt, and a simple 3-question framework for moving through the hard stuff
3. You don't need to see the whole staircase — just the next step
4. Rebuilding has no finish line, and why that's actually okay
5. Authenticity is where real connection lives — with others and with yourself

Whether you're navigating a divorce, an empty nest, a career shift, or any season where life has asked you to rebuild something, this one will meet you where you are.

Mentioned in this episode: Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) — a skills-based approach to emotional regulation worth looking into 

Daring Greatly by Brené Brown — on vulnerability and connection 

Wellness Wake Up intro program — $99 [LEARN MORE HERE]

Transcript

00:00 Welcome & What This Episode Is About

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Hello friends and welcome back to Real, Brave and Unstoppable for episode 149. I am your host Kortney Rivard, and I have a great episode today where I'm gonna get a little personal. This will be part story and part lessons learned. And honestly, it's one that I've been wanting to record for a while, since if I hadn't had this experience, I probably wouldn't be a coach, and this podcast would likely not exist. So whether you are navigating a divorce, a breakup, career change, an empty nest, or just a season where life has asked you to rebuild something, this episode is for you. Rebuilding looks different for everyone, but the experience of it has a lot in common. So today I am, like I said, I'm gonna get a little personal with you, share a little bit of my story. I've been sitting with this one for a while trying to figure out how to share in a way that's actually useful to you.

01:00 When the Rug Gets Pulled Out

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Some of you listening may be familiar with my story, but if you're not in the summer of 2014, my life changed in a way I absolutely did not see coming. My marriage ended when I discovered my husband at the time is gay. Yes. That happened. And the circumstances were the kind that pulled the rug out from under you completely. Not just the relationship, Because of course that was gone. But also my sense of who I was, what my life was, and what came next. All of it was just gone in a moment. I wanna be clear, I am not gonna share every detail today because honestly, the details aren't really the point. What matters is what it felt like and what it felt like was ground zero. It was like standing in the rubble of something and not even knowing where to start picking up the pieces. So for a period of time, I was. Like, eh, pretty non-functional, like embarrassingly non-functional. And I say that as someone who prides herself on being capable and resilient and figuring things out. I couldn't figure this out. I was going through the motions of being a mom, trying to show up for my kids and not always doing the best job, if I'm being honest. Trying to keep things together on the outside. And on the inside I was completely wiped out. I was completely falling apart. And honestly, on the outside I probably looked like I was falling apart sometimes too. There were moments where I didn't know how on earth I was gonna get through this. And if you've ever been in a season like that where the pain is so big, it's physical. Where you can't see any version of a future that feels okay. Then you know exactly what I mean. I'm getting a little emotional as I talk about this actually.

03:11 The Messy, Nonlinear Truth About Rebuilding

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But slowly, and I mean slowly, very slowly, I started to rebuild my life. Not in a linear way, not in a tidy, here's my glow up story kinda way. It was messy friends. It was very messy. Two steps forward, one step back, maybe 10 steps back. Some days I've got this. Which actually those days were probably pretty few and far between in the early days. And some days I didn't feel like I had it and I didn't know if I ever would ever have it. And that rebuilding the divorce, the years that followed, the relationship, I tried before I was ready. And a lot of hard lessons about myself taught me things that I, I just, I couldn't have learned any other way. So that's what today is about. It's not about the story itself really, but it's about what the story taught me. And I wanna share with you the things that rebuilding taught me. Some of them I learned the hard way. I think most of them I learned the hard way, to be honest. I'm not gonna lie. And some of them I'm still learning and sometimes I still do learn the hard way. That seems to be what I do, learn things the hard way. So if that resonates with you, you're not alone. But I hope that at least one of these lessons lands for you, wherever you are right now. So let's get into the lessons.

