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Mandy Walker (MA)
When people ask me about working with me as a divorce coach I like to say it's like having a hundred trusted friends who've been through divorce and who are willing to share their knowledge and experience in a supportive, collaborative and non-judgmental way.
If you're trying to decide if divorce is the right decision for you, I can help you through your thought-process so you understand your fears and can balance the pros and cons of your situation. Don't expect me to make the decision for you: ending a marriage is never easy and if you're not able to make this decisoin for yourself, then you're not ready to face these challenges.
If your marriage is ending then I can help you prepare for divorce, collect your professional team, renegotiate your relationship with your Soon-To-Be-Ex, formulate your parenting philosophy, create your financial plan and adapt to living singly. I'll coustomize the coaching to fit your circumstances.
You can find out if divorce coaching is right for you in a free 30-minute New Beginnings phone consultation.
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Are you're struggling to see what life could be like after divorce? Download my free Visioning Your Life After Divorce workbook and let me inspire you to start creating the next chapters of your future.
The Reason I Became A Helping Professional
I‘ve met many women who’ve said they could write a book about their divorce and I was no different. My book was going to be about all the tasks and activities I learned to do when my husband was no longer around, such as removing the dead mouse from the mouse trap, learning to use an electric drill, installing a curtain rod, replacing the flush mechanism in the toilet and so on.
It didn’t take me long to realize that it would take quite some time to learn enough to fill a book and even then, I wasn’t sure that anyone else would be interested in reading it. So then my book idea morphed into collecting stories about other people’s accomplishments. I started my blog, Since My Divorce and started my search for interviewees.
Slowly people came forward and trusted me with their stories. I started out asking “What do you consider your most significant accomplishment?” I chose the wording of the question very carefully. I didn’t want my interviewees to be constrained by any societal definition of success. I wanted them to share what it was that made them proud.
I thought I would get a collection of entertaining and humorous tales like learning to drive a boat trailer or changing the fluorescent light bulb, but I was wrong and naively so. I can see now that my simplicity was a reflection of my own emotional numbness at the time.
Growing from divorce
The stories these people shared were more meaningful and deeper than a simple record of mastering a new household skill. The accomplishments were on an entirely different level of learning, often wrapped around the emotional obstacles and challenges of their marriage and upbringing. I am now convinced that it is the people who can face the end of their marriage as a learning opportunity that have the resilience and capacity to reinvent themselves.
What has also surprised me about the interviews is the variety of lessons I’ve been able to garner. As I review each each interview, it's usually easy for me to pick out one overarching message. With many of these interviews that message sticks with me for days and days following the interview. There's such a resonance that I understand now that these interviews were and continue to be a key part of my own learning and growth. These stories opened my eyes to issues that I had never considered, increased my awareness, guided me and helped me understand.
We tend to think of therapy as formal sessions sitting with a counselor and I do wholeheartedly endorse the value of formal therapy especially when you are dealing with any example of extreme behavior, such as domestic abuse, addiction issues and narcissism. I used a counselor when I first started to think that ending my marriage was an option. I was reluctant to discuss our martial issues with friends having been raised with the mantra that what happened within a marriage stayed within the marriage. Thus it was enormously helpful to meet with a counselor.
Subsequent to my divorce, my therapy also included a holistic healer who I was seeing for some food sensitivities. It wasn’t traditional therapy and yet she helped me see what my own part was in my divorce especially after the sudden and unexpected death of my father surfaced familial tensions and behavior patterns I’d successfully buried for many years. Most recently, it was my dating coach who gave me the final piece of the puzzle to forgive myself for my divorce.
Yet, as valuable as the insight from each of these professionals has been, it was often a piece from one of these interviews that lead to a breakthrough. Through them I’ve come to a new appreciation for story-telling because it is these stories that open our minds to possibilities and opportunities.
Mandy Walker
Additional Details
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Mandy Walker
Payment Options
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Between $51-80 per session


