Your divorce is distressing. That doesn’t mean it has to become trauma

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Here’s something nobody tells you when you’re in the middle of divorce: distress and trauma are not the same thing.

One is what’s happening to you right now. The other is what happens if you go through it alone.

Somatic therapist Natalia Rachel has been divorced for nine years. She’s also a trauma specialist and author of Why Am I Like This? Natalia works with women rebuilding after exactly this kind of rupture. She joined me on the podcast this week – and this was the first of many things she said that a lot of us need to hear.

The conversation went somewhere I didn’t expect. She made a distinction that shifted something in me – and I’ve been in this space for quite a few years now.

“Distress and trauma are not the same thing. Whether a divorce becomes trauma depends less on how bad it was, and more on whether you had safe, supportive relationships around you while it was happening.” – Natalia Rachel

That single idea has significant implications for what women do – and don’t do – in the middle of separation.

What’s the difference between distress and trauma?

Natalia is precise about this distinction, and it matters.

Distress is what’s happening to you right now. The 2am panic. The legal letter that just arrived. The moment your child asked when dad was coming home. The court date looming next week. These things are real, painful, and demanding.

Trauma is different. Trauma is when a past experience of threat or harm – one that is actually over – is still living and breathing in you now. You’re altered by it. You’re adapting around it. The thing has stopped happening but it hasn’t stopped affecting you.

As Natalia explained it in our conversation:

“If we go through a distressing experience and we take time to recover and heal and thrive, we’re no longer holding trauma. We’ve just gone through something really difficult. And at the other end, there’s peace again and resilience again.” – Natalia Rachel

Plenty of women go through divorces that are deeply distressing without those experiences becoming trauma. The question is: what determines which way it goes?

What’s the single biggest predictor of post-divorce trauma?

Natalia’s answer to this question is both simple and profound.

It’s not how bad the divorce was. Not how much money you lost. Not how badly your ex behaved. Not whether you had to move house twice or fight every step of the way through the Family Court.

It’s this:

The presence or absence of safe and supportive relationships during the distressing experience.

If you had people around you who let you tell the truth about what was happening – who validated your experience, who didn’t flinch when you said the hard thing – you’re less likely to be carrying trauma now.

If you held it in, navigated it alone, or surrounded yourself with people who changed the subject or told you to ‘move on’ – you’re more likely to be carrying it in your body.

This is backed by the broader research on trauma recovery. 

A 2020 review published in Frontiers in Psychology found that social support is one of the strongest protective factors against developing PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) following stressful life events. The absence of it is consistently identified as a risk factor for prolonged distress.

Natalia Rachel

Why rage is your power, not your problem

One of the most useful parts of my conversation with Natalia was her reframe around anger – specifically the kind that builds up when you’ve felt disempowered, unseen, or harmed in a relationship.

Many of us have been taught that anger is unpalatable. That it’s aggressive. That it makes us difficult. So we compress it, minimise it, and perform composure – while the pressure quietly builds underneath.

Natalia’s view: that unprocessed rage doesn’t disappear. It stores itself.

“When we channel that experience of rage, what it transforms into is the purest power. Once we clear out all of that rage, we find our power again.”

She describes a “trauma triangle”: an interplay of grief, anger, and powerlessness that sits repressed inside us. As we heal, we move through the corners of that triangle, and what we find on the other side is peace, power, and groundedness.

How to start if anger feels terrifying

If you’re someone who doesn’t do anger – who keeps things nice, who is the peacemaker – Natalia suggests starting very small:

• Notice irritation and frustration. These are the milder end of the anger spectrum. Naming them is the beginning.

• Practise your ‘no’. Setting a boundary and noticing how your body responds is one of the gentlest ways to begin reconnecting with your anger.

• Try physical release. Kickboxing, running with intention, or even screaming alone on top of a hill – rage is physical energy and needs a physical outlet.

• Use a feelings wheel. 

The Gottman Institute’s Feelings Wheel is a widely-used tool that helps you name what you’re experiencing – particularly useful if you grew up in a household where feelings weren’t named or welcomed.

The key insight: anger isn’t a character flaw. It’s information. And it’s energy that, once expressed, often transforms into clarity.

How somatic therapy can help after divorce

Natalia is a somatic therapist, and this modality came up repeatedly in our conversation as one of the most effective approaches for women processing separation.

Soma means ‘body’ in Greek. Somatic work is the process of returning to your body – and in doing so, repairing the connection between body and mind that many of us have lost.

Here’s why this matters specifically after divorce: many of us have spent years in a marriage where we disconnected from our instincts. Somatic work can help you reconnect with those impulses – including the ones that are now guiding you towards a different life.

“A lot of us that get divorced, we’re finally connecting to this impulse away from a relationship that, for many of us, we’ve not been able to connect to for a very, very long time.” – Natalia Rachel

Somatic work is also valuable because it bypasses the ‘I understand it but nothing has changed’ problem that many women describe after years of talk therapy.

“Anytime you’ve been doing a lot of processing work and it feels like you know your story, but nothing’s really shifted – that’s a clear sign that somatic work may unlock something new. Because it’s all about the felt experience.” – Natalia Rachel

How to get started with somatic work

You don’t need to jump straight into one-on-one therapy. Natalia recommends starting gently:

• Try free somatic meditations online. Natalia has a series called The Felt Sense on Spotify – a gentle, accessible starting point.