04:40 Lesson 1: Emotions Are Survivable

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And I wanna start with the one that I think is the most important and the one I had to learn the hardest way. When you're in the middle of something really painful, emotions can feel absolutely unsurvivable. Unsurvivable. I don't mean that like dramatically. I mean it like literally it can feel that way. So there were moments where what I was feeling was so big and so overwhelming that I genuinely didn't believe I could get through that. The grief, the shock, anger, fear, loneliness. It wasn't just emotional. It was in my body. It was physical, it was relentless. And what most of us do when emotions feel that big and bad, myself included, is we try to get away from them. We stay busy, we push through, we numb out. We find anything that keeps us from actually having to sit with what we're feeling. And sometimes those things aren't particularly effective in other areas of our life or even healthy, but sitting with it feels like it might actually break us. Here's what I learned though. Emotions are like waves. They build, they peak, and they pass every single time. Even the ones that feel like they won't pass, they do. And I wanna be really honest here. This is not something I learned on my own. This is not something I figured out on my own. I went through something called DBT, which is Dialectical Behavior Therapy and DBT is a skills-based approach to learning how to tolerate and regulate emotions that are difficult. And I didn't just do it once. I went through three rounds of DBT once back in 2015 and twice last year in back to back six month blocks. And, and DBT is something they, they recommend doing back to back two, two cycles of it. And I share that because I think that's important. We have this idea that if we learn something once we should have it. But these kinds of skills, emotional skills, especially, they don't work that way. They have to become habitual. They have to be practiced over and over until they're your default response instead of your last resort. And that's actually why multiple rounds of DBT is so valuable. And that's actually why multiple rounds of DBT are so valuable. You're not relearning, you're just deepening. You're rewiring pathways in your brain to recognize that, "oh, when this happens, I can use this skill". So DBT gave me a framework and a set of tools for doing something most of us were never really taught, actually feeling our feelings and letting that be okay without being destroyed by them. Distress tolerance, emotional regulation, mindfulness. These are not soft, abstract concepts. They're real, learnable skills, and they changed how I relate to my own emotional experience completely. If you've never heard of DBT, I'd really encourage you to look into it, especially if you tend to feel things intensely or find yourself avoiding emotions through busyness or numbing, things like that. It's one of the most practical, genuinely useful things I've ever done for my own mental health. So if you're in the middle of something hard right now, I want you to hear this. You are more capable of tolerating this than you think you are. You don't have to have it together. You don't have to be okay all the time. You just have to let yourself feel it and then trust that you will come out on the other side. Because you will, and I promise you that. I know it doesn't always feel like it.

08:43 Lesson 2: The Difference Between Regret and Shame

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The second thing rebuilding taught me is the difference between regret and guilt and why that distinction matters more than I ever realized. I'm gonna be honest with you about something that was really hard for me during the darkest period of my divorce. I was not the mom I wanted to be. I was surviving. I was barely keeping myself together, and my kids needed more from me than I had the capacity to give at the time. And I've carried a lot of regret about that. And it's still a little hard to talk about, but for a long time that regret lived in my body is guilt and shame. Which if you know anything about shame, you know, it doesn't motivate you to do better. It just makes you feel like you're bad. Not that you did something imperfectly, but that you are fundamentally not enough. And that's a very different and much more damaging thing. Now, I also experienced reinforcement, and I won't get into this here, but I also experienced this reinforcement that you are not enough right now from people who I cared about in my life and mattered to me, and that was very, very difficult. So here's the distinction that eventually changed everything for me. Regret can be useful if we don't stay stuck in it. Regret looks at a moment and says I didn't show up the way I wanted to there. What can I learn from that? How do I wanna do it differently? So regret can be like a compass point. Yeah, it points you somewhere. Guilt and shame, especially shame. Shame just keeps you stuck. It doesn't point you anywhere. It just says you are bad for this. You should have known better, you should have done more, and you replay it over and over and over without actually moving through it.

10:40 The 3 Questions That Help You Move Through It

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So when I started working with regret, instead of being just overcome with guilt or shame, I needed something practical to actually do with it. And I found a framework. I created a framework. Three questions. That's it. Super simple. The first question is what worked? Second is what didn't work. And the third one is, what do I wanna learn from this? Write those down if you can, because they're deceptively simple. What worked- because even in your hardest seasons, something worked. A person who showed up a habit that kept you grounded, the fact that you kept getting up even when you didn't want to. There is always something, even if it's small. The second question is, what didn't work? And this is where the real honesty lives. Not to beat yourself up, let's be really clear there. But to look clearly at what you'd do differently. The patterns you'd interrupt sooner, the things you'd ask for help with instead of white knuckling alone and what do I wanna learn from this? That's the one that shifts everything because it, it assumes there's something to learn. It moves you from the victim of your story to student of it, and eventually to the author of what comes next. So the truth is, I did the best I could with what I had at the time. And sometimes, and this is one of the hardest things I've ever had to sit with, is that our best sometimes isn't enough for the people who need us. Not because we don't love them, but because we're human. And human beings have limits. Self-compassion isn't letting yourself off the hook. It's actually what allows you to grow. The women who can't forgive themselves for their worst seasons are the ones who stay stuck in them. The ones who can look at those moments with honesty and compassion, those are the ones who actually change. We move through it. So whatever hard season you're sitting with right now, I'd encourage you to try these three questions when you're ready, what worked, what didn't work, and what do I wanna learn from this? And then be as kind to yourself with the answers as you would be to your very best friend.

