Divorce with Carolyn

What If Your Divorce Came Without Shame?

• Season 1 • Episode 4

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0:00 | 21:53

What if your divorce came without any shame at all? Not less shame – no shame? For most women, that question feels almost impossible to answer. In this episode, Carolyn explores the deep cultural, historical and personal roots of divorce shame, what the research says about how women's lives improve after separation, and four grounded ways to start loosening shame's grip. Plus a simple journalling exercise you can try tonight. Warm, honest, and evidence-backed.

Key takeaways

  • Shame doesn't start at divorce – it activates something already present from cultural and personal conditioning.
  • Women internalise relationship breakdowns far more than men, and research confirms this has measurable effects on mental health and self-esteem.
  • A 20-year Kingston University study found women report significant increases in contentment and life satisfaction for up to five years after divorce.
  • 100% of Women's Divorce Academy members surveyed (separated 12+ months) said they were happier after divorce.
  • Shame can't survive being spoken aloud to one safe person — connection is the antidote.
  • Patterns in your relationship history are not proof that something is intrinsically wrong with you. They reflect what you learned and believed you deserved — and that can change.
  • A simple journalling exercise can help you examine and dismantle shame gently over time.


Resources mentioned


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SPEAKER_00

Jill thought she had a happy marriage. After sixteen years together she really believed she and her husband were in it for life. Then one day he told her it was over. Out of nowhere she didn't see it coming. She couldn't sleep, she was terrified about the future, she felt ashamed and broken. But eight years on, Jill says her divorce has become the best thing that ever happened to her. In this episode, we talk about sudden abandonment, the shame that comes with it, raising her boys alone, and how she rebuilt her confidence and eventually found love again, even though she wasn't looking for it. If you're in the thick of separation right now and struggling to see how life could ever feel good again, this conversation will give you hope. I'm Carolyn Tate, founder of Women's Divorce Academy, and your guide to turning your divorce into the best thing that ever happened to you. This is Divorce with Carolyn. I want to start today with a question, and I'd like you to really just sit with it for a moment. What if your divorce came without any shame? Not less shame, not manageable shame, no shame at all. Imagine it like you're changing jobs or getting a new haircut. For so many women, shame feels like it comes bundled with divorce, like it's a tax you have to pay for leaving, for being left, for the marriage ending at all. And I don't think I've spoken to a single woman going through separation who hasn't carried some version of it with her. So today I want to talk about where that shame comes from, what function it actually serves, and most importantly what we can do to get it to loosen its grip on us so that we can get through this in one piece. This isn't about pushing shame down or pretending it doesn't exist. It's about questioning whether it belongs to you at all. First, let's talk about where shame comes from and why it sticks to us so much. One of the most important things I've come to understand about shame is this. It never starts at divorce. Divorce just activates something that was already there in us. And that something has very deep roots culturally, historically, and personally. So let's zoom back for a moment. Women's relationship with shame is not new, unfortunately. Across cultures, across centuries, women who stepped outside social expectations face profound consequences through history. Women who are too outspoken, too independent, or too defiant have historically been punished for it, sometimes quite literally. And that's not even ancient history. The expectation that women should keep the peace, should hold families together, and should bear the emotional weight of relationships, that's still very much something that we live with today. Australian journalist Annabelle Crab wrote about this in her excellent book, The Wife Drought, that quiet, persistent expectation that women will absorb the domestic and emotional labor of family life, often at the expense of everything else. And when something ends, like when our marriage breaks down, the blame has this well-worn path and it leads straight back to us. And, you know, we often internalize that too. Did we try hard enough? What didn't we do? What drove our partner away? Even when the answers to all of those questions is clearly nothing, nothing, and nothing. Research backs this up. Studies consistently show that women internalize relationship breakdowns far more than men do. We are more likely to question ourselves, more likely to blame ourselves, and more likely to carry the emotional aftermath long after that relationship has ended. Men on average move on more quickly, not because they feel less, but because culturally they've never been assigned the responsibility for holding the relationship together in the first place. The shame that arrives with divorce isn't something that you created. It's something you absorbed from the culture you grew up in, from the messages you received about what a good wife, a good mother, or a good partner looks like, and from what happens to women who don't fit that mold or who dare to be different. And on top of those cultural messages, most of us carry our own personal shame history as well. Moments from our lives that have