Divorce Happens

Fresh Starts
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Welcome to Divorce Happens, the podcast where we inspire, educate, and support you through divorce and beyond so that you can start fresh on the next phase of your journey. Produced by Fresh Starts Registry, the only divorce registry platform for everything you need to begin again, including home items, hype team, and everything in between. Remember, divorce happens...and then, we start fresh. We're here to support you before, during, and after divorce. Hosted by Olivia Dreizen Howell, the co-founder and CEO of Fresh Starts Registry.

  1. vor 11 Std.

    The 5 Toxic Things You've Quietly Normalized in Your Marriage (That You'd Never Tell a Friend to Accept) with Olivia Howell

    There's a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from living inside a marriage you've stopped questioning — not because it's fine, but because you've explained it to yourself so many times that the explanations have started to feel like truth. In this solo episode of Divorce Happens, Olivia Howell turns her attention to one of the quietest forces behind unhappy marriages and delayed divorces: normalization. Not the big, dramatic ruptures that make for tidy divorce stories, but the slow, invisible erosion of patterns so many people live inside for years without ever calling them what they are. Olivia walks through five of the most common things we normalize in marriage — and why each one matters more than we tend to admit. She starts with contempt disguised as humor, the mockery and dismissiveness wrapped in "I'm just kidding," and points to relationship research showing contempt, not conflict, as one of the strongest predictors of divorce. From there she names the invisible mental load carried by one partner, the way emotional unavailability gets excused as a personality trait, and the particularly insidious pattern of being made to feel like the problem every time you raise a concern. She closes with the ache of loneliness inside a marriage — the experience, more common than most people realize, of feeling completely alone while technically not being alone at all. What makes this episode land isn't just the naming of these patterns — it's the permission Olivia gives listeners to see their own marriage clearly, without guilt and without building a case against anyone. Her core takeaway: normalizing something doesn't make it okay, it just makes it invisible, and understanding your own experience fully is what allows you to make different choices going forward. Whether you're contemplating divorce, in the middle of one, or years into rebuilding, this episode offers the kind of clarity that turns hindsight into self-trust — and a reminder that you deserved better then, and you deserve better now. 🔗 Check out Fresh Starts Registry: The first & only divorce registry + support platform ➡ https://www.freshstartsregistry.com/ 📱 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/freshstartsregistry/ 📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FreshStartsRegistry 🎙 Podcast IG: https://www.instagram.com/divorcehappenspod/ 📬 Magazine: https://divorceguidemagazine.com/

    8 Min.
  2. The Quiet Divorce Plan Every Woman Needs Before She Says a Word with Amy Polacko

    vor 2 Tagen

    The Quiet Divorce Plan Every Woman Needs Before She Says a Word with Amy Polacko

    Most women don’t wake up one morning and announce a divorce. They spend months — often years — in the quiet space of knowing, where a gut feeling won’t go away but guilt over the kids and fear about money keep the words stuck in their throat. In this candid, galvanizing episode of Divorce Happens, Olivia Howell sits down with divorce coach and award-winning journalist Amy Polacko to talk about what to do in exactly that space: the quiet divorce plan every woman needs before she says a single word. Through the lens of Belle Burden’s viral memoir Strangers — the stay-at-home mom whose hedge-fund husband pulled the rug out from under her idyllic life — Amy and Olivia name a hard truth women are rarely warned about: the financial vulnerability that comes with building your life around someone else’s career. What makes Amy’s guidance land is that it is strategic without being cynical. Her north star for clients is simple and steadying: plan for the worst and work toward the best. You are not manipulative or evil for protecting yourself, she insists — you are being the CEO of your own divorce. The actionable heart of the episode is preparation you can begin quietly and safely: build your team before you announce anything, and start gathering your financial documents — tax returns, bank statements, retirement accounts, insurance policies, credit card statements, business records. Amy’s reporter instincts shine here. Even women experiencing financial abuse, who don’t control the accounts, know more than they think they know; jotting disparate details in a notebook (the old Fidelity account, the inheritance, the bank that “disappeared”) becomes powerful ammunition your attorney can pursue in discovery. And anything that touches moving money or assets, she’s clear, belongs in a conversation with your attorney and a certified divorce financial analyst first. The conversation never loses its humanity. Amy and Olivia talk about the trap of the “nice girl” who so badly wants an amicable divorce that she forgets to protect herself, the way a once-generous partner can change the moment it becomes “his” money, and the quiet courage it takes to put even one toe out the door. For anyone not yet ready, Amy offers a gentle on-ramp — a single hour with a coach focused on your biggest crisis right now — and a tender emotional practice anyone can start today: journaling. Putting your experience on paper validates feelings that gaslighting tried to erase, and one day you’ll read it back and see how far you’ve come. This episode is a strategy session and a permission slip at once: you are allowed to prepare, you are allowed to protect yourself, and you don’t have to do any of it alone. 🔗 Check out Fresh Starts Registry: The first & only divorce registry + support platform ➡ https://www.freshstartsregistry.com/ 📱 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/freshstartsregistry/ 📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FreshStartsRegistry 🎙 Podcast IG: https://www.instagram.com/divorcehappenspod/ 📬 Magazine: https://divorceguidemagazine.com/