12:54 Lesson 3: You Don't Need to See the Whole Staircase

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The third thing rebuilding taught me sounds almost too simple, but I promise you it's super powerful. When you're at ground zero or anywhere in a rebuilding season really, one of the most overwhelming things you can do is look too far in the future. I. I did this constantly in the early days. I'd lie awake at night trying to map out the next five years -where was I gonna live? Would I be okay financially? Would my kids be okay? Would I ever feel normal again? Would I be alone forever? And every single time I did that, I felt worse. Not better. Because when you're standing in the rubble, the view from there is terrifying. You can't see how it's gonna work out. You can't see the path forward. All you can see is how far you have to go and how impossible it looks from where you're standing. So I learned eventually, and with a lot of resistance, if I'm being honest, to put the blinders on. You know how racehorses wear blinders so they can't see what's beside them or behind them, just straight ahead, just the next thing. That's what I had to learn how to do. Not because the future didn't matter, or I had to look ahead a little bit for some things, but because looking at the whole staircase when you're exhausted and scared and rebuilding is paralyzing, it's overwhelming, debilitating. You don't need to see the whole staircase. You just need to see the next step. Sometimes we might peek at the staircase to determine our next step. But all we really need is the next step in that moment. So what is the one next right thing in front of me right now? Not five steps from now. Not the whole plan, just one step. Some days that next step was to get through today. Some days it was just to get outside for 20 minutes, or maybe it was even just to put my shoes on, to prep to go outside because it didn't always happen. And those tiny steps, the ones that felt almost embarrassingly small are what actually moved me forward. So here's the other thing about rebuilding that nobody tells you: Progress is almost never visible in the short term. You rarely feel yourself getting better day to day, but when you look back three months, six months a year, you can see it. The evidence is there even when it doesn't feel like it. So if you're in a season right now where the future feels overwhelming and you can't figure out how it's all gonna work out, you don't have to figure that out today. You just really don't. Just ask yourself, what's the one next step in front of me? That's it. Just that. And the rest. It's gonna reveal itself as you go.

15:46 Lesson 4: Rebuilding Has No Finish Line

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The fourth thing that rebuilding taught me is something I am still learning, and I think that I probably always will be learning it, is that rebuilding has no finish line. Now I know that's not what we want to hear because when we're in the middle of something hard, we wanna know when it's gonna end. We want a timeline. We want someone to tell us, okay, it's gonna be hard for about this long, and then you're gonna arrive on the other side and it will be done and you'll feel all better. And that is not how it works my friends. I went into my rebuilding, expecting to complete it like it was a project with a start date and an end date, and I kept waiting to feel done. To feel like I had successfully gotten through it and I, that I could move on. I did my time, had my hard stuff happen, did the work, got through it, and now I'm good. And every time I thought I was close, something would knock me back. A hard day, a setback. Maybe the grief came out of nowhere and I'd feel like I failed, like I was behind. Like I should be further along by now. And I'm not gonna lie, sometimes I. Still think and feel those things. So here's what I know now: Rebuilding is not linear. It is not a straight line from A to B, from broken to whole. It's more like a spiral, like this tangled ball of yarn that just. Everywhere you revisit things, you process layers you couldn't access before. You have seasons where you feel like you're doing really well, you're flying, and seasons where you are back at square one, and both of those are part of the process. I also wanna say something about comparison here because I think it's really easy when you're rebuilding to look at someone else's process and then measure yourself against it. She seems like she's handling her divorce so much better than I handled mine. He moved on so quickly. Why is this still so hard for me? But here's the truth: Everyone in midlife is rebuilding something. Every single person. But what someone is rebuilding is completely unique to them. Their history, their nervous system, their support system, their circumstances, none of it is the same as yours. Comparison in rebuilding is not just unhelpful, it's genuinely unkind to yourself. Your timeline is your timeline, your processes, your process, and here's the reframe that helped me the most. The goal of rebuilding isn't to get back to who you were before. That person is gone. And honestly, that's okay because who you're becoming through this process: more self-aware, more honest, more grounded, that person is worth becoming. Even if it's hard, I'm still rebuilding in some ways and I probably always will be. And I've mostly made peace with that. I mean, I have my days. But mostly I've made peace with that because it means I'm still growing and that's what we're wired for as humans. We're wired to be wanting to expand. And you know, I guess like when I think about it, I'd rather be someone who keeps growing, then someone who just arrived somewhere and stopped.

