# 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

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/divorce-happens-6931880/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
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/divorce-happens-6931880/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.md
Podcast: [Divorce Happens](https://stenobird.com/podcast/divorce-happens-6931880)
Published: 2026-06-03T20:10:00+00:00
Episode link: https://www.freshstartsregistry.com/divorce-happens
Audio file: https://episodes.captivate.fm/episode/c7bda222-9e38-4065-8c60-a89e5f67dc5b.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/divorce-happens-6931880/episodes/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
Duration seconds: 1270

## Resource

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…

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