What To Say When a Client Tells You They're Thinking About Divorce

Most therapists can describe the moment precisely. A session that was about something else entirely, and then a sentence lands in the middle of it: I think we're getting divorced.

What happens in the thirty seconds after that sentence matters more than it should. Not because you're expected to have answers — you're not, and any answer you gave would be the wrong kind. It matters because your client is about to start making decisions very fast, and yours may be the only calm voice in the room for a while.

I spent years as a counselor before I practiced law, so I've sat on both sides of this. What follows is roughly what I wish someone had told me when I was in the first chair.

The first thing is not a question

The reflex is to reach for information. How long have you been thinking about this, have you told him, is there someone else. All reasonable, all better a few minutes later.

The thing to do first is simply to receive it. A pause, and something that acknowledges the size of what they just said. That's a big thing to say out loud. Anything that lets it sit in the air without a follow-up question chasing it.

Two reasons. The obvious one is clinical — they've probably been carrying this alone, and the telling is itself the event. The less obvious one is that people who feel rushed at this moment tend to do something impulsive afterwards, and the pace you set in session has more influence on the next fortnight than you'd think.

Then buy them time

This is the part I'd underline for anyone working with a client in this position.

The days right after someone says it out loud are when they do the things that are hard to undo. Move out. Empty an account. Send the message they can't take back. Or, most commonly and most consequentially, retain the first attorney a friend recommends — which quietly sets the direction of the next two years before anybody has thought about it.

None of that is a plan. It's a nervous system doing something so it can stop feeling helpless.

So the most useful sentence you have is some version of you don't have to decide the whole thing this week. It sounds almost too simple. In practice I think it's the intervention that changes what follows, because it converts a panic into a process, and a process is something a person can actually be supported through.

What you can say without giving legal advice

Therapists worry, rightly, about overstepping. But there's a real difference between directing a client's divorce and making sure they know it isn't one single road.

You can say, and I'd argue you should:

"Before you take a next step, it's worth knowing that how people divorce varies enormously. There's more than one process, and the one a couple chooses shapes the next several years for everyone in the family."

That's not legal advice. It doesn't name a path, promise anything, or tell them what to do. It just refuses to let the biggest structural decision of their transition happen by accident.

If they push and ask what you'd do — and some will — this version works:

"That's not mine to decide, and honestly you'd want better legal knowledge than mine. What I'd say is choose the process consciously instead of by default. The families I've seen come through this best are the ones who understood their options before they picked one."

Watch for the two stories

In my experience two narratives tend to arrive alongside this disclosure, and both are worth noticing early, because both drive behavior.

The first is I have to protect myself. Usually reasonable in origin. It gets expensive when it hardens into a belief that protection means going first and going hard, which is how ordinary fear becomes two years of adversarial process.

The second is I have to be the good one. This client concedes everything early, calls it being reasonable, and turns up eighteen months later with a settlement they can't live in and a resentment they can't quite place.

Neither needs correcting in the first session. Both are worth holding, because whichever process your client ends up in will amplify whichever story they're carrying.

The clinical case for caring about process

I'll make this argument plainly, because I don't think it gets made often enough.

Divorce is a loss, and people move through losses. Your client can grieve a marriage. What does the lasting damage isn't the ending — it's a process that holds someone in a threat state for a year or more while you're trying to help them regulate. You can't do attachment work with a system braced for the next filing. Progress made in session gets undone between sessions.

A cooperative, out-of-court process isn't gentler for sentimental reasons. It's gentler because it doesn't require your client to spend eighteen months assembling evidence about someone they used to love.

That's why I think process choice belongs on a therapist's radar and not only on a lawyer's. It's a clinical variable. It just happens to get decided in someone else's office.

And then: stay

The last thing, and the one clinicians most often assume they shouldn't do.

You don't have to step back because a client is separating. A lot of therapists quietly withdraw, worried about being pulled into something legal, and the client loses the one steady relationship they had going into the hardest year of their life. The boundaries around records and testimony are worth understanding — that's a separate conversation and a real one — but they're a reason to be informed, not a reason to leave.

Your role changes. It doesn't end.

If you'd like to talk through how any of this works in practice, or what happens to the therapeutic relationship when a family starts mediation, John and I keep time open for free 20-minute calls with therapists. Bring a situation hypothetically; we don't need names.

Peter Fabish, J.D., M.A. (Counseling)