By Zakh Flynn
What the early stages of divorce are teaching me about gentleness, professional life, and the work of becoming whole again.
I am 37yo gay cisgender man – who also happens to work as a clinical psychotherapist in New York City – and I’m also in the early stages of divorce. I write that preceding sentence slowly and with purpose. Each clause is true. They’re all important facets of my life. None of those qualities negates or diminishes the others. The work I’m learning now, is how to let each of those qualities sit in the same room.
People often imagine that therapists encounter disruptions with ease and fluency. We do not. We arrive with language, frameworks, and a practiced capacity to stay present with other people’s pain. We also arrive as human beings, who have our own nervous system that does not care if we can name the stages of grief or recite passages of the DSM-V verbatim. Knowing the map is not the same as walking the terrain. Ask any hikers’ blistered feet and swollen ankles.
This is not a case study, and it is not a confession. It is my attempt to speak from the inside of a transition many of my fellow world neighbors will recognize: the moment when the life you built no longer fits, and the life ahead of you has not yet grown a shape. I am writing and sharing, because I believe clients deserve a therapist who can hold complexity without pretending to be untouched by it; and because I believe starting over can be treated as an investment in the self – not only as a loss.
The strengths that show up when the ground moves
Divorce – even when it is chosen or mutually understood – tends to strip away the story we used to organize our days. That stripping is painful. It is also clarifying. In the early weeks, I have noticed strengths I used to treat as professional tools and am now having to practice them as personal ones.
Curiosity is one. In session, I often ask my clients what a feeling is trying to protect. At home, I am learning to ask myself the same question before I rush to fix, numb, or perform competence. The grief is not a problem to solve by tomorrow – or the next day. It is information about what mattered.
Another is the capacity to hold two truths at once. A marriage can have been real and still be coming to an end. Love can have been sincere and still have become unsustainable. I can be proud of the life I built and honest that it no longer provided me with the peace, happiness, or love I once had. Clinical work trains that kind of both/and thinking. Living it is humbling.
A third is community – something queer adults in this concrete jungle often already know how to build outside the nuclear script. Friendship, chosen family, the quiet ritual of a walk after a hard session, the colleague who does not need the whole story in order to check in. Insight is not only what happens in a journal. It is what happens when we let ourselves be witnessed, without having to be impressive.
A shift in perspective: from collapse to investment
The cultural story of divorce is often a story of failure, especially for people who came from an age believing that a lasting partnership is the sole proof of a successful life. I am practicing a different frame. This is not the demolition of self. It is a reallocation of attention. And a recommitment to myself that I am worth it – I yield the greatest return, as I maximize my ROI.
Empowerment, in this context, is not a mood. It is a set of small, unglamorous choices: being honest with myself about what I can carry this week; keeping the appointments that keep me healthy and well; declining the urge to turn my private life into a performance of unique resilience. Growth is not the absence of ache. Growth is the willingness to stay in contact with the ache long enough to learn what it is asking for.
I am treating this season as an investment in internal peace – not the peace of having everything resolved, but the peace of no longer abandoning myself in order to keep a structure standing. That kind of peace is quiet, but powerful. It looks like sleep. It looks like a calendar that includes recovery – not only productivity. It looks like asking, before I say “yes” – whether that “yes” is coming from values or from fear of being alone.
Why I shan’t speak for all gay men – speaking as a gay man and from my individual perspective – many individuals who had relationships built against a backdrop of scarcity – scarcity of role models, of safety, of the feeling that a life like ours was allowed to exist, let alone last – the ending of a marriage can stir old material. The work is not to pathologize that experience. The work is to notice it, to be tender with it, and to refuse the conclusion that starting over means starting from zero. I am not beginning with nothing. I am beginning with a self that has already survived becoming. I am beginning with a newfound strength and insight that will lead me into a healthy, happy, and successful future.
Be gentle with yourself
Gentleness is not the same as avoidance. Avoidance says, “I’ll deal with this when I am less busy.” Gentleness says, “I will make the feeling small enough to sit beside, and I will not punish myself for having these feelings.”
In practical terms, that has meant giving emotion a container instead of an audience or a hiding place. A walk without a podcast. Ten minutes of writing that are only for me and my therapist’s eyes to read. Letting a wave of sadness finish, rather than interrupting it with a to-do list. The nervous system does not metabolize loss on a professional timetable. When I try to rush loss, it returns as irritability, insomnia, or a sudden thinness in the room between me and my own life.
