Behind a burgeoning industry is the idea that divorce is something we can all do better
Kate Anthony was settling into the warm sand on a Mexico beach when an email landed in her inbox. She was on vacation, but the note, from one of her clients, caught her attention.
The woman was in the throes of a messy divorce with her husband, and she’d just come across distressing material from his phone on their shared iCloud.
What she’d found was tawdry, lewd, even grim — but it wasn’t illegal. That’s where Anthony comes in.
“My client had some shit come down,” she says. They hopped on a 20-minute call where Anthony explained that it wasn’t something she should take to her lawyer because it wouldn’t help the contentious custody proceedings.
“What you do have is a lot of information that he probably doesn’t want in the public record, and so you might have some information that you can use to bargain and leverage down the line to keep yourself out of court tomorrow,” she told her.
It’s the kind of strategizing clients pay hundreds of dollars an hour for.
Anthony is part of a burgeoning industry of divorce coaches, one she helped create. And despite a decline in America’s divorce rate, it’s an area she argues is sorely in need of attention — and improvement.
Divorcing better
Every 42 seconds, a US couple divorces. That’s 86 divorces an hour, or ~2k a day. And while the number of divorces is going down — falling faster than the also declining marriage rate — our desire to divorce better has gone up.
We throw divorce parties to celebrate (one template on Evite reads: “I’m better off bein’ with my besties! In my divorce era”). We make divorce announcements and create registries for starting-over homewares. We find other ways to take the immense sting out of one of life’s most traumatic events.
An offshoot of life coaching, coaches specializing in divorce often:
- Help clients parse out emotional reactions from information germane to their legal cases
- Work with attorneys to provide extra support, particularly in custody proceedings
- Strategize next steps for starting over
Anthony speaks to me from an office festooned with plants in her Los Angeles home. She looks vaguely familiar: for five years, she acted as Nurse Kate on “Grey’s Anatomy.” From the outside, her Hollywood life looked sparkly. Perfect job, perfect love story, perfect child. From the inside, nothing felt perfect. “Inside, I was really kind of dying,” she says.
She and her husband had the kind of volatile marriage that made everyone in the room uncomfortable when they showed up.
After years of couple’s therapy (them), individual therapy (her), and cheating (him), they decided to call it. And that’s strangely when things started to work.
She and her husband decided to put their son at the center of every decision they made and, using that as their north star, divorced spectacularly well, she says.
“People would come to me and ask, how did you guys do it? If you guys could have a good divorce, surely anybody can,” she says.
Anthony hung out her shingle 15 years ago, before Gywneth Paltrow and Chris Martin’s “conscious uncoupling” divorce announcement shook the world in 2014 and began a conversation about how to divorce more mindfully. Anthony looked around and didn’t see an industry.
When she pitched her idea to attorneys in L.A., they were optimistic. “I’m the most expensive and least qualified therapist these people have ever had,” one told her. A coach (ranging from $60 to $300/hr) would be cheaper than a lawyer or therapist ($300/hr+).
To have someone to talk to who could bridge the gap between emotion and strategy could mean less wasted time in a lawyer’s office. But convincing women facing the biggest financial crisis of their lives to spend more money was a much tougher sell.
“A good divorce coach will save you money. It’s an extra expense on the front end that could save you tens of thousands in attorney fees,” Anthony says. “I talk my clients through how to actually work with their attorneys.”
Someone in a heightened state of trauma or emotional chaos isn’t going to see what matters to an attorney — and is going to waste their time and money spewing all of it. Anthony’s job, as she sees it, is to pull them out of that heightened state. (Some coaches take on men and women; Anthony works exclusively with women.)
“My favorite clients are the ones that have been through therapy, and they’re like, yeah, I get it. I get it. I understand how I got into this marriage to begin with, and blah, blah, blah. Now what do I do?” she says. “And that’s where a really good coach comes in.”
Unregulated
When Bachelor Nation stars Rachel Lindsay and Bryan Abasolo announced last year that they’d decided to divorce, the show’s fanbase responded with teary-eyed emojis. Soon after, Abasolo appeared in an Instagram reel describing how much his divorce coach, Rene Garcia of Men’s Divorce Coaching, had helped him.
“When I first met my divorce coach last year, I was emotionally and psychologically beaten down,” he told his followers in what was surely an ad in exchange for services. “I needed an objective opinion and guidance to make a huge decision.”
Former Bachelorette Rachel Lindsay and her winning pick, Bryan Abasolo, in happier times. (Photo by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for iHeartMedia)
The nation was far less sympathetic to his public display, particularly after Abasolo, a chiropractor, won spousal support of $13k a month from his ex, a podcaster and attorney. (Lindsay, for her part, called this “leech money” in a text as the divorce grew increasingly contentious.)
Garcia, based in Miami, is one of many divorce coaches who have tons of opinions but little by way of certified industry credentials. That’s because, similar to life coaching, the certifications that do exist are patchwork at best.
That means anyone can style themselves as a coach — life, divorce, or otherwise — and grow from there. Garcia’s website reads, “dare to make this fucked up situation bigger and better than you think.” (A choice YouTube video: “Make her wish she never left you: how to win after your divorce.”)
Anthony suggests working with a coach who has at the very least training in life or relationship coaching. Other coaches, herself included, have pursued high-conflict divorce coaching certifications or become domestic violence victims advocates to better serve their clients, but because there’s no standard of care or regulations, working with a coach requires research.
“These are the biggest legal and financial decisions you’re ever going to make,” she says.
The mission, as she's accepted it
Anthony doesn’t date — you try explaining her job to a prospective husband! — and instead co-parents her 19-year-old son and unwinds by watching “Dateline” on the couch.
Coaching is now Anthony’s full-time job, but she’s had to diversify to build a business. Alongside one-on-one sessions, she runs support groups at a lower cost for clients who can’t afford her hourly rate and hosts the New York Times-recommended podcast “The Divorce Survival Guide.”
And despite the pitfalls, the high-conflict nature of the work, the emotional burnout, she’s committed to helping women navigate a system she feels is stacked against them.
Divorce rates may be falling, but she’s not concerned. “Nothing would make me happier than to be put out of business by a rapid decrease in domestic violence and overall happiness and empowerment of women in relationships,” she says.
In the meantime, she’s got a job to do.
Anthony’s clients often come to her after they’ve made a decision to divorce but before they’ve told their spouse, taking her calls from the car or the bathroom. She’s still often accused of influencing their choices, which doesn’t engender goodwill between her and her clients’ partners, particularly in cases of abusive relationships (~25% of divorces).
Earlier this month, when one husband told his soon-to-be-ex-wife, “tell Kate I said hi” angrily in the background of a phone call, she got to thinking.
“You know what? If I die doing this work, it’ll suck, you know? But I won’t necessarily regret it,” she says. “Like, I mean, I’ll be dead so I won’t be able to. But I’m kind of okay with it, in a sense.”
Or maybe that’s just the “Dateline” talking.
