She was a global leader at PayPal, having the best year of her career. Her nervous system was in free fall.

From the outside, everything looked extraordinary.

Global leader at PayPal. One of the best years of her career by any measure. The kind of professional momentum that takes years to build.

And inside, she was not sleeping. Not one night a week. Every single night disrupted. Stress at a 10 out of 10. The divorce process so all-consuming she used that exact word to describe it, completely all-consuming, like it had taken over every corner of her life regardless of what she was doing or where she was.

That is where Karen was when we started working together.

We Did Not Try to Fix the Chaos Around Her

The instinct, when everything feels out of control, is to try to control something. To focus on the external situation, on what your ex is doing, on the legal process, on the logistics, on all the moving pieces that feel like they are falling at once. It makes sense. It just does not work.

With Karen, we did not start there. We focused entirely on her internal world, because that was the only thing she could actually influence, and because it turned out to be the thing that moved everything else.

There were three areas we concentrated on over those first months together. The first was learning how to move through big, painful emotions without getting stuck in them, which sounds simple and is genuinely one of the harder skills to build when you are in the middle of a crisis. The second was setting boundaries with her ex that actually held, not boundaries that sounded good in theory but collapsed under pressure. The third was building enough self-trust that she could make hard decisions, about custody, finances, co-parenting, from a place of steadiness rather than reactivity. When you are sleeping zero nights a week and your nervous system is in free fall, almost every decision feels impossible. That steadiness had to come first.

Six Months Later

Six months after we started working together, Karen moved into her own home. She established a co-parenting rhythm. And something shifted in the dynamic with her ex that she describes in a way I still think about.

"We have not had one challenging divorce or co-parenting situation. It has been a truly remarkable shift."

Co-parenting drama, which had been consuming and destabilizing, was at zero. Stress in those interactions, also zero. At work she described feeling happier and lighter, and said that translated directly into being more able to fully show up. At home she was present in a way she had not been able to be during the worst of it, and she was sleeping, really sleeping, in a way that had felt completely out of reach when we first started.

None of that happened because her circumstances became easy. It happened because she changed how she moved through them.

What She Said She Gained Most

When I asked Karen what she had gained most from this experience, she did not hesitate.

"Peace of mind, which impacts everything."

And then she said something that has stayed with me: "I have faced the dark, my deepest fears, and come out bearing gifts, for myself, my kids, and for the world."

That is not the language of someone who survived something. That is the language of someone who was genuinely transformed by it, and who did the internal work required to get there. The divorce did not become easier. She became someone who could move through it without losing herself in it, and on the other side of that process, she found something she had not expected to find.

If You Are in the Middle of It Right Now

If you are reading this from inside the chaos, from the sleepless nights and the all-consuming logistics and the feeling that your nervous system has not had a moment of rest in months, I want you to know that where Karen started is not where she ended up. And the distance between those two places was not traveled by fixing her ex or waiting for the external situation to resolve. It was traveled by turning inward, building the internal resources that the external chaos was constantly trying to erode, and learning to trust herself again in the middle of all of it.

That kind of change is available to you too, wherever you are starting from.

FAQ: Divorce Coaching for High-Achieving Women

How do I stop feeling so overwhelmed by the divorce process? 

The overwhelm of divorce is real and it makes sense, because the process genuinely does touch every area of your life at once. What tends to help most is not trying to manage all of it simultaneously, but building enough internal steadiness that you can face each piece without your nervous system going into free fall. That steadiness is a skill, and it is one that develops with the right support and consistent practice.

Why is it so hard to sleep during divorce? 

Sleep disruption during divorce is extremely common because your nervous system is under sustained stress, and a stressed nervous system does not easily shift into the rest state required for sleep. The mind keeps processing, replaying, anticipating, and that cycle is very hard to interrupt through willpower alone. Learning to regulate your nervous system during waking hours tends to have a significant effect on sleep over time.

How do I make good decisions about custody and finances when I am this stressed? 

The honest answer is that good decision-making under acute stress is genuinely difficult, and the solution is not to push through but to build the internal resources that make clearer thinking possible. That means working on nervous system regulation, reducing the reactivity that stress creates, and building enough self-trust that you can distinguish between a decision made from fear and one made from your actual values and needs.

Can co-parenting really become drama-free? 

It can become dramatically less dramatic, even when your ex does not change at all. What shifts is your relationship to the interactions, your ability to stay grounded going in, to hold your boundaries under pressure, and to recover quickly when things get difficult. For some women, like Karen, the shift in their own internal state ends up changing the dynamic in ways that go further than they ever expected.

What is the most important thing to focus on during divorce? 

Yourself, and I know that sounds counterintuitive when there is so much external chaos demanding your attention. But the internal work, learning to process difficult emotions without getting consumed by them, building self-trust, setting boundaries that actually hold, is what makes everything else more manageable. It is also the work that stays with you long after the divorce is over, in your parenting, your career, and the life you build on the other side.