told us that something is wrong with us long before divorce was even on the horizon. Those things can be many and varied. And I can speak to this from my own experience. I've actually been divorced twice. I have three children to two different men. And I want to tell you that when my second marriage ended, every old story I had about myself came back bigger and louder and stronger than ever. The failure narrative, what must be wrong with me? Why couldn't I make this stuff work? The sense that this confirmed something that I'd always feared. Something was intrinsically wrong with me to make these people not want to be in a relationship with me, even though I called time on both of those marriages. What I've since come to understand, and what research supports as well, is that those feelings weren't evidence of truth. They're echoes of old conditioning. Shame sounds like our own voice, which is what makes it so convincing, but it's not actually us at all. It doesn't feel like something we were taught. It feels like something we know about ourselves, but it's a trick. Brene Brown, who has spent decades researching shame and should be, I don't know, everybody's best friend when it comes to this stuff, she describes shame as that intensely painful feeling that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and of both belonging. And belonging is so important to us as humans. But the key word there is feeling, not fact, not evidence. It's a feeling. And she makes an important distinction between shame and guilt that I find really useful when it comes to this stuff. Guilt says, I did something bad. Shame says I am bad. Big difference, right? We can be guilty about stuff all the time that we've done, but that feeling of just being intrinsically bad, you know, the core of our being, that's some rough stuff. When it comes to guilt, that can motivate us to change and to make positive changes, but shame just makes you want to hide, to disappear, to be in dark corners where no one's looking at you. And for women going through divorce, shame is a really dominant and common experience. Now let's talk about why women carry more of this shame. It's not just an anecdotal observation. Research consistently shows that divorced women are significantly more likely than men to internalize stigma and direct it towards themselves. There was a study published in the journal BMC Psychology, which found that self-stigma, that internalizing of what society thinks of divorced women, has measurable harmful effects on self-esteem and mental health. Women who absorbed that stigma were more likely to see themselves as failed mothers, as less worthy, and as permanently marked by what had happened, like there was something just completely wrong with them that could never be fixed. And the knock-on effect of that, of course, is that when bad things happen to them, they deserve it. And so they allow it. They don't stand up for themselves. You probably, if you're listening to this, you probably know that feeling in yourself. Women who were able to resist that stigma showed significantly more positive beliefs about themselves. And that distinction really matters because the stigma is not yours to carry. It belongs to a culture that still hasn't fully updated its view of what a woman's life is supposed to look like. Which is shocking. I know. I mean, feminism's done its job, right? Ha ha ha ha. So, um, like anything societal too, there's a generational layer to this. This gets passed down over and over and over again. Many of us grew up watching our mothers navigate divorce or watching our parents' marriage or relationship and noticing their the roles that they played in those. And we absorb everything that comes along with it. I know, you know, my parents got divorced, and I watched the way my mother was treated, and I watched the way she spoke about herselves and the adjustments she made for men in her life. We absorb those lessons before we even have the language to question them. So when our relationships end, we're not just dealing with our own shame, we're dealing with our mother's shame and our grandmother's shame and her mother's shame. Because they've all, whether they were divorced or not, they've all played a role in these relationships that were very often submissive or second rank to their husbands. I want to pause here because there's also good news and genuinely good news, because everything we've talked about so far is really quite heavy, right? And I don't want to leave you sitting there without feeling some sunshine on your face. So let's take a look at that. This part's really important. Change is happening, and there is long-term research on women's well-being after divorce that tells a very different story from the one shame would have us believe. There was a large study by Kingston University in the UK, which followed 10,000 people over 20 years, and they found women reported a significant increase in contentment and life satisfaction for up to five years after divorce. And men, by contrast, were only slightly happier. Despite the financial impact that divorce often has on women, they still reported feeling dramatically better about themselves. The researchers concluded that women who leave unhappy marriages feel much more liberated than their male counterparts. And if you look at that traditional marriage, it's easy to see why, because the women do the caring, right? You know, a lot of the women are still doing the heavy lifting at home, they're still doing the emotional heavy lifting. And so when women leave, they're only caring for themselves and it feels lighter. Whereas the men are suddenly having to do all of this extra labor that they weren't doing before. Sociologist Paul Amato, who reviewed decades of research on divorce