Episode Details

You've made the decision. Maybe it took months — maybe it took years. But you've finally arrived at it, and now your brain is telling you: move fast, do something, protect yourself. And that instinct, as understandable as it is, might be the very thing that costs you the most. In this indispensable episode of Divorce Happens, host Olivia Howell sits down with Lyerly Spongberg — certified ADR divorce coach, pre-mediation coach, and co-parenting specialist — to walk through the most common and costly mistakes people make in the early stages of the divorce process. Lyerly brings years of front-line coaching experience to a conversation that is equal parts educational and deeply compassionate, pulling back the curtain on why even intelligent, capable people get derailed right at the start — and exactly what to do instead.

The first thing Lyerly wants you to understand is that when the divorce decision finally lands, your nervous system is not your friend. What looks like urgency is often dysregulation — a survival-mode brain that is neurologically incapable of making clear, future-focused decisions. From that dysregulated state, people make the same predictable mistakes: they call the most aggressive attorney they can find, they ask their hairdresser and their college roommate and their coworker what they're "entitled to," and they latch onto other people's divorce settlements as a blueprint for their own. Lyerly dismantles all of it with precision. Every divorce is different, she explains. The laws vary by state. The finances vary by marriage. And perhaps most crucially, the person across from you is not your aunt's ex-husband. What worked — or didn't — in someone else's divorce has almost no bearing on yours. The second major pitfall she unpacks is what she calls the four-letter word of divorce: "fair." Few things derail the early divorce process more reliably than the obsession with getting a fair outcome — and Lyerly reframes it beautifully, shifting the question from "what's fair?" to "what do I actually need, and who do I want to be when this is over?"

What makes this episode truly standout is the humanity Lyerly brings to the hard stuff. She talks about working with women who can't imagine not being a mom 24/7, who have built their entire identity around being the primary caregiver, and who face the co-parenting schedule as one of the most disorienting losses in their entire divorce. She is both honest and hopeful: she has seen enough to know that many of those same women, once the dust settles, find that those solo days look a lot different than they feared. Her practical tools — journaling, exercise, naming your fears so you can find the right expert to address them, breathing exercises before high-stakes meetings, setting firm boundaries with well-meaning friends who make things worse — are immediately usable and grounded in real coaching experience. If you are standing at the very beginning of your divorce and you feel the panic rising, this episode is the steady hand on your shoulder you didn't know you needed. Lyerly's parting message says it all: take one baby step today. That's enough.

Learn more about Lyerly Spongberg: https://www.freshstartsregistry.com/resourceguide/step-up-with-lyerly

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