Episode Details

Nobody hands you a map for the in-between. You have decided to divorce — or you are circling the decision — and yet you are still sharing a kitchen, a hallway, maybe even a bedroom with the person you are in the biggest conflict of your life with. It is one of the most common and least talked-about chapters of the divorce journey, and in this grounding episode of Divorce Happens, host Olivia Howell sits down with divorce coach Lisa Lisser to name it out loud. Lisa is a retired attorney who practiced litigation in New York City, a CDC Certified Divorce Coach and child-centered co-parenting coach, a Jewish educator, a spiritual counselor, and the founder of LZL Coaching — and she is also a divorced mom of three who lived this exact season herself. She calls it the in-between: the narrow, uncertain space between being a married couple and being two separate people. “It is wanting certainty while living in uncertainty,” she says — and if you are cohabitating during divorce right now, you already know exactly how tight that jacket feels.

What makes this conversation so useful is that Lisa does not leave you in the discomfort — she hands you a structure. She walks Olivia through four boundaries that help everyone in the household breathe: physical, parenting, financial, and emotional. The physical boundary is permission to claim your own space, whether that is a bedroom, a family room, or a corner of the basement, and her reframe lands hard: creating that space is not punishment, it is agency. You do not need anyone’s permission to exhale, to cry, to research, to simply close a door. The parenting boundary is a clear, child-readable schedule — who drives, who packs lunch, who handles pickup — because kids feel the weight of a changing house even when no one is fighting in front of them, and predictability is how they stay anchored. Threaded through it all is one of Lisa’s most tender insights, shared from her own honest hindsight: your children have the right to love both of you, and protecting them from the details is its own act of love.

The financial boundary is about building a blueprint before anyone gets blindsided — agreeing on who pays what, who funds the account, and how the household runs while you are still under one roof — because, as Lisa puts it, divorce creates uncertainty, uncertainty creates anxiety, and money magnifies both. And the emotional boundary may be the one that ties it all together: when the person who used to be your support system is now the source of the stress, you have to build a new team. A coach, a therapist, a support group, the friends who can hold your story without a stake in it. Olivia and Lisa land on the throughline of the whole show — that the strongest, bravest thing you can do is ask for help, and that divorce was never meant to be carried alone. If you are surviving the in-between right now, this episode is a deep exhale and a real plan: gentle, pragmatic, and full of permission to get outside the box you have been living in.

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