You Are Still in There

August 12, 2026

Tobia Bradley, CDC

Certified Divorce Coach and Client Relations Manager, Ashby Jones and Associates, LLC

The human side of divorce and custody

There is a chair in my office that has held a lot of people.

For more than two decades I have sat across from women and men in the middle of a divorce or a custody case, and I can usually tell within about five minutes how long they have been carrying it. It is not what they say. It is the way they sit. Shoulders up around the ears. Purse still on the lap, like they are not sure they are allowed to stay.

I always want to tell them the same thing, and most days I do.

Honey, put your bag down. You can rest here for a minute.

Here is what all these years have taught me. The case is only half of it. The other half is what quietly happens to you while the case is going on, and almost nobody asks about that part.

So today, I am asking about that part.

The person you were before all of this is not gone. She is just buried under the weight of it.

The one who slept through the night. The one who laughed with her whole chest. The one who did not feel her stomach drop every single time the phone lit up. That person is still in there, and I have watched hundreds of people find their way back to her.

Let me tell you what helps.

You do not owe everybody an explanation

You are going to feel the pull to justify yourself. To your mother. To the friend who keeps gently asking whether you two have tried counseling. To the sweet woman at church who means every bit of well. To the coworker who has developed some very firm opinions about a marriage he was never inside of.

I want to save you some energy.

You do not have to hand your reasons to every person who reaches out a hand for them.

Some people are not asking so they can understand you. They are asking so they can have a position on you. There is a real difference between the two, and I promise you will feel it in your body before you can put words to it. Trust that feeling. It is older and wiser than you think.

Your life is not on trial in your own kitchen. Say less than you think you should, and save what you have for the rooms where it truly counts.

You do not have to earn your rest

I cannot count the number of people who have come into my office running on four hours of sleep, three cups of coffee, and pure nerve. Working all day. Parenting all evening. Reading discovery documents at midnight because that is the only quiet hour in the house.

And then apologizing to me. For being tired.

Sweet friend, no.

You do not have to run yourself completely into the ground before you are allowed to lie down. Rest is not the prize waiting for you at the end of all this. Rest is the thing that makes getting to the end possible.

I have seen what a rested parent can do. She reads the email twice before she answers it. She has a longer fuse at bath time. She can sit through a hard conversation without coming out of her skin. That is not a small thing. That is the whole ballgame.

Go to bed. The paperwork will still be right there in the morning, and you will read it with clearer eyes.

Talk to yourself the way you talk to your children

I have listened to people say things about themselves that they would never in a hundred years allow anyone to say to their child.

I should have seen it coming. I ruined my kids’ lives. I am a failure. What kind of mother lets this happen.

If your baby came to you saying those words about herself, you would stop everything. You would put down what you were holding, take that little face in your hands, and tell her the truth.

So tell yourself the truth too.

You are doing one of the hardest things a person can do. You are doing it while still going to work, still packing lunches, still answering questions you do not have good answers to yet. That is not failure. That is endurance, and it is a rarer thing than people realize.

The days you deserve your own kindness the most are the days it is hardest to give. Give it anyway. Say it out loud in the car if you have to. I have done it. It works.

Not everyone is coming with you

This is the part nobody warns you about, and it is the part that brings the tissue box across the desk more often than the custody schedule ever does.

Some friendships are not going to survive this season. Some family members will pick a side, and it will not be yours. People you have known for twenty years will get strangely, painfully quiet.

It hurts. I will not stand here and tell you it does not.

But I want you to sit with something, gently. Not everything familiar is good for you. Some of those relationships were already costing you far more than they ever gave back, and this season simply turned the lights on in a room you had been walking through in the dark.

You are allowed to outgrow people. You are allowed to stop pouring into a well that has been dry for years. Choosing what is healthy over what is familiar is not disloyalty, no matter how it feels at first. It is growth, and growth nearly always looks like loss before it starts to look like anything else.

There are no perfect parents, only present ones

A custody case has a way of making you feel like you are living under a microscope, and I will be honest with you, in some ways you are. Every text. Every exchange in the parking lot. Every pickup you were nine minutes late for.

So people start performing. They try to be flawless. They lie awake terrified that one ordinary bad day will be held up in a courtroom as the sum total of who they are.

Let me tell you what twenty five years in this work have shown me.

The parents who come through this well are not the perfect ones. There are no perfect ones. They are the ones who keep showing up, keep telling the truth, and go back and repair it when they get it wrong.

Your children do not need a flawless parent. They need a present one. They need to watch somebody they love walk through something hard without losing her decency, because that is how they will learn to do it themselves someday.

And you do not have to wait until you have handled all of this gracefully to be worthy of your own life. You are worthy of it right now, exactly as you are, in the middle of the mess, with the laundry undone.

Come back to yourself

Somewhere in all of this you stopped being a person and started being a case number. A schedule. A long list of things that have to get done before you are allowed to sit down.

I want you to start putting yourself back on that list. Not at the top. I have been doing this too long to ask that of a parent in the middle of a custody case. Just somewhere on the list, in your own handwriting.

Take the walk. Make the doctor appointment you have moved twice. Call the friend who makes you laugh until you snort. Sit in the car in your own driveway for ten minutes before you go in, and just breathe.

Loving your children has never once required you to abandon yourself. Not once. And on the day all of this is finally behind you, somebody is going to need to be there in your body when the dust settles.

Let it be you.

If you carry nothing else out of this, carry these three.

Protect your peace.

Honor what you feel.

Keep going.

You are still in there. I have never once seen somebody come all the way back in a single afternoon. It happens the way every real thing happens. Slowly, quietly, and then one ordinary morning you notice that you slept through the night and you did not check your phone before your feet hit the floor.

I have got a chair here, and I am rooting for you.

Tobia Bradley is a Certified Divorce Coach and Client Relations Manager at Ashby Jones and Associates, LLC.  She is not an attorney and does not provide legal advice, and she is not a licensed mental health professional. Nothing in this post is intended as legal or medical advice.