• Read her book Why Am I Like This? – each chapter includes a somatic exercise to help you bring awareness to what your body is holding.

• Work with a somatic practitioner. The Australian Psychological Society’s Find a Psychologist tool lets you search by specialty and location.

Can you put off processing trauma? (Yes, and that’s often wise)

One of the most reassuring things Natalia said in our conversation: you don’t have to process everything now. In fact, your nervous system probably won’t let you until it knows there’s space to do so safely.

If you’re in the thick of it right now – solo parenting, managing lawyers, working out how to pay rent, holding everything together for your kids – you may not have the capacity to fall apart. And that’s not avoidance. That’s wisdom.

“If we don’t have the capacity to be with the feelings and all that happens when we sit with it, we will put it off until such a time as there’s space to surrender. We can hold it. Many of us hold it until we know it’s safe.” – Natalia Rachel

Many women only begin to process their divorce trauma years later – sometimes when they’re finally financially stable, sometimes when they enter a healthier relationship and feel safe enough to let themselves fall apart, sometimes when the kids leave home and there’s finally silence.

If that’s where you are, you’re not behind. You’re right on time.

Research consistently shows that the acute emotional phase of divorce typically settles within two to three years for most people – though for those who experienced high conflict or family violence, the process takes significantly longer.

A 2021 Australian study from the University of Sydney’s 45 and Up cohort – tracking more than 33,000 adults – found that recent divorce was associated with significantly elevated psychological distress, anxiety, and depression.

International divorce researcher Paul Amato describes this as the ‘divorce-stress-adjustment’ model: distress peaks early and diminishes over time, but the timeline varies enormously depending on the circumstances of the separation and the support available.

Dating is okay but make sure you spend time with yourself too. Source: iStock

The trap of dating too soon after divorce

Natalia was candid about her own post-divorce experience here – “Don’t get into a relationship with that next arsehole!” was the advice she’d give to her younger self.

The pull toward a new relationship after divorce is completely understandable. It soothes. It distracts. It fills the space. But if you’re using another person to plug the holes in your own heart, it sets up a dynamic that rarely ends well.

“The moment we need a relationship to survive on a very practical level, there is the potential for power play. And love dies in that moment – because that’s not love, that’s survival.” – Natalia Rachel

What ‘slow burn dating’ actually looks like

Natalia recommends what she calls a ‘slow burn’ approach to post-divorce dating:

• Leave a few days between early dates to sit with what comes up in your body.

• Be cautious about oversharing early – it can create a power imbalance before trust is established.

• Build independence and stability before you start dating – not hyperindependence, but enough ground beneath your feet that you’re choosing a relationship rather than needing one.

• When triggers come up (and they will), practise disconnecting them from the person in front of you – notice what’s past, versus what’s present.

This isn’t about being rigid or waiting for some arbitrary point of ‘healed’. It’s about entering relationship from a stable place rather than a frenetic one. From fullness, not from need.

Three things to do every day when you’re going through it

I asked Natalia: if a woman going through divorce right now can do nothing else, what are the small daily things that actually help?

Her answer was simple, and I think it’s worth taking these on board:

1. Self-validation.

Tell yourself: of course this is hard. Of course I’m scared. Of course I’m a mess. This isn’t weakness – it’s accuracy. Validation from yourself is often the first thing to go when everything falls apart. Get it back.

2. Ask yourself: what can I do to feel a little safer today?

It doesn’t need to be big. It might be cancelling a non-essential commitment, calling a friend, or not looking at that email until tomorrow. One small action toward safety.

3. Ask yourself: what can I do today to feel a sense of agency?

Something that returns a sense of power to you – even something small. A walk after school drop-off. Making yourself something you actually want to eat. One task on the list crossed off. Agency is the antidote to helplessness.

The whole point of this

I built Women’s Divorce Academy because I went through two divorces and I know, from the inside, that the women who heal best are not the women with the cleverest lawyers.

They’re the women who weren’t alone.

If you’re in it right now, that’s the most important thing: find your people. Not the friends who tell you you’re so strong and then change the subject. People who can sit with you when you’re a mess. People who let you say the unsayable thing and don’t flinch.

If you don’t have that yet, build it. Whatever form that takes.

Whether you have support or not isn’t just a quality-of-life question right now. It’s the single biggest factor in whether you carry this divorce in your body for the next ten years and beyond.

Listen to the full podcast episode

Natalia and I cover a lot more ground in the full Divorce With Carolyn podcast episode – including the trauma triangle in detail, why rage is a portal to your power, and the three daily practices she gives every woman starting over after separation.

▶ Listen to the episode here – bit.ly/divorce-with-carolyn

And if you’re looking for a community of women who get what you’re going through, that’s exactly what Women’s Divorce Academy was built for.

▶ Find out what’s inside WDA – womensdivorceacademy.com

About this post

This article is based on Carolyn’s conversation with Natalia Rachel, somatic therapist and author of Why Am I Like This? (Penguin Random House). Listen to the full episode on the Divorce with Carolyn podcast.

This article contains general information only and is not intended as a substitute for professional psychological support. If you are experiencing mental health concerns, please reach out to Beyond Blue (1300 22 4636) or Relationships Australia (1300 364 277).