Episode
Should You Stay or Should You Go? Author D’Ionna Washington on Breaking Up Now, Releasing the Shame of Divorce & Building a Life You Actually Love
- Podcast
- Divorce Happens
- Published
- Jun 3, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1270
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://www.freshstartsregistry.com/divorce-happens
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Summary
There is a moment — quiet, uncomfortable, impossible to unhear — when you realize the marriage you’re in isn’t the marriage you thought you were building. For D’Ionna Washington , that moment came just one year into her first marriage. Instead of suppressing it, she eventually did what so few women feel permitted to do: she left. And then she wrote the book about it. In this candid, fire-lit conversation on Divorce Happens, host Olivia Howell sits down with D’Ionna — relationship coach, author, and the woman behind the powerfully named brand The Kept Wife Strategist — to talk about her debut book Break Up Now: Releasing the Shame of Divorce and Finding the Peace in Letting Go . D’Ionna brings over a decade of coaching experience, a faith deconstruction journey, and a deeply personal story of divorce and remarriage to a conversation about one of the most taboo questions in relationships: what if you knew early and stayed anyway? The emotional core of this episode lives in a story D’Ionna shares about her mother — a woman who stayed married for 23 years after knowing, within the first year, that it wasn’t working. That revelation cracked D’Ionna open. Suddenly she saw the pattern everywhere: women who knew, stayed silent, and spent decades managing a life that was slowly wearing them down. Her book is the answer to that pattern — a clear-eyed, shame-free argument that leaving sooner is not a failure but an act of radical self-respect. She and Olivia dig into the real reasons women stay: kids, sunk costs, religious conditioning, the fear of starting over after divorce. And D’Ionna doesn’t just validate those reasons — she dismantles them with the kind of direct, loving honesty that can only come from someone who’s lived it. Her most powerful reframe? Every year you don’t…