    16 Min.
  3. Still Living Together During Your Divorce? Here Are the 4 Boundaries That Will Help You Survive It with Lisa Lisser

    vor 5 Tagen

    Still Living Together During Your Divorce? Here Are the 4 Boundaries That Will Help You Survive It with Lisa Lisser

    Nobody hands you a map for the in-between. You have decided to divorce — or you are circling the decision — and yet you are still sharing a kitchen, a hallway, maybe even a bedroom with the person you are in the biggest conflict of your life with. It is one of the most common and least talked-about chapters of the divorce journey, and in this grounding episode of Divorce Happens, host Olivia Howell sits down with divorce coach Lisa Lisser to name it out loud. Lisa is a retired attorney who practiced litigation in New York City, a CDC Certified Divorce Coach and child-centered co-parenting coach, a Jewish educator, a spiritual counselor, and the founder of LZL Coaching — and she is also a divorced mom of three who lived this exact season herself. She calls it the in-between: the narrow, uncertain space between being a married couple and being two separate people. “It is wanting certainty while living in uncertainty,” she says — and if you are cohabitating during divorce right now, you already know exactly how tight that jacket feels. What makes this conversation so useful is that Lisa does not leave you in the discomfort — she hands you a structure. She walks Olivia through four boundaries that help everyone in the household breathe: physical, parenting, financial, and emotional. The physical boundary is permission to claim your own space, whether that is a bedroom, a family room, or a corner of the basement, and her reframe lands hard: creating that space is not punishment, it is agency. You do not need anyone’s permission to exhale, to cry, to research, to simply close a door. The parenting boundary is a clear, child-readable schedule — who drives, who packs lunch, who handles pickup — because kids feel the weight of a changing house even when no one is fighting in front of them, and predictability is how they stay anchored. Threaded through it all is one of Lisa’s most tender insights, shared from her own honest hindsight: your children have the right to love both of you, and protecting them from the details is its own act of love. The financial boundary is about building a blueprint before anyone gets blindsided — agreeing on who pays what, who funds the account, and how the household runs while you are still under one roof — because, as Lisa puts it, divorce creates uncertainty, uncertainty creates anxiety, and money magnifies both. And the emotional boundary may be the one that ties it all together: when the person who used to be your support system is now the source of the stress, you have to build a new team. A coach, a therapist, a support group, the friends who can hold your story without a stake in it. Olivia and Lisa land on the throughline of the whole show — that the strongest, bravest thing you can do is ask for help, and that divorce was never meant to be carried alone. If you are surviving the in-between right now, this episode is a deep exhale and a real plan: gentle, pragmatic, and full of permission to get outside the box you have been living in. 🔗 Check out Fresh Starts Registry: The first & only divorce registry + support platform ➡ https://www.freshstartsregistry.com/ 📱 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/freshstartsregistry/ 📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FreshStartsRegistry 🎙 Podcast IG: https://www.instagram.com/divorcehappenspod/ 📬 Magazine: https://divorceguidemagazine.com/

    20 Min.

  4. vor 5 Tagen

    The Slow Erosion: How Long-Term Marriages Can Make You Forget Who You Are with Olivia Howell