19:18 Lesson 5: Authenticity Is Where Real Connection Lives

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The fifth thing rebuilding taught me, and I just wanna say there are more than five lessons, but I'm capturing the five that. It felt the biggest to me. But the fifth thing that rebuilding taught me is something I didn't expect to learn from one of the hardest seasons of my life. But that lesson is that authenticity is where real connection lives. So when everything fell apart, I had a choice about how to show up in the world. I could hold it together on the outside, perform "okayness", keep the armor on, make sure no one saw how bad it really was. And I tried that for a while and it's exhausting and it's incredibly lonely. Or I could just be honest. I could let people see that I was struggling. I could stop pretending I had it all together when I absolutely did not. And what happened when I chose the second thing, I was really surprised. People didn't think less of me. In fact, the connections I made during that time, they were the real ones. They were the ones that actually mattered. They came not when I was polished and composed and it looked like I had my shit together. That person was kind of intimidating to people, which I think is hilarious. 'cause when people told me that they thought I was intimidating, I probably had, like, they had no idea that inside I felt like I was not enough. But the real connections came when I let people see me falling apart a little. Now I will say that when I say I let them see me falling apart a little, when I, when they saw me falling apart a lot, I think people just didn't really know what to do with that. And. S that's just also human. And I get that. But back to my point is when I stopped performing and just showed up as a human who is messy and who's going through something hard, that's when. I felt most connected. And Brene Brown talks about this, the relationship between vulnerability and connection, that we can't have real intimacy without being willing to be seen. And I, I read her work before my divorce. I just kind of nodded along and really loved it and I thought, yes, that makes sense. But I didn't really understand it until I lived it. Because here's what I learned like in my bones during that time, is that people don't connect with your highlight reel. They connect with your humanity. I wanna say that again, people, it's really important. People don't connect with your highlight reel. They connect with the true, authentic, messy human that you are. We are all messy humans. Even the ones who look like they have their shit together, But people connect with the real stuff, the messy, imperfect, I don't have this figured out stuff. That's what makes someone feel less alone. That they're in it with you. And somewhere in the middle of all of this, I started to let go of needing to be perfect at anything. I adopted more of a growth mindset, not to have to get this right, but what can I learn from this? Not I should be handling this better, but I'm doing the best I can and that's enough for today. So I started taking off my armor mostly, you know, it's a practice, not a permanent state, and sometimes we need the armor in the form of like boundaries or whatever. But but yeah, it's a practice. I wanna be really clear about that. I don't walk around just fully bearing my soul wherever I go. You know, there are days when I still need to put that armor back on, whether it's 'cause I'm insecure about something or yeah, I don't know. But there are days when it's hard to not have the armor on. It's vulnerable. Vulnerability is scary, emotionally scary. But now I notice it and I know how to come back to myself and step into that true version of who I am. But here's what I want you to hear about this lesson. This is, like I said, it's how we feel. It's how we find real connection with other people, Yes, but here's the bigger one. Also with ourselves, we also find real connection with ourselves and when we can embrace all of who we are, including the parts we're not proud of, including the seasons, we'd rather forget,. Including the versions of ourselves that didn't show up perfectly. That's when we become whole. That's actually the heart of this podcast. Real, brave, unstoppable. Not perfect, not polished. Real. And I think that might be the most important thing that rebuilding gave me. Not just the lessons, not just the resilience, but the willingness to be fully unapologetically human, even when it's hard, and to trust that that is enough.