outcomes, found that many people, and particularly women, experienced higher levels of autonomy and personal growth after divorce ended. That's definitely something I experienced too. I took, you know, especially the first year after I separated from my husband, to really do a lot of therapy, do a lot of, you know, self-analysis and really take note of what I learned about myself in that breakup so that I could move forward, not making the same mistakes. I could move forward more in touch with myself and more in touch with what I wanted out of my life. And that was so powerful for me. And that's something that I really try to do with women inside Women's Divorce Academy as well, because it depends on how you look at it, right? Like it can be a tragedy or it can be an opportunity. And that choice alone can make a massive difference to how you experience divorce. Women reported a boost in self-confidence, a better sense of control, and improvements in career opportunities, and also an increase in their happiness. There was also an Australian study on women's health that found that while women experience a sharp decline in life satisfaction around the time of separation, life satisfaction increases long term, often beyond where it was before the relationship ended. So, you know, I mean, how many times does a marriage or a relationship end and you look at it and think, well, that was perfect, that was amazing, everybody was so happy. It happens, but usually there's stuff that's wrong, you know, people are just, you know, living with whatever they've got or they're making the best of it or whatever. But when you get the opportunity to reinvent yourself, to restart your life, it can often be so much better than it was before. It's something that we see as well in our community and women's divorce academy. We actually ran a survey of our members a while back where we asked the women who had been separated for 12 months or longer whether they were happier than before their divorce, the same level of happiness or less happy. Every single one of our respondents, that's a hundred percent, said they were happier 12 months after separation. And these were women, you know, it wasn't all women who called time on their marriage. It wasn't all women who had made the best of it. It was women who had a broad depth of experience of being left, being cheated on, being, you know, raked through the coals when it came to the legal process, who had been through, you know, all sorts of terrible things. But every single one of them, 12 months later, said, I'm happier now, life is better. And that's because clarity, autonomy, and self-trust has had an opportunity to slowly replace that survival mode. So if you're in survival mode right now, it's really important to take a breath, take a moment, look at it, and just think, this is not where I will stay. This is a halfway house to where I'm going. So, what do we actually do with shame when it shows up in our lives, especially during our divorce? Here are four things that I found genuinely useful for myself and for the women that I work with in Women's Divorce Academy. Number one, shame grows in dark corners. Brene Brown says it best when she says shame hates having words wrapped around it. It can't survive being shared. When shame stays tucked away, it feels like truth. Our brain just spins on this same story. We keep telling ourselves these same stories, and there's nothing to interrupt it. The moment you say a shameful thought out loud to one safe person, it starts to lose its power. This is why community matters so much. Not to fix you, not to offer solutions, just to say, I get it, I hear you, me too, you're not broken. Connection is the antidote to shame, and it's not something that you can think your way to. It's not a mind over matter situation. It only happens when you have relationships with other people. A useful prompt that Brene Brown suggests, and one that I use myself, is that instead of stating a shame thought as a fact, try starting that sentence with, This is the story I've been telling myself. So, you know, this is the story I've been telling myself. My husband left me because I was a terrible wife. It just takes that 100% truth out of it and creates just enough distance between you and the thought to be able to examine it and go, is there another way to look at that? You know? Number two, patterns are not proof. Your relationship history is not your scorecard. So patterns don't mean you're broken. They reflect what you've learned, what you've tolerated in the past, and what you believed that you deserved at the time. That's not a character flaw. It's a story that made sense given what you've lived and what's happened to you thus far. And that's a story that you can change. For me, I put up with a certain uh way of being treated in relationships because that's what I thought I deserved. And it wasn't until I did the work on myself that I could even see that clearly, let alone, you know, change that pattern. So, you know, the the three children to two different men thing, you know, was I was telling myself that I was broken, but actually I was accepting a certain level of treatment that I just thought was okay. So taking that year out after my second divorce really gave me an opportunity to go, it's not me. It's a series of circumstances, a series of stories, and that was something I was then able to disrupt and change. Whatever your history looks like, it doesn't have to define what comes next for you. And the fact that you're here listening to me right now, questioning the narrative and doing that work is already evidence of that. You're open to something else, you're open to something different for yourself. And by all means, you know, speak to a therapist, do the work, talk