Lawyers will purposely stall to run up the bill—they don’t actually want you to settle as soon as possible.
This is probably the one I hear most, and I can totally understand why. As a Marriage and Family Therapist, I have seen multiple clients—couples and individuals—through a wide variety of divorce scenarios.
I will be the first to say that there are absolutely, without a doubt, lawyers who do this.
However, for every unethical lawyer I know of in Chicago, I know just as many—if not more—who genuinely care about their clients’ well-being. They are honest professionals who understand the emotional and financial gravity of what their clients are experiencing, and they want to help them get things wrapped up.
Isn’t it funny how the lawyers who are actually good tend to get enough business through referrals that they don’t need to take advantage of the clients they already have?
Your kids will be traumatized.
Divorce is a major disruption to the entire family system—there is no getting around that. But the fact that divorce will inevitably be painful does not mean your children are destined to be permanently traumatized by it.
The lasting impact is shaped not by the divorce alone, but by what happens before, during, and after it: the level of conflict children are exposed to, the stability and support available to them, the quality of their relationships with their parents, and the way the adults help them make sense of what is happening.
What can traumatize children is being pulled into the emotional and relational fallout of the divorce. This includes being pressured to choose sides, used as a messenger or source of information, treated as a parent’s confidant, exposed to chronic conflict, or made to feel responsible for a parent’s emotional well-being.
It can also include one parent repeatedly criticizing the other, interfering with the child’s relationship with a safe and loving parent, or creating the sense that loving one parent is a betrayal of the other. Ongoing instability, frightening legal conflict, inconsistent caregiving, and the sudden loss of meaningful contact with a parent can deepen that impact.
Children do not need their parents to remain friends or pretend that the divorce is painless. They need permission to love both parents, protection from adult information and loyalty tests, predictable care, and adults who can carry their own pain without asking the children to carry it for them.
Divorce means your marriage was a failure.
Something a lot of people do not know about couples therapists—at least the good ones—is that we do not equate staying together with success.
My job is not to keep a couple together at all costs. My goal is to support clients in understanding what is happening in their relationship and help them reach clarity and confidence about what they want to do next.
Do I feel like I “did a bad job” if a couple ultimately decides to divorce? Absolutely not.
What would concern me is if clients made a major decision impulsively, without fully understanding what led them there, and later felt as though they had never really thought it through. The decision about whether to continue a relationship belongs solely to the people in it. It is not the therapist’s job to make that call for them.
There are many situations in which divorce is the healthiest or most honest option, and that does not always mean someone did something terribly wrong. Sometimes people do cause irreparable harm—but that is not the only reason marriages end.
Although we cannot physically see it, relational health is a living, changing thing. I was going to compare it to a plant here, but I hate plant analogies, so we are not doing that.
People change over time. “Growing apart” is a real thing. A relationship may have made complete sense when you chose it, and now the people or circumstances may be different enough that the relationship no longer works. Both of those things can be true at the same time.
Sometimes a relationship is fundamentally changed by an unexpected and devastating life circumstance. A couple may have endured something so painful that remaining in the relationship becomes a constant reminder of what they lost, and their next chapter is one they need to enter separately.
A marriage ending will never erase the love that once existed, the family that was created, or the ways the relationship shaped both people. It does not automatically mean the marriage failed. Sometimes honoring the truth of what the relationship has become is more honest than remaining committed to what it used to be.
Both people are always equally responsible for the divorce.
I hear this one frequently when someone is trying to blur accountability for hurtful behavior surrounding a divorce—having an affair without taking real responsibility for its impact, blindsiding a partner with the decision to leave, or acting as though years of secrecy were simply an unavoidable result of being unhappy.
Relationships are unbelievably complicated. I do not think many people go through a divorce thinking, “I was the perfect partner at all times, and I cannot think of one thing I could have done better.” If they do, I become a little concerned from a clinical perspective—but honestly, I have never seen this.
Most people contributed something to the relational dynamic. That does not mean both people contributed equally, and it does not make every behavior equivalent.
When someone feels they are being unfairly blamed for making the decision to leave because they were unhappy, my question is this:
Did you ever bring it up? Did you tell your partner what had been bothering you or suggest any kind of solution?
Sometimes the answer is yes. They brought it up repeatedly, asked for change, suggested therapy, or clearly communicated that the relationship was in danger—and their partner dismissed them or refused to engage. In that case, the decision may still be painful, but it did not arrive out of nowhere.
Often, though, the answer is: “No, I never said anything.”
In that case, yes, you may own more responsibility for how the marriage ended. Not necessarily for every problem in the relationship, but for making a unilateral decision that affected multiple people without giving your partner an opportunity to respond to information you never shared.
Relationships are systems, but systems thinking does not require us to pretend every person behaved equally well. Understanding the context of a decision is not the same thing as removing accountability for it.
I want to be very clear that this does not apply when speaking honestly would be unsafe, such as in an abusive or coercive relationship.
I work with many survivors of abuse, and I take this distinction seriously. Abusive dynamics are deeply complex. A decision to stay or not speak up never equates to someone “doing nothing.” For many people, staying is the safest—or only—option available at the time.
If your divorce gets ugly, you must be doing it wrong.
There are a lot of definitions of “ugly” when it comes to divorce, and I think we all know what the stereotypical ugly divorce looks like: mudslinging, character assassination, using the children as weapons, or making demands intended to punish or dehumanize the other person.
But I often see people equate that kind of behavior with the divorce simply becoming emotional, tense, or hard.
I will tell you what I tell my clients: divorce is hard. Even when it is the right decision. Even when both people agree. Even when everyone is respectful and nobody is fighting over every lamp, serving bowl, and decorative throw pillow.
It is hard because it involves two of the most difficult human experiences: grief and change.
You can know the divorce is necessary and still grieve. You can feel relieved and devastated at the same time. You can believe you are making the right decision and still have moments when you desperately wish things could have been different.
The question is not whether you remain perfectly calm throughout the process. The question is whether you are moving through it in alignment with your values.
Are you acting with integrity? Are you making decisions you can stand behind later? Will you be able to look back and feel proud of how you showed up during an incredibly difficult period of your life?
If the answer is yes, you have nothing to be ashamed of.
Endings are hard, even when we choose them. Give yourself grace, stay aligned with your values, and use them as your compass.
Breathe. You’ve got this.
