A Map of Every Mistake You're About to Make at the Start of Your Divorce — and How to Avoid Them with Lyerly Spongberg

A Map of Every Mistake You're About to Make at the Start of Your Divorce — and How to Avoid Them with Lyerly Spongberg

From Divorce Happens by Fresh Starts Registry

April 17, 2026 · 19 min · Season 1 · Episode 211

About this episode

In this episode, Olivia Howell and Lyerly Spongberg discuss common mistakes made at the start of divorce and how to avoid them.

You've made the decision. Maybe it took months — maybe it took years. But you've finally arrived at it, and now your brain is telling you: move fast, do something, protect yourself. And that instinct, as understandable as it is, might be the very thing that costs you the most. In this indispensable episode of Divorce Happens, host Olivia Howell sits down with Lyerly Spongberg — certified ADR divorce coach, pre-mediation coach, and co-parenting specialist — to walk through the most common and costly mistakes people make in the early stages of the divorce process. Lyerly brings years of front-line coaching experience to a conversation that is equal parts educational and deeply compassionate, pulling back the curtain on why even intelligent, capable people get derailed right at the start — and exactly what to do instead. The first thing Lyerly wants you to understand is that when the divorce decision finally lands, your nervous system is not your friend. What looks like urgency is often dysregulation — a survival-mode brain that is neurologically incapable of making clear, future-focused decisions. From that dysregulated state, people make the same predictable mistakes: they call…

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