to your friends. You know, we have these conversations inside Women's Divorce Academy. There's stuff, you know, just realizing that doesn't mean everything changes, but being aware of it means you now you can change it. And that's really important. Number three, other people's stories are not your stories. Everybody speaks from their own experience, and everybody judges from their own wounds and their own limitations. That includes your parents, that includes your ex, that includes your community, that includes your friends, that includes the voices that you grew up with, and even the voices that you hear in your head. None of those narratives are objective truth. Not even the ones that have become your inner voice, especially those ones a lot of the time. Maybe someone told you that you should have tried harder. Maybe someone implied that the breakdown was your fault. Maybe the gossip at school made you feel judged or not worthy. None of those are your stories to keep. The work is noticing where someone else's story has quietly snuck in and become your own story. And then just gently putting that down or looking at it and going, This is the story I've been telling myself. And just creating that distance again. And number four, you're allowed to question everything. You don't have to accept every thought as truth, even your own. One of the most powerful things you can do is ask simply and without aggression, is this actually true? Shame can't survive scrutiny. The more you examine it, not harshly, but with genuine curiosity, pull it apart. And then it starts to unravel. One shift that I've found that's really helpful is moving from that I'm ashamed thought to a part of me feels shame right now. And that part isn't your whole self. It's learned somewhere along the way that staying small or blaming yourself felt safer than risking rejection. It has a purpose. It's trying to protect you. It doesn't need to be pushed away. It just needs to be understood and gently redirected. And there's a branch of psychology called uh internal family systems, which really gets into this. It breaks things apart and you can look at different parts of yourself. So they they call them internal family systems. So different parts of you that maybe formed at different ages in your life that have a, they feel like they have a protective role. And you can look at them and go, what is that actually trying to do for me? What's the purpose of this part? And just sit with it and let it be heard. And if you'd like to learn more about that concept, self-help by Gabby Bernstein is a really wonderful place to start. Now I want to talk about something simple that you can do today to start feeling better about shame. One tangible thing that you can try today, tonight, whenever it feels right. Here it is. Write down one shame sentence that you've been carrying. It might be about your divorce, it might be about your parenting, your choices, or something else entirely. It doesn't matter. Just pick one thing that spins around in your head as something that's wrong with you. Write it down. Look at it, think about it for a few minutes, ask yourselves ask yourself these three questions. Is this story objectively true? Is there any evidence to the contrary or that it's harsher than the facts warrant? And what else might be true? Is there a kind of lens I can look at this through? If a friend came to you and said, This is a story I've been telling myself, and then read you that sentence, what would you say to her? Write those answers down and keep writing until you have nothing else to write. It doesn't matter how long, it could be 30 seconds, it could be 30 minutes, it really doesn't matter. This is about just reframing and writing it out really helps your brain to loosen up and be with that idea. Doing that exercise regularly, either before bed or first thing in the morning, is one of the most effective ways I know to slowly dismantle that shame. It's not a big dramatic flourish, it doesn't all happen at once. But if you do that regularly, gently and consistently over time, you will start to feel the difference. If meditation is something that works for you, I'd also point you towards the work of Sarah Blondon and Tara Brack, both available on Insight Timer, which is a free meditation app. They are both warm, grounding, and excellent at helping you sit with difficult feelings without being consumed by them. And if therapy is accessible to you, please consider it. In Australia, you can access a mental health care plan through your GP, which gives you a rebate on psychology sessions. It's worth asking about. If you are outside of Australia, please investigate what your options are in your local area. Now, just to close out today, I want to end by coming back to that question that I started with. What if your divorce came without shame? I'm not asking you to be there yet. I'm asking you to sit quietly for a moment and consider that it's possible, that the shame you're carrying isn't evidence of who you are. It's a response to a culture that has always been harder on women than it should be. And to stories you absorbed before you had the tools to question them. You are not your divorce. You are not your history. You are not what the most critical voice in your head says about you at 11 o'clock at night. You are someone navigating one of the hardest seasons a person can go through. And you're doing it. That counts for a lot. If doing this alone feels heavy, Women's Divorce Academy offers clear. Guidance, practical tools, and a supportive community for the legal, financial, and emotional realities of divorce. Whether you're considering separation in the middle of it or rebuilding afterwards, there's something here for you. Find us at Women's DivorceAcademy.com.