Divorce Happens

Fresh Starts
Fresh Starts
  • 5.0 (115)
  • How To
  • Updated Weekly

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. 2h ago

    Hey Olivia, Why Do I Keep Having Sex Dreams About the Husband I'm Divorcing?

    A listener wrote to me this week with a confession she was mortified to even type out: her marriage is over, she's made her decision, she doesn't even like the man her husband has become — and she keeps having sex dreams about him that leave her waking up ashamed. In this solo episode of Divorce Happens, I tell her, and every one of you sitting with the same quiet secret, exactly what I wish someone had told me: nothing is wrong with you. Attraction and respect run on two completely different systems, and being finished with a marriage doesn't mean your body got the memo on the same timeline as your mind. What follows is a close, compassionate look at why the nervous system doesn't operate on decisions — it operates on repetition. Years of a specific voice, a specific smell, the rhythm of someone next to you at night get wired in far below the part of the brain that files paperwork and calls it done. I share my own experience of feeling disgusted with myself for a night my body “missed” my ex, and how I eventually understood I wasn't grieving him, I was grieving familiarity — a distinction that changes everything about how you treat yourself during divorce recovery. This episode reframes a common but rarely discussed part of starting over after divorce: wanting a body you don't want a life with, and realizing that contradiction is human, not broken. This episode is ultimately about self-compassion and timeline. I offer two concrete tools: naming the feeling out loud as fact rather than confession (“my body remembers him, that doesn't mean I want him back”), and choosing real distance over white-knuckled discipline, since distance gives the nervous system room to actually recalibrate. For anyone deep in divorce recovery who feels ashamed of grieving someone they're relieved to be leaving, this episode offers both scientific clarity and real permission — and a reminder that healing after divorce was never going to move in a straight line. 🔗 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/ 💛 The Divorce Happens Community: https://divorcehappens.substack.com/

  2. 6h ago

    Managing Triggering Communications & Reclaiming Your Power During Divorce with Family Mediator & Parenting Coordinator Laura Lorber

    You know the feeling before you’ve even read the words. The phone buzzes, you see who it’s from, and your whole body braces — shoulders up, stomach tight, heart already pounding. A text from your co-parent. An email from your attorney dropped into the middle of an ordinary Tuesday. And just like that, the day you were having is gone. In this episode of Divorce Happens, Olivia sits down with Fresh Starts expert Laura Lorber, J.D. — a family mediator and parenting coordinator who has built her entire practice around these exact moments. Laura mediates parenting plans for the Los Angeles courts, is trained in mindfulness and conflict resolution, and is the rare professional who is genuinely comfortable working at the edges of the hardest cases: high-conflict co-parenting, substance use, and past domestic violence. As Olivia puts it, divorce is “ninety-nine percent triggering conversations” — and this is the episode about how to actually survive them. What makes the conversation so disarming is that it is both deeply practical and rooted in real neuroscience. Laura walks through her “seventy-two-hour rule”: a single triggering message floods your system with cortisol, and it can take up to three days before your thinking brain comes fully back online. So why, she asks, would you fire off a reply when the logical part of your brain has literally left the building? Her permission-giving reframe lands like a key turning in a lock — you can respond, “I received your communication and will get back to you by this day, at this time,” fulfill the court order, and set the message down. From there she teaches the tools she gives her own clients for emotional regulation after divorce: siloing every divorce communication into one dedicated email or co-parenting app with notifications off, belly breathing you can practice at a red light, and the “name it to tame it” exercise that moves you from raw feeling (“I’m angry”) to real clarity (“I feel disempowered — so what do I actually need?”). She even shares Dan Siegel’s hand model of the brain, the unforgettable image of “flipping your lid” the moment conflict hijacks you. Underneath every tip is one quiet, powerful mindset shift: you are the one who chooses when to engage — it is not the other way around. That single reframe is what turns a triggering text from an ambush into something you can hold, name, and answer on your own terms. And the beauty of these tools is that they travel: they work with a high-conflict ex, a combative attorney, a difficult boss, anyone who knows how to push your buttons. For the days when the conflict feels too tangled to untangle alone, Laura also pulls back the curtain on what mediators and parenting coordinators actually do — how they step in when communication breaks down, when a parenting plan stops working, or when a case has simply become too high-conflict to move forward. Whether you are newly separated or years into co-parenting, this episode is a hug and a toolkit at once: real, grounded support for anyone learning to communicate calmly, protect their peace, and reclaim their power in life after divorce. 🔗 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/ 💛 The Divorce Happens Community: https://divorcehappens.substack.com/