24:35 Who You Become on the Other Side

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So if I zoom out and I look at everything that rebuilding has taught me, and I mean really look at it, what I see is this, I am stronger than I thought I was. Even if some days I don't believe that or feel it, I'm more resilient than I ever gave myself credit for. I'm capable of rebuilding even when I was completely convinced I couldn't, and I do not say those things to sound impressive or like I have my shit together. Because a lot of days I just really don't. I say it because I want you to hear it about yourself too, because if you're in a rebuilding season right now, or you've been through one, or you feel one coming, I want you to know that the same is true for you. You are more capable than you think you'll get through this, and who you become on the other side will be worth it. I know what I want now in a way that I never did before. Not just in relationships, although that's a big part of it, but in life. And what I mean by that is I know my values. I know what actually matters to me for the most part. I know the difference between settling because it's comfortable and choosing because it's right. And I know that a full meaningful life doesn't require perfect circumstances. It requires showing up for yourself, even when that's the hardest thing on the list. That clarity, I couldn't have gotten there without going through what I went through. In some ways, I would've preferred not to go through it. Because life is very different now. However, I wouldn't have gotten that clarity without going through that. And I, I guess like if I'm really being honest with myself, even though it was hard, I wouldn't really trade it because even the hardest parts. Like I said, it sure would've been easier if it never would've happened, but no, so, and I don't really think I would trade it even the hardest parts because of who it really made me. I, and again. It would've been a lot easier if I would've never had to go through that for sure, but I did go through it, and so I can choose to look at it from the perspective of, wow, it really taught me a lot. It brought me places I might not have gone otherwise. And so it had a purpose. It made me who I am today.

27:00 Questions to Sit With

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So before I let you go, I just wanna leave you with a few questions to sit with. You don't have to answer them right now 'cause it might take you a little time to know the answers. Just let them be somewhere in the back of your mind. Just let them float. But what is your current rebuilding season teaching you? Um, is there something you're re rebuilding? Maybe it's a new relationship with your partner after your kids go to, went to college or off to college. You're in the empty nest phase, so you're trying to figure that out. Maybe you're taking care of aging parents and that's like a new relationship and a lot of work and a lot of stress. Um, maybe you've gone through a divorce like I did. Um, maybe you lo you've lost your job, um, maybe you're in the middle of dating and going, learning how to. Be healthy in a relationship and deal with the fear and the anxiety of being in the middle of it. You know, maybe you're rebuilding is you've gotten to a place in your life where you realize that you don't feel healthy and you wanna re, you wanna rebuild your health and wellness. You wanna lose, lose weight to be, not because you should lose weight, but because you wanna feel lighter and more energetic. You know, maybe you have. Maybe, you know, you're pre-diabetic and your A1C levels are high and you wanna feel better. You don't wanna end up diabetic, and so you're rebuilding your health from that standpoint. Um, maybe you are realizing that you are not as strong as you wanna be and you're rebuilding your strength. Lots of different rebuilds here, friends. And they all, all can teach you something. The next question is, where are you being hard on yourself for not handling something perfectly, and what would it feel like to offer yourself a little grace instead? What's the one step in front of you right now? That's the next. The next question is, what's the one step in front of you right now? Not five steps from now, just one. Doesn't mean you can't look at the other ones, but just right now, what's that next one? And then where might letting your guard down just a little bit actually create more connection than keeping up your guard would. You don't have to have this all figured out. None of us do. None of us ever really will. That's actually kind of the point.

29:32 Work With Kortney + Until Next Time

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So if this episode resonated with you and you're in a season where you feel stuck or disconnected and you want some support figuring out what's actually going on and how to start shifting it, that's exactly the work I do. I have an intro program called The Wellness Wake Up. You've probably heard me talk about it lots. Um, it's personalized, it's practical, and it's designed to help you get clarity and figure out your next right steps without overhauling everything and adding more to your plate. So I'll link it in the show notes if you wanna check it out. And those next right steps can be everything from rebuilding after a divorce to learning how to eat right. Also, if you know someone who's going through a, a rebuild right now, a rebuilding season, a divorce, a loss, transition, any kind of like ground zero moment, big or small, please share this episode with them. Sometimes the most powerful thing we can do for someone is say, Hey, I heard this and I thought of you. You're not alone. So thank you, my friends, for being here. Thank you for trusting me with your time and your ears. I know there's so many, there are so many great podcasts out there. So much great information and I am so honored that you are choosing to listen to mine. This community means everything to me. I would love to hear from you. Tell me what you thought of this episode. What do you wanna hear more of? Reach out to me. I'll link my email in the show notes too. All right, my friends, thank you for being here and I will see you next time.