    You look up one day and realize you have no idea who you are anymore. Not because of one dramatic event. Not because of obvious abuse or a single catastrophic betrayal. Just because of time — accumulated compromise, the slow drift of putting someone else's needs, preferences, and comfort at the center of your life for so long that your own self quietly went missing. In this solo episode of Divorce Happens, Olivia Howell names something that gets almost no airtime in the divorce conversation: the slow erosion of self that can happen inside a long-term marriage. If you've ever stood in front of the mirror and not recognized the person looking back, this episode is for you. Here's the part that makes this kind of self-loss so hard to catch: it doesn't start as erosion — it starts as love. You meet someone, you build a life, you compromise, because that's what people in relationships do. You shape yourself around their schedule, their moods, their preferences. Maybe you move for their career and scale back your own. Maybe you stop seeing certain friends, start ordering what they like, watching what they want, going where they choose. Slowly, in ways so small they're almost invisible, you begin to disappear — and it rarely feels like loss while it's happening. It feels like being a good partner. Like flexibility. Like keeping the peace. Like love, because so many of us were taught that love means putting someone else first and that wanting things for yourself is selfish. So you keep going, and the longer the marriage, the deeper the erosion can go. By the time many people reach divorce after a long marriage, they don't just feel sad or angry or relieved — they feel disoriented. They can't answer basic questions about themselves anymore: What do I like? What do I want? What music do I actually enjoy when no one else is in the car? Those questions feel trivial. They are not. Olivia reframes them as the beginning of coming back to yourself. The most important truth in this episode is also the most freeing: losing yourself in a marriage does not mean you were weak or foolish. It means you were human, you loved someone, and you adapted — the way people do in long-term relationships. The real problem isn't that you compromised; it's when the compromising only ever went one direction, when you were the one who kept shrinking and accommodating while the relationship never asked the same in return. Naming that isn't about blame — it's about understanding what actually happened so you can consciously choose differently. And coming back to yourself starts genuinely small: noticing your own preferences again and taking them seriously, making one decision a day based purely on what you want, reconnecting with a hobby or friendship or part of your personality that went quiet. Sometimes it starts with grief and even anger over the years spent making yourself smaller — and that's not bitterness, it's reclamation. If you're navigating a long-term or gray divorce and wondering how to find yourself again, hold on to this: you were always in there. You just got buried for a while — and the fact that you're asking these questions means you're already on your way back. 🔗 Check out Fresh Starts Registry: The first & only divorce registry + support platform ➡ https://www.freshstartsregistry.com/ 📱 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/freshstartsregistry/ 📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FreshStartsRegistry 🎙 Podcast IG: https://www.instagram.com/divorcehappenspod/ 📬 Magazine: https://divorceguidemagazine.com/

    7 Min.

  5. 23. Juni

    What to Say to a Friend Going Through Divorce (When You Don't Know What to Say) with Olivia Howell

    Someone you love is going through a divorce, and you want to show up for them — you just have no idea how. This episode of Divorce Happens is for you: the friends, the sisters, the coworkers, and the neighbors who found out and froze, terrified of saying the wrong thing. Olivia Howell flips the usual script and talks not to the person in the divorce, but to the people who love them — and she opens with a relief so many supporters need to hear: the fact that you're even asking how to help already puts you ahead. The people who do the most damage aren't the ones who fumble their words; they're the ones who say nothing at all, who disappear because they're uncomfortable. If you're here trying to figure out how to support a friend going through divorce, you're already doing something right. The heart of this episode is a single freeing truth: you do not need the perfect words. When someone we love is in pain, we want to say the thing that fixes it — but divorce grief isn't fixable with words, and your friend doesn't need a solution. They need to feel less alone, and that's something you can give without having a single right answer. Olivia shares the simplest, most underused, most powerful sentence there is: “I don't know what to say, but I'm not going anywhere.” For someone whose deepest fear right now is being abandoned — by their partner, their social circle, the whole life they built — knowing you are not one of the people leaving is worth more than any advice. She's equally clear about what not to say: skip “I never liked them anyway” (it complicates their pain instead of validating it), skip “everything happens for a reason” and “you'll be so much better off” (true or not, it rushes them past grief they haven't finished feeling), and please don't make it about you — this is their moment to be held, not yours to fill. From there, Olivia gets refreshingly practical about what real support looks like. It looks like specificity — not “let me know if you need anything,” which dumps the burden back on someone running on empty, but “I'm bringing dinner Thursday, does six work?” It looks like consistency over time: everyone shows up the first week, but the loneliness is often loudest at the 30-day mark, the 90-day mark, and on what would have been their anniversary — so check in when the noise dies down. It looks like following their lead, asking whether they want to talk about it tonight or just eat takeout and watch something, and honoring whichever they need. And sometimes it's as simple as telling them: you are doing an incredible job, your kids are lucky to have you, and I see how hard you're working. Because being truly seen by even one person can make a brutal day survivable. The takeaway is one anyone can act on today: you don't have to have the right words — you just have to show up, again and again. That is what friendship looks like in the hard seasons, and it is enough. 🔗 Check out Fresh Starts Registry: The first & only divorce registry + support platform ➡ https://www.freshstartsregistry.com/ 📱 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/freshstartsregistry/ 📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FreshStartsRegistry 🎙 Podcast IG: https://www.instagram.com/divorcehappenspod/ 📬 Magazine: https://divorceguidemagazine.com/

    7 Min.

  6. 23. Juni

    Divorce Grief Doesn't Follow the Rules — And That Doesn't Mean Something's Wrong With You with Olivia Howell

    Divorce grief might be the most misunderstood, most minimized, and most complicated grief there is — and the thing almost no one warns you about is that it doesn't follow the rules. In this solo episode of Divorce Happens, Olivia Howell takes on the quiet, disorienting experience of grieving a divorce: why it refuses to behave the way we expect grief to behave, and why that can make you feel like something is wrong with you when absolutely nothing is. We're all handed some version of the stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — and we absorb the idea that grief has a shape, a direction, a tidy end. Divorce grief doesn't move like that. And as Olivia gently insists, the sooner we stop expecting it to, the more compassion we can offer ourselves when it doesn't. What makes divorce grief so different starts with a wrenching truth: you are grieving someone who is still alive. There's no funeral. There's no casserole on the doorstep. There's no moment where the world stops to acknowledge that you've lost something enormous — in fact, the person you're grieving might be texting you about the electric bill or showing up at Saturday's soccer game. That's disenfranchised grief: real, profound, life-altering loss that goes socially unrecognized, and it has its own particular ache. Layered on top is that you're not grieving one thing but many at once — the person, the relationship, the future you imagined, your identity as a spouse, your home, your finances, your in-laws, your friendships. Each is its own loss, and they arrive in waves: sometimes one at a time, sometimes all at once, sometimes out of nowhere. Which leads to the part that ambushes people most — divorce grief is not linear. You can feel fine for two weeks, then hear a song in a grocery store and be undone. You can reach what feels like acceptance and get hit with rage six months later. You can grieve the end of a marriage you desperately wanted out of, miss someone you know was wrong for you, and feel relieved and devastated in the same hour. All of it is normal. All of it is grief doing what grief actually does. The mindset shift at the heart of this episode is freeing: instead of something you move through in stages, picture grief as something that moves through you — in waves, on its own timeline, without asking permission. Your job isn't to manage it perfectly or to reach acceptance on schedule; it's to let it move, to not dam it up so tightly it has nowhere to go. Practically, that looks like letting yourself cry in the car, refusing to perform okayness for people who can't hold your grief, and finding at least one person or one space where you don't have to edit yourself. It also means being patient on the days you thought you were over something and discover you're not — that's not regression or failure, just the layered nature of this particular loss. If you're walking through divorce recovery, healing after divorce, or simply trying to make sense of why you still hurt, hold on to this: you don't have to be over it yet. You don't have to be anywhere other than exactly where you are. Grief is not a problem to be solved — it's love with nowhere to go, and it deserves your tenderness. 🔗 Check out Fresh Starts Registry: The first & only divorce registry + support platform ➡ https://www.freshstartsregistry.com/ 📱 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/freshstartsregistry/ 📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FreshStartsRegistry 🎙 Podcast IG: https://www.instagram.com/divorcehappenspod/ 📬 Magazine: https://divorceguidemagazine.com/

    6 Min.
  7. Before You File for Divorce, Do These 5 Things — A Divorce Expert's Guide to Starting on Solid Ground with Ron Platt, founder of the National Association for Single & Divorced Families

    22. Juni

    Before You File for Divorce, Do These 5 Things — A Divorce Expert's Guide to Starting on Solid Ground with Ron Platt, founder of the National Association for Single & Divorced Families

    No one hands you a roadmap when your marriage ends. You're expected to make some of the biggest legal, financial, and emotional decisions of your life at the exact moment you have the least capacity to make them — and most of us walk in completely unprepared. That's the gap Ron Platt set out to close. In this practical, reassuring episode of Divorce Happens, we hear from Ron Platt, co-founder and CEO of NASDF — the National Association for Single and Divorced Families — for five fresh, foundational tips to help you prepare for divorce and walk out the other side standing on steadier ground. With more than 35 years across insurance, real estate, and social advocacy, and lived experience as a foster parent who later adopted his son, Ron built NASDF to be the resource he wished every divorcing family had: an umbrella of vetted support, services, and community for people before, during, and long after the paperwork is signed. 🔗 Check out Fresh Starts Registry: The first & only divorce registry + support platform ➡ https://www.freshstartsregistry.com/ 📱 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/freshstartsregistry/ 📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FreshStartsRegistry 🎙 Podcast IG: https://www.instagram.com/divorcehappenspod/ 📬 Magazine: https://divorceguidemagazine.com/

    4 Min.

  8. 22. Juni

    Crying in the Car, Then Making Dinner: The Quiet Place Before Divorce No One Warns You About with Olivia Howell

    You already know. You just aren't ready to say it out loud yet. If you're living in that quiet, heavy, terrifying place — the one where the knowledge sits in your chest and doesn't go away — this solo episode of Divorce Happens was made for you. Olivia Howell names one of the most common and least talked-about experiences in the entire divorce process: the in-between space before anything is official, before anyone else knows, before you've even fully admitted it to yourself. It's Googling at midnight and clearing your history. It's crying in the car and then walking inside to make dinner like nothing happened. It's knowing and not-knowing at the same time, because fully knowing would mean having to do something — and you're not there yet. Olivia says the thing so many people carry in silence out loud: that space is real, and it deserves to be taken seriously. From there, the episode does the gentle, necessary work of separating two things we tend to confuse — knowing your marriage is over, and being ready to leave. So many people walking through divorce say they knew long before they spoke, sometimes for months, sometimes for years, and they carry deep shame about that gap, as if staying after they knew makes them weak, dishonest, or complicit in their own unhappiness. Olivia pushes back on that hard. Knowing is not the same as being ready, and being ready takes time for reasons that are completely legitimate: waiting until the kids are older, until the finances are steadier, until enough therapy has helped you trust what you feel. The reframe at the heart of this episode is that the waiting is not wasted. In that in-between place your nervous system is preparing and your mind is quietly building the architecture of a different life. The gap between knowing and saying isn't a failure — for most people, it's a necessary part of the process. The episode also names something tender but important: there's a version of “not ready” that is a season, and a version that becomes a cage — and only you know which one you're in. If the weight is starting to crush you, if you're disappearing inside your own life, that's worth paying attention to, not because you have to act today, but because you deserve support in that place, not just solitude. The actionable takeaway is freeing: telling one trusted person, a therapist, or a divorce coach doesn't commit you to anything. It simply means you're not carrying it completely alone anymore — and there is real relief in that, even before anything changes. If you're contemplating divorce, deciding whether to leave, or just beginning to imagine starting over after divorce, this is your reminder that you are not behind, not broken, and not failing your family. You are moving at the pace that feels survivable to you. And when you're ready — tomorrow or two years from now — the words will come. 🔗 Check out Fresh Starts Registry: The first & only divorce registry + support platform ➡ https://www.freshstartsregistry.com/ 📱 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/freshstartsregistry/ 📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FreshStartsRegistry 🎙 Podcast IG: https://www.instagram.com/divorcehappenspod/ 📬 Magazine: https://divorceguidemagazine.com/

    7 Min.
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Welcome to Divorce Happens, the podcast where we inspire, educate, and support you through divorce and beyond so that you can start fresh on the next phase of your journey. Produced by Fresh Starts Registry, the only divorce registry platform for everything you need to begin again, including home items, hype team, and everything in between. Remember, divorce happens...and then, we start fresh. We're here to support you before, during, and after divorce. Hosted by Olivia Dreizen Howell, the co-founder and CEO of Fresh Starts Registry.

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  • Kanal
    Fresh Starts
  • Erstellt von
    Fresh Starts Registry
  • Jahre aktiv
    2024 - 2026
  • Folgen
    265
  • Bewertung
    Unbedenklich
  • Copyright
    © Fresh Starts Registry
  • Sendungswebsite
    Divorce Happens

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