Close to 2 million people divorce each year in the U.S., and one in three people who have been married have experienced a divorce. Divorce can be heartbreaking, financially difficult and exhausting, but it can also come with the motivation to reinvent yourself, both personally and professionally.
Oona Metz, a Boston-based psychotherapist with 30 years of experience helping women navigate divorce, is the author of the book Unhitched: The Essential Divorce Guide for Women publishing in 2026. She shares that women are using the pivotal personal decision to get a divorce as a launching point to upskill, change careers or start purpose-driven businesses, as an evolution of their identities.
Some people seek deeper meaning, while others realize they just want to have some fun. For example, Kristina Rajzer, based in Slovenia, posted recently on LinkedIn about how her own divorce stripped down her life as a strategist and in its place, she found a new passion—“I did the only thing that felt alive. I bought a DJ set.”
Whether your new personal reinvention translates to a full career trajectory pivot or whether you simply develop a new work-adjacent hobby, divorce can be the inciting incident that pushes you toward the career you’ve been dreaming of.
Using emotional reinvigoration to go for your dreams
For some, divorce pushes them to head out on their own, whether it’s to become a consultant, contractor or freelancer or to build their own business. “I was head of brand marketing at The Knot when I was going through my divorce,” says Amanda Goetz, author of Toxic Grit: How to Have It All and (Actually) Love What You Have. “Post-divorce I built and sold a VC-backed consumer packaged goods business, wrote a book and built a portfolio career before taking a new CMO position,” showing that not all career pivots after divorce move you into an entirely different field, but rather some push you to accomplish your individual dreams.
“There is a ‘phoenix rising out of the ashes’ emotional bump that you get when you come out of the emotional fog of divorce,” Goetz adds. “I also was able to fully focus on my career when my ex had the kids because he now had to take up the cognitive load of raising them.”
Like Goetz, Metz shares that many of the clients she’s worked with find themselves looking at those career changes toward the end of the divorce process. This is a mix of financial uncertainty and the emotional expenditure it takes to actually get divorced. “So a lot of times people have to wait till the dust settles,” she says.
Clearing out toxicity during career reinvention for women after divorce
Metz sees not only women reinventing themselves, but also “renegotiating boundaries” in their lives and relationships. “Not only the relationship with their spouse, but also their relationship with other people—I’ve seen people decide to leave an abusive or critical spouse, and then they kind of realize ‘Oh, my boss is like that too. I’m also going to leave my boss.’ They realize there’s so much relief in leaving an abusive marriage that they [ask] what other relationships they’re going to clear out of now too.”
Metz has especially seen a rise of people who want to move into helping roles, such as becoming therapists themselves or even coaching others through divorce. For example, after her own divorce, Olivia Howell, CEO of Fresh Starts Divorce Registry, established a network of vetted, helpful resources, which includes Metz, for those going through divorce. Doing so enabled her to build a new career for herself.
Changing work responsibilities to accommodate emotional turmoil
It can be almost impossible to maintain work responsibilities during the toughest days of divorce. It’s a struggle Chedva Ludmir, CEO and founder at Consider Labs in Tel Aviv, knows well. She says as someone who’s a part of an “ultra orthodox” religious community, she was essentially excommunicated when she got divorced.
“I didn’t anticipate this happening to this extent, and as someone who considers herself quite resilient, I also didn’t expect how much this would affect my work. Not only did I find it hard to lead the agency in the direction I already plotted and strategized, I also found it next to impossible to focus on strategic work,” she says. “Even when I eventually did, my confidence was so shattered that I couldn’t pitch myself or the agency to new clients and even turned down opportunities that arrived at my door, referring them to colleagues because it was hard for me to see myself as an expert, despite many years of experience and proven success.”
She had to postpone the next season of her podcast, for example, because she couldn’t picture talking to an audience while going through that. Instead, her career changed in that she “focused on very execution-oriented, tactical projects” for a time.
She calls her work life before her reinvention a “very scary” time. She eventually took time off to work on a book and also birthed a new business called Consider Labs.
“For the first time in my life, as someone whose work has always been inherent to my sense of self, I lost interest in work—and at the time when I most needed to make a living.… During that time, I did a lot of work reminding myself that my identity is more than my career and also more than that time in my life.”
She’s not alone—research found that almost 44% of people getting divorced reported a negative impact of the experience on their work. But the impact isn’t permanent. The research also showed that work engagement and performance improve a year after the divorce.
Financial independence after divorce
While sometimes people reinvent themselves out of a drive to pursue a passion, others are simply trying to make more money at a time when financial stability is top of mind. Metz says she’s seen multiple women who have been trying to figure out how to make money after being stay-at-home moms prior to their divorces because “women do lose financially during divorce.”
While some of them head back to school, Metz hopes women will consider the cost of making a career change, as sometimes more schooling means multiple years with little to no income. “You have to really be realistic about how much it’s going to cost you,” she says. “Do you need to go back to school in order to achieve this or do you need to start at the bottom of the pile and work your way up in a new career? That can cost money.” She notes that self-employment can come with its own costs that people should consider too.
A successful life after divorce
While it might seem a daunting road ahead, building a new career path during or after divorce may not be as arduous as you think.
Ludmir says, “I’ve gone through a few career pivots and reinventions prior to this one, but this one was the easiest and the most embodied of all of them because I didn’t have the added pressure from a spouse who doesn’t get what I do professionally. Also the hard career decisions seemed so much easier in comparison, and I’ve risen from the divorce someone who trusts herself more implicitly—making it easier to explore this reinvention.”
Photo by Moon Safari/Shutterstock
