From crisis to confidence: Turning heartbreak into divorce coaching

After a sudden and shocking divorce, and moments of ill judgement, Claire Black pieced herself together and became the person she wanted to be. Now she’s a divorce coach and has written the book she felt she needed when she went through her divorce, writes Andy Martin

Friday 14 August 2020 11:25 BST
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In 2018 in the UK alone, 90,871 couples divorced: that’s 249 bubbles bursting every single day
In 2018 in the UK alone, 90,871 couples divorced: that’s 249 bubbles bursting every single day

At 8.15 on the evening of Tuesday 25 March, 2008, at their home in Bristol, Claire Black was watching an episode of hospital drama Holby City with her husband when her marriage suddenly died. Black noticed that her husband had gone unusually quiet. “You’re rather quiet,” she said. “Are you OK?” He turned to her, having lost all interest in the TV drama. “No, not really,” he said. “I’ve been seeing someone else.”

For Black, it was a trauma on a par with anything on offer on the television screen. She’d had no inkling of underlying conditions. She went into shock and can now only recall fragments of what happened next. Their two young sons (then aged three and one) were fast asleep upstairs and her instant magical solution – having picked herself up off the floor – was to run next door to her neighbour’s house and stay there for an hour. If she was out of the house, she imagined, then he would have to stay to make sure the kids were OK. “It was ridiculous really,” she says now. “I was just giving him time to pack. By the time I went back he was ready to leave. By ten o’clock he was out the door.”

They had been married for seven years. Black says, “At the time it was the most horrific thing that had ever happened to me. But it was also the start of something that led me to where I am now.” Having been through a divorce, she has been reborn as a “divorce coach” and has written a book, Break-Up: From Crisis to Confidence, which she says “is the book I wish I’d had at the time”. Both she and her husband are now remarried and her children “share four parents instead of two”, as she puts it.

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