It has also meant watching my inner critic with clinical interest. My inner critic likes to arrive dressed as standards: “You should be further along.” “You should be modeling optimal regulation.” “You should not need as much as you need.” I know that voice. I have sat with it myself and with my clients. It is usually trying to prevent a perceived sense of humiliation. It is rarely a reliable narrator of worth and hope.
Being gentle includes letting the uncomfortable parts stay uncomfortable. Ambivalence. Anger that feels disloyal. Relief that feels like a betrayal of the past. Loneliness that is not solved simply by being around other people. None of these feelings are evidence that I am doing the transition wrong. They are evidence that the transition is real.
Leaning into the unknown of starting over
The unknown…that is the part most individuals try to manage and control, out of existence. We make plans, we forecast, we turn uncertainty into a project. Some of that is adaptive. Too much of it is a way of refusing the fact that a new life cannot be fully designed in advance.
I am practicing a more honest relationship with the unknown. I do not yet know the shape of my days a year from now. I do not yet know what kind of partnership – if any – will make sense on the other side of this. I do not yet know how the concrete jungle will feel, when familiar routines have been rewritten. What I can know is how I want to move through the unknown. With curiosity, rather than self-abandonment. With kindness and a gentle voice. With standards for how I treat myself, which has enough structure that the open space does not become a free fall.
Starting over is not a single leap. It is a sequence of ordinary days, in which I choose…and choose again and again, not to disappear. The uncomfortable part is that those days will include immense grief and glimmering possibilities in the same afternoon. I can miss what was and still build what is next. I can honor a shared history and still claim a future that belongs to me. The task is not to pick one feeling and make it the official story. The task is to keep walking while both are true.
The working professional who also has a private life
There is a particular challenge in being a helping professional during personal upheaval. The work asks for presence. The life asks for recovery. If I give the work everything, I become a therapist who is technically functioning and privately depleted. If I collapse the boundary the other way, I risk bringing weather into the room that does not belong to my clients.
The balance I am building is not perfect symmetry. It is stewardship. Stewardship looks like protecting the therapeutic space and clinical hour as a place that is about the person in front of me, not about my need to feel useful so I can outrun my own feelings. It looks like using consultation and my own supports, rather than turning the caseload into unofficial therapy. It looks like a calendar that treats administrative time, rest, movement, and meals as non-negotiable parts of the job, because they are part of what makes the job ethical.
It also looks like humility about capacity. Clients do not need a therapist who is endlessly available to every demand. Clients need a therapist who is well enough to think clearly, feel accurately, and hold the therapeutic space for their clients. Taking care of yourself is not an indulgence. It is part of the work – as both a therapist and as a human.
For anyone reading this who is not a therapist but is a lawyer, a teacher, a nurse, a founder, a caregiver – anyone whose livelihood depends on holding other people while their own life is rearranging – the principle is the same. You are not required to be two different people. You are required to notice when one role is being used to starve the other, and to make the necessary small corrections before a larger collapse arrives.
What I hope this makes possible
I am still in the early part of this. Of divorce. I am not writing from the far shore of years or decades past. I am writing from the late beginning/very early middle. I am writing from where my growing insight is real; but the feelings have not agreed to become a lesson yet. That is the honest location.
If you are in a similar location – divorce, a breakup that is rewriting your home, a life that looked finished and turned out to be a chapter – I hope you will consider this: you do not have to wait until you feel strong to treat yourself as someone worth investing in. Gentleness can come first. Meaning can arrive later. The unknown does not have to be conquered before you are allowed to take up space in your own life.
Therapy will not make the ending neat. But what therapy can do is give the ending a witness, a pace, and a place where you do not have to be impressive in order to be taken seriously. That is the room I and my colleagues offer. It is also, in this season, the room I am having to offer myself.
If you are a professional in New York navigating a transition of your own – especially if you are used to being the one who feels like you’re having to hold everything together – and you want a safe place to think, feel, and plan without abandoning yourself, I welcome you to reach out. We can start where you actually are, not where you or others think you should already be.
A clinical note on this essay
This piece is a limited, purposeful self-disclosure intended to destigmatize life transition among working adults. It does not describe any client, and it is not a substitute for individual treatment. Therapists who write personally still keep clinical material inside the consulting room, use their own supports, and maintain the boundary between a public reflection and the private work of therapy.
