Divorce continues to affect millions of Americans. During 2024, the American Community Survey reported that nearly 986,810 women divorced in the previous year, alongside a comparable number of men.
A Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data found that one-third of Americans who have ever married have gone through a divorce.
It is normal for families that undergo divorce to face various emotions such as frustration, bewilderment, perseverance, and survival. The process of divorce will not be experienced in the exact order listed, and some individuals will go back and forth in their feelings during the divorce process.
Understanding these emotional divorce stages can help people recognize that difficult feelings are a common part of adjusting to major life changes.
Let’s look at these emotional stages of divorce and how people may cope with the changes that come with each stage.
Where the Framework Actually Comes From
Many of the views held about the emotional aspects of divorce have been developed on the basis of a model that was not originally designed for divorce at all. In 1969, a famous psychiatrist by the name of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross developed the concept of “stages of grief” after working with numerous terminally ill patients who were confronted with the fact of their eventual death.
The identified stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. These stages have become one of the most widely practiced psychological concepts. It later underwent changes and began to be used in dealing with any form of grief, including divorce.
Why the Model Doesn’t Fit Everyone the Same Way
Kübler-Ross later rejected rigid applications of her framework, explaining that grief doesn’t unfold as a tidy progression and that individuals may not go through all stages or follow any set sequence.
The issues raised here are long-standing issues within the field of grief research. These stages were identified within a specific group of people experiencing a specific kind of loss, and the evidence for a universal linear process is much weaker than its popular belief would suggest.
These stages constitute just a guide and are not fixed to be followed blindly. An individual may experience denial at an earlier stage. Another person undergoing divorce might feel anger and bargaining at the same time.
Where Emotion and Legal Strategy Collide
More often than not, people find that the emotional and legal aspects of divorce intertwine in a more complex way than they realize. When someone is angry or bargaining, they tend to make property decisions in which one spouse refrains from giving more than necessary to save the marriage or hurt the other person. As time goes by, they often regret these decisions after the anger or bargaining stage has passed.
The legal aspects of divorce are complex and can directly or indirectly be influenced by someone’s emotions. A person undergoing divorce may benefit from hiring a skilled lawyer who understands the role emotions can play during divorce proceedings. A family lawyer can leverage their legal training and real-world experiences as their foundation when tackling divorce cases.
Two Different Timelines
An uncontested divorce can be legally final in a matter of months. But the adjustment to a new financial reality, a new household, and often a new custody schedule usually takes longer than the case itself. People who expect the emotional resolution to show up at the same time as the final decree are often surprised when it doesn’t.
There’s also a practical reason to pay attention to which emotional stage is driving a given decision. Family courts don’t revisit a signed settlement just because one party later feels they agreed to something under duress from grief rather than clear judgment.
People undergoing the divorce process are advised to make decisions regarding trusts, asset division, and expense payoff when the involved parties are able to rationally think of their choices rather than make decisions emotionally and impulsively.
People in the field of divorce, like lawyers, mediators, and therapists, have all observed the same phenomenon. It can be argued that while the legal aspect is conclusive, the emotional aspect is not. These two different aspects can create issues that should not arise from their combination.
Accepting that the stages serve more as a template than as a rigid structure makes the social aspect of divorce much easier to manage.
