Episode
Divorce Grief Doesn't Follow the Rules — And That Doesn't Mean Something's Wrong With You with Olivia Howell
- Podcast
- Divorce Happens
- Published
- Jun 23, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 387
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://www.freshstartsregistry.com/divorce-happens
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Summary
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 s…