    Managing Triggering Communications & Reclaiming Your Power During Divorce with Family Mediator & Parenting Coordinator Laura Lorber

  3. 2d ago

    Preparing Your Nervous System for Divorce: What No One Tells You Before You Walk Into That Room

    Most people think divorce begins with paperwork. Leslie Mathews will tell you it actually begins in your nervous system. In this candid, deeply practical episode of Divorce Happens, Olivia sits down with Leslie Mathews, JD, MSW, a former attorney turned therapist, mindfulness coach, and founder of The LooM Life and LooM Life Therapy. Leslie brings a rare combination of expertise to the conversation: a law degree, a master's in social work, and her own lived experience of divorce, which she says taught her exactly what was missing from her process, and exactly what she now builds into every program she offers women navigating separation and starting over after divorce. At the heart of Leslie's work is a truth most divorcing people never hear until it's too late: high-stakes conversations about money, custody, and separation can trigger the nervous system into freeze, and freeze can mean walking out of a meeting with no memory of what you just agreed to. Leslie has watched clients make life-altering decisions in a room full of people and retain nothing about it, and she now teaches nervous system regulation and dissociation awareness as the foundation of divorce preparation, before a single conversation about alimony or custody even happens. From there, the work moves into attachment styles and trauma bonds, naming the disorienting experience of craving a spouse you can't stand, and into grief work for the parts of life divorce quietly takes with it: the extended family, the favorite restaurants, the whole ecosystem you didn't realize you'd lose. She even makes space for reclaiming pleasure and libido post-divorce, treating self-connection as both healing and protective against reconnecting with an ex out of loneliness. What makes this episode so hopeful is Leslie's own hard-won clarity: divorce may be one of the worst things you go through, but she promises that life on the other side gets shockingly good, and that the self-awareness built during the process isn't wasted, it's the foundation for everything that comes next. Listeners walk away with two concrete takeaways: first, that preparing your nervous system before high-conflict meetings is just as important as preparing your case, and second, that noticing your reactions with curiosity, rather than shame, is what actually changes the outcome. Whether you're weighing whether to leave, mid-process, or newly divorced and trying to figure out who you are now, this conversation offers real tools for healing after divorce and rebuilding identity on the other side. 🔗 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/ 💛 The Divorce Happens Community: https://divorcehappens.substack.com/

    Preparing Your Nervous System for Divorce: What No One Tells You Before You Walk Into That Room

  4. 2d ago

    The Happenstance: The Hidden Cost of Having a Husband

    In this solo episode of Divorce Happens, Olivia reads a piece from her personal writing Substack, The Happenstance, called "The Hidden Cost of Having a Husband." It's a reflection on domestic inequity — the invisible labor that piles up in a marriage even when a task only needs one person to do it. Olivia shares her own story, including the time she broke her foot and still had to keep the household running. It's honest, a little funny, and gets at something a lot of women feel but rarely say out loud. This piece originally ran on The Happenstance. Follow along at oliviahowell.substack.com for more essays like this one.

  5. 4d ago

    Co-Parenting Coaching After Divorce: Building the System That Keeps Your Kids Steady

    What if the single biggest predictor of how your kids come through your divorce has almost nothing to do with the divorce itself? That's the question at the heart of this episode of Divorce Happens, where Olivia sits down with Maria Natapov, a BeH2O® Certified Co-Parenting Coach, Rapid Resolution Therapy® Facilitator, and founder of Synergistic Stepparenting. Maria has spent years helping divorcing and divorced parents move from reacting to responding, and she brings something rare to this conversation: the lived experience of a child of divorce and a stepparent, paired with the clinical grounding of a family systems coach who has watched, up close, what actually determines whether kids come out of co-parenting resilient or overwhelmed. Maria's central insight reframes everything: it isn't separation itself that shapes a child's long-term wellbeing, it's their ongoing exposure to parental conflict — the frequency, duration, and intensity of it. Through her signature BeH2O® framework, Maria helps parents build an internal operating system for co-parenting after divorce, likening the process to building muscle at the gym rather than waiting for a court date or a milestone to magically deliver peace. She's also candid about the limits of simply "being nice." Many of the parents she works with are seasoned over-functioners running on an internal pressure cooker — anticipating everyone's needs, absorbing everyone's emotions, and quietly burning out, until the pressure finds its way out anyway, often at the expense of the very kids they're trying to protect. Where this episode offers real hope is in what Maria says comes next: parents who commit to the work report they stop replaying conversations late at night, stop feeling responsible for managing everyone else's emotions, and start setting boundaries without guilt — changes that ripple directly into how safe and steady their kids feel. Listeners walk away with two clear, actionable shifts: first, that co-parenting peace is built through consistent, repeatable patterns rather than a single finish line, and second, Maria's simple reframe for high-conflict moments — what kind of parent do you want your child to remember, and what would it take to be that person today? For anyone navigating co-parenting after divorce, blended family stress, or single parenting on the other side of separation, this conversation offers a genuinely usable place to start. 🔗 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/ 💛 The Divorce Happens Community: https://divorcehappens.substack.com/

    Co-Parenting Coaching After Divorce: Building the System That Keeps Your Kids Steady

  6. 5d ago

    Divorce, Co-Parenting & the Cost of College: What Every Divorced Parent Needs to Know

    You survived the divorce. Then your kid turns thirteen, and a new bill you never quite planned for starts looming on the horizon: college. In this practical, reassuring episode of Divorce Happens, Olivia sits down with Vicki Vollweiler, MBA, CDC, the founder and CEO of College Financial Prep and author of College Planning for Divorced and Widowed Parents. Vicki built her practice specifically around separated, divorced, remarried, and widowed families after years of working as a certified divorce coach, when clients kept asking her the same question: how am I possibly going to afford college as a divorced parent? As a divorced mom herself, currently guiding her own daughter through the college search, Vicki brings both firsthand experience and deep technical expertise to a topic most divorced families don't realize they need to plan for years in advance. The heart of this episode is a financial aid distinction most parents have never heard of, and one that can cost or save a family tens of thousands of dollars: the difference between the FAFSA, which typically considers one household's finances, and the CSS Profile, used by many selective schools, which often wants information from both biological parents and their new spouses, meaning a blended family could suddenly be reporting four incomes instead of one. Vicki walks through the hidden costs that catch divorced families off guard, from test fees and application fees to campus visits and tutoring, and the fee waivers available to offset them. She's equally candid about the emotional layer underneath the spreadsheets: co-parents often carry different values and different definitions of "the best school for my child," and neither is wrong, but those differences need to be named and discussed long before decision letters arrive. What makes this episode so hopeful is Vicki's reminder that this process doesn't have to be adversarial or lonely. Listeners walk away with two clear, actionable takeaways: first, to check whether college is even addressed in their divorce agreement, and if it isn't, to start that conversation with their co-parent now, ideally years before senior year, since tax returns from tenth and eleventh grade can shape a family's first financial aid award; and second, to loop in the wider support system, whether that's grandparents, aunts, uncles, or family friends, to help make campus visits and the college search feel like a gift instead of a burden. For any divorced or divorcing parent staring down the cost of college, this conversation offers real clarity, real savings strategies, and genuine reassurance that this milestone can still be joyful. 🔗 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/ 💛 The Divorce Happens Community: https://divorcehappens.substack.com/

    Divorce, Co-Parenting & the Cost of College: What Every Divorced Parent Needs to Know

  7. 6d ago

    Divorce Reads: Midstream: A Life Remade in 50 Swims by Kate Washington

    What if the way back to yourself started with getting your head under water? That's the question at the heart of this episode of Divorce Happens, where Olivia talks with Kate Washington — a Sacramento-based writer, former dining critic, and author of two deeply personal memoirs: Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America, and her brand-new release, Midstream: A Life Remade in 50 Swims. Kate's byline has appeared in the New York Times, Time, and HuffPost, but this conversation isn't about her résumé. It's about the year she turned a personal challenge — swim in fifty different bodies of water before her fiftieth birthday — into the roadmap for finally leaving a twenty-three-year marriage that had quietly hollowed her out. Kate's story complicates the narrative around divorce and caregiving in exactly the way this show exists to do. For years, she was the primary caregiver not only for her two daughters but for her then-husband through a severe cancer diagnosis — carrying, as she puts it, the vast bulk of the mental load in a marriage that was quietly draining her. The 50 Dunks Project started as something playful, a way to reclaim the joy and childhood wonder she'd lost somewhere along the way. But immersing herself, literally, in rivers, hot springs, and the waters of southern France became something more: a practice of embodiment, presence, and boundary-setting in a life that had none. Kate shares the test that ultimately helped her decide to separate — asking herself whether she'd tell her own daughter to stay in a marriage like hers — and speaks candidly about the guilt of choosing divorce while her ex-husband was still chronically ill, and the very real grief her daughters carried alongside her. The episode closes on the note this show always returns to: divorce is not the crisis it's made out to be — it's often the exit from one. Kate's final swim, on her fiftieth birthday, with both daughters at her favorite spot on the South Yuba River, becomes a quiet, hard-won reconciliation after years of pain neither of them chose. Her message to anyone circling the decision to leave an unhappy marriage is direct: the freedom on the other side comes sooner than you'd think, and it is worth it. Listeners will walk away with two practical takeaways for starting over after divorce — a simple gut-check question for evaluating whether a marriage is serving you, and a reminder that reclaiming joy, in almost any small form, is never a frivolous first step toward midlife reinvention. 🔗 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/ 💛 The Divorce Happens Community: https://divorcehappens.substack.com/

    Divorce Reads: Midstream: A Life Remade in 50 Swims by Kate Washington

  8. Jul 13

    Divorce Clarity: Why the Pause Before You React Might Be Your Most Powerful Move

    Somewhere in your divorce, a well-meaning friend has probably told you to "hire a shark." Lisa Lisser wants you to pause before you do. In this grounding, clarifying episode of Divorce Happens, Olivia welcomes back one of the show's most beloved recurring experts: Lisa Lisser, a Certified Divorce Coach®, BeH2O® Child-Centered Co-Parenting Coach, and founder of LZL Coaching. A retired attorney who built a career in litigation before becoming a divorce coach, Lisa brings a rare blend of legal fluency, lived experience of her own divorce, and spiritual grounding to a conversation about something most divorcing people never slow down long enough to find: clarity. Lisa's signature framework, divorce clarity, starts from a simple but radical idea: before you can make good decisions during divorce, you have to get honest about your values, and that requires pausing instead of reacting. She walks through what she calls "the pause for clarity," a moment to ask where am I right now, what am I feeling, and what's the fear underneath the fear, before the nervous system's fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response takes the wheel. From there, she introduces "strategic curiosity": the practice of asking the questions divorcing people are often too afraid or too overwhelmed to ask, whether that's what does hiring a shark attorney actually mean for my case, or who can answer my questions about qualifying for a mortgage on my own. Lisa is candid that she didn't ask enough questions during her own divorce, and that she now builds her entire coaching practice around helping clients avoid that same regret. What makes this episode so reassuring is Lisa's insistence that clarity is buildable, even for someone in the most heartbroken, spiraling phase of divorce, one pause, one breath, one question at a time. Listeners walk away with two clear, actionable tools: first, the pause for clarity itself, a simple nervous-system reset to use before any high-stakes conversation or decision; and second, a challenge to name their own top three to five values as a compass for who they want to be, both during the divorce process and in the life that comes after it. For anyone navigating divorce fog, decision paralysis, or the pressure to react fast instead of think clearly, this conversation offers a genuinely calming, practical place to start. 🔗 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/ 💛 The Divorce Happens Community: https://divorcehappens.substack.com/

    Divorce Clarity: Why the Pause Before You React Might Be Your Most Powerful Move
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out of 5
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About

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.

Information

  • Channel
    Fresh Starts
  • Creator
    Fresh Starts Registry
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    280
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Fresh Starts Registry
  • Show Website
    Divorce Happens

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