Hey Olivia, How Do I Start Talking About Possibly Separating When Communication Is Gone?

About this episode

Olivia Howell discusses how to initiate conversations about separation in a marriage where communication has broken down.

There is a particular kind of loneliness that lives inside a marriage that has gone quiet — where you’ve been having the conversation about separating entirely in your own head for weeks or months, but haven’t said a single word of it out loud. Not because you don’t know what you feel. But because you genuinely don’t know how to start — especially when real communication between you and your spouse has all but disappeared. In this solo episode of Divorce Happens, host Olivia Howell sits with that exact moment and offers something rare: not a to-do list, but a deeply compassionate and practically useful framework for what it actually takes to crack open that silence. Olivia begins with the reframe that changes everything: when communication breaks down in a marriage, it isn’t laziness or weakness that keeps the hard conversations from happening. It’s a nervous system doing its job — protecting you from a pattern that has taught you, over and over, that bringing things up leads somewhere painful. Understanding that is the first step toward finding the conditions that make the conversation possible rather than impossible. From there, she walks through how to start small — not with…

People in this episode

Host: Olivia Howell

Topics covered

• communication
• separation
• marriage
• loneliness
• self-advocacy
• emotional health

Keywords

• divorce
• communication breakdown
• marriage issues
• emotional support
• self-advocacy
• loneliness in marriage
• starting difficult conversations

More episodes of Divorce Happens

• She Turned Her High-Conflict Divorce Into a Movement. Here’s What Courtney Gilmartin Learned About Surviving, Documenting & Fighting Back · June 13, 2026 · 15 min
• Hey Olivia, We Told the Kids About the Divorce — Now the Questions Won't Stop. What Do I Say? · June 11, 2026 · 8 min
• Hey Olivia, My Ex Wants to Tell the Kids the Divorce Is My Fault. How Do I Stop Him? · June 10, 2026 · 7 min
• Divorce Books: Soft Launch: A Coming-of-Adulthood Novel by Sarah Vacchiano · June 8, 2026 · 21 min
• Everything You Need to Know About College Planning and Divorce with Vicki Vollweiler · June 8, 2026 · 15 min
• 50 Challenges. 6 Continents. One Divorce: How Lisa Niver Found Herself — and Fearlessness — After 50 with Lisa Niver · June 5, 2026 · 15 min