A couple's therapist and a divorcee

Most of my clients find out eventually. Somewhere in the work, it comes up: the couples therapist sitting across from them has been divorced. Ten years, one marriage, and then the decision to stop.

I don't hide it. But I used to wonder whether I should.

The story of that marriage isn't the point here — maybe another time. What matters is that I came to this work already carrying it. At first it didn't weigh much. Divorce is common enough now that I assumed it was just a fact about my life, not a fact about my competence.

Then the doubt found a way in.

It arrived through a book — Getting the Love You Want, by Harville Hendrix. He opens by describing himself walking out of a courthouse, newly divorced from his first wife, feeling like a fraud. A couples therapist who couldn't hold on to his own marriage. Who was he to help anyone else with theirs?

There it was, in print, the exact shape of the question I'd been avoiding: if you couldn't keep your own, what right do you have to guide other people through theirs?

That question moved in and stayed for a long time. Re-entering dating after my marriage ended, I carried a private rule I'd never agreed to out loud — that my next relationship had to be the real one. The one that lasts. Forever and ever, amen. As if a lasting relationship were the credential that would finally make me legitimate.

Then my mother said something I didn't expect.

She'd been married to my late father her whole life, so I braced for advice about finding the one. Instead, with a bright, easy smile, she suggested I might just enjoy the first wonderful stretch of new love — the bright, easy part — and skip the long, hard middle altogether. You already have what you need. Take it easy. She meant it. She'd also loved my father dearly to his last breath. Both of those were true at once.

Something in me loosened.

I started to see that I could be a couples therapist and live my own life on my own terms. I don't have to share a person's struggle to help them through it. And I don't have to be in a forever-marriage to sit with people who are fighting for theirs.

That clarity didn't arrive all at once. There were two relationships after my divorce, each about two years, and each time we approached the end I felt the old pressure — a couples therapist should be able to make this work. Sometimes I bent further than I would have, because I couldn't face another ending on my own record. It took a long time, and a lot of hours in supervision, to understand what my supervisors kept telling me: that a full life becomes a resource in this work — but only if you don't let it become a weight.

Because here is what the marriage, the crisis, the divorce, the careful re-building of a relationship with my ex-husband, and the long relationship I'm in now all gave me: I am not frightened of the dark parts. I know how scary a crisis feels from the inside. I know the particular loneliness of wondering whether to stay. None of it is theoretical to me, and that changes how I sit with a couple in the middle of it — with more care, not less.

I'm in a lasting, loving relationship now, and the gratitude for it is enormous. When we hit a rough patch, the old thought still visits — what kind of couples therapist would you be if this one ended too? The difference is that now I notice it, let it be there, and let it go. I've stopped needing my own relationship to prove I'm qualified.

So if you're sitting in your own relationship question right now — whether to stay, whether it can be repaired, whether the distance between you is the end or just a hard chapter — you don't need a therapist who has never struggled. You might be better served by one who has, and who came back.

I won't be the right therapist for everyone. Because of what's written about me on paper, some people will look elsewhere — and that's as it should be. But for the people who'd rather sit with someone who knows the terrain from the inside, who isn't afraid of the hard middle or the scary edges, who has lived the questions and not just studied them — for those people, the same paper is exactly why they choose me.

If that's you, I'm